Dennis Twentymen strolled through the halls of Mexico City's Chapultepec Castle, tagging behind a group of German tourists. Dennis's German was good enough he could follow the story as the guide told the tale of the Seven Young Heroes who had wrapped themselves in the Mexican flag and jumped off the walls of the castle to their death rather than surrender to General Scott's invading American Army.

Shaking his head over the stupidity of heroism that only the very young can demonstrate, Twentymen broke away from the aging tourists and walked toward a vacant space under a large stairway.

Eduardo Costas was already there, waiting in a dark corner.

Twentymen didn't waste any time on common civilities. "What do you have today?" he demanded.

Costas reached into his pocket, pulled out a manila envelope and handed it to Twentymen. "I've got a list of new assignments in the military garrison near Guantanamo," he said. "There is also a biography of the new Foreign Minister. He's close to Ra-l, but not too popular with El Jefe's personal staff." It would be crap intelligence, not worth a dime. Everything that Costas had provided since Dennis started working him had been just as useless. Dennis had expected it would be that way. What counted was not what Costas was providing today, but what he would provide at some future time. Dennis put the envelope in his own pocket and pulled out another envelope which he handed it to Costas. The white envelope had a small receipt attached to the outside.

"Sign the receipt," Dennis ordered. "You know the drill."

Eduardo opened the envelope and counted the five one hundred dollar bills. He rolled them up and put them in his pocket, then signed the receipt before handing it back to Twentymen.

"I've got other news," Eduardo said, his voice suddenly nervous. "I've got transfer orders this morning. I'm supposed to leave in two weeks."

"Where they sending you?"

"Back to Havana. I'm being assigned to the American section in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs."

"Congratulations," Twentymen said. He let the silence force Costas to say the next words.

"I've done my part," Costas said slowly, hopefully. "Now you must to do your part."

When Twentymen still said nothing, Costas continued, speaking emphatically. "Our agreement was that I would pass you all the information I could get for as long as I was working in Mexico, then you were to send me to the States before I had to go back to Cuba."

"I made the promise expecting real intelligence. There is no way Langley will approve a budget to set you up with a new identity in my country, not based on what we've given us so far."

"I told you from the first I didn't have access to important secrets," Costas insisted. "You said it didn't matter, that anything I passed you would be worthwhile."

"It was worth a few lousy bucks and you got that." Twentymen watched the Cuban's face, enjoying the storm of emotions shifting from disappointment to anger to fear.

"You mean that's it? This ends it?" The last three words were not so much a question as a plea.

"Of course it doesn't end it. You'll keep working for us when you get back to Havana. Someone will contact you there to arrange for a continued exchange."

"The hell I will!" Costas exploded with anger, talking so loud a couple of tourists walking by looked their way. He lowered his voice back to a whisper. "I won't go back to Cuba and I damn well wouldn't spy for the CIA if I did." The anger died, replaced again by fear as he added. "The one thing 'El Jefe' is good at, is catching spies."

"Which is exactly why you will continue working for us. If you aren't working for us, we have no reason to protect you."

"You wouldn't betray me?"

Dennis waited a few seconds, savoring the moment before he set the hook. He always enjoyed the feeling of power he experienced in that instant when a new recruit realized that he was trapped with no way to escape, that he would forever more do exactly what Dennis ordered him to do.

"If you don't do what we want, your security service gets copies of the receipts you've signed and a lot more," Dennis said. "I have pictures that were taken while we met, tape recordings of our conversations, copies of the documents you've passed us, all the evidence needed to put you against the wall."

"I won't go back," Costas insisted. "I'll ask the Mexican government for asylum."

"Do that, and you'll have both Havana and my people after you. There is no place you can hide."

It was time to throw the man a bit of hope. "It won't be so bad," Twentymen said, his voice soothing. "Castro can't last that long anyway. When he falls, you'll be free, and my government will reward those who helped make it happen."

"No you won't," Costas said, the despair rising like vomit in his throat. "I should have never talked to you. Your promises are worth nothing."

"They are when I promise what will happen if you don't keep cooperating. We'll meet again before you leave Mexico. I'll tell you then about the arrangements we will make to contact you in Havana."

The Cuban started to say something more, then realized nothing he could say would do him any good. He turned and shuffled away. Even from the back, the man looked totally defeated.

Dennis watched him disappear around the corner. When Costas was gone, Dennis walked out of the castle and found the nearest taxi stand. He told the driver to take him to the American embassy.

