She returned the file to her shoulder bag, laid her head back, and fell asleep staring out the window, dreaming again about a mother she’d never known, but only ever imagined. And in her dream, she was happy.
* * *
It was a few minutes before nine thirty in the morning local time when María was cleared through passport control at Mexico City’s Benito Juárez International Airport. The official welcomed her home and waved her through. At customs, she told the agent she had only her purse and the one carry-on bag, and she was cleared without an inspection.
Two other flights had come in about the same time, and the baggage claims area she had passed through had been busy, crowded with a lot of families and relatives waiting beyond the barriers.
A pair of men in light sport coats wearing hats and sunglasses were looking toward the people streaming from the baggage pickup area into customs, and María walked right past them. They had the look of cops, possibly even DI, and if the latter were the case, it meant Ortega-Cowan had been faster on his feet than she thought he would be.
Outside on the street, she glanced back as she got into a cab, but no one was coming after her. “Four Seasons Hotel, please,” she told the driver in Spanish.
Five minutes away from the airport, she got online with her cell phone and connected with Aeromexico’s Web site, where using her Delgado credit card she booked a round-trip first-class ticket to Miami, with no bags to check, on Flight 422, which left in less than three hours.
She had thought hard about this next move and whether she should leave her father’s journals and her file behind, but had decided she would almost certainly need them as proof. She would not be welcomed with open arms. Once it was known who she was, just about every tough guy living on and around Calle Ocho would come gunning for her.
“Driver, I’ve changed my mind. Take me back to Aeromexico. Departures.”
FORTY-TWO
It was noon when Delta Flight 363 from Dulles via Atlanta touched down at Benito Juárez International Airport and McGarvey, traveling separately from Otto because of his Federal Air Marshal credentials, was met at passport control by two men who identified themselves as Federal Agency of Investigation agents. He was taken to a small office nearby, where he had to produce his credentials, including his permit to carry a weapon aboard an international flight.
“You might want to let me phone my embassy,” McGarvey said.
“That won’t be necessary, Mr. McGarvey,” the dark, dangerous-looking of the two agents whose credentials identified him as Julio Mejía said. “We merely wanted to confirm your identification, and warn you that because of the increasing gun violence in Mexico, we take a very serious look at anyone carrying a firearm for any reason, no matter who they are, and not declaring it.”
“In addition, your reputation precedes you,” the other taller agent, whose name was Alberto Gallegos, said. “We know that you are traveling with Mr. Otto Rencke of the CIA. Why have you and your associate come here?”
“To speak with Dr. José Diaz, who is the curator of your National Archives. We have an appointment with him later today.”
“In regards to what?”
“Actually, we’re on an errand for our Library of Congress.”
“Concerning exactly what?” Mejía pressed.
“Electronic data sharing. Mr. Rencke is something of an expert.”
“Sí, we know this,” Gallegos said. “The question remains, why have you come to Mexico armed?”
“As you say, there is increasing gun violence here, and Mr. Rencke is a valuable asset. And a friend. I’m here to protect him.”
The agents exchanged a glance. “When will you be leaving?” Mejía said.
“First thing in the morning.”
“Take care that you violate none of our laws,” Gallegos said. He nodded at McGarvey’s overnight bag. “Anything to declare in addition to your weapon?”
“Change of socks and shaving gear.”
“May I look?”
McGarvey held out the bag. “Be my guest. And do you want my gun?”
But after a moment the agent shook his head, and McGarvey was allowed to leave. He joined the queue in the customs hall, where he was passed through without question.
Otto was waiting outside at the curb. “Your gun?”
“I still have it, but they wanted to know what we were doing in Mexico City. I told them that I was here to protect you, and you were here to talk to Dr. Diaz about electronic data sharing.”
Otto grinned.
They took a cab downtown to the art noveau Hotel Marquis Reforma, where Otto had booked them into a two-bedroom suite on the seventh floor, the balcony windows of which had a view of the Castillo de Chapultepec. The Company didn’t know it yet, but according to Otto, it was paying for this little bit of luxury.
“Anyway, we can charge a finder’s fee if we actually come up with the gold,” he said.
“Which you don’t think is likely.”
“Not a chance in hell. But you can’t win at lotto unless you put your money down.”
“Yet we’re here,” McGarvey said. “And unless I miss my guess, there were a couple of DI officers just outside customs. Makes you wonder who they were looking for.”
“I didn’t see them,” Otto said. “Do you want to go back and find out what they’re up to? I wouldn’t put it past Colonel León to put two and two together and show up. She’s an inventive woman who’s not afraid to take risks.”
“That she is,” McGarvey said. “But they didn’t follow us, so we should be clear unless the Mexican cops are helping out.”
After a late lunch in the hotel’s La Jolla restaurant, a very good Mexican beefsteak with mole chichilo, they took a leisurely walk along the broad Paseo de la Reforma to burn off some time and to see if anyone was taking an interest in them. Traffic was very heavy, and the air stank of diesel and gasoline fumes and something else that could have been burning garbage or something industrial. Surrounded by mountains, which caused air inversions that sometimes lasted for weeks or even longer, the city’s air quality was often as bad as Beijing’s.
