Castro's Daughter

by David Hagberg

  “I’ll get help from a couple of El Comandante’s friends on the AFI.”

  “Nothing hands on,” Ortega-Cowan warned. “We need to keep this completely below the radar. Because of the attempt on her life that very nearly succeeded, and her father’s recent death, the good coronel is working from seclusion for the time being. I merely want to know what the hell she’s up to.”

  “What about the recording equipment at her house?”

  “She switched it off.”

  “Then she knew that she would be leaving the country and she wanted to leave no trace.”

  Ortega-Cowan smiled patronizingly. “You’ll make a very good chief of staff. But first we need to bring her down.”

  “Seems to me that she’s doing a good job of her on her own,” Fuentes said.

  There was nothing else of interest in either bedroom, and five minutes after he’d entered the suite, he let himself out and went downstairs to his room, where he used his cell phone to place an encrypted call to Ortega-Cowan.

  “Where are you at this moment?”

  “In my room,” Fuentes said. “But listen, I found a pistol and a silencer in their suite.”

  “I hope you took them.”

  “Of course.”

  “There’s been a new development. The coronel did not check into the Four Seasons where she had reservations. Instead she came back to the airport about the same time McGarvey and Rencke were arriving from Atlanta.”

  “We didn’t spot her anywhere near them,” Fuentes said.

  “I had a hunch and did a computer search of all flights leaving about that time—flights to anywhere. Ines Delgado flew out first class on an Aeromexico flight to Miami.”

  Fuentes’s breath was all but taken away by the news. “The bitch is defecting after all.”

  “I don’t think so. If she was, she would have gone to Washington not Miami. If she’s recognized on the street, she won’t last five minutes before someone puts a bullet in her brain.”

  “What then?”

  “I don’t know, but I want you to fly over tonight and take charge of DI operations on the ground. We need to know what she’s doing.”

  “What do you want me to do about McGarvey and Rencke?”

  “Where are they at this moment?” Ortega-Cowan asked.

  “They were followed to the Palacio Nacional, evidently to meet someone there because they showed up at the north entrance, which at this hour is not usually for the public.”

  Ortega-Cowan was silent for a long moment.

  “Román?” Fuentes prompted.

  “Give me a minute, I’m on my computer.”

  A full minute passed before Ortega-Cowan was back. “It could be the Spanish gold after all,” he said, and he almost sounded as if he were out of breath.

  “What nonsense are you talking about? It’s nothing but a fairy tale.”

  “Maybe not. Because in addition to the government, the Palacio Nacional is also home to Mexico’s National Archives. The curator is Dr. José Diaz.”

  Fuentes was startled. “I think I know this name from El Comandante’s journal. I think he was here in Mexico City with Uncle Fidel and Che and the others.”

  “And where would men such as McGarvey and Rencke go to find out about Spanish gold in the New World?”

  “Ay, Jesús,” Fuentes said. “I’ll go over there right now.”

  “I don’t want you to interfere with McGarvey or Rencke. Wait until they leave, and then have a little chat with Dr. Diaz and find out what he told them.”

  * * *

  By chance, McGarvey and Rencke were just climbing into a cab when Fuentes was paying his taxi driver and getting out, not more than two car lengths away. McGarvey glanced over his shoulder and their eyes met, but if there was any recognition in them, Fuentes couldn’t see it. And moments later, they drove off.

  Ortega-Cowan had sent a two-year-old photograph to Fuentes’s phone of Dr. Diaz taken from a National Geographic article on Aztec ruins, and as it began to get dark, he waited at the corner, where he had a good sight line of the Palacio’s north exit. But the plaza across the street, and the sidewalk in front of the building were busy, and as it was, Diaz walked right past him before he recognized the archive’s impeccably dressed curator.

  Fuentes turned and started to follow the old man, but Diaz walked less than fifty feet to the bus stop. He was frail looking, not more substantial than a scarecrow, but he was carrying a bulging leather briefcase that had to weigh at least ten kilos.

