Castro's Daughter

ONE

The streets of downtown Havana out to the suburb of Miramar were all but deserted at two of a muggy morning as María León, driving an older 7 Series BMW, pulled up at the security entrance to the compound of Fidel Castro.

She was a slender woman, thirty-six, her flowing dark hair framing a finely defined dusky face of high cheekbones, narrow nose, firm chin, and broad, darkly expressive eyes. She was dressed in an L.A. Rams T-shirt and light-colored shorts that accentuated her long legs.

But she wasn’t crying, not yet, if ever she would. She had mixed feelings about her father that very often bordered on hate, even now that he was dying.

A pair of officers in slacks and guayabera shirts, both of them armed, came out of the gatehouse. One of them held back, his hand on the butt of the pistol in his shoulder holster, while the other approached the open driver’s-side window. They were not smiling.

Neither of them had pulled their weapon. She could easily have shot both of them with a silenced pistol and gotten into the compound without raising an alarm.

She held up her state credentials card, which identified her as Director of Operations for Cuba’s foreign secret service — the DI, Dirección de Inteligencia — and for a moment, the man at her window didn’t know what to do.

“Damned sloppy, both of you,” María said. Security out here came under the umbrella of operations, and up until now, she’d assumed that Captain Manuel Fuentes, the little mouse of a man who ran the division for her, was doing a good job.

“I’m sorry, señora, but you were expected and we recognized the car.”

“Anyone could have been driving. The real María León could be lying dead in a ditch somewhere.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Get out of my way, puto,” María told him, and as he stepped back, she raced down the one-way driveway that passed through one of the security screens of trees that crisscrossed the compound, the first tears beginning to well up in her eyes.

She was angry, as she’d been for most of her life. She felt as if she could count on one hand the number of times she’d ever been truly happy or in love or not lonely. Since she’d finally stopped asking why she was treated differently from the other children in the KGB-run special school years ago, she’d been so filled with resentment that most of the time — like this morning — the bitterness lit up her insides with a nuclear furnace that powered nearly every aspect of her life and her career.

“You’re mad all the time,” one of her lovers, a dashing captain in the air force, had told her one night after they made love.

“It’s what keeps me going,” she remembered telling him.

“That’s too bad for you, because it’s ugly.”

But then, he wasn’t an illegitimate daughter of Fidel’s, not acknowledged, not once. Never told that she was loved, never held in her father’s arms, never seated at his table, never allowed to play with his other children. No aunts or uncles or cousins or grandparents to send her little presents. No vacations to the mountains, or even day trips to the beach.

Only tutors, studying, books, small classes where students were identified only by their first names in schools run by stern, no-nonsense Russians who endlessly drummed into their heads that they were special, that ahead of them lay brilliant futures in service to the state.

Later, the purely academic subjects of mathematics and science and languages — Spanish, of course, but also Russian and especially English, and all the rich literature — were followed by political indoctrination lessons last thing every day, almost like boring sugarless desserts.

And then when she turned thirteen, María joined a small class of boys, dressed like them in camouflaged uniforms, and learned weapons and explosives and hand-to-hand combat, a discipline she enjoyed immensely. A vent for her anger.

The entire compound was lit up, and driving up to her father’s house, she saw a lot of people milling around, some of them by the pool, some in the covered walkway and in the living room, spilling out from the open doors. She knew this place, but she’d never been here at the same time as her father, and she hated herself all the more for feeling sad about that it.

Fuentes, speaking on a walkie-talkie, came from the house as María parked behind a line of mostly beat-up old American cars from the 1950s. Dressed in green military fatigues with no name tag or insignia of rank — the same as Fidel and most of the others from the revolution favored — he looked like some idiot outfitted for a costume ball, or one of those dreary Marxist stage productions about the bright Communist world, where every worker was treated the same.

“You’re almost too late,” he sniveled.

María resisted the sudden urge to take the little man apart here and now, but it would wait. “I want you in my office at eight, Captain,” she said sharply.

