Authors: David Hagberg
And now he was dead. Gone from her forever.
She flipped to the next page, and for what seemed to be the longest time, she could only stare at the handwritten letter, dated simply
Noviembre,
with no year. But it had to have been fairly recent, because her father’s hand had shaken when he wrote it.
But the salutation clutched at her heart, and she had to look away for another longish time, because he had written:
Mi queridisima hija
, My most beloved daughter.
When she was finally able to turn back, she read the short letter in which he sent her apologies for all the years of being a neglectful father, and for all the letters he’d written but never had been able to send.
Perhaps we will finally meet and I can hold you in my arms, and smell your sweet perfume and look into your beautiful eyes.
The next letter was dated in January, again with no year but the same salutation, in which he wrote to her about the isolation he was feeling after the illness that had forced him to step down.
I have always loved you, and someday I will tell this to you in person.
The remainder of the documents in the file were letters to her, dated with months but no years and the same opening, but from the things he wrote about, she could see that they were in reverse chronological order: the Bay of Pigs, the missile crises, defections, and finally one dated on an October thirty-six years ago, when she’d been born.
“Mi queridisima hija,”
he began, and he wrote about missing her birth in Santiago de Cuba in which her mother had died, but he was out of the country in Moscow and word had not gotten to him until it was too late. Conditions of state meant that their relationship had to be kept secret until someday in the future, but he would make sure that she was well cared for and would never want for a thing.
Except for a father.
She closed the file and looked out the window again. It was the first mention she’d ever heard about her mother, whose name she’d never known. There were times when she was young when she’d dreamed about her mother, being held in her arms, being told about becoming a woman, which was extremely important. Custom dictated that Hispanic females be prim and proper virgins before marriage, but Eves to their Adams afterwards. But no mother had been there to teach her.
She returned the file to her shoulder bag, laid her head back, and fell asleep staring out the window, dreaming again about a mother she’d never known, but only ever imagined. And in her dream, she was happy.
* * *
It was a few minutes before nine thirty in the morning local time when María was cleared through passport control at Mexico City’s Benito Juárez International Airport. The official welcomed her home and waved her through. At customs, she told the agent she had only her purse and the one carry-on bag, and she was cleared without an inspection.
Two other flights had come in about the same time, and the baggage claims area she had passed through had been busy, crowded with a lot of families and relatives waiting beyond the barriers.
A pair of men in light sport coats wearing hats and sunglasses were looking toward the people streaming from the baggage pickup area into customs, and María walked right past them. They had the look of cops, possibly even DI, and if the latter were the case, it meant Ortega-Cowan had been faster on his feet than she thought he would be.
Outside on the street, she glanced back as she got into a cab, but no one was coming after her. “Four Seasons Hotel, please,” she told the driver in Spanish.
Five minutes away from the airport, she got online with her cell phone and connected with Aeromexico’s Web site, where using her Delgado credit card she booked a round-trip first-class ticket to Miami, with no bags to check, on Flight 422, which left in less than three hours.
She had thought hard about this next move and whether she should leave her father’s journals and her file behind, but had decided she would almost certainly need them as proof. She would not be welcomed with open arms. Once it was known who she was, just about every tough guy living on and around Calle Ocho would come gunning for her.
“Driver, I’ve changed my mind. Take me back to Aeromexico. Departures.”
FORTY-TWO
It was noon when Delta Flight 363 from Dulles via Atlanta touched down at Benito Juárez International Airport and McGarvey, traveling separately from Otto because of his Federal Air Marshal credentials, was met at passport control by two men who identified themselves as Federal Agency of Investigation agents. He was taken to a small office nearby, where he had to produce his credentials, including his permit to carry a weapon aboard an international flight.
“You might want to let me phone my embassy,” McGarvey said.
“That won’t be necessary, Mr. McGarvey,” the dark, dangerous-looking of the two agents whose credentials identified him as Julio Mejía said. “We merely wanted to confirm your identification, and warn you that because of the increasing gun violence in Mexico, we take a very serious look at anyone carrying a firearm for any reason, no matter who they are, and not declaring it.”
“In addition, your reputation precedes you,” the other taller agent, whose name was Alberto Gallegos, said. “We know that you are traveling with Mr. Otto Rencke of the CIA. Why have you and your associate come here?”
“To speak with Dr. José Diaz, who is the curator of your National Archives. We have an appointment with him later today.”
“In regards to what?”
“Actually, we’re on an errand for our Library of Congress.”
“Concerning exactly what?” Mejía pressed.
“Electronic data sharing. Mr. Rencke is something of an expert.”
“
Sí,
we know this,” Gallegos said. “The question remains, why have you come to Mexico armed?”
“As you say, there is increasing gun violence here, and Mr. Rencke is a valuable asset. And a friend. I’m here to protect him.”
The agents exchanged a glance. “When will you be leaving?” Mejía said.
“First thing in the morning.”
“Take care that you violate none of our laws,” Gallegos said. He nodded at McGarvey’s overnight bag. “Anything to declare in addition to your weapon?”
“Change of socks and shaving gear.”
“May I look?”
McGarvey held out the bag. “Be my guest. And do you want my gun?”
But after a moment the agent shook his head, and McGarvey was allowed to leave. He joined the queue in the customs hall, where he was passed through without question.
Otto was waiting outside at the curb. “Your gun?”
“I still have it, but they wanted to know what we were doing in Mexico City. I told them that I was here to protect you, and you were here to talk to Dr. Diaz about electronic data sharing.”
Otto grinned.
They took a cab downtown to the art noveau Hotel Marquis Reforma, where Otto had booked them into a two-bedroom suite on the seventh floor, the balcony windows of which had a view of the Castillo de Chapultepec. The Company didn’t know it yet, but according to Otto, it was paying for this little bit of luxury.
