Authors: David Hagberg
“Your ride is here, sir,” Sergeant Anderson said.
“Tell the driver to join us, would you?” Martínez said.
The door to the cockpit was open and the pilot was staring at them; he nodded and the sergeant went down the stairs.
“I’ll need a ride back to Homestead, if that’s possible,” Martínez said.
“When?”
“I’ll let you know in fifteen minutes.”
“Yes, sir,” the pilot said, and he turned and began talking on his radio.
“You’re leaving me here?” María asked.
“You’ll be safe for the time being,” Martínez said. “And Mac is already on his way, so you’d best have your story straight, because he’s a man who doesn’t take kindly to bullshit.”
“I know,” María said, and she told herself that she was looking forward to seeing him again and yet afraid of failing because she had no idea what would come next for her. Returning empty-handed to Cuba would mean a death sentence, yet the longer she was away, the greater the chances that Fuentes would find her again and this time kill her. He was a devious bastard, and if he and Ortega-Cowan had formed an alliance, which she was pretty certain they had, the resources of the entire DI would be at their disposal.
“Your coming to Miami the way you did has created a lot of problems. By now, too many people know that I’m helping you and they want to know why. Especially why I didn’t kill you myself after three of my people were gunned down, one of them not twenty feet away while I was sitting having a glass of wine with you. Half of Little Havana wants to hold an inquisition for me, while the other half is on the verge of rioting.”
“I understand,” María said.
“No, you don’t,
puta,
” Martínez said, keeping a measured tone, though it was obviously difficult. “Because they’re right, and it was you and people like you—just following orders—who’ve created this mess. We want to go home, we’re tired of being here, of waiting for a day that a lot of people are beginning to believe will never come.”
María didn’t know what to say, but she refused to look away or lower her eyes. The situation was what it was.
“Do you know what we did in Miami while your father’s funeral was taking place?”
“Celebrate, I imagine.”
Martínez glared at her, a deep, deep hatred in his dark eyes. “We were dancing in the streets. All day long, that night and into the next day. The monster was finally dead, finally there was hope, something worth dancing for.”
The sergeant came back aboard followed by a tall, slender woman, whom María immediately recognized, and all the air seemed to leave the cabin.
Martínez looked up and managed to smile. “Hi,” he said.
“Mrs. Rencke,” María said, barely able to get her voice.
“Actually I use my maiden name, Louise Horn. And I’ve been looking forward to meeting you, and spending some time together.”
“Do you want me to stay with you till Mac and Otto get back?” Martínez asked.
Louise shook her head. “You’ve got fires to put out in Miami. And besides, I’d like to get to know her better. Girl talk, you know.” And she smiled, but it was vicious. “We’ll be fine.”
FIFTY-ONE
Carlos López was a nondescript man of fifty, with black hair that was prematurely gray, wire-rimmed glasses, and a round, pleasant face that pegged him as anything but the Chief of Station for DI activities in Washington. He’d been dead set against the operation to kidnap Otto Rencke’s wife, and he was not afraid to repeat himself to Fuentes.
Operations was housed in the upstairs rooms of a well-established Chinese restaurant on M Street not far from Georgetown Park, the Potomac just a couple of blocks south. A half dozen officers worked here, including a couple of communications technicians, but most of the DI’s personnel worked under nonofficial cover—as cabdrivers, gardeners, a tailor, and even a Catholic priest who had taught at Georgetown University for the past eighteen years—and they communicated only in code via encrypted telephone, or for more secure operations via letter drops.
“Don’t push him,” Ortega-Cowan had warned. “He’s independent as hell, but he knows how to get things done. Tell him what you want and then step back and let him do his job.”
But he’d not been happy when Fuentes had shown up without warning last night and explained what he wanted. Nor was he happy now, perched on the edge of his worktable in the front room, looking down on the busy street.
“D.C. Metro and the Bureau were all over the place for three days after the kidnapping, but all of a sudden it was as if someone had pulled the pin, and it was business as usual,” López said. He was speaking Spanish, but his expressions were irritatingly American.
