41

It took them two and a half hours to reach San Cristóbal on the mountain bikes, the sun rising, then beating down and heating up the roadway beneath their wheels. Cooper thinking as he pedaled that if you wanted to see Cuba-the real Cuba-the trip was best made by bike. Spend your time in what was left of the old tourist havens, or the bustle of Havana, and you saw the propaganda, the illusion that the communist nation’s economy and overall health of its citizens were on the up-and-up. Put your ass on a bicycle seat, though, and head out on a country road, and you’d catch the real deal. The jovial but understated people who lived here, desperate for a few bucks from any and every wayward tourist, long since accustomed to the disaster that was the Cuban economy but still doing fine.

Keeping the Caribbean attitude alive, he thought: governments, conquerors, hurricanes, wealth, and poverty came and went, but the sun was always hot and the sand and sea and earth were always there. Live slow, mon-though they didn’t say it quite that way in Fidel’s homeland.

He pointed to the sign as they rode past-part makeshift billboard, part poster, the wooden placard set back from the road announcing to them in a cursive scrawl that they’d arrived in San Cristóbal. Palm fronds and a batch of weeds had grown to partially obscure the sign. Cooper had been here before; he had expected then, and found himself expecting now, to see some symbol of the past-a communist propaganda billboard, perhaps-advertising what the town had become world famous for: in aerial photographs taken in 1962 and 1963, an American spy plane had identified it as one of the main construction sites which Cuba and the USSR had been gearing up for the installation of Soviet ICBMs. Ground zero, as it were, of the Cuban missile crisis.

But this morning, same as during his first visit, Cooper found there existed no local clue that any such thing had taken place. The town seemed as ordinary as you got-another busy village at the junction of a few country roads, home to the usual farm-oriented bustle found in just about every such town south of Texas.

They steered off the road into a gravel flat, flipped down the kickstands, and looked directly at each other for the first time since they’d got themselves untangled from Cooper’s sleeping bag. Laramie handed Cooper her portable GPS unit.

“Here are Achar’s numbers,” she said, and pointed to the color screen. “And here’s where we are now.”

Cooper saw from the graphics on the screen that they were approximately four miles from the place Benjamin Achar had supposedly told them to go. Their destination was on this side of town, but judging from the GPS unit’s directional arrow, it would take finding a side road or two to get them there.

Cooper handed the device back.

“You want to review our story, or are you all right with it,” he said.

They were bohemian newlyweds out seeing the world on an extended honeymoon. Cooper had their fake passports-they’d used these identities before, during their aborted resort-hopping trip.

Laramie shook her head. “I’m good.”

Cooper secured his backpack and swung himself onto the Mongoose.

“I’m assuming if there’s anything worth seeing,” he said, “somebody’s going to be there keeping undesirables out.”

“Like us,” Laramie said.

“Correct. What I’m getting at,” he said, “is if the shit hits the fan, I shoot, and you run.”

Something twitched slightly at the corner of Laramie’s mouth, but Cooper didn’t exactly feel comfortable calling the expression a smirk.

“You’re the operative,” she said.

Cooper disturbed some gravel as he led the way back out onto the road.

Following the GPS unit’s directions, they turned onto a narrow, paved ribbon of road that cut through a dense stand of trees. After a short ride, Cooper encountered a metal gate set back off the right side of the road. The gate blocked entry to what might once have been a dirt or gravel road but had long since been retaken by nature. He’d expected something like this, and he supposed Laramie had too: grown over and hiding the remnants of John F. Kennedy’s beef with Nikita Khrushchev stood the usual Caribbean blend of indigenous and imported foliage-part pine forest, part palm fronds, but mostly weeds.

Stenciled in faded, red letters on a yellowing sign secured to the gate by two pieces of wire, there hung a warning against aspiring visitors.

PROHIBIDO EL PASO-PROPIEDAD DE LA F.A.R.

Cooper pulled his Mongoose into a shallow ditch at the side of the road, propped it on its kickstand, and was approaching the gate for a look around when he saw the slight shimmer of movement between the trees.

He ducked low beside the gate and Laramie followed his lead. From his hiding place, Cooper was just able to make out the unmistakable figure of an armed, though distant human being. The guard stood on a hill about half a mile back from the gate, barely visible over the peaks of pine and palm. Perched on the near side of the summit was a dilapidated hut-looking no different, Cooper thought, than the endless stream of fruit stands they’d encountered on the way here, but with the alternate purpose of housing the guard currently strolling about it.

The sentry walked out of view behind the shack, then reappeared on the other side. He wore fatigues and had a rifle slung over a shoulder. He was doing something with his hand, Cooper having trouble making out the miniscule activity from this distance until he realized the guard was having a smoke. Cooper watched him for a couple of minutes, rapidly becoming satisfied that the guard looked the way a guard looks when he isn’t too concerned about the threat of encroaching trespassers.

“So we’ve got company,” Laramie said. “As expected.”

He felt her right breast kind of pillowing against the back of his left shoulder. It bothered him that he noticed which body part had touched him as she leaned in for a look, but he dismissed the increasingly, irritatingly common sensation of helplessness and did his best to train his brain on the situation at hand.

“We do.”

“Could mean nothing,” she said. “Could be Castro has kept somebody posted here for forty-four years for no significant reason. At least nothing outside of sentry duty over an abandoned military base.”

He didn’t say anything.

“Or it could mean they’ve got something worth protecting,” Laramie said.

Cooper backed away from the gate, falling in behind the stand of pines that blocked the sentry’s view of their spot on the road.

“In the mood for a hike?” he said.

“Lead the way.”

They found the perimeter fence about two hundred yards into the woods. It was chain-link fencing with rusting barbed wire trellised along the top. PROHIBIDO EL PASO and PROPIEDAD DE LA F.A.R. signs of the same style as they’d seen on the gate were wired to the fence, alternating at fifty-yard intervals. Cooper tried lifting the fence in a place midway between poles and succeeded: there was plenty of space for them to crawl underneath.

“Congratulations,” he said as he came through behind her and got to his feet. “You’re now trespassing.”

“I’ve never been good with boundaries.”

They’d been prowling for close to three and a half hours when Cooper fell into a hole.

He felt his ankle roll, attempting and failing to transfer his weight to the other foot before the sprain engaged and a stab of agony rocketed up his leg. He swore at the pain, planted a knee, then had a look around: it seemed he’d fallen into a six-foot-deep depression, which he now observed had been masked by a sea of dead leaves.

“You all right down there, operative?”

Laramie was smiling at him, and Cooper was about to devise some wiseass reply when he realized she was pointing at something behind him.