Authors: David Hagberg
After a breakfast of rolls, butter, mango jelly, and strong black coffee, he’d been brought swimming trunks, a beach jacket, and sandals.
“Go for your swim, señor,” Toro said. “The
coronel
’s property extends two hundred meters in both directions. Stray farther than that on the beach or in the ocean, and our orders are to kill you.”
“What about my friend?”
“Not until the
coronel
returns.”
“When will that be?”
“I have not been told,” Toro said, and he did not lock the door when he left.
McGarvey had changed, and when he stepped out of his room, Toro was waiting at the end of the corridor. Otto was back here, but he figured that he would wait until nightfall to make a move. If María León had not shown up by tonight to explain what was going on, he would free Otto and kill anyone who got in his way.
And swimming now, he watched the surf breaking another fifty yards offshore, which was about as close in as Ruiz could safely land the float plane. In the meantime, he meant to find out as much about the compound and staff other than Toro and the man on guard duty with the Dragunov as he could this afternoon.
Back onshore, he nodded toward the man on the lifeguard tower as he toweled off and then headed in an easy, loping run down the beach toward the east. He looked back once, and the guard had gotten to his feet and was talking into a handheld radio, but he hadn’t raised the rifle yet.
When he got as far as the east end of the main house, he had a clear sight line to the still-empty helipad, the windsock this morning filled out with the light breeze. But a thick line of casuarina Australian pine trees blocked his view of the highway.
About one hundred fifty meters farther, he came to the stump of what looked like a weathered old fence post just above the high-water mark, which he took to be the border of the colonel’s property.
He stopped and stretched as he looked back at the tower. The guard was still on his feet, but now it looked as if he had raised the rifle. Ignoring the threat, McGarvey walked up to the edge of the water line, still keeping well inside the border, and searched the open field all the way to the trees. But if there were motion sensors or infrared detectors or even closed-circuit television cameras, he could not make them out from this distance. Which either meant the colonel relied solely on her house staff to keep the occasional visitor in line, or that the detectors were camouflaged. He expected that for a woman in her position, it was the latter.
Finished stretching, he started back west, running at the same loping pace, scarcely building up a decent sweat even though it was already nearly eighty degrees. As he passed the guard on the tower, who’d lowered the rifle, he smiled and nodded and continued along the beach, gradually building his pace until he was running flat out.
The west wing, which angled away from the main house, was a low concrete block structure that matched the architecture of the rest of the place except that it was windowless, and the roof bristled with three satellite dishes, one of them pointing to the southwest, and several shortwave and UHF antennas. It looked as if she was well connected with the Cuban military and intel operations plus satellite services that the Russians still provided, which included secure connections with the Internet.
The Gazik was parked in front of the building he’d taken as a garage on the way in last night, and the second building—with windows and sliders and a couple of patios with lawn furniture nestled in a copse of casuarinas—was definitely living quarters for the staff, but it was hard to tell for just how many people. Probably the two men who’d picked him up last night and a cook, maybe a houseboy, a yardman, and a communications specialist.
But as he passed, he saw no activity, which could have meant nothing, just routine at this time of the morning, or possibly that the colonel had ordered everyone to remain out of sight as much as possible while their American guests were here.
An old rusted oil drum half buried in the sand just at the high-tide line marked the western edge of the property, and McGarvey stopped a couple of meters short of it, and again did his stretches, sweat pouring off him as he tried to make out the highway, but the line of Australian pines that stretched entirely across the back of the property made an impenetrable screen. Nor could he hear any sounds, though in the distance to the far southwest, he could see a high contrail above the puffy trade wind clouds scudding in from the east.
After a couple of minutes, he headed back to the house and, ignoring the guard, grabbed his towel and beach jacket and went inside to his room, where he took a shower, then changed into a pair of shorts and light T-shirt that had been laid out for him.
Ten minutes later, he came back out and sat down at one of the umbrella tables on the pool deck with a fabulous view of the beach and the electric blue of the same waters that Hemingway had fished eighty or ninety years ago. Cuba had changed, but the ocean hadn’t. The guard on the tower was gone.
A young boy dressed in shorts and a white jacket came out of the house with a coffee service plus a bottle of Cuban rum and a pair of glasses on a silver tray, which he laid on the table with a little smile before he hurried away without a word.
McGarvey poured a coffee when María, wearing sunglasses and a white, low-cut, backless bathing suit and gauze beach jacket came out.
“Pour me a cup, please,” she said, her English good with just a trace of upper-crust British. English was taught by Brits here and in Moscow.
McGarvey looked up, then got to his feet. The woman was more stunning than beautiful. “Colonel León,” he said.
She sat down and crossed her legs as McGarvey poured her coffee, to which she added a dollop of rum. “I trust that your treatment and accommodations last night and this morning were reasonably comfortable.”
“The best prison I’ve been in so far,” McGarvey said, sitting.
María smiled faintly. “If I have your word that you won’t try anything stupid, your door will not be locked tonight.”
“That depends on why I’m here, and what has happened to my friend.”
“Otto is just fine,” she said. “Quite a brilliant man. Inventive. But he’s warned us not to underestimate you, which of course we don’t.”
“Where is he?”
“Here in the house. I’ll have him brought out after we talk.”
“What about his wife?”
“We’ll talk first,” María said sharply.
McGarvey looked at her for several beats, but then he nodded. “If any harm comes to Otto or to his wife, I’ll kill you. Am I clear?”
María started to say something, but she cut herself off. Toro appeared at the open slider for just a moment, but then disappeared back inside the house.
“You went through a lot of trouble to get me here so that you could tell me something,” McGarvey said. “You must have known that there would be repercussions, yet you authorized the operation. And coming so close on the heels of your father’s death, there must be a connection.”
