Authors: David Hagberg
“I have not had the chance to thank him, or debrief him,” María said, sidestepping the issue. “I had no idea that such an attack was coming, nor did Major Ortega-Cowan say anything to me about it.”
“I want a full written report on my desk before the end of the day, including the real reason why you went to your father’s house, and what you took, if anything, because a full inventory is taking place at this moment.”
“As you wish, sir,” María said, and she saluted again, but didn’t bother to wait for Raúl to return it before she turned and went to the door.
“What bothers me is the coincidence of the timing,” Raúl said to her back. “That and the possibility that a light plane may have landed in the water near your compound. Include an explanation in your report.”
“Naturally, Señor Presidente.”
* * *
At that moment, Ortega-Cowan showed up at Fidel’s compound and was allowed to pass the guard post and drive up to the house, which was a beehive of activity this morning. Fuentes met him at the front door, and they walked together around to the pool.
“There were no survivors out there last night?” Fuentes asked.
“We made sure there were none,” Ortega-Cowan said. “And we had a bit of luck with the timing, her coming back to her house right in the middle of it. She called off the air strike before I had a chance to do it in her name myself.”
“Another nail in the bitch’s coffin,” Fuentes said with satisfaction. “Raúl will want to ask her about it.”
“His office called first thing this morning, and I personally put the message on her desk before coming out here,” Ortega-Cowan said, and he glanced over his shoulder. “Have you found out what she was looking for?”
“Fidel kept journals from the days before and during the revolution. We haven’t found those yet, so there’s a good chance she took them. And we’re sure that she went through his personal files.”
“How can you be sure?” Ortega-Cowan asked.
“Her file was missing.”
“What was in it?”
“I don’t know. I just know that the file was there after the funeral, and so far as we can tell, it’s the only one missing this morning.”
“You had the chance last week, and you didn’t read it?” Ortega-Cowan asked. He was astounded.
“I had more important duties to attend to. I didn’t think it was going anywhere. Anyway, it probably doesn’t contain much of interest for our purposes.”
“There’s no way of knowing that for sure,” Ortega-Cowan said. “What about Fidel’s journals? Did you ever get a look at what they contained?”
“He showed them to me once. Just after his second stroke, when he retired. He was sitting in his study, in his pajamas, when I came in to give my daily security report. ‘Take a look at this, Manuel,’ he told me. And he handed me the notebook, which was just about falling apart. ‘We were so young and foolish then.’”
“Did you find anything interesting?”
Fuentes shook his head. “Fascinating but useless. The usual day-to-day stuff about the revolution and about the early days with Che and the others in Mexico City. And his obsession with the gold. I didn’t read much of it.”
Some fabulous treasure had been something of a hobby of his, in the early days of the government. Ortega-Cowan remembered reading something about it a number of years back, when he’d worked in the Directorate of Intelligence as a junior officer whose duties had included keeping current files of foreign press clippings about Fidel. He had mentioned something about lost Spanish gold both times he’d been to the UN in New York, but no one had taken him seriously.
A glimmer of an idea came to Ortega-Cowan. “Can you be more specific?”
“About what?”
“The gold.”
Fuentes laughed. “Don’t be an ass. It’s a fairy tale. Right now, we need to concentrate on how to use this situation with the Americans to bring her down.”
“The real question is, why did she go to the trouble to arrange the kidnapping in Washington in order to lure the CIA computer expert here in the first place? She didn’t share her reasons with me. But they had to be important.”
“You’re her chief of staff,” Fuentes said. “Find out.”
“She’s staying at one of our safe houses in town until the mess at her compound is cleaned out. She’ll need new bodyguards and perhaps some new surveillance equipment.”
“And you’re just the man to supply them,” Fuentes said with admiration. “Keep watch on her—she’s bound to make a mistake.”
* * *
María was at her desk, fabricating a report that would make some sense to Raúl without revealing the actual details of the Rencke–McGarvey operation, when her chief of staff passed her door. She called him back.
“What the hell was that all about last night?” she demanded before he had a chance to sit down.
