Castro's Daughter

FIVE

In Washington, it was a couple of minutes past seven in the morning when a late-model Cadillac Escalade with heavily tinted windows carrying three DI field officers from Miami operations parked across the street from the Lil’ Tots Day Care Center for the third day in a row.

Rodrigo Cruz, driving, was not happy with this assignment, which had been so hastily put together that, in his estimation, it had almost no chance of success — with a high likelihood that the three of them would end up in a federal holding cell before noon. But the highly secret orders came directly from the top, and had he not known better, he would have been certain that the colonel was loca. The story they had been given was completely crazy.

“Maybe it’s true,” Julio Cabrera suggested in Miami before they boarded the plane to get up here.

“Not likely,” Cruz had told him, but the more he thought about it, the more it made some kind of sense to him. Only a fantastical story like this one would have any chance of convincing the woman and her husband to cooperate with them. Out of simple curiosity, if for no other reason.

And Esteban Álvarez, perched in the backseat, watching the activities across the street through a pair of binoculars, had doubts. “There’ve been rumors,” he’d said. “We’ve all heard them even in Miami.”

“Especially in Miami,” Cruz said. “Those bastardos will believe just about anything.”

The three men were slightly built, typical of a lot of Cubans, with dark hair and eyes and almost handsome good looks. They’d worked in Miami for the past four years, getting back to Havana for only one week each year. After this crazy assignment, they were due home for their seven days, and they were looking forward to it. Miami had glitter, plenty of good food, and nice cars, but it was far too frenetic a place for them. And this city was worse. They felt off balance.

A steady stream of cars came up the short driveway; the parents, mothers for the most part, took their children inside and came back out and drove away. The first half hour was the busiest, and by seven thirty there was almost no traffic until the next rush around eight.

Louise Horn was the exception; yesterday and the day before, she’d shown up at precisely 7:45. Not much to go on, Cruz thought, but they’d not been given the time to do a proper job of surveillance in order to establish a pattern. If she were late this morning, it would put her at the start of the next rush, which would make snatching her impossible.

The Washington bureau had provided the SUV and the safe house just off Massachusetts Avenue between Lincoln Park and the D.C. General Hospital — less than four miles away, as the crow flies — keeping their exposure to a minimum. Plus their untraceable weapons and a syringe filled with methohexital, a powerful sedative they’d used in several Miami operations over the past couple of years. When methohexital was injected directly into a subject’s vein, the victim would be out in less than five seconds. In a muscle, it could take five minutes, during which time the target would put up a struggle. If it were a man, they could have some difficulty. But they’d seen the tall, slender — almost anorexic — woman, and they’d gained a little confidence. Handling her would be fairly easy.

And she was a high-value target. In addition to the weapons, an informational packet had been left for them at the house. The woman was the wife of Otto Rencke, the Director of Special Projects for the CIA, and she herself was a high-ranking satellite image analyst working for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency with an office attached to the CIA’s Old Headquarters Building. The husband was the primary objective; kidnapping his wife was merely to assure the man’s cooperation. But the abduction could also result in a firestorm of federal and local cops coming after them, and despite the propaganda, every DI field officer here in the States understood just how effective, and sometimes ruthless, the FBI functionaries could be.

Cruz glanced in his rearview mirror in time to see the battered dark blue Toyota Land Cruiser come up the street and turn into the day care center’s driveway, Louise Horn driving.

“It’s her,” he said.

“She’s early,” Cabrera said. “Wait until tomorrow?”

Two women who’d dropped off their children came out of the day care center, waved as Louise got out of her Toyota, got into their cars, and drove away. No one else was arriving at the moment.

“We’ll go now,” Cruz said, watching nervously in his rearview mirror and out the windshield. They had been given three days for the job. This morning was it, or this afternoon, but then they would have to deal not only with the woman but her two-year-old child as well. Involving the toddler was something he wanted to avoid at all costs; he had two small children of his own in Havana. “No shooting.”

Louise unstrapped the child from the car seat and walked her through the gate. The moment they disappeared inside, Cruz drove across the street and backed the wrong way into the driveway so that they were directly in front of the Toyota.

Cabrera and Álvarez got out of the Cadillac and walked back to Louise Horn’s SUV just as she came out of the day care center. She was out of the gate, obviously in a hurry when she noticed them, and she pulled up, a look of concern on her narrow features.

Cabrera held up an identification wallet. “Ma’am, I’m Ulises Rodríguez, CIA Security. Mr. Rencke sent us.”

Louise was suspicious, but she came the rest of the way toward them. “Is there some trouble?”

“Not at all. We were just ordered to pick you up and bring you to the Campus.”

Louise glanced at the ID. “What about Joann?”

“I was told the child’s name is Audrey. She’ll be fine here.”

“I’ll just call,” Louise said, taking a cell phone out of her pocket. She turned to look back at the day care center.

“That’s not possible,” Cabrera said. He pulled out a Glock 17 with a suppressor and pointed it at her. “Believe me, I do not want to shoot you. But you are coming with us right now.”

“Shit,” Louise said, and she started to back up, but Cabrera was close enough to grab her arm, and before she could pull away, Álvarez came around and took her other arm.

One of the teachers appeared in the doorway about ten meters away. “Louise?” she called out. “Are you okay?”

Cabrera turned and, still holding Louise’s arm with his left hand, fired two shots, both of them hitting the teacher in her torso and driving her back inside.

“No!” Louise screamed. “Help!” But just at that moment, there was no traffic on R Street, no one to witness the struggle or hear her cries, and they half dragged and half carried her back to the Cadillac.

Cabrera yanked open the rear door, but when he tried to shove her inside, she managed to half turn and brace her hip against the doorframe. For just an instant, she was nearly motionless, though she was still screaming, and Álvarez managed to plunge the needle into her carotid artery and depress the plunger.

Louise yelped as if she had been shot, but almost immediately she began to sag, her legs giving out, and Cabrera was able to roll her onto the backseat, far enough inside so that he could close the door.

