Castro's Daughter

by David Hagberg

  A young boy, maybe in his early teens, dressed in a white jacket came out with a silver tray on which was a bottle of Máximo Extra Añejo fine Cuban rum and two glasses, but no ice. “Good afternoon, Señora Coronel,” he said brightly. He set the tray on the table. “You’re home early. Shall I pour?”

  “No. Leave us now.”

  “Shall I tell Cook there will be two for dinner?”

  “Yes, please,” María said, and the boy left.

  Otto got the impression that the boy and the two minders—the only ones he’d seen in the house—were happy, not at all oppressed by their boss. Which was confusing, because he’d wanted to believe that the woman was a monster.

  María was looking at him, a faint smile on her lips. “I’m not what you expected.”

  “No. But then I suppose that insanity has a bunch of different faces, not all of them ugly.”

  “A left-handed compliment, I suppose. But there’s nothing insane about this operation, except for its difficulty and, I suppose, improbability.”

  “Your people kidnapped my wife—you can’t expect me to cooperate.”

  “You’re here,” María said. “Anyway, you must have figured out that she wasn’t the target, even though she probably has some interesting information we could use.”

  It was what Otto had been telling himself from the start. “Neither am I,” he said.

  “Actually, no—although I know some people in our Technical Directorate who would like to spend a month or two talking to you.”

  “I’d love to get at the DI’s computer system, but what I have in mind wouldn’t take much more than an hour or two, ya know.”

  María poured a couple of fingers of rum into each glass, and handed Otto one. “This is among our better rums,” she said. And she delicately sipped hers. “But I’ve always been curious about something. With your expertise, I’ve always assumed that you could hack into our systems just about any time you wanted to do. Why haven’t you?”

  Otto sipped his rum and nodded. “This is very good,” he said. “It’s never been worth the effort, at least not on my watch. And a lot of your data is stored the old-fashioned way—on paper in file cabinets—and we would have to run the risk of burning some of our assets to get at them. Again, not worth the risk. The Russians didn’t leave you enough for us to worry ourselves.”

  María looked away for a moment. “It’ll have to end one day. The embargo. It’s so stupid.”

  “We never pointed nuclear missiles at you.”

  She looked back. “We didn’t invade your country. And we don’t maintain a military base on your soil.”

  “We were willing to help in the beginning,” Otto said. “But your father chose the Russians instead of us.”

  “Your government supported Batista—”

  Otto waved her off. “Save it for the faithful. It’s not why I’m here, and frankly, I don’t give a shit about your internal politics. If you guys ever straighten out your act, you’d be surprised what we could do for you.”

  “No thanks,” María said bitterly. “We’ve seen what you’ve done for Iraq and Afghanistan.”

  “They have free elections,” Otto said. He finished his drink, Louise’s sweet face popping up in his mind’s eye, and it took everything he had not to jump up and start hopping from foot to foot as he usually did when agitated. The only other alternative was to grab the liquor bottle and try to beat her to death with it.

  “I took a great risk getting you here, but it was the only way I could see to get Kirk McGarvey to come to me. I want you to get word to him.”

  “It’s already been done.”

  “Then you knew before you got on the plane?”

  “Of course, just not the why.”

  An odd look briefly crossed María’s eyes. “I haven’t an idea. It was my father’s deathbed wish that I get him to come here. He said something about retribution, and that McGarvey would know.”

  “Know what?”

  “Our salvation. My father’s exact words. And he told me something else that made no sense. He said that Kim Jong-il told him McGarvey could be trusted. Does that mean anything to you?”

  Otto shook his head. “Sounds like the ravings of a lunatic to me,” he lied.

  María bridled. “He was my father.”

  “That’s something else you can save for the faithful,” Otto said, but he was intrigued. “Salvation from what? Did he say?”

  “No. He made me promise to get McGarvey here and then he died.”

  “No clue?”

  “None.”

  “What about his personal papers? Maybe a daily journal, something like that.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Shit,” Otto said angrily. “You pulled off this stunt without doing your homework?”

  “It’s not so easy here. Especially just now. The entire country is on high alert. Everybody is being closely watched. No one can afford to make a false move.”

  “You don’t seriously think we’ll invade.”

  “No one does. But Raúl and the people around him are afraid of a revolution. They’ve been paying close attention to what’s been going on in the Middle East, especially Egypt, and they don’t want something like that to get started here.”

  “And yet you took the risk to kidnap my wife and bring me here so that you could get at Mac.”

  “I suspect that he’ll come for you, and when he does, your wife will be released unharmed.”

  “He’ll come for me,” Otto said. “But maybe not in the way you want.” And he was very afraid for Louise.

  FOURTEEN

  But instead of dinner with the American, Raúl’s secretary telephoned to order María back to Government Plaza for an urgent meeting. A military helicopter touched down on the lawn in front of her house and she was whisked into the city, where she was admitted to the president’s office, less than fifteen minutes after the call.

  Raúl was alone in his office, and María, dressed in military fatigues, approached his desk and saluted. He was a pleasant-looking man in his eighties, though he didn’t look that old. His eyes were squinted behind square glasses, his hair gray, and just now the corners of his mouth were turned down, as if he’d been given disappointing news. He was dressed in a rumpled tweed sport coat and open-collared white shirt.