“Yes, there is a connection, as you put it,” María said. “I was at my father’s deathbed, the only person in the room on his orders, and he made me promise to bring you here. He said that you would know something that could help us.”
McGarvey was at a loss, and he told her so. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. I never met your father and never had any dealings down here except for a couple of visits to Guantánamo.”
“
Sí,
but my father told me that you came highly recommended by Kim Jong-il, who said that you were a man who could be trusted. And that makes no sense to me, unless the CIA is in some sort of collusion with the North Koreans. Or maybe it was just you.”
“I was of some assistance a couple years ago.”
María said something under her breath. “The Chinese general shot to death outside his embassy in Pyongyang. You had something to do with shifting the blame away from Kim?”
“Something.”
“My God, I’d like to hear about it. Must have been amazing.”
“Is that why I’m here?”
“Just before he died, my father used the word
retribution,
and when I asked what he meant—because it made no sense to me—he told me to find you. ‘Bring him here. He’ll know.’”
“Know what?”
“‘Our salvation,’” María said. “His exact words. ‘Bring him here. Ask him. Promise me. My friend Kim Jong-il told me he could be trusted.’”
“What else?”
“That’s it. He made me promise, which I did, and he died. What does that mean to you?”
McGarvey shook his head. “Not a thing.”
María flared. “Don’t play this game with me. I won’t hesitate to kill you and your friend and his wife. Perhaps I could even find a way to get to your granddaughter. Believe me, Señor McGarvey, I am serious.”
And frightened, it seemed to McGarvey. “I’m sorry, Colonel, but you’ve gone through a great deal of trouble, including kidnapping an innocent woman and murdering another for no good reason. I can’t help you, because I haven’t a clue what your father was talking about.”
María jumped up. “We’ll see about that!” she shouted. “And we
will
find the man who came ashore with you.” She turned and went back to the house.
Toro was there. “Colonel?”
“Kill the bastard if he so much as twitches.”
TWENTY-TWO
Lying on his cot in the dark as he had been for twenty-four hours now, in his mind Otto was seeing and hearing Puccini’s opera
Madama Butterfly
as a break to the master games of chess he’d played through the night and mathematical puzzles he’d set himself to solve.
It was coming to the end of the score: Pinkerton has returned to Japan with his wife, Kate, and they’ve learned that Butterfly has had a child and that she will probably commit suicide now that she knows her American lover hasn’t returned for her in the spring as he’d promised.
Kate tells Butterfly’s maid, Suzuki, that she’ll care for Butterfly’s son as if he were her own.
“Vi credo,”
I believe you, Suzuki sings. “But I must be quite alone with her … quite alone in this hour of crisis! She’ll cry so bitterly.”
And Otto always cried at this point because he knew that Butterfly had been left with absolutely no hope of being with her true love, and that her son would be raised by another woman, and that in the end there was no choice open for her but seppuku.
Last night for dinner, a metal tray of shredded pork and rice with no utensils had been pushed through a slot in his door, and he’d been forced to eat with his fingers in the absolute darkness. Later, he’d taken a cold shower and lain on the cot to get some rest. But he’d been unable to shut down all night, still awake at a breakfast of bread, butter, and strong coffee, and now at what he took to be late morning or early afternoon, he was exhausted but still awake.
With the last strains of
Butterfly
dying in his head, he sat up and set his mind again to what Fidel’s deathbed request to his daughter might mean.
His starting point was the risk/reward ratio. The Cuban government in the person of a DI colonel, and presumably a number of her staff, had taken the extraordinary risk of kidnapping Louise in order to lure him here as bait for McGarvey, who he suspected was already here or certainly on his way.
Such an operation could have gone south in a New York minute, which it had at least partially done with the murder of Joyce Kilburn in front of her day care center in broad daylight, and the fallout when it came would be nothing short of catastrophic for the government.
Yet the risk had been taken, which meant it was either the work of a logical mind, or worst-case scenario, it was an operation designed and ordered by a deeply disturbed person. But he’d not detected insanity lurking around the corners when he spoke with María León. She struck him as a bright, possibly even brilliant woman who’d been faced with a puzzle that she was trying desperately to solve. She was frightened—he’d seen that, too—but he’d been unable to figure out what she was frightened of. Failure, perhaps. Which brought him back to Fidel’s final words.
Retribución,
the dying man had told his daughter. And there was some sort of sense there; the old man had wanted to somehow get back at the United States, which he blamed for the poor state of his island.
But then he’d used the phrase,
Nuestra salvacion.
“Our salvation,” which made less sense to Otto than retribution, and so he’d set himself to remembering every single thing he’d ever heard or read about Castro, the CIA’s files unreeling in his mind’s eye, page after page, photo after photo, and recorded speech after speech with translations, starting with the base assumption that the promise he’d extracted from his daughter was not simply the ravings of an old man who’d become a lunatic.
The lights in his cell suddenly came on, temporarily blinding him so that he had to cover his eyes until they could adjust.
The door opened and the larger of the two DI officers who’d picked him up from the airport came in and handed Otto a pair of shorts, a shirt, and sandals. “Take a shower and shave. You have ten minutes.”
When he was gone, Otto went to the door, which had been left partially ajar, and looked out into the empty hallway. He thought that he could hear music playing somewhere in the house, and he could smell the ocean and perhaps chlorine from the pool and just hint of perfume all mixed together.
He’d counted four doors besides his own when he’d been brought back here yesterday, and hesitating for just a moment to make sure that no one was coming, he stepped out into the hall and tried the three to the left, the first two unlocked and empty, the third at the end of the hall locked, and the fourth just to the right of his own room furnished exactly like his. The cot had been slept in and still-dripping swimming trunks had been hung up in the shower.
Mac was here already.