Miami is less a fixed backdrop than a hinge between Cuba, the United States, and the novel’s pursuit of the missing cameo. It brings together Cuban exile networks, intelligence operations, and the secretive religious groups surrounding the jewel; it is also the place from which Aurelio escapes a sect whose reach extends beyond the city. The cameo itself does not remain there: by the time John Robbart is tasked with recovering it, it has been moved to Washington.

A Base Between Cuba and Exile

Miami figures as an important point of contact between covert actors inside Cuba and Cuban exiles in the United States. An undercover CIA operative attached to the U.S. chargé d’affaires in Havana has recruited a Spanish double agent with access to the Castro government. The intelligence trail leads from Ramondo Cardoso, who died suddenly in Cárdenas after buying the jewel in Kansas City, to Rodrigo Lerbier, the Yoruba officiant who came to possess it. Lerbier is placed under surveillance, drawing the cameo’s movement into a cross-border investigation.

That surveillance operates within a wider political network. Two covert Cuban dissidents hold high positions in the regime while maintaining connections with Freemasons among Cuban exiles in Florida and elsewhere in the United States, organized through the Grand Lodge of Cuba in Exile. Their stated strategic aim is to prepare for a post-Castro government. Miami therefore represents more than a convenient location for agents to meet: it is a node in a political project linking clandestine opposition on the island with exile organizations abroad.

Aurelio’s Passage Through the City’s Orbit

Aurelio’s story connects Miami to another kind of clandestine network. A Masonic channel persuades him to join a newly established Cuban lodge, presenting membership as a possible route out of Cuba and toward travel in the United States. As an initiation test, he is told to take the cameo, which the lodge describes as a dangerous object requiring collective spiritual power to neutralize. The mission gives the theft an apparent religious and humanitarian purpose, even as it draws Aurelio into a system of manipulation.

After reaching the United States, Aurelio is gradually pulled into a group whose practices take him from Santería toward Palo Mayombe and, eventually, Satan worship. The sect’s installations are near Miami. When Aurelio recognizes the nature of what he has accepted and invokes Jesus Christ, he decides to flee. He escapes the compound at night using a series of ruses, then travels away from the main roads until he reaches Key West. There he finds an abandoned boat and crosses the Florida Straits. Recreational sailors tow him toward the boundary between the United States and Cuba; exhausted but safe, he reaches a deserted shore near Varadero. Miami’s proximity to the sect thus marks both the reach of Aurelio’s captivity and the beginning of his escape.

Intelligence, Frustration, and the Missing Cameo

Miami also becomes a working base for Chris, Robbart’s friend and CIA contact. After the cameo vanishes just as it seems close to recovery in Cuba, Robbart speaks with Chris by telephone. The CIA has been following Lerbier to determine whether he staged a break-in to reclaim the jewel, but the Cuban purges make intelligence work there hazardous. Chris’s position in Miami makes him a practical link to the investigation, even though Robbart is based in Kansas City and the agents operating in Cuba must remain cautious.

The novel complicates any assumption that the cameo is still in Miami. In 2003, Robbart is ordered to retrieve the genuine jewel from a satanist sect in Florida, with the help of a powerful, masked intermediary using the pseudonym Brendan while Robbart is to use Gilbert or Gil. The plan is delayed when Jeff discovers that the cameo is no longer where it had been displayed. He suspects it may have been taken to a related satanist lodge in Washington, but the team must first establish its location and reconnoiter. Months and then years pass. In April 2019, Robbart finally enters the building after using concealed electronic listening devices to check that it is empty, disables its alarm, and substitutes a counterfeit supplied by Charles de Castelmont. The operation’s Miami premise has given way to a recovery attempt in the capital.

A Threshold, Not a Resting Place

The city’s significance lies in these overlapping movements rather than in the cameo’s lasting presence. Intelligence from Miami helps connect Cuban surveillance, exile Freemasonry, and the search for the jewel; the sect near the city draws Aurelio into a destructive spiritual allegiance and becomes the point from which he escapes toward Cuba. Meanwhile, the attempted retrieval is repeatedly frustrated by the object’s movement elsewhere. Miami appears to promise access—to Cuba, to exile networks, and to the hidden artifact—but each route leads onward, leaving the city as a threshold in a pursuit that never settles there.