“I explained all of that,” Fuentes said. “Once Señor Rencke and then Señor McGarvey showed up in Havana, the CIA ordered the search called off. All that was left for the police was an apparent drive-by shooting at the day care center.”
“Which was still another colossal blunder. If I had been asked to mount the operation, the murder of an innocent woman would not have happened.”
“Ortega-Cowan felt, as did the
coronel,
that your overall mission here was too important to jeopardize it by a one-task operation.”
“Instead, you sent three idiots from Miami, none of whom had ever been to Washington, to do the job.”
“It was a success,” Fuentes flared.
López shook his head. “The death of this schoolteacher means nothing to you?”
Fuentes waved it off. “Collateral damage.”
“Take care, Captain, that someday you do not become collateral damage yourself.”
Technically, the station chief outranked Fuentes, but he was nothing more than a field officer. He’d never served at headquarters in Havana, and he certainly had never enjoyed the trust of El Comandante. Fuentes was about to tell him something of this when López handed him a Post-it note with an address in Georgetown written on it.
“Your coming here to tell me that Colonel León has defected is nothing short of unbelievable,” the station chief said. “Until this morning, I did not think it was possible.”
“What do you have?” Fuentes demanded.
“I spoke to Major Ortega-Cowan early this morning, who gave me two pieces of information that were vital. Something you should have known about.”
“Don’t toy with me,” Fuentes warned.
“The colonel is at that address.”
“Why wasn’t I told?”
“She got there less than ten minutes ago, and I needed the time to arrange for someone to accompany you, to make sure that you didn’t fly off and make another mess of things. The major told me that she would be arriving at Andrews Air Force Base sometime before noon. I had two teams standing by the main gate, and she was seen leaving the base in the company of a woman driving a blue Toyota SUV.”
For a long moment, the significance of what López had just told him didn’t sink in, but when it did, he was almost speechless. “Louise Horn, the woman we kidnapped?”
“The same,” López said. “But Raúl Martínez was not with them. He apparently flew up merely to deliver the colonel. Which tells us something beyond what I can decipher.”
“Your teams were not detected?” Fuentes asked to mask his own uncertainty.
“The two women gave no sign of it. Ms. Horn drove directly over to what turned out to be a brownstone here in Georgetown owned by a French medical doctor. We’re still looking for more information—telephone numbers, ISPs, utility records.”
“You have someone watching the house?”
“Of course.”
It bothered Fuentes that Ortega-Cowan had not given him the same information. “What else did the major tell you?”
“That Señors McGarvey and Rencke will arrive at Andrews from Gibraltar on another military VIP jet within the next two hours.”
It was another strike at his ego, and he had to wonder what sort of game Ortega-Cowan was playing at. The man was Colonel León’s chief of staff, but he knew too much; he’d had the combination to her safe, he hadn’t seemed at all surprised by the possibility that the colonel was El Comandante’s daughter, he knew that she’d flown up from Miami apparently on a military jet, just as he knew that McGarvey and Rencke had gone to Spain and for whatever reason were returning to Andrews from Gibraltar.
López was watching him. “What exactly is your mission here, Captain?”
“To find the colonel.”
“You’ve found her, now what? Do you mean to assassinate her?” López was filled with animosity, and it showed. “As you say, my station’s mission is too important to jeopardize over a defecting government official, even one so highly placed as Colonel León. Unless there is more to the situation than Major Ortega-Cowan was willing to share with me.”
And it suddenly came to Fuentes that Ortega-Cowan didn’t really give a damn about some fabled treasure supposedly buried in New Mexico. His only goal was to take over the DI’s Operations Directorate, and to do so, he wanted her out of the way and branded a traitor, with Fuentes taking the blame of aiding in her escape. For the moment, López was the key.
“Colonel León is El Comandante’s illegitimate daughter.”
“So what? His other illegitimate daughter defected to Spain and has even published a book. No one cares. And Uncle Fidel is dead.”
“Before he died, her father gave her a deathbed wish.”
“To kidnap a CIA officer?” López asked disparagingly.
