Authors: David Hagberg
“Yeah, we’re going to look for it,” he said.
“And if you find it?” Martínez asked.
McGarvey told them, and when he was finished, Martínez started to laugh and Otto shook his head.
“Oh, wow, kemo sabe.”
THIRTY-FIVE
Martínez had arranged for a CIA C-20G Gulfstream IV jet to meet McGarvey and Otto at Miami International’s private aviation terminal and fly them up to Andrews, and it was dawn by the time they touched down, both of them bleary eyed from the events of the past twenty-four hours.
McGarvey drank a couple of brandies neat and managed to close his eyes for a few minutes at a time, but Otto had borrowed a laptop from one of the crew and worked online for the entire two-and-a-half-hour flight until they taxied over to the hangar the Company used, and he broke out into a broad smile.
Louise Horn, looking crumpled in the same faded pair of jeans and tank top she’d been wearing when the kidnappers grabbed her, stood beside her dark blue Toyota SUV, waving at Otto in the window. A pair of Cadillac Escalades bracketed her car, four serious-looking men—dressed in suits, ties snugged up, their heads on swivels—waited with her.
“She looks okay,” Otto said, his voice full of emotion.
“That she does,” McGarvey said.
They thanked the crew, and as they stepped out of the aircraft, Louise let out a whoop of joy and came running, reaching Otto before he got two feet, nearly knocking him off his feet.
“Oh, wow, kemo sabe,” she said when they finally parted. “I was worried about you.”
“Did they hurt you?”
“Not as much as I hurt them,” she said, and she turned to McGarvey and gave him a long hug. “I told them that because of you, Otto was the last guy they wanted to mess with. Thanks for bringing him back in one piece.”
“How’s Audie?” McGarvey asked.
“She’s at the Farm for now. Until we get whatever this is settled.”
“They spoil her rotten,” Otto said, beaming, and McGarvey didn’t think he’d ever seen his friend more alive and animated and happy. His family was intact, and he had another mission.
One of the four men came over. “Welcome back, Mr. Director. I’m Don Young, and I’ve been assigned as protective detail supervisor for Ms. Horn.”
“Appreciate the help, but you and your people can stand down now.”
“Mr. Bambridge asked that we escort you back to the Campus to be debriefed. The FBI is starting to press pretty hard for some answers, and he thought that the operational details might have to be sanitized.” Young was being exceedingly careful choosing his words.
“Tell Mr. Bambridge that we’ll drive out tomorrow morning. But Otto and I haven’t had a decent night’s sleep in several days, so we’re going to crash until then.”
McGarvey started to turn away.
“Sir, I have my orders,” Young said.
McGarvey turned back. “I know. But I’m tired and I’m hungry, so don’t piss me off by trying to follow us. I’ll explain it tomorrow to Marty that I gave you different orders.”
Young clearly wanted to argue, but he thought better of it and finally nodded. “Yes, sir. Stay safe.”
“Thanks for your help, guys,” Louise said, and she and her husband and McGarvey got into the Toyota and drove off.
Otto lowered the front passenger-side window and adjusted the door mirror so that he could watch to the rear until they were out the main gate and on Suitland Parkway into the city. “We’re clear,” he said, closing the window.
“GPS tracker?”
“Not in this car.”
“Okay, so what’s all this about?” Louise asked.
“Not now,” McGarvey said from the backseat. “They may have bugged your car.”
“The Bureau?” she asked.
“Our people,” McGarvey said. The Cuba thing was just too big a deal, so out of the ordinary, that if he were in Marty’s shoes, it’s what he would have done.
“Shit,” Louise said, but she held her silence all the way through the city and across to Georgetown, where they maintained a three-story brownstone that Otto had bought and sanitized a year and a half ago to use as a safe house. The Company didn’t know about it, nor was it reasonable to think they could discover it, because Otto had been very thorough with the transfer of deed and with the monthly maintenance and utilities fees that were paid from a Paris bank on the account of a doctor with Médecins Sans Frontières who was always out of the country.
She pulled around to the back of the house, where she parked to the left of the small garden she maintained whenever they were in residence, and they went inside.