Fuentes flinched, but he didn’t back down. “Is there something wrong with my security arrangements, Madam Director?”

“Plenty,” she said. “Now, did El Comandante ask for me specifically?”

“Yes, and he’s sent everyone away, except for Dr. Céspedes.”

Some of the people on the veranda and just inside the house were looking at her — some of them family, others close personal advisers — but none of them smiled. She was an outsider, the fact that Fidel was her father a closely guarded secret except from a select few, Fidel’s brother Raúl among them. None of the leader’s children had any idea she was a half sister, and the people gathered here this morning knew her as nothing more than some government functionary. But they were obviously curious about why Fidel had called her to his deathbed.

She glared at them, but then admitted to Fuentes that she didn’t know the way.

“I’ll show you,” Fuentes said coolly, and he took her through the modestly furnished living room to the small master bedroom at the rear corner of the house, knocked once, and went inside.

The room stank of death and decay mingled with the odors of medicines and maybe alcohol, and cigar smoke that was permanently embedded in the walls and ceilings and fabrics. Fidel Castro lay propped up with a couple of pillows in the middle of a queen-sized bed, his doctor taking his blood pressure. His face had sagged, and his beard was poorly shaved, leaving a bluish tinge to his skin.

He turned his head when María approached, and she got the impression that he was minutes if not seconds away from death. His eyes were weeping some thick mucus, and a little blood had seeped from his mouth to stain the front of his pajamas. But when he focused on her, he seemed to revive, pulling himself up out of a near stupor.

“Leave us now,” he told the doctor, his voice weak but surprisingly firm and understandable.

The doctor hesitated but then took the blood pressure cuff off Fidel’s arm and walked out with Fuentes, leaving María alone with her father, and she realized how frightened she was.

Fidel was nearly a god to most people of Cuba, and to her as well, she had to admit. From the time that, as a teenager, she’d learned who her father was — the reason she was so special to her Russian teachers — she’d been almost in awe of herself, of her genes. That reverence had turned to anger within a few years because of his distance, because he never acknowledged her, and because she was constantly reminded that her relationship to Fidel was an important state secret. Divulging it would be considered an act of treason.

And after a while, she began to understand the reasons for the secrecy — or at least she thought she did — which only increased an anger that was directed inward. She began to hate herself for loving her father, or at least her idealized notion of what a father should be. She wanted to be proud, a vanity that she thought was stupid. She wanted to think about him rescuing her from a dreary life; it would have taken only one stroke of a pen, one word to Raúl, and she would have been properly acknowledged. Loved. Yet she hated that longing, too, because of all the years of her life that had been wasted.

In the end, brainwashed or not, she became the functionary the Russians had trained her to be. An agent for the state, taught spy craft and international diplomacy at the finest schools in Moscow.

And right now, she felt like a child. “Hello, Papá,” she said, unable to think of anything else.

“Come closer.”

She went next to him, where the smell of death was much stronger. Her heart pounded and her mouth was dry. Dios mio, she felt stupid. “I’m here.”

Phlegm rattled deep in Fidel’s chest. “You’re a beautiful child,” he said, his voice very soft as he tried to catch his breath. “Retribution,” he whispered. His eyes closed.

She leaned closer, half-convinced he had just died. “What did you say?” she asked. She didn’t want to touch him.

His eyes opened and María was so startled, she reared back.

“Find Kirk McGarvey,” he said. “Bring him here. He’ll know.”

She knew the name, of course: He was the near legendary former director of the CIA who until recently had gone back to work for the agency from time to time. He’d once even conducted some investigation at Guantánamo Bay, so he was a fixture on the DI’s Persons of Interest list. But he had dropped out of sight some months ago, and nothing she’d read in any Daily Report or Weekly Summary hinted at any operation of interest to Cuba that he was currently engaged with.

“He’s retired,” she told her father. “No longer a threat to us.”

