Castro's Daughter

by David Hagberg

  When she was able to see his face, she recognized him as the de facto chief of the Cuban dissident community’s unofficial intelligence service, and one of the DI’s highest-value targets. “Señor Martínez, it’s about time you finally showed up,” she said. “I didn’t know if you liked red wine, but I brought a second glass from my room. Unless you mean to shoot me first.”

  “Kirk was right. You do have cojones.”

  María was surprised. “It was you who came ashore with McGarvey. And it was you who directed the attack on my house.”

  “I’m sincerely sorry that you were not at home, Señora Coronel.”

  María’s anger flared. “Had I been, the outcome would not have been quite so certain for you.”

  Martínez chuckled.

  “Most of my house staff were gone.”

  “They were never our targets.”

  María believed him, and she nodded. “Thank you for that much.”

  “We are at war with the government, not the people.”

  “The people are the government—,” María said, but it sounded foolish even her ears.

  “Spare me.”

  María shrugged.

  “What are you doing here? And give me one good reason why I shouldn’t put a bullet between your eyes.”

  “I don’t know if you’ll believe me, but I’ll give you two good reasons. Kirk McGarvey and Spanish gold. You wouldn’t care about the third.”

  Martínez stood ten feet away, staring at her. “Are you armed?”

  “No. I was on the run through Mexico City, and in the limited time I had, it would have been too difficult to get a weapon through.” She nodded toward the wine bottle. “But I suppose if you got close enough and let your guard down, I might beat you to death.”

  “Stand up.”

  She put her glass down and stood up, her arms slightly away from her sides, and slowly turned around, until she was facing him again. “No place for me a hide a weapon. Unless you want me to strip so you can make sure.”

  “The thought is there,” Martínez said. “You do it to our people in Quivicán and elsewhere. Full cavity searches, rubber hoses, broomsticks, electric shocks, ice water baths.”

  “You didn’t mention waterboarding,” María said. “But then, that’s your interrogators’ methods.”

  Martínez nodded. “Sit down, I’ll be right back,” he said, and he turned and disappeared into the shadows.

  María sat down and picked up her glass, only this time her hand shook a little. She’d made it over the first hurdle, getting this far without being shot to death, but the next part—convincing Martínez and especially McGarvey and Rencke that she was sincere—would be even harder.

  She was playing a dangerous game, not so much of cat and mouse but of balancing a fine line between the complete truth—which would end up with her immediate execution—and a partial truth, enough so that she would come across as credible.

  Martínez was back almost immediately, his pistol holstered, and he came across to her, pulled a chair over, and sat down a few feet away. “I have people just outside to make sure that we are not disturbed.”

  “You’re keeping me safe until you find out why I took the risk of coming here.”

  “Something like that.”

  “Safe from whom? The DI or your Cuban traitors?”

  An expression came across Martínez’s face that María couldn’t quite read. Interest, perhaps, or maybe puzzlement.

  “Are you trying to tell me that you’re attempting to defect?”

  “No, it won’t be that easy. Not for you, not for me, and especially not for Kirk McGarvey and the CIA.”

  “I’m listening,” Martínez said.

  “How much have he and Rencke told you about what we discussed at my house, and the reasons I had them brought to Cuba?”

  “I’m listening,” Martínez repeated.

  FORTY-SIX

  At the corner of SW Eighth Street, known locally as Calle Ocho, and Twenty-sixth Avenue SW, which turned into a one-way heading east, Fuentes sat in the backseat of an older Chevrolet van with DI operatives Eddie Hernández next to him and Abelando Parilla at the wheel.

  “She’s here, but we’re not sure exactly where she disappeared,” Hernández said.

  Fuentes was angry. “You saw her passing through customs yesterday but then you lost her? And twenty-four hours later, you’re no closer to finding out where she is hiding?”

  “There was a problem with traffic at the airport,” Parilla said. “We were blocked by a bus and a couple of taxis. By the time we managed to get out of there, she was gone. So we thought it best if we came back to wait for you. And as you have seen, it’s almost impossible to get any cooperation out of these people. Every one we manage to turn ends up dead in a day or so, and the ones who say they’re helping us can’t be trusted.”

  “Damned sloppy,” Fuentes said, fuming. They looked and sounded more like Americans than trained DI officers, and he made a note to have Ortega-Cowan recall them for retraining before they got their heads blown off.

  At this time of the night, the streets were busy. This was practically the heart of what the Cuban defectors and traitors who lived here called Little Havana, and all the shops and coffeehouses where men were playing dominoes at sidewalk tables looked very much like what the real Havana looked like. Except that it was busier here—louder, more traffic, newer cars, bustling. And he could almost let himself feel the excitement.

  “We have informants looking for her,” Hernández said. “Believe me, Captain, if she is anywhere here in the city, we’ll find her sooner or later. But if in fact she is trying to defect, as you say, she’s probably already on her way to Washington.”

  “How? According to you she hasn’t shown up back at the airport.”

  “She may have rented a car and driven to the airport at Fort Lauderdale. It’s only a half hour, depending on traffic, from here. And from there Washington.”