"You sure we can trust him once he gets back to Cuba?" Twentymen's supervisor, Bob Purzer, asked the question after Dennis had described the meeting with Eduardo Costas.

"He won't just work for us in Cuba, he'll work damn hard at his job in the Ministry," Dennis answered. "He'll want to convince his bosses he's a loyal employee who doesn't have to be watched too closely."

"Why are you so sure of that?"

"Costas is in love," Twentymen answered, making it sound like a disease. "He thinks it's a secret, but her name is Esperanza Suarez. She's a Cuban American who came down here with an American trading company. Her father is a big queso in the anti-Castro movement in Miami so there is no way she could follow Costas to Havana. That's why he made the deal to work for us for a promise we'd sneak him into the United States when he got ordered back to Cuba."

"A promise you never intended to keep."

"That's the way we play the game. Smart people know that. Dumb people do what we tell them to do after they bite on the bait we set for them."

"You enjoy it," Purzer said. "That bothers me, Denny. You get off on breaking the people you recruit. I know, it's part of the job. But Jesus! We don't have to enjoy it."

"We don't have to hate it either. I'm the best damn case agent the Company has because I do enjoy it."

"One of these days, one of your victims is going to bite you back."

"He'll have to find a weakness first, and I don't have any. I don't need more money than what the Company pays me, I've got a career I love, I don't have any family, and I'm not into drugs nor kinky sex."

"What happens to the woman?" Purzer asked.

"She'll stay here in Mexico City--hoping that lover boy gets an occasional trip out of Havana. We'll want to keep track of her, hopefully get some kind of control over her. She's our guarantee that Costas won't double on us. I'm working on that part of it now."

"You've got a vacation scheduled." Purzer said. "Is that going to interfere with setting this all up?"

"It won't. I'm only taking a week off. It'll take Langley that long to make the arrangements for a contact for Costas in Havana. I'll be back in plenty of time to pass Costas the instructions for keeping in contact."

Later that evening, Dennis Twentymen sat alone at a table in the Perro de Andaluz, a sidewalk cafe in the Zona Rosa, an entertainment district not far from the American Embassy. He saw the woman from a half block away as she walked down Copenhague Street toward him. Dennis marveled again at how beautiful she looked. He had wanted her the first time he had seen her through a set of binoculars. From the beginning, he had no doubts that sooner or later she would be his. Getting a woman was the same game as recruiting intelligence sources. One just had to find the right bait.

She spotted him, recognized he fit the description she was looking for, and walked straight toward his table.

"You are Dennis Twentymen?" she asked. She wore a scowl on her pretty face and her voice was angry as she asked the question.

"You are on time," he said. "I like that. Please sit down. What would you like to drink?"

She ignored the offer of a drink as she took a seat opposite Twentymen. "Eduardo told me what you are doing to him ... to us," she said.

"He is a foolish man."

"Foolish because he believed you when you promised you would help him go to America."

"I thought I would be able to do that. The people I work for decided otherwise. They want him in Cuba."

"They must change their minds. My father has friends in Congress. My family is not without power in Washington as well as Miami."

He waited a second to make sure he had her full attention, then added. "You're father may not have nearly so much influence when his friends discover that his favorite daughter has been working for the Castro government."

"I have never done such a thing."

"You have been secretly seeing a Cuban diplomat and I have the pictures to prove it. We will use those pictures in ways that will give you and your father a lot of publicity, all of it bad."

She glared at him a moment, the hate building in her eyes. "Why did you call me and insist that I meet you here if you will do nothing to help us?" she asked.

"I can make it look like Eduardo is not someone we could trust in Havana and suggest that we cut him loose."

"But there is something you want," she said, sudden sarcasm riding her voice. "What? Money in a Swiss bank account?"

He watched her eyes across the table as she asked the question. She knew it wasn't money he wanted.

"I want a week's vacation with you in Acapulco, starting Saturday," he hissed.

The hate flashed like summer lightning in her eyes. She started to get up, intent on walking away, then hesitated and settled back into the seat. "Eduardo will kill you for your insult. If he fails, my father will do it. You are a dead man. I swear it."

"Eduardo doesn't have the guts for that and your father won't touch me because you won't tell him about me, just like you haven't told him about Eduardo. You have only two alternatives--to give me what I ask, or to tell Eduardo good-by and hope that Castro's goons never discover Eduardo spent so much time while he was in Mexico with a CIA agent and a gusano's daughter."

