Castro's Daughter

by David Hagberg

  Retribución, the dying man had told his daughter. And there was some sort of sense there; the old man had wanted to somehow get back at the United States, which he blamed for the poor state of his island.

  But then he’d used the phrase, Nuestra salvacion. “Our salvation,” which made less sense to Otto than retribution, and so he’d set himself to remembering every single thing he’d ever heard or read about Castro, the CIA’s files unreeling in his mind’s eye, page after page, photo after photo, and recorded speech after speech with translations, starting with the base assumption that the promise he’d extracted from his daughter was not simply the ravings of an old man who’d become a lunatic.

  The lights in his cell suddenly came on, temporarily blinding him so that he had to cover his eyes until they could adjust.

  The door opened and the larger of the two DI officers who’d picked him up from the airport came in and handed Otto a pair of shorts, a shirt, and sandals. “Take a shower and shave. You have ten minutes.”

  When he was gone, Otto went to the door, which had been left partially ajar, and looked out into the empty hallway. He thought that he could hear music playing somewhere in the house, and he could smell the ocean and perhaps chlorine from the pool and just hint of perfume all mixed together.

  He’d counted four doors besides his own when he’d been brought back here yesterday, and hesitating for just a moment to make sure that no one was coming, he stepped out into the hall and tried the three to the left, the first two unlocked and empty, the third at the end of the hall locked, and the fourth just to the right of his own room furnished exactly like his. The cot had been slept in and still-dripping swimming trunks had been hung up in the shower.

  Mac was here already.

  He went back to his room, shaved, took a quick shower, the water warm this time, and got dressed. Pushing his long frizzy red hair back out of his eyes, he headed down the hall to the main wing of the house, where he pulled up short.

  The large DI officer stood at the open sliders, and he looked over his shoulder.

  Otto hesitated only a moment before he crossed the broad living room and went out to the pool, where McGarvey, his back to the house, was sitting alone at one of the tables.

  “Oh, wow, kemo sabe, you came.”

  McGarvey turned around and got up, a look of deep concern on his face. “Are you okay?” he demanded.

  “I haven’t had my lunch, if that’s what you mean,” Otto said, and he went to his friend and they embraced. “Long time no see,” he said.

  “You’ve met the colonel, I expect,” McGarvey said. “Did she tell you why she wanted me here?”

  “Just her father’s deathbed request. What’d you tell Page and Marty?”

  “Everything I knew to that point. And that I was coming down here to get you out.”

  Otto couldn’t help but grin. “That must have been some meeting. What’d they say?”

  “Said that we were crazy.”

  They sat down.

  Otto turned his head slightly. The same perfume as before was suddenly stronger. “It’s Prada, I believe,” he said. “Won’t you join us, Colonel León?”

  TWENTY-THREE

  “Not for long unless I get some answers,” María said, coming out of the house. She was still dressed in the swimming outfit and beach jacket, and this time neither man rose when she pulled out a chair and sat down.

  She’d watched McGarvey’s reaction when Rencke had come outside, and Toro had shown himself for just a moment as she’d ordered. And she’d thought that Ramiro was lucky to still be alive, and she also wondered what it must be like to have such a prodigious friend.

  “Answers we don’t have,” McGarvey said.

  “I thought that you’d be a more practical man when it came to saving the lives of your friend and his wife.”

  “The delusions of an old man, Colonel. Are you going to risk Cuba’s security over a fantasy? I’m sure that Raúl and the government don’t share your tolerance for this kind of meaningless operation; otherwise, we’d be downtown in a holding cell at DI headquarters, or maybe even in a cell at Quivicán Prison, eating boiled beans and chicken broth and having our fingernails pulled out instead of being here, drinking coffee and good Cubano rum.”

  He was an arrogant bastard, just as she had gleaned from his file. But sitting across from him now, measuring the set of his shoulders and the supreme self-confidence in his voice, she was beginning to believe that the files might not have gone far enough. In her estimation, McGarvey was a man among men, and she was impatient with herself for admitting such a thing and, in some respects, even admiring it.

  But she refused to look away, and the bastard smiled, her temper spiking.

  “I’ve been thinking,” Rencke said. “Your father used the word salvation.”

  It took several beats for what Rencke had just said to register before she could tear her eyes away from McGarvey’s. “What?”

  “He said something about retribution, but he mentioned that Kim Jong-il had given Mac high marks, which made me think that salvation was more to the point.”

  “I understand what happened in Pyongyang,” María said.

  “I don’t think you do.”

  “It was a matter of solving a murder and saving face.”

  “No,” Rencke said. “Mac saved the regime, and by doing so, he averted war not only on the peninsula but in the entire region, Japan included. Nuclear war, because the nut case would have ordered his eight or ten nukes to be launched. Seoul, Tokyo, Beijing. The Chinese would have retaliated—massively—obliterating all of North Korea, killing a lot of innocent people whose only crime is trying to survive.”

  Something like that was impossible for María to accept. “Our networks picked up nothing.”