Álvarez got in on the other side and shoved Louise to the floor as Cabrera got in the front passenger side, and even before he had shut the door, Cruz had taken off down the driveway and was around the block on Q Street, merging with traffic heading toward Massachusetts Avenue.

Cruz checked the rearview mirror, but no one seemed to be taking any particular interest in them. And although someone inside the day care center had probably gotten a good look at the car, they couldn’t have read the license number, nor could they have known which way the kidnappers had gone.

The first thirty minutes were the most critical in cases like this, but before that, they would have reached the safe house and hidden the Caddy safely out of sight in the garage, where it would remain until the operation was completed.

“How is she?” he asked, looking at Álvarez’s image in the mirror.

“She’s out, but her heart is steady and her breathing is normal.”

“That was damned fast.”

“I managed to hit an artery.”

Cruz turned back to his driving. “I told you no shooting. ”

“The woman at the doorway saw our faces. She would have called the authorities.”

“Someone has by now, so keep your eyes open,” Cruz said. And already in the distance, he thought he could hear sirens.

SIX

Otto Rencke had lost a lot of weight in the past year, in part because of the diet Louise had put him on — no more heavy cream out of the carton to wash down Twinkies, his favorite food in all the world — and in part because the CIA doc had put him on a loose regimen of exercise: thirty minutes on the treadmill every weekday morning. Now, a few minutes after eight thirty and coming up from the gym to his third-floor office in the OHB, he thought he had looked a little bony in the big mirrors, although he had to admit that he felt pretty good. He still dressed badly — mostly baggy jeans and sweatshirts, plus unlaced sneakers — and his long frizzy red hair was always out of control: like an aura around a spirit medium, one of the kids in the Directorate of Intelligence had quipped. And Otto had actually caught the joke.

He keyed his code into the door reader and entered his suite of offices that were filled nearly to capacity with computer monitors, keyboards, and one horizontal touch screen monitor nearly the size of a conference table. All the equipment ran 24/7, though the screens were usually either blank or showed blinking cursors, which indicated incoming messages or sometimes announced that a search engine had come up with results.

Maps, file folders, books, magazines, and newspapers — most of them from obscure cities and paper archival centers around the globe that had not gone digital yet — were scattered just about everywhere; on tables, the one desk, on chairs, on the floor, and pinned up on walls. Field officers sent him a steady stream of the stuff, based on his shopping lists sent out to the chiefs of stations in places of interest to him.

He touched the encrypted incoming message screen, and sat down as a list of eighty-seven e-mails came up, all of them overnights, except for one just a minute ago. A video from Louise.

He called her number upstairs in Geospatial. One of the clerks picked it up on the third ring. “Louise Horn’s desk.”

“This is Otto. Is my wife handy?”

“Sorry, Mr. Rencke, she’s not here yet.”

Rencke brought up Louise’s video, the first hint of trouble niggling at the back of his head. “Have her call me when she gets in.”

“Yes, sir.”

Louise’s image appeared on the monitor and Otto nearly dropped the phone before he could hang up. She looked like hell: her face had sagged, her eyes were half-closed, and a line of drool oozed from the side of her mouth.

“I’ve been kidnapped,” she said, the words slow and slurred to the point she was barely understandable.

Otto split the screen, and with his heart hammering, his fingers flew over the keys, opening a program that would search for the source of the message — but almost immediately it came up from somewhere in Venezuela. A remailer, because as of six thirty or so this morning, his wife was here in the city.

“Audie’s not been harmed. She’s at Lil’ Tots.”

According to his analysis program, the encryption algorithm was an old one that hadn’t been used by any U.S. intelligence agency in at least ten years. He started a search for likely users — certainly not civilians, because although the protocol wasn’t so secure as modern ones in use, it was still very sophisticated.

“I was drugged. They told me that it was methohexital, but it’ll be completely out of my system very soon. No side effects.”

The Russian Federal Security Service had used the same algorithm until eight years ago, before selling it to Libya’s Military Intelligence Force and to Cuba’s DI.

“No harm will come to me if you do exactly as you are told.”

Fidel Castro’s death, the photographs of the unknown woman who’d apparently been the last to visit him — sent from one of their sources in Havana last week — and now this kidnapping were not coincidental.

Louise looked up into the camera, her eyes still half-closed, and she winked. “Three Hispanic males, white Caddy Escalade, shot one of the day care—”

The message abruptly ended, and Otto remained seated staring at the screen, which had gone back to the list of incoming e-mails. The goddamned Cubans because of the photographs of the woman? What sense did that make? And why the hell hadn’t they edited out Louise’s last words?

Security had to be given the heads-up, as would the Bureau, and Audie would have to be taken somewhere, probably down to the Farm, where she was practically the official mascot. He wished to hell that Mac were here. But he wasn’t.

A new incoming message came in from the same Venezuelan remailer, and with the same encryption algorithm, but this one was live, and headed only with his name.

Otto touched the screen. His camera activated, but the monitor remained blank.

“Good morning, Mr. Rencke,” a man said. His accent was slight, but definitely Hispanic. “We mean your wife, or you, no harm. Nor will we in any way retaliate for the information she passed to you before we could end the transmission.”

“What does the Cuban government want with us?” Otto asked.

“El Comandante’s funeral will be held this afternoon at four o’clock. An aircraft from your State Department will leave from Andrews three hours from now. We want you to be on that flight.”

“Impossible.”

“Nevertheless, it is what you will do. Someone will meet you in Havana with further instructions. If you do not comply with our instructions, your wife will be shot to death and her body dumped in the CIA’s driveway.”

Otto was on camera, and he kept his expression neutral though he was hemorrhaging inside.

“Do you understand, Mr. Rencke?”

“No,” Otto said. One of his search engines was working to pinpoint the Venezuelan remailer, and he needed to keep the kidnappers online as long as possible.

