The moment was held in tableau, María looking up in surprise, the muzzle of Toro’s pistol wavering somewhere to McGarvey’s left, when Otto began hopping from one foot to the other as he often did when he was excited and lost in the moment.
“Maybe not such a big fairy tale after all, ya know!” he shouted, totally wild now, his long red frizzy hair flying in every direction, his eyes flashing as if he were a madman, which in effect, for the moment, he was.
McGarvey was about to move when Gonzáles, the guard who’d sat atop the lifeguard tower on the beach this morning, rounded the corner of the house from the west in a run, a Kalashnikov in his hand.
He shouted something in Spanish.
“No,” María ordered. “Stand down! Stand down!”
Otto acted as if he were oblivious of everything, but McGarvey momentarily caught his eye and realized all of a sudden that it was an act meant to bring the situation to a head and then defuse it.
“Fourteen ninety-two!” Otto shouted, and he looked at María as if he expected an answer from her.
Toro and Gonzáles were stopped in their tracks, looking at him.
María spread her hands. “Columbus,” she said.
“Exacatamundo,” Otto said. He sat down, poured a measure of rum, drank it neat, and then looked again at María as if he’d just told her what she wanted to hear.
She shook her head.
McGarvey had a glimmer of what Otto might be getting at, besides stalling for time, but he let it be.
“Fourteen ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue,” Otto prompted. “Found the New World. Killed most of the natives in the Caribbean with chicken pox, but then did something very bad. Worst thing possible. He found gold. And the floodgates opened. The Old World sat up and took notice when Chris came back from his first trip. He proved the world was round, all right, but he found gold, and there never was anything like it. Every gold rush since has been child’s play by comparison to the hordes of Spaniards who showed up here and in Mexico, because those guys sailed up in heavily armed ships, something the natives couldn’t even have dreamed of, and landed hundreds of soldiers in armor, along with their horses and their weapons. It would have been like a U.S. aircraft carrier battle group with jets and SEALs showing up off Boston just before the start of the Revolutionary War. It would have been all over except for the shoutin’.”
“I know about this,” María saíd. “But what does it have to do with Cuba?”
“Everything, or maybe nothing, depends on who you talk to, and how you follow the money trail, ’cause the first gold the Spaniards found was in Costa Rica and Hispaniola, and after they’d just about killed everyone with disease and overwork, they came to Cuba looking for more slaves. That was in 1511.”
“Don’t teach me the history of my country,” María flared. “Make your point.”
“Look, if you added up all the gold the Spaniards mined and just flat-out stole from the Mayans and what was left over from the Aztec civilization all through the sixteenth century, it would only amount to maybe twenty-five tons—not a lot of money even by today’s standards. But the next hundred years were a completely different story, because by then the Spanish government was in control of pretty much everything from California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and possibly as far north as parts of Colorado, down through Mexico and Central America to Venezuela. All the while looking for gold. Turning it into ingots, and coins, and sending most of it back home to Madrid, where inflation was killing the government, bleeding it dry. It’s why Spain eventually dropped into some serious poverty. It ran out of money.”
This was Otto’s show, and for the moment McGarvey let it stay that way, waiting for an opening. María was becoming absorbed, but Toro and Gonzáles were focused on what they understood was a dangerous situation.
“Don’t you see?” Otto asked.
“No,” María said.
“A whole bunch of that gold and silver was sent back to Spain through Havana, where it was loaded aboard fleets of ships, convoys that provided safety in numbers.”
“Pirates.”
“Right. Everyone wanted some of the action, and they were willing to do whatever it took to climb aboard the gravy train. Including the Spanish governor in Cuba, who took his percentage of everything shipped through Havana. Which was a pretty good deal while it lasted, because he got his share first, before the ships headed out, bunches of them going down in storms. The shipping lanes between Cuba and Spain are carpeted in gold.”
“The government in Cuba, as you say, was Spanish,” María said. “And if you’re trying to tell me that Spain owes us anything, you’re crazier than you look.”
“That’s not the entire story,” Otto said. “You’re not counting the gold that never got to Havana.”
“Are you talking about the gold that pirates or crooked mine operators, or highwaymen in Mexico took?”
“That was nothing but shrinkage—ten or fifteen percent of the total at most. I’m talking about monks.”
“The Church?”
“Bingo,” Otto said. “By the mid-1700s, serious amounts of gold and silver were coming out of the ground from Costa Rica up to Mexico and into the States, all of it supposed to be shipped to Mexico City, some of it going to Manila and then China, but a lot of it to Havana by convoy. But the Church figured that its needs for the gold far outweighed the needs of what by then was thought to be one of the most corrupt governments in Europe, so the story goes the monks began siphoning off as much of it as they figured they could get away with.”
“How much?”
“Hundreds of tons,” Otto said. “At seventeen-hundred-plus dollars per ounce, that’s about four and a half billion per hundred tons. Serious money.”
María was dazed, and now Toro and Gonzáles were caught up in it.
“But that’s just the melted-down value,” Otto said. “The historical value could be worth ten times that much.”