He waited a moment, then added. "If he goes back to Cuba, he will be found out. Most of our spies in Cuba eventually go to the wall."

"Why do you send him to his death if you expect him to get caught?

"Before he dies, he may give us something we can use. That's the way we play the game. The question you should e asking is why will you send him to his death when a small gift of love could set him free, a gift he'll never know you made, if you want to keep it a secret?"

She looked down at the table, then around the restaurant at the well dressed tourists and high class Mexicans enjoying an evening on the town. He could see the tears in her eyes as she looked at him briefly before dropping her eyes back to stare at the table in front of him.

"How do I know you will do what you promise?" she asked without looking up.

"You can't be sure. I won't deny that. But perhaps after a week in Acapulco, I will be anxious to make you as happy as you have made me happy."

"I won't do it. I would die first."

"Dieing is not an alternative for you. The alternative is living with yourself after Eduardo has died."

He stared at her as she looked at him through her tears. The hook was set and all he had to do was reel her in. He reached into the breast pocket of his coat and pulled out an envelope which he handed to her. She stared at it a minute, then slowly reached a hand out to take it.

"Your ticket to Acapulco is in the envelope," he said. "I have reservations at the Acapulco Princess. I'll be waiting in the lobby for you. I suggest that you tell Eduardo that you are going to Miami to see your father. When I tell him that we will not need him in Cuba, he will think it was something your father did for you. He will never know about us and Acapulco."

She said nothing as she put the envelope in the purse she carried, got up, and walked away without looking back.

He smiled to himself and took a sip of the El Presidente Brandy he had ordered before she had joined him. She would be angry when Costas left for Havana, but Dennis would have an explanation for why the promised fix couldn't be made. After that, he would become her only hope for keeping Eduardo alive, and perhaps to bring him back some day to Mexico. As long as Eduardo lived, she would do anything he asked her to do. Power was the ultimate aphrodisiac. He could hardly wait for Acapulco.

He was sitting in the open air hotel lobby when she stepped out of the airport taxi and walked up the steps of the hotel, carrying a single bag. She was dressed for the beach in a cotton print dress that displayed naked shoulders. Her jet black hair was teasing the light breeze blowing through the lobby. He got up to meet her, took her bag, and led her to the elevator. "Were you afraid I wouldn't come?" she asked as he set the bag down inside his hotel room.

She wasn't acting like he expected. She was too self- assured, too much in control. "I knew you would come," he answered.

"How could you? I wasn't sure myself until today that I would come?"

"What decided you? Did Eduardo tell you how frightened he was about what would happen to him in Havana?"

She laughed, the laugh catching him by surprise. "I could care less whether poor Eduardo goes back to Cuba or stays in Mexico." "Why? What happened?"

"I told him what you wanted me to do to set him free, expecting he would kill you. Instead, he begged me to come to you."

"Then why are you here?"

"You are a man of power. You get what you want. I like that."

He reached for her. She backed away.

"No! The deal to save Eduardo is off. If you want to bed me, you must first make me want you as much as you want me."

He laughed. "You are a surprise. How did you get tied up with Eduardo?"

"I wanted information about what is happening inside Cuba for my father." She paused and looked at him for a moment, a small smile on her lips. "I hope you got more intelligence out of Eduardo than I got."

"We didn't, not yet. We are betting on the come."

"I suspected that," she said. "So we can start our new relation by discussing how we both should play Eduardo after he goes back to Cuba. I assume you want me to make Eduardo think I'm still in love with him, that he should try and come back to Mexico and visit me once in a while."

He agreed that would be useful. From a professional point of view, the unexpected development was a welcome one, an opportunity to exercise even tighter control over Costas. But he had lost the total control he had expected he would have over her when she walked into the hotel. He was sure that would only be a temporary situation.

She asked more questions about handling Costas and he answered as best he could, feeling his way into the new relationship as he probed for her weaknesses he might use to regain his total control.

"Would you order some champagne while I unpack my bag?" she asked when she had no more questions about Eduardo.

Dennis called room service and gave the order. He hung up and stood watching as she moved the few clothes from her bag to the closet. After that, she went into the bathroom, promising she would be right back out.

She came out after room service had delivered a bottle of iced champagne. She had bathed and was wearing a large towel wrapped around her body.

"Let's have some champagne first," she said.

