Castro's Daughter

by David Hagberg

  Ortega-Cowan could imagine what Fuentes was talking about, but he felt the first stirrings of unease. “I’m listening.”

  “Do you know your mother?”

  The question was startling, and Ortega-Cowan almost didn’t answer. But he was intrigued. “She died in a car wreck when I was five, but I remember her telling me that my father had been a hero of the revolution and would one day come for me.”

  “But he never did.”

  “No.”

  “Nor did he ever come for the coronel, your half sister.”

  SIXTY-FOUR

  They had rented a couple of cars, including a plain Ford Taurus and a Chevrolet Impala from Hertz at Dulles, and had taken up residence at a small two-story colonial in McLean that Otto had purchased almost two years ago. The house at the end of a cul-de-sac backed to a stand of trees that would provide cover if they needed to make a run for it. And although the neighborhood was quiet, the four of them kept out of sight so far as it was possible.

  After his meeting with Page, McGarvey had spent most of the rest of the day on the phone with a number of contacts, including, and especially, Martínez in Miami, who fed him up-to-the-minute reports on not only what the DI was up to, but also what the mood of the exile community was.

  “Caliente and growing,” Martínez said.

  “And you’re fanning the flames.”

  “Of course. But you might have to come here soon and talk with a few key people before they’ll commit as a mob. You understand?”

  “Do you have a leak in your organization?”

  “There’re DI spooks all over the place. We work around them.”

  “The word is out about the treasure?”

  “Yes,” Martínez said.

  “We’ll be down first thing in the morning.”

  “Not sooner? They need to know what this is really all about, and what their chances will be.”

  “I still need to make sure of one more thing.”

  “The coronel?”

  “Sí.”

  “There, you do speak Spanish.”

  “Claro que sí.” Of course I do, McGarvey said. “Tomorrow. Early.”

  * * *

  By late afternoon, he’d taken his plans about as far as he could from Washington, and he went into the kitchen and opened a Pils Urquell beer and sat at the counter drinking and looking out the window at the woods and darkening evening and thinking that Katy would have liked it here, at this hour with a glass of nice merlot.

  “A centavo,” María said at the doorway.

  McGarvey looked up. “Actually it’s a penny for your thoughts. Are you ready to leave?”

  “Louise and Otto have pinpointed at least one site near Victorio that looks very promising. I assume we’re going to take a look before I go to Ciudad Juárez to start everything in motion.” She looked bright, fresh, even animated.

  And naïve despite her hard experiences, McGarvey thought. “First Miami, we need to put out a few fires. Your Captain Fuentes evidently assassinated three key people. The entire Calle Ocho is in an uproar.”

  “It’s not part of the operation—”

  “It is now, because you’re the cause of it,” McGarvey said coolly. “You’re here, and you’ll do as I tell you to do. Comprende, Señora Coronel?”

  She turned and stalked down the hall as Louise and Otto came back to the kitchen.

  “Tantrums?” Louise asked.

  McGarvey laughed. “Just the start, I think. What’d you two find out?”

  Louise glanced over her shoulder to make sure María had gone upstairs. “Victorio Peak was all but hollowed out sometime back in the sixties. If there was any treasure buried in the caves, it’s long gone by now.”

  “Hollowed out by who?”

  “The military, of course. It’s what you expected, wasn’t it?”

  “Counted on, actually,” McGarvey said. “She doesn’t know?”

  “Probably does, but there’re a dozen conflicting accounts,” Otto said. “Take your pick.”

  “What about the topographic maps of the vicinity? Did you find anything promising?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Louise said. She’d brought her laptop with her, and she opened it on the counter in front of McGarvey, and pulled up a satellite view of the southern New Mexico desert just northeast of the border. “Fort Bliss Military Reservation land about fifty miles south of Victorio Peak. Looks really promising.”

  “We’ll need permission for what we want to do.”

  “I spoke to Walt Page fifteen minutes ago,” Otto said. “He’s going to the president with it first thing in the morning.”

  McGarvey sat back. “Castro’s gold,” he said. “I would never have believed it actually existed.”

  “Oh, but it does, kemo sabe,” Otto said, and he began hopping from foot to foot.

  * * *

  They were leaving for Andrews around four in the morning, and after an early dinner of Cuban pork roast with rice and plantains—the ingredients for which Louise and María managed to find in a small bodega in Alexandria and which María cooked for them—McGarvey turned in early.

  Being on the hunt and with friends like this, he’d turned a little morose; he missed his old life with Katy and Liz and Todd. Standing now in jeans but no shirt at the window in his second-floor bedroom around midnight with a snifter of brandy, one part of him was engaged with his memories, while the other professional part was going over his plan, and everything that could go wrong—which was just about everything.

  Dealing with thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of people was unpredictable. Anything could, and probably would, happen. But it was going to come together very soon now, and he honestly had no feeling for how it would turn out. Too many variables, most of which were out of his control, he told himself, and yet for the first time in a long time, he thought that he had a shot of changing something important—not just the elimination of some expediter or even some cabal, but something even more important, more fundamental for a lot of innocent people whose only misfortune was being born in the wrong place.

