Castro's Daughter

by David Hagberg

  “And you think that your ordinary Mexicans—as you call them—will actually do it? I mean why?”

  “Fear.”

  “What’s in it for the cartels?”

  “Without us, a major link in their supply chain would suddenly disappear. They’ll want to protect it.”

  “Have you talked it over with any of them?” Martínez asked.

  “With all of them,” María said.

  “And you think you can pull this off right under the noses of your chief of staff and that little prick Captain Fuentes?”

  “That’ll be easy part. The rest will be up to Washington.”

  Martínez seemed to consider her words for a moment, then looked at McGarvey. “What happens after you drop her off?”

  “We’re going to Holloman. The main cache of the treasure is to the south, we think somewhere on Fort Bliss. Not too far from the border. We’ve got it pinpointed to two or three spots within a mile or so of each other. Should take us less than twenty-four hours to check out all three.”

  “So you find this treasure, then what?”

  “Dig it up.”

  “You sure of this, comp?”

  “Sure enough about what it means to us and to Cuba,” McGarvey said.

  Martínez got to his feet. “Then I truly do wish you the best of luck, Coronel,” he said. He nodded to McGarvey and Otto and left the aircraft.

  * * *

  Four hours later, they were allowed to taxi to an empty slot at Benito Juárez International Airport’s Terminal 2, which serviced international flights. A pair of nervous customs agents came aboard to check everyone’s passport, and they visibly relaxed when they learned that only María, under a work name, was getting off and would be flying to Havana on the next available commercial flight. The aircraft did not have CIA written on its tail, but the number came with diplomatic immunity from an unspecified agency that was not affiliated with the U.S. Department of State. Nothing was said about the warrant for McGarvey’s arrest because Otto had temporarily blocked it from the Mexican police computer system.

  “Do you wish for us to stamp your passport, Señora Delgado?” one of the uniformed agents asked.

  “As a courtesy, no,” María said.

  “Sí, señora,” the agent said, and he returned her passport.

  “How long do you wish to remain in Mexico?” the other agent asked McGarvey.

  “We’ll leave as soon as we refuel and have clearance to take off.”

  “Have you filed a flight plan?”

  “Yes, for Albuquerque, New Mexico.”

  María gathered her purse and bag, and before she followed the customs officers off the aircraft, she turned back to McGarvey. “I want this to work.”

  “So do I.”

  “I have your sat phone number—I’ll call you in a day or two to see what you’ve found. And maybe I’ll see you in New Mexico in a few days, maybe sooner.”

  “Can your Mexican contacts round up enough people to storm the border in that short a time?”

  “They guarantee that they could do it even faster. Do you think you can find the treasure and convince your government not only to dig it up, but allow us to cart it off as well?”

  “I’m working on it.”

  “To bring down my government.”

  McGarvey didn’t bother to answer, and at the open hatch, María hesitated again and looked back.

  “This is crazy, you know?”

  “Certifiable,” McGarvey said.

  * * *

  In the air again, heading northwest, with Bloody Marys as they waited for the attendant to rustle up some breakfast, McGarvey phoned Page in his office at CIA headquarters.

  “Everything is just about in place now. Time for you to see the president.”

  “The colonel is on her way back to Havana?” Page asked.

  “We dropped her off in Mexico City a couple hours ago.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “About two hours from Holloman, Mr. Director, so you’ll have to hustle—because these guys aren’t going to go along on my word alone. And we’ll need the New Mexico Army National Guard and probably the border patrol.”

  “And someone who can assume overall command,” Page said. “This is insanity—you do realize it, I hope.”

  “Convince the president, because if we can pull this off, it just might solve our problem with Cuba once and for all.”

  Page was silent for several beats. “I’ll do my best, Mac. But give me three hours.”

  “You got it,” McGarvey said. Using the aircraft interphone unit, he called the flight deck. “Can you slow us down a little? I don’t want to get to Holloman for another three hours.”

