Authors: David Hagberg
“You don’t know the half of it,” Louise said, and all of a sudden, she was so overwhelmed with weariness that her knees began to buckle. “Bring me something decent to eat, and maybe I’ll start to behave myself.”
“Eat what’s on the floor.”
Louise bent down, very slowly, her movements those of an old woman, picked up the tray, straightened up, and threw it at him. But it was thrown weakly and he caught it easily.
“If you don’t want to feed me, you’d best bring some help the next time you come through that door.”
Cruz gave her a last, lingering look—half anger, half grudging respect—and he backed out of the room and closed and locked the door.
Louise sank down on the mattress, her stomach doing slow rolls until she managed to open the bottle of water and take a drink. It was possible that the water, and not the food had been drugged, but she no longer cared. She’d made her point.
TWENTY-SEVEN
“It’s on for tonight,” Martínez told Ruiz on the encrypted satellite phone. He was calling from a thatched roof porch at the front of the fishing shack right on the beach a few miles to the west of the
coronel
’s compound.
“Same spot?” the pilot asked. He’d been standing by on Little Torch Key near Newfound Harbor ever since he’d flown back last night.
“Yes. I’m shooting for around midnight, give or take a half hour. Can you make it?”
“Of course,” Ruiz said. “Have you run into trouble?”
“Nothing so far,” Martínez said, and he told Ruiz everything that had happened since he and McGarvey came ashore, including the setup he’d arranged with Fidel and Margarita.
“I’ve heard good things about them. But take care, Raúl, you’re needed here. You could have sent someone else for the rescue.”
“Not this time,” Martínez said.
Jorge Guerra, his primary contact and longtime friend of the de la Paz’s, came around the corner at the same time Martínez heard the low growl of a slow-moving boat just offshore, very close.
“Gotta go, my people are showing up, and they need to be briefed,” Martínez said. “Some of them are probably going to die tonight, and they need to know the odds.”
“And we’re not going to have the protection getting out that we had coming in.”
“No. Best you circle low and slow twenty or thirty miles out until it’s time for our extraction. I’ll call you.”
“Go with God,” Ruiz said.
“And you,” Martínez said, and he broke the connection.
Guerra, a short wiry man in his late fifties whose skin, fried by countless hours of commercial fishing in the sun, made him look seventy, offered a little smile. “They know the odds, not only in the operation but afterwards when the DI comes looking for them and their families.”
“Some of them can come with us.”
Guerra shook his head. “No.”
The boat was very close now, though because it was running without lights, Martínez couldn’t make it out until it was a few yards from the rickety dock Guerra sometimes used. When it pulled up, one man jumped down, tied it off, and a moment later when the engine was shut off, the second man jumped down to the dock and the two of them came up to the house, both of them rough looking, weathered like Guerra, who introduced them as Luis Casas and Pedro Requeiro.
“Pedro actually made it to Miami and lived there with his brother-in-law Miguel Sánchez for five years, helping with the dry cleaning business,” Ruiz said.
“I’m a fisherman,” Requeiro said, laughing. “Anyway, washing clothes is for young mothers and old ladies, not men.”
“I know your brother-in-law,” Martínez said. “He’s a good man.”
“He says the same thing about you. It’s the only reason we’re here tonight.”
“It won’t be easy.”
“What is?” Casas said.
“Come inside, I’ve made a sketch map I’d like you to look at.”
“Is there rum?” Requeiro asked.
“Of course.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
At Fidel’s compound, where there was already talk about turning it into a museum for El Comandante and the revolution, María was stopped again at the gate by two armed guards. This time, they’d not been warned that she was coming, and they drew their pistols as they approached the car, one of them holding a couple meters back.
It was dark, and she had parked just within the circle of light atop the gatehouse, but the security officer who came over shone his flashlight through her open window.
“Good evening, Colonel,” he said. “I’m sorry, but I have orders that no one is to be admitted this evening.”
“Whose orders?”
“El Presidente’s.”
“Call him.”