  When the bus came, Diaz boarded, told the driver he was going to San Esteban, paid his fare, and sat two rows back. Fuentes got on just ahead of eight or ten others in time to hear the doctor’s destination, which he repeated to the driver, paid his fare, and found a seat a few rows farther back.

  The small community on Highway 57, which was part of Mexico City’s ring road, was located just beyond the Plaza de Toros, less than five miles as the crow flies from the Palacio, but with the heavy work traffic, it took nearly an hour to get there.

  Diaz got off the bus with a dozen others and trudged a block and a half to a ten-story apartment building. Fuentes caught up with him just before the curator went inside. No one else was around.

  “Dr. Diaz, I have come from El Comandante on a matter of some importance.”

  Diaz turned, startled, but he was interested. “He’s dead.”

  “Yes, and I was with him when he passed. He asked me to give you an important piece of information. But it had to be done in person not over the telephone or Internet. Is there someplace nearby where we can talk in private?”

  “My apartment upstairs.”

  “I think that the American CIA may have planted microphones sometime earlier today. It’s why I’m here to warn you about an American by the name of Kirk McGarvey, who may have been traveling with a partner. You’re not to talk to them under any circumstances.”

  “But they were in my office this afternoon,” Diaz said. He was concerned.

  “My God,” Fuentes said. “We have to talk.”

  “Across the street, in the park,” Diaz said.

  It was very dark and the park, though small, had many trees and benches here and there along a meandering path. Fuentes chose a spot that was completely out of sight of the apartment building, and he and the doctor sat down.

  “This information was very important to El Comandante. What was it those two men came to see you about?”

  “May I see some identification?”

  “Of course,” Fuentes said, and he handed over his diplomatic passport, which Diaz had to hold up to a stray bit of streetlight filtering through the trees. “El Comandante warned me that the Americans would be looking for information about a treasure in Spanish gold buried somewhere in the U.S.”

  “That’s exactly what they came to ask me about,” Diaz said.

  “What did you tell them?”

  “That I couldn’t help.”

  Fuentes relaxed a little. “Very good, Doctor. You did the right thing.”

  “You don’t understand,” Diaz said. “In truth I could not help, because I have no information.” He handed the passport back. “What is the Cuban government’s interest?”

  “Some of that treasure belongs to us.”

  Diaz smiled. “Fidel had the same thought, and I told him before the revolution that he was dreaming. Spain would never entertain such a claim. At best, you would be tied up in an international court for years.”

  “Is that what you told the Americans?”

  “I advised them that only a treasure hunter would have any possibility of convincing Spain to cooperate. In any event, none of that money would go to the Cuban government.”

  “I think that you are wrong.”

  Diaz smiled. “Old men often are.”

  Fuentes got up and walked a few paces away, where he took out McGarvey’s pistol and screwed the silencer on the end of the barrel. He turned back as Diaz was getting to his feet, and shot the old man once in
the forehead, killing him instantly.

  Wiping the pistol down, he tossed it a few paces away into the bushes and walked through the park, where he found another exit, then went in search of a cab back into the city.

  * * *

  It was fairly late by the time Fuentes had the cabbie drop him off a couple of blocks from the hotel. He found a small café, where he sat at a sidewalk table, and after he had ordered a coffee, he phoned Ortega-Cowan and told him everything that had happened.

  “It is about the gold after all.”

  “But Diaz said he told them nothing, because he knew nothing. We could still be chasing a fairy tale.”

  “Men such as McGarvey don’t believe in fairy tales,” Ortega-Cowan said. “You’re flying to Miami tonight, but first I want you to make an anonymous call to the police and tell them that you saw a murder being committed. They’ll find the pistol, and if they’re in time, they might just delay McGarvey long enough for you to find out what the coronel is up to.”

  “If I find her, I think it would be best I kill her and we can get on with things.”

  “No,” Ortega-Cowan said.