  “No problem, Mr. McGarvey,” the captain said. “In fact, I’ll let air traffic control know that we’ve run into an unexpected head wind.”

  “Good man,” McGarvey said, and he put the phone down.

  Otto was staring at him, obviously troubled.

  “Do you think this is a mistake?” McGarvey asked.

  “Tons of stuff could go wrong, kemo sabe,” Otto said. “I mean, why not just dig up the treasure and somehow convince the president to share it with the Cubans? Wouldn’t have to involve Colonel León—she was lying back there, by the way.”

  “Yeah, I know. There’s no way she could have struck some kind of a deal with the Mexican cartels that fast. She was on the run.”

  “She’s got help, and I’m betting it’s her chief of staff, because she didn’t seem overly worried about going back to Havana.”

  “Which leaves Captain Fuentes,” McGarvey said. “I have a feeling he has his own agenda. Probably part of the internal struggles going on ever since Fidel died.”

  “So, back to my original question,” Otto said. “Why not just dig up the treasure and convince the president to share it?”

  “In the first place, it wouldn’t be likely the president would be convinced, leastways not right now, not with pressure from the Mexicans or from Havana.”

  “And in the second?” Otto asked.

  “There is no treasure in New Mexico. At least not on Holloman or Fort Bliss.”

  SIXTY-SEVEN

  María’s credentials under the work name Ines Delgado raised no eyebrows at Havana’s José Martí International Airport passport control nor had she expected they would, though it seemed a little strange to be coming home like this. As anonymously as she had left just a few days ago.

  She had only her carry-on bag, which was given a cursory check by customs, and then she was outside—where Ortega-Cowan, in tan slacks and a crisp white guayabera shirt, was waiting with his Chevy, the top down.

  “Your call from the airplane came as a surprise,” he said. “Welcome home.”

  “Intrigued?” she asked. She dumped her bag in the backseat and got in the car as Ortega-Cowan slipped behind the wheel and they took off. The traffic was light and the weather fabulous, warm, the air silken and the breeze light.

  “Somewhat. But I thought you’d defected—we all did. Though I couldn’t fathom why.”

  “I did defect,” she said. “It was the only way to maintain the illusion for McGarvey and Rencke.”

  Ortega-Cowan glanced at her. “Illusion?”

  “I needed to seem sincere.”

  “By flying to Miami and putting your life in danger?”

  “Exactly. Just as I’ve returned and put my life in danger again. I’m sure that El Presidente was quick to issue orders for my arrest for treason, which right now puts you in his crosshairs.”

  “You were never the one to mince words, Comrade Colonel,” Ortega-Cowan said. “You’re back, which means you believe that there’s something to this business with a treasure somewhere in New Mexico.”

  And she had him, as she knew she would. No one, especially not a man of Ortega-Cowan’s appetites and ambitions, could resist a good treasure story. “It’s there all right, Román, and the Americans are going to help us get part of it.”

&nb
sp; “Does it have anything to do with the agitation going on in Miami right now?”

  “Sí, they’re also going to help us.”

  They drove in silence for a time, but Ortega-Cowan kept glancing at her. “You’ve changed,” he said.

  It surprised her. “What do you mean?”

  “Your father’s death, and then the attack on your compound and McGarvey and your defection and now the gold. Manuel said that you truly were a traitor.”

  “How would that little bastard know?”

  “He recorded your conversation with McGarvey and Rencke and the man’s wife you had kidnapped.”

  “Impossible,” María said. Louise had showed her the antisurveillance systems, promising that they were perfectly safe from eavesdropping.

  “Nevertheless, it’s true. He’s back and we’re going to him right now so we can figure out what comes next.”

  “The bastard tried to kill me,” María flared. “He’s not a part of this. I want him behind bars.”

  “It’s too late for that,” Ortega-Cowan said mildly. “He knows about the deals you made with the Mexican drug cartels, and he’s spent every waking hour since he got back cementing those deals for you. All we need now are the precise location across the border and the time you want the invasion to start.”