  “Of course not,” Rencke said. “Your attention is on this hemisphere. And I doubt Kim Jong-il shared all of the details with your father. But we are talking about salvation. Mac saved the North Korean regime so that he could save innocent lives, and Kim told your father just that.”

  “I can’t imagine that my father thought you would help save our government,” María said to McGarvey.

  “I see what Otto’s getting at, and I don’t think he meant saving your father’s successors. He meant saving the Cuban people.”

  “From what?”

  “Starvation.”

  María bridled. She wanted to tell them both that they were wrong. But of course, they were not, and she knew it. Everyone in Cuba knew it. “Anything is possible.”

  “Maybe I’m just guessing, ya know,” Otto said. “But I think you didn’t much care about what you probably took as nothing more than the ravings of a dying old man. A father you might have hated.”

  María held herself in check, but it was hard. Both of them were so smug.

  “What changed your mind?” Otto asked. “Why have you gone through all the trouble to get us here?”

  “I wasn’t going to,” she admitted. “Not at first. Not until my photographs from that night were probably transmitted to Langley, which meant it would only be a matter of time before my true identity was no longer a secret.”

  “For all practical purposes, it still is,” McGarvey said. “No one cares that you might be one of Fidel’s illegitimate kids.”

  “They would in Miami.”

  “Sorry, Colonel, but no one really gives a damn. The regime will either change or it will fall, and if that happens, it’ll be a bloodbath, and I think that you and everyone else here knows it.”

  A blinding rage had been building like an approaching hurricane, and it suddenly struck her what a colossal mistake she had made, mounting this insane operation, risking her career, even her life. Raúl had warned that she no longer had her father’s protection. No longer was she anyone special.

  Her anger spiked and she jumped up. “Ramiro!” she shouted.

  Toro appeared at the open slider. “Colonel?”

  “Shoot these bastards and dump their b
odies in the sea.”

  Toro reached for his pistol, and McGarvey was about to shove Otto to the side and upend the table, when Otto laughed.

  “It’s about money, of course,” he said calmly.

  Toro had his pistol out and was bringing it up, but María waved him off, not sure exactly what she’d heard. McGarvey was about ready to spring, but Rencke seemed amused. For just a split instant, she wondered if maybe she was a little out of her depth here.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Money,” Otto said. “Cuba is starving. Your only salvation now that Russian doesn’t subsidize your sugar and we continue to boycott you, especially the bulk of your tourist trade, is money and a lot of it. Five hundred thousand of your government employees have been laid off, and from what I hear, they’re not doing so good.”

  “We have Caracas.”

  “How much aid do you get from them? Not much, I think.”

  “Colonel?” Toro prompted. He still had his pistol pointed at McGarvey.

  “As you were,” María said, and she sat down, having no idea where this was going, but intrigued nonetheless. Salvation, indeed. “I’m listening.”

  “Not a loan from the Association of Latin American States or from the IMF, because you’d have no way of repaying it, and in the end, you’d be in bigger trouble than you are right now.”

  “I’m still listening.”

  “Not a loan, but from a treasure that your father believed rightly belonged to his people. Something he’d searched for most of his life.”

  She’d heard talk over the years, not much, but what there was most often was prefaced by craziness. Muy loco. “How could you possibly know such a thing?”

  “I did some research last night.”

  “What are you talking about?” María demanded. “Research, how? With what?”

  “My memory,” Otto replied. “Your father mentioned it once during his trip to the UN in 1960, and again in 1995, celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of his dictatorship.”

  “Presidency,” María said automatically.

  “Right,” Otto replied dryly.

  There’d always been rumors, of course. El Dorado, Cíbola, sunken Spanish treasure ships—some of which had already been found and plundered off the coast of Florida—tantalizingly close. But nothing was concrete. Nothing that Cuba could lay any legitimate claim to. Nothing easy to find and retrieve. And certainly no fortune large enough to be the salvation for an entire country.

  Toro was still at the slider, his pistol still in hand. María could see him out of the corner of her eye. Again, she had to ask herself if luring them here had been a terrible mistake that could eventually cost her everything—her job, even her life.

  “I want answers,” she told Rencke. “Not fairy tales.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Martínez was seated at a table in a small but tidy second-floor apartment on Avenue Jesús María, a few blocks up from La Habana Vieja waterfront, having coffee with his old friends Fidel and Margarita de la Paz.

  “By tonight, it will be twenty-four hours since I came ashore with Kirk,” he told them. “Plenty of time for his little chat with the coronel.”

  They were in their early sixties—Fidel small and wiry, his muscled arms gnarled with veins and blackened by the sun; his wife just the opposite, buxom, with full broad hips and tree trunks for legs. But no matter how badly things had ever gotten for them—both had spent time at Quivicán, where they’d been starved and beaten—they never lost their sense of humor, their smiles, their good nature, and the basic belief that Cuba would someday be free. And like many Cubans, they knew that their salvation would eventually come from their neighbor to the north. It was the same reason that most Cubans in exile in the United States believed their situations were only temporary. They were on hold until they could return home.

  “Then, niño, we must help,” Margarita said.