  He sketched a tired salute and motioned for her to take a seat. “Thank you for coming at such short notice,” he said. “This is a troubled time we all knew was coming. And I’m asking for the cooperation of all my important … people.”

  María thought he’d almost said friends. “I’m at your service, Señor Presidente.”

  “You will attend the funeral tomorrow in civilian clothes, but no one else from your directorate must be there. You understand the necessity in order to avoid any speculation about your true identity.”

  “Of course.”

  “You will interact with no one, especially the American delegation,” Raúl said, and he looked away for a moment, a sudden expression of sadness, maybe even grief, coming to his face. “It’s not what I want. Not what your father would have wanted. Not the way any of us thought that this would turn out. None of it.”

  María felt a little sorrow for him, though he was a wily old bastard, almost as adept at manipulating people as Fidel had been. He’d been there at the beginning of the revolution and as the youngest of the three Castro boys, he had learned his lessons well from the masters of the game, including Che Guevara and the Soviet spy Nikolai Leonov, whom he’d met in Moscow in the mid-fifties. But he’d lost a brother, and he was now fully faced with the nearly overwhelming task of pulling his country out of its abject poverty without appearing to cave in to Washington’s demands for political reform.

  “I understand, sir,” she said. “I’ve always understood.”

  “He loved you, as he did all his children.”

  María lowered her eyes. The remark was unexpected. But she nodded. “I didn’t know it until he called me that nig
ht.”

  “You were the only one with him when he passed?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did he say to you?”

  María suppressed a smile. Calling her here tonight had nothing to do with the funeral arrangements. “Nothing that made any sense. He talked about the revolution, and before that Mexico City, and the good friends he’d lost. The Bay of Pigs and the missiles that were almost his.”

  “And me?”

  “He said your name, but I couldn’t understand the rest. He was very weak, but he held my hand and told me that I was a beautiful child.”

  Raúl looked disappointed. “You know about the spy who took photographs of you and presumably sent them to the CIA?”

  “Yes. But so far, there have been no repercussions.”

  “How would you know something like that?”

  “We have assets in Washington and New York, some of them quite effective. Had I been outed, the word would have spread.”

  “Are you telling me that we have someone inside Langley?”

  “No, but we have at least two close connections with people in their headquarters.”

  “Will you share that information with me?”

  Operational details were almost never part of a presidential briefing, and certainly the names of key people were usually kept secret, in case of an inadvertent slip of the tongue. “I will prepare a report first thing in the morning, Señor Presidente.”

  “No need, if you are sure that your true identity has not been guessed.”

  Raúl was probing, so the problem was what he knew and where he was getting his information. Only her chief of staff, Ortega-Cowan, and very few of her operational people knew the full extent of the Washington operation that got Rencke here, part of which was telling the CIA who she was. And when this op was over, the three kidnappers would disappear.

  “No one knows my true identity,” she said, and she watched for a reaction, but there was none, except that Raúl nodded.

  “I thought that perhaps your father might have told you something that could be useful,” he said. “These are troubled times, and I have a premonition.” But he trailed off.

  “Sir?”

  Raúl shook his head. “Nothing. Go back to your home. Tomorrow will be a fateful day for Cuba.”

  * * *

  Downstairs, María headed down the long corridor, most of the offices dark now, to the rear exit, where the helicopter was waiting. Ortega-Cowan came out of the shadows, giving her a start. “What the hell are you doing here?” she demanded.

  “I was just leaving the office when I saw you get out of the helicopter. What did the great one have to say?”

  “He doesn’t know about our little operation, if that’s what you mean,” María said, and she continued down the corridor.

  “It’ll only be a matter of time.”

  “Not if you keep your mouth shut and a tight hand on the operational assets.”

  “Don’t worry about me, Colonel, but Washington could have been a disaster. Still might be if the FBI finds the woman.”

  They stopped at the doors. “What’s this all about, Román? Are you getting cold feet on me?”

  “If you would confide in me why El Comandante wanted Kirk McGarvey to come to us, I might be able to come up with another scenario that might not be so dangerous. If Washington falls apart, all our heads will be on the chopping block.”

  “Make sure that it does not.”

  “I cannot in all good conscience operate blind,” he said, and María almost laughed.

  “When have you ever had a good conscience?” she said. “I’ll tell you one thing, this is important, but even I don’t know the full extent of it, nor will I until I actually get to speak with McGarvey face-to-face.”

  Ortega-Cowan was still troubled, and it showed. “Is he close enough to Señor Rencke to come here?”

  “I think so,” María said. “But if not, we’ll devise another plan, you and I. Maybe even meet him somewhere on neutral ground.”

  “Mexico City?”

  “It’s a possibility we might have to consider. Why don’t you work something out and have it on my desk after the funeral?”

  “As you wish, Colonel,” he said, and he turned and walked away down the corridor toward the front doors and the parking lot in the plaza across the street.

