“That must have been a relief for you,” McGarvey said.
Marti nodded. “It was, at first,” he said. “For a while it was like the old days when we’d first come to Washington, after she’d gotten over her mother’s death. At least outwardly. We had lunch a couple times a week, even though she was very busy. Some weekends she’d come over and bunk with me. We’d go to movie, maybe have a pizza afterward. I’d bought a new barbecue grill, and we had a few cookouts on the balcony of my apartment.”
“Did she ever bring any of her friends or co-workers over to introduce you?” McGarvey asked.
“No. She always said that she wanted to make her mark with the JAG before she branched out with personal issues.”
“Her words?”
Marti nodded. “More or less.”
“No boyfriends?”
“Not until her husband, Raul,” Marti said. “Or at least none that she ever mentioned.”
“But she was still up, happy, pleasant to be around?”
“For the most part. Once in a while if she was tired, she might snap at me, but she always apologized immediately. She’d tell me that she was ‘working on it.’ She was busy in those days, more often than not putting in seventy- and eighty-hour weeks.”
“How about you?” McGarvey asked.
“Oh, I was scaling back, the calls out to Langley were getting less frequent and certainly a lot less urgent, so in the spring I packed up, sold the Georgetown apartment, and moved down here.” Marti smiled suddenly. “Gloria took the better part of a week to help me pack. It was great.” He looked away. “I’d held the hope, even though I knew it was utterly impossible, that she would quit her job, move down here, and open a law practice in Little Havana.”
“Did you ever mention it to her?”
Marti shook his head. “In the fall I learned that she had been recruited by the CIA, and for the first time I was frightened for her safety.”
McGarvey knew the answer but he asked anyway. “Why?”
“She was going to be sent back to Cuba—it would have been a waste of a valuable resource otherwise. But she was the daughter of General Marti, a traitor to Uncle Fidel. The DGI would have moved heaven and earth to get its hands on her. I would have been forced to return.”
Would you have returned? McGarvey wanted to ask, but he didn’t. He figured that whatever answer Marti gave him would be a lie. The relationship between the general and his daughter was as complex as it was odd. It wasn’t as if they simply disliked each other; there was something deeper than that going on, but McGarvey didn’t know what it was yet.
“In the end there was nothing I could say or do that would have had any effect on her decision,” Marti said. “She had turned into a thoughtful, pleasant daughter, but she was still headstrong—if anything, more than when she was a difficult child. So in the end I said nothing to her, and decided to do nothing until she was sent to Cuba.”
“How long was it after she’d joined the Company before she was sent to Cuba?”
“About a year, maybe a little longer, but by then she was married and I was a little less worried.”
His name was Raul Ibenez. He was an instructor at the Farm when Gloria took her training. Within the first two weeks they had fallen head over heels in love with each other, and Gloria blossomed like never before.
“She called me every time she could to tell me about him,” Marti said. “His parents had defected when he was an infant, so he had no direct memory of Cuba, only what he’d been told. And she said that’s all they ever talked about at first. He wanted to know everything about her life as a kid, and together they were going back to help topple Fidel’s regime.
“When she graduated from the field operations course, she was assigned to the Cuban section of the Latin American desk, which was no surprise. But within three months she and Raul were married in a civil ceremony in the Falls Church courthouse.”
“Did you approve?” McGarvey asked.
“Of course. It was at least half a dream come true. She was marrying a nice Cuban boy. I checked him out. He was three years older than Gloria, he had his degree in foreign studies right there at Georgetown University, and his supervisors all gave him top marks.
“His father was a tailor and his mother a seamstress, and in fact they’re still here in Little Havana. But they closed their shop after their son was killed. I do what I can to help.”
“Does Gloria ever come to see them?” McGarvey asked.
“Just the once when she got out of Cuba, but since then, no.”
“Did you go to the wedding?”
Marti shook his head. “I didn’t know anything about it until two weeks later when they came down to Miami and invited me to lunch. They’d gone to Monaco for their honeymoon, and they looked like they had the world by the tail. They were young, beautiful, intelligent, and invincible.” Marti smiled with the memory. “They were something to behold. I didn’t even ask them about a proper church wedding. If I had, Gloria would have told me that they were too busy to fool with anything like that.”
“What about his parents?”
“They’d already broken the news, so they were going back to work the very next day.”
“To get ready for Cuba,” McGarvey said.
“Yes,” Marti said. “They divided their time between the Cuban desk at headquarters, and advanced tradecraft training at the Farm. They were working seven days a week by then, so after lunch that day I didn’t hear much from them.”
“You knew they would be assigned to go back.”
“As sure as the sun rises,” Marti said.
“When did it finally happen?”
“Not for a whole year,” Marti said. “I was even beginning to hope that maybe it wouldn’t happen. But they showed up here one night, all excited. They were on their way, and pumped up. They even refused to speak any English, although Raul’s accent wasn’t right, and I told him so. His controllers had built a legend around a small-town boy from up around Santa Clara. They all talked funny up there, so he figured he’d be safe in Havana.”
