Ortega-Cowan could hear the president’s footsteps down the hall at the same time he realized that Nuñez was pointing a pistol with a silencer on the end of its barrel directly at his head from just a few feet away.
He started to raise his hand, but a thunderclap burst inside his skull.
SEVENTY-FOUR
President Langdon and a half dozen of his staff, including his National Security Adviser Frank Shapiro, his Chief of Staff John McKevit, and the Director of the FBI Gavin Litwiller, were in the Oval Office watching the CNN reports on the events unfolding in northwest Texas when Mrs. Stubbs, his private secretary, appeared at the door.
“Mr. President,” she said. “Raúl Castro wishes to speak with you.”
Everyone except Langdon looked up in surprise. McGarvey had predicted this.
“You might want to hold off taking his call until we know how this shakes out, and until we can get someone who speaks Spanish in here,” Shapiro said.
Langdon had been leaning against his desk. He motioned for someone to mute the sound on the television, and when it was off, he punched the number for the line that was lit and hit the speakerphone. “Good evening, Mr. President,” he said.
“Good evening to you, Mr. President,” Castro said in English, no translator. “Undoubtedly you are monitoring the events that are taking place outside of El Paso, Texas.”
McGarvey had not only raised the possibility that Castro might call and why, but how to respond. Nonetheless, just now it was extraordinary to Langdon.
“Yes, we are, with great interest. From what we’ve been able to gather, some of the marchers may be Cuban citizens.”
“They are,” Castro said with no effort at diplomacy. “Which is why I have made this call to personally give you my word that neither I nor anyone in my government allowed such an operation. In fact, it just came to complete light a couple of hours ago. Before this evening, my only knowledge was of the kidnapping of the wife of one of your CIA officers and the interrogation outside of Havana of that officer and another at the hands of my director of intelligence operations.”
“Which would be Colonel María León.”
“Yes, Mr. President. You also may know that she was my late brother’s daughter. Unhinged, I fear, by her father’s death.”
“Are you telling me that she is leading this march across my border?”
“Yes.”
“With the help of President Calderón?”
“No. It is my understanding that Colonel León and others in her ring of traitors enlisted the help of a number of drug cartels to not only transport Cuban citizens to Mexico, but to force ordinary Mexican citizens to participate.”
“To what end, Mr. President?” Langdon asked.
Castro was silent for several beats, and for a moment Langdon thought the call had been disconnected. But then the Cuban president was back.
“I hesitate to tell you what I have learned. The story is almost too fantastic to believe. But it involves the quest for a Spanish treasure of gold and silver that may have been buried in the deserts of southern New Mexico and perhaps northwestern Texas.”
“Yes, I, too, have heard something of the same fantastic story,” Langdon said. “But it isn’t true.”
“No, Mr. President,” Castro said. “But it brings us now to the problem at hand. We wish no harm to come to any of our citizens, nor any to yours in El Paso or on your Fort Bliss. I’m told that the demonstration will be peaceful, and by morning the marchers will return across the border.”
It was almost exactly word-for-word what McGarvey had said might happen. “You are asking for restraint.”
“Yes. Mr. President, I’m asking for exactly that. And you have my personal word that once the situation has calmed down that I will discover all the facts, and report them to you.”
“You say that this Colonel León may be among the marchers?”
“Yes, along with a Captain Manuel Fuentes, who is her coconspirator.”
“If we find them, they would be subject to arrest and prosecution,” Langdon said.
“Of course, Mr. President. But if they manage to return here, they will be harshly dealt with as traitors.”
“I understand,” Langdon said. “Thank you for this call, Mr. President.”
Again Castro hesitated for a few beats. “Perhaps this could be the beginning of a useful dialogue between us.”
Langdon didn’t hesitate. “Certain difficulties would have to be overcome first.”
“Naturally.”
“In the meantime, there is something that you can do to help resolve the situation in Texas.”
“Anything within my power, Mr. President,” Castro said without hesitation.
And Langdon explained what he wanted.
“Extraordinary,” Litwiller said when Langdon had hung up.
“I spoke with Kirk McGarvey, who predicted something like this might happen, and if it did how he suggested I handle it,” Langdon said. “And he was right.”
Shapiro looked a little uncomfortable. “Mr. President, I should have said something earlier, but I wasn’t aware of all the facts when Marty Bambridge came to me two days ago with a story about McGarvey and the Cuban Colonel León and the Spanish treasure in New Mexico. Marty thought it likely that McGarvey was actually going to somehow help the Cubans recover some of the gold.”
Litwiller had walked away to receive a cell phone call, and before Langdon could respond to Shapiro’s admission, the FBI director interrupted.
“I’m sorry, Mr. President, but we have another situation developing. This one in Kentucky.”
SEVENTY-FIVE
The mob had been gathering for several hours, and now that it was finally dark and only a few last stragglers were coming in, McGarvey was ready to make his move. He’d been waiting in the deeper shadows between the two mounds, watching the people gathering, almost all of them obviously nervous and uncertain. Crossing the border, they’d not been hassled by the police or National Guard, and here on the base, General Gunther’s people were at least one hundred yards out around the perimeter, but the marchers had come across the border illegally, and there were cops and soldiers everywhere.