  Growing up in Havana, Martínez had known Margarita and Fidel—who were close friends and neighbors with his parents—as tía and tío, aunt and uncle. And from the time they were teenagers, they’d worked underground for the resistance movements in Havana and elsewhere, just lately the militant factions of the Free Expression Solidarity and the Liberty and Democracy movements. Their main pipeline for contacts to the resistance was through a small private restaurant, called a paladar, they operated out of the ground-floor apartment just below. It was one of the private enterprises that the government allowed. And there were so many of them in Havana that the DI couldn’t watch them all.

  “It won’t be easy. But I have a plan.”

  Margarita shrugged. “We can go tonight, if that’s what you wish. But once we have them out, where will we take them?”

  Martínez told them about the float plane and how they had come ashore without a challenge from the patrol boat less than a kilometer away. “He’s standing by at Newfound Harbor for my call.”

  “Your friends might have been expected to show up, and the back door was left open, but it won’t be the same tonight.”

  “We’ll have to take out their communications ability. Antennas and dishes on the roof, and the phone line coming into the property.”

  “Cell phones?” Fidel asked.

  “Jorge will cut power to the Cojimar tower at midnight, and it’ll take Cubacel at least until noon to fix it,” Martínez said. Jorge Guerra was the man in the fishing shack west of Cojimar, whom he’d gone to after McGarvey had been picked up, and Cubacel was the state-operated company that provided cellular service in the Havana district.

  “What about muscle?”

  “Jorge spotted two guys out there who were obviously DI. They were the same ones who picked up Otto Rencke at the airport, and probably the two who came for Mac.”

  “But you can’t be sure,” Fidel said.

  “I was close, but it’s impossible to say for sure.”

  “Then we could be dealing with four guns, maybe more,” Margarita said. “How about the house staff?”

  “A cook, houseboy, and yardman, plus a DI communications specialist, but apparently he’s only on standby in town, coming out when he’s called.”

  “Plus Colonel León,” Fidel said. “She could be a factor.”

  “How do you mean?” Martínez asked.

  “If we’re going to make sure that you have time enough to get out of there, plus time enough for our people to disappear, we’re going to have to take out the DI muscle. That’s trouble enough, but what do you want us to do with the coronel if she’s at the house? If we kill her, this won’t blow over so easily, especially if what you tell me is true about her being El Comandante’s daughter.”

  Martínez had given that possibility some thought, and he’d come up with no easy solution. He shrugged. “This is war. We do whatever is necessary.”

  “It always has been,” Fidel said. “What’s your plan, exactly?”

  “Two cars—four men in each—one from the west and the second from the east, in case she’s decided to station someone on the highway at the entrance to her compound. We go in, two guys take out the comms, while the rest of us deal with the DI muscle, however many of them there are out there—two or four or whatever. We’ll take out the colonel, free Mac and Otto, and get down to the beach.”

  “You’ll need a boat to get out to the airplane, unless your pilot means to pull right up to the beach.”

  “He’ll stand offshore—it’ll be safer for him, quicker takeoff.”

  “Who is he?” Fidel asked.

  “Ernesto Ruiz.”

  Fidel whistled softly. “He has cojones grandes. Offshore will be best. We’ll arrange for a fishing boat, something old and slow that won’t raise any suspicions. You’ll be on it with two men.”

  Martínez started to object. He wanted to be at the house, the one to take out the coronel, if she was there, and there was no reason to think she wouldn’t be, but Margarita didn’t agree.

  “We hear that you are doing good things in Miami, niño, s
o your job is to get your Mac and Otto out and return to your work. The time will come soon enough for you to return to us and bring the fight here.”

  Fidel nodded. “We have plenty of bravery, what we lack are the brains. Someone will have to take over, show us the proper way, once Raúl and his Council of State bunch are gone. You understand the Yanquis and will know how to deal with them when the time comes. A lot of us are afraid of what might happen once they arrive.”

  Margarita touched Martínez’s hand. “We’re afraid we might get rid of a dictator only to find ourselves in bed with a well-meaning elefante. A very large elephant.”

  Martínez still wanted to argue, but he knew it was no use because they were right. “It’s not easy being a son of Cuba,” he said bitterly.

  “It never has been,” she said.

  “We’ll arrange everything,” Fidel said. “In the meantime, go back to Jorge’s. The boat will pick you up there at one.”

  “I’ll call Ernesto.”

  “Make sure he’s on time, or this will all be for naught.”

  People were going to die tonight, Martínez knew, and there was no way to avoid it.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  McGarvey estimated the firing angles and distances between Toro at the slider and María seated across the table with her right shoulder toward the house. It would be very close, but if he feinted to the right, placing María in Toro’s line—and away from Otto—he might have a chance of grabbing her.

  She was staring at him, and as he tensed, ready to move, her eyes widened, understanding what was about to happen, and she started to swing left and raise her hand in a gesture to Toro, who reacted almost instantly, moving to the right and raising his pistol.

  It took less than a split second before Otto suddenly leapt to his feet and waved his arms as if he were flagging down a speeding animal. “Oh, wow!” he shouted.