Authors: David Hagberg
The exit out of the basement was tucked in the west corner. The steel door lifted upward at an angle, and McGarvey, expecting that Fuentes or at least one or more of his people would be either coming up the driveway or most likely over the wall from the alley, switched the Walther’s safety lever off and eased the door open far enough so that he had a clear angle on the back wall.
But as before, nothing moved. Fuentes was either very slow, or he was very smart and had laid a trap.
McGarvey opened the door the rest of the way, hesitated for just a moment—expecting to take incoming fire—but nothing happened so he slipped outside and, keeping low and in the deeper shadows next to the house, hurried to the east side, where he checked the driveway.
The electrically operated gate was unlatched, but still closed. A Yellow Cab passed slowly as if the driver were looking for an address. No one was in the backseat.
McGarvey started to turn away when he caught two muzzle flashes from the roof of the brownstone across the street, and he was in time to see the silhouette of the shooter falling back, a rifle pitching over the edge of the roof and landing with a clatter on the curb, just missing a parked car.
It had to be María’s doing. Exposing herself to draw the two shots, and then taking the sniper down. Twenty-five yards with a silenced pistol. A damned near impossible shot unless it had been a setup, but for the life of him, he couldn’t understand why, or what the arrangement with Fuentes could be.
He went back to the basement door and waited for her to show up, all his senses heightened. The woman was the head of the DI’s Directorate of Operations, and by all accounts plus what he’d witnessed firsthand, she was bright, devious, and extremely driven to secure her own survival in the new Cuba. Most telling was the fact she’d used the silencer.
“Kirk,” she called softly from inside the basement.
McGarvey raised his pistol. “Come.”
FIFTY-EIGHT
Fuentes, standing in the shadows at the opening of the alley from where he had a clear sight line to the wall behind the brownstone, answered his cell phone on the first ring.
“Sí.”
It was Vásquez, who’d just made a pass in his Yellow Cab. “José is down.”
“What do you mean, down?”
“They have a shooter on the roof. Looks like José took a couple of shots, and the last I saw as I made the corner was him falling back. And I think he dropped his rifle on the street.”
“Turn around right now,” Fuentes ordered. “I think they’re trying to get out from the front.”
“On my way.”
“Rápido,”
Fuentes said. He speed-dialed Murillo’s number, and the agent hiding behind the Pepco van answered on the first ring.
“They have a shooter on the roof,” he said. “José is down. And the
imbécil
dropped his rifle on the sidewalk. What do you want me to do?”
“Vásquez is on his way to back you up. Has anyone taken notice?”
“Not yet.”
“Stay where you are. I think there’s a good chance they’re going to come out the front way.”
“They’d be fools.”
“Don’t underestimate these people, especially Colonel León.”
“What about you?”
“I’m at the alley, in case they come this way,” Fuentes said.
“That’s a comfort,” Murillo said, and before Fuentes could respond, the agent broke the connection.
Garcia called. “I saw gunfire from the roof across the street.”
“Start the van and get ready to go,” Fuentes said. “I think they’re going to try to leave the front way.”
“They’d be fools.”
“I’ve heard that before. Just start the van and stand by.”
“Sí.”
Holding his pistol tightly, Fuentes started down the alley toward the brownstone, his stomach sour, his mouth dry. His ace in the hole had been the sniper on the roof across the street, who was supposed to keep them bottled up, leaving them only one way out. Right into his arms, where he would have been waiting at the corner to take them out one at a time as they came over the wall.
But Cobiella had made a mistake and they’d taken him down, and Fuentes was seething with rage. He knew the colonel’s plan, and as insane as it was, he thought that with Ortega-Cowan’s help, they might be able to pull it off. But not before learning where the treasure was hidden. Somewhere in southern New Mexico, they knew that much, but they needed the exact location. It was the one piece of information apparently known only to McGarvey, Rencke, and Louise Horn.
