Chapter 30
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Havana, Cuba
“Cuban intelligence monitors all foreigners and suspicious locals. Neighborhood committees report unusual activity. Your hotel room is also monitored.” Castro stood and moved to the window and whispered to Flint, “But there are ways to work around the system if you’re careful.”
He pointed to the street below and spoke at normal volume.
“See the old man selling newspapers? He’s been there fifteen years.
Knows everyone who comes and goes. The woman sweeping her doorstep?
She reports to the local committee. The teenagers playing dominoes?
They work for various people who pay for information. ”
Flint studied the street. Normal neighborhood activity that masked a surveillance network. He cataloged the faces. The positions. The sight lines.
“I’ll need counter-surveillance support,” he said quietly.
“I can provide that. Limited resources, but effective. My people know how to move around the watchers.” Castro returned to his desk. “Give me two hours to make inquiries about your guy. Meet me at the Café Taberna on Plaza Vieja at six o’clock.”
“What if you can’t find anything?”
“Then your genealogy research ends with disappointed academic researchers returning to Miami tomorrow.” Castro smiled thinly. “But I have a feeling that family tree has interesting branches.”
Flint decided to use the two hours productively.
They left Castro’s office and walked through Old Havana’s streets.
The architecture was impressive despite decades of neglect.
Colonial buildings with arcades and internal courtyards.
Baroque churches. Neoclassical facades reflected the island’s former grandeur.
“Notice anything?” Drake asked.
“Two men in casual clothes. Been behind us since we left the embassy. Different faces from the ones at the hotel.”
“How many teams you figure?”
“Cuban intelligence probably has three or four teams rotating surveillance. Question is whether anyone else is watching.”
They paused at a plaza to study a colonial church. Flint used the reflection in a storefront window to spot another pattern. Non-Cuban faces had appeared at multiple locations. Too well-dressed for tourists. Too alert for casual observers.
“We’ve got more company,” he said.
Drake followed his gaze. “Same as the Kentucky team?”
“Possible they tracked us here somehow,” Flint replied. “Could be someone else.”
“So much for going dark with coms.”
“Tells us they’re resourceful. Connections probably extend to Cuban operations.”
Flint continued walking. He made mental notes of escape routes. Narrow alleys that led away from main streets. Buildings with multiple exits. The old defensive walls that surrounded parts of the colonial city.
He also studied the infrastructure. Power lines. Electrical substations. Water systems. Communications equipment.
Cuban public utilities were notoriously fragile. The entire national electrical grid had collapsed four times in the past six months. Any significant disruption could trigger widespread failures.
Good to know.
At six o’clock they entered Café Taberna, a small restaurant with exposed stone walls and low lighting. Castro waited at a corner table in the dark where he had a clear view of the entrance.
“Find anything useful?” Flint asked as he sat down.
Castro ordered Cuban coffee strong enough to power machinery for all three. “Your target has been a careful man. But he is not invisible.”
He leaned forward and spoke quietly. “There’s an old man who knows the American expatriate community.
Raúl’s been helping people settle here for twenty years.
He says there’s a couple that fits your description.
American man with a scar on his left hand.
Lives with his wife in a building near the cathedral. ”
Flint felt a familiar surge of anticipation. “Address?”
“Calle Mercaderes. Three blocks from here. Colonial building, blue door, second floor.” Castro sipped his coffee. “Raúl says they’re good people trying to live quietly. They help their neighbors. They don’t cause trouble.”
“We just want to talk.”
“Raúl also mentioned the man sometimes has visitors. Other Americans who don’t stay long. Business meetings, perhaps.”
Drake raised an eyebrow. “What kind of business?”
“The kind that requires privacy.”
“Recent visitors?”
“Within the past month. Raúl didn’t get a close look, but he said they were well-dressed. Not tourists, for sure,” Castro explained. “He said they didn’t socialize with the locals.”
Flint and Drake exchanged glances. Recent and regular visitors could mean many things, none of them good.
They finished their coffee and carefully discussed logistics. Castro could provide counter-surveillance. His people could watch for Cuban intelligence and any other parties showing interest.
“Face-to-face communications only. No phones, no electronic messages,” Flint reminded him.
“One more thing,” Castro said with a nod as they prepared to leave. “The building on Calle Mercaderes is old. Many of these colonial structures are unstable. The government lacks resources for proper maintenance. Be careful if you need to move quickly.”
“How unstable?” Drake asked.
“Buildings collapse here regularly. Sometimes from hurricanes. Sometimes from age. Sometimes from nothing at all.” Castro stood. “Just be aware of your surroundings.”
They left the café separately. Castro went first. Drake and Flint followed five minutes later.
Old Havana at night was a different world. Streetlights provided uneven illumination. Shadows stretched between buildings. The tourist areas bustled with activity, but the residential neighborhoods grew quiet after sunset.
Flint and Drake made their way through narrow streets toward Calle Mercaderes. They paused frequently to check for surveillance. His experience with Cuban watchers caused him to describe them as competent but predictable. They maintained distance and rotated positions on schedule.
But Flint had advantages they didn’t know about. He understood Cuba’s infrastructure vulnerabilities. He’d studied the electrical grid again during their afternoon reconnaissance.
Calle Mercaderes was a narrow street lined with colonial buildings. Most showed signs of age and neglect. Peeling paint. Cracked masonry. Iron balconies that had seen decades of Caribbean weather.
