He watched as the Gazik turned around and headed back west before he stepped out on the highway and headed for his contact’s fishing shack a couple of klicks in the opposite direction. He wanted to be in Havana before dawn.
* * *
No security was evident along the broken seashell road from the highway to the long, low ranch-styled house, very few lights showing. A helicopter pad, empty, its windsock barely fluttering was to the east, while a pair of buildings—one of them McGarvey took to be a garage, the other possibly living quarters for the staff—was off in the copse of trees fifty yards to the west.
They pulled up in front of the main house, and McGarvey was escorted inside to a small windowless room in the west wing that was pleasantly furnished with a comfortable-looking double bed, a dresser, mirror, hand-woven rug on the floor, and some decent Picasso prints on the painted plasterboard walls. A change of clothing, his size, was laid out on the bed, and the small but spotlessly clean bathroom was equipped with a luxury hotel range of toiletries.
The sturdy door and large dead bolt made the purpose of the room clear.
“The colonel is away from the compound tonight and for a part of tomorrow, but she is most anxious to speak to you,” Toro said.
“What’s wrong with right now?”
“We weren’t quite sure exactly when you would be showing up. She asked me to apologize for your inconvenience and to assure you that we mean you no harm.”
“I want to see my friend.”
“Tomorrow.”
McGarvey thought about it for a moment. He could take the security officer down; he had little doubt of that. But such an act would only accelerate the violence. First he wanted to find out what the hell this was all about.
He nodded. “Bring me a couple of Dos Equis lagers, with limes, and a little something to eat.”
Toro bristled, but he nodded.
“And I want to take a swim in the morning before breakfast, around six would be fine.”
When Toro was gone, McGarvey made a quick tour of his room, looking not only for a way out, but also for a weapon. Behind the plasterboard was cinder block, which could be breached, though it would take time. The mirror in the bathroom was polished stainless steel, and the light fixtures and wall sockets were attached with headless screws.
A lot of thought had gone into this cage, and looking up at the screwheads holding the slow-moving ceiling fan in place, he smiled and nodded.
TWENTY
María’s bedroom in the east wing faced the ocean, and the sliders were open, admitting a gentle sea breeze that ruffled the diaphanous gauze drapes. She always had trouble sleeping, or at least she had since the rape at school, but she’d never taken drugs to help. She considered that a sign of weakness.
Standing now at the open window, wearing only a man’s T-shirt too big for her, she tried to take her mind off McGarvey for just a minute or two. She’d read his DI file and the press clippings from the New York Times and Washington Post, but the measure of the man she thought she’d had went completely out the window in the first five minutes of watching him in his room.
It had struck her that he wasn’t the caged animal she thought he would become once he realized that his freedom had been taken from him and that he was at the complete mercy of his captors.
He’d looked up directly into the closed-circuit television camera lens concealed in the base of the ceiling fan and smiled patiently, as if he were a man with all the time in the world—but even more important, a man who understood things, a man who’d been around long enough, who’d been through enough, including the assassinations last year of his wife, his daughter, and his son-in-law.
Until her own father’s death, such a loss had been meaningless at a gut level. But now, thinking about McGarvey in his cage, seeing the look in his eyes, the set to his handsome mouth, and the squaring of his shoulders, she did understand, at least a little. And she couldn’t help but admire the man for coming to rescue a friend. It was something no one would do for her.
She’d set up a laptop at the foot of her bed to monitor McGarvey, and she sat down cross-legged as Toro went in with two beers and a tray with a bowl of what looked like black bean soup and a couple of bread rolls, plus a spoon. He would have had to heat the soup himself unless he roused the cook, and he’d acted out of loyalty to her rank, not to her personally.
McGarvey said thanks and opened the first beer after Toro left the room.
It was a mistake, of course, feeding him. Now he had weapons—the beer bottles and the spoon—and possibly a means of freeing himself.
But watching him sitting back on the cot while she sat mostly naked on her own bed maybe fifty feet away, she was struck with the totally irrational and erotic thought of going to him, just as she was, to begin their conversation. It had been more than a year since her last partner, an air force lieutenant who’d come back from liaison duty in Caracas, was beaten to death, supposedly by CL dissidents. Actually, she’d killed him herself down south where they’d taken a little vacation halfway up Pico Turquino, Cuba’s highest mountain in the Sierra Maestras. He’d told her that they should get married, that she should quit her job, which he believed was as a functionary of some sort in the DI, and settle down and have babies and let a man do the man’s work of running a household. She’d said no, he’d insisted, and she’d tossed him off the mountain into a rock-strewn gully three hundred feet below.
He’d just been a kid filled with machismo Cubano—unearned machismo—where just looking at McGarvey, she knew in her gut that he had earned his chops.
And she lay back and drifted off to sleep, wondering how it would be when she finally met him face-to-face. But not too soon. She wanted him to wonder as well.