María was just ten yards from where McGarvey was standing. She said something into a cell phone, then started to raise a bullhorn when he stepped out of the shadows.
“I have a much better sound system set up for you,” he called to her.
She turned around, surprised at first, but then relieved when she saw who it was, and she put the bullhorn down and came back to him. “I didn’t know if you would be here.”
“I told you I would,” McGarvey said. “Do you want to talk to your people?”
“I was just about to,” she said.
“Come with me,” McGarvey told her, and they went to the rear of the east mound, where they scrambled up a ramp that had been bulldozed then stabilized with a light wire mesh.
At the top, McGarvey took out a remote control that Otto had set up, pushed a button, and suddenly the bases and front slopes of both mounds were softly illuminated. He handed María a microphone, stepped back out of camera range, pushed another button, and María’s image was projected on the big screens. A collective sigh swept across the crowd.
“Is it here?” she asked. “Did you find it?”
“They’re waiting,” McGarvey said, and for just a moment, María hesitated, but then she turned back to the people and keyed the microphone.
“My name is María León, and I am a Cuban who with your help wants to save her people from poverty. And I have a story to tell you how. It has to do with a fabulous treasure of Spanish gold and silver buried right here. A treasure that in part belongs to us.”
McGarvey went down the base of the mound and phoned Otto. “Are you in place?”
“Yes. How about you?”
“It’s just started. But before I showed myself, she called someone on her cell phone.”
“Stand by,” Otto said. He came back t
en seconds later. “Looks like some sort of a network call. One number for maybe four or more phones.”
“Who’d she talk to?”
“Unknown. But she said only two words: ‘Go! Go!’”
“Son of a bitch,” McGarvey said when someone jammed the muzzle of a silenced weapon into the base of his neck.
“Mac?” Otto asked.
“The mission’s a go, but I have company,” McGarvey said. He broke the connection and pocketed the phone. “Unless I miss my guess, Captain Fuentes has decided to cooperate with Colonel León after all.”
The crowd out front suddenly cheered.
“She’s a convincing woman,” Fuentes said. “But she’d have to be to get you to cooperate like this. The problem is that none of us can understand your motive. What’s in it for you?”
“Justice.”
Fuentes laughed. “That’s the one thing your government knows nothing about. You’ve kept Cuba in the dark ages for half a century. Before that, you supported that hijo de puta Batista.”
“I meant for kidnapping the wife of a friend of mine,” McGarvey said.
“Not my doing.”
The crowd cheered again. María had said something about gold and silver in Havana.
“Let her talk,” Fuentes said. “Right now, we have something more important to do.”
“What’s that? Why’d you come here?”
“The gold, of course. And you’re going to take me to it.”
“There’s no gold here,” McGarvey said. “Never was.”
Fuentes jammed the silencer harder into the back of McGarvey’s neck. “You’re lying.”
“I’m telling you the truth.”
“No!” Fuentes shouted.
At that moment, María’s voice was replaced by that of Raúl Castro, whose image would now be on the big screens. President Langdon had evidently managed to convince the Cuban president to do this to try to defuse the situation, and Otto had set it up.
“What’s happening?” Fuentes demanded.
“You have been duped,” Castro’s voice rolled over the crowd. “Traitors in my government have used you to help smuggle a large number of drug runners across the border into the United States. Without America’s insatiable appetite for cocaine and marijuana, the Mexican cartels would not exist, and the killing of innocent Mexicans would come to an end.
“What I do care about are the traitors who have used you for their own financial gain. The only treasure there tonight is the money the cartels are willing to pay to get their people across. And now that it has happened the way they planned it, it is time for you to come home.”
The crowd was ominously silent, and at this point, María’s microphone and the camera were locked out so she could not interfere.
“The woman who is leading this traitor’s act is María León, a colonel in the Dirección de Inteligencia, who along with coconspirator Captain Manuel Fuentes, is there now, and will be arrested the moment they return to Cuba. The others — Román Ortega-Cowan, a major in the DI, and Julio Rosales, who was a trusted man in our Ministry of Justice and, I am sad to say, a personal friend of mine — have already been arrested and have confessed to their crimes.”
“I’d tell you to put your gun down and go home,” McGarvey said. “But you might want to consider asking for asylum here. You were Fidel’s chief of security — you might be able to trade information for safety.”
“I’ll make a deal, but it’ll be with El Presidente, when we bring back samples of the treasure. Enough to convince him that we were not traitors after all.”
“She lied to you.”
“No,” Fuentes said. “There was no reason for it. Besides, I heard everything you talked about in Georgetown.”
“I know,” McGarvey said. “We set it up so you would.”
SEVENTY-SIX
Raúl Martínez stood smoking a cigarette next to his Caddy not two hundred yards from the U.S. Bullion Depository on Fort Knox, a series of razor wire fences protecting it from intruders.
