“I have to live with it, don’t I? One wrong move here or even in WITSEC protection, if we get that far, and I—we—won’t be living at all, not if Ames and who knows who else has his way.”
Nick nodded, and they shook hands. He could only trust and pray that Jace would continue to be helpful and protective, because, on top of everything else, he feared Jace wanted Claire and Lexi back.
* * *
The shoreline, Jace noted, as he looked through Nando’s beat-up pair of binoculars, was hardly how he’d pictured Cuba. On the one narrow, rutted road he could see two horse-drawn wagons instead of the 1950s vintage American cars he’d seen in photos. No palms but pines clinging to the hills and shadowing the short cliff hovering over pristine, deserted beaches. And red soil with rows and rows of tobacco plants waving in the breeze as far as the eye could see.
“Bonita, no?” Nando asked him with a proud grin, as if he owned every acre of the scenery. “Costa Blanca!” he said, pointing at the shoreline with a distant dock and cluster of small, tile-roofed houses on a gentle slope of hill. He pointed higher up, more to the west. “Mi casa,” he said and Jace nodded.
“Berto!” Jace called out, using Heck’s WITSEC name. “Be sure he’s going to let us out away from the dock and village.”
“Oh, yeah, he knows,” Heck said and rattled off more Spanish to Nando, who kept nodding. “He says, with us, his house will be crowded, some must sleep on the floor. His daughter, Gina, she comes home this weekend from university in Havana where she studies to be a doctor, very smart.”
“Then they will be a wealthy family someday,” Jace said.
Heck translated, then answered. “No, that’s why he wants to sell the rafts, even though he have to hide them for now. Doctors in Cuba, they only make as much money as someone lays bricks or sells T-shirts on the street.”
Claire’s voice came from behind him where she had stood up to stretch and flex the cramps in her legs. Lexi was sleeping on the deck with her head on Claire’s purse for a pillow, covered with a coat. His ex-wife, whom he’d discovered too damn late he still loved and wanted—much of the divorce was his stupid fault—was frowning at the nearing shoreline.
“Communist country, Jace,” she said. “We’re about to see what that really means.”
“If Ames is here, it doesn’t mean he makes as much as a bricklayer or street vendor. He may be helping to fund the Castro kingdom and somehow making big bucks here, I know it.”
Heck spit over the side of the boat and said, “The Castros ruined everything. Took my grandfather’s lands, his house, his money—my family, my heritage. Took a lot of lives, firing squads their favorite way. But we’re not gonna get caught. He’s not gonna take nothing else from us—maybe the other way ’round.”
Jace turned to him. “Just don’t do anything to screw this up—this secret mission we didn’t ask for but have to handle. Getting in and getting out of here, together, everyone in one piece.”
“’Course not. I’m gonna want out of here, fast as you. ’Specially ’cause I hear this place is locked up tight for social media, email, online research, all that I need to do my work. And what’s out there is monitored and controlled. Coupla dry-foot escapees told me that not long ago.”
“Great, just great,” Nick groused as he came to stand beside them. “With the internet off-limits or monitored, we’re going to have to use something like passenger pigeons to contact the FBI so they don’t think we’re dead, so they can help us get out of here.”
“We’re as good as back in the Dark Ages here,” Jace said. “Outnumbered and outranked, but we won’t be outthought or outfought. We got this far and we’ll make it in and out.”
“Just remember what Lincoln said during our own country’s terrible war,” Nick said, bouncing a fist off both Jace’s and Heck’s shoulders. “We have to hang together, or we’ll hang separately.”
As if they’d made a vow, both men nodded solemnly. Claire did too as she moved to stand between Jace and Nick. Suddenly, Nando spewed out behind them what sounded like an order.
“He says,” Heck told them, “he sees the place where he can drop us off and where we can hide the rafts for him. But we’ll have to wade a ways and wait for a couple of hours before we walk to his house.”
“Dry land sounds good—wading for it, dragging rafts or not,” Claire said.
“Piece of cake,” Jace added with a sarcastic snort. “All of this.”
“You can say that because you’ve been in combat,” Claire told him.
Nick said, “Nothing may be what it seems here, just like other things we’ve been through. To quote another wise man, ‘All for one and one for all,’ so let’s remember that—live by that until we all get out of here.”
In a small, lovely inlet edged by a narrow band of blinding white sand, the rescued party sloshed ashore in the late afternoon. Since the crystal clear water where Nando let them out was waist deep, Jace carried Lexi. Nick and Bronco tugged the two orange rafts in to shore, hoping they could find a spot in the lush greenery to deflate and hide them until Nando could find buyers.
It was the least that they could do for him, Nick thought. He didn’t want to tip off the man or his family that he had a lot of cash on him. It was obvious that money was tight on the island, at least for average people. He’d heard things had been tough after Castro’s 1950s revolution and got worse when the old USSR then Venezuela and China abandoned supporting Cuba. Evidently, Raul Castro had finally eased up restrictions on some small, private businesses. And, of course, if international billionaires like Clayton Ames were here, all cozy with the Castros while most Cubans had it hard, well, that was obscene.
“Strange, but this scary place seems like paradise,” Claire said to him, her voice shaky. “It’s so beautiful and serene, but evil lurked in Eden and led people astray.”
“We’ll be careful,” he assured her, but he was on edge too. Surely, if Ames was in Cuba, he would not have hired that rickety boat to come out to bring them into his latest realm, using Nando so they wouldn’t suspect a trap. But he put nothing past his father’s murderer, a master manipulator with long arms.
Nick flinched as a brown pelican dived so close it splashed them when it scooped up the unsuspecting fish in its bill, swallowed it whole and wagged its tail in delight. Yeah, even this Eden had its dangers.
Waiting for dusk, when they would head for Nando’s house, they hunkered down in a patch of sun as their clothes dried stiff and salty against their skin. At least they weren’t cold now. When Lexi kept asking to play in the sand, things almost seemed normal. They didn’t want to be spotted, but finally they let her, over on the side of the little inlet, partly hidden by the cliff. Claire was with her. Would Lexi’s light hair and Claire’s red tresses draw attention? Obviously, some non-Cubans lived here, surely redheads, but his wife was a striking woman. Thank God, they had Heck and Nita to act as translators and buffers.
As if he’d read his mind, Heck said, “’Cording to what Nando said, we’re going to have to go into Havana to get to the internet. How else we gonna tell Patterson we’re not lost? Surprise! We are here, come get us—somehow.”
“I know,” Nick said. “We could try the British Embassy, where I read there’s a so-called American desk upon request. But some of us would stand out like sore thumbs there, and we need to stick together. The Brits might not believe us, and we’d have to go through red tape, declare who we really are to get American help. Then there’s Gitmo.”
“Guantanamo? The US prison for terrorist enemies here?”
“Everything’s