“That’s part of it. But the main reason the woman was kidnapped was to force her husband, Otto Rencke—who is the CIA’s leading computer expert—to meet with Colonel León in Havana.”
“I know the name—everybody does. But what in God’s name did she think she was doing, pulling a crazy stunt like that?”
“Señor Rencke’s presence was required to lure Kirk McGarvey to Havana.”
“And he actually went down there? And you were a part of it?”
“Only at the edges.”
“Well, let me tell you something about Señor McGarvey. If you go up against him, you will die. And that’s not a guess, that’s fact.”
“The
coronel
did, and she not only survived the encounter, she made her way here and, as you say, she was picked up by the woman she ordered kidnapped, and McGarvey and Rencke are on their way as well.”
“What does the major want?”
“He wants her brought down so that he can take over the directorate.”
“And you, Captain?”
“I want what Colonel León wants, the reason she lured Rencke and McGarvey here, and why they apparently agreed to help.”
“You’re not here to arrest or assassinate a traitor?”
“Not unless I am given no other choice. But I’ll need your station’s help getting close enough to her and her new friends to find out what their next moves will be.”
“And all of this has to do with Uncle Fidel’s deathbed wish to his daughter? Including the apparent duel between you and Major Ortega-Cowan?”
“Sí.”
“Tell me,” López said.
And Fuentes did just that, leaving out only the possible size and location of the treasure.
“If what you’re saying is true, it will be a coup for you.”
“And anyone who helps me.”
FIFTY-TWO
Carleton Patterson was waiting in the backseat of an armored Cadillac limousine when McGarvey and Rencke showed up at Andrews Air Force Base, and his driver, a beefy man in a baggy suit coat, opened the rear door for them. The CIA’s general counsel was on a cell phone.
“They just arrived. We’ll be about a half hour.”
“Surprised to see you here, Carleton,” McGarvey said as he and Otto climbed in and the driver shut the door.
“Page would like to have a word with you. Marty wanted to send someone from security, but considering what’s been happening over the past few days, we thought you might have more need of a lawyer than a couple of extra guns.”
“Anyway, I’d be more cooperative with you,” McGarvey said.
“Something like that.”
They were waved through the main gate and got directly on I-495, the Beltway, weekday afternoon traffic heavy.
“Let me guess, there’s a warrant for my arrest for the murder of a museum curator in Mexico City, and Interpol in Spain was asked to cooperate.”
“It was your pistol, registered as an Air Marshal weapon on your flight to Mexico City.”
McGarvey explained how he had come to lose his weapon, because he hadn’t counted on the DI being so quick on the uptake. But it was the timing of the thing that bothered him.
“There weren’t warrants for our arrests until after we’d gotten out of Dodge through Gibraltar,” Otto said, giving voice to McGarvey’s thought. “Seems like the Mexican
federales
wanted us to get back here.”
“You met this Dr. Diaz?” Patterson asked.
“It’s why we went to Mexico City.”
“And Seville?”
“To see the curator of the Archivo General de Indias,” McGarvey said, and he handed over the copy of the agreement he’d signed with Dr. Virgílio.
“Good heavens,” the normally unflappable Patterson said. He quickly read through the five pages, went back to reread a couple of sections, and when he looked up he seemed puzzled. “This is not a standard finder’s agreement under any stretch of the imagination. In any event, it would have been in Spanish. So whoever put it together was pulling your leg. But Spanish treasure in the New World? What are you up to this time, and what’s it got to do with Cuban intelligence?”
“It’s got to do with why Louise was kidnapped and why I went to Havana,” Otto said. “And why Mac came to fetch me.”
“Louise sent one of our VIP aircraft to pick up you guys in Gibraltar, but she also sent a plane to Florida to pick up Raúl Martínez and an unidentified female, whom Louise met at Andrews a couple of hours ago. Is there any connection? It’s important, because of course, both of them have disappeared.”
“The woman is Colonel María León.”
“Well, three people who worked for Raúl have been gunned down, and little Havana is all but in armed revolt, worse than April 2000, when the boy Elián González was kidnapped by INS agents and returned to his father in Cuba. What’s going on, Mac?”