  Fuentes had to laugh. “Don’t tell me that you believe in fairy tales?”

  “El Comandante did. And maybe this isn’t such a fairy tale.”

  FORTY-FOUR

  McGarvey had been feeling odd all afternoon, and especially after their talk with Dr. Diaz. And during a light dinner in the hotel’s restaurant, Otto had commented on his mood, but he’d not been able to pinpoint any reason except that he was getting twitchy, as if someone were tailing them. Yet when he did a little tradecraft, double backs, feints—entering and immediately leaving buildings—or suddenly crossing against a light, he’d spotted nothing.

  But looking in his overnight bag to see his pistol and silencer missing, he was not surprised that someone had traced them this far and had waited until they left the suite to get in and search it. It was a DI operation that obviously had help, possibly from the same Mexican federal cops who’d interviewed him at the airport.

  It had been two hours since they left the Palacio, and suddenly this hotel was no longer safe for them, and he had a terrible feeling that Dr. Diaz was involved and that it had something to do with María León. He grabbed his bag and went out into the sitting room.

  Otto was at the door to his bedroom. “Hey, I think somebody’s been through my stuff.”

  “Get your things, we need to get out of here,” McGarvey said. He opened the door and checked the corridor, which was empty at the moment. It had been dumb to leave his gun in plain sight, but he’d not wanted to create a problem by trying to get into the Palacio with it, so he took a chance that the DI wouldn’t catch up with them so soon.

  And now he was afraid that his mistake may have cost Dr. Diaz his life.

  He and Otto took the elevator down to the hotel’s mezzanine level and from there checked out the lobby, where it seemed to be business as usual for this time of the early evening, before taking the stairs down. A handful of people were scattered here and there, and a young couple with two children were at the front desk, but there were no police.

  Outside, they headed on foot east on the Paseo de la Reforma, crossed the broad boulevard a block later, and recrossed a block after that, McGarvey reasonably sure that they had not been tailed from the hotel.

  “Where are we going?” Otto finally asked.

  “Seville, but first we need to get out of Mexico. Whoever got into our rooms took my gun and silencer.”

  “The DI?”

  “That’s my guess. But I think they probably have help from the Mexican cops.”

  “Do you think they traced us to Dr. Diaz?” Otto asked.

  “Do you have his phone number?”

  Otto got out his cell phone. “I’ll try his office first,” he said, but after a half a minute, he shook his head and pulled up another programmed number. “He lives in an apartment in San Esteban.” But again there was no answer.

  “Does he have a cell phone?”

  “None that I found,” Otto said. “Maybe he’s out to dinner somewhere.”

  “I think he’s been shot to death with my gun, and once it’s found, probably close to the body, the AFI is going to take a real interest in me. We need to get out of the city and then the country. Let’s start with a car.”

  “I’m on it,” Otto said, and he brought up an online air/car/hotel reservations site.

  A half block later, they took a table at a sidewalk café, and before their coffee came, Otto showed McGarvey the screen. “Dodge Avenger, Hertz. We pick it up at the airport, is that okay?”

  “I don’t think they’ll expect us back out there, especially not at the arrivals terminal,” McGarvey said. He saw that Otto had rented the car in the name of Richard Rank. “Separate passport?”

  “Yup, but that’s my real name. Richard O. Rank.”

  “I never knew.”

  “I got a couple secrets, kemo sabe,” Otto said. “Anyway, if they’re looking for you to show up, it might take them a while to start looking for me, too.”

  Their coffee came, and Otto went back to work on the Internet, coming up ten minutes later with a pair of first-class tickets from Miguel Hidalgo International Airport up in Guadalajara direct to Los Angeles. “Leaves at seven tomorrow morning, so we’ll have to hole up somewhere ’cause it’s less than two hundred fifty miles on a good divided highway.”

  “We’ll chance a hotel up there,” McGarvey said. “What airline?”

