“Wait a moment,” Patterson said. “Could be that this is the overture the administration has been hoping for.”
“Not by kidnapping,” Bambridge said.
“They gave us an important piece of information, with the woman’s name and position.”
“No reason to believe that they were telling the truth.”
“They’re in too deep to have lied to me,” Otto said. “They shot and killed the day care center director, who was apparently a witness. Whatever the reason the DI wants me in Havana in such a hurry has to be big.”
“You fit the bill,” Bambridge said.
“It’s more than just what Otto knows,” Patterson disagreed. “If that’s all they wanted, they could have kidnapped him instead of his wife, taken him to a safe house somewhere nearby, pumped him full of drugs, and he would have told them everything.”
“They killed an innocent bystander!”
“Terribly unfortunate. But the entire incident tells us how serious they are.”
“I tend to agree with Carleton, though it goes against my better judgment,” Page said. “Otto?”
“I’ve tried to separate myself from the fact that my wife is being held somewhere by men who’ve shown they’re willing to assassinate whoever gets in their way, with curiosity about why the director of DI operations has gone to these lengths to speak to me face-to-face. But I can’t do it.”
“Of course not,” Page said. “What’s the next step? What do you want to do?”
“I’m going down to Havana, all right, and if need be, I’ll kill the bitch with my bare hands.”
“You’re not a field officer,” Bambridge objected.
“I’m motivated,” Otto said. “But I have to go down there to find out what Fidel told her on his deathbed that caused her to go to these lengths.”
“Wars have started for less,” Patterson said.
“What about Mac?” Page asked.
Otto had thought about it. “Only if something goes wrong.” He handed the director a small flash drive. “It’s how to reach him, but it’s only a onetime read.”
“Is there a password?”
“The nickname of your first girlfriend.”
Page was taken aback, and he obviously wanted to know how Otto could possibly have gotten that kind of information. “I’ll phone Chris Morgan,” he said. Morgan was the Secretary of State.
“Yes, sir,” Otto said, a vision of his wife’s image on the monitor plain in his mind’s eye, especially her wink, and he turned and left the office.
NINE
It was noon, and after more than two hours of work, Louise had managed to remove only one of the screws holding the plywood against the window frame. In the process, the end of the fingernail file was badly twisted, and the thumb and forefinger of her right hand were bloody.
She looked at the other eleven screws in despair and leaned her forehead against the wooden cover and closed her eyes. She felt so incredibly stupid, letting herself be taken so easily. The moment she’d gone through the gate and seen the car and the two men waiting, she knew something was wrong.
Right then, she should have turned around and run away instead of walking up to them like a dope. And the little trick of calling her daughter by a different name hadn’t worked, and yet she’d stood there.
And what was she supposed to say to Joyce’s husband and their children? They would know that had she run in the opposite direction, leading the guys away from Lil’ Tots, no one except her would have gotten shot. She hadn’t been thinking straight.
Almost as bad was imagining the look in Otto’s eyes when he watched the video. He wasn’t tough at all; in fact, inside he was mush, a teddy bear, although when someone he loved was placed in harm’s way, he could be formidable. She had seen him in action backstopping Mac. He’d been fearless.
Opening her eyes and looking at the eleven screws, she had no doubt that at this moment, Otto was doing everything within his power at the CIA to find her. And his devotion gave her heart.
She went into the bathroom and washed off her bloody fingers, the cuts only superficial, drying them with a few squares of toilet paper. The file would not stand up to another screw, so the plywood had become a nonissue; there was no way she could remove it.
Stuffing the file in the waistband of her slacks, she went back to the bedroom, where she pulled the cover and pillow off the bed, rolled the thin mattress away in a heap, and turned the bed upside down so that the four metal legs pointed up toward the ceiling.
Each was held to the frame with two nuts and bolts, and all of them were snug, making it impossible for her to loosen them with her bare hands. But the bed was old, the metal rusted in spots.
She shoved the frame up against the wall, and bracing it there with her right foot, she grabbed one of the legs from the head of the bed with both hands and, with every ounce of her strength, tried to bend it down. And it came away a half inch or so from a crease at the lower nut and bolt.
Shoving in the opposite direction, she managed to force the leg nearly back into place, and then immediately pulled it away again, the bend increasing another half inch.
Growing up on a farm in Wisconsin with three brothers, she’d naturally been something of a tomboy who knew her way around tools, and a little something about metal fatigue. Bending the leg back and forth would weaken the metal to the point of failure. It would snap off, and she would have a weapon.
But the going was slow, and she had to stop twice to catch her breath and ease the ache in her arms and wrists. She was still a little light-headed and she suspected that some of the sedative they’d given her was still in her system.
What sounded like a large truck pulled up somewhere near, and Louise cocked her ear to listen. Metal rattled against metal several times, and some sort of machinery rumbled into life for maybe ten or fifteen seconds, and the truck moved on, stopping a little farther on—and then the same metal on metal rattled. And she knew she was hearing a garbage truck collecting trash. This was a residential neighborhood. People were here, neighbors who might notice that something odd was going on in the house with the boarded-up windows.
