Castro's Daughter

by David Hagberg

  “Stick it out until noon, three at the latest, and then take the jet and get out of here.”

  “I still haven’t got a lock,” Otto said. “But I’ll keep trying. Have you talked to Raúl this morning?”

  “Not yet.”

  Otto hesitated for a moment. “Take care of yourself, kemo sabe.”

  “You, too.”

  Like Otto, Raúl Martínez also answered on the first ring, as if he’d been holding his cell phone waiting for the call, but unlike Otto, he sounded wound up. And in the background McGarvey could hear a lot of noise, a chanting crowd, a lot of people shouting all at once, and someone on a bullhorn, the voices distorted.

  “Are you just about ready?” Martínez asked.

  “Within the next twelve hours,” McGarvey said. “Are you getting any hassles yet from the cops or anyone else?”

  “The locals are keeping clear, and so far the federales have not interfered, thanks to you, but the situation here is nearly at the breaking point. I can’t hold it together much longer.”

  “How about the DI?”

  “There’ve been a couple of incidents, but nothing we can’t handle,” Martínez said. “Give me the word, Mac.”

  “How many people do you think you’ll be able to move?”

  “Between the trains, buses, and private cars and vans, at least two thousand, probably more once we actually get started. A lot of people down here have heard this kind of shit almost from the beginning. They’re skeptical. They want to see something concrete for a change, and I can’t blame them.”

  “I want them in place in twenty-four hours,” McGarvey said. “Can you manage it?”

  “You’re damned right, comp!”

  “No guns.”

  “I can’t guarantee that.”

  “Goddamnit, Raúl, this isn’t going to work if there’s even a hint of violence. This has to be a peaceful demonstration.”

  “I’ll do my best,” Martínez said. “But they’re fired up. What about Otto?”

  “He’s still working on it.”

  “This is goddamned tight.”

  “Tell me about it,” McGarvey said. “I’ll see you sometime tomorrow.”

  “Where will you be? Exactly.”

  “Around.”

  “Good luck.”

  “You, too,” McGarvey said, and he phoned María.

  She, too, answered on the first ring. “Is it time?”

  “Twenty-four hours. Where are you?”

  “Just outside Ciudad Juárez. Have you actually found it?”

  “It’s not in New Mexico, it’s a lot closer than I thought,” McGarvey said.

  “Is it fabulous?”

  “More than you’d think,” McGarvey said. “How many people will you have?”

  “At this point, it looks like at least five thousand, possibly more.”

  “No guns, no violence. This is going to be a peaceful sit-in. It’s the only way it’ll work.”

  “I understand.”

  “I shit you not,” McGarvey said. “The first shot fired, and all bets are off.”

  “I told you that I understood,” María said sharply. “You said closer. Where do you want us?”

  “You’re to cross the Bridge of Americas on foot. And from there, it’s a little less than five miles to Fort Bliss. I’ll send a map to your cell phone.”

  “It’s actually there?” María asked, and she sounded breathless.

  “Twenty-four hours,” McGarvey said.

  SEVENTY-ONE

  Waiting on the Mexican side of the Bridge of Americas across the Río Bravo del Norte a little past three in the afternoon, María sat in one of the four Hummers blocking the northbound lanes to all but foot traffic as thousands of people, most of them Mexicans, but more than one thousand of them Cubans flown in by the cartels, walked by. And she couldn’t help but think of the colossal chance she was taking.

  She had lied to Ortega-Cowan about her intentions from the beginning, and of course she had lied to Captain Fuentes and to Raúl Castro and to McGarvey and his geeky computer freak friend Otto Rencke. Getting the gold to the people had never really mattered to her, nor had McGarvey’s efforts to find the treasure, going so far as to Spain and to track it down.

  All along her goal had actually been a simple one: Ever since she’d learned as a child who she was, she’d wanted power. Not the same as her father or uncle, but real power and especially wealth that she could hide from the people and yet still enjoy.

  For that to happen, she’d always figured that she would need a cause célèbre, something so big that it would attract the attention of not only the government, but the people as well and propel her to a seat on the Council of Ministers—even a seat as one of the vice presidents on the Council of State just a few ranks beneath the president himself. But the years had passed with nothing on the horizon until her father died and set her on a quest to find Cuba’s salvation with the help of Kirk McGarvey.

  And her time was now, yet she was uneasy, unsatisfied.

  The pock-faced driver glanced at her. “Are you going to walk with your people, señora?” he asked, and he laughed roughly. He was one of the Los Zetas, a Glock pistol holstered on his chest, a Kalashnikov assault rifle in the rack between the seats.

  In the end, the cartels had agreed to take on the job of getting the crowd to the border and across for the continued cooperation of the Cuban government, but so they could get more of their own people across the border in relative anonymity, so that they could slip away and filter north to manage to drug pipelines within the United States. Too many interruptions in the distribution network were happening, and a new order needed to be put in place.

  “Of course I am,” she said. “But you’re staying here.”

  The driver turned away. This wasn’t his battle.