“It’s what I want,” Fidel croaked, half-rising off his pillows, his face turning beet red.

María was truly alarmed now. She didn’t want to witness her father’s death, and she certainly didn’t want to cause it. All her anger was gone. “I’ll call the doctor.”

“No,” Fidel said, his voice strong again for just that one word. “He knows.”

“What does he know?”

Fidel started to say something, but then he shook his head and fell back. “Our salvation. Bring him here. Ask him. Promise me. My friend Jong-il told me he could be trusted.”

She had no idea what her father was talking about, except that Kim had been the General Secretary of North Korea; maybe this was only the lunatic ravings of a dying old man who’d manipulated practically the entire world for nearly all his life. The U.S. embargoes made Cuba poor while at the same time making Fidel more powerful in the eyes of his people. He was the man who stood up to the United States. The Bay of Pigs was his victory, as was the so-called missile crisis, out of which came the pledge from Washington that Cuba would never be attacked.

“Promise,” Fidel said, his voice nearly inaudible now.

But he’d first said retribución. For what? Guantánamo? María touched his bony shoulder. “I promise, Papá,” she told him.

And he smiled the open yet secret way he did when he went on television and shook his fist at the United States. She’d seen the smile a thousand times; everyone in Cuba had. And everyone knew that he was holding something up his sleeve. “Be careful whom you trust, child.”

“I promise,” she said softly.

And a moment later, Fidel Castro took his last, shallow breath, his open eyes draining of life.

María looked at the old man. The bastard was up to something, even at the last. It was amazing, and perhaps, she thought, her life to this point had been a better one without his acknowledgment.

TWO

Carlos Gutiérrez, one of the gardeners on the staff, had stepped outside for a smoke on happenstance when the woman driving the BMW showed up, and he lingered in the shadows near the end of the covered walkway until she came out after only a few minutes inside.

He was Cuban born but had escaped to Miami with his sister and parents when he was eight, and after he graduated with an honors law degree from Stetson, the CIA had recruited him. He was whip thin with a dark, narrow boyish face that made him look eighteen when in fact he was twenty-eight. He was dedicated to the Cuban people and the eventual overthrow of the Communist government so that his family and other refugees could return to their homeland in peace.

Making sure that no one could see what he was doing, Carlos pulled out his cell phone and snapped a half dozen photos of the woman, two of them nearly face-on and two of the car, one capturing the government license tag.

Whoever the woman was, she had to be well connected. Only important people drove nearly new luxury cars, because sure as hell she wasn’t a rich tourist, not with those government plates. And a tourist would not have been invited to Fidel’s deathwatch.

Pocketing his cell phone, Carlos started back to his room around the other side of the swimming pool when Captain Fuentes came from the house and said something to the group on the covered veranda, and a woman screamed out loud.

Another woman shouted, “El Comandante!” and began to sob.

The old bastard had finally died, and Carlos held back a smile. Maybe now they could begin to make some progress, come back from the fifty-year slide into abject poverty.

He turned and slipped away into the shadows at the end of the walkway and hurried around the pool to his quarters, actually just one small room with a bathroom, the same as all the other service personnel, including security, here in the compound. No one was above anyone else, they were constantly told.

He stopped a moment in the darkness to check out the window. But evidently no one had seen him take the pictures and then followed him to find out what he was up to. For now, he was safe.

Leaving the lights out, he went into the bathroom — where, by feel, he removed a small panel from behind the toilet and took out an encrypted sat phone wrapped tightly in a plastic bag. It took less than one minute for the device to power up and automatically find the right satellite so that he could enter his eleven-digit alphanumeric password. The phone connected to only one number at Langley, which was answered in English on the first ring by his handler.

“Yes.”

“Fidel is dead.”

“When?”

“Just minutes ago,” Carlos said. “But there is something else. An important woman I’ve never seen before showed and was taken inside by Captain Fuentes himself. She stayed only a short time, and she left just before the announcement was made.”

