Castro's Daughter

by David Hagberg

  The place was a dump, but far enough from Little Havana to be reasonably safe. “Good enough,” Fuentes said.

  He got out, went past the last house, took four stairs down to the walk that paralleled the river and gave access to boats tied up alongside the seawall, and headed back about one hundred meters to the hotel property bounded by a tall wooden fence. All his senses were alert for the presence of anyone, and he held his pistol, the silencer still in place, the safety catch off, at his side.

  He’d expected that the Cuban traitors would send someone after him, which they had, just as he expected that Martínez would cover his back while he was somewhere inside interviewing the coronel; the bastard had the reputation of being very thorough. Not once had any DI operator here in Miami gotten close enough to take a shot with any reasonable expectations of making good an escape. On more than one occasion, Ortega-Cowan had suggested a suicide mission be mounted. A bomb in a café, a drive-by shooting, a poison dart fired from a dark alley. The assassin would pay with their life, but he suspected that any number of young, loyal officers would agree to do the job if they were given assurances that afterwards their families would be well taken care of. But each time, the coronel had denied her chief of staff’s sensible request.

  “We don’t know who would replace him,” she’d said. “Better the enemy we know than the one we don’t.”

  Fuentes had shared his suspicion with Ortega-Cowan that their DI Miami operatives were inept.

  “Hand-picked by the coronel.”

  “My point exactly,” Fuentes had said.

  A large cabin cruiser, its salon lights ablaze, loud music with heavy thumping bass booming across the river, passed by as Fuentes reached the hotel fence and held up in the corner. A man stepped out of the shadows less than ten meters away and watched the boat.

  Just behind the fence was a swimming pool, Fuentes could smell the chlorine, but the man was dressed in street clothes, not a swimming suit. And he’d been standing in the shadows, waiting for someone.

  Fuentes raised his pistol and walked directly toward the man, who at the last moment sensing someone was approaching started to turn, but it was far too late. Fuentes shot him in the side of the head and he went down with only a grunt; that and the sound of the silenced pistol shot were completely drowned out by the fading noise coming from the cabin cruiser.

  The one watchdog back here, if that’s what he was, and almost certainly another in front. Still holding his pistol in case someone was coming to investigate, Fuentes searched the body with his left hand, finding a 9 mm Beretta pistol favored by the dissidents because it was standard issue in the U.S. military and easy to come by—almost certainly supplied by the CIA.

  He tossed the pistol into the river and went to the rear gate and looked through the gap, and nearly stepped away by instinct.

  Raúl Martínez, seated on a chair at the pool, not ten meters away, a cell phone to his ear, was looking directly at the gate. But Fuentes steadied himself, because there was no way the hijo de puta could see anything, nor could he have heard anything over the noise the cabin cruiser had made.

  But more surprising was María León seated on a chaise lounge next to him, sipping what looked like red wine as calmly as if she had rendezvoused with a lover or an old friend. The two of them were definitely not antagonists. Made her a traitor after all, just as he had suspected all along.

  After a moment, Martínez turned back and the night became still enough for Fuentes to hear what he was saying.

  “It was nothing,” he spoke into the phone. “What were they doing in Mexico City?”

  Martínez could have been talking about anyone, but whoever it was had surprised María and she put down her wineglass.

  “Are you talking to McGarvey?” she asked.

  “Just a minute,” Martínez said into the phone. “This is Louise Horn, Otto Rencke’s wife. Mac and Otto were checking out something in Mexico City, but they’re on the run from the police now. You father’s historian, José Diaz, was shot to death apparently with McGarvey’s gun, which he brought into the county on an Air Marshal permit.”

  “It’s the DI,” María said.

  Martínez turned back to the phone. “Are they heading back to Washington?”

  This time it was Martínez’s turn to be surprised; Fuentes could hear it in his voice. “What are they looking for in Seville?”

  María was watching him closely, but he was quiet for a very long time, until finally he nodded, apparently coming to a decision.