“Colonel?”
“I’m going up to the house, call him and tell him that I’m here.”
The security officer was suddenly uncomfortable. “It was Captain Fuentes who actually gave us the orders in the name of El Presidente.”
“Then call him.”
“Unfortunately, the captain is not in the compound this evening. It’s only the security and house staff plus some of the family.”
“Fine, then I’ll telephone Raúl,” María said, and she took her cell phone out of her shoulder bag. She started to punch in a random number.
“That won’t be necessary, Colonel,” the security officer said quickly. He stepped away from the car and motioned for the other man to move aside.
María canceled the call and drove into the compound, dousing her lights when she came into the clearing, and pulled up in front of her father’s house. The cook, a nervous old woman, met her at the door.
“May I be of assistance, Señora Coronel?”
“No, return to your duties,” María said, and she went back to her father’s bedroom, hesitating just inside the doorway. The bed had been made up, and she thought that she smelled a cleaning solution of some kind, yet the odor of death mixed with mustiness still hung in the air, and she shivered. She could smell his dying breath.
The room was mostly in darkness, only a single small bulb lit in the bathroom, the door ajar. This place would end up a holy shrine for many Cubans, especially the older ones who remembered firsthand not only the revolution but also the brutalities under Batista, even though her father hated such sentiments. But she could almost feel his spirit here, even though she’d been raised not to believe in ghosts, hobgoblins, spirits, or gods of any sort.
She crossed the room and went through a door opposite the bathroom, which opened into a short corridor, nothing but shutters on the broad windows, to another door, which led to her father’s private study. She’d never been in this room, though she knew about it from Fuentes, who liked to brag to Ortega-Cowan how often El Comandante called him here for advice.
It was ludicrous, of course, nevertheless María had counted on the room being left unlocked with no security standing by. More than sloppy, it was criminal.
The study was small, maybe ten by fifteen, with only one small window double-glazed to prevent electromechanical eavesdropping and bulletproof against assassination. Three walls were covered by floor-to-ceiling bookcases, the fourth lined with tall, old-fashioned, eight-drawer steel file cabinets, none of them secured with locks, which was another surprise to María. But then her father might have felt safe here, inviolable.
A small desk sat on a Persian carpet in the middle of the room, with only the one lawyer’s chair, a worn cushion on the seat, behind it. Visitors to this room, for whatever reason, were meant to stand in El Comandante’s presence like children called before a principal. A floor lamp stood beside the desk.
María closed the wooden blinds over the window and went back and closed the door before she switched on the light. This place, too, smelled like cigars and the hints of a dying old man, though that part she figured was her imagination, as what she felt was a deep chill.
She put her shoulder bag down and started with the desk, not really knowing what she was looking for, but hoping that her father might have kept a diary or some sort of a daily journal that might point her in the right direction. Rencke had talked about Spanish gold, something her father had apparently mentioned twice during his visits to the UN in New York. And if even one tenth of what the American had suggested had a grain of truth to it, the find would be fabulous for cash-strapped Cuba.
An appointment book lay open to a date ten days ago, Fidel’s final notation made at nine in the evening:
Arrange for M to be summoned. Soon.
María shivered, the
M
was very possibly her, and
Soon
could have meant that he knew he didn’t have long to live.
But there was nothing indicating what he intended to say to her, what he intended asking her to promise on his deathbed. Nor was there anything of interest in the four drawers, other than stationery, a well-thumbed Spanish–English dictionary, a box of cigars, several boxes of wooden matches, and a collection of pencils, erasers, pens, paper clips, a couple of folded maps of Cuba, and of the southeastern section of the United States, along with street maps of Manhattan and downtown Washington, D.C. The only thing that she found odd was a small paper bag filled with what she recognized as votive candles, some partially burned down. But she couldn’t wrap her mind around what they might mean, nor did she want to go in that direction.