  “Do you have people up there?”

  “We’re stretched thin,” Hernández said. “We don’t have the manpower to spare.”

  “If she’s still here as you think she is, she’s probably lying shot to death in some alley somewhere,” Parilla said. “Or perhaps her body was tossed into the Miami River with all the other trash. We’ll find her.”

  “Give me a pistol and silencer—I’ll find her myself.”

  “Not such a good idea, Captain. You won’t get two blocks without someone taking an interest.”

  “I hope it takes only one block.”

  Parilla gave him a Soviet-made 9 mm Stechkin pistol with a twenty-round magazine and a silencer. It was an old but reliable weapon that in the right hands at medium range was lethal. He checked the load, screwed the silencer on the barrel, and stuffed the pistol in his belt under his shirt.

  “What do you want us to do?” Hernández asked.

  “Stand by someplace close—I may need to be picked up soon,” Fuentes said, and he got out of the car and walked away to the west, deeper into the district.

  He was dressed much the same as most of the other men here: slacks, an embroidered guayabera shirt, and leather sandals. He put a little swish into his walk. In the past, he’d learned that if he acted openly gay, most men, not just Hispanics, would underestimate him. It gave him an advantage at the start.

  A block later, he figured that he had picked up a tail—two men, both of them as lean and fit-looking as soccer players—and at SW Twenty-seventh, he headed south, picking up the pace. After a couple of blocks he turned again, this time on Eleventh, a much quieter neighborhood of apartment buildings and a few shops, closed for the night.

  A dog was barking on someone’s balcony near the corner as Fuentes ducked into the deeper shadows of the entrance to a men’s clothing shop, roll-down iron security grates covering the windows and doors.

  Seconds later, the two men came running, and when they had passed, Fuentes stepped out. “Back here, sweethearts,” he said.

/>   They pulled up short and turned around. “A fucking invertido,” one of them said, and the other laughed.

  “You boys want some action?” Fuentes asked sweetly, and he stepped back into the doorway and pulled out the pistol, thumbing off the safety catch.

  The first showed up in the doorway, and Fuentes grabbed him by the shirt so that he wouldn’t fall backwards and shot him in the forehead at point-blank range, pulling him forward. He crumpled in a heap, dead before he hit the ground.

  The second had just enough time to react and start to reach for something at the small of his back when Fuentes showed himself and pointed the Stechkin at the man’s face.

  There was traffic passing a block away on Eleventh, but for the moment, everything was quiet down here.

  “I need information,” Fuentes said. “If you lie to me, I will kill you without hesitation. If you tell me the truth, I’ll wound you but let you live.”

  The man shrugged, almost indifferently. “What do you want?”

  “Colonel León showed up here yesterday, but I lost her. Where is she at this moment?”

  The man started to say something, but Fuentes stepped forward and placed the muzzle of the silencer directly on his forehead.

  “Where is she?”

  “I don’t know, but it doesn’t matter anyway.”

  Fuentes lowered his pistol, as if he had changed his mind, but then shot the man in the right kneecap, knocking him to his left knee with a grunt.

  “Bastardo!”

  “Where is she?”

  “Miami River Inn.”

  “Here in Little Havana?”

  “Sí, but if the hija de puta isn’t dead already, she soon will be.”

  Fuentes grinned. “At least as far as she’s concerned, we’re on the same side,” he said. “And you’re right about me being gay, but I never much liked the word invertido. It’s vulgar.”

  The man started to say something, but Fuentes shot him in the top of his head just at his hairline, and blood gushed out of his eyes as he fell over.

  The street remained quiet, and Fuentes stuffed the pistol back in his belt, stepped out of the doorway, and as he headed down the street, called his DI operatives to come pick him up.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  Martínez sat listening to María León with a mixture of incredulity bordering at times on disbelief, and outright disgust. As chief of the DI’s Directorate of Operations, she had personally signed extrajudicial death warrants for dozens if not hundreds of Cuban dissidents—traitors, as she called them.

  She had directed operations here in Little Havana and up in New York through the UN and in Washington that had resulted in more incidents of torture and death. It was under her direction that Otto’s wife, Louise, had been kidnapped, during which an innocent day care teacher had been shot dead.

  And it was because of her that Martínez had become involved in a gun battle to free Mac and Otto, losing some good people in the operation.

  Yet she had left Havana and come here, of all places, where she was on every Cuban exile’s hit list, and had simply checked into a hotel and waited for someone to come for her.

  “Assuming you’re telling the truth, and you left Cuba to find some Spanish treasure, which even by your own admission probably doesn’t exist, or if it does would be unreachable, it’s impossible for me to accept that as a reason for you coming here to Miami.”

  “Nevertheless, here I am, and you’ll have to do something about it before my presence touches off a riot.”

  “I think I’d find it easier to believe if you told me that you were defecting.”

  María sat forward. “You know the situation right now in Cuba. Since my father’s death, no one knows what’s coming next. The government is nearly in a shambles, and every other bureaucrat or functionary in just about every department, including the DI, is positioning themselves to make the deal of a lifetime. And without my father’s protection, I’m vulnerable.”