Otto motioned for them to keep quiet until he entered a code on a keypad in the mudroom just off the kitchen, and after a few moments, a green light came on.
“We’re good here,” he said. “No bugs.”
Louise put on a pot of coffee for them, then went upstairs to take a shower and change into some clean clothes. She looked beat up, and twice on the ride from Andrews, she had mentioned Joyce Kilburn’s death at the preschool. “It made absolutely no sense.”
“Could have been you,” Otto suggested.
“Or one of the kids, if the bullet had missed.”
They could hear the shower running upstairs, and Otto brought a bottle of brandy over and poured some into their coffee. “How much do you want to tell her?” he asked. He leaned against the sink, facing McGarvey, who was seated at the counter.
“Everything.”
“Okay. What about tomorrow, how much do we tell Marty? And the Bureau is bound to want some answers.”
“We tell them that it was a rogue operation to dig me out in retaliation for what I did at Guantánamo Bay.”
“Marty might swallow it, mostly because he won’t have much of a choice. He can’t send us to Saudi Arabia for interrogation. But Page will suspect that we’re being less than honest. He’ll press.”
“The woman is nuts. Her father was dead, which meant for the first time in her life, she was on her own, so she pulled this crazy stunt to make a big name for herself.”
“But it backfired, and the only real casualty was the teacher at Audie’s school. We can make them buy it. And then what, because if what you told me in Key Largo wasn’t just idle speculation, we could end up in some really serious shit? Not that I’d mind, if we had a chance of pulling it off.”
“First we have to find out if there really is any gold buried somewhere on, near, or across the Mexican border.”
“There’s gold, all right,” Otto said. “I did some more research on the flight up here about the mountain in southern New Mexico that I told the colonel about. It’s actually a part of Holloman Air Force Base and the White Sands Missile Range, about fifty miles north of the Mexican border, and about the same distance south of Trinity, where the first atomic bomb was tested in ’45. Anyway, a lot of gold and other stuff was found buried in some caves dug into the mountain. But nothing much came of it, and so the story goes the air force pulled out the gold and shipped it away. That’d be sometime in the early sixties.”
“So it’s gone,” McGarvey said. “And its information the colonel could have gotten online herself, right?”
“Right. But that’s not all. There’ve been rumors and legends about caches of gold all over the place in the same general area.”
“Rumors.”
Otto was nodding. “But rumors are all we’ll need for the first part of what you want to do, so long as we can find some sort of a paper trail.”
“Mexico City,” McGarvey said.
“Or Spain.”
“And the second part is, what happened to the original gold the air force took away?”
Louise appeared at the kitchen door in fresh sweatpants and a T-shirt, a towel wrapped around her wet hair. “What gold?” she asked.
“Castro’s daughter’s gold,” McGarvey said. “I think she’s going to come looking for it, and when she does, she’s going to be in for a very nasty surprise.”
“Two surprises,” Otto corrected. “One of which will come when the deal she’ll have to make with one or more of the Mexican drug cartels turns sour.”
THIRTY-SIX
In his office in the CIA’s Old Headquarters Building, Marty Bambridge brought up the encrypted Skype for Windows on his desktop computer, and in seconds was connected with Rául Martínez back in Miami.
“Are you someplace where we can talk?” Bambridge asked. It looked as if Martínez was seated at a table in a busy restaurant or coffee shop, using an iPad. It was noisy and people passed behind him.
“Sure.”
“You’re not alone.”
“No one is paying attention, Mr. Bambridge. Believe me, they’re more interested in their dominoes than in someone’s phone call.”
Bambridge was vexed because Martínez was independent like McGarvey, and a difficult man to deal with. But his presence, watching Cuban dissident movements in Miami and keeping an eye on the DI field officers running around the Calle Ocho was absolutely indispensable. Without him keeping a lid on things in Little Havana by cutting off the right people at the right time, the entire place could erupt in riots. The dissidents had been waiting for a very long time—some of them for their entire lives—to go back to Cuba. Many of them didn’t think of themselves as American citizens; they were exiles. Volatile at the best of times.
