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He stood ten feet back from the open door of a tiny third-floor, harbor-facing furnished apartment with a good view of the water and an even better view of the container terminal just a couple hundred yards in front of him.
This place was a dump, dusty and moldy like it had been abandoned for years; the furniture was broken and bland, and the other makeshift apartments on this floor looking over the water were uninhabited, as well.
Havana was a flat city, so the third-floor disused space that an agent for the local CIA station had acquired on the top floor of an old dockside warehouse had seemed like the best vantage point, but there was no way Pace could get eyes on everything happening in the harbor from here, even with the high-quality spotting scope.
The ground floor of the warehouse, in contrast, had been cleaned up and converted into a massive artisans’ market that wouldn’t open for another hour, so Pace had the entire building to himself for now. He had spent the evening looking at the layout of the entire space, familiarizing himself with the sight lines and the three stairwells, even checking the big freight elevator that led up here, only to find it was out of service and the car had been removed, so now it was just a big dark hole when looking down from the top floor.
In addition to the front door he kept open so his scope didn’t have to look through the imperfect glass of the front window of the flat, there was also a rear exit, but it led to a metal catwalk running along the inside of the back wall. The catwalk was two stories above the main warehouse floor, which meant if Pace had to use it to evacuate after eight a.m., everyone on the ground floor of the twenty-five-thousand-square-foot artisans’ market would probably stop and stare, something any self-respecting CIA officer would be keen to avoid. Still, he was happy to know he had an extra escape option if the local authorities came looking for him.
And he was also thankful Gentry and his cohort would be somewhere watching the approaches to this location so he could focus all his attention on Juliet Victor out in the water.
Long-distance surveillance was no cakewalk. To do it right, one needed to disassociate with everything happening close, and focus all energy through optics on whatever distant location was under surveillance.
Even with Gentry and his friend outside, even with an idea of how to get the fuck out of here in a hurry, even with the little Glock 43 pistol Pace had talked Travers into lending him, standing by himself in a dark room in the middle of the capital city of a semi-enemy nation and concentrating all his attention on a distant position was scary as hell.
The American standing in the darkened flat remained perfectly still behind his optic for a time, and then he tapped an encrypted radio on his belt that was connected to a wired headset he wore over his head.
“Overwatch to Victor Actual, how do you read?”
Chris Travers’s voice was tinny from the encryption through his radio. “Victor Actual. Five, five.”
“Say status?” Pace could hear the rain through the transmission, and he imagined Travers and his team were already soaked.
“We’re about to enter the water. Hard to say about any current in the harbor. I’m estimating about twenty mikes before you hear from me again.”
“Roger that. All quiet on the vessel. Two patrol boats visible, both way north of your poz at the mouth of the harbor, no factor on your ingress. Good luck.”
Pace swiveled his scope to the east in a futile search for the Juliet Victor team now, but he didn’t have line of sight on their insertion point, the far side of an abandoned dockyard on the southern tip of the harbor. Slipping into the water at that location meant a longer swim for the Ground Branch team than they would have preferred, but the high weeds, rusted-out hulls of oil storage containers and long-ago-discarded piping made that area the best place to enter the water covertly.
So Jim Pace scanned and waited, only pulling his eye out of the spotting scope to duck into the little kitchen to refill his thermos of coffee from a coffee maker he’d brought along while the rain hammered down on the rusty and leaky tin roof above him.
FORTY-SIX
One and a half miles away, Mexican national Carlos Contreras stepped into the front room of his little homestay, noted the heavy weather outside, and waited for the two security men sent by Cyrus to duck out of the Polar Air Conditioning Service van parked out front and run through the deluge and into the house. When they came in, they followed him back upstairs, helped him with the several cases and two backpacks he carried, and then together they all headed out to the van.
Contreras had his equipment with him, and he’d been up late in the night testing it. Cuba was a particularly nonpermissive environment for drones, so the models he’d fly today were tiny and therefore harder to see, plus they made much less noise than the more robust units he’d used in Mexico and Guatemala.
But they’d also be useless in a thunderstorm, so he wondered when the weather would pass so he could put them to work.
Soon they were all out in the van, but the driver had yet to be given a destination because Contreras was still waiting on targeting info from Cyrus.
The three of them smoked in silence, Carlos ate a candy bar for breakfast, and they all downed cafecitos, tiny sweet shots of coffee the wife of one of the Cubans in the vehicle had prepared and sent with her husband for today’s outing, along with a tall stack of little disposable paper cups.
The two Cubans carried pistols, Contreras had noticed as they lugged the gear, and he wondered if they might be off-duty cops hired by Cyrus to watch his back, but he purposefully didn’t engage the men in much conversation.
The Mexican had just crumpled an empty cup and dropped it on the floor of the van when he felt his phone vibrate in his pocket. He put out his cigarette and lifted the device to his eyes.
A Signal message from Cyrus, giving him the last known coordinates of the target, a crystal clear image of the man, and a dossier, which he clicked open.
Contreras took a moment to read it, then blinked hard when he realized who he was being sent after today.
“Madre de dios,” he muttered to himself.
He couldn’t believe it, and he questioned whether he was being paid enough for what he would be asked to do.
It took a full minute for him to respond, and when he did, his reply was terse.
Understood.