  “According to you, it’s why you went to the trouble of getting McGarvey to Havana, some deathbed wish of your father’s. Mac told me all about it. But it still doesn’t explain why you came here. Why not Washington?”

  “I need your help.”

  “Me specifically?”

  “If I’m right, someone from my directorate will trace me here, and probably send someone to kill me.”

  “Does the name Manuel Fuentes mean anything?” Martínez asked, and he watched for her reaction.

  Her left eyebrow rose slightly. “He was chief of my father’s security detail. And he was the one who killed the spy inside the compound.”

  Martínez had thought as much, but hearing it from the head of the Operations Directorate made him want to take out his pistol and put a bullet between her eyes. He steadied himself. “He’s already here, and we’re keeping an eye on him.”

  “Is there any chance he’ll find me?”

  “He’s probably dead by now, but even if he were to get this far, I have two very good people just outside.”

  “His coming here proves that at least something of what I’ve told you is the truth,” María said.

  “Okay, I’ll buy that much that someone in the DI is after your scalp, but it still doesn’t explain why you left Cuba. Raúl is your uncle, and I would have thought that you’d be in a better position to defend yourself by staying put. Maybe even pushing back.”

  “I need proof.”

  “Of what—?” Martínez asked, but then it came to him all of a sudden. “You found something after Mac and Otto were gone. That’s why you left your house that night.”

  “I went back to my father’s compound and looked through his personal files and journals. There is Spanish gold buried somewhere in New Mexico, and the proof is in Mexico City or maybe in Rome at the Vatican or in Spain.”

  “You were in Mexico City?”

  “I had no way of protecting myself there, so I came here, hoping to convince you to help.”

  “Ave María,” Martínez said softly. “Did you manage to bring any of the files or his journals out with you?”

  “All the journals, dating back to Mexico City, before the revolución.”

  “You have them here?”

  “Sí,” María said. She reached for her bag.

  Martínez pulled out his pistol, instantly hyperalert. “Take anything other than a book or a file out of your bag, and I will shoot you.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” María said, and she very carefully took the first of her father’s journals out. “This is his writing from Mexico City, when he was with Che and the Russians, along with an historian by the name of José Diaz who knew about the Spanish gold.”

  Martínez laid the pistol on his lap and took the notebook. “You have all of them?”

  “Yes. He made the last entry days before he died.”

  Martínez felt as if he couldn’t catch his breath. Having Fidel’s journal in his hands was akin to a Jew holding something written by Adolf Hitler. Monstrous, was all he could think for just a moment. And he understood that once he opened the journal and began to read, everything he thought he knew would be indelibly stained for everyone to see. There would be no going back once he looked into the mind of someone he’d always believed was a madman, an evil man, because even such men had inner thoughts and hopes and desires that sometimes were very much like any man’s.

  María read something of that from his expression. “He was one of the people at first. Before the Communists got to him.”

  Martínez nodded. “Makes what happened to Cuba all the more tragic.”

  And María agreed with him. “Absolute power corrupts absolutely. It got beyond his control.”

  “Macbeth.”

  “Actually, Lord Acton,” María said. “I may have been a Communist from a poor country, but it doesn’t mean I wasn’t educated.”

  For the first time in his memory, Martínez didn’t know what to do. Common sense told him that María León was an enemy to the Cuban peo
ple, and she deserved to die here and now. And yet something she hadn’t said was deeply troubling to him. If she were dead, he would never know what it was.

  “Even if your government had a legitimate claim on some of the treasure, you can’t possibly believe that Washington would send a shipload of it to Havana. You’re educated, as you say, but are you stupid?”

  “Not for the government,” replied María.

  Martínez wanted to be angry, but again there was that something about her manner, about what she was saying, and the very fact of her presence here that was troublesome. “Save me the promise that the gold would be given to the people. Even if you wanted something like that, it would never happen.”

  “Not without Kirk McGarvey’s help.”

  “Tell me what you have in mind.”

  FORTY-EIGHT

  The Chevy van drove past the Miami River Inn, and a half block later, Fuentes ordered Parilla to turn down a narrow side street lined with tiny houses and cottages, most of them painted in funky bright colors, stopping at the water’s edge less than fifty yards off South River Drive.

  A few lights were on back here, and there was some boat traffic on the river, but the tall condos, office buildings, and hotels on the other side dominated the night skyline. A man could get lost over there, Fuentes thought. Anonymous. But it would take money.

  “Most likely she has someone with her,” he said. “I’ll go in first to make sure.”

  “It’ll be Raúl Martínez,” Hernández said.

  “I know about him.”

  “Watch yourself, he’s a slippery bastard and for something like this operation, he’ll have backup muscle somewhere close.”

  “Turn the van around and be ready to leave on a moment’s notice.”

  “Do you want one of us to come with you?” Hernández asked.

  “It’s not necessary. But I may be bringing Colonel León with me. Is there someplace secure we can take her?”

  “Back to the motel in Hialeah, where you stayed last night. We own it.”