“How do you know that she is important?”

“She was driving a BMW, looked fairly new.”

“Was she alone?”

“Yes,” Carlos said. He’d never met his handler face-to-face and knew the man only by the name John. But he had complete confidence in his colleague. John’s was a calm voice; his advice had always been reasonable and steady. “I have photographs.”

“Send them now.”

In the sat phone’s bag was a USB cord, which Carlos used to connect his cell phone to the satellite phone. He brought up the stored pictures file and sent them as a message. The transfer took a couple of seconds.

“I have them,” John said. “Stand by.”

Suddenly nervous, Carlos went to the window to look outside when the door burst open and one of Captain Fuentes’s security officers barged in, pistol drawn.

“What are you up to, you bastard?” the officer demanded.

Carlos feinted as if he were trying to make a run for the bathroom to get to the window there, and the guard switched his aim just far enough left to leave himself wide open. But there could be no gunfire to alert the staff, so Carlos grabbed the officer’s gun hand, gripping the hammer so that it could not be triggered, and twisted the weapon out of the man’s grasp all in one lightning-fast movement.

The security officer was a large man by Cuban standards, and was slow on his feet, giving Carlos time to ram three fingers into a spot just below the man’s Adam’s apple, driving him backwards and instantly constricting his windpipe.

After jamming the pistol into the waistband of his trousers and dropping the connected phones on the edge of the bed, Carlos was on the gasping security officer, shoving him to the side and twisting the man’s head sharply to the left, snapping his neck, and letting him crumple, dying, to the floor.

John had not disconnected.

“I’ve been burned,” Carlos told him. “But I’m okay for the moment.”

“What are your chances of getting out of the compound?”

Carlos looked out the window. No one else was coming. “Fifty — fifty,” he said. And the fact that he was now armed meant absolutely nothing. Because once the shooting began, by anybody, he would be cornered.

“Your extraction point is X-ray, copy?”

“Roger, X-ray,” Carlos said.

“Good luck.”

Glancing out the window again to make sure that he was still in the clear, Carlos shut off the phones, pocketed them, and stepped outside into the warm, humid night. X-ray was Marina Hemingway, about fifteen kilometers west along the coast, where a speedboat and captain would be waiting for him. But even if he managed to get to the motor pool on the other side of the house without being spotted, managed to steal a car and drive away, his chances once he got to the boat were hardly better. The Cuban navy maintained a heavy patrol presence around the entire island, but especially on its north coast. And they were good at intercepting watercraft.

More cars were coming up the driveway, and the crowd at the front of the house had grown appreciably in the last few minutes. He’d never really known these people, even though this was his country. From the moment he’d come back to the island, he felt a disconnect between the Cubans here and the Cuban exiles in Miami and elsewhere. That rift was not only the result of fifty-plus years of separation, but mostly came about because of the vastly different lifestyles between here and the States. The language was the same, but the words had come to have different meanings.

Carlos hesitated for just a moment before he started the opposite way he had come, down a path that led behind the house and away from the growing crowd coming from Havana. By dawn, there would be hundreds of people here from all over the island. And he supposed that heads of state or their representatives from all over the world would be attending the funeral sometime next week, fawning over a dictator and mass murderer who’d once brought the entire western hemisphere to the brink of nuclear war.

Light spilled out from the windows in Fidel’s bedroom, and Carlos had to get off the path to stay in the darkness.

“Alto!” Halt! someone shouted from behind.

And it was over just like that, just as he knew the day would likely come. He veered to the right, directly away from the house, and sprinted deeper into the darkness, pulling the security officer’s 9 mm Glock 17 from his waistband.

“Halt!” someone else shouted from ahead.

And Carlos raised the pistol forward and fired five shots in quick succession, and pulled off five more to the rear.

A bullet slammed hard into the base of his spine, knocking him forward off his feet the instant before he heard the sound of the shot. He felt no pain, except that breathing seemed difficult and he was having trouble moving his gun hand.