Flint found the building with the blue door. Three stories, typical colonial construction, with a narrow staircase visible through an open entrance. Light flickered from windows on the second floor.
He settled into a doorway across the street where he had a clear view of the building. Drake had filed off a couple of streets back. He should be approaching from the opposite direction, establishing visual contact from a different angle.
Flint pulled out binoculars and focused on the second-floor windows. Movement inside. Shadows passing in front of the light.
A man appeared briefly in the window. Dark hair, visible scar on his left hand. Frank Tantanella, older but still recognizable from the photographs.
Then a woman joined him at the window.
Flint adjusted the focus and studied her profile. Something familiar about the way she moved. The set of her shoulders. The angle of her head.
She turned toward the window, and the light illuminated her face as if she were a heavenly angel.
Flint raised his eyebrows when he recognized her and murmured, “Well, well, well.”
Tantanella’s wife wasn’t a Cuban woman. She wasn’t really a stranger at all.
Lizzy Pace was alive. Living in Cuba with Frank Tantanella. After more than twenty years.
“How is that possible?” he wondered aloud and lowered the binoculars.
Lizzy hadn’t died in the bus crash. She’d been hiding in Cuba all this time. Presumably with Tantanella’s help.
She might know where the Fisher kids were now, too.
But who did die in that bus accident?
Flint was so focused on the revelation that he almost missed the movement in his peripheral vision.
Armed men emerged from the shadows at both ends of the street. Cuban security forces came from one direction. Private operatives from the other. He glanced up to see more security personnel appearing on rooftops and in doorways.
All converging on Calle Mercaderes.
Flint keyed his radio. “We’ve got multiple hostiles. Cuban authorities from the north. Unknown hostiles from the south. Unknown count on the rooftops.”
“Copy that. I see them. What’s the play?”
Flint assessed the situation rapidly. They were outnumbered and outgunned. Running would only delay the inevitable.
Across the street from Tantanella’s building stood a neighborhood electrical substation. A collection of transformers and switching equipment that distributed power to several blocks of Old Havana. The kind of aging system that regularly failed under normal circumstances.
“I’m going to level the playing field,” Flint told Drake. “When the lights go out, move fast.”
Flint crossed the street quickly. He stayed low. The substation was enclosed by a chain-link fence, but the lock was old and yielded to pressure.
He slipped inside and studied the transformer configuration.
The system was exactly what he’d expected. Soviet-era equipment that had been patched and modified over decades. No modern protection systems. No redundant safeguards. No spinning reserves to compensate for sudden failures.
Perfect for creating a cascading grid collapse.
“You sure this will work?” Drake’s voice crackled back.
“No. But it should.” Flint pulled a small demolition charge from his gear that he’d collected at the embassy. “All it takes is the right push in the right place.”
“How do you know that?” Drake asked.
“Training supplied by Uncle Sam,” Flint replied as he placed the charge against the main transformer’s control panel.
He set a thirty-second timer.
“Thirty seconds and counting,” he radioed Drake on his way out.
“Copy that. I’ll be ready to move.”
Flint retreated to the street and counted down.
The explosion was smaller than he expected but perfectly targeted. The transformer sparked and died. The immediate area plunged into total darkness.
For a moment, nothing else happened.
Then the cascade began.
Flint’s sabotage created exactly the kind of transmission line fault that had caused four total grid collapses in the past six months.
The blackout spread like a wave across Old Havana. Block by block, the lights went out. Within minutes, entire neighborhoods were dark.
In the confusion, all the high-tech surveillance equipment went dead. Night vision goggles, communications systems, electronic coordination tools. All technological advantages vanished.
Cuban security forces lost their command-and-control systems. Streetlights failed. Traffic signals died. The organized manhunt dissolved into chaos.
“Drake, you copy?” Flint whispered into his radio.
“Roger that. Cuban forces are scattered,” Drake said, reporting what he could see in the limited moonlight. “They might have backups, but right now they can’t coordinate without their electronics.”
“Lost their night vision, too. They’re stumbling around like the citizens,” Flint said.
In Tantanella’s building, the power failure seemed to have killed the structure’s aging electrical systems completely. Water pumps that kept moisture from the foundation stopped working. Emergency lighting systems that provided basic safety illumination had gone dark.
The colonial building, already weakened by decades of deferred maintenance, began to shift and settle. Its minimal modern supports failed.
Flint heard the first ominous creaking sounds.
He moved toward the building. Cuban security forces were shouting orders in the darkness.
Operatives were trying to coordinate without their electronic systems. Civilians were pouring into the streets.
They banged pots and demanded answers about the blackout.
Perfect chaos.
“What the hell did you do?” Drake’s voice came through the radio.
“Gave Cuba what it gets regularly. A total grid failure.”
“The building’s making noise.”
“Right. Castro warned us these structures are unstable.”
Exactly what Flint needed.
He reached the blue door. The building’s internal structure gave a major groan of distress.
Somewhere above, plaster was falling. Wood was splintering. The kind of sounds that preceded the partial or total building collapses that occurred regularly in Havana.
Flint looked up at the second-floor windows where he’d seen Lizzy Pace. The woman whose death had been faked more than twenty years ago. Twice. The one who claimed to be the mother of the missing Fisher children.
She was alive. She was thirty feet above him in a building that was about to fall down.
While armed hostiles converged from multiple directions in the blacked-out streets of Old Havana, Flint moved quickly toward Lizzy Pace, dodging bullets as he ran.