No matter what, then, McGarvey and the colonel had to be eliminated—priority one, because they were too dangerous. Which would leave only Rencke and his wife—an egghead and a woman.
FIFTY-NINE
María took her time coming up the stairs from the basement, and when her head and shoulders emerged, she looked up directly into the muzzle of McGarvey’s pistol and reared back, her eyes wide in the darkness. “Are you going to shoot me?” she asked, keeping her voice low.
McGarvey was having a hard time reading her. Right now she was cautious but not fearful. And the corners of her mouth turned up in a half smile. Triumph? “The thought occurred,” McGarvey said, lowering his gun.
“May I come up?”
“Yes. What about Otto and Louise?”
“Out of danger for the moment,” María said. “I took out the sniper. Do you mean to take the fight to them, or will you wait until they come over the wall?”
“A little of both,” McGarvey said. He still didn’t know if he could trust her, which on the face of it was stupid. She might be running for her life, but she was Castro’s daughter, and following her father’s deathbed request. For Cuba’s salvation, or for her own personal rescue. She had to figure that if she actually pulled this off, actually got at least some of the treasure across the border and back to Cuba, she could return to Havana on a white charger, a hero of the state.
“What do you want me to do?”
“Cover the rear wall,” McGarvey said. “I’ll be right back.”
He headed to the driveway and, keeping low and as much as possible in the shadows, reached the gate. The Pepco van hadn’t moved from its spot about thirty yards on a diagonal across the street, nor did the shooter hiding behind it show himself.
After screwing the silencer on the end of the Walther’s barrel, he yanked the gate open as he fired two shots, aiming for a spot on the pavement beneath the van just behind the front tire. But if the ricochet shots found their mark as he thought was only an off chance, the Cuban agent didn’t cry out, nor did he return fire.
He hurried back to the house. “It’s me,” he called softly around the corner.
“Clear,” María replied.
She was watching the top of the wall from where she crouched in the shadows behind Otto’s car when McGarvey came around the corner and went to Louise’s Toyota SUV and opened the driver’s-side door.
“Get ready to move,” he told her. “We’re going over the wall in about one minute.”
“We’re not driving out?”
“No,” McGarvey said. Pocketing the pistol in the waistband of his jeans, he got behind the wheel, started the engine, backed out from where the car was parked nose in to the wall, and when he got it turned around, dropped it into drive and headed toward the open gate, jumping out only at the last minute just before the nose of the vehicle cleared the opening.
Several silenced shots hit the windshield as the SUV slowly moved across the street, where it came up against a parked Chevy Impala and stopped.
McGarvey raced back to where María was still crouched. “We’re going over the wall now.”
“Me first?” she asked.
“Together,” he said. “Before they figure out the Toyota was a bluff.”
SIXTY
Fuentes ran to the end of the alley and, making sure no traffic was coming up the street, hurried around the corner, past the van where Garcia was waiting with the engine running.
He was still connected with Murillo across the street from the brownstone.
“Bruno. What’s going on? Talk to me.”
“I’ve been hit in the leg,” Murillo came back.
“Did they get past you?” Fuentes demanded. “Are they gone?”
“No, no, it was a trick. They opened the gate, someone fired a couple of shots, and a minute later the SUV came out of the driveway and I started shooting at the driver. But there was no one behind the wheel. The bastard just came across the street and crashed into a parked car.”
“Have you attracted any notice yet? Anyone come snooping to find out what’s going on?”
“Not yet,” Murillo said, and he sounded steady, but in pain.
Fuentes ducked behind a parked car three down from the florist van and looked back to check the shadows toward the alley. But so far, there was no movement. “Stand by,” he told Murillo.
“What do you want to do, Captain? This situation will not last more than a few minutes.”
“Stand by,” Fuentes repeated, and he speed-dialed Garcia. “Have the police been notified?”
“I’m picking up nothing yet,” Garcia came back. He, too, sounded steady. “Where are you?”
