Topaz - Leon Uris [51]
His eyes were glued to deep ruts and tire marks on the dirt road. He calculated their width and depth. This was what he had been told to look for. Monsters on wheels had passed on this ground.
Suddenly the main gate of the Finca San José loomed ahead. It had changed.
“Halt!”
Four angry Russian soldiers dashed from the guard shack, all yelling at him at the same time.
“What in the hell is this!” Vicente Martínez demanded, shoving the door open, getting out of the car and fanning himself with his wide-brimmed hat.
The Russians continued to jabber heatedly in a language he could not fathom. Vicente argued back just as heatedly in a language they could not fathom.
The old Dodge boiled over, too.
At last a Cuban officer was sent for. He arrived on the scene growling. “Who are you! What the hell are you doing here!”
“Me! What am I doing here? What are you doing here? I am Gonzoles. I come here every month since I was a child to see my grandfather.”
“Well, your grandfather is no longer here.”
“He has been here all his life, señor officer. Why should he leave?”
“He has been relocated.”
“What means by this, relocated?”
“He has moved. Did you not receive the letter?”
“Yes, I got a letter. But who can read?”
“You damn fool. Why didn’t you get it read to you?”
“Well, I get the letter and I see all the government stamps and seals in it so I think it is an order for more crops. So I throw the letter away. I want to see my grandfather.”
“You must go to the District Committee in San Cristóbal to find out where he has been relocated.”
Vicente Martínez scratched his head.
A Russian officer pulled the Cuban officer aside. “He must be taken in for questioning,” the Russian demanded.
“Oh, I don’t think that is very wise Señor Captain.”
“He may have seen too much.”
“Señor Captain, you do not understand. This man is a Cuban peasant. The families are very close. If he does not show up at his home tonight, we will have ten more of his relatives down here looking for him. It is safer to send him off.”
The Russian grunted reluctantly at the Cuban’s logic. Perhaps he was right. It would be better not to risk having any more of them around or to arouse suspicion by questioning.
“Gonzoles” was ordered to leave the area and never return.
“I need some water for my old car,” Vicente Martínez said.
They got him water. He poured some into the radiator and drank some. Then he turned and drove away, still mumbling protests.
Vicente Martínez was one of the finest lawyers in that part of Cuba. When Héctor de Córdoba practiced law in Havana, they had a number of joint clients and cases. Juanita de Córdoba was a good family friend of two decades’ standing. He was one of the first recruited.
In addition to the telltale tire marks on the dirt road he was able to spot hundreds of Russian soldiers beyond the Finca gate.
He saw something else, too.
He saw the launching tower.
The information was written and placed in the little holder of a magnetic hide-a-key. The railing of the bridge outside San Cristóbal was made of hollow tube, like most of Cuba’s bridges.
Vicente removed a loose knob at the end of the rail and placed the hide-a-key inside and returned the knob.
Later the dead-letter box was emptied and the message eventually found its way to the poultry butcher Jesús Morelos in Havana.
25
AS THE TAPE CAME to an end, everyone stood and stretched. Kramer pushed the buzzer to call the outside guards and asked that the lunch dishes be cleared and a new pot of coffee brewed.
Dr. Billings spooled on another tape. “One, two, three, four,” he counted into the microphone, adjusting the voice level.
In the second week of interrogation the atmosphere had relaxed. Boris Kuznetov had come to find the four ININ people agreeable and was less and less disturbed by W. Smith’s rapid-fire, terse questioning. After all, if one had to speak, it was far better that it was under such circumstances. The continued absence of André Devereaux annoyed him, but Michael Nordstrom personally assured him that Devereaux would