Martínez glanced at him. “No shit,” he said. “No one down there knows exactly who the American is, but everyone seems to have the impression that Langley has to be kept out of it for the time being. The American’s — Otto’s — life depends on it.”
“Sounds like DI backspin.”
“That’s what I thought,” Martínez said. He shook his head. “So they grab Otto’s wife, but the operation is sloppy and a bystander gets shot to death in the process. Nonetheless, they got her, so Otto can’t do anything but get down to Havana, where he’s snatched by the deputy director of operations in such a way that his presence is supposed to be a secret. Supposedly, dissidents killed him and the two guys who picked him up. And the DI spreads the rumor that whatever the situation might look like, it has to be kept away from the CIA. And that doesn’t sound loco to you?”
“Muy loco,” McGarvey said. “But it’s worse than that.”
Martínez worked it out in a split second. “Hijo de puta. Otto’s just the bait. It’s you they want.”
“That’s what I think.”
“Why? They can’t still be pissed off about the Guantánamo operation. That makes no sense.”
“I don’t have a clue, but I’m not going in the front door.”
“The air force has good radar of the entire strait, and the navy doesn’t screw around. The second we take off from Largo or the Matecumbes — by float plane or boat — they’ll know we’re coming.”
“I’m counting on it,” McGarvey said. “And if I’m right, they’ll wait to pick us up from the beach.”
“If you’re wrong, you’ll find out what the inside of a Cuban prison is like.”
“You just need to get me somewhere in the vicinity of Cojimar and then head back. They won’t interfere with you.”
“And then what?” Martínez said. “At some point, you and Otto will have to get out of there, unless this colonel has something else in mind for you. I mean, it makes no sense. None of it. The risk they’ve taken is beyond insanity.”
“Unless it has something to do with Castro’s death,” McGarvey said, and he told Martínez the incident with the CIA asset at the compound that night, leaving out the speculation that Colonel León was Castro’s daughter.
Martínez was angry. “I know Carlos’s family here in Miami,” he said. “No one told me, so I could go to them and tell them about their son. They worry about him all the time. They need to know what happened.”
“Not yet,” McGarvey said. “This is an ongoing op.”
“Soon,” Martínez said without taking his eyes off the road.
“Soon,” McGarvey agreed.
Martínez headed east toward the turnpike, which was the fastest route down to the Keys. “I have a friend who has float plane on Key Largo. Depending on how long he wants to stay low and follow the Keys west before he turns straight south, could take maybe an hour and a half.”
“We’ll go tonight,” McGarvey said. “Sometime after midnight.”
SIXTEEN
Standing alone, one hundred feet from her father’s simple mausoleum in the Colón Cemetery, María was also alone with her thoughts and remembrances. A priest was saying something, his words muffled by a huge crowd of several thousand people, most of them Cubans, but many of them from around the world, including the Americans, so she couldn’t make out what he was saying.
But it didn’t matter. El Comandante was officially an atheist, and the priest was here only for state decorum, the necessity of which her father would have understood, as he understood just about everything.
Except for his daughter’s needs — until the last minutes of his life, when he’d called her a beautiful child. Too little too late.
In the eighth grade, she was the only girl in the special class of thirteen boys who had teased her from the very beginning. But she’d begun to develop that summer, and by midyear she was finally having her periods, her hips had rounded out, and she’d developed breasts, and the boys had began taking her seriously — too seriously. Grabbing at her in the hallways, and outside on the playing fields, and in the swimming pool. Although she had her own tiny section of the dressing room, she’d become aware that peepholes had been drilled and that they watched her in the shower. And she’d wanted to go to someone, a father or mother, to ask for advice, because she truly didn’t know what to do.
The situation came to a head in the early spring, when one evening, five of the boys slipped into her sleeping quarters, and before she was fully awake they’d thrown off the covers and pulled off her nightdress. Two of the boys held her down while another dropped his pajama bottoms and started to rape her.
“Wait,” she said sharply, but not loudly enough to alert the dorm’s night matron, who was asleep at her desk at the front door.
The boys were startled.
“We can do this one at a time and no one will get hurt,” she said.
The boy hovering between her legs didn’t know what to say or do. She got a hand free, and she reached up and touched his erect penis and he almost jumped out of his skin.
“I’m a virgin, so I don’t know what’ll happen. But I know that I need privacy. So the rest of you go back outside and wait until we’re done.”
She had a hold on the boy’s penis and she could feel him shivering.
“Go on now,” she said.
“Get the fuck out of here,” the boy over her ordered. He was one of the class leaders and the school’s best soccer player. The others, including most of the teachers, had a lot of respect for him. He was almost certainly the son of someone important in the government or military.
The boys took a last lingering look María’s body but then filed out of the room and quietly closed the door.
“Now,” María said softly, and she guided the boy’s penis inside her, a very sharp pain stabbing at her gut, much worse than her monthly cramps, nearly causing her to cry out.
But it was over nearly before it began, and the boy stiffened and shuddered in her arms, thrust hard one more time, and then pulled away, heaving a deep sigh.
