“Because I’d found out what I needed to know, and I found out that my father had been right when he’d promised that Mr. McGarvey was an honorable man who might be persuaded to help if he understood the true nature of what he was being asked.”
It sounded like a carefully rehearsed speech. “So you’ve made it this far, what next? Because if you think that by some twisted sort of logic, you’re going to convince him to find a treasure and turn it over to your government, you’re deluded. Worse than that, nuts.”
“Not to the government, to the people.”
“Save it for the gullible, Colonel, because when Mac gets here, he’s going to want the truth, not bullshit.”
“I am telling the truth,” María flared. “I burned my bridges in Cuba to come this far.”
“You burned your bridges because you found yourself in the middle of a power struggle. With your father’s death, you were vulnerable. It would have been only a matter of time before you found yourself behind bars, probably in front of a firing squad. You ran for your life.”
“And the lives of my people!”
“Your people,” Louise shot back. “Who the hell are you trying to kid? What did you really come for? Political asylum in trade for secret information from inside the DI? The true skinny on your father’s monstrous treatment of your people?”
“Mr. McGarvey believes me,” María said. “And so does your husband.”
“Right.”
“Otherwise, why did they go to Mexico City to see Dr. Diaz, the historian my father wrote about in his journals? And why did they go to Seville? It means something.”
“It’s not the possibility of a Spanish treasure hidden somewhere after several centuries that is under serious question. It’s your motivation, Colonel, that nobody believes.”
“Well, someone does, because the DI tried to get to me in Miami, and there’s little doubt that they’ll try to find me here.”
“To do what, give you legitimacy?” Louise demanded. She found that she was becoming disturbed, not just by what the woman was saying, but also by what she wasn’t. No apologies, no defense for her actions. María León was a believer, but of what?
“Maybe just that. Or maybe if the DI succeeds in assassinating me, you’ll finally believe that I was telling the truth.”
“You’re a mass murderer.”
“An apparatchik, a functionary,” María said weakly.
And Louise laughed. “Delusional. And it would almost be comic if people like you didn’t have actual power.” Otto had told her that María had almost certainly been trained by the KGB in Moscow. “Is that what you learned in Russia? To blame the system for your excesses — or would you rather call them mistakes?”
A look of genuine anguish made María’s face drop. “I was alone for most of my life.”
“Save it for the confessional,” Louise said harshly.
“I’m here to help.”
“To help yourself.”
“No,” María said. “You have to believe me.”
“We’ll see,” Louise said, and she glanced out the window at the deepening gloom of late afternoon, wishing that Otto and Mac would get here soon. She’d felt competent all the way to this point, even through the ordeal of her kidnapping, But now she felt as if she were in over her head, and she needed help.
FIFTY-FOUR
Fuentes sat in the back of a Capital City Florist windowless van just around the corner from the brownstone where López’s operatives had traced the two women. From here, the sophisticated low-lux cameras and surveillance equipment sensors and antennas had clear sight lines to the rear and west sides of the three-story structure. But nothing electronic, mechanical, or infrared was showing up on the scanners. All they had was the dim early-evening visual image on one of the monitors, and although he was disappointed, he wasn’t surprised; the woman and her husband were technocrats.
Ariel Garcia in white coveralls with the florist company’s logo on the back sat next to Fuentes. He and Hector Vásquez making passes in a Yellow Cab were the only two men López had allowed for the initial stage of the assignment, something else that Fuentes was angry about. But both men were heavily armed with Glock 17 pistols, and the silenced version of the Russian AKS-74U, and both seemed competent.
“If it occurs that we must assassinate her, then we will do it quickly and leave before the authorities arrive,” Fuentes had told the chief of station.
“I won’t allow more killings,” López said angrily.
“The FBI won’t care very much if a Cuban defector — one such as Colonel León, who has signed so many death warrants and whose father was El Comandante — is gunned down.”
“If McGarvey becomes involved—”
“I will take full responsibility,” Fuentes had said, and López reluctantly agreed. Maybe not reluctantly enough, and watching the brownstone from the back of the van, he had to wonder what else the station chief hadn’t told him. That Ortega-Cowan was playing some sort of a game was a foregone conclusion: it was the man’s nature. But the major had never studied under Uncle Fidel, the master of artifice, and Fuentes found that he was almost beginning to enjoy himself. They were in the middle of a game of chess in which the stakes were the highest. And he possibly had the checkmate move.
He had done a lot of thinking in Mexico City and Miami and on the way up here. The operation hinged on whether or not an accessible gold treasure was a possibility. If it wasn’t, the best course would be to assassinate the coronel as a traitor and return home the avenging hero. If the gold actually did exist, which apparently McGarvey and Rencke believed it did — otherwise, why did they travel to Mexico City and then Seville? — then finding it and reporting back to Havana would make him a hero of a much larger sort.
The problem, of course, was Ortega-Cowan and what designs he’d made to manipulate the situation to suit his own ambitions.