“Behind a car about twenty meters to your south. I think they might be coming from the back after all. Are you getting anything from the house?”
“Nothing. But listen, Captain, I think we need to get out of here.”
“Hold your position, you bastard, until I say we head out!” Fuentes shouted.
He speed-dialed Vásquez in the Yellow Cab. “Where the hell are you, Hector?”
“At the end of the street from Bruno’s position, still covering the front of the house. What do you want to do, Captain?”
“Just hold where you are until I give the order to move out. This is still my operation.”
“The hell it is—”
“
Hijo de puta,
do as you’re told or I’ll have you in front of a firing squad in Havana for dereliction of duty, failure to obey the direct order of a superior, and for cowardice in the middle of an operation vital to the state.”
Murillo made no reply.
Fuentes turned again to watch where the alley opened to the street, but still saw no one coming out. It was possible that they had crashed the SUV to get someone’s attention, figuring that they would call the police. Time was running out and he was frustrated and fast losing his patience. Everything was falling apart.
“Do you understand what I’m saying?” he sputtered. “Answer me!”
“I’m calling López.”
“Hold your position!” Fuentes shouted, when the muzzle of a pistol was placed against the back of his head.
“Tell him and the others to leave,” McGarvey said. “Or I’ll put a bullet in your brain.”
Fuentes froze for a moment. “We have a development,” he told Vásquez. “Leave right now, and tell the others to pull out.”
McGarvey grabbed the cell phone out of his hands, tossed it across the street, and stepped back. “Your man in the florist van?”
“Sí,”
Fuentes said, and he looked over his shoulder at McGarvey, whose face he’d only ever seen in photographs. But he’d not been prepared for the man’s bulk, or the look of confidence and even contempt in the American’s eyes. And instantly, he realized that he had made a very large mistake underestimating the man.
“You were in Mexico City and then Miami—why did you come here?”
Fuentes hesitated.
“Give me one good reason not to blow you away.”
“We came for Colonel León. She’s a traitor to the state.”
“To arrest her or kill her?”
Fuentes came down a little. Evidently, McGarvey was more interested in information than anything else. “It didn’t matter which, though we would have preferred to take her back to Cuba to stand trial.”
“Because she no longer has her father’s protection?”
“Qué?”
“She’s Castro’s daughter.”
Fuentes laughed. “She is simply a traitor to the DI, and to the state. She’s been stealing and extorting money from a wide range of low- and midlevel government officials for years. Trading on her father’s name, threatening them with arrest and even torture if they refused to cooperate. What story did she try to sell you?”
“That’s not a matter for the U.S. court system, whoever the hell you are and what your real purpose here is, but the murder of three people in Miami is.”
“Traitors,” Fuentes said, but then he glanced across the street and saw María standing between two parked cars. She was holding something in her right hand.
“She wants to kill you,” McGarvey said. “She told us some story about a treasure of gold somewhere just across our border with Mexico. She claims that you’ve come here to kidnap her and force her to tell you where it is.”
“And you believe that?”
“We’re looking into it,” McGarvey said. “Which leaves you two choices. And two only. Leave now, return to Cuba immediately, and you’ll have your freedom, because at this point my government is not involved nor should it be.”
“What about the people in Miami you claim I shot to death?”
“I didn’t say anything about how they were killed.”
“What’s my second choice?”
“Die.”
PART
FOUR
SIXTY-ONE
First thing in the morning, the CIA’s Deputy Director of Operations Marty Bambridge powered down the rear window of his chauffeured black Cadillac limousine and showed his credentials to the guard at the White House’s West Gate, who waved him through. The driver let him off at the West Entrance, where he was met by Doris Sampson, who was the secretary to Frank Shapiro, special adviser to the president on National Security Affairs, and she took him back to the NSA’s office.
Shapiro, a husky man in his mid-fifties with thick dark hair and childhood acne scars, was just finishing a telephone call and he hung up. He seemed harried and moody. “What brings you across the river this morning?” he asked.