TWENTY-ONE
From fifty yards offshore, McGarvey was just able to make out the figure of the smaller of the two men who had picked him up last night sitting on a wooden structure that could have been a lifeguard tower. Standing guard with a Russian-made 7.62 mm Dragunov sniper rifle, any shot at a human-sized target out to 650 yards was a guaranteed no-miss.
After a breakfast of rolls, butter, mango jelly, and strong black coffee, he’d been brought swimming trunks, a beach jacket, and sandals.
“Go for your swim, señor,” Toro said. “The coronel’s property extends two hundred meters in both directions. Stray farther than that on the beach or in the ocean, and our orders are to kill you.”
“What about my friend?”
“Not until the coronel returns.”
“When will that be?”
“I have not been told,” Toro said, and he did not lock the door when he left.
McGarvey had changed, and when he stepped out of his room, Toro was waiting at the end of the corridor. Otto was back here, but he figured that he would wait until nightfall to make a move. If María León had not shown up by tonight to explain what was going on, he would free Otto and kill anyone who got in his way.
And swimming now, he watched the surf breaking another fifty yards offshore, which was about as close in as Ruiz could safely land the float plane. In the meantime, he meant to find out as much about the compound and staff other than Toro and the man on guard duty with the Dragunov as he could this afternoon.
Back onshore, he nodded toward the man on the lifeguard tower as he toweled off and then headed in an easy, loping run down the beach toward the east. He looked back once, and the guard had gotten to his feet and was talking into a handheld radio, but he hadn’t raised the rifle yet.
When he got as far as the east end of the main house, he had a clear sight line to the still-empty helipad, the windsock this morning filled out with the light breeze. But a thick line of casuarina Australian pine trees blocked his view of the highway.
About one hundred fifty meters farther, he came to the stump of what looked like a weathered old fence post just above the high-water mark, which he took to be the border of the colonel’s property.
He stopped and stretched
as he looked back at the tower. The guard was still on his feet, but now it looked as if he had raised the rifle. Ignoring the threat, McGarvey walked up to the edge of the water line, still keeping well inside the border, and searched the open field all the way to the trees. But if there were motion sensors or infrared detectors or even closed-circuit television cameras, he could not make them out from this distance. Which either meant the colonel relied solely on her house staff to keep the occasional visitor in line, or that the detectors were camouflaged. He expected that for a woman in her position, it was the latter.
Finished stretching, he started back west, running at the same loping pace, scarcely building up a decent sweat even though it was already nearly eighty degrees. As he passed the guard on the tower, who’d lowered the rifle, he smiled and nodded and continued along the beach, gradually building his pace until he was running flat out.
The west wing, which angled away from the main house, was a low concrete block structure that matched the architecture of the rest of the place except that it was windowless, and the roof bristled with three satellite dishes, one of them pointing to the southwest, and several shortwave and UHF antennas. It looked as if she was well connected with the Cuban military and intel operations plus satellite services that the Russians still provided, which included secure connections with the Internet.
The Gazik was parked in front of the building he’d taken as a garage on the way in last night, and the second building—with windows and sliders and a couple of patios with lawn furniture nestled in a copse of casuarinas—was definitely living quarters for the staff, but it was hard to tell for just how many people. Probably the two men who’d picked him up last night and a cook, maybe a houseboy, a yardman, and a communications specialist.
But as he passed, he saw no activity, which could have meant nothing, just routine at this time of the morning, or possibly that the colonel had ordered everyone to remain out of sight as much as possible while their American guests were here.
An old rusted oil drum half buried in the sand just at the high-tide line marked the western edge of the property, and McGarvey stopped a couple of meters short of it, and again did his stretches, sweat pouring off him as he tried to make out the highway, but the line of Australian pines that stretched entirely across the back of the property made an impenetrable screen. Nor could he hear any sounds, though in the distance to the far southwest, he could see a high contrail above the puffy trade wind clouds scudding in from the east.
After a couple of minutes, he headed back to the house and, ignoring the guard, grabbed his towel and beach jacket and went inside to his room, where he took a shower, then changed into a pair of shorts and light T-shirt that had been laid out for him.
Ten minutes later, he came back out and sat down at one of the umbrella tables on the pool deck with a fabulous view of the beach and the electric blue of the same waters that Hemingway had fished eighty or ninety years ago. Cuba had changed, but the ocean hadn’t. The guard on the tower was gone.
A young boy dressed in shorts and a white jacket came out of the house with a coffee service plus a bottle of Cuban rum and a pair of glasses on a silver tray, which he laid on the table with a little smile before he hurried away without a word.
McGarvey poured a coffee when María, wearing sunglasses and a white, low-cut, backless bathing suit and gauze beach jacket came out.
“Pour me a cup, please,” she said, her English good with just a trace of upper-crust British. English was taught by Brits here and in Moscow.
McGarvey looked up, then got to his feet. The woman was more stunning than beautiful. “Colonel León,” he said.
She sat down and crossed her legs as McGarvey poured her coffee, to which she added a dollop of rum. “I trust that your treatment and accommodations last night and this morning were reasonably comfortable.”
“The best prison I’ve been in so far,” McGarvey said, sitting.