First, then, was to somehow find out if the gold existed, and if it did, eliminate McGarvey, who was the only real physical danger; kill the coronel, who would have fulfilled her function by getting them to this point; and finally hold Louise Horn at gunpoint again to ensure her husband’s cooperation. Where McGarvey was a man of action, Rencke was an intellect, a man of the mind, who would find the treasure.
“Base, two.” The radio came to life. It was Vásquez in the cab. He was a short, stocky man with a bull’s thick neck and a raspy smoker’s voice.
Fuentes’s headset was on vox. “Go ahead, two.”
“Two male subjects on foot just went down the driveway to the rear of the location.”
“Can you make a positive ID?”
“A high-probability match.”
It was finally coming together. “Get out of there. But don’t go far. I may need you.”
“Sí,” Vásquez came back.
Fuentes pulled off his headset. “Anything from the house?”
“No.”
López had supplied all three of them with E71 encrypted Nokia cell phones and Bluetooth headsets. The phone’s software, with dual-layered RSA 1024-bit and AES 256-bit military-grade encryption was older generation, but for all practical purposes still unbreakable.
Fuentes speed-dialed Garcia’s phone so he would have continuous contact with the van, and when the connection was made, pocketed the phone and hooked the small headset over his left ear. “Keep me posted if you get anything from the house, or if Hector notices anything I need to know about.”
Garcia was a little flustered. “Where are you going, Captain?”
“We’re getting nothing here, so I’m going in on foot,” Fuentes said, and before the DI Washington field officer could object, he jumped out of the van and headed down the block to the corner.
The brownstone was a three story, well kept but anonymous, the blinds on its front windows tightly drawn. A driveway closed by a tall iron gate on the east side of the building led to what looked like a garage in the rear. From the van, they’d seen a tall stone wall at the bac
k, but it had been impossible to see if there was a gate or opening to the adjacent property.
At the end of the block, Fuentes stopped to light a cigarette. This shaded avenue of residences was well enough away from busy M Street NW with its shops and restaurants, so that there was only light traffic at this hour and no pedestrians. The curb was wall-to-wall parked cars, lights showing in many of the houses; people were home from work, their children home from school. Pleasant, established, traditional, rich, and above all tidy. The electric, phone, and cable lines were all underground.
“Anything from the house?” he asked Garcia back at the van.
“Nothing has changed, Captain. What do you want to do?”
“Stand by,” Fuentes said. He broke the connection and phoned López, who answered on the first ring.
“Good evening.”
“I’ll need help, four additional officers,” Fuentes said, and he explained what he had in mind.
“So you’re going to kill her and McGarvey after all.”
“It may be for the best.”
“What about the treasure?”
“I think that if we’re holding Louise Horn again, it will give her husband incentive to work in our behalf.”
“You’ll need another safe house to keep her.”
“Yes. Will you help?”
“Do I have any choice?” López asked, but it was rhetorical. “I’ll send you two men, but it’ll take one hour. And you must understand that I am merely complying with your orders, nothing further. It something goes bad, you’re on your own, Captain.”
“Sí,” Fuentes said. But when this mission was completed, López would stand in front of a firing squad right next to Ortega-Cowan, if for nothing else than his incorrect attitude.
FIFTY-FIVE
In the brownstone, Mac went directly upstairs to clean up after the trip, and after he’d finished watched from a front window as a man wearing a dark sport coat walked slowly past and at the corner stopped for a minute or so as he spoke on a cell phone before he walked away.
“Looks as if we have company,” he’d told Otto on the first-floor landing before they went back to the kitchen, where Louise had nuked a couple of pizzas.
“Want to call for backup?” Otto asked.
“I want to know how they tracked us. And the only way is to ask them.”
“I don’t want Louise in harm’s way again.”
“They came for Colonel León, and if it comes to it, we’ll offer a trade.”
Otto grinned, even though he was concerned for his wife’s safety. “But you have no intention of giving her up.”
McGarvey shook his head. “We’re going to end up needing her just as much as she needs us.”
“What about our company?”
“When I ask for a cognac, I want you to turn off your security systems. But don’t say anything to the colonel. We’re going to stage a little drama for the DI, and she’s going to be the star.”
Otto opened a gun safe in the hall closet and took out a Walther PPK, a silencer, and two magazines of ammunition for McGarvey; and a subcompact Glock 29 that fired a 10 mm round, and another silencer, which he pocketed along with two magazines of ten rounds each.
“If this goes down, I want you to take the women out of here. Over the roofs,” McGarvey said, as they went back to the kitchen.
“I’ll shoot back if need be,” Otto said, and he was resolute.
Louise had laid out the plates and glasses, and María was opening a bottle of red wine, and they looked up.
“Home again at last,” Louise said. “Did anybody on Campus give you guys trouble?”
“Marty tried to be his usual self, but Walt held him off,” Otto said. “At least temporarily. Gave us forty-eight hours.”
“To do what?” María asked. “Or did you find out what you went looking for in Seville?”
“Enough to convince us that the gold actually does exist,” McGarvey said.
“Well, you better sit down and tell us all about it,” Louise said. “Do you want a cognac?”
