Hazardous Duty (Presidential Agent 8)

No, Murov thought, but if I had to smoke these, I’d stop smoking myself.

Among other intelligence Murov had acquired while he was the rezident in Washington was that all the good cigar makers had fled from Cuba immediately after the revolution. The really good ones had gone to the Canary Islands, where they continued to turn out Cohibas and other top-of-the-line cigars.

The Cuban Cohibas were not really Cuban Cohibas, in other words. When Murov saw the humidor of Cuban Cohibas, he had immediately decided to take it to Moscow, where he would give them to people he didn’t like, and he hoped ol’ Raúl wouldn’t expect him to light up one of the ones he had given him.

“No, I hadn’t,” Murov said.

“He said he feels better now that he’s stopped smoking.”

“Well, I can understand that,” Murov replied, and mentally added, If he was smoking these steadily, I’m surprised they didn’t kill him.

“So tell me, Sergei,” Raúl said, “what brings you to Havana?”

“I need about a dozen of your best DGI men,” Murov replied. “For a month, maybe a little longer.”

“To do what?” General Cosada asked.

“Vladimir Vladimirovich wants to entertain three people now in Argentina, and I need your people to assist them in getting on the plane to Moscow.”

“What three people?” Raúl asked.

“Former SVR Polkovnik Dmitri Berezovsky, former SVR Podpolkovnik Svetlana Alekseeva, and Lieutenant Colonel C. G. Castillo, U.S. Army, Retired.”

“Why don’t you go to the Venezuelans?” General Cosada asked. “I know they don’t like the American. For that matter any Americans.”

“Have you already forgotten Major Alejandro Vincenzo, Raúl? Sic transit gloria, Major Alejandro Vincenzo?”

“I don’t like to think about Alejandro,” Castro said. “But no, I haven’t forgotten t

he loss of my sister Gloria’s second-oldest son. But it momentarily slipped my mind that that bastard Castillo was responsible for what happened to him.”

“Raúl,” Murov asked, “does the fact that that bastard Castillo killed your nephew in Uruguay change our conversation from ‘What can the SVR do for the DGI?’ to ‘What can the DGI do for the SVR?’”

President Castro considered that a moment.

“No,” he said finally. “It doesn’t. Where we are now is ‘What can the SVR do for the DGI, in exchange for what the SVR wants the DGI to do for the SVR?’”

When Murov didn’t immediately reply, Castro went on, “I wouldn’t want this to get around, Sergei, but neither Fidel nor I ever really liked Vincenzo. But he was our sister’s kid, and you know how that goes: We were stuck with him.”

“And between you and me, Sergei,” General Jesus Manuel Cosada said, “the sonofabitch was always sucking up to Fidel. He wanted my job.”

“But then why did you send him to Uruguay?” Murov asked.

“Sending him there,” Cosada said, “is not exactly the same thing as sending him there and hoping he got to come back.”

“Jesus Christ, Jesus!” Raúl said. “If Gloria ever heard you say that, you’d be a dead man!”

“I asked why you sent him, feeling the way you apparently felt, to Uruguay,” Murov said.

“Well, when the Iraqi Oil-for-Food people told us what they wanted…”

“Which was?” Murov asked.

“They wanted the UN guy, Lorimer, dead.”

“Because he ripped them off for sixteen million dollars?”

“Well, once he’d done that, they knew he couldn’t be trusted. And he knew too much, too many names. He had to be dead. They didn’t seem to care too much about the money,” Raúl said.