“Then what?”
“They left that night,” Marti said. He got up and went into the living room, brought back a humidor of cigars, and offered one to McGarvey.
“No thanks,” McGarvey said. “What happened in Havana?”
“Nothing much for maybe six months. My contact at Langley wouldn’t give me anything, in fact he wouldn’t even admit where they were. But I was sure that if anything were to happen, or if they were in any grave danger, he would have let me know.”
“What about the people you knew in Havana?”
A pained expression came into Marti’s eyes. He was lighting a cigar, and looked up. “I asked some friends to look out for my daughter, I’ll admit that, though Langley ordered me not to do it.”
“And?” McGarvey prompted.
Marti finished lighting his cigar. “In retrospect I’m sorry I did.”
“Why?”
“I learned something about my daughter that I wished I’d never learned.”
FIFTY-THREE
THE APARTMENT
Marti smoked his cigar in silence for a minute, looking out across the city. He was a man who was obviously wrestling with a difficult decision, but McGarvey couldn’t find much sympathy for him. He was worried about his daughter. That much was obvious. But he’d never had any idea of what it was to be a father.
“What was it that you learned?” McGarvey prompted.
Marti took a moment before he turned his attention back to McGarvey, and he suddenly seemed ten years older than just a minute before. “Would you like another drink?”
McGarvey shook his head, and Marti looked away again.
“I found out that they had been made by the DGI within the first day or two after they got to Havana,” the general said. “But the word didn’t get out to me until six months later, and by then there wasn’t much I could do.”
“How did you find out?” McGarvey prom
pted.
“I have friends there.”
“Yes, I know. But exactly how do you hear things from Cuba?”
“From Mexico. We have an organization here in Miami to collect money for our friends and relatives. We can’t send it from the States, so we fly people over to Mexico City once a week with cash for Havana or wherever.
“But it’s not a wire transfer. The Cuban government would take a hefty share as import duties if we went through normal channels. The money is given to a banker, who sends a message to a friend in Managua perhaps, or Bogotá, where U.S. dollars need to be laundered, with the amounts he has collected, and the people to whom they are to be delivered.
“Our banker in Mexico City distributes the cash in trade for a bagman from Bogotá to fly into Havana with the money he needs to launder and delivers it. The books are kept in balance that way.”
It was a method of transferring cash all over the world without having to use legitimate banks or mechanisms such as Western Union. Its use was widespread because it worked.
“I understand how the cash gets from Miami to Havana. But how do you get information back?”
“Lists of needs in code,” Marti said. “Let’s say a friend of mine working in the Air Force wants to send me a message. He will hand a personal letter for the Bogotá bagman to take out of Cuba. The letter is a list of items he needs money for. Maybe a special medicine for his parents that he can’t get in Cuba. Or money for building supplies, or to fix his car. Things like that. If the Cuban authorities discover the letters, and they do from time to time, they look like nothing more than innocent requests for help. Which most of the letters are. Not all of them contain codes.”
“Does the CIA know about this?”
Marti laughed. “They can’t help but know, but I’m told they don’t, or at least they claim not to know. So far as I can tell, no one in the DO has ever acted on any intel that was handed to them. ‘Unsubtantiated rumors. Local gossip. Unreliable information. Probably DGI disinformation.’”
“How long has this been going on?”
“Since after the Bay of Pigs,” Marti replied.
“I never knew,” McGarvey said.
“At first no one down here trusted the CIA. Not after that disaster. Later the CIA trusted no one down here because every second refugee was a DGI agent or informant.”
“You said that you learned something about your daughter that you wished you hadn’t.”
“When I got word that Gloria and Raul had probably been made by the DGI, I flew to Mexico City with five thousand in cash to be sent to one of my old Air Force friends. It was some serious money, so nobody objected when I told them I wanted to get a message inside. Two words: ‘Get out.’”
“What happened?” McGarvey asked.
“Nothing,” Marti replied tiredly. “I don’t know if they received my message; if they did, they ignored it.”
“The DGI might have picked it up. If you were infiltrated here in Miami, it’s likely that they were watching the Mexico City money operation.”
Marti nodded. “Sí, I thought of that, so I flew up to Washington and went out to Langley to talk to Don Nealy, my contact on the Latin American desk. He made a couple of phone calls while I was sitting in his office, and when he was finished he promised to see what he could do.”
“I’m surprised he even acknowledged the fact that your daughter and her husband were in Cuba,” McGarvey said. Nealy had risen to chief of the Western Hemisphere Division because he was a bright, capable officer who knew how to play by the book. He would not have divulged that sort of information even to a man such as General Marti.
“He didn’t,” Marti said. “Or at least not in so many words.”
“But he promised to help.”
“He promised to see what he could do. He looked me in the eye and told me that he had no idea where my daughter was stationed. It was possible that she was somewhere in the States. Maybe even in Little Havana. But wherever she was, he would see about getting a message to her.”