All she had to do was make noise, and a lot of it.
She started on the leg again, and after a minute or so the first cracks radiated out from the bolt and all of a sudden, the work got a lot easier.
Someone was at the door, and Louise looked up as a key grated in the lock. She attacked the leg now like a woman possessed, the cracks deepening, until it came free in her hand, and she turned as the door swung open and the guy who’d shot Joyce came in, carrying a tray with lunch.
It took him a moment to realize what he was seeing, time enough for Louise to reach him and swing the metal leg like a club, catching him in the side of the head.
He lurched backwards, his shoulder bumping into the doorframe, the tray clattering to the floor.
A large gash on the side of his head just above his left ear began welling blood, and Louise screamed as loud as she could and swung the leg again, meaning to hit him in the same spot, but he grabbed it from her, tossed it aside, and shoved her across the room.
“What’s this, then?” he demanded, coming toward her.
Someone was coming up the stairs in a big hurry, and Cabrera looked like he wanted to take Louise apart. She didn’t know what other options she had, but she wasn’t going to stop fighting.
She feinted to the left, as if she were trying to get away from him, pulled the fingernail file from her waistband, and stepped into him as he started to raise his fist, and tried to plunge the file into his left eye.
His reflexes were good and he managed to twist his head so that the tip of the file only grazed his cheek, opening up a four-inch gash that instantly began bleeding. He grabbed her wrist and bent it back until she was forced to drop the file and he shoved her backwards again.
“Puta!” Whore! he shouted, and before Louise could attack again, he pulled out his pistol and pointed it at her.
TEN
At José Martí Airport, Otto was the last off the State Department’s Gulfstream executive jet, which on landing had been instructed to taxi to an empty hangar across the main runway from the terminal. Palm trees dotted the horizon, and puffy white clouds soared overhead to the west.
Several Cuban army Gaziks, which were the leftover Russian jeeps, along with a half dozen Havana policemen on battered old Indian motorcycles were waiting to escort two Cadillacs, one of them a boxy-looking 1950s-era limousine.
A handful of Cuban dignitaries, a few of them dressed in suits and ties, several in plain olive drab fatigues, waited in a reception line.
Otto stood at the foot of the jet’s stairs, his overnight bag in hand, as two dark-complexioned, intense-looking men in khaki slacks and white guayabera shirts drove up in an unmarked Gazik and parked a few feet away, between the aircraft and the group getting into the two Cadillacs. They looked at Otto but they remained in the Gazik.
He’d sat at the rear of the Gulfstream on the four-hour trip down from Andrews, and no one but a female flight attendant had said a word to him. He’d been the first aboard, ten minutes before the group from the State Department had arrived, and she came back to him.
“Good morning, Mr. Rencke. May I get something for you?”
“A Coke if you have it, and maybe something to eat? A sandwich?”
“There’ll be box lunches once we’re in the air. Quite good, I’m told.”
Otto had stowed his small overnight bag in the overhead and, buckling in, used his cell phone—which bypassed the normal Cuban control system—to call the day care center. But after six rings, there was no answer and he gave up. He felt so damned alone at this moment, more isolated than he’d been when he lived by himself for a time in France a few years ago. He’d had nothing to work for then, nothing to care for, no one whom he could talk to until Mac showed up at his door with a problem he needed help with. And Otto jumped right into the middle of it without hesitation. And had been doing the same ever since, especially last year when Katy, Liz, and Todd were assassinated.
Twice, he’d almost called Mac’s contact number, but both times he’d stopped. Mac had his own full plate, his own troubles to deal with, but Otto knew that he would drop everything and come to help if he were told about Louise. But not yet. Not until he learned the reason the Cubans were taking such a terrible risk, which he figured would be made clear to him as soon as he was brought to Castro’s daughter.
The attendant had brought back his Coke, and a half hour after they were in the air, she served him a box lunch with a fresh turkey and Swiss croissant, a light pasta salad, an apple, a chocolate chip cookie, and a split of a very good sauvignon blanc.
And after he ate, he’d laid his head against the window and watched the clouds as he tried to make sense of the why of the thing, and tried to send a telepathic message to Louise that everything would turn out well.
The president had sent Deputy Secretary of State Gladys Faunce; along with William Chapman, who was the assistant legal adviser for Inter-American Affairs; and Ralph Scott, the State Department’s Coordinator for Cuban Affairs; plus two bodyguards for Faunce. Other nations had sent either their premiers or presidents, but the White House felt it was conciliatory enough to send a delegation of this rank.
When the Cadillacs and their escorts pulled away and sped across the tarmac, the man riding shotgun in the Gazik waiting for Otto got out and walked over. Otto took him and the driver to be DI officers.
“Señor Rencke?” he asked respectfully.
“Yes.”
“Have you brought any weapons into Cuba?”
“No.”
“A cell phone or satellite phone?”
Otto took out his phone and handed it over. But they wouldn’t learn anything unless they came up with his very complicated password, and if they tried too hard, the phone’s SIM card would be erased.