  Otto had to laugh. “You’re not going to believe this. We’re booked on Alaska Air’s 243.”

  “We’re seriously going after a three-hundred-year-old treasure that probably doesn’t exist. So right about now, I’d believe almost anything.”

  Otto looked away for a moment. “I hear you, Mac. But what about afterwards? What about if we do find it?”

  “I have a couple of ideas.”

  Otto went back online and after two minutes had hacked into the mainframes of the Protection and Transit Directorate, which was Mexico City’s largest police force responsible for day-to-day crimes, including murder.

  “Two shootings have been reported in San Esteban in the past hour, but there’s nothing else except ‘Officers en route.’”

  “No victim IDs, or probable causes?”

  “Drug related is always the first assumption here,” Otto says. “But one of them could be Dr. Diaz, and they killed him because he talked to us. Colonel León.”

  But McGarvey wasn’t all that sure it was her. He’d read something else into the crazy op she’d pulled getting him and Otto to Havana. Something between the lines, maybe something she’d said, or her attitude, or the fact that she allowed them to escape. It wasn’t adding up, and he knew that he was missing something.

  They cabbed it out to the airport, where Otto rented the car from Hertz, and once they were away, he pulled over and let McGarvey drive. By then, they were heading north on 15D, which was a modern four-lane highway—traffic moderately light—and before they got out of cell phone range, Otto had made reservations with Iberia Airlines for their flight to Spain using a credit card that Louise maintained under her maiden name of Horn.

  “We’ll get to L.A. tomorrow morning about nine thirty, which gives us a little more than an hour to catch the Continental flight to Newark, and from there Barcelona and finally Seville at five on Monday afternoon.”

  “Long flight,” McGarvey said absently, his mind still on María León.

  “First class, so maybe we can get some rest. I know I need it, ’cause I expect that there’s a whole lot more coming our way.”

  McGarvey glanced over at his friend, and an almost overwhelming sense of loneliness for his wife came over him. But then he shrugged. “Always is.”

  FORTY-FIVE

  The Miami River Inn was a funky little Caribbean-style hotel right on the river at the edge of the Little Havana district, and by midnight, the evening was still warm and tropically humid
, almost the same as in Havana. Only it was noisier here than at home, and María, alone at the pool, was amazed by the contrast.

  She had arrived from Mexico City yesterday, and found this hotel listed in a rack of tourist brochures at the airport that described everything that there was to see and do by day or night in Coral Gables, Miami Beach, and Miami proper—including the neighborhood around the Calle Ocho, which was home to thousands of Cubans. Exiles, they called themselves, but in María’s mind they were defectors and traitors.

  On the way here, she’d had the cabbie stop at a liquor store, where she’d picked up a couple bottles of Chilean merlot, which she was sipping now, an extra glass on the table beside her. The city was alive with street noises, cars honking, buses and trucks rumbling by, a baby crying somewhere, and in the distance in the general direction of Biscayne Bay, she’d heard what she thought was gunfire. Several shots, then nothing but the city’s background noise except until a couple of minutes later a siren and then others in the same general direction.

  But the hotel itself, which looked nothing like the pictures in the brochure, was quiet for a Sunday night, in part she suspected because it was summer and the off season. But it was fine with her. Her room was pleasant, the staff at the desk friendly, the pool nice, and the peace good after the past few hectic days.

  A perfect getaway, she thought, except she figured that sooner or later she would be recognized and someone would come to kill her. All she had to count on was the likelihood her assassin would be curious and want to know why she had come to Miami.

  She was wearing jeans and a light blouse, her sandals off, and she was sitting back on a chaise lounge when something made her look to the right, where a figure stood in the deeper shadows by one of the cottages. Her hand shook for just an instant.

  She raised her wineglass. “Won’t you join me?” she asked.

  A slender man with fine dark hair and a thin mustache, dressed in jeans and a dark short-sleeve pullover, stepped out of the shadows. He was pointing a pistol in her general direction.