Spy in a Little Black Dress - By Maxine Kenneth Page 0,56

Others wore rumpled dark suits. All had guns drawn or rifles raised, and they were being led by the man Jackie recognized as Colonel Sanchez. Apparently, this member of the secret service had finally caught on to the fact that the rebel headquarters in the city lay only a stone’s throw from his own command center.

There was a mass scraping of chairs as the revolutionaries rose and bolted for the doorway, hoping to get downstairs and outside the building before this flying squad from the Service of Military Intelligence could round them up. Jackie watched as two men from the front row grabbed Fidel by both arms and dragged him toward the exit. But the doorway was a narrow one, and there was a bottleneck as all the rebels tried to flee the room at the same time. Jackie’s natural instinct was to follow them down the stairs. But instead, she held back and put a hand on Emiliano’s arm, silently urging him to follow her lead.

Between the shafts of sunlight, there were still deep pockets of shadow, and it was into one of these shadows that Jackie now dissolved, with Emiliano instinctively at her side. She followed the pocket to the wall against which all the remaining ballroom chairs had been piled, found the slight gap between the wall and the chairs, and slipped into it. After Jackie’s slight tugging on his sleeve, Emiliano did too.

Trying to control her heavy breathing and rapid heartbeat, Jackie looked out through the chairs and watched horror-struck as Rosario, the last rebel out of the room, was nabbed by Colonel Sanchez, who seemed to wear a look of vindication on his face. There was something unusual about that moment of capture, but Jackie had no time to think about it now, as she was too busy trying to plot their escape from this room.

She waited until Sanchez and Rosario started down the stairs in the wake of the other members of Sanchez’s flying squad. Then Jackie put one finger on her lips as a signal to Emiliano to step as quietly as possible, and they emerged from behind the relative security of the chairs. She needn’t have worried about making any noise, however, because sounds of absolute chaos came from the ballroom below as terror was unleashed on the remaining dancers.

Jackie walked quickly over to the windows that she had checked out upon first entering the room. The shutter was easy to raise. Jackie lifted one, then stepped through the window onto the fire escape, first stopping to make sure that her camera bag was secure. She motioned for Emiliano to step over the sill and join her. The fire escape creaked and vibrated and shook in place. Jackie guessed that it was now only rust that was holding the structure to the wall. Best to get off it as quickly as possible. She pointed downward, then started down the rickety iron ladder to the landing directly below.

As she clambered down the rusted ladder, she began to replay in her mind the end of the scene that she had just witnessed. There was Rosario trying to flee from the flying squad. She was the last through the doorway and would have made it had not Colonel Sanchez seized hold of her from behind. He grabbed her around the waist and flung her around, spinning her so fast that her blond hair, obviously a wig, flew off her head to reveal a thick mane of dark brown, curly hair. Now, why would someone with hair like that want to disguise it?

XIII

They were on the run.

Once down the rickety fire escape, Jackie and Emiliano exited the alley opening to the street, hoping they were far enough from the building’s entrance to escape being spotted by any members of the flying squad who had been positioned there. The scene in the street was absolute pandemonium as the rebels caught by Colonel Sanchez’s men were placed in army trucks parked at the curb. People had come out to rubberneck and were being held back by police officers supporting the flying squad with crowd control. Jackie could only hope that some of the rebels had managed to take advantage of this crowd and blend in with the gawkers as Sanchez’s men herded the ones already captured into the rear of the waiting trucks.

In one of the vehicles, she spotted Rosario, noticeable now by her long, dark brown curls. She looked frightened, as anyone would have been under the