“A glass a wine will do for now,” McGarvey said, and he and Otto sat at the counter, and between them they told Louise and María everything that had happened, beginning in Mexico City and their flight out of the country when Mac’s gun had gone missing and they suspected that Dr. Diaz had been assassinated with it.
“It was a DI operation,” McGarvey said, and María protested, but it was obvious she didn’t believe it herself.
“Román isn’t that good, and neither is Manuel,” she said.
“They had to have tracked you to Mexico City, where they probably stumbled across us, and from there they followed us to our meeting with Diaz and managed to dig you out in Miami.”
“Maybe this is just a big scam,” Louise said. “All started by kidnapping me, getting my husband and Mac to come running to your little house by the sea, and then, in a really magnanimous gesture, letting them waltz right out.”
“No reason for it.”
“Hounds and hares? Is that it? Once they took you at your word, you hopped a plane — just that easy — flew to Mexico City, where you figured they’d follow you, and from there Miami, where you could out Raúl. The point of the entire operation. Right?”
María was shaking her head. “I swear that’s not it. I wanted to come here to ask for Mr. McGarvey’s help. I wanted to tell him that I believed him about the gold, and I wanted him to believe that I was only interested in the treasure for my people. Not for the government. ”
“The DI was coming after you in Mexico City and Miami, not Raúl? Is that right?”
“They wanted me dead. Major Ortega-Cowan wants to run operations now that I no longer have my father’s protection.”
“Then why did they kill Dr. Diaz in Mexico City and not you?” Louise hammered. “And again in Miami, your old pal Manuel had you and Raúl in his sights at the hotel — according to what you told me — why didn’t he take the shot? Could have eliminated two big problems, you and Raúl, who’s given the DI fits for the past ten years. And the guy was certainly capable of it — he’d already proved that much by taking out three of Raúl’s people.”
Throughout all of that, McGarvey got the impression that for all her training and experience, María was a little naïve. She’d been sheltered from the real world for most of her life; even though she had risen remarkably fast in the Cuban intelligence service, she’d never wanted for anything, her orders were obeyed, she was treated with a real respect to a measure that most women in the country didn’t enjoy, and her future had never been uncertain — at least not in her mind — until her father had died. Yet she had risked everything merely on a speculation that Otto had proposed.
“She could have come straight here from Mexico City,” McGarvey said. “But she took a big risk going to Miami first. Lot of people down there would like to have put a bullet in her head. If not to out Raúl, why’d you do it?”
María looked grateful. “It was the only way I thought I could prove my intentions.”
“Save us,” Louise said, rolling her eyes.
“Just a minute, I want to hear what she has to say,” McGarvey interrupted. “What are your intentions?”
“To find the gold—”
“You’ve already said that. But just how do you envision getting the gold, if we find it, to your people? It’s in the U.S., on a military reservation, so just getting to it is the first big hurdle. It has to be dug up, maybe loaded aboard trucks — or were you planning on using helicopters? — and then driven where? Across the border into Mexico, right where it started from a few hundred years ago? All of this would have to be done under cover of darkness, of course, and without the air force or border patrol learning about it — so I guess that would leave out helicopters, unless they flew very low.”
María held her silence, as did Otto and Louise.
“So now the gold is in Mexico, maybe several hundred tons of it. The Cuban air force could send some transport a
ircraft, except even if you had enough airplanes capable of landing in the desert for the job, which I doubt, someone would take notice and want to know what was going on. Our people watch your excursions out into the Gulf pretty closely, and I’m sure that the Mexican air force would be curious about what might look like an invasion or at the very least a smuggling operation.”
María managed a faint smile. “Something like that,” she said, and McGarvey knew then that he had her. “But it’s going to depend on you to not only find the gold, but allow me to bring some of it home, too.”
“But not to Havana.”
“To a processing and distribution center at Guantánamo Bay at first,” she said.
“With my government’s cooperation for a piece of the pie.”
“I’d need that, too.”
McGarvey nodded. “I’ll tell you how we’re going to find the gold, and you’re going to tell me how you’re getting it out of Mexico and across to Guantánamo Bay.” He glanced at Louise. “But first I think I’d like that cognac after all.”
FIFTY-SIX
After his walk around the block, Fuentes ended up back at the van, where Garcia was about to call him on the phone. The surveillance technician had shoved his headset off one ear and had the Nokia out, ready to dial, and he was excited. Fuentes slipped into the seat next to him.
“Something’s finally coming through,” Garcia said.
Fuentes snatched a headset, and though he was hearing voices and some other sounds, it took several seconds for him to begin to make some sort of sense of exactly what was coming from the house, and he suddenly recognized María’s voice, and that of a man, perhaps McGarvey. “I hope you’re recording this,” he said.
“It kicked on automatically,” Garcia said. He adjusted something on one of his panels, and the voices became clearer. “I’m getting bounce from one of the rear windows — a kitchen, I think. They’re having something to eat.”
“You’d need the help of the drug cartels along the border,” McGarvey was saying. “That might create a problem.”
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