“If it didn’t come through Havana, how did they get it to the Vatican?” María asked.
“That part I don’t know, except that the treasure never made it to Madrid, and if it had reached Rome, the Church kept silent. What I really think happened is that the gold never made it out of Mexico.”
“You think that it’s buried somewhere.”
“In the U.S., maybe,” Otto said. “I’m guessing about this part, but a big cache of Spanish gold was supposedly found by an American named Milton Noss in a series of caves under a small mountain in southern New Mexico. One of the legends says that a series of donkey caravans manned by hundreds of monks came to the mountain from the south through an area called the Jornada del Muerto—journey of death—dug the caves, and hid their cargo. They also brought their religion and spread the Word amongst the Pueblo Indians that the mountain was holy ground.”
“If there is any of this siphoned-off gold, it could be anywhere by now,” María said. “In the ground between Mexico and the U.S., maybe at the bottom of the sea somewhere between Mexico and here, or buried in some vault beneath the Vatican. Maybe even spent by the Church for one of its cathedrals.”
“If it ended up in Rome, there would be records, in Mexico City or the Vatican,” Otto said.
“Or in Madrid.”
“Or right here in your father’s papers,” Otto suggested.
“That would be a starting point,” McGarvey said.
Toro and Gonzáles were obviously intrigued, but not so much that they had dropped their guard.
“Maybe,” María said. She, too, was distracted. “Even if what you’re telling me is true, what claim would Cuba have on the gold? It was taken by force from the natives, most of whom were worked to death as slaves in the mines, but how could a concrete value be placed on that?”
“Some of them were Cuban natives,” Otto said.
María waved it off. “An extinct people.”
“Retribution, your father told you,” McGarvey said. “Maybe he meant reparations. Owed to Cuba by the Span
ish government.”
“What if the gold is in Mexico or the U.S., as you suggest is possible?”
“A case could be made for one third to Spain, one third to the country wherever it’s found, and one third to Cuba. Still a lot of money.”
“Craziness,” María said after a very long beat, and the afternoon was suddenly very quiet. The wind had died to a whisper and even the surf breaking on the reef seemed to have subsided.
“Colonel?” Toro prompted, breaking her out of her reverie.
She got to her feet and gave them a last lingering look. “Take Mr. Rencke back to his room,” she said, and she turned.
“There’s no need to separate us,” McGarvey said. “You have my word.”
She gave him a bleak look, then went back into the house.
“Keep your word, and nothing will happen to your friend,” Toro said. “Do you understand?”
“We’ve told her what she wanted to know, so when do we get out of here?” Otto asked.
“That’s up to the coronel.”
Otto got up. “Well, you might want to tell the coronel that if anything happens to my wife, I will personally see to crashing every computer system on this island. Your government networks, your banking and shipping and air traffic control will end up in the Dark Ages. And I can do it from my little room right here. I shit you not.”
“And I will kill you and your coronel,” McGarvey said, no inflection in his voice. “Count on it.”
TWENTY-SIX
It was dark again, the evening of what Louise thought might be the third day since she’d been kidnapped, though with the drugs they’d given her, she suspected that she could be off by a full twenty-four hours, maybe longer.
Lying on the dirty mattress, she’d watched the fading light in the crack between the plywood and the windowframe, but she’d been unable to muster the energy to get up and turn on the bathroom light. They’d fed her regularly, she thought, yet she had become weak. Maybe drugs in the food because of her threat yesterday. And she began to truly believe that she was going to die here, and never see Otto or Audie again.
Someone came to the door and Louise struggled to sit up, her head spinning and a sudden wave of nausea making her break out in a cold sweat. When the door opened, the light from the corridor was blinding and she had to shade her eyes. She felt so goddamned helpless, she wanted to scream.
The man who called himself Rodrigo came in with a tray of food and a bottle of Evian. “It’s good that you’re awake,” he said. “You slept through lunch, and we were beginning to get worried about you.”
He set the water on the floor next to the mattress and started to put the tray down, when Louise managed to gather some little bit of strength, ball up her fist, and punch him in the face, sending him back, more in surprise than anything, the tray dropping to the floor.
“Ay, Jesús!”
“If you bastards are going to kill me, get it over with. But stop drugging my food.”
“Puta, maybe that’s exactly what we’ll do. We no longer need you.”
Louise kicked the tray away, and rolling over to her hands and knees shoved herself upright and somehow got unsteadily to her feet, her head spinning wildly and bile coming to the back of her throat. She wanted to vomit, but she held it back by sheer force of will. She wasn’t going to give the son of a bitch the satisfaction of seeing her sick.
“Come on,” she said, holding out her hands. “You want, let’s have it out right now.”
Cruz stepped back, an odd, wary expression in his eyes that Louise couldn’t read. But she’d gotten his attention. One for the Christians, zip for the lions, as Otto would say.
“Well?” she goaded him.
“We warned you to behave yourself.”
“That’s not going to happen, ’cause I won’t eat this shit anymore, and I get really mean when I’m hungry. Could be next time you come back, I’ll take out your eyes, or maybe kick your miserable little balls right up to your armpits.”