  “Colonel León is here in Miami. In fact, I’m with her right now, and she’s told me this story about Catholic monks from Mexico City hiding what could amount to billions of dollars in Spanish gold somewhere in southern New Mexico. It’s the same thing she told Mac and Otto in Havana, and it sounds like they’re taking it seriously and so is the DI, because one of her people has followed her here.”

  Fuentes was astounded. Fidel had been searching for Cíbola or something like it for most of his life without success, and now his daughter with the help of the CIA was on to it.

  “I need to get her out of Little Havana, I can’t guarantee her safety here. We have DI operatives running all over the place, and probably even a good number of exiles who are plants. I don’t know for sure who I can trust with something this big.”

  Fuentes was torn between killing them both right now or waiting to find out as much as he could about the treasure. Bringing something like that back to Havana—something he was now sure that had been the coronel’s plan all along—would guarantee him her job, completely sidestepping Ortega-Cowan. And with that leap under his belt, he could think of many other possibilities from a more-than-grateful Raúl. With his success here and his command of the language, maybe even Minister of Foreign Relations after all.

  “I want to put her in a safe house until Mac gets back. She says that she has a plan, or at least the start of one, that she wants to talk to him about. She wants some of the gold for the Cuban people, not the government.”

  Fuentes almost laughed out loud. The coronel was an ambitious woman—every bit as ruthless as her father had been. The two of them had been cut of the same cloth. The Cuban people indeed.

  “I agree,” Martínez said. “Send a plane for us, I don’t want to risk flying commercial.” He suddenly turned around and looked directly at the gate.

  Fuentes stepped back, his grip tightening on the Stechkin.

  “I’ll call you right back,” Martínez said. He pocketed his phone and got to his feet, a pistol in his hand. “Roberto?”

  Fuentes wanted to kill both of them outright, but knew that he would have to allow the coronel to reach the safe house, probably somewhere close to CIA headquarters. Even with the might of the entire DI, he didn’t think that he would be able to find the treasure faster than her and McGarvey. But if he let them do the work, he could step in at the last minute, eliminate them, and take the credit.

  He headed away from the gate and had just reached the stairs when someone came running behind him. Firing two shots over his shoulder, he made it up to the street and the van parked a couple of meters away.

  The side door was open and he clambered aboard just as they took two shots, starring the rear window.

  “Move it!” Fuentes shouted, and he snapped off three shots at a figure just at the top of the stairs, his aim spoiled as the van suddenly accelerated.

  They took two more hits in the rear, but then they were turning onto South River Drive and heading away from the hotel.

  Hernández was slumped forward against the back of the front passenger seat, blood soaking his neck and shirt.

  “What happened, Captain?” Parilla demanded. He sounded shook up.

  “I found out what I needed to find out. Have you been hit?”

  “No. What about Eddie?”

  “He managed to get himself shot to death by an hijo de puta,” Fuentes said. “We need to dump his body somewhere and then get back up to Hialeah and make this va
n disappear. I’m sending you home.”

  “I’m sorry, Captain,” Parilla said.

  “Don’t worry, you did nothing wrong. You’re just getting out of Miami for your own good.”

  “Eddie and I were friends.”

  “I understand,” Fuentes said. But the stupid bastard was dead because of his gross ineptitude, and Parilla would almost certainly not like the firing squad he would face for his own failures over the past twenty-four hours.

  FORTY-NINE

  Getting out of Mexico through Guadalajara had gone without a hitch, and while they’d waited in Los Angles for their flight, Otto took another quick look at the Mexico City police network, but the murder of Dr. Diaz still hadn’t shown up, which puzzled McGarvey all the way across the Atlantic. It was a loose end, something that usually signaled trouble was coming their way, and Otto agreed.

  The Iberia Airlines flight touched down at Seville’s San Pablo Airport a few minutes after five, Monday afternoon. They’d already cleared passport control and customs in Madrid, so they were simply able to walk off the airplane and pass through the arrivals hall and baggage claim area to the waiting cabs.