“If you will get in the backseat, sir, it is about a half hour’s drive from here,” the officer said, and he took Otto’s overnight bag.
The day was warm and humid, but the Gazik was a cabriolet; its canvas top was down and the breeze felt refreshing as they headed away from the airport.
Havana city center and the Plaza de la Revolución were about fifteen miles to the north, as the crow flies, the countryside this far out mostly barren, just the occasional small cattle ranch and clutches here and there of shacks down dirt roads, with very gently rolling hills in the distance to the east and west.
They drove fast until they came to Arroyo Naranjo, one of the bigger population concentrations within the city of Havana, seven miles south of the old city on the Havana–Las Vegas Highway. A lot of old cars and bicycles and even donkey carts clogged the narrow road until they reached the modern divided ring road that circled downtown.
At one point a few miles away, they passed a sign for a turn-off to the Finca Vigía, which had been Hemingway’s home, under renovation for the past several years. But money was tight and the work would probably take several more years to complete. So much depended on the American tourist dollar, which up to now was practically nonexistent.
A couple of miles past that, they reached the Autopista Nacional, this one a modern highway that went straight into the city, but instead of turning to the northwest, they continued on the ring road that would eventually end up at the castle on Havana Bay and another way into the city, and the headquarters of the DI, where Otto figured they were taking him.
They were out in the country now, in what was considered Havana’s east side, some boxy Soviet-era high-rise apartment buildings mixed with small houses, sometimes hovels, and small factories dotted here and there.
But again, the driver did not head into the city; instead, they got off the main highway and drove roughly northeast, toward the coast.
“I thought we’d be going to DI headquarters,” Otto said.
The officer riding shotgun glanced over his shoulder. “No.”
“Where, then?”
“I don’t know.”
Otto was alarmed. They were well off the main highway now, in the middle of what amounted to nowhere. People disappeared in places like this. “You have to know where you’re taking me. I came here to meet with Colonel León.”
The driver glanced at Otto’s reflection in the rearview mirror, and said something to his partner, who turned around.
“You are correct, we are not taking you downtown to headquarters, that would be far too dangerous at this moment. And you are also correct that the colonel wishes to speak to you.”
“Why too dangerous downtown?”
The officer said something to the driver that Otto didn’t catch, then turned back again. “There is much turmoil since El Comandante died.”
“I understand. But isn’t Raúl fully in control?”
The officer was extremely nervous. “There are some facciones, what you call ‘factions,’ that may be forming.”
“Troubles?”
“Sí, problemas.”
“Are you expecting trouble for our delegation at the funeral?”
The DI officer reared back as if he’d been shot. “No, nothing like that, I assure you. This trouble I’m speaking of involves only a certain section.”
“A power struggle?”
The officer nodded. “Something like that.”
This was not good. “Turn around,” Otto said. “Take me back to the airport.”
The officer was genuinely alarmed. “That’s not possible. The colonel has gone to a lot of trouble to get you here.”
“Yes. Including kidnapping my wife and killing an innocent civilian at a day care center, and endangering the lives of the kids there, my child included. Take me back! Now!”
“Ramiro,” the driver said urgently, jamming on the brakes as a small canvas-covered troop truck pulled out from a dirt path and blocked the road.
“Do exactly as you are told, Señor Rencke,” the man riding shotgun said.
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The Gazik came to a complete halt a few yards away from where a half dozen armed soldiers jumped out of the truck and took up defensive positions. Their officer came around from the front.
“Or else what?” Rencke asked.
“Or else you will die here. All of us will.”
Their driver got out and walked up to where the officer beckoned, and they walked a few feet down the road away from the troops. The driver appeared a minute later and motioned for his partner.
“We’re going the rest of the way in the truck,” the officer told Rencke. “Just keep your mouth shut.”
They got out of the Gazik and, without saying a thing, walked to the truck and climbed aboard. Moments later, the troops joined them, and immediately the truck lurched forward but only about twenty-five yards, where it stopped again.
One of the troops, armed with a LAWS rocket, jumped down, extended the tube, unfolded the sights, and fired, hitting the Gazik dead center, the Russian jeep going up in a ball of flame, the explosion flat and loud.
“It was necessary to maintain the illusion,” the DI officer told Otto as the soldier hurried back and climbed aboard.
“What illusion?”
“That you were killed or kidnapped by insurgents.”
ELEVEN
It was early evening, already dark outside, when Louise awoke with a splitting headache. For several beats she was disoriented, not sure at all where she was or what had happened to make her body ache all over. But then it came to her that she’d been in a fight and she had been drugged again.
The bed frame had been taken away and she was lying on the bare mattress on the floor, the filthy pillow that smelled of something sour under her head. She pushed herself up to a sitting position, and then struggled painfully to her bare feet. They’d taken her shoes for some reason, which didn’t make any sense to her.
For a long time she stood swaying, her legs trembling, until she could shuffle to the bathroom, where she splashed some cold water on her face and used the toilet.
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