“Saving your life, Colonel. And it was damned lucky you weren’t at home when the attack began, because we might not have been on time.”
“They came after McGarvey and Rencke?”
“That’s what I was led to believe by my informants, who said the man who’d come ashore with McGarvey was Raúl Martínez, who’s been running our Miami operators around in circles for years. It was he who got some Cuba Libre bastards to attack from the highway while he came by boat to ferry the Americans out to the float plane.”
“Who are your informants?”
“A couple who run a small
paladar
near the waterfront. We had them in Quivicán a few years ago, where they learned that if they cooperated with us from time to time, we would allow them their freedom.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I only just found out last night, and when I tried to reach your cell phone, it was dead, something wrong with one of the towers. At any rate, they’re back in the States now, so can you tell me what the hell it was all about?”
“Not yet, Román,” she said. She didn’t think that she could trust him. He’d willingly helped set up the kidnapping, but he was a devious man, and it was more than possible that he’d covered his tracks so that when the time came, he would have something on her. And at this moment, she was hanging out in a very stiff breeze.
“Well, at least did you find out whatever it was you wanted to find out?”
“I’ll let you know as soon as I can. But for now, my biggest problem is Raúl. I have to write him a detailed report that’ll make some sort of sense.”
“Raúl may not be your only problem. Fuentes is gunning for you. He said you took something from Fidel’s study last night, and he’s threatening to make it public, along with the fact that you’re one of El Comandante’s illegitimate daughters.”
Her office was suddenly cold. “He doesn’t want to fight with me. He’ll lose,” she said quietly. “I want him here this afternoon. Six o’clock.”
“Now that he thinks he has something to use against you, he might refuse.”
“Then arrest him,” María said. “Who knows, maybe he’ll get shot trying to escape.”
THIRTY-EIGHT
Page was waiting in his office with Bambridge and the Company’s general counsel, Carleton Patterson, when McGarvey came up with Otto and Louise a few minutes after nine in the morning. They all stood around a grouping of couches and chairs in front of a coffee table.
The DCI gave Louise a chaste hug and a peck on the cheek. “I’m so glad to see that you survived your ordeal. No worse for the wear, I hope?”
“No, sir. None whatsoever.”
“I understand that your daughter is doing just fine at the Farm.”
“That she is.”
“Terrible business, involving an officer’s family,” Page said, and he directed them to sit down.
A staffer came in and poured everyone coffee from a silver server and then left.
“I thought that it would be more productive if we just had a little chat this morning to try to get to the bottom of this incident,” Page said. “Rather than submit you to a formal debriefing.”
“The FBI wants to talk to me,” Louise said. “It’s the no-ransom thing that’s driving them crazy. And I’m sure that Joyce Kilburn’s husband is wanting some answers.”
“She was the unfortunate woman shot to death at the day care center,” Patterson explained.
“That’s why we’re here,” Page said. “To find out what just happened and why, so that we can give the Bureau something to work on.”
“The kidnappers were DI operatives here from Havana, either through New York or Miami,” Otto said. “And by now, they’re back in Cuba. Untouchable. You can count on it.”
“Well, what the hell was this all about?” Bambridge demanded. “We’re sitting on the edge of our seats here. I mean, one innocent civilian shot to death in Georgetown, and we have no earthly idea yet how many casualties it took to get the two of you home. Martínez won’t tell us a thing. He claims to have his hands full in Miami, making sure the pot doesn’t boil over.”
“It might without him,” McGarvey said. “Leave him alone and he’ll manage, because it’s probably not over with yet.”
Bambridge started to say something, but Page motioned him back.
“I think we’re agreed that the reason Louise was kidnapped was to force Otto to fly to Cuba, where he was taken, which action precipitated Kirk to become involved,” Patterson said. “And from what we’ve learned so far, the operation was ordered by a colonel in the DI’s Directorate of Operations, María León, apparently an illegitimate child of Fidel Castro. And I think it’s a fair assumption to guess that all of this had something to do with Fidel’s death. Perhaps something he asked his daughter to do for him. A deathbed wish, because we’re told that she was the only one with him when he died.”