  * * *

  On the way back to her house near Cojimar and her guest there, she had time to think about the question Ortega-Cowan had asked: Was Kirk McGarvey close enough to Otto Rencke to come here? And in time—before Washington unraveled or before someone on General Muñoz’s staff became interested in what María’s directorate was doing in the aftermath of the shooting last week in El Comandante’s compound?

  The day after her father’s death, she had searched the DGI’s archives for everything the service knew about McGarvey. Much of it was little more than gleanings from newspapers—mostly in the United States, but elsewhere around the world as well, including London, Paris, Berlin, Prague, Moscow; but nothing in Tokyo, Beijing, and certainly not in Pyongyang.

  A somewhat lengthy report concerned an operation in which McGarvey had taken part, at Guantánamo Bay—but it was mostly speculation, because the DI had no one reliable inside the U.S. Navy base, except that there were at least two night incidents in which gunfire had been reported.

  She hadn’t waded through all the material—there was no time for it—but she’d read enough, including a few DI-generated reports from Washington and the UN, to notice that almost every time McGarvey’s name came up, Otto Rencke’s had also been mentioned.

  Which had led her to Rencke’s file, which was curiously a much larger one than McGarvey’s because the DI had a great deal of respect for his computer genius. And a certain amount of fear, which was especially shared by the Venezuelan SEBIN.

  “Bring that man here, and you might be letting a hornet’s nest into our living room,” Ortega-Cowan had warned.

  “We’ll keep him for just as long as need be,” she’d said.

  “Nowhere near any of our computers.”

  “Of course not,” she’d agreed.

  But Rencke had told her that he could break into Cuba’s systems anytime he wanted, except that it wasn’t worth the effort.

  And she’d believed him.

  FIFTEEN

  At Langley, Bambridge escorted McGarvey up to the DCI’s office on the seventh floor. Page was new to the Agency since Mac had been in the Old Headquarters Building last, and it was he who’d appointed the new Deputy Director of Operations. “Welcome back, Mr. Director,” his secretary said.

  “I’m not really back for very long,” McGarvey said, and he and Bambridge went in.

  Page rose from behind his desk and came around to shake hands. “Good to finally meet you, Mr. McGarvey,” the DCI said. “I assume that Marty briefed you on the way over.”

  “Yes, he did. Has the Bureau made any progress finding Louise?”

  “Nothing overnight. But we’ve asked that it be kept low key as long as Otto is in Havana.”

  “What’s the reaction from the White House?”

  “I’ve not briefed Bible yet, so it hasn’t gotten to the president,” Page said. Madeline Bible was the new Director of National Intelligence, and the word on the street, even as far as Serifos, was that she was probably the last. That layer of bureaucracy created in the aftermath of 9/11 had proved ineffective. “I won’t be able to keep this under wraps for much longer, though.”

  “What about the State Department’s delegation to Fidel’s funeral?”

  “If you mean have they reacted to Otto’s disappearance, no, they have not. Officially, he wasn’t on the plane, but the aircrew reported that he was met by two men and they drove off once the delegation was gone. And that’s the last anyone has seen or heard of him.”

  “Mr. McGarvey is of the opinion that the real target is him, not Otto,” Bambridge said.

  Page was startled. “How did you come to that conclusion
?”

  “Otto doesn’t have anything they would understand, and he sure as hell wouldn’t cooperate with them by revising their computer systems,” McGarvey said. “They grabbed Louise, the easiest target, to force Otto to Havana, knowing I would go after him.”

  “But why? Have you had any connection with this woman who runs their directorate of operations? Or Castro himself?”

  “I was involved with something at Guantánamo Bay a couple of years ago, but this has to be something else, something important enough for them to go to these lengths.”

  “And you intend on going to Havana?”

  “Otto is a friend.”

  Page didn’t seem surprised. “What can we do to help?”

  “I need to borrow one of your people in Miami, because I’m going through the back door.”

  “Or course,” the DCI said. “Who is it?”

  And McGarvey told him.

  * * *

  After the flight across the Atlantic and the meeting in the DCI’s office, McGarvey was dead tired and in need of a shower, but using the Company’s travel agency to book him a flight direct to Miami, he cabbed it directly out to Dulles. Louise and Otto were in harm’s way, and he would catch up on his sleep later.

  He was traveling on his Federal Air Marshal Service credentials, so he had no trouble bringing his weapon through security, and the pilot and copilot nodded but said nothing when he boarded. Crews on every commercial flight were more than happy to have an air marshal aboard, but they were to be given no special attention. They were to be anonymous to the passengers.

  The two-and-a-half-hour flight got him to Miami International Airport a few minutes after three, where he was met by Raúl Martínez, the CIA’s chief of deep-cover operations in the Little Havana section of the city, centered around the Calle Ocho. It was a job the slender, dark-complexioned man had held for a number of years. He and McGarvey had worked together more than once, and they’d built up a mutual trust.

  Martínez was dressed in dark slacks and a white guayabera shirt with intricate embroidery around the pockets and along the button line; he didn’t smile when he and McGarvey left the terminal and got in his Cadillac Coupe de Ville parked illegally out front. He nodded to one of the cops, who looked the other way, and they took off south toward the Dolphin Expressway.