He started to say something, but María rolled over on top of him, clamped her legs around his waist to hold him down, and strangled him, her thumbs crushing his larynx, her fingers cutting off the blood to his brain through his carotid arteries.
The attack had been so sudden, so unexpected, so powerful that the boy only thrashed around for a few seconds before he blacked out, and still María did not release her grip for at least two full minutes, when she was sure he was dead.
Afterwards, she’d walked out without getting dressed, blood running down her legs from her vagina, past the boys who made no move to stop her, and reported the rape and defensive murder to the matron.
And almost nothing came of it, her father more important than the boy’s father, other than an examination to make sure she wasn’t pregnant, a brief visit with a Russian psychologist on staff, and a long, fatherly talk with the school’s KGB headmaster, during which he’d actually used the word pride.
No one had bothered her after that incident, which garnered a little respect: You think you’re man enough, go ahead and have a go, see how well you fare.
Academically she excelled, finishing each form at or near the top of her class. She played soccer and baseball well enough so that she started most games, and she won a gold medal her third year in the South American Swimming Confederation in Buenos Aires.
By the time she’d finished prep school and gone off to university in Moscow, she was considered to be among the KGB’s better recruits; she had the rare combination of intelligence, athletic ability, and beauty. But instead of becoming a field officer as had been suggested, her father kept her close to home, in the DI. It was an order she hadn’t learned until a couple of years ago. But it was just as well, and she’d accepted the possibility that she might one day run the spy agency.
Until her father died.
El Comandante’s coffin was moved into the mausoleum and the crowd began
to disperse. Most of the diplomats and government dignitaries were dressed either in uniforms or in black suits. For anonymity’s sake, María wore a simple cotton dress and plain shoes much like the vast majority of commoners lining the narrow walkways that honeycombed the cemetery and spilling out of the main gate and into the streets. At least as many as one hundred thousand people, she figured. Despite the islanders’ poverty, Fidel was well loved.
She moved back and blended with the crowd as the diplomats moved up the long walk to the waiting limos outside the gate, no one paying her the slightest attention. And twenty minutes later, it was over — just a few people, mostly women, with lit candles staying behind for a last few minutes in the cemetery.
“Nothing will ever be the same,” she heard one woman tell another.
* * *
On the evening she’d told Ortega-Cowan that she was Fidel’s illegitimate daughter, she had the impression that he wasn’t surprised. But she had let it go because, of course, she’d needed him to implement the operational details in Washington to get Rencke here. And returning to her office after the funeral, she’d got the impression again that nothing was coming as a surprise to him, and she had to think that he might know a lot more than he was letting on. And it was bothersome.
“How was the service?” he asked, standing in her doorway.
“Boring,” she said. She went into her private bathroom and without closing the door she splashed some water on her face. The morning sun had been warm.
“I watched it on television,” Ortega-Cowan said. “Quite a crowd.”
“Us or them?” she asked.
“Both. But it was too bad that you couldn’t have been in uniform in front.”
She came out. “What are you getting at?”
“Ibarra called this morning about twenty minutes after you’d left.” Julio Prieto Ibarra was Raúl’s chief of staff. “He wanted to know how we were involved in the kidnapping yesterday of an American here in Havana. I denied it, of course. But I promised that we’d look into it.”
“Evidently he saw the police report. But how did he connect it to us?”
“I didn’t ask him,” Ortega-Cowan said dryly. “But maybe he has a little bird whispering secrets in his ear.”
“Someone here on my staff?”
“Or at Cojimar.”
María had worried about this possibility, because no operation was absolutely waterproof. Leaks were common, and the higher the stakes, the greater possibility of a breakdown.
“I don’t think McGarvey will wait very long to come to his friend’s rescue,” she said. “So time is on our side.”
“Perhaps not.”
“What else did Ibarra say to you?”
“Raúl wanted to talk to you as soon as you returned.”
“In person?”
“A phone call will do.”
“Any hint?” María asked.
“No, but I’d guess he wants to ask you about the kidnapping,” Ortega-Cowan said. “What will you tell him?”
“I’ll think of something.”
* * *
She called on Raúl’s private line that only he answered. But it was four rings before he picked up. “Good afternoon, Colonel. Thank you for returning my call so promptly.”
“Yes, sir. I only just got back to my desk from the funeral.”
“It was a moving ceremony.”
She didn’t know what to say.
“I want to know what sort of a game you are playing,” Raúl said, a harsh edge to his voice. “Your chief of staff is evidently in the dark, which leaves only you to explain why a ranking officer of the American CIA was kidnapped and has disappeared.”
“The police report came across my desk this morning. But I wasn’t aware that the man worked for the CIA. Was he a spy?”
“Who better to know than you, if you are in complete control of your department.”
“There’s been no reaction from my contacts in Washington. Maybe he faked his kidnapping so that he could go to ground here. It’s a possibility that we shall look into immediately, Señor Presidente. He may have had help from the CL.” Which was Cuba Libre, “Free Cuba”—the organization, not the drink. “He may even have been killed, for all we know.”