María smiled faintly. “If I have your word that you won’t try anything stupid, your door will not be locked tonight.”
“That depends on why I’m here, and what has happened to my friend.”
“Otto is just fine,” she said. “Quite a brilliant man. Inventive. But he’s warned us not to underestimate you, which of course we don’t.”
“Where is he?”
“Here in the house. I’ll have him brought out after we talk.”
“What about his wife?”
“We’ll talk first,” María said sharply.
McGarvey looked at her for several beats, but then he nodded. “If any harm comes to Otto or to his wife, I’ll kill you. Am I clear?”
María started to say something, but she cut herself off. Toro appeared at the open slider for just a moment, but then disappeared back inside the house.
“You went through a lot of trouble to get me here so that you could tell me something,” McGarvey said. “You must have known that there would be repercussions, yet you authorized the operation. And coming so close on the heels of your father’s death, there must be a connection.”
“Yes, there is a connection, as you put it,” María said. “I was at my father’s deathbed, the only person in the room on his orders, and he made me promise to bring you here. He said that you would know something that could help us.”
McGarvey was at a loss, and he told her so. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. I never met your father and never had any dealings down here except for a couple of visits to Guantánamo.”
“Sí, but my father told me that you came highly recommended by Kim Jong-il, who said that you were a man who could be trusted. And that makes no sense to me, unless the CIA is in some sort of collusion with the North Koreans. Or maybe it was just you.”
“I was of some assistance a couple years ago.”
María said something under her breath. “The Chinese general shot to death outside his embassy in Pyongyang. You had something to do with shifting the blame away from Kim?”
“Something.”
“My God, I’d like to hear about it. Must have been amazing.”
“Is that why I’m here?”
“Just before he died, my father used the word retribution, and when I asked what he meant—because it made no sense to me—he told me to find you. ‘Bring him here. He’ll know.’”
“Know what?”
“‘Our salvation,’” María said. “His exact words. ‘Bring him here. Ask him. Promise me. My friend Kim Jong-il told me he could be trusted.’”
“What else?”
“That’s it. He made me promise, which I did, and he died. What does that mean to you?”
McGarvey shook his head. “Not a thing.”
María flared. “Don’t play this game with me. I won’t hesitate to kill you and your friend and his wife. Perhaps I could even find a way to get to your granddaughter. Believe me, Señor McGarvey, I am serious.”
And frightened, it seemed to McGarvey. “I’m sorry, Colonel, but you’ve gone through a great deal of trouble, including kidnapping an innocent woman and murdering another for no good reason. I can’t help you, because I haven’t a clue what your father was talking about.”
María jumped up. “We’ll see about that!” she shouted. “And we will find the man who came ashore with you.” She turned and went back to the house.
Toro was there. “Colonel?”
“Kill the bastard if he so much as twitches.”
TWENTY-TWO
Lying on his cot in the dark as he had been for twenty-four hours now, in his mind Otto was seeing and hearing Puccini’s opera Madama Butterfly as a break to the master games of chess he’d played through the night and mathematical puzzles he’d set himself to solve.
It was coming to the end of the score: Pinkerton has returned to Japan with his wife, Kate, and they’ve learned that Butterfly has had a child and that she will probably commit suicide now that she knows her American lover hasn’t returned for her in the spring as he’d promised.
“Vi credo,” I believe you, Suzuki sings. “But I must be quite alone with her … quite alone in this hour of crisis! She’ll cry so bitterly.”
And Otto always cried at this point because he knew that Butterfly had been left with absolutely no hope of being with her true love, and that her son would be raised by another woman, and that in the end there was no choice open for her but seppuku.
Last night for dinner, a metal tray of shredded pork and rice with no utensils had been pushed through a slot in his door, and he’d been forced to eat with his fingers in the absolute darkness. Later, he’d taken a cold shower and lain on the cot to get some rest. But he’d been unable to shut down all night, still awake at a breakfast of bread, butter, and strong coffee, and now at what he took to be late morning or early afternoon, he was exhausted but still awake.
With the last strains of Butterfly dying in his head, he sat up and set his mind again to what Fidel’s deathbed request to his daughter might mean.
His starting point was the risk/reward ratio. The Cuban government in the person of a DI colonel, and presumably a number of her staff, had taken the extraordinary risk of kidnapping Louise in order to lure him here as bait for McGarvey, who he suspected was already here or certainly on his way.
Such an operation could have gone south in a New York minute, which it had at least partially done with the murder of Joyce Kilburn in front of her day care center in broad daylight, and the fallout when it came would be nothing short of catastrophic for the government.
Yet the risk had been taken, which meant it was either the work of a logical mind, or worst-case scenario, it was an operation designed and ordered by a deeply disturbed person. But he’d not detected insanity lurking around the corners when he spoke with María León. She struck him as a bright, possibly even brilliant woman who’d been faced with a puzzle that she was trying desperately to solve. She was frightened—he’d seen that, too—but he’d been unable to figure out what she was frightened of. Failure, perhaps. Which brought him back to Fidel’s final words.
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