“Five days ago, a CIA operative working as a yard boy at El Comandante’s compound in Miramar took a series of photographs of a woman who attended Fidel’s deathbed. No doubt, your Directorates of Operations and Intelligence are trying to identify the woman. Her name is María León. She is Colonel León, chief of the DI’s Directorate of Operations. She is also an illegitimate daughter of El Comandante.”

“His daughter is Alina Fernández, and she lives in Spain.”

“This is a second one. Unknown.”

“Why me?” Otto demanded.

“In trade for your wife’s life, of course.”

“I understand that part, but what does Cuban intelligence want from me? I go down there, you take me to some interrogation center, feed me some drugs, and then what? What do you think I know that would be of any use to you?”

“You must know that you are considered a high-value target because of your specialized knowledge of the CIA’s computer systems.”

“Even if I drew your people pictures, you have nobody with the technical expertise to fully understand what we’re doing here.”

“Nevertheless, you will come to Havana this afternoon if you wish to see your wife returned to you alive.”

Otto held up his hands. “All right, I’ll be there. But what am I supposed to tell my people here in the building? Or the FBI? Or, for that matter, the State Department whose delegation you want me to join?”

“I’m sure you will think of the proper things to say.”

“That somebody totally out of their gourd inside the DI has ordered a high-ranking CIA officer’s wife to be kidnapped in order to lure the officer to Cuba? Christ, do you guys want to start a war. Won’t be another Bay of Pigs.”

“I understand your confusion, señor. Nevertheless, you will come to Havana.”

The instant before the connection was broken, one of his search engines brought up the remailer, which belonged to SEBIN — Servicio Bolivariano de Inteligencia — Venezuela’s national intelligence service.

This was a legitimate, well-thought-out intelligence operation, not some harebrained scheme dreamed up by a lunatic.

He was going to Havana — he had to — but the problem was what the hell he was going to say to his boss, the new DCI, Walter Page, that would make any sense.

SEVEN

Louise sat on the edge of a narrow bed in a small room with a tiny attached bathroom, her head still swirling from the drug they’d injected into her neck. She’d been awake enough however, to give Otto a little information that the Bureau might be able to use to track her down.

But her captors hadn’t seemed to mind, though they’d pressed the SEND button on the laptop they used to record the message before she could say anything else.

And then nothing — they’d just walked out. They hadn’t hit her, or shouted at her, or threatened her, which was in itself ominous. That, and the fact they’d made no effort to hide their faces, led her to believe that when this operation was completed, they would kill her. She was no field officer, but in their shoes, it’s what she might think had to be done.

But she had no intention of making it easy for them. For Otto’s sake. For Audie’s sake.

They hadn’t taken her wristwatch. It wasn’t nine yet, and the entire kidnapping from the day care center to here had taken a little less than two hours. She turned her head and stared at the window, which was boarded over, and in her mind’s eye she saw Joyce Kilburn violently shoved back into the school, surprise on her round face. She was the center’s director, and was married with three children of her own. Sweet. Gentle. And tears wanted to well in Louise’s eyes.

They needed Otto to do something for them, or tell them something. But they couldn’t have any real idea whom they were dealing with. And the enormous risk they had taken to carry out something like this, so incredibly dangerous, with so many unintended consequences for them, and for whoever was directing them, had to mean that whatever they wanted was super important.

Something topical, she figured, because she didn’t think whoever they worked for had merely gone on a fishing expedition. Venezuela was the most likely. SEBIN was directly under Chávez’s thumb, and he hated the United States with a passion that went beyond reason.

The room was mostly in darkness except for what little light seeped in around the edges of the plywood covering the window, and from a small light over the sink in the bathroom. But it was sufficient for her to take stock of her surroundings.

The narrow bed was covered with a dirty blanket and filthy pillow, and she had to hope that whatever they wanted would happen before nightfall so she wouldn’t have to sleep here. The floor was bare plywood, on which someone, probably a child, had drawn stick figures in yellow and green chalk. A mother and father, two children and a dog standing in front of a small house with a one-car garage and a big tree. Another showed a swing set and a picnic table under another large tree: in the backyard?

Louise started to struggle to her feet off the low bed, when someone was at the door unlocking it, and she sat back, tensing. By now Otto had gotten the video, and her captors had probably talked to him about the terms of her release. He almost certainly would have agreed to their demands or he would have stalled them — either way, she figured she still had some time.

The man who’d driven the Caddy came in with a bottle of Evian, which he handed to her. “The drug sometimes makes the mouth dry,” he said.

“Thank you,” Louise said, and she took a deep drink.

“We mean you no harm, señora.”

“Right. It’s why you jabbed a needle in my neck, filled me with a sedative that had a fair chance of killing me, and brought me here.”

“It was necessary—”

“To kill an innocent woman at the day care center?”

“That was also necessary,” Cruz said without apology.

“You could have hit one of the children inside — did your man think about that? Or didn’t he give a shit?”

Cruz shrugged.

And Louise suddenly got the feeling that she knew these guys. They weren’t Venezuelan intelligence officers; they were nothing more than thugs off the streets of Miami. “What does the DI want with my husband that they were willing to send someone like you to force his hand?”

Cruz showed only a flicker of surprise.

“Fidel is dead, so is this something that Raúl hatched to show that he was in charge?”

“Your husband was more cooperative when we talked to him a few minutes ago. Perhaps you should curb your tongue.”

“Or what?” Louise demanded. “You’ll beat me up, starve me? Or bore me to death with your sad tales of woe in Cuba, all brought on by us?” She wanted to get him angry, force him to make a mistake and say something he didn’t mean to say — reveal something, any little scrap of information that she could use.

But he just gave her a long stare, then shook his head and turned to go.

“You’ve made a mistake.”

Cruz turned back and nodded. “Qué?”

“My husband and I have a friend who will find you, if something happens to us. And when he does, he will kill you. Comprende, señor?”