After forty minutes or so, McGarvey was satisfied that they were not being tailed, and he and Otto went back to the hotel, where they cleaned up. Mac left his pistol in the room before they went down to the bar to have a drink. Otto had warned him that they would be required to pass through a security arch before going inside any of the government buildings.
“Lots of paranoid people these days.”
“Can’t blame them,” McGarvey said.
They took a cab over to the Palacio Nacional, the National Palace, located on the Zócalo, which was the largest main square anywhere in Latin America. Also here were a temple and museum dedicated to the Aztecs and the massive Metropolitan Cathedral, which had taken two and a half centuries to complete.
The palace itself, which had been built on the site of Montezuma’s home served as the seat of the government and the National Treasury. Also located in the same building were the National Archives, where Dr. Diaz had his offices, that included a smallish research library adjacent to a specialized restoration workroom where only the most delicate projects were brought. Everything else was sent to other restoration centers around the city, including the major one at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, which had been in existence since the mid-sixteenth century.
Checking through one of the entrances on the north side of the massive building that Otto had been instructed for them to use, they were required to pass through a metal detector and afterwards had to surrender their passports.
Dr. José Diaz, a tiny, stoop-shouldered old man with a shock of snow white hair — unusual for a Hispanic male — nut brown skin, and eyes that were wide, bright, and very much alive, shuffled to his office door and beckoned them inside. He was dressed in a tweed three-piece suit, the bottom button of his vest undone and a plain blue tie properly snugged up.
“The gentlemen from the Library of C
ongress,” he said, smiling furiously as if he were sharing some inside joke.
His inner office was a large room with broad windows that looked toward the Aztec museum. Books, folios, maps, and manuscripts, most of them very old, lay in piles everywhere — on his desk, on a couple of small tables, on the floor — or were stuffed in several overflowing floor-to-ceiling bookcases that appeared as if they were on the verge of tipping over. The place looked like it had not been swept or dusted in years.
He cleared off a couple of chairs that faced his desk, and they all sat down.
“We’re not actually from the Library of Congress,” Otto said.
“Of course not, though when I talked to Hiram, he said that he thought you might work for the CIA, which is actually quite intriguing for an old revolutionary such as me.”
“Hiram Stannard?” Otto asked. Stannard was the Librarian of Congress.
“Yes, we’re old friends,” Diaz said. “Do you actually work for the CIA?”
Otto nodded. “Were you actually a revolutionary?”
“I was on the edges when Fidel and Che and the Russian were here in the fifties,” Diaz said. “Exciting times. But they’re all gone now.” He turned to McGarvey.
“Kirk McGarvey, I used to run the CIA.”
Diaz smiled and nodded. “You must be here to ask about the Spanish gold the monks hid up north. The Jornada del Muerto. Victorio Peak, the seven signs, the seven cities, seventy miles north of El Paso del Norte.”
“Then it’s not merely a legend?” Otto asked.
“No, of course not. But why are you here now, unless it has something to do with El Comandante’s death?”
Otto quickly told him about María León and everything that had happened from the time of Louise’s kidnapping and his own research on the Internet.
“He was quite keen on finding the gold. I wanted to take up arms and go back to Cuba with him and the others, but he wanted me to stay here and do my research. Which, of course, didn’t yield much more than you apparently know. And in end, his daughter has sent you on the same quest. How odd, how tragic.”
“But you think the treasure exists?” McGarvey asked.
“I’m convinced of it,” Diaz said. “Six locations in addition to Victorio Peak on the New Mexican desert. Inaccessible now, of course, because your government continues to use the area as a testing range for missiles and other weapons including, of course, the first atomic bomb.”
“The treasure inside Victorio Peak has evidently already been removed,” Otto said.
“That’s common knowledge.”
“Which leaves the other six sites.”
“So you’ve come here to ask if I know their locations,” Diaz said. “If I did, why should I reveal them to agents of the U.S. government?”
“A claim could be made that one third of the gold belongs to Cuba,” McGarvey suggested.
Diaz threw his head back and laughed out loud. “The embargo, el bloqueo, has been going on since 1960. Don’t insult an old man by suggesting the U.S. would lift so much as a finger to help Cuba.”
“Not the government,” McGarvey said. “But Cuban the people. Only the people.”
“How?”
“I don’t know yet, but if the treasure actually exists as you say it does, and if we can find it, we might be able to make a case in Washington.”
Diaz, suddenly serious, looked away in thought for a beat. “My heart has always been with the people of Cuba. Batista was a monster, who was propped up in large measure by your government.”
“Fidel was no better.”
“At first he was. He was one of the people, he and Che. It was why the revolution succeeded.”
“And later?”
“And later,” Diaz said. “Moscow got to him before Washington. And after Che was gone, Uncle Fidel maybe went a little crazy.”
“Can you help us?” Otto asked.