“I’m ordering the police to stop their investigation. Your directorate is to take charge, either to find the man and arrest him, or to find his body and return it to Washington.”
“Yes, sir,” María said. Pulling the police off the case was actually a break.
“There has been no official reaction from Washington because although the man arrived aboard the State Department aircraft, his name was not on the manifest; therefore, he came here unofficially. But before I lodge a formal complaint, you need to find him. Am I clear on this?”
“Sí.”
“All eyes are on us,” Raúl said. “On you. Your father is dead, so you no longer have his protection.”
María flared. “My father has been dead since my conception,” she said bitterly, but Raúl had already broken the connection.
When she put the phone down, Ortega-Cowan offered a sympathetic smile. “That should hold him for a day or two, but not much longer,” he said.
“Well, the cops are out of it for now, but I think that McGarvey will come either by boat or most likely by seaplane. I want you to coordinate with the navy to alert us when and where he shows up, but he is not to be interfered with.”
“What if he’s not alone?”
“I want him picked up and brought here undamaged,” María said. “There will be no other considerations.”
SEVENTEEN
At the Sheraton Key Largo, Martínez got them a room overlooking the Bay of Florida for five days and made a few phone calls before he left, suggesting that McGarvey get a couple hours of sleep before they headed for Cuba.
“This guy who’s going to fly us over is cautious,” Martínez said. “If the Cubans catch him, he’s a dead man, so I’ll have to be convincing.”
“What’s his story?”
“He was a Cuban air force pilot, but his wife apparently was mixing with the wrong people — the anti-Castro crowd — and she was arrested and died on the way to prison. They were coming after him when he took off with his MiG-25 and flew it to Key West.”
“Ernesto Ruiz,” McGarvey said. “About twenty years ago. I remember it was a big deal because he came in so low and so fast, no one knew he was coming until he’d touched down. And the fighter was loaded with air-to-air and air-to-surface missiles.”
“And a new Russian radar jamming system that caught us by surprise. So the DI wants him in a big way. As a result, he’s become a careful man.”
“There’re a lot safer places for him to live than Key Largo.”
“That’s true, but he changed his name and appearance and runs a nice little charter service for fishermen who want to work the flats in the bay for bonefish. He told me that he likes being this near to home, and that sometimes on a day off when it’s clear, he’ll fly close enough so that he can catch a glimpse of the island. It’s enough for him.”
“What makes you think that he’ll take the risk to fly me down there?”
“If he thinks doing it will somehow stick it to the regime, he’ll jump at the chance,” Martínez said, and he smiled. “I’ll tell him about Carlos, but just leave that part to me.”
* * *
McGarvey was sitting in the dark on the balcony, looking at the running lights of a slow-moving boat out in the bay, music drifting down from the Fishtales Lounge on the top floor, people in the pool below, when someone was at the door. He got to his feet, picked up his pistol from the low table beside him, and stepped farther into the shadows.
Martínez was at the door, framed by the lights in the corridor. “It’s me,” he said softly.
“Are we good to go?” McGarvey asked, showing himself as he holstered the pistol at the small of his back.
Martínez came the rest of the way in and closed the door. �
�He’s gassing up and preflighting the plane right now. Were you expecting trouble?”
“I’m sure the DI would like to catch you at something. They might have followed you back here.”
Martínez laughed. “Those putos in Miami couldn’t find their asses in a lit room with instructions. You going to take your gun with you?”
“They’ll expect me to come in armed.”
“Might come in handy if something goes south. You can never tell.”
McGarvey grabbed his dark blue Windbreaker and, leaving his overnight bag behind, went with Martínez, and they drove down to the tiny village of Rock Harbor, where Bay Flats Air Tours maintained a hangar up a one-hundred-foot concrete ramp from the water’s edge on the bay side.
The plane, already on the ramp, was a sturdy short takeoff and landing de Havilland Beaver that had once been used all over the world, but especially up in Alaska, for back country flying. It could carry the pilot and up to six passengers and gear at a cruise speed of a little over 140 miles per hour, its floats equipped with wheels that allowed it to take off and touch down on land or sea. The little aircraft was all but indestructible.
Ruiz was a short slope-shouldered man with a belly, bandy legs, and thinning gray hair over thick black eyebrows and mustache. He was trundling the hangar door closed when they drove up.
“I’ve read about you in the papers,” he said, shaking McGarvey’s hand. “Pretty risky for a former DCI to be going into harm’s way.”
McGarvey instantly liked him. “That’s why I get the big bucks.”
Ruiz laughed. “They’re mostly a bunch of fine people over there saddled by a fucked-up system. But don’t think they’re incompetent because the Russians are gone and just about every governmental agency is broke. They’ve got a good coastal navy, and some damned effective radar installations.”
“You’re taking a bigger risk than I am.”
“Acceptable, given the mission.”
McGarvey didn’t ask what the man understood the mission to be.
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