“Anyway, we can charge a finder’s fee if we actually come up with the gold,” he said.
“Which you don’t think is likely.”
“Not a chance in hell. But you can’t win at lotto unless you put your money down.”
“Yet we’re here,” McGarvey said. “And unless I miss my guess, there were a couple of DI officers just outside customs. Makes you wonder who they were looking for.”
“I didn’t see them,” Otto said. “Do you want to go back and find out what they’re up to? I wouldn’t put it past Colonel León to put two and two together and show up. She’s an inventive woman who’s not afraid to take risks.”
“That she is,” McGarvey said. “But they didn’t follow us, so we should be clear unless the Mexican cops are helping out.”
After a late lunch in the hotel’s La Jolla restaurant, a very good Mexican beefsteak with
mole chichilo,
they took a leisurely walk along the broad Paseo de la Reforma to burn off some time and to see if anyone was taking an interest in them. Traffic was very heavy, and the air stank of diesel and gasoline fumes and something else that could have been burning garbage or something industrial. Surrounded by mountains, which caused air inversions that sometimes lasted for weeks or even longer, the city’s air quality was often as bad as Beijing’s.
After forty minutes or so, McGarvey was satisfied that they were not being tailed, and he and Otto went back to the hotel, where they cleaned up. Mac left his pistol in the room before they went down to the bar to have a drink. Otto had warned him that they would be required to pass through a security arch before going inside any of the government buildings.
“Lots of paranoid people these days.”
“Can’t blame them,” McGarvey said.
They took a cab over to the Palacio Nacional, the National Palace, located on the Zócalo, which was the largest main square anywhere in Latin America. Also here were a temple and museum dedicated to the Aztecs and the massive Metropolitan Cathedral, which had taken two and a half centuries to complete.
The palace itself, which had been built on the site of Montezuma’s home served as the seat of the government and the National Treasury. Also located in the same building were the National Archives, where Dr. Diaz had his offices, that included a smallish research library adjacent to a specialized restoration workroom where only the most delicate projects were brought. Everything else was sent to other restoration centers around the city, including the major one at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, which had been in existence since the mid-sixteenth century.
Checking through one of the entrances on the north side of the massive building that Otto had been instructed for them to use, they were required to pass through a metal detector and afterwards had to surrender their passports.
Dr. José Diaz, a tiny, stoop-shouldered old man with a shock of snow white hair—unusual for a Hispanic male—nut brown skin, and eyes that were wide, bright, and very much alive, shuffled to his office door and beckoned them inside. He was dressed in a tweed three-piece suit, the bottom button of his vest undone and a plain blue tie properly snugged up.
“The gentlemen from the Library of Congress,” he said, smiling furiously as if he were sharing some inside joke.
His inner office was a large room with broad windows that looked toward the Aztec museum. Books, folios, maps, and manuscripts, most of them very old, lay in piles everywhere—on his desk, on a couple of small tables, on the floor—or were stuffed in several overflowing floor-to-ceiling bookcases that appeared as if they were on the verge of tipping over. The place looked like it had not been swept or dusted in years.
He cleared off a couple of chairs that faced his desk, and they all sat down.
“We’re not actually from the Library of Congress,” Otto said.
“Of course not, though when I talked to Hiram, he said that he thought you might work for the CIA, which is actually quite intriguing for an old revolutionary such as me.”
“Hiram Stannard?” Otto asked. Stannard was the Librarian of Congress.
“Yes, we’re old friends,” Diaz said. “Do you actually work for the CIA?”
Otto nodded. “Were you actually a revolutionary?”
“I was on the edges when Fidel and Che and the Russian were here in the fifties,” Diaz said. “Exciting times. But they’re all gone now.” He turned to McGarvey.
“Kirk McGarvey, I used to run the CIA.”
Diaz smiled and nodded. “You must be here to ask about the Spanish gold the monks hid up north. The Jornada del Muerto. Victorio Peak, the seven signs, the seven cities, seventy miles north of El Paso del Norte.”
“Then it’s not merely a legend?” Otto asked.
“No, of course not. But why are you here now, unless it has something to do with El Comandante’s death?”
Otto quickly told him about María León and everything that had happened from the time of Louise’s kidnapping and his own research on the Internet.
“He was quite keen on finding the gold. I wanted to take up arms and go back to Cuba with him and the others, but he wanted me to stay here and do my research. Which, of course, didn’t yield much more than you apparently know. And in end, his daughter has sent you on the same quest. How odd, how tragic.”
“But you think the treasure exists?” McGarvey asked.
“I’m convinced of it,” Diaz said. “Six locations in addition to Victorio Peak on the New Mexican desert. Inaccessible now, of course, because your government continues to use the area as a testing range for missiles and other weapons including, of course, the first atomic bomb.”
“The treasure inside Victorio Peak has evidently already been removed,” Otto said.
“That’s common knowledge.”
“Which leaves the other six sites.”
“So you’ve come here to ask if I know their locations,” Diaz said. “If I did, why should I reveal them to agents of the U.S. government?”
“A claim could be made that one third of the gold belongs to Cuba,” McGarvey suggested.
Diaz threw his head back and laughed out loud. “The embargo,
el bloqueo,
has been going on since 1960. Don’t insult an old man by suggesting the U.S. would lift so much as a finger to help Cuba.”
“Not the government,” McGarvey said. “But Cuban the people. Only the people.”
“How?”
“I don’t know yet, but if the treasure actually exists as you say it does, and if we can find it, we might be able to make a case in Washington.”
Diaz, suddenly serious, looked away in thought for a beat. “My heart has always been with the people of Cuba. Batista was a monster, who was propped up in large measure by your government.”
“Fidel was no better.”
“At first he was. He was one of the people, he and Che. It was why the revolution succeeded.”