Diaz looked at them, his mottled face sad, and he shook his head. “I have searched our National Archives, but no such records exist. In any event, it was a situation between the Mother Church and the Spanish government that lasted more than two hundred years. So the legend goes the monks made the trip up into New Mexico along the Jornada del Muerto many times, perhaps dozens. If there are any written records of those expeditions, they would be located in the Vatican Secret Archives in Rome, certainly not open to treasure hunters. But to my knowledge, the Church has never mounted a search to recover what it believes might be its treasure.”
“What about the Spanish government?” Otto asked.
“Now, that’s a different story. Records of the losses were undoubtedly kept, and would be in the Archivo General de Indias, where all the documents from the Spanish Empire in the Americas are maintained.”
“Madrid?” Otto asked.
“Actually Seville,” Diaz said, and he held up a hand before Otto could ask the next question. “I can’t help. It’s a very long story, but I have had disagreements with the staff ever since illegal notes I’d made were discovered and I was kicked out of Spain.”
“But you remember.”
Diaz nodded. “The records of the six treasure sites undoubtedly exist, because the Spanish government mounted two military expeditions to the region — the first in the late 1700s, and the second, undercover during the siege of Alamo to the east. Twelve soldiers in civilian clothes rode up into New Mexico along the Jornada del Muerto but only two returned, empty-handed except for expedition maps and journals.”
“If you can’t help us reach someone in Seville, we’re at a dead end,” Otto said. “None of that stuff will be digitized.”
“But you don’t need me.”
“No?”
“Not if you represent yourselves as treasure hunters willing to split whatever you find with the Spanish government. It would be something new for them, not having to take every successful American treasure-hunting corporation to court.”
Otto was grinning. “Greed,” he said.
“It’s something just about everyone understands,” Diaz said.
FORTY-THREE
Manuel Fuentes got off the elevator on the sixth floor of the Hotel Marquis Reforma and took the stairs up one floor. He hesitated for a moment to make sure the corridor was empty before he hurried down the hall to the suite where McGarvey and Rencke were staying and let himself in with a universal key that had been waiting for him in an envelope, courtesy of the AFI, Agencia Federal de Investigation, when he’d checked in this afternoon.
It was past six, and his DI contact on the ground had phoned to report that the two Americans had taken a cab over to the Palacio Nacional and were inside at this moment. Their purpose for going there was so far unknown.
Donning a pair of rubber gloves, Fuentes quickly went through the contents of the two bedrooms, coming up with a Walther PPK pistol along with a silencer in the overnight bag. These he pocketed, a glimmering of a plan already forming in his head.
In many respects, he felt like a puppet on a chain, his every move directed by Ortega-Cowan, a man he admired and respected and feared and loathed and perhaps even loved a little, all mixed together. But María’s chief of staff was a devious son of a bitch who knew exactly what he was doing.
Yesterday, when it seemed likely that the coronel had skipped, he’d opened her office safe and discovered that the Ines Delgado identification papers, along with a fair sum of money and a credit card were missing. From there, he’d traced her military flight from Playa Baracoa to Camagüey, where she’d registered at the Hotel Plaza.
At first, the hotel had seemed to be a mistake on her part because it was right across the street from the train station, where a pair of local DI officers discovered that she had booked a train ticket to Santiago de Cuba under her real name. The obvious conclusion was that she was defecting and would try to reach the American base at Guantánamo Bay.
But casting the net a little wider, the agents discovered the Cubacar rental Hyundai in the Delgado name parked near th
e train station, and Ortega-Cowan had gone searching for airline reservations first from Camagüey and then Havana, coming up with the Delgado reservations for Mexico City.
“Arrest the bitch at the hotel,” Fuentes had suggested. “We don’t need anything else. Shoot her trying to escape, and we’ve already won.”
“Not yet,” Ortega-Cowan had said. “We don’t know why she’s going to Mexico City, unless it’s to meet with McGarvey or Rencke.”
“What do we do, just let her go?”
“For now. But you’re leaving for Mexico City this evening, so you’ll be there before she does. I want you to organize a couple of teams at the airport to find out where she goes, and another team to watch for the Americans.”
“I’ll get help from a couple of El Comandante’s friends on the AFI.”
“Nothing hands on,” Ortega-Cowan warned. “We need to keep this completely below the radar. Because of the attempt on her life that very nearly succeeded, and her father’s recent death, the good coronel is working from seclusion for the time being. I merely want to know what the hell she’s up to.”
“What about the recording equipment at her house?”
“She switched it off.”
“Then she knew that she would be leaving the country and she wanted to leave no trace.”
Ortega-Cowan smiled patronizingly. “You’ll make a very good chief of staff. But first we need to bring her down.”
“Seems to me that she’s doing a good job of her on her own,” Fuentes said.
There was nothing else of interest in either bedroom, and five minutes after he’d entered the suite, he let himself out and went downstairs to his room, where he used his cell phone to place an encrypted call to Ortega-Cowan.
“Where are you at this moment?”
“In my room,” Fuentes said. “But listen, I found a pistol and a silencer in their suite.”
“I hope you took them.”
“Of course.”
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