Read Ghosts of Havana (A Judd Ryker Novel) for Free Online

planned to induce paranoia and psychosis by lacing his coffee with LSD via a tainted sugar cube. A fourth scheme made covert payments to bribe his security guards into turning their guns on their leader. They had accepted the cash but never pulled the trigger.
    None of these operations had worked. His predecessor Randolph Nye had let America down. And let down the brave Cuban people.
    The Deputy Director sighed to himself, knowing that, decades later, he was still letting them down. All nineteen successors between Nye and the current occupier of this office had letthem down, he thought. The Deputy Director knew he now had access to more money and more technology than anything Nye could have ever imagined. Yet the same old men, the same ragtag rebels who had seized Havana in 1959, still ran Cuba. The island was in a prison and part of the blame lay squarely on him.
    It wasn’t for lack of trying. The Deputy Director had green-lit operations to spark street riots by creating false bread shortages, to disrupt the banking system by implanting a virus in the central bank’s computers, and to plant misinformation in the local newspapers about luxury homes in the Spanish Costa del Sol owned by top Cuban politicians. He had provided seed capital to Cuban exiles in Costa Rica to create a SMS text network about the Miami Marlins baseball team that was a cover for organizing social protests on the island.
    His boldest PsyOps gamble was to launch AeroLibre , a high-altitude plane to beam television broadcasts into Cuban homes. The Deputy Director had even signed off on a Top Secret plan to create BesoPeso, a new electronic currency that could be used to evade the control of the Cuban authorities and, if necessary, pay off potential friends in Havana without drawing the notice of the U.S. Treasury.
    None of these plots had had the desired effect. None had even made a dent in the Cuban armor. Cuban intelligence had countermoved each scheme. They jammed AeroLibre ’s signal. They uncovered and blocked his phantom BesoPeso. Oswaldo Guerrero had found a way to choke his every move. The Devil of Santiago had to be the luckiest bastard on earth, he thought. Or, perhaps, the man known as O was actually the smartest.
    The Deputy Director collected the files again into a neat pile and carefully aligned the corners. He plucked every page from OPERATION RAINMAKER off the floor and returned it to the top of the pile. Then he sat back in his chair to clear his head. The long list of Agency failures was an embarrassment. He didn’t want to end up like Randolph Nye. He didn’t want the next man sitting in this chair to muse over his failings .
    Most Americans had long forgotten about the fight for Cuba. Hell, most Cuban exiles in Florida had given up, too. Inside the Agency, there were only a few Cold Warriors left, only a few old men like him that even remembered the competition with the Soviets and what it really meant to wage war for freedom. The chess games they played in Poland, Romania, Chile, Angola, Vietnam, Nicaragua. The current generation didn’t even think about communism. They studied Arabic and Pashtun and Mandarin. They wrote computer algorithms and tracked terrorist bank accounts and flew satellites and built biometric databases.
    Worse, the civilians at the White House and over in the State Department were going soft. They were surrendering our goals in the Western Hemisphere for the sake of taking the easy path on Cuba. No one worried about old communists on a tropical island anymore. They were only too happy to ignore history for the sake of expediency. To just roll over and pretend history didn’t matter. That freedom didn’t matter. The administration he served, like most of the country, was willing to just give up on Cuba. Open the embassy, exchange ambassadors, do the POTUS whitewash tour. Close our eyes and take a victory lap. Pretend everything was just normal. Nothing to see here, amigos. It made him sick. But he