More nervous than he had been with a woman in a long time, he pulled the bottle from the ice bucket, untwisted the wire, and popped the cork. She picked up the two glasses off the tray and held them out, letting him fill them both. She handed him one glass and lifted the other glass to her lips as he stared at her beauty. He waited until she took the first taste. When she did, he raised his own glass and drank half the golden liquid in a single gulp.

She walked across the room, sat on the bed and raised her glass in another toast, then took another long sip, emptying the glass. He followed her example. She held her glass out and he refilled it, then his own.

"Tell me about yourself," she said, making her words sound like she was giving an order, as they each sipped more of the bubbling gold. "Do you often get women the way you tried to get me?"

He denied he did so.

"Then why me? Why do you want me?" she asked.

"I've wanted you since the first moment I saw you walking with Eduardo along Reforma, near our Embassy." He took a step toward the bed, determined to take back the control. He stumbled, caught himself and reached a hand out to steady himself on a chair. He was suddenly dizzy as he looked at the two women sitting on the bed. Both of them were laughing at him. He reached out for them and tumbled forward. The two women merged into just one as he fell toward her, knocking her down to sprawl on her back across the bed. He could hear her giggling as he lay half across her on the bed, his knees still on the floor. She was trying to wiggle out from under him, but seemed to have no more strength than he did.

He woke up from wild dreams of flashing strobe lights and laughing, dark-haired women. The room was dark. He was lying naked between crisp, clean sheets. His head pounded with pain as he fumbled and found a lamp on a table beside the bed. Confused, he got up after turning the lamp on and looked around the room. He stood there for almost a minute before he could put the latest memories back together. He had been drugged. It must have been the champagne. She had drunk from the bottle too. They both had been drugged. He looked around, wondering what had happened to her.

He got up from the bed and found his clothes hanging in the closet. His wallet and his Rolex watch sat on the top of a chest of drawers. He grabbed the watch and looked at the face. It was five o'clock in the morning. It was the date that held the surprise. It was the Monday he was supposed to be back at his desk in the embassy in Mexico City.

He stepped into the bathroom and washed his face, trying to clear his head. When he looked in the mirror he discovered he had been recently shaved and his facial skin was a dark tan. He looked down at his body. He had a tropical vacation tan except for the area his trunks would have covered. He was hungry, but not as hungry as he should have been after a week without meals.

He found the small puncture wounds on the inside of his elbows that confirmed that whoever had kept him in a drugged state, had fed him with an IV as well as using a sun lamp to make him look like he'd spent his vacation lying on the beach. Someone had set him up, but why? He considered the possibility that Esperanza had done it. That made for the easiest explanation, but she had drank even more Champagne than he had done. She must have passed out too.

He was reaching for the phone to call his office in the embassy when someone knocked on the door.

He put on a pair of pants before answering. A half dozen Mexican cops waited outside the door. They pushed their way into the room, put handcuffs on him, and told him he was charged him with the murder of Eduardo Costas and Esperanza Suarez. He stood between two policemen and watched while they searched the room. They found an automatic pistol in the bottom of his suitcase. He recognized it as his own as a policeman pulled the clip and found it empty. He had not brought the pistol with him. He had left it in his apartment back in Mexico City.

Because he had diplomatic immunity, the Mexican police flew him back to Mexico City and turned him over to the embassy security officer.

Dennis Twentymen looked at the five men standing around him. One of the men was Bob Purzer and a second was the station chief, Fred Vanover. Two of the men had just flown in from Washington, D.C. and the fifth man was the Deputy Chief of Mission, the number two man in the embassy bureaucratic structure.

"Let's go over it again," Purzer said. "The Mexican police found the badly burned bodies of Eduardo Costas and Esperanza Suarez in an old mine shaft near Acapulco. The identification of Suarez was positive, based on dental plates supplied by her dentist in Miami. Costas was identified by a couple of pieces of personal jewelry. Both of them had been shot several times. The slugs the police recovered from the bodies came from a gun found in your hotel room, which was originally purchased by you in San Antonio, Texas."

"I didn't take the damn gun to Acapulco," Dennis insisted. "Some one stole the pistol, killed them, then hid the pistol in my suitcase."

"While you were dreaming like a baby," Purzer said. "You've told us your story. Who do you think did such a terrible thing? Give us a name, a reason, a motive."

"It's obvious, isn't it? Cuban security. They found out I was working one of their diplomats so they killed him and his girl friend and framed me."

"That's not the way they work," one of the men from Washington said. "If they couldn't double him, they would have kidnapped him and taken him back to Havana, tortured him in to a confession, then held a big public trial."

