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•••
Court entered the market just thirty seconds after Lancer and his men, and he found it to be a large metal-framed warehouse building the size of an airplane hangar, with a ceiling three stories high and crisscrossed with catwalks.
A pair of huge Cuban flags, each one the length of a city bus, hung straight down from the catwalk along the back wall, one on each side of the open sliding bay doors that led out to a small walkway and then the harbor.
Between Court and those doors, dozens of kiosks were set up with men and women selling paintings, jewelry, clothing, and other arts and crafts, and though it was still early, there were already a lot of shoppers milling about.
Court didn’t spend much time taking in the lay of the land, because he wouldn’t be staying down here. He went to his left, saw the simple metal door that led to the stairwell, and began walking towards it.
Just as he put his hand on the door latch, however, he heard a voice from behind him.
“Espere.” Wait.
He turned around to find himself facing a fair-skinned Cuban male wearing the light blue uniform of the PNR, the Policía Nacional Revolucionaria.
Great, he thought. Cops.
He was on an open line with Pace, and he wanted to alert the CIA man to this delay. “Hello, Officer. How can I help you?”
He instantly heard Pace’s voice, soft in his left ear. “Shit. Deal with that, Violator. I can’t leave my poz.”
The PNR officer was young, maybe twenty-five, and he didn’t seem in any way agitated. “Español?” he asked.
“Poco,” Court replied.
The officer continued in Spanish. “Identification, please.”
Court glanced behind him at the stairwell, then reached into his pocket to grab his passport.
Any search of his body would turn up the pistol, the holster, and the two extra mags, and that would get him arrested and, essentially, condemn Jim Pace to death two stories above him.
The man looked over the Canadian passport, and Court began coming up with a hasty plan in case the officer delayed with the ID check, because Court didn’t have time to fuck around right now.
•••
As Scott Kincaid and one of his new partners neared the top of the stairwell, a door opened on his right. He saw that it led to the catwalk that ran along the wall on the north side of the warehouse but, more importantly, he also saw that a uniformed officer stood there, looking right at him.
The man was Black, in his forties, and he eyed Kincaid with confusion for a moment, but only until the Cuban goon Lancer had brought along with him huffed around the corner below and looked up.
“Sanchez?” the Black cop said.
To Kincaid, his henchman appeared disquieted, seeing the officer who obviously knew him. After a moment he said, “Fidel. Cómo estás?”
Lancer had wondered if the two men he’d borrowed from the drone pilot were off-duty local cops, and this all but confirmed his suspicions.
Fidel kept his eyes on Sanchez as he began asking him questions. Kincaid didn’t speak Spanish, and he didn’t understand a word, but from the tone he could sense immediate suspicion on the part of the older Black officer.
Sanchez was gruff and defensive; he was handling this encounter all wrong. Kincaid didn’t need to know Spanish to recognize the instantly confrontational body language of the two men, standing now just five feet apart.
Kincaid fumed silently. It should have been a lucky thing to get stopped by a police officer who happened to know the guy he was with, but apparently Sanchez’s relationship was such that it was having the exact opposite effect. Kincaid’s presence with the Cuban here only made the cop suspicious.
Lancer could tell Fidel wasn’t buying a bit of the other man’s story, perhaps because he already knew Sanchez was either a hoodlum or a dirty cop.
The dark-complected man turned to the American and shifted into heavily accented English. “What is your name, señor?”
Lancer knew his fake passport said Robert Alan, so this was the name he gave.
Fidel nodded.