“What the hell happened down there?”
“Mac asked for my help to get Otto out.”
“One of our birds picked up what looked like a pretty fierce firefight just off the beach last night. Make my day and tell me that you weren’t involved.”
“I had help setting it up, but no, I personally didn’t fire a shot.”
“Well, thank God for small favors—”
Martínez cut him off. “A lot of very good people lost their lives. Without them, Otto and Mac would still be there.”
Bambridge forced himself to calm down. “The ones who survived will talk,” he said.
“No.”
“They won’t be able to help themselves. The DI is pretty good.”
“There weren’t any survivors.”
And Bambridge wanted to ask how Martínez could know for sure, but the look in the man’s eyes was cold. “Did they explain what they wanted with McGarvey?”
“You’ll have to ask Mac about that,” Martínez said. “If he’ll talk to you guys.”
“He says that he’s coming over tomorrow,” Bambridge said. “I’d like you here as well, so we can get this mess resolved. I don’t want any fallout.”
“I don’t have the time.”
Bambridge was angry. “That’s an order, mister.”
“The word that some of our people were shot to death outside Havana has already reached the streets, and there are some seriously pissed-off people around here who need calming down. And I expect that within the next twenty-four hours, we’ll have some DI goons running around, looking for the same answers you want. So I’m sincerely sorry, Mr. Deputy Director, but I have my hands full at the moment.”
Bambridge’s monitor went blank, and a moment later he was staring at his own image before he hit the
DISCONNECT
tab. “Sincerely sorry, my ass,” he muttered, and he called to see if Page was in his office.
* * *
“The question is why Colonel León pulled off some harebrained stunt like that in the aftermath of her father’s death,” Bambridge told the DCI.
“Hopefully Mac will shed some light on the matter in the morning,” Page said.
They were sitting in the director’s office on the seventh floor of the OHB, the big bulletproof and vibration-resistant windows looking over the wooded Virginia countryside. “If he and Rencke actually show up.”
“If he says he’ll be here, he will. But we’re going to take it easy with him. I’ve had a chat with three of my predecessors who worked with him, and they all said the same thing: Treat the man with respect—after all, he was the DCI, and he’s given a lot for his country. But if you lean on him, he’ll lean back. Hard. And that, we want to avoid.”
Bambridge had also talked to some people who had worked with McGarvey, and they had the opposite opinion. In their view, the man had always been a wild card, totally out of control. And as soon as his name popped up in an ongoing mission or investigation, bodies immediately began to pile up. But he kept his thoughts to himself and nodded. “I understand.”
“The thing is, we either trust the man or we don’t. Either way, we don’t have much choice.”
“I don’t trust him any farther than I could throw this building,” Bambridge said.
“I know,” Page replied.
THIRTY-SEVEN
María, in a fatigue uniform with bloused combat boots, entered Raúl Castro’s office, came to attention in front of his desk, and saluted crisply. “Colonel León reporting as ordered, Señor Presidente.”
The message to report had been on her desk when she arrived a half hour ago, and it did not come as a surprise. There was going to be some serious fallout after last night, and depending on how this went, she figured that she would have to make some tough choices.
Raúl was writing something on a pad, and he let her hang there for several seconds before he looked up. But he did not tell her to stand at ease or to sit down.
“Tell me what progress your department has made investigating the disappearance of the Amercian who showed up for the funeral.”
“The investigation is ongoing, sir. And I am happy to report that my department is nearing a successful resolution of the matter.”
“I’m told that you made a visit to your father’s house last night. Has it anything to do with your investigation?”
“No, sir,” María said.
“You are not to go there again without prior permission.”
“May I ask why?”
“Because I’m ordering it,” Raúl said, raising his voice.
A little bird had been whispering in his ear. Either her chief of staff or the little pansy Funetes or both of them. “I’m at a loss, Señor Presidente. What have I done to anger you, or bring my directorate’s policies or actions into question?”
“I don’t know yet. But I’m going to find out. I think you’re involved in something that very nearly cost you your life last night, and it was only through your chief of staff’s intervention that you were not assassinated.”