The Successor by Stephen Frey Page A

he’d seen the damage they caused on so many X-rays. But there was something about the general that made Padilla want to emulate him in every way. Something about the way the general carried himself, how he was like ice when it came to tough decisions, how he was so effortlessly in charge of situations, how he had no compassion whatsoever for Rodriguez. Delgado’s lack of emotion flew in the face of everything Padilla had ever believed in, was diametrically opposed to the way he’d lived his entire life. But it dawned on Padilla that caring and gentleness didn’t have much chance of emancipating a nation. It had also dawned on him that he might be at the very core of a movement that could in the end bring a new, much better way of life to millions of people who’d never known it. But that the means to achieving those lofty goals might well involve a terrible level of brutality in the interim.
    Over the last three months Padilla had accepted that awful reality and that he might even be a conduit to it in the short term. He’d taken a number of psychology courses at medical school in Toronto, and he was aware that his temporary change of attitude was manifesting itself in his daily routine in an increasing number of ways. Smoking cigars; eating foods that tasted good as opposed to being healthy for him; being shorter and stricter with nurses at the hospital and his children at home; asking Delgado to get him a gun at their last clandestine meeting; frequently demanding sex from his wife—once a few weeks ago even forcing her to have it with him when she’d said no at first.
    Padilla’s eyes narrowed, thinking about the intensity of that encounter. How his wife had actually fought him for a few moments as he’d held her down and pulled her clothes off—the first time that had ever happened in their seventeen-year marriage. How she’d admitted to him afterward as they lay wrapped in each other’s arms that she hadn’t been so aroused in years.
    “Señor, will you please—”
    “I’m sorry for taking so long, gentlemen,” Padilla interrupted the attorney, pulling the cigar from his mouth. “I’ve been collecting my thoughts.” He leaned forward, put his arms on the scarred table, and looked each of them squarely in the eye in turn: the deputy minister of foreign investment and economic development just to his left; the number four man at the Ministry of Science and Technology next to him; the attorney at the other end of the table who had been at the Ministry of Justice for twenty years; the deputy minister of agriculture to the attorney’s left; and, directly to Padilla’s right, the number three executive at the Central Bank of Cuba, who was also a former executive of the country’s cartography company—a company owned and run by the army so that no military installations on the island ever made it onto a map of Cuba. “Forgive me, I have much to tell you about my recent trip.”
    The other men around the table nodded to each other expectantly.
    Padilla had just returned yesterday from a weeklong trip to the United States, where he’d been a guest observer at eleven operations performed at Lenox Hill hospital in Manhattan. The operations had ranged from a triple-bypass procedure to brain surgery. It had been an intense schedule, but he’d still managed to slip away to meet his contacts twice. The primary reason he was a member of the Secret Six was because he was a doctor—he couldn’t add much to what they were going to do after the Incursion, as they were calling it, but being a doctor allowed him to travel to and from the United States frequently. Which was invaluable to the group at this stage because it enabled them to keep in frequent touch with their U.S. intelligence contacts without having to use phones or e-mail, which could easily have been traced.
    Despite the official embargo on products and services between the two countries, the United States wanted to be able to demonstrate to the