Authors: David Hagberg
“El Comandante did. And maybe this isn’t such a fairy tale.”
FORTY-FOUR
McGarvey had been feeling odd all afternoon, and especially after their talk with Dr. Diaz. And during a light dinner in the hotel’s restaurant, Otto had commented on his mood, but he’d not been able to pinpoint any reason except that he was getting twitchy, as if someone were tailing them. Yet when he did a little tradecraft, double backs, feints—entering and immediately leaving buildings—or suddenly crossing against a light, he’d spotted nothing.
But looking in his overnight bag to see his pistol and silencer missing, he was not surprised that someone had traced them this far and had waited until they left the suite to get in and search it. It was a DI operation that obviously had help, possibly from the same Mexican federal cops who’d interviewed him at the airport.
It had been two hours since they left the Palacio, and suddenly this hotel was no longer safe for them, and he had a terrible feeling that Dr. Diaz was involved and that it had something to do with María León. He grabbed his bag and went out into the sitting room.
Otto was at the door to his bedroom. “Hey, I think somebody’s been through my stuff.”
“Get your things, we need to get out of here,” McGarvey said. He opened the door and checked the corridor, which was empty at the moment. It had been dumb to leave his gun in plain sight, but he’d not wanted to create a problem by trying to get into the Palacio with it, so he took a chance that the DI wouldn’t catch up with them so soon.
And now he was afraid that his mistake may have cost Dr. Diaz his life.
He and Otto took the elevator down to the hotel’s mezzanine level and from there checked out the lobby, where it seemed to be business as usual for this time of the early evening, before taking the stairs down. A handful of people were scattered here and there, and a young couple with two children were at the front desk, but there were no police.
Outside, they headed on foot east on the Paseo de la Reforma, crossed the broad boulevard a block later, and recrossed a block after that, McGarvey reasonably sure that they had not been tailed from the hotel.
“Where are we going?” Otto finally asked.
“Seville, but first we need to get out of Mexico. Whoever got into our rooms took my gun and silencer.”
“The DI?”
“That’s my guess. But I think they probably have help from the Mexican cops.”
“Do you think they traced us to Dr. Diaz?” Otto asked.
“Do you have his phone number?”
Otto got out his cell phone. “I’ll try his office first,” he said, but after a half a minute, he shook his head and pulled up another programmed number. “He lives in an apartment in San Esteban.” But again there was no answer.
“Does he have a cell phone?”
“None that I found,” Otto said. “Maybe he’s out to dinner somewhere.”
“I think he’s been shot to death with my gun, and once it’s found, probably close to the body, the AFI is going to take a real interest in me. We need to get out of the city and then the country. Let’s start with a car.”
“I’m on it,” Otto said, and he brought up an online air/car/hotel reservations site.
A half block later, they took a table at a sidewalk café, and before their coffee came, Otto showed McGarvey the screen. “Dodge Avenger, Hertz. We pick it up at the airport, is that okay?”
“I don’t think they’ll expect us back out there, especially not at the arrivals terminal,” McGarvey said. He saw that Otto had rented the car in the name of Richard Rank. “Separate passport?”
“Yup, but that’s my real name. Richard O. Rank.”
“I never knew.”
“I got a couple secrets, kemo sabe,” Otto said. “Anyway, if they’re looking for you to show up, it might take them a while to start looking for me, too.”
Their coffee came, and Otto went back to work on the Internet, coming up ten minutes later with a pair of first-class tickets from Miguel Hidalgo International Airport up in Guadalajara direct to Los Angeles. “Leaves at seven tomorrow morning, so we’ll have to hole up somewhere ’cause it’s less than two hundred fifty miles on a good divided highway.”
“We’ll chance a hotel up there,” McGarvey said. “What airline?”
Otto had to laugh. “You’re not going to believe this. We’re booked on Alaska Air’s 243.”
“We’re seriously going after a three-hundred-year-old treasure that probably doesn’t exist. So right about now, I’d believe almost anything.”
Otto looked away for a moment. “I hear you, Mac. But what about afterwards? What about if we do find it?”