  Someone came to his door, and he resisted the automatic urge to reach for his pistol lying on the nightstand a couple of feet away. This place was a safe haven.

  “I didn’t know if you were asleep,” María said.

  “It’s late and we have an early start. Get some sleep.”

  “I can’t. I’m frightened.”

  “You should be—after Miami, you’re going back to Havana sooner or later.”

  “Don’t be a fool. They’ll arrest me the moment I step off the plane, and I would just disappear as if I’d never existed.”

  “You should have thought about it before you started this thing,” McGarvey said.

  “Goddamnit—”

  McGarvey turned. “Shut up before you wake up the house,” he said. “What the hell do you want? Who the fuck do you think you are? How many people have to kiss your ass while you send them to be tortured or murdered? How much is enough for people like you and your father and all the other insane bastards who think that the only way to lead a country is to put it in chains? Bullies, all of you, even worse than the Taliban. They only want to take away women’s rights—you want to take away everyone’s.”

  “I want to make amends,” María said in a small voice. She came closer. “I want it to stop. Honest to God. Finally. I need your help.”

  McGarvey turned away. “And you’re getting it.”

  She came to him and laid her head on the back of his shoulder. Just that and no more.

  He could feel her heat and smell her scent. “As long as they’re convinced that you know how to retrieve the treasure, they won’t touch you,” he said. “But we’re dropping you off in Mexico City, and from there it’ll be up to you.”

  “Where will you be?”

  “In New Mexico, waiting for you.”

  SIXTY-FIVE

  Ortega-Cowan picked up his bedside telephone at the same time he glanced at the clock. It was a l
ittle past four in the morning, the sun not yet up. “Quien es?”

  “Ernesto,” a man said softly. “I have news.”

  “Sí,” Ortega-Cowan said. He got out of bed, glanced at his eighteen-year-old ballet dancer, Giselle, lying curled into a ball tangled with the damp bedsheets, and padded nude out to the balcony of the eighth-floor penthouse looking out over Havana harbor to the northeast and the wooded Maestranza Park that paralleled the Avenida del Puerto, formally known as the Avenida Carlos Manuel de Céspedes.

  Ernesto Cura had lived in Miami as an exile, where he owned a small coffee shop just off Southwest Eighth Street (Calle Ocho itself) and Ponce de León Boulevard, and was a reasonably trusted if somewhat fringe observer of the local power structure. He heard things. “There is a development.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Colonel León is on her way back with her CIA friends. Should be touching down at Homestead in the next hour or so. I thought that you might be interested.”

  It wasn’t quite what Ortega-Cowan expected, at least not if Fuentes’s report about the conversation he’d surveilled in Georgetown was true. But he was very interested. “How do you know this?”

  “CK Alpha’s people were at my shop and they were talking.” CK Alpha was the DI’s designator for Raúl Martínez. “Still talking. The entire district is in an uproar.”

  “Because she’s on her way back?”

  “That and something else.”

  María returning to Miami, where she was a woman marked for assassination, made no sense—unless Kirk McGarvey had somehow convinced Martínez that she knew where the treasure was and had a plan to retrieve it, and she meant to include the dissidents. But if that were the case, it might mean that she had something else up her devious sleeve. Another misdirection for which she was an expert, well trained by her Russian instructors.

  “What else?” Ortega-Cowan demanded.

  “The whole place is practically going crazy. Trash fires in the streets, people singing and marching. No vandalism yet, but it almost feels like a religious festival, except—”

  “Except what?”

  “It’s crazy.”

  “Madre de Dios,” Mother of God, Ortega-Cowan said. “You’re not making any sense!”

  “They’re chanting the number seven over and over. Seven cities. And they’re all happy.”

  Ortega-Cowan’s heart began to race. Cíbola and the Seven Cities of Gold. “Are they getting ready to take a trip?”

  “What?”

  “Are they getting ready to leave Miami? Maybe ordering buses, or getting their cars ready, or buying train or bus tickets?”

  “I don’t know,” Ernesto said.

  “Find out,” Ortega-Cowan said.

  * * *

  Giselle didn’t stir when he went back into the bedroom and got dressed for the day in his plain olive drab military fatigues. They’d both done too many lines of coke last night with Maximo Extra Añejo rum chasers, but she had a lot less body mass than he had and she was still zoned out, whereas his own head was crystal clear.

  Outside, he got in his old Chevrolet Impala, kept in good running condition by one of his operational planners who happened to be a master mechanic on the side, and headed to his office in Plaza Havana. If María was on the move, he had a lot of work to do before the distraction of regular hours. And he would need to set Fuentes to the hunt.

  His cell phone vibrated. “Sí,” he answered.

  It was Ernesto in Miami, and in the background, the crowd noises were loud. “You were right, they’re getting set to leave in the next twenty-four hours. A convoy.”

  “To where, exactly?”

  “I haven’t been able to find out. I don’t think most of them know where themselves.”

  That final detail actually didn’t matter, because Ortega-Cowan knew exactly where they were going—New Mexico. But he was a man of completeness, of elegant endings just like the operas he so loved. “Find out. And let me know when Colonel León arrives, and especially where she goes, who she talks to and what reaction she causes.”