  Otto had made reservations for them at the Hotel Alfonso XIII, less than four hundred yards as the crow flies from the ancient Seville Cathedral with its bell tower that had been converted from a minaret in the thirteenth century and across the street from the building that housed the Archives, closed at this hour until ten in the morning.

  He had not bothered using the onboard Wi-Fi service on the flight over, because it was too insecure, but even before their cab for the city had pulled away from the curb, he’d powered up his encrypted Nokia, where he found four messages from Louise, each asking him to call back. Urgent.

  “Something up?” McGarvey asked.

  “Louise wants me,” Otto said, and called her work number at the CIA. She answered on the first ring. “Me,” he said.

  The cabbie, a younger man with long hair tied in a ponytail, looked at them in the rearview mirror.

  “He’s right here,” Otto said, and he handed the phone to McGarvey.

  “Are you someplace where you can talk?” Louise asked.

  “In a cab heading into the city.”

  “Okay, careful with what you say for now. You can call back later. There’ve been some developments. Colonel León was in Mexico City about the same time you and Otto were there. But she showed up in Miami late Saturday night, booked a room at a small hotel right on the edge of Little Havana. No one was expecting her, so Raúl didn’t get to her until last night.”

  It was a surprise to McGarvey, and yet it wasn’t, because leaving Cuba, he was sure that they hadn’t heard the last of her. “What did she want?”

  “To talk to you about the gold. She told Raúl that she has a plan to give it to the people and keep it out of the hands of the government.”

  “I’ll bet she does.”

  “But there’s a lot more,” Louise said. “A DI captain by the name of Manuel Fuentes showed up in Miami, killed a couple of Raúl’s people who were following him, and somehow found out where María was staying. He managed to take out another of Raúl’s soldiers before he was burned. But instead of sticking around to fight it out, he turned tail and took off.”

  “Could be he and María are pals,” McGarvey suggested.

  “Not according to her. Raúl wants to stash her someplace up here until you and Otto get back. But he thinks there is a possibility that Fuentes may have overheard some of the conversation that he had with the colonel, and possibly part of a cell phone call he had with me.”

  “Where’s Audie?”

  “Still at the Farm. I thought it was for the best until things settle down a bit.”

  “Keep her there.”

  “What do you want to do about Raúl and the woman? I’m still holed up at the brownstone. They could come here.”

  “I don’t know if that’s such a good idea, but I don’t think she’d try anything. What about you, after everything?”

  “I can handle her.”

  “I’ll have Otto make that call,” McGarvey said. “Just take care of yourself, okay?”

  “Will do.”

  McGarvey handed the phone to Otto and sat back in his seat. That María got out of Cuba and showed up in Mexico City was no real surprise; he had gotten from her that her position in Havana was tenuous at best. But she had taken a very large chance going to Miami. Any number of Cuban expats would love to take someone like her down, and Little Havana had always been a hotbed for DI operations, whose operatives would be gunning for her if she’d defected.

  The problem was Captain Fuentes, who was sharp enough to make his way to Little Havana, take out three of Martínez’s people, and get presumably within shooting range of María and yet he hadn’t taken the shot. It was almost as if the DI operative had managed all of that simply to get close enough to overhear a conversation. But at this moment, with what information McGarvey had to go on, the situation made no sense.

  “We’re going to play tourists down here and probably up in Madrid for at least a week,” Otto said. “Should be home by Sunday, I think.”

  McGarvey caught the cabdriver glancing in the rearview mirror again. Otto had evidently realized that the man was interested in what they were saying.

  “We’ll check in, have some dinner, and get a good night’s sleep. Take care, sweetheart. And say hi to our guests for me when they arrive.”

  * * *

  The Hotel Alfonso XIII looked like a Moor’s dream of a palace of ornate brick arches surrounding a central patio, marble floors, wood-panel ceilings, stained glass, and ceramic tiles—and according to Otto, lots of well-heeled tourists. This was the place in Seville to see and be seen and it was outrageously expensive.