Cruz smiled but then left the room, relocking the door behind him, and Louise lowered her head. The effort to goad the man had made her a little dizzy and sick to her stomach. And she had learned nothing from it, except that this was almost certainly a Cuban operation. But for the life of her, she could not think of why they would take such a risk.

The problem was that Kirk McGarvey had gone to ground again — to try to heal his wounds, physical and especially mental — and only Otto knew where he was. Certainly not at his home on the Gulf Coast of Florida. Last year, his wife, Katy; their daughter, Elizabeth; and their son-in-law, Todd Van Buren, had all been assassinated in an effort to keep Mac away from an investigation into a powerful lobbyist group here in Washington with its tendrils in just about every important governmental agency, including the Pentagon and the CIA itself.

A Washington Post reporter had uncovered the essential parts of the story and brought the evidence to Todd, who worked for the CIA, because he felt the operation was too big for him. And in part because Todd’s father-in-law had once been the director of the agency.

And the killings had started that very day, with Todd’s assassination and with murders of the reporter and his wife and their son. In the end, of course, Mac had been a driven man, pushed to his breaking point, and he had taken his revenge, bringing down a security firm second only to Blackwater, and causing the deaths of more than two dozen crooked power brokers and Washington insiders whose actual fantastical aim had been to bring down the government.

When it was over he had disappeared, almost as if he had dropped off the face of the earth, and only Otto knew for sure where he was. Or at least she hoped he did.

She took another drink of water, then struggled to her feet and tottered to the window boarded over with a sheet of thick plywood held in place by a dozen screws. She figured that from the outside, this place probably looked like an abandoned house, or perhaps one that had been foreclosed on. It had to be somewhere in the Washington area, but in the two hours since the kidnapping, they could easily have gone fifty miles or more.

Although some light seeped in from around the edges of the plywood, she couldn’t see much of anything outside except for what might have been the color green, perhaps the tree from the chalk drawing, but no indication if this was a room at the front of the house or at the rear.

The bed, actually a metal cot, was the only piece of furniture in the small room. Its legs were attached to the frame by nuts and bolts, none of which were loose enough for her to remove, which was too bad because one of the legs would have made a great weapon.

The bathroom had an old-fashioned claw-foot tub, a toilet, and a sink with a medicine cabinet above it. The cabinet’s mirrored door had been removed and the shelves were empty, and the small window had been boarded over as well.

Her head was spinning fast enough for her to nearly be sick to her stomach, and she sat down on the toilet seat and closed her downcast eyes for a moment or two. If she had to fight them by hand, she would do so, because there was no way in hell she was just going to lie back meekly and allow them to kill her.

When she opened her eyes, she saw the edge of a small piece of metal, or something, under the tub, and she reached down and got what turned out to be a small nail file, the kind often found in personal grooming kits. One end was pointed, but the other was nearly flat across.

She got up, went back into the bedroom, and looked at the screws holding the plywood on the window frame.

Nearly as flat across as the blade of a screwdriver.

EIGHT

The kidnappers had given him a three-hour window, which didn’t leave much wiggle room and especially no time for fretting — that would come later, on the flight down to Havana. Even so, Otto’s hand shook as he called Bob Packwood, the director of the Farm, which was the CIA’s training facility at Camp Peary, just south of Richmond.

Todd had been a codirector of the Farm, along with Mac’s daughter, Liz. Audrey was their daughter, and had become the camp’s darling girl. Everyone down there thought of themselves as aunts and uncles to Audie, whom Otto and Louise had adopted.

“Send somebody up to the day care center to get Audie. Louise and I are going to be busy for the next few days.”

“I’ll send Mary Beth,” Packwood said without a trace of hesitation. Mary Beth Stroble was the camp’s shrink. “It’ll be good to have her back, even if only for a few days. Let them know we’re coming to fetch her.”

“My next call. But it’d be best if you sent Mary Beth up as soon as possible. There was a shooting there this morning.”

“Was Louise in the middle of it?”

“Three men kidnapped her and shot one of the teachers.”

“Shit,” Packwood said. “What can we do?”

“Get Audie out of there, and send someone to fetch Louise’s car — it’s probably still in the driveway.”

“What’s the Bureau saying?” Packwood asked.

“Nothing yet,” Otto said, and he cut Packwood off from asking anything else. “Thanks for your help,” he said.

He phoned the day care center, and one of the teachers answered. She sounded nearly hysterical.

“Oh, Mr. Rencke, it’s just terrible. They murdered Joyce, and then they took Louise — Mrs. Rencke — away, and the police are here and they want to talk to you. I don’t know what to do. All the parents are coming to get the children, but we only had Louise’s contact number, not yours.”

“Mary Beth Stroble is coming to get Audie. She works for the CIA, and she’ll want you to see her credentials, but she will not be giving the police a statement. Let them know I’ll contact them later this morning.”

“They said that the FBI was coming here, too.”

“That’s all right, just tell them what you know, and say that I will call.”

“Yes, sir. But I just don’t know what to do next.”

“Let the police handle it,” Otto said.

He phoned Walter Page and told the director that he was on the way up, and needed their meeting to include Marty Bambridge, who was the Deputy Director of Operations, and Carleton Patterson, the CIA’s general counsel.

“Something important?”

“I need to get down to Havana for Castro’s funeral.”

Page, a stern-looking man who’d been the CEO of IBM before the president tapped him to run the CIA, was seated on an upholstered chair across a coffee table from Bambridge and Patterson on the couch when Otto walked in.

“Good morning,” the DCI said, motioning to an empty chair. “You’ve piqued our curiosity.”

“The State Department flight to Havana leaves from Andrews at noon,” Otto said, remaining standing. “I need to be on it. Castro’s funeral is tomorrow.”

“Not such a good idea,” Bambridge said. He was a narrow-shouldered man who wore a perpetual look of surprise on his dark features. “You have the keys to the fortress in your head.”

Otto had expected the DDO, who was nominally his boss, would say something like that. “They don’t have anyone down there who’d understand even if I drew them a picture. So that’s a nonissue.”