  “I think that if she shows her face here, the mood of the crowd, they’ll tear her limb from limb.”

  “Keep your eyes and ears open,” Ortega-Cowan said, and he phoned Fuentes, who was staying at the same DI safe house on the Malecón where María had stayed before she made her run for Camagüey.

  “Sí,” Fuentes answered on the first ring all out of breath, as if he’d been waiting for the call.

  “Can’t sleep, either?” Ortega-Cowan asked.

  “Has something happened?”

  “María should be touching down in Homestead in an hour or so with McGarvey and Rencke.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “It might, but listen. All of Calle Ocho is in an uproar. People in the streets, chanting about seven cities, singing, partying.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Cíbola. The Seven Cities of Gold. They’ve been told about the treasure and apparently they’re getting ready to go after it.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense, either. The only way they’d know about it is if the bitch somehow got McGarvey to convince Martínez that the traitors and defectors could go directly to New Mexico to grab the gold themselves. No need to involve the Mexican cartels or try to bring it to Guantánamo.”

  “It’ll take them time to get organized, and at least two days to get across country,” Ortega-Cowan said.

  “We’ll need to beat them to the punch,” Fuentes said.

  “Exactly. And I’ll tell you how we’re going to do it.”

  SIXTY-SIX

  The CIA’s Gulfstream G650 biz jet touched down at Homestead Air Force Base twenty miles south of Miami just before the sun began to rise, and the pilot was directed to immediately taxi to a hangar across the field from flight operations. Louise remained in McLean to backstop them, so it was just McGarvey, Rencke, and a highly agitated María aboard.

  Martínez was leaning against his car inside the hangar, his arms crossed, an unlit cigar at the corner of his mouth. He looked dangerous this morning.

  “I can understand going back to Havana to pull this off,” María said. “I still have enough clout in the DI to at least make my chief of staff listen long enough to put everything in place. After all, the only way I could have found out what I needed was by supposedly defecting. But why this now?”

  It was the same thing she’d been saying since early this morning. But in fact, McGarvey thought that she’d agreed way too easily. It was nearly impossible to read anything usable from her eyes, yet he was almost certain he detected something there, maybe something disingenuous.

  “You’re going to explain to Raúl just how you mean to keep the treasure away from your government and make sure that it gets to the people.”

  “You know,” she said.

  “But he doesn’t, and the explanation will have to come from you,” McGarvey told her. He glanced out the window as they came to a stop and the jet’s engines began to spool down. “And by the looks of his mood, I suggest you tell the truth. It was because of you that three of his people were gunned down.”

  The young male flight attendant in a crisp white shirt and dark blue blazer opened the hatch and lowered the stairs, then got something from a forward galley and brought it back to Otto.

  “Will this do, Mr. Rencke?” he asked.

  It was a small digital video camera, and Otto quickly checked it over and nodded. “Just fine,” he said.

  And María understood the real purpose for this stop, and realized there was nothing she could do about it. “Blackmail,” she said.

  “Maybe you’ll turn the gold over to the navy at Guantánamo, and do exactly as you said you wanted to do—get the money to the people. But then again, maybe you’ll change your mind. Maybe a video of your cooperation with the DI’s most wanted man might show up on Castro’s desk, or better yet broadcast over TV Cubana or Cubavision on the Internet so that
the people could see what had been promised and been taken away from them—by you.”

  Martínez pushed away from his car, pocketed his cigar, and started for the aircraft stairs.

  “I’ve told you want I want to do and why I’m doing it, but what about you?” María asked. “If you know where the gold is, why not just tell the military and grab it for yourselves?”

  “We’re going to take most of it, but you’ll get away with at least a third. A lot of money by any account, but for Cubans a king’s ransom.”

  “If the money gets to the people, there’ll be a real incentive to topple the government.”

  “And you’ll be the one who did it for them.”

  “Along with the help of your government.”

  “Something like that,” McGarvey said.

  María glanced over at Otto, who’d already begun recording. “How much of that do you want me to tell Martínez?”

  “He knows most of it already, so don’t hold anything back. This is just a stage drama that we may never have to use.”

  “Colonel León, back so soon?” Martínez said from the open hatch.

  The attendant had gone into the cockpit with the flight crew and closed the door.

  “She has something to tell you before she goes back to Havana,” McGarvey said.

  “Better not try to get her out through MIA, the mood up there just now is ugly,” Martínez said, and he sat down across the aisle from her.

  “We’re flying her to Mexico City soon as we’re finished here.”

  Martínez nodded. “I’m all ears, Colonel. And believe me, I do wish you the best of luck when you get home.”

  “Mr. McGarvey tells me that you’ve been told everything, so I won’t go into the details—”

  “Ah, but by all means, please do.”

  “Bastardo,” she said, but she told him the same things she’d laid out for McGarvey in Georgetown, including the use of the Gulf Cartel based in Matamoros, the Sinaloas who used to be Gulf’s main opposition, Los Zetas, all of them ex-military and their main allies the Beltrán-Leyvas, to gather ordinary Mexicans and herd them en masse across the border. “No guns,” she said. “No one will get hurt.”