Next she went to the files, starting with the top drawer of the leftmost cabinet, which contained a series of folders, some of them quite thick, labeled with names in alphabetical order, beginning with
ACOSTA, HOMERO
, who was the current Minister Secretary of the Council of State, followed by hundreds of names—most of which she did not recognize—for whom her father had kept dossiers.
Under
K,
were three fat folders for the Kennedy brothers, starting with the president, whose dossier actually filled nearly half of one drawer. He’d kept files on a lot of figures before and after the revolution, including Batista and the people in his regime, plus a dozen or more U.S. gangsters, among them Meyer Lansky and Santo Trafficante. A lot of history from Fidel’s point of view that would probably never see the light of day.
And in a lower drawer of the second cabinet, she came across a thick file marked
LEÓN, MARÍA
, which she passed by, not wanting to know what it might contain, her chest tight, her throat constricted. And she felt like a total fool because of her reaction. Stupid, actually.
In the hour and a half it took to go through the files, she’d found no references to Spanish gold or the speeches he’d made at the UN, only names. If there was any mention, she would have to read through every file, which could take weeks, probably months. Time that she didn’t have.
After closing the last file drawer, she went to the window, eased one of the wooden slats aside, and looked out. The compound was quiet.
The floor-to-ceiling bookcases held what María guessed had to be at least three thousand books, some of them stacked double deep on the shelves, other larger books lying flat. They weren’t arranged in any specific order, and many of them were old and dog-eared, especially the paperbacks, most of which were falling apart. A lot of the books were novels—many of them American Westerns or Mexican and Spanish science fiction. Some were history books, of Cuba and Spain and other countries, including the Soviet Union, with several shelves containing nothing but histories of the United States and its leaders beginning with Washington, Franklin, and the other revolutionaries, and of Lincoln and Davis and the Civil War.
But she found what she was looking for in less than ten minutes. A series of notebook-sized lined journals—Moleskines, similar to the notebooks that Hemingway had used to jot down his ideas—were stacked behind a full shelf of books on military history and strategy, including von Clausewitz and Sun Tzu. A dozen of them—apparently in chronological order, because the ones toward the bottoms of the stacks were old, the covers tattered, some of them moldy, while the ones near the top were new, even shiny.
María opened one of them, and she recognized her father’s distinctive handwriting from documents and drafts of his speeches she’d studied at university. The notebook entries began three months ago, detailing a series of meetings he’d had with his brother and with Darío Delgado, who was the Attorney General, on the advisability of hiring lobbyists to deal directly with the U.S. Congress concerning the trade and tourism embargo. Nothing concrete had come of the meeting, and her father’s notes made it seem as if he were vexed, not only by his apparent ineffectiveness in the day-to-day running of his government, but also because of his age and failing health.
R seemed sympathetic but Gen DD didn’t want to listen to anything but his budget concerns. Defense is a must, but whom does he think he’s going to war with?
An entry dated two weeks ago was the last, his handwriting nearly illegible.
Must talk to my people. Much to tell them, much to suggest, to give them hope.
She took all twelve of the notebooks off the shelf and brought them back to the desk, careful to keep them in the same order. If he’d left any clue to his search for the Spanish gold, she was sure it would be somewhere in his journals.
Then she rearranged the military books so that it wasn’t apparent that something had been removed, and went back to the desk. Some of the notebooks were held shut by an elastic band attached to the back cover. Some had a nylon string attached to the spine that could be used to mark a page.
The journal entry marked in the second book from the latest took María’s breath away. It was under a date in mid-September last year.
J-i’s letter arrived by secret courier today, and he’s given me much needed detail about the incident in Pyongyang with the former DCI. Incredible. J-i says the man is to be trusted, even though he is the enemy—former DCI and contract assassin. Was involved two years ago at Guantánamo Bay. J-i promises that KM is willing to cut through any bureaucracy, including his own if he believes the truth of a thing. Might be able to help in your quest. But the right man would have to approach him, in the right way. Very important. Salvation and especially retribution can be extremely costly. Something I’ll have to think about, but for now there is only one person in all of Cuba I can trust.…