Moments, or perhaps minutes, later — time seemed to be distorted — someone kicked the pistol away from his hand and he looked up as Captain Fuentes hunched down next to him.

“It seems we were right to keep an eye on you.”

“Bastardo,” Carlos managed to croak, amazed that he still felt no pain, but worried that he felt as if he were drowning. And the sinking sensation was getting worse.

“Whom do you work for?” Fuentes asked. “The CIA?”

Three years in place, essentially on a deathwatch, from which almost no hard intelligence had been gained, except for the time and date of El Comandante’s passing, and the unexpected appearance of a mystery woman — perhaps Fidel’s last visitor. John had the photographs, so maybe something interesting would come of it.

Captain Fuentes was shouting words that Carlos couldn’t quite make out, and his last thought was that he would have liked to meet John face-to-face, maybe over a cold cerveza.

THREE

The headquarters of the Dirección de Inteligencia is located in Plaza Havana — across from the Parque de la Fraternidad, in sight of the capitol building, amongst most of Cuba’s government buildings — and driving there a couple of hours before dawn, María still wasn’t quite sure what she was feeling.

Traffic had begun to pick up, most of it heading down to Miramar, leaving her to wonder if everyone in the country except her had been on a deathwatch this morning, dressed and ready to respond. She was sound asleep at her finca on the beach near the tiny fishing village of Cojimar — about ten kilometers east of La Habana Vieja, old town — after a difficult day, when the call came from Fuentes, and it had taken her a half hour to get her act together.

Raúl, who had officially succeeded his brother in 2008, would be the one to announce El Comandante’s death, and the proclamation of a state of national mourning. Out of the public’s eye, Cuba’s military and intelligence services would be placed on the highest condition of alert against the chance that some nation might try to take advantage of what could be perceived as a weakness in government. At least, that’s the stance she was sure Raúl and his generals were taking right now. It was another reason for her to go directly to her office, because things were going to get very busy in the government plaza.

The precautions were paranoia, but that was the state of affairs all of them would be faced with, especially her directorate. Another Bay of Pigs? She didn’t think so; there’d been no hints, no odd bits of intelligence from Miami or Washington to suggest such a possibility. But she needed to be ready for the rounds of meetings and staff conferences with every scrap of intel her directorate could produce.

Parking in her slot in the rear, she went inside, showing her ID to the man on duty, whose right eyebrow rose at the sight of her in a T-shirt and shorts. But she was a colonel and he was a sergeant, so he said nothing.

She took the elevator up to her suite of offices on the third floor. In addition to the night-duty officer and his four people manning the watch, which closely monitored the output of the entire sophisticated network of signals intelligence (SIGINT) facilities around the island, her chief of staff, Major Román Ortega-Cowan was also seated at his desk.

He was a career intelligence officer of medium height, with a thick barrel chest, a square-jawed face, and wide, smiling eyes under a high golden tinged forehead and coarse, richly black curly hair. His passion was opera, for which it was rumored he knew by heart the score and libretto for every major work performed in the last two hundred years. He was also a patron of the country’s four professional orchestras and one seriously depleted opera company, many of whose members had fled to take jobs, mostly in Spain.

But in María’s estimation, he was a conniving, two-faced hijo de puta whose smile concealed deeper, darker purposes — almost always for his own personal gain — and who needed to be constantly guarded against. Exactly why she had picked him for her chief of staff three years ago: She wanted a conniver who would get results no matter the obstacles. And he’d done a fine job for her, his training at the hands of the Russian intelligence apparatus in Moscow first-rate.

He looked up when she came to his open door, said something to whomever he was talking to on the phone, hung up, and got to his feet. “I was just about to call you,” he said.

“I’ve already heard. Who was that on the phone?”

“General Muñoz’s chief of staff. We’re at DEFCON Two, and I was ordered to start the call up.” General Ramiro Casas Muñoz was chief of the DI; Defense Condition Two was just one step below the actual military invasion of the island, and all military and intelligence personnel were being called for duty.