  “Listen to me, Román. If need be, I’ll tell the president everything and recommend that both Manuel and you be placed under arrest.”

  “As I said, sister, it’s too late for that.”

  It took a moment for what he had called her to sink in, and she looked at him, really looked at him. He was smiling, and he glanced over at her and nodded.

  “It’s true. Manuel told me about it, and showed me the records. Actually we’re half siblings. Different mothers, same father. It explains why we’ve worked so well together over the past few years since you got back from Moscow.”

  She wanted to argue, but looking into her own feelings, she realized the truth of it. They had too many similarities in tastes and ambitions. And she remembered staring at him every now and then, wanting to say something or ask him something; it was always on the tip of her tongue, but she’d never been able to give voice to it.

  “Papá was a very busy man,” she said at last. “Five sons and a daughter, plus you and me.”

  “Who knows, maybe there’s more of us,” Ortega-Cowan said. “In the end, what it comes down to is that you and I have to trust each other.”

  María chuckled. “What trust?” she asked. “We’re Castro Ruz’s. We have the genes for intrigue and scheming and double-crossing.”

  And Ortega-Cowan laughed again. “Well, I promise not to try to stab you in the back, at least not until we actually get our hands on the gold. And I agree with you about Manuel. But for now he knows too much—or thinks he does—so we might as well use him.”

  “And if something goes wrong, we can always lay the blame on his doorstep. Or is he also related to us?”

  “I very much doubt it. But he said that you planned on giving the treasure to the Americans at Guantánamo. You weren’t serious, were you?”

  “What do you think, brother?”

  Ortega-Cowan nodded. “I think that this will turn out to be an interesting operation, no matter what happens. At the very least, if we come back empty-handed, we’ll give the international lawyers something to do, suing in The Hague for our share.”

  María turned over in her mind what else her half brother and the little prick Fuentes knew and what they might be planning. “Where are we going?”

  “The Malecón safe house.”

  * * *

  Fuentes, in jeans and a T-shirt, was talking on the phone when María and Ortega-Cowan walked in. A Russian-made 5.45 mm PSM semi-automatic pistol was lying on the coffee table in front of him. He looked up. “I’ll call you later,” he said, and closed the cell phone.

  María’s anger spiked, and before he could move, she snatched the pistol, checked to make sure that a round was in the firing chamber, and pointed the gun at his face.

  “This came from my office safe,” she said. “How did you get it?”

  Fuentes blanched.

  “I brought it here,” Ortega-Cowan said. “It was necessary for me to clean out your safe to find out what documents and credit cards you had taken so that you could be traced, and to keep anything incriminating out of El Presidente’s hands, in case he sent someone over to make an independent check.”

  “I thought that I was marked as a traitor.”

  “One can never be certain of everything.”

  María had the almost overwhelming urge to shoot both of them. But getting out of the country with them dead would be difficult, maybe even impossible, depending upon what safeguards Román might have put in place. Something she would have done, were she in is shoes.

  “Would you mind pointing that gun someplace else?” Fuentes asked.

  “Yes, señora, please do before there’s an unfortunate accident,” an older man with neatly trimmed gray hair said, coming from the kitchen. He was impeccably dressed in a white linen suit and open-collar white shirt.

  María’s hand shook, but she lowered the pistol. “Who the hell are you?”

  “Julio Rosales,” Ortega-Cowan said. “He is the Ministry of Justice’s chief counsel for international law. He knows everything, or at least as much and Manuel and I know.”

  María tried to figure out what Ortega-Cowan and Fuentes had been busy doing while she was gone. But this was starting to get seriously out of hand, and yet she’d known almost from the beginning that she needed McGarvey and Rencke—especially McGarvey—to make the operation work in New Mexico, and that she would need at least Román’s best efforts here.

  “Please, señora, put the gun down,” Rosales said. “And let me tell you the only way in which this project of yours will have any chance whatsoever of success.”

