Valley of the Templars by Paul Christopher Page B

Eddie pointed it to it, carefully carried the chair back into thesitting room of the suite and then came back out onto the balcony again, closing the French doors behind him.
    “I turned on the radio so the microphone will not be lonely. They are playing an old speech of Fidel’s—it will go on for hours.”
    “They really bug hotel rooms?”
    “Certainly.” Eddie smiled. “They must give the last few Chinese at Bejucal
something
to listen to.”
    Holliday spread out the map again, anchoring it with the candle lamp. There was enough light from the French doors to see the map clearly. “Show me,” he said again.
    Eddie ran a large black forefinger through a gently curving arc in the center of the island. “These are the mountains of Escambray. They run like a spine down the middle of Cuba, not high, but mostly covered with jungle. The roads are still dirt and the only way in or out is in military trucks. This is where the War of the Bandits was fought.”
    “War of the Bandits?” Holliday asked.
    “It is an old story in Cuba, once taught to schoolchildren, but heard of very little in the United States.”
    “So tell me,” said Holliday.
    Eddie lit a cigar with his old Zippo, something that Holliday hadn’t seen him do in a very long time. Being back in Cuba and the loss of his brother were clearly taking their toll.
    “There are two versions—the bedtime story CIA agents tell their grandchildren and the one Fidel tells. The only one that I know to be true is the one from 1962 in which my brother at fifteen years old fought in the Sierra del Escambray with an old Springfield rifle and almost died.”
    “Who was he fighting?”
    “The remains of Batista’s army—the truly corrupt one who had so much to lose—control of drugs, prostitution, gambling, other criminals, some right-wing anticommunists and of course the CIA. Fidel spent three years trying to get them out with the regular army, but his losses were too high; fighting in the Sierra del Escambray is like fighting your own shadows, and the Batistanados were better armed—by the CIA.
    “Eventually Fidel had a better idea; he gathered together everyone and anyone he could think of—young people especially. He soon had fifteen thousand volunteers. They walked, almost arm in arm, through the jungle like when you search for a lost child, a
cordón
?”
    “Cordon.” Holliday nodded.
    “Anyway, like this they enclosed the banditos like fish in a net and then they killed them all. My brother was wounded badly in the leg. He almost lost it and walks with a limp still, and Fidel lost many people, but eventually all the banditos were gone. It took almost three years. By the second year the CIA saw there was no hope, so they withdrew their support.”
    “And the Valley of Death?”
    “The Sierra del Escambray is divided into two parts, the Sierra Guamuhaya and the Sierra de Sancti Spiritus. Between them flows the Agabama River. This is the Valley of Death.”
    “You think this is where he has gone to hide himself?”
    “No,” said Eddie. “I don’t think he is hiding; to hide, all you have to do is lose yourself in the favelas of Havana. There are places in those slums and
baracoas
even the Secret Police will not go. I think perhaps he knows something, maybe too much. I think perhaps he has gone there to find something.”
    “So, how do we get there?”
    “To go by the motorcycle or even a rented car would attract too much attention.”
    “We’re tourists. We can go anywhere.”
    “This is Cuba,
mi colonel.
You cannot go anywhere without a reason, even a tourist. And this is not a place where tourists go.” For a moment Eddie’s eyes settled on the tourists and prostitutes lingering by the sea wall. Then his focus shifted farther out.
    “By sea,” said Eddie finally. “We must find a boat.”
    “One of my people in Cardinal Ortega’s office in Havana has been in contact,” said Father Thomas Brennan, head of Soladitum Pianum, the Vatican