“That’s stupid. Fidel wasn’t murdered.”

“We can’t be certain.”

María had turned to go to her office, where she kept a set of military fatigues with her insignia of rank and the DI badge, when Ortega-Cowan stopped her.

“There was a shooting at the compound a couple of hours ago.”

She came back, her stomach suddenly hollow. “What are you talking about?” She’d been out there, of course, but she could not tell that to her chief of staff. She was sure that he didn’t know the relationship she had to Fidel.

“I don’t have the details, but Captain Fuentes sounded excited. He’s on his way right now — it’s one of the reasons I was just about to call you.”

Nor could she tell him that she’d ordered Fuentes to come here first thing this morning because of sloppy security out there. Neither man knew her entire story, though they were both cut of the same conspiratorial cloth, and both of them thought they knew everything. They wanted her job — that had always been obvious — and she had a feeling that now that Fidel was dead and Fuentes was freed from his compound security position, he might think he had the opening he was waiting for. And of course, Ortega-Cowan was a typical Cuban male, full of machismo, who thought from the beginning that María’s post should be filled by a man, not by a woman.

As long as the two of them never got together, she would be safe, and perhaps now was the time for her to get rid of one of them. There would be a lot of confusion in the coming days. Who could tell what might happen?

“I want to talk to Captain Fuentes when he gets here,” María said. “Not a word about the shooting to anyone.”

“Of course,” Ortega-Cowan said. “Shall I sit in with you?”

“I’ll handle him myself, probably nonsense. You know how he can get.”

Ortega-Cowan nodded. It was unspoken knowledge that Fuentes was a homosexual, but he’d been Fidel’s choice for chief of his personal security, and everything had been left at that; speculation was not encouraged. “Staff meeting at ten?”

“Oh-nine-hundred,” María said, and she walked back to her office to change, and to ponder not only her father’s last request, but also the business of a shooting out there. It must have happened just minutes after she’d left. Curious.

Something wasn’t right, and although she’d prefer to think that it was some trick that Fuentes had worked up, she wasn’t sure, because there was no motive she could think of. Fidel was dead; there was no one left for the captain to impress.

She changed into her crisp fatigue uniform, ordered up a pot of strong café con leche from the cafeteria, and was just going over the first overnights from the watch — and especially the collated data from the dozen and a half signals intelligence ground stations around the island — when Ortega-Cowan showed up at her door two hours later with Fuentes, who carried a canvas shoulder bag.

If they were in any sort of collusion, she couldn’t make it out from the expressions on their faces, except that Ortega-Cowan was curious and Fuentes was excited. And maybe smug?

“I’ll be in my office if you need anything, Colonel,” Ortega-Cowan said, and he turned and walked away.

María waved Fuentes to a seat across the desk from her. “You reported a shooting after I left,” she said before he was settled.

“Yes, Colonel. We caught a spy trying to escape. He managed to kill one of my officers, and when he fired on us, we shot him.”

María sat back. “A spy in El Comandante’s compound is nothing short of incredible. CIA?”

“Presumably,” Fuentes said, but he didn’t seem concerned, which was bothersome.

“Don’t play games with me, Captain,” María said harshly. “You have sixty seconds to explain to me why I shouldn’t have you arrested and tried for gross dereliction of duty bordering on treason.”

Still, Fuentes didn’t seem to be bothered. “We’ve had one of the house staff under investigation for the past year and a half. His name was Carlos Gutiérrez, and he was hired as a gardener about the same time El Comandante retired.”

“He’s dead?”

“Most unfortunately. But it’s not likely, had he survived, that he would have told us anything under interrogation.”

“We have the drugs.”

“We found a hollow tooth with cyanide.”

“I’ll want to see the report of your investigation, but what the hell was he doing out there? He could hardly have been gathering anything important, other than Fidel’s health. Unless he he’d been put in place as an assassin. Was that what happened this morning?”