  “Doesn’t matter if you actually find any gold,” the lawyer Rosales had explained to her and Ortega-Cowan and Fuentes at the safe house. “Even though you’re certain such a treasure actually exists, and you can enlist Mr. McGarvey’s aid.”

  “It’s there,” she’d said.

  “Be that as it may. But if a sufficient number of Cuban citizens can be somehow gotten across the border into the U.S. to stage a peaceful demonstration on the site of one of your treasure caches, the U.S. military will move in, as will Homeland Security, the FBI, and certainly the local authorities. And as long as no Cuban raises his or her hand—and there should be some mothers with children in arms, and old women—this will have a chance of working. Of course, it would be infinitely better if the U.S. authorities were pushed into firing on the crowd, with luck killing someone—a mother and child, an old woman.”

  “You mean to get this into the international courts,” Ortega-Cowan had said.

  “It’s the only way,” Rosales said. “If there is gold there, none of you can certainly believe that the crowd would be allowed to stuff their pockets and simply return home.”

  “You’re talking about a three-way split—us, Spain, and the U.S.,” María said.

  “It’d probably be more complicated than that. The treasure has been on U.S. soil for several centuries now, and much of what was hidden by the monks, if the stories are true, was bound for the Vatican.”

  “Doesn’t matter, most of the gold that was lost at sea went through Cuba. There’s a treasure off the U.S. East Coast, a portion of which also belongs to us.”

  Rosales had nodded patronizingly. “Your job, Señora Coronel, is not exploration and mining, it’s simply making a claim loudly enough that the international press will sit up and take notice.”

  But the gold could be there after all, and she had given her DI operatives one simple instruction: “No matter what happens, you’ll make your way under cover of darkness to wherever the treasure exists and simply take any samples you can find. Doesn’t matter how much, just bring back something that we can use for proof.”

  “Are you sure it’s there, Coronel?” Lieutenant Ruiz asked.
/>   “Sí.”

  “What if we run into opposition?”

  “Get the samples out and meld back into the crowd,” María said, and before the lieutenant could speak, she answered his next question. “Whatever it takes, but quietly.”

  * * *

  At that moment, Ruiz passed by but didn’t look over to see who was parked in the Hummer, and within minutes he was lost in the crowd on the bridge.

  She got out as Fuentes walked up. Like most of the others choking the roadway, he was dressed in jeans and a loose shirt.

  “Any trouble from the other side?” María asked.

  Fuentes was in cell phone contact with one of the DI operators near the lead. “The cops and Texas National Guard are there, just like you said they would be, but they’re not blocking the roads, just directing the parade through downtown toward Highway 54.”

  “Any sign of the media?”

  “They’re all over the place, also just like you said they would be.”

  María had phoned Ortega-Cowan and given him the word to start calling the media in the States immediately after she’d talked to McGarvey. The New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, plus all the wire services, including the AP and Reuters, online sites such as AOL Latino, and the television networks CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, Fox, and the local television, radio, and newspapers.

  “Treasure march for the people.” The catchphrase had grown overnight, as Ortega-Cowan promised it would, because the average non-Cuban American was frankly sick of what seemed to be a senseless embargo against an island just ninety miles south of Key West. Cubans were pleasant, if desperately poor, the tropical nights were fantastic, the rum even better. And who really remembered Batista, the revolution, even the Bay of Pigs or the missile crisis? If some Spanish treasure could be shared, why not?

  None of this ever really had a chance of success, not from the beginning. And yet what else was there? María figured that if she made it to the treasure cache, whether it was there or not, and then made it back across the border, she would have won. In the end, Rosales would make it right.

  And yet María had a gut feeling that she had lied not only to everyone else but to herself as well. Lied all her life, because as corny as it sounded even to her inner voice, all she ever really wanted was to fit in somewhere, to love and be loved, to be appreciated for—as a lover had once said—her inner beauty.

  But she had always denied it.

  “Shall we take a walk?” she said to Fuentes, and she joined the crowd moving slowly across the bridge, a mother with a crying infant in her arms, and two others hanging on to the hem of her dress just ahead.

  The power of a mother and child, indeed.

  SEVENTY-TWO

  McGarvey stood just below the crest of the hastily bulldozed mound on the east side of the first trench, binoculars raised as the first of the crowd estimated at seven thousand people began to appear on Highway 54. The sun had set fifteen minutes ago, and many of the people carried flashlights or torches, but they made no noise. The panorama was nearly surreal, otherworldly, or from another time; Egyptian workers marching in protest on the pyramids.

  “What do you want to do?” General Gunther called up from the base of the mound, where he was waiting next to a Hummer.

  “Let them come ahead,” McGarvey said, lowering the binoculars.

  “Sure you don’t want backup?”

  “It’s okay, General. They’ll be gone by first light. Some even before that.”

  “What about the media? They’re all over the place.”

  “Don’t interfere with them,” McGarvey said absently. It was just as he figured it would turn out. Gunther had given his people strict orders not to contact the press or television networks. It meant that María or someone directed by her had leaked the word to the media.

  “How about when the marchers get here,” Gunther shouted. “Do you want me to set up a perimeter?”