“That was exactly what it was,” McGarvey said. “He apparently told her that Kim Jong-il recommended me. Suggested that if Fidel ever found himself in a situation that even as supreme commander of Cuba he could not resolve, he was to ask for my help.”
“Extraordinary,” Patterson said. Very few people outside the Operations and Intelligence Directorates knew anything about the operation McGarvey had been on last year, in which he had been of some service to the North Korean leader, but the CIA’s general counsel was one of them.
Two police officers in Pyongyang had been assassinated, apparently by a high-ranking Chinese intelligence officer, and China was ready to start a war with North Korea. Kim Jong-il had threatened to launch his nuclear weapons if the Chinese moved against his regime.
North Korean intelligence had contacted McGarvey, and he’d agreed to look into what became, to this point at least, one of the most intense endeavors of his life.
“Fidel was on his deathbed—what did he want you to do?” Bambridge asked.
“Cuba’s salvation, he supposedly told his daughter.”
“Salvation from what?”
“She didn’t know, but she hoped I did, because Fidel told her to contact me. Which she did the only way she knew how, because I’d gone to ground in Greece. But she figured Otto knew, which was actually a pretty astute guess, so she targeted him by grabbing Louise.”
“Which was a big mistake,” Louise said with some satisfaction, and her remark hung on the air for a long moment.
“You met her face-to-face,” Bambridge said. “What did you tell her?”
“That I didn’t know what her father was talking about. But my guess was that he might have been talking about his country’s salvation from the Soviet economic model that he’d finally admitted wasn’t working, and never would. Five hundred thousand of the government’s labor force thrown into the private sector has pushed the country into an economic crisis at least as big as Germany’s at the end of WWI.”
“That’s it?” Bambridge pressed. “After killing an innocent bystander here in Washington and ultimately causing the deaths of however many people who came to your rescue, you’re sitting there telling us that the woman was merely going on a fishing expedition?”
“Something like that,” McGarvey said. “But I wasn’t in control of the situation. She initiated it.”
“Couldn’t have pleased her, your knowing nothing to help,” Patterson suggested.
“She threatened to kill us both,” Otto said. “She just never had the chance, ya know.”
“Extraordinary,” Patterson repeated himself. “Is the woman insane, in your estimation?”
“Almost certainly,” McGarvey said.
“How should we respond?” Page asked.
“We shouldn’t.”
Bambridge looked from Page to McGarvey and back, clearly frustrated just about beyond control. “That’s it?”
“What would you have us do, Marty?” Page asked.
“For one thing, if she’s as nuts as McGarvey thinks she is, we need to expand our presence in Miami. And have the Coast Guard step up its patrols in the strait, maybe send a navy destroyer on an unannounced visit to Gitmo.”
“Something like that would be viewed as provocative,” Patterson said.
“What are they going to do about it,” Bambridge practically shouted.
“We’re not suggesting anything quite so drastic just yet,” Page said. “What’s our operational status on the ground in Havana?”
Bambridge calmed down a little. “We have three assets at the moment: a mechanic at the air regiment in Playa Baracoa; a writer for the political magazine
Carteles,
which was reactivated a couple of years ago, when Raúl began relaxing the state’s restrictions on the media; and an old couple who run a little privately owned restaurant near the waterfront. They go back to the revolution as kids, and they apparently know just about everybody.”
“Have them keep their eyes and ears open, but stay out of it,” McGarvey said. “We’re not done with Colonel León.”
Bambridge glared at him. “You meant to say that
you’re
not done, right?”
“Something like that,” McGarvey said.
“Are you going to tell us?”
“Not yet.”
THIRTY-NINE
María changed into a print dress and flats around noon and left her office, where she had stayed last night to drive directly over to one of the DI’s safe houses, this one on the Avenue Antonio Maceo, commonly known as the Malecón, right on the bay. It was actually a large, nicely furnished apartment in a foreigner’s building that was sometimes used on a temporary basis to house visiting VIPs. The entire place was wired, and a listening post had been installed in the attic. She was in civilian clothes so as not to attract any attention.