“No. Dr. Céspedes is certain El Comandante’s death was from natural causes. He’s been failing for months now. In any event, the gardener had no direct access. They were never alone together.”

“How do you know that he was CIA?”

Fuentes took a satellite phone from his bag and laid it on the desk, and María immediately recognized it for what it was.

“Encrypted?” she asked.

“I think so, and the machine needs passwords. Our technical department might be able to figure it out. But it’s almost certain that he called his report in to Langley that El Comandante was dead and was given instructions for his escape.”

It didn’t add up for María. “It would have been stupid for him to try to run. He’d done nothing wrong, unless his call had been detected and he became aware of it.”

Fuentes took a flip cell phone out of his bag and placed it on the desk. “We’ve kept him under surveillance, as I’ve said. And we’ve been extra alert the past few days because of El Comandante’s condition. We searched his quarters, but we couldn’t be as thorough as we wanted, lest he become suspicious of us. And it was driving us crazy why he was there. What did he hope to learn?”

“And?”

“One of my officers spotted him taking photographs with this cell phone.”

“Of what?” María asked.

“You.”

María powered up the phone, careful to make sure her hands did not shake, and brought up the half dozen photographs of her and her car, one of which included the tag number. “Are you sure that he managed to send these to Langley?”

“We found a USB cord in his room, which would certainly suggest that he had the opportunity to do so.” Fuentes shrugged.

He was enjoying himself, and it infuriated María. But looking at the photographs again, she couldn’t see that any real damage had been done. “Were there any indications that he knew my rank?”

“None that I’m aware of.”

“Or why I was out there this morning?”

Fuentes hesitated. “No, but I’m wondering the same myself. Is it anything you can share with me, Colonel? You were the last one to see El Comandante alive. What were his last words?”

María waved the question off. “Minutiae,” she said. “He wanted to know what SIGINT we’d gotten from Miami in the last twenty-four hours.”

“That makes no sense.”

“The final ramblings of a very old man who’d been accustomed all his life to knowing everything.”

Fuentes was skeptical.

“He died in the middle of my report,” María said. “And that bit of information, Captain, will never leave this office. Am I clear?”

“Perfectly.”

She’d been taught by her Russian masters that the secret of keeping a subordinate in line was to keep him forever off balance. She’d become adept at it. “I originally wanted you here this morning to discuss your security procedures, but that has become a moot point. So now let us discuss your next assignment, which will depend on your skills.”

Fuentes was clearly distressed, but María held back a smile. She’d never liked the man, and maybe having him here at headquarters, close at hand, would force him into making a mistake that she could use to get rid of him.

“Talk to me, Captain,” she said. “Tell me what you want.”

FOUR

Emerging from the colonel’s office and stalking down the corridor, Fuentes knew damned well what the bitch was trying to do to him, had been trying all along, but it still wasn’t straight in his mind why she wanted him out. Uncle Fidel had trusted him, and yet he’d called a nobody director of operations to his deathbed, and the why of that alone was enough to drive a man crazy.

Passing Ortega-Cowan’s open door, their eyes met, and Fuentes resisted the urge to step inside and have a little talk. Of all the people with any influence in the DI, María’s chief of staff was the only one he had common ground with. But not now; the fact that they could be allies was something best kept from the colonel until it was time for them to strike.

Outside, he got into his battered Gazik, which was one of the jeeps the Russians had left behind, but before he could drive away, Ortega-Cowan came out. The parking lot was at the rear of the building, while the colonel’s office was in front. They went to a bench in one of the gardens.

“You didn’t look too happy up there, Manuel,” Ortega-Cowan said. “Mind sharing with me what’s going on?”

“She wants to get rid of me,” Fuentes said bitterly. He needed to complain to someone.

“I meant about the shooting.”

And Fuentes told him everything, leaving out no detail, including the photographs of María and her car that had presumably been transmitted to Langley, and about her reaction.