“I have a couple of ideas.”
Otto went back online and after two minutes had hacked into the mainframes of the Protection and Transit Directorate, which was Mexico City’s largest police force responsible for day-to-day crimes, including murder.
“Two shootings have been reported in San Esteban in the past hour, but there’s nothing else except ‘Officers en route.’”
“No victim IDs, or probable causes?”
“Drug related is always the first assumption here,” Otto says. “But one of them could be Dr. Diaz, and they killed him because he talked to us. Colonel León.”
But McGarvey wasn’t all that sure it was her. He’d read something else into the crazy op she’d pulled getting him and Otto to Havana. Something between the lines, maybe something she’d said, or her attitude, or the fact that she allowed them to escape. It wasn’t adding up, and he knew that he was missing something.
They cabbed it out to the airport, where Otto rented the car from Hertz, and once they were away, he pulled over and let McGarvey drive. By then, they were heading north on 15D, which was a modern four-lane highway—traffic moderately light—and before they got out of cell phone range, Otto had made reservations with Iberia Airlines for their flight to Spain using a credit card that Louise maintained under her maiden name of Horn.
“We’ll get to L.A. tomorrow morning about nine thirty, which gives us a little more than an hour to catch the Continental flight to Newark, and from there Barcelona and finally Seville at five on Monday afternoon.”
“Long flight,” McGarvey said absently, his mind still on María León.
“First class, so maybe we can get some rest. I know I need it, ’cause I expect that there’s a whole lot more coming our way.”
McGarvey glanced over at his friend, and an almost overwhelming sense of loneliness for his wife came over him. But then he shrugged. “Always is.”
FORTY-FIVE
The Miami River Inn was a funky little Caribbean-style hotel right on the river at the edge of the Little Havana district, and by midnight, the evening was still warm and tropically humid, almost the same as in Havana. Only it was noisier here than at home, and María, alone at the pool, was amazed by the contrast.
She had arrived from Mexico City yesterday, and found this hotel listed in a rack of tourist brochures at the airport that described everything that there was to see and do by day or night in Coral Gables, Miami Beach, and Miami proper—including the neighborhood around the Calle Ocho, which was home to thousands of Cubans. Exiles, they called themselves, but in María’s mind they were defectors and traitors.
On the way here, she’d had the cabbie stop at a liquor store, where she’d picked up a couple bottles of Chilean merlot, which she was sipping now, an extra glass on the table beside her. The city was alive with street noises, cars honking, buses and trucks rumbling by, a baby crying somewhere, and in the distance in the general direction of Biscayne Bay, she’d heard what she thought was gunfire. Several shots, then nothing but the city’s background noise except until a couple of minutes later a siren and then others in the same general direction.
But the hotel itself, which looked nothing like the pictures in the brochure, was quiet for a Sunday night, in part she suspected because it was summer and the off season. But it was fine with her. Her room was pleasant, the staff at the desk friendly, the pool nice, and the peace good after the past few hectic days.
A perfect getaway, she thought, except she figured that sooner or later she would be recognized and someone would come to kill her. All she had to count on was the likelihood her assassin would be curious and want to know why she had come to Miami.
She was wearing jeans and a light blouse, her sandals off, and she was sitting back on a chaise lounge when something made her look to the right, where a figure stood in the deeper shadows by one of the cottages. Her hand shook for just an instant.
She raised her wineglass. “Won’t you join me?” she asked.
A slender man with fine dark hair and a thin mustache, dressed in jeans and a dark short-sleeve pullover, stepped out of the shadows. He was pointing a pistol in her general direction.
When she was able to see his face, she recognized him as the de facto chief of the Cuban dissident community’s unofficial intelligence service, and one of the DI’s highest-value targets. “Señor Martínez, it’s about time you finally showed up,” she said. “I didn’t know if you liked red wine, but I brought a second glass from my room. Unless you mean to shoot me first.”
“Kirk was right. You do have
cojones.
”
María was surprised. “It was you who came ashore with McGarvey. And it was you who directed the attack on my house.”