“What is the issue, then?” Page asked. “Why are you so interested in attending Castro’s funeral?”

“The DI kidnapped Louise just after she dropped Audie off at the day care center less than two hours ago.”

“My God,” Patterson said. He was a pale old man, in his late seventies, who had been called from academia to act as the Company’s general counsel several presidents ago. The job was supposed to last through just the one administration, but he’d stayed on and no president or DCI since had found any need to replace him.

“Does the Bureau have this?” Page demanded.

“They’re at the day care center now. I’ve sent someone up from the Farm to get Audie out of harm’s way.”

“We’ll have to get them over here to debrief you,” Page said, but Bambridge broke in.

“You said it was the DI that kidnapped her. Have they already contacted you?”

“A few minutes ago. They sent a video of Louise, who told me that she wouldn’t be harmed if I cooperated. Soon as I’d seen it, one of the kidnappers contacted me and said that I was to be on the plane to Havana, where someone would meet me.”

“Did you trace either ISP?”

“A SEBIN remailer in Caracas, but they were using an old encryption algorithm that only the Libyans and Cubans still use.”

“Okay,” Patterson said. “Why do they want you in Havana? They might take the risk of kidnapping your wife, but they’d never risk luring a high-ranking CIA officer down there to kidnap or kill him, unless the stakes were very high.”

“What’d they offer you?” Bambridge asked.

“My wife’s life.”

“In exchange for what?”

“Five days ago, one of our people in Castro’s compound took photographs of a woman who’d been at the dictator’s side when he died. Possibly the only one in the room.”

“We haven’t come up with an ID yet,” Bambridge said. “But one of our people in the city swears he’s seen her in Government Square. She’s probably a functionary of some sort. Our current thinking is that she might be one of Raúl’s aides or maybe a personal secretary. Did they mention her?”

“She’s one of Fidel’s illegitimate kids.”

“Did they give you a name?”

“María León. She’s a colonel in the DI, apparently chief of their Directorate of Operations. She wants to meet with me.”

“Jesus Christ, that’s the dumbest thing I’ve heard in my twenty years,” Bambridge said. “No way in hell are we going to allow you anywhere near Havana.”

“Wait a moment,” Patterson said. “Could be that this is the overture the administration has been hoping for.”

“Not by kidnapping,” Bambridge said.

“They gave us an important piece of information, with the woman’s name and position.”

“No reason to believe that they were telling the truth.”

“They’re in too deep to have lied to me,” Otto said. “They shot and killed the day care center director, who was apparently a witness. Whatever the reason the DI wants me in Havana in such a hurry has to be big.”

“You fit the bill,” Bambridge said.

“It’s more than just what Otto knows,” Patterson disagreed. “If that’s all they wanted, they could have kidnapped him instead of his wife, taken him to a safe house somewhere nearby, pumped him full of drugs, and he would have told them everything.”

“They killed an innocent bystander!”

“Terribly unfortunate. But the entire incident tells us how serious they are.”

“I tend to agree with Carleton, though it goes against my better judgment,” Page said. “Otto?”

“I’ve tried to separate myself from the fact that my wife is being held somewhere by men who’ve shown they’re willing to assassinate whoever gets in their way, with curiosity about why the director of DI operations has gone to these lengths to speak to me face-to-face. But I can’t do it.”

“Of course not,” Page said. “What’s the next step? What do you want to do?”

“I’m going down to Havana, all right, and if need be, I’ll kill the bitch with my bare hands.”

“You’re not a field officer,” Bambridge objected.

“I’m motivated,” Otto said. “But I have to go down there to find out what Fidel told her on his deathbed that caused her to go to these lengths.”

“Wars have started for less,” Patterson said.

“What about Mac?” Page asked.

Otto had thought about it. “Only if something goes wrong.” He handed the director a small flash drive. “It’s how to reach him, but it’s only a onetime read.”

“Is there a password?”

“The nickname of your first girlfriend.”

Page was taken aback, and he obviously wanted to know how Otto could possibly have gotten that kind of information. “I’ll phone Chris Morgan,” he said. Morgan was the Secretary of State.

“Yes, sir,” Otto said, a vision of his wife’s image on the monitor plain in his mind’s eye, especially her wink, and he turned and left the office.

NINE

It was noon, and after more than two hours of work, Louise had managed to remove only one of the screws holding the plywood against the window frame. In the process, the end of the fingernail file was badly twisted, and the thumb and forefinger of her right hand were bloody.

She looked at the other eleven screws in despair and leaned her forehead against the wooden cover and closed her eyes. She felt so incredibly stupid, letting herself be taken so easily. The moment she’d gone through the gate and seen the car and the two men waiting, she knew something was wrong.

Right then, she should have turned around and run away instead of walking up to them like a dope. And the little trick of calling her daughter by a different name hadn’t worked, and yet she’d stood there.

And what was she supposed to say to Joyce’s husband and their children? They would know that had she run in the opposite direction, leading the guys away from Lil’ Tots, no one except her would have gotten shot. She hadn’t been thinking straight.

Almost as bad was imagining the look in Otto’s eyes when he watched the video. He wasn’t tough at all; in fact, inside he was mush, a teddy bear, although when someone he loved was placed in harm’s way, he could be formidable. She had seen him in action backstopping Mac. He’d been fearless.

Opening her eyes and looking at the eleven screws, she had no doubt that at this moment, Otto was doing everything within his power at the CIA to find her. And his devotion gave her heart.

She went into the bathroom and washed off her bloody fingers, the cuts only superficial, drying them with a few squares of toilet paper. The file would not stand up to another screw, so the plywood had become a nonissue; there was no way she could remove it.

Stuffing the file in the waistband of her slacks, she went back to the bedroom, where she pulled the cover and pillow off the bed, rolled the thin mattress away in a heap, and turned the bed upside down so that the four metal legs pointed up toward the ceiling.