  SIXTY-EIGHT

  Holloman Air Force Base is located about sixty miles north of Ciudad Juárez on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande and El Paso on the north, which straddles the Texas–New Mexico border. And when McGarvey and Otto arrived in the CIA’s Gulfstream, the day was hot, dry, and dusty.

  Captain John Whitelaw, the base public affairs officer met them as they got off the plane that had pulled into an empty hangar, and they shook hands. He was in his late twenties or early thirties and acted nervous. “Gentlemen, welcome to Holloman. Have you eaten lunch yet?”

  “We had something on the plane,” McGarvey said, and he and Otto followed the captain to a large table set up near the rear of the hangar.

  “Our base CO, Lieutenant Colonel Ron Endicott, is on his way, and so is Brigadier General Melvin Gunther, the CO of Fort Bliss, and I have to warn you that neither of them is in a particularly receptive mood.”

  A topographic map of the desert and narrow mountain ranges that also included Alamogordo to the east, White Sands Missile Range to the north and south, and the army’s vast Fort Bliss Military Reservation that stretched from New Mexico to Texas was spread out on the table. Overlaid on the map was a transparency that showed the roads—including unpaved tracks—towns, bases, and a dozen other military facilities scattered here and there, and even the few abandoned cattle ranches, most of them bought or seized by the government during or after WWII.

  “We’re not equipped to handle what Colonel Endicott says you want,” the captain continued.

  Studying the map, McGarvey could see that the major problem they were faced with was the distance. If the Mexicans, and presumably a fair number of Cubans, were to cross the border west of El Paso, they would have a twenty-mile trek across the desert just to reach the Rio Grande, and another sixty to Holloman. Impossible without some sort of transportation. However, if they crossed the Rio Grande into Texas well southeast of El Paso, they could be on Fort Bliss in well under ten miles.

  “What’s down here?” McGarvey asked, pointing to the area on the military reservation between the museums and study center and the N
ational Cemetery.

  Whitelaw studied the chart. “Desert, mostly scrubland.”

  “Anything like a hill?”

  “Lots of them, but no real mountains, unless you go farther east and north.”

  McGarvey looked up. “All I need is a hill.”

  Otto set up his laptop at one corner of the big table, powered it up, and got online.

  Whitelaw watched him. “Sir, this is a secured area, you’re not authorized to use our Wi-Fi connection.”

  “I’m connected via satellite with my own server in Washington,” Rencke said without looking up. “It’s a whole bunch more secure for some things, you know.”

  “Anything yet?” McGarvey asked.

  “No. But Page has his BlackBerry on, and I’ve located him at the White House. West Wing.”

  “Good,” McGarvey said.

  A Hummer with air force markings pulled up outside, and a lieutenant colonel in desert BDUs jumped out and strode into the hangar. He was an athletic-looking man with a long, narrow face, and he was mad as hell. His name tag read ENDICOTT.

  Whitelaw saluted. “Colonel, these are the gentlemen from the CIA.”

  Endicott returned the salute without looking at the captain. He glanced at the map and at Rencke and the laptop, and finally at McGarvey. “I suppose you’ll tell me what the hell you’re doing on my installation, and what sort of sheer bullshit you’re trying to pull off.”

  McGarvey didn’t have the patience to put up with the man’s bluster. “Turns out, I probably won’t need your installation, Colonel. I’ll probably have to commandeer some Fort Bliss real estate on the Texas side.”

  Endicott thought it out for a second, then turned to Rencke. “Turn that goddamned machine off, mister,” he ordered.

  Rencke looked up with a mild expression. “Sorry, I can’t do that. The president will be wanting to talk to us shortly, and in any event, I think that General Gunther is about to land.”

  At that moment, they all heard the sound of an incoming helicopter and a half a minute later, a UH-60 Blackhawk with army markings sharply flared and touched down just in front of the Hummer. Almost immediately, a one star also in desert BDUs jumped down from the open hatch and marched into the hangar, where Whitelaw and Endicott came to attention and saluted.