Otto had set up his laptop on the hood of the car, his fingers flying over the keyboard. Apache gunship helicopters from nearby Godman Army Airfield were incoming, along with more than one thousand soldiers from the Third Brigade Combat Team of the First Infantry Division, and fifty officers from the U.S. Mint Police force. But they were late to respond because Otto had interfered with their initial security alert system.
It was early evening, but the squat, prisonlike concrete structure and the open grounds around it were lit up like day, as were the roads that surrounded it, including Gold Vault Road and Bullion Boulevard, now completely choked by buses and cars and vans and pickup trucks and even a number of motorcycles, some with sidecars, that had streamed up from Miami and more than a dozen other communities in Florida, among them Sweetwater, Palm Springs, and Coral Gables, plus West New York, in New Jersey, and even some by plane from Houston, where they’d rented cars in Louisville for the short drive down.
And Martínez and several of his organizers had been clever enough to bring the four thousand Cuban exiles and their families to Fort Knox from all different directions, a lot of them up I-75, where they spread out along I-64 and a bunch of secondary highways; others as far west as I-65, from where they used other secondary highways to approach from the west. Everyone stuck to the speed limits, stopping only for bathroom breaks or to switch drivers. They were on a mission; they were dedicated.
Most of them were out of their vehicles, a lot of them singing some old Cuban folk songs, a lot of them with guitars and even some trumpets and other instruments. But no one littered or created any disturbance.
The first police had arrived only ten minutes ago, but generally everyone in the crowd politely ignored them, offering only their driver’s licenses, registration, and proof of insurance.
But now the military was on its way in force.
Otto looked up. “Okay, you have three choices,” he said, handing Martínez a cell phone. “Press one for Ronald Campagnoli, who is the Director of the U.S. Mint, Fort Knox; two for Colonel Leonard Chalmers, who runs the U.S. Mint Police here; or three for Brigadier General Thomas Bogan, who is in overall command of all Fort Knox operations.”
“What about Mac?”
“I’ll try to reach him again.”
Martínez pressed three, and after one ring, General Bogan came on. “Who’s on this secure number?”
“My name is of no importance for the moment, General,” Martínez said. “But if you want to avoid a bloodbath tonight in which a lot of innocent civilians will be hurt or killed, listen to what I have to say. I won’t take up much of your time.”
The general was silent for several long seconds, but there was a lot of noise in the background. Martínez figured the general was in a helicopter somewhere near, surveying the situation on the ground.
“I’m listening,” he said at last.
“We are Cuban exiles, mostly from Miami, here to stage a peaceful demonstration. None of us is armed, none of us mean any harm to the facility.”
“A demonstration to what end?” the general demanded.
“We believe that a portion of the gold and silver bullion that has been stored in either vault B or C since the late fifties belongs to the Cuban people.”
“Start making some sense, whoever the hell you are, or I will order your people to be removed, by force if necessary.”
“Don’t turn this into another Tiananmen Square, please.”
“You have five minutes.”
“For three hundred years, the Spanish in Mexico, Cuba, and throughout the Caribbean and South America collected huge amounts of gold and silver — stealing it from the natives, then forcing them to work in the mines as slave laborers. This treasure was sent back to Spain, most of it through Havana, where very little of it was given to the people who produced it. Maybe as much as four to five hundred tons were stolen from the Spanish in Mexico City and buried in several locations mostly in southern New Mexico. One such p
lace was inside a small mountain on what’s now Holloman Air Force Base. It’s the treasure from Holloman that was excavated and brought here.”
The general was silent for a long time, and when he came back, he sounded somewhat subdued. “Approach the fence or the front gate and you will be shot.”
“You have my word,” Martínez said, but the connection dropped.
He tried Campagnoli, who was director of the Depository, and then Colonel Chalmers, who was chief of the Mint Police, but neither number answered after five rings.
The dozen or more helicopters that had been incoming minutes ago took up station, hovering two hundred feet above the perimeter of the mob.
“Looks like we’re okay for now,” Otto said. He’d brought up a Google Earth image of the Depository and the crowd surrounding it. Tanks blocked every road out, and soldiers were deploying from Hummers and APCs, completely surrounding the open fields all the way to the edge of the woods. No one else was getting in, and for the moment, no one was getting out.
“I think I threw the general a curve,” Martínez said, looking over Otto’s shoulder.
“Just like Mac said they would take it. But it won’t last long. We’ll have to be out of here by morning.”
“So far, so good — but we’re going to need him here long before then, because there’s no way in hell the general or anyone else is going to do much more talking other than order us to get out.”
Otto looked up from his computer. “Contact your unit leaders and let them know we need to hunker down for now. Meanwhile, I’ll try to reach Mac.”
The crowd had been roughly divided into a half dozen sections, and Martínez had picked six lieutenants in Miami to ride herd on them. He phoned them now and brought them up to date.
“It’s party time, but nobody even thinks about getting anywhere near the fence line or even looking like they’re thinking about it.”
“How long do we need to hold them here?” all of them wanted to know.
“Until first light, and no matter what’s happened or not happened by then, we’re going home.”
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