Each was held to the frame with two nuts and bolts, and all of them were snug, making it impossible for her to loosen them with her bare hands. But the bed was old, the metal rusted in spots.

She shoved the frame up against the wall, and bracing it there with her right foot, she grabbed one of the legs from the head of the bed with both hands and, with every ounce of her strength, tried to bend it down. And it came away a half inch or so from a crease at the lower nut and bolt.

Shoving in the opposite direction, she managed to force the leg nearly back into place, and then immediately pulled it away again, the bend increasing another half inch.

Growing up on a farm in Wisconsin with three brothers, she’d naturally been something of a tomboy who knew her way around tools, and a little something about metal fatigue. Bending the leg back and forth would weaken the metal to the point of failure. It would snap off, and she would have a weapon.

But the going was slow, and she had to stop twice to catch her breath and ease the ache in her arms and wrists. She was still a little light-headed and she suspected that some of the sedative they’d given her was still in her system.

What sounded like a large truck pulled up somewhere near, and Louise cocked her ear to listen. Metal rattled against metal several times, and some sort of machinery rumbled into life for maybe ten or fifteen seconds, and the truck moved on, stopping a little farther on — and then the same metal on metal rattled. And she knew she was hearing a garbage truck collecting trash. This was a residential neighborhood. People were here, neighbors who might notice that something odd was going on in the house with the boarded-up windows.

All she had to do was make noise, and a lot of it.

She started on the leg again, and after a minute or so the first cracks radiated out from the bolt and all of a sudden, the work got a lot easier.

Someone was at the door, and Louise looked up as a key grated in the lock. She attacked the leg now like a woman possessed, the cracks deepening, until it came free in her hand, and she turned as the door swung open and the guy who’d shot Joyce came in, carrying a tray with lunch.

It took him a moment to realize what he was seeing, time enough for Louise to reach him and swing the metal leg like a club, catching him in the side of the head.

He lurched backwards, his shoulder bumping into the doorframe, the tray clattering to the floor.

A large gash on the side of his head just above his left ear began welling blood, and Louise screamed as loud as she could and swung the leg again, meaning to hit him in the same spot, but he grabbed it from her, tossed it aside, and shoved her across the room.

“What’s this, then?” he demanded, coming toward her.

Someone was coming up the stairs in a big hurry, and Cabrera looked like he wanted to take Louise apart. She didn’t know what other options she had, but she wasn’t going to stop fighting.

She feinted to the left, as if she were trying to get away from him, pulled the fingernail file from her waistband, and stepped into him as he started to raise his fist, and tried to plunge the file into his left eye.

His reflexes were good and he managed to twist his head so that the tip of the file only grazed his cheek, opening up a four-inch gash that instantly began bleeding. He grabbed her wrist and bent it back until she was forced to drop the file and he shoved her backwards again.

“Puta!” Whore! he shouted, and before Louise could attack again, he pulled out his pistol and pointed it at her.

TEN

At José Martí Airport, Otto was the last off the State Department’s Gulfstream executive jet, which on landing had been instructed to taxi to an empty hangar across the main runway from the terminal. Palm trees dotted the horizon, and puffy white clouds soared overhead to the west.

Several Cuban army Gaziks, which were the leftover Russian jeeps, along with a half dozen Havana policemen on battered old Indian motorcycles were waiting to escort two Cadillacs, one of them a boxy-looking 1950s-era limousine.

A handful of Cuban dignitaries, a few of them dressed in suits and ties, several in plain olive drab fatigues, waited in a reception line.

Otto stood at the foot of the jet’s stairs, his overnight bag in hand, as two dark-complexioned, intense-looking men in khaki slacks and white guayabera shirts drove up in an unmarked Gazik and parked a few feet away, between the aircraft and the group getting into the two Cadillacs. They looked at Otto but they remained in the Gazik.

He’d sat at the rear of the Gulfstream on the four-hour trip down from Andrews, and no one but a female flight attendant had said a word to him. He’d been the first aboard, ten minutes before the group from the State Department had arrived, and she came back to him.

“Good morning, Mr. Rencke. May I get something for you?”

“A Coke if you have it, and maybe something to eat? A sandwich?”

“There’ll be box lunches once we’re in the air. Quite good, I’m told.”

Otto had stowed his small overnight bag in the overhead and, buckling in, used his cell phone — which bypassed the normal Cuban control system — to call the day care center. But after six rings, there was no answer and he gave up. He felt so damned alone at this moment, more isolated than he’d been when he lived by himself for a time in France a few years ago. He’d had nothing to work for then, nothing to care for, no one whom he could talk to until Mac showed up at his door with a problem he needed help with. And Otto jumped right into the middle of it without hesitation. And had been doing the same ever since, especially last year when Katy, Liz, and Todd were assassinated.

Twice, he’d almost called Mac’s contact number, but both times he’d stopped. Mac had his own full plate, his own troubles to deal with, but Otto knew that he would drop everything and come to help if he were told about Louise. But not yet. Not until he learned the reason the Cubans were taking such a terrible risk, which he figured would be made clear to him as soon as he was brought to Castro’s daughter.

The attendant had brought back his Coke, and a half hour after they were in the air, she served him a box lunch with a fresh turkey and Swiss croissant, a light pasta salad, an apple, a chocolate chip cookie, and a split of a very good sauvignon blanc.

And after he ate, he’d laid his head against the window and watched the clouds as he tried to make sense of the why of the thing, and tried to send a telepathic message to Louise that everything would turn out well.

The president had sent Deputy Secretary of State Gladys Faunce; along with William Chapman, who was the assistant legal adviser for Inter-American Affairs; and Ralph Scott, the State Department’s Coordinator for Cuban Affairs; plus two bodyguards for Faunce. Other nations had sent either their premiers or presidents, but the White House felt it was conciliatory enough to send a delegation of this rank.

When the Cadillacs and their escorts pulled away and sped across the tarmac, the man riding shotgun in the Gazik waiting for Otto got out and walked over. Otto took him and the driver to be DI officers.

