I heard you the first time, George. "Baconburgers or cheeseburgers?"

"Cheese," said Lila.

"Me too. Home fries or french fries?"

"French."

"Play nicely, kiddies," said George. "We'll be back as soon as we can."

As soon as the others were out of the waiting room, Lila jumped up, and grabbed Chicken's hand. "Let's go."

"Go where?"

"Outside. I told you, I can't take hospitals. Even the waiting room makes me feel funny."

"It's cold out there," he said, but when she tugged his hand he followed along.

It was cold, it was snowing heavily, and the afternoon light was fading fast. They walked around the building to keep warm, and then through the parking lot, walking hand-in-hand, which now seemed the natural thing to do. They walked with their heads down against the driving snow, their eyes on the ground, and walking that way they did not see the four men looming out of the whiteness all around them, closing in.

13

YOU want to know why I am here, said Julio Ramirez, aka Rafael Canero. He said it to Claudia Wing, aka Snake, and also known as his onetime lover as they sat in the dark on the porch of the Southern Manor.

I am here because I am a man of passion, that's why. You know me, Snake. Passion rules me, I am passion's little plaything. Passion pulls my strings like a master puppeteer, and when passion pulls I caper and leap. I am a slave to passion, I admit it.

You smile. Why? Do you think that I use the word in its limited, sexual sense? Well, we were lovers once, and so you know that I am a passionate man in that area, but I am also much more than that. Mine is a passion for all of life, an overwhelming need to chew life like an apple and spit out the core. My passion is to risk, to dare, to fence with fate, and that is why I am here.

It began when I was ordered back to Havana from the U.N., after we said goodbye to each other. On my first day home I reported to my team leader for my next assignment, and I was told to see Patrício Chavez over at the Directión General de Inteligencia, which didn't please me at all. This Chavez is what your outfit calls the DDO, he runs all the operations, and he is not one of my favorite people. He's a mean, narrow-minded son of a bitch, and he is also one of the trickiest bastards that you'll ever meet on the face of the earth. I tell you, he's slick as oil, everything he says has three or four meanings, and you never really know what he's getting at. He was trained by the Jesuits before the revolution, the same school in Santiago where Fidel was trained, and maybe that's where he gets it from. There was one stunt that he pulled in Angola that cost us some very good people just because he outsmarted himself, and ever since then he hasn't rated very high with our aces. Not that there's anything we can do about it. We're in the same boat as you are. The CIA runs your Center, the DGI runs ours, and that's the way the world spins. So I wasn't very happy when I was told to report to Chavez; first because I loathe the little prick, and second because why would the DDO himself be giving me my next assignment? I always got my orders from my team leader, not from some normal, but, what the hell, there was nothing I could do about it. I went in to see him, and there he was sitting behind a desk as big as a tank in a tailor-made uniform that must have cost him a month's pay, no faded fatigues for this guy, and he told me that I was going straight back to the States.

"Don't bother unpacking," he said, "you're going to Miami. I'm putting you in with Mendoza and Fitch."

Now this came as no big surprise. This was duty that I was due for in the normal rotation of things. But I'd better tell you first about Mendoza and Fitch, and I don't give a damn if I'm talking out of turn. I meant it when I said that I'm out of it, out of it for good. So if you want to give this to your people at Langley, go right ahead. I don't care. It's not that I'm switching sides, it's just that I'm out of it.

Mendoza and Fitch is a stock brokerage house in Miami, a covert operation of the DGI. The DGI owns it, runs it, and staffs it with their agents. They've been in business for years, and most of their clients are Cuban expatriates. Cute, huh? The DGI making money off the exiles, but there's more to it than that, a lot more. The name of the game for Mendoza and Fitch is hard currency, something that Cuba is dying for. They can't trade with the United States, the peso is worthless off the island, and so they don't see much of anything hard. They're constantly strapped for convertible currency, so Patrício Chavez with that Jesuit mind of his comes up with the idea of planting legitimate businesses in the States as a way of funneling cash back to Cuba. This was years ago. I don't know how many covert ops he established, maybe a dozen, and all of them in south Florida where the DGI agents could blend in with the exile population. There was a trucking company, an outfit that made aluminum siding, a cigar factory, and some others that I never got close to. Some of them made good, some of them didn't, but they all had one main purpose, and that was to send dollars back to Cuba. Mendoza and Fitch is by far the most successful. As a stock broker and a financial consultant, Mendy services the cream of the expatriate community in south Florida, the families of all those fat cats who grabbed their cash and ran when Fidel came in. Mendy is good. Mendy makes money for its clients, it makes money for the house, and it makes money for Cuba. Chavez is very proud of the Mendy operation, not only for the money but because of the other function it performs. You see, there is always at least one sensitive working out of the Mendy office in Miami, dealing with the customers, and look who those customers are. The financiers, the bankers, the politicians, the high rollers in the exile community all use Mendoza and Fitch, and there's always a sensitive in the office to tap their heads. There's always a sensitive to sit in on the board meetings, the planning sessions, the late-night get-togethers when the movers and shakers make the decisions. You know what that means? It means that nothing goes on in the Cuban exile community that Mendoza and Fitch doesn't know about, and if Mendy knows, then Chavez knows, and if Chavez knows, then Fidel knows. He thinks of the exiles as his deadliest enemies, and he wants to know what they're thinking and planning. And he does, every minute of the day, thanks to Mendoza and Fitch.

So, Mendoza and Fitch is an intelligence gold mine… right? Wrong. In theory, that's the way it should be, but in practice it's virtually worthless. Why? Because, as the old proverb goes, you can't make chicken salad out of chickenshit, and you can't gather intelligence when there's no intelligence to gather. You think those high-powered expatriates, those captains of industry sit around all day plotting how they're going to overthrow Fidel and take back Cuba? You think they're busy hiring assassination teams to hit the Maximum Leader, slip him an explosive cigar? You think they're dreaming about another Bay of Pigs, only better? Forget it, that was yesterday. You know what they think about now? First they think about money, how to get it and how to keep it. Then they think about power, how to get it and how to use it. After that, the men think about women, the women think about men, and they both think about their kids, their education, the future, the marriage. They think about clothes, about food, about the weather, about the Dolphins, and all the way down at the bottom of the list they think about Cuba. Algún día, they think. One of these days we'll be able to go back to Cuba. You see what I'm getting at? I'm not saying that these people aren't sincere, it's just that they have other things to think about. American things, because they're Americans now. So, algún día, but that's tomorrow, and this is today.