Ortega-Cowan was impressed. “This just might be what we need to take her down.”

“What are you talking about? She means to use the fact that I let a spy so close to El Comandante to have me demoted, possibly even court-martialed.” And she’d be well within her rights and duties, the errant thought flashed in his head. But the kid’s eyes were enchanting, and Fuentes had seen him a couple of times tending the less prickly of the plants while wearing nothing but brief shorts and sandals. He’d been dazzled.

“Use your head. Until now, the identity of all our directorate chiefs has been kept a secret. Just like in the Mossad. But if the CIA has her photographs, especially in connection with Fidel’s compound, on the very morning of his death — within minutes of his death — and pictures of that goddamned fancy car of hers, they’ll sit up and take notice.”

“So what?”

“If she’s identified, she’s out,” Ortega-Cowan said. “And maybe I can help.”

“How?”

“Never mind for now. But what exactly was she doing out there this morning? Who called her?”

“El Comandante asked for her.”

“By name, or simply as the director of operations?”

“By name, and he even knew her private number by heart. Told me to tell no one else, just fetch her.”

“And no one else was alone with them in the bedroom?”

“No.”

“Which, of course, you had not bugged.”

Fuentes flared, and for a moment he forgot himself. “He was going to come back and I was going to be his new Minister of Foreign Relations.”

Ortega-Cowan smiled, but not derisively. “He told you that?”

“No, but it was obvious he wanted to return to government. And my English is nearly letter perfect.”

Ortega-Cowan looked away. They could hear the traffic around the plaza, and already the parking lot was beginning to fill as the call-up continued. The coming days were going to be a frenzy of activities. “That was then and this is now,” he finally said.

“But you have something in mind.”

“Of course. If I can pry the colonel out of her position, I’d have a good shot at taking over the directorate. No one else is qualified. If that’s the case, would you serve as my chief of staff?”

“It’s not what I wanted, but I’d take it.”

“But I’d have to watch my back, right?”

Fuentes smiled. “Naturally.” What he really wanted, what he’d realistically hoped to get, was the directorate. And a promotion to chief of staff would put him only a heartbeat away. “Do you have a plan?”

“Yes, but you’ll have to be patient. First we need to get past the funeral, and stand down from the general alert. Could be weeks. And then we can find her weakness.”

“Might not be so easy.”

“You’re wrong,” Ortega-Cowan said. “Uncle Fidel didn’t call his chief of DI operations to his deathbed to discuss Miami signals intelligence. The question is exactly what they talked about.”

Fuentes was at a loss, but Ortega-Cowan was waiting for an answer. “A deathbed confession?”

“You may be close, because what does a person knowing he has only hours, maybe minutes, to live, want to talk about? Want to get off his chest? It’s either a confession of some past wrong — an infidelity, maybe? — or some last-minute instruction. One last order?”

“But what?”

“We’ll find that out eventually, but first we need to learn why it was Colonel León he called.”

And Fuentes had a glimmering of an idea. “Perhaps El Comandante did not call Colonel León to his bedside. Perhaps he called María León. One of his mistresses?”

“Somehow I don’t think so. Word would have gotten around, especially because of the difference in their ages. She’s young enough to be a daughter.”

“Dios mio,” Fuentes said softly, not sure if he was being manipulated, and he watched the cars and bicycles streaming into the parking lot.

Ortega-Cowan smiled. “It would explain her schooling and her promotions,” he said. “She’s one of the only female colonels in the service, and the only woman to be in charge of an entire directorate.”

“If that’s true, she’s just lost her protector. Leaves her wide open.”

“That depends on what Raúl knows and how he feels about it,” Ortega-Cowan said. “If we’re right about this, we might not have to do anything at all, just sit back until she’s fired.” He smiled again. “Let’s just wait and see what happens. And if it needs a little nudge here and there, we’ll find a way.”

“Yes, we will,” Fuentes said. His heart was much lighter than it had been in months, perhaps ever.