“What was the message you wanted him to deliver?”
“I wanted the Company to order her and Raul out of there because the DGI knew about them.”
“Did Nealy want to know how you came by your information?”
“He never asked.”
“And you didn’t volunteer.”
Marti was irritated. “Don knew the situation. Everybody on the Latin American desk did. It was an open secret. So long as the money going into Cuba stayed reasonably small and out of the public’s eye, and so long as it didn’t interfere with the CIA’s operations, everyone looked the other way. It was a humanitarian thing to do, so I was told. In fact, during my consulting days my contact officer never delved too deeply into how I was getting my information. Not after the bulk of what I’d handed over had been verified.”
“You sent a message to your contact in Havana, and you let the Company know that a pair of its field officers had probably been burned. What did you do next?”
“I flew down here, picked up some more money, and went back to the banker in Mexico City. Every day I sent one thousand dollars in, with a query for word about my daughter and her husband.”
“How long did it take before you heard something?” McGarvey asked.
“I started getting bits and pieces within a day or two. Their address in an apartment building. The old Dodge they were trying to buy. The jobs they supposedly worked at. She was a waitress at a small music club, and Raul was an electrician for the state. It was their cover, of course, because it would have been impossible for either of them to actually get a job. They were visible for their neighbors’ sake, but below the radar as far as official Havana was concerned.”
“But you never found out if they had been warned?”
“No,” Marti said. “But of course I continued to send the same message every day: Get out. And I continued to hear back about them. They had been spotted dancing at a street party. They had been spotted on the beach.”
“All of which could have been DGI-engineered messages to you.”
“I considered that possibility as well. But it made no difference. I had to try to get the word to them.”
Traffic on the street below had begun to quiet down, and a wet blanket of humidity had descended over the city, as it did most evenings in Miami. McGarvey had to wonder if Marti had played the part of the worried parent in Mexico City because he’d been concerned for the safety of his daughter and her husband, or because he’d been concerned about his own safety. If Gloria had been arrested by the DGI, they might have tried to use her as a lever to bring the general back to Havana.
McGarvey didn’t think that Marti would have returned to Cuba, even to save his daughter’s life. But he must have been worried that his image would have taken a serious hit had he not sacrificed his freedom for his daughter’s.
Marti was a big man down here in Little Havana. A star among his people. A man to be looked up to, a man to be respected. He stood to lose that position if his daughter got into trouble in Cuba and he did nothing to help.
“In the end it didn’t matter if my messages got through or not. Raul was arrested one night at their apartment about twenty minutes before Gloria was supposed to come home from her job.
“She disappeared, and three days later Raul was shot to death while trying to escape from a DGI interrogation center. Three days after that Gloria showed up right here in Miami, and before I could get back from Mexico she’d flown up to Washington.”
“You never saw her,” McGarvey said.
“I never even talked to her,” Marti said. “But I tried. I think she was hiding out at the Farm while she was being debriefed. But nobody would tell me.”
“You must have been relieved that she got out after all.”
“It was a father’s comfort.”
“I imagine it was,” McGarvey said, but Marti apparently did not catch the sarcasm. “What did you learn about your daughter?” he asked again.
/> FIFTY-FOUR
THE APARTMENT
The question hung in the air, and it didn’t seem as if Marti was going to answer it. He finished his drink, and snipped the glowing end off the cigar with a silver cutter. “Good cigars have become hard to find, even for me.”
“That’ll change when Cuba finally opens,” McGarvey suggested.
“It’s time to go,” Marti said, getting up.
McGarvey got to his feet. “I still don’t know about your daughter.”
“Neither do I,” Marti said, and he ushered McGarvey to the front door, where one of the bodyguards was there with his pistol.
“I’d hoped that you would help me.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t want to make a mistake with her. A lot of lives could be at stake.”
“Yours?”
It was the sort of question McGarvey had expected from a man such as Marti. He nodded. “Yes, mine, and Gloria’s and some others.”
“It wasn’t long after she’d gotten out that I began to hear things from my friends in Cuba. At first I didn’t believe any of it. As you suggested, I thought the rumors were nothing more than the DGI’s crude attempt at disinformation. They knew I was getting the messages, and maybe they wanted to discredit my daughter in my eyes.”
“For what reason?”
“I truly do not know,” Marti admitted. “But it became a moot point when a man claiming to be a former DGI case officer showed up here at my door. My people came close to killing him, until he convinced them that he had escaped from the island, and that he had something I needed to see. It was a document he’d smuggled out.”
“Something about your daughter?”
Marti nodded. “It was a signed confession that she and her husband were a CIA team. In exchange for her freedom, she promised to come back to the States and either convince me to return to Cuba or kidnap me and bring me back. The guarantee was to be her husband, who would be placed in ‘protective custody.’ But no one counted on him trying to escape.”
“It was probably a forgery,” McGarvey said. “I can’t imagine her signing something like that, or for the DGI to let it walk out the door with a defector. Did you recognize her signature?”
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