"Why would I do it?" Dennis demanded. "What's my motive?"

"That's what you didn't think we would find out," the man from Washington said. "We would have bought your story that someone framed you, except for one thing. What you didn't know was that Costas had a surprise package someone was holding in case you did something like this. We received it in the mail yesterday."

"What are you talking about?" Twentymen demanded.

Purzer spread the package full of material out so that Twentymen could look at it. There was a copy of a Mexican bank draft made out to Twentymen in the sum of fifty thousand dollars and a copy of a Panamanian bank account with his name on it that showed several deposits of fifty thousand dollars followed by a cash withdrawals in the same amount. There were three color prints showing Twentymen and two men standing by a table stacked high with plastic packages packed with white powder. The clothes he was wearing in each of the pictures were clothes he had taken with him to Acapulco. While he had been drugged, someone had dressed him, stood him up and taken the pictures. That explained the dreams of flashing strobe lights.

"We've identified the other men in these pictures," the man from Washington said. "They're Cubans on the narcotic look-out list."

"You and Costas were shipping cocaine," Fred Vanover said, his voice rising in pitch with a burning anger. "Eduardo brought the shipments into Mexico in a Cuban diplomat pouch, then you shipped them on in our embassy's pouch."

"If I was making so damn much money, why did I kill my partner?"

Purzer answered. "Knowing you, I figure you made enough money for one scam and decided to get rid of the only witnesses. You always were a careful man, never too greedy."

"You going to turn me over to the Mexican cops?"

"We're going to insist on your diplomatic immunity as far as the Mexican government is concerned," the Chief of Station answered. "We obviously don't want anyone who knows as much about intelligence methods as you do, sitting in a Mexican jail. You won't be tried for murder, but these men will be taking you back to Washington to face narcotics charges in an American court."

Twentymen refused to say anything more. He'd get a good lawyer and eventually he'd get off. It would never go to trial, because the Agency would never agree to produce the documents on the CIA intelligence operations against the Cuban Embassy in Mexico that he would insist he had to have to prove his innocence.

He was sure he had it figured out. The Cuban security boys had spotted Costas as a spy. Somehow, they had learned about his date in Acapulco with Esperanza. Probably Costas himself had told them about, maybe hoping he could save his own skin. Instead the Cubans decided on a payback that would pay triple dividends. They punished a spy, hurt a Gusano by killing his daughter, and took out one of the CIA's best case officers.

"Damn them!" he thought. He was finished as far as the Agency was concerned. His colleagues will think he had been stupid, if not guilty. The Company expected a bit of corruption, but getting caught being stupid was the unforgivable crime.

"Thank you Mr. Calles," the pretty waitress said as she picked up the credit card slip and saw the size of the tip the hotel guest had added.

The handsome, dark haired man, waived her off with a hand motion that suggested the tip was nothing, and checked his copy of the charge, before putting the paper and the Visa card back in his new wallet. Then he smiled across the table at the beautiful woman sitting there. He took a deep breath of the cool Colorado air and thought again how it would forever remind him of the smell of freedom. He tasted the last sip of his breakfast coffee, then told her, "I still can't believe it went so smoothly. I keep expecting a tap on my shoulder."

"It won't happen," the woman answered. "No one looks for people they know are dead."

"I'm still angry you didn't tell me what you were going to do. I would have never let you take such a risk." "The way my father fixed things, there was no risk for me."

"But you deliberately drank that Champagne, knowing it would knock you out."

"It had to be done. It was part of the plan." "It's my fault you had to take the risk. I thought someone working with the U.S. government could be trusted to keep a promise, even if he was a spy."

"My father learned that lesson during the Bay of Pigs."

"How did your father arrange for the corpses they think were us?"

"Don't worry. Pap... didn't kill two strangers so we could live. There are many poor people in Mexico and they die regularly like flies. It was not hard to find two families willing for a good price to bury a coffin without the deceased loved one in it. It took a little more effort for my father to replace my dental records in Miami with the x-rays of the peasant woman who died in a bus accident in Chilpancingo, but it was done." "I'm surprised that Twentymen took the bait," he said. "That he didn't suspect anything when you went so willingly to his hotel room." "He was so sure he could control me, he forgot to fear me."

[NOTE: We have obtained permission from the author to republish this article on BuildFreedom.]

Copyright 1996--Mack Tanner. This original work may not be copied or distributed in any format without the specific consent of the author.

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