  María was out there; he could practically feel her presence. And she had almost certainly brought muscle with her. For just an instant, he caught an image of her face as she had emerged from the basement of the brownstone in Georgetown. She’d been wide eyed, her lips pursed, excited, maybe even a little frightened. And vulnerable. She was in a place that for her was badland with some serious people gunning for her.

  McGarvey lowered the binoculars. “No,” he called down. “Just keep them from spreading out, especially east toward the airport.”

  “How long do we keep the highway closed?”

  “Until they clear out.”

  Gunther turned away, then looked back up. “There’re a lot of them.”

  “I’d hoped there might be.”

  “Some of them are probably armed.”

  “Almost certainly,” McGarvey said.

  The general shook his head, got back in his Hummer, and his driver took off.

  McGarvey phoned Martínez. “Where are you?”

  “Close. A few hours.”

  “How many people?”

  “Maybe three or four thousand. I didn’t stop to count.”

  “It’ll have to do,” McGarvey said. “Good luck, Raúl.”

  “You, too, comp.”

  Otto called almost immediately. “I’m in.”

  “Did you find it?” McGarvey asked.

  “Looks like it.”

  SEVENTY-THREE

  Except for the four-man swing shift crew in the operations center, Ortega-Cowan was alone on the fifth floor in his office watching the events unfolding in Texas as reported by CNN. So far, everything was going exactly as planned. The American authorities were doing nothing to block the marchers who were beginning to enter Fort Bliss along a narrow road south of the National Cemetery, which was just as incredible and unprecedented to him as the correspondent was terming it.

  “… nothing short of a so far peaceful invasion of the United States, for what purpose no one is saying yet.”

  The only difference in his sister’s plan was the ultimate outcome for her. At some point in the confusion tonight, Fuentes would shoot her to death. An unfortunate accident, but one with some poetic justice. Colonel León had become unstable over the past weeks. She’d even been called before El Presidente to explain herself.

  Of course, it was the unfortunate passing of her father that had sent her over the edge, caused her to defect to the United States, and led to her current delusion that by somehow staging some mass demonstration in Texas, she would find the salvation she’d preached she was seeking.

  “But salvation from whom or what?” Ortega-Cowan had written in his daybook. It was an answer she couldn’t or wouldn’t give to him, at which time, he wrote, he’d become deeply concerned for her sanity and loyalty to the state.

  He happened to glance up when the elevator, which had been on the ground floor, stopped on the fifth and two very large men, wearing khaki slacks and plain white guayabera shirts, got off and marched down the hall to his office.

  He got to his feet. “This is a restricted area,” he said. “Who are you and what are you doing here?” But he knew.

  Both of them were dark, with the solid build of rugby players. One held up an SDE identification booklet with the name ERNESTO NUÑEZ. It was the Seguridad del Estado—the state police under Raúl Castro’s direct control. “Major Román Ortega-Cowan, you are under arrest.”

  “On what charge?”

  “Treason.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Ortega-Cowan said, but his heart froze. The incredible bitch had done it to him.

  “Are you armed at this time, Major?”

  Ortega-Cowan, who was dressed in plain olive drab fatigues, spread his arms. “No.”

  He was handcuffed and taken downstairs past the evening security officer, who looked away when they passed, and outside was handed into the backseat of a Gazik with military markings.

  Not really paying much attention to where he was being driven, Ortega-Cowan tried to work out his next moves, because there was no way
he was going to face a firing squad on such a charge, although it did have some truth to it. It could be proved that he had helped with María’s scheme, but he could and would argue that everything he had done was to prove that she—not he—was the traitor. And it was she and Captain Fuentes who were at this moment marching on a military installation in Texas, while he was still here in Havana at his desk doing his job.

  But before this was allowed to go much further, and definitely before he was locked up in some cell, he needed to speak to the president, and he started to tell that to the officers when he realized that they were on the Malecón, evening traffic just beginning to pick up.

  “Where are you taking me?”

  “You know where,” Nuñez said without looking over his shoulder.

  Two minutes later, they pulled over and parked in front of the apartment building where he’d last spoken with María and Manuel and the attorney Rosales, and he was hustled out of the jeep and taken upstairs to the safe house, a very sour taste in his mouth.

  The place was in a shambles: the furniture was cut apart, the tables and chairs and appliances in the kitchen and even the fixtures in the bathroom had been dismantled, the wallpaper stripped, holes punched in the walls.

  Raúl Castro stood in the middle of the mess and he turned around. “Here you are at last.”

  Ortega-Cowan’s heart soared. He still had a chance. “I’m glad that you’re here, Señor Presidente, I have so much to tell you.”

  “Sí,” Castro said. “But first I will tell you what I have learned about you and your plotters of treason, including Colonel León, Captain Fuentes, and two spies who have worked for you from their paladar downstairs in this very building. Fidel and Margarita de la Paz, I believe their names are.” Raúl brushed it aside. “But they have already confessed and have been taken care of, along with Julio Rosales—a personal friend and an exceedingly sad surprise.”