“Señor Rencke?” he asked respectfully.

“Yes.”

“Have you brought any weapons into Cuba?”

“No.”

“A cell phone or satellite phone?”

Otto took out his phone and handed it over. But they wouldn’t learn anything unless they came up with his very complicated password, and if they tried too hard, the phone’s SIM card would be erased.

“If you will get in the backseat, sir, it is about a half hour’s drive from here,” the officer said, and he took Otto’s overnight bag.

The day was warm and humid, but the Gazik was a cabriolet; its canvas top was down and the breeze felt refreshing as they headed away from the airport.

Havana city center and the Plaza de la Revolución were about fifteen miles to the north, as the crow flies, the countryside this far out mostly barren, just the occasional small cattle ranch and clutches here and there of shacks down dirt roads, with very gently rolling hills in the distance to the east and west.

They drove fast until they came to Arroyo Naranjo, one of the bigger population concentrations within the city of Havana, seven miles south of the old city on the Havana — Las Vegas Highway. A lot of old cars and bicycles and even donkey carts clogged the narrow road until they reached the modern divided ring road that circled downtown.

At one point a few miles away, they passed a sign for a turn-off to the Finca Vigía, which had been Hemingway’s home, under renovation for the past several years. But money was tight and the work would probably take several more years to complete. So much depended on the American tourist dollar, which up to now was practically nonexistent.

A couple of miles past that, they reached the Autopista Nacional, this one a modern highway that went straight into the city, but instead of turning to the northwest, they continued on the ring road that would eventually end up at the castle on Havana Bay and another way into the city, and the headquarters of the DI, where Otto figured they were taking him.

They were out in the country now, in what was considered Havana’s east side, some boxy Soviet-era high-rise apartment buildings mixed with small houses, sometimes hovels, and small factories dotted here and there.

But again, the driver did not head into the city; instead, they got off the main highway and drove roughly northeast, toward the coast.

“I thought we’d be going to DI headquarters,” Otto said.

The officer riding shotgun glanced over his shoulder. “No.”

“Where, then?”

“I don’t know.”

Otto was alarmed. They were well off the main highway now, in the middle of what amounted to nowhere. People disappeared in places like this. “You have to know where you’re taking me. I came here to meet with Colonel León.”

The driver glanced at Otto’s reflection in the rearview mirror, and said something to his partner, who turned around.

“You are correct, we are not taking you downtown to headquarters, that would be far too dangerous at this moment. And you are also correct that the colonel wishes to speak to you.”

“Why too dangerous downtown?”

The officer said something to the driver that Otto didn’t catch, then turned back again. “There is much turmoil since El Comandante died.”

“I understand. But isn’t Raúl fully in control?”

The officer was extremely nervous. “There are some facciones, what you call ‘factions,’ that may be forming.”

“Troubles?”

“Sí, problemas.”

“Are you expecting trouble for our delegation at the funeral?”

The DI officer reared back as if he’d been shot. “No, nothing like that, I assure you. This trouble I’m speaking of involves only a certain section.”

“A power struggle?”

The officer nodded. “Something like that.”

This was not good. “Turn around,” Otto said. “Take me back to the airport.”

The officer was genuinely alarmed. “That’s not possible. The colonel has gone to a lot of trouble to get you here.”

“Yes. Including kidnapping my wife and killing an innocent civilian at a day care center, and endangering the lives of the kids there, my child included. Take me back! Now!”

“Ramiro,” the driver said urgently, jamming on the brakes as a small canvas-covered troop truck pulled out from a dirt path and blocked the road.

“Do exactly as you are told, Señor Rencke,” the man riding shotgun said.

The Gazik came to a complete halt a few yards away from where a half dozen armed soldiers jumped out of the truck and took up defensive positions. Their officer came around from the front.

“Or else what?” Rencke asked.

“Or else you will die here. All of us will.”

Their driver got out and walked up to where the officer beckoned, and they walked a few feet down the road away from the troops. The driver appeared a minute later and motioned for his partner.

“We’re going the rest of the way in the truck,” the officer told Rencke. “Just keep your mouth shut.”

They got out of the Gazik and, without saying a thing, walked to the truck and climbed aboard. Moments later, the troops joined them, and immediately the truck lurched forward but only about twenty-five yards, where it stopped again.

One of the troops, armed with a LAWS rocket, jumped down, extended the tube, unfolded the sights, and fired, hitting the Gazik dead center, the Russian jeep going up in a ball of flame, the explosion flat and loud.

“It was necessary to maintain the illusion,” the DI officer told Otto as the soldier hurried back and climbed aboard.

“What illusion?”

“That you were killed or kidnapped by insurgents.”

ELEVEN

It was early evening, already dark outside, when Louise awoke with a splitting headache. For several beats she was disoriented, not sure at all where she was or what had happened to make her body ache all over. But then it came to her that she’d been in a fight and she had been drugged again.

The bed frame had been taken away and she was lying on the bare mattress on the floor, the filthy pillow that smelled of something sour under her head. She pushed herself up to a sitting position, and then struggled painfully to her bare feet. They’d taken her shoes for some reason, which didn’t make any sense to her.

For a long time she stood swaying, her legs trembling, until she could shuffle to the bathroom, where she splashed some cold water on her face and used the toilet.

There’d been a towel bar above the tub, but that had been ripped out of the wall, leaving absolutely nothing she could use as a weapon, except perhaps the wooden toilet seat. But she didn’t think she had the strength to take the toilet apart, let alone put up a decent fight. At least not for now. And she was actually glad the mirror had been removed so she didn’t have to look at herself; she suspected she was a mess.

It had taken all three kidnappers to finally subdue her and stick her arm with the needle, and then nothing. She suddenly felt her wrist, realizing that they’d taken her watch, too, along with her shoes, which she supposed could have been used as weapons. Maybe like brass knuckles.