“I’m sincerely sorry that you were not at home,
Señora Coronel
.”
María’s anger flared. “Had I been, the outcome would not have been quite so certain for you.”
Martínez chuckled.
“Most of my house staff were gone.”
“They were never our targets.”
María believed him, and she nodded. “Thank you for that much.”
“We are at war with the government, not the people.”
“The people are the government—,” María said, but it sounded foolish even her ears.
“Spare me.”
María shrugged.
“What are you doing here? And give me one good reason why I shouldn’t put a bullet between your eyes.”
“I don’t know if you’ll believe me, but I’ll give you two good reasons. Kirk McGarvey and Spanish gold. You wouldn’t care about the third.”
Martínez stood ten feet away, staring at her. “Are you armed?”
“No. I was on the run through Mexico City, and in the limited time I had, it would have been too difficult to get a weapon through.” She nodded toward the wine bottle. “But I suppose if you got close enough and let your guard down, I might beat you to death.”
“Stand up.”
She put her glass down and stood up, her arms slightly away from her sides, and slowly turned around, until she was facing him again. “No place for me a hide a weapon. Unless you want me to strip so you can make sure.”
“The thought is there,” Martínez said. “You do it to our people in Quivicán and elsewhere. Full cavity searches, rubber hoses, broomsticks, electric shocks, ice water baths.”
“You didn’t mention waterboarding,” María said. “But then, that’s your interrogators’ methods.”
Martínez nodded. “Sit down, I’ll be right back,” he said, and he turned and disappeared into the shadows.
María sat down and picked up her glass, only this time her hand shook a little. She’d made it over the first hurdle, getting this far without being shot to death, but the next part—convincing Martínez and especially McGarvey and Rencke that she was sincere—would be even harder.
She was playing a dangerous game, not so much of cat and mouse but of balancing a fine line between the complete truth—which would end up with her immediate execution—and a partial truth, enough so that she would come across as credible.
Martínez was back almost immediately, his pistol holstered, and he came across to her, pulled a chair over, and sat down a few feet away. “I have people just outside to make sure that we are not disturbed.”
“You’re keeping me safe until you find out why I took the risk of coming here.”
“Something like that.”
“Safe from whom? The DI or your Cuban traitors?”
An expression came across Martínez’s face that María couldn’t quite read. Interest, perhaps, or maybe puzzlement.
“Are you trying to tell me that you’re attempting to defect?”
“No, it won’t be that easy. Not for you, not for me, and especially not for Kirk McGarvey and the CIA.”
“I’m listening,” Martínez said.
“How much have he and Rencke told you about what we discussed at my house, and the reasons I had them brought to Cuba?”
“I’m listening,” Martínez repeated.
FORTY-SIX
At the corner of SW Eighth Street, known locally as Calle Ocho, and Twenty-sixth Avenue SW, which turned into a one-way heading east, Fuentes sat in the backseat of an older Chevrolet van with DI operatives Eddie Hernández next to him and Abelando Parilla at the wheel.
“She’s here, but we’re not sure exactly where she disappeared,” Hernández said.
Fuentes was angry. “You saw her passing through customs yesterday but then you lost her? And twenty-four hours later, you’re no closer to finding out where she is hiding?”
“There was a problem with traffic at the airport,” Parilla said. “We were blocked by a bus and a couple of taxis. By the time we managed to get out of there, she was gone. So we thought it best if we came back to wait for you. And as you have seen, it’s almost impossible to get any cooperation out of these people. Every one we manage to turn ends up dead in a day or so, and the ones who say they’re helping us can’t be trusted.”
“Damned sloppy,” Fuentes said, fuming. They looked and sounded more like Americans than trained DI officers, and he made a note to have Ortega-Cowan recall them for retraining before they got their heads blown off.
At this time of the night, the streets were busy. This was practically the heart of what the Cuban defectors and traitors who lived here called Little Havana, and all the shops and coffeehouses where men were playing dominoes at sidewalk tables looked very much like what the real Havana looked like. Except that it was busier here—louder, more traffic, newer cars, bustling. And he could almost let himself feel the excitement.