  They got connecting suites, ordered up a bottle of fino, the very good local sherry, and while they waited for it to arrive, Otto got back on the Internet, checking first with the Mexican Police and then with Interpol, but still there was nothing about the murder of Dr. Diaz, nor had their names come up as persons of interest.

  “Maybe the AFI isn’t that sharp,” Otto suggested.

  McGarvey disagreed. “I registered the gun’s serial number on my Air Marshal international entry permit. And when I didn’t show up for the return flight, the connection would have become obvious.”

  “Maybe Dr. Diaz wasn’t one of the victims at San Esteban, and maybe whoever took your pistol still has it. Could have been one of the hotel staff, maybe a maid who took it and sold it on the black market.”

  “You may be right,” McGarvey said. But it had been sloppy on his part, though if it was a pro who’d gotten into his room, hiding the pistol wouldn’t have done much good.

  “But you don’t think so.”

  “The DI is popping up all over the place.”

  “They followed the colonel to Miami—do you think they could have followed us here?”

  “I think it’s a possibility we have to consider,” McGarvey said. “And so do you, the way you talked so the cabbie could hear you.”

  “I guess some of your tradecraft is starting to rub off on me.”

  “Makes you wonder if we were expected,” McGarvey said.

  “It’d have to be as an old boy favor, a phone call friend-to-friend, ’cause it’s not on the Internet.”

  “From Mexican Police?”

  “And the Cubans. Ever since ’07, when Spain and Cuba started talking to each other, their security forces share info. Right now, Spain is Cuba’s third-largest trading partner. I’m sure their cops talk to each other.”

  McGarvey had figured as much. “I’m going down to the concierge to rent a car for one week, with a drop-off in Madrid—we might have to get out of here in a hurry. In the meantime, if we’re going to present ourselves as treasure hunters tomorrow, I want you to set up a corporate presence on the Internet. Offices somewhere outside the Beltway.”

  Otto brightened up. “I set it up before we went to Mexic
o City,” he said. He’d always loved a challenge, even a small one. “The company is Treasure Recovery Specialists, LLC.”

  “Good. Call Louise back and have her arrange a CIA jet for us first thing in the morning.”

  “Madrid?”

  “No, Gibraltar.”

  * * *

  The car was a VW Jetta, which they left in parking lot a half block from the Archives; the morning cool, not a cloud in the sky. It was a Tuesday and the Barrio de Santa Cruz was busy, some of its twisty streets and narrow alleys that had once been the Jewish Quarter were alive with tourists shopping in antiques and souvenir stores, while most were residential and quiet.

  McGarvey and Otto made their roundabout way to the museum to make sure that they were not being followed, but no one seemed to be taking any interest in them.

  But at the Archives, when they presented themselves to a young woman at the information counter just inside the public entrance, it was a different story.

  “Señores McGarvey and Rencke, finally,” the pretty dark-haired girl said brightly. “Dr. Vergílio has been expecting you, but we just didn’t know when.” She made a phone call.

  McGarvey was surprised, but he didn’t let it show. Adriana Vergílio was the director of the Archives. Otto had looked her up on the Internet. She had spent years in the field as an archeologist in Mexico and the Southwestern United States, researching Spain’s early presence in the region. She was considered a leading expert in the field, and eight years ago had naturally taken this position when it was offered.

  A young man escorted them upstairs to a second-floor suite of book-lined offices with windows that looked down on a beautiful central courtyard. An extremely short, slightly built older woman, salt-and-pepper hair up in a bun, the skin of her arms and face brown and leathery from too much time in the sun, stood up from behind her desk when they were ushered in. She was smiling more with curiosity, it seemed, than pleasure to see them.

  “Good morning, gentlemen,” she said, motioning for them to sit down. “Dr. Diaz spoke highly of you, suggesting that we might have a beneficial mutual interest.” Her English was good if a little flowery.