She stepped forward and Cruz backed up. He was shaking his head. “You’re loca.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” Louise said, and all of a sudden, she was so overwhelmed with weariness that her knees began to buckle. “Bring me something decent to eat, and maybe I’ll start to behave myself.”
“Eat what’s on the floor.”
Louise bent down, very slowly, her movements those of an old woman, picked up the tray, straightened up, and threw it at him. But it was thrown weakly and he caught it easily.
“If you don’t want to feed me, you’d best bring some help the next time you come through that door.”
Cruz gave her a last, lingering look—half anger, half grudging respect—and he backed out of the room and closed and locked the door.
Louise sank down on the mattress, her stomach doing slow rolls until she managed to open the bottle of water and take a drink. It was possible that the water, and not the food had been drugged, but she no longer cared. She’d made her point.
TWENTY-SEVEN
“It’s on for tonight,” Martínez told Ruiz on the encrypted satellite phone. He was calling from a thatched roof porch at the front of the fishing shack right on the beach a few miles to the west of the coronel’s compound.
“Same spot?” the pilot asked. He’d been standing by on Little Torch Key near Newfound Harbor ever since he’d flown back last night.
“Yes. I’m shooting for around midnight, give or take a half hour. Can you make it?”
“Of course,” Ruiz said. “Have you run into trouble?”
“Nothing so far,” Martínez said, and he told Ruiz everything that had happened since he and McGarvey came ashore, including the setup he’d arranged with Fidel and Margarita.
“I’ve heard good things about them. But take care, Raúl, you’re needed here. You could have sent someone else for the rescue.”
“Not this time,” Martínez said.
Jorge Guerra, his primary contact and longtime friend of the de la Paz’s, came around the corner at the same time Martínez heard the low growl of a slow-moving boat just offshore, very close.
“Gotta go, my people are showing up, and they need to be briefed,” Martínez said. “Some of them are probably going to die tonight, and they need to know the odds.”
“And we’re not going to have the protection getting out that we had coming in.”
“No. Best you circle low and slow twenty or thirty miles out until it’s time for our extraction. I’ll call you.”
“Go with God,” Ruiz said.
“And you,” Martínez said, and he broke the connection.
Guerra, a short wiry man in his late fifties whose skin, fried by countless hours of commercial fishing in the sun, made him look seventy, offered a little smile. “They know the odds, not only in the operation but afterwards when the DI comes looking for them and their families.”
“Some of them can come with us.”
Guerra shook his head. “No.”
The boat was very close now, though because it was running without lights, Martínez couldn’t make it out until it was a few yards from the rickety dock Guerra sometimes used. When it pulled up, one man jumped down, tied it off, and a moment later when the engine was shut off, the second man jumped down to the dock and the two of them came up to the house, both of them rough looking, weathered like Guerra, who introduced them as Luis Casas and Pedro Requeiro.
“Pedro actually made it to Miami and lived there with his brother-in-law Miguel Sánchez for five years, helping with the dry cleaning business,” Ruiz said.
“I’m a fisherman,” Requeiro said, laughing. “Anyway, washing clothes is for young mothers and old ladies, not men.”
“I know your brother-in-law,” Martínez said. “He’s a good man.”
“He says the same thing about you. It’s the only reason we’re here tonight.”
“It won’t be easy.”
“What is?” Casas said.
“Come inside,
I’ve made a sketch map I’d like you to look at.”
“Is there rum?” Requeiro asked.
“Of course.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
At Fidel’s compound, where there was already talk about turning it into a museum for El Comandante and the revolution, María was stopped again at the gate by two armed guards. This time, they’d not been warned that she was coming, and they drew their pistols as they approached the car, one of them holding a couple meters back.
It was dark, and she had parked just within the circle of light atop the gatehouse, but the security officer who came over shone his flashlight through her open window.
“Good evening, Colonel,” he said. “I’m sorry, but I have orders that no one is to be admitted this evening.”
“Whose orders?”
“El Presidente’s.”
“Call him.”
“Colonel?”
“I’m going up to the house, call him and tell him that I’m here.”
The security officer was suddenly uncomfortable. “It was Captain Fuentes who actually gave us the orders in the name of El Presidente.”
“Then call him.”
“Unfortunately, the captain is not in the compound this evening. It’s only the security and house staff plus some of the family.”
“Fine, then I’ll telephone Raúl,” María said, and she took her cell phone out of her shoulder bag. She started to punch in a random number.
“That won’t be necessary, Colonel,” the security officer said quickly. He stepped away from the car and motioned for the other man to move aside.
María canceled the call and drove into the compound, dousing her lights when she came into the clearing, and pulled up in front of her father’s house. The cook, a nervous old woman, met her at the door.
“May I be of assistance, Señora Coronel?”
“No, return to your duties,” María said, and she went back to her father’s bedroom, hesitating just inside the doorway. The bed had been made up, and she thought that she smelled a cleaning solution of some kind, yet the odor of death mixed with mustiness still hung in the air, and she shivered. She could smell his dying breath.
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