She walked back into the bedroom at the same moment someone was at the lock, and the door opened. The driver, a tray in his hand, stood there with a half smile on his narrow features, and she decided that he looked dangerous, like a street hood, which had been her first impression outside the day care center.

“You must be hungry,” he said.

She nodded. “And thirsty.”

“It’s the drug,” he said. He tossed her a liter bottle of Evian.

Which she caught and opened with fumbling fingers. Her mouth was dry, the water a relief. “What do I call you?” she asked.

“Rodrigo will do.”

“Is that your real name?”

Cruz smiled faintly. “May I come in and give you this tray? Or do you mean to attack again?”

“Set it down on the floor and leave.”

“I’ll do that, señora, but if you wish to have another meal, you will push the tray under the door when you are finished. No tray, no food.”

“Okay,” Louise said.

Cruz motioned for her to back up, which she did, and he stepped just inside the doorway and set the tray, which was covered with a napkin, on the floor. “Beans and rice, with some shredded pork. Same as we had for dinner.”

It smelled very good to Louise, who had eaten nothing since the piece of toast for breakfast this morning. But her hunger meant little to her, except as a reminder that by now the cops, and probably the feds would be in the middle of the investigation, which left Otto where? Doing what?

“How long do you mean keep me here like this? Or do you plan to kill me?”

“We thought that was a possibility, but the danger has passed because your husband decided to cooperate with us.”

Louise forgot her hunger. “The DI’s not looking for a ransom. So what is it? What is he doing for you?”

Cruz considered his answer for a long moment, but then he shrugged. “He has gone to Havana for El Comandante’s funeral.”

Louise was rocked, but just for an instant. “He might have gone to Havana, but it wasn’t for the funeral. State would probably send a delegation, but his name would most definitely not be on the list. Has he been kidnapped in exchange for me?”

“I don’t know.”

“Bullshit.”

“Señora, believe me for your own comfort and safety. My orders were to pick you up, bring you here, and communicate our demands to your husband. To this point, he has complied.”

“You must be raving lunatics to think the CIA will sit still for the kidnapping of one of its officers.”

“He has not been kidnapped,” Cruz said. “He flew to Havana with your State Department delegation at noon. I was given word that he arrived safely and no harm will come to him, or you.”

“Do you people actually think he’s going to give you secrets in exchange for my life?” Louise demanded. As romantic as the notion was, she knew that Otto wouldn’t do such a thing for all the tea in China, for anyone, for any reason.

“I don’t know that, either.”

“Has to be something else, otherwise he wouldn’t have dropped everything at a moment’s notice and gone down to Havana, leaving me here. He would have moved heaven and earth to find out who you guys were and where you took me. You have no idea how clever he is.”

“I’m following my orders, is all.”

“But you must have told him something pretty convincing. What was it?”

“Eat your dinner, señora,” Cruz said. “I’ll be back for your tray in thirty minutes.”

“Wait, please,” Louise said before he could leave. “If both of us are going to be murdered, it won’t matter what you tell me.”

“I’ve told you that no harm will come to you. Those are not my orders once your husband agreed to travel to Havana.”

“Okay, that’s fair. How long am I going to be held here?”

“A few days, maybe a little longer.”

“My husband?”

“The same.”

“He knows the reasons you gave him, and if he’s sent home in a few days, he’s going to tell his boss what they were. So what’s the harm in telling me now?”

“There’s no reason for me to tell you anything.”

“Yes, there is.”

“What?” Cruz asked.

“I promise not to give you any more trouble.”

Cruz had to laugh. “What trouble?”

Louise stared him down. “I have no idea, except you should think of a caged animal, a cornered animal, who gives you no choice other than to kill it. In that case, Señor DI Field Officer, you would be in a serious world of shit, because of how bad the fallout would be for Raúl and the government.”

Cruz was impressed. “I’ll think about it.”

“Do that,” Louise told him. “Or the next time I see you, I’ll shove this tray up your ass.”

“No tray outside your door, no more food.”

“I’d give up that pleasure for a shot at you,” Louise said, and she smiled. “By the way, how’s your partner? I found the nail file next to the toilet, maybe he’ll get the creeping crud.”

Cruz just looked at her before he backed out.

“Say hi to him for me,” Louise said, not really knowing why she was pushing so hard, except that it felt good to fight back a little.

TWELVE

It was noon, and Kirk McGarvey was running shirtless along the rocky path above the Aegean Sea on the Greek island of Serifos, pushing himself as he had since coming back to the same island, the same converted lighthouse he’d run to a number of years ago.

That time, John Lyman Trotter, a close friend, had turned out to be a mole within the CIA, and in the end, McGarvey had been forced to kill him, getting seriously wounded himself. He’d found this island, this refuge in the middle of nowhere, and started the healing process.

Now in his early fifties, he was a husky man, built something like a rugby player, a little under two hundred pounds, a little under six feet, with a square, pleasant face and expressive eyes that were sometimes green and sometimes, when he was in the middle of high tradecraft, a slate gray. When his wife, Katy, was alive, she’d thought he was devastatingly handsome, self-assured, with a charisma that sent the message that all was well and safe when he was close.

The Trotter business had been long enough ago that he’d bounced back fairly easily, but this time was different, and this time he was truly alone except for his granddaughter, whom Otto and Louise had brought here six weeks ago for a visit.

And seeing Audie, being with her, was wonderful and sad all at the same time because she was the spitting image of Liz, who’d been the spitting image of Katy. A lot of memories had come to the surface, making it next to impossible to keep smiling and keep it light.

Already she was forgetting her parents. It was something Otto and Louise wanted to correct. They wanted to show her the pictures and the few videos that Todd had made and tell her about them.

“Later, when she’s older,” McGarvey had told them after they’d put her to bed. The night had been soft, the kind Katy had always loved. “She wouldn’t understand. You’re her parents now. Just love her, it’s all she needs.”

Reaching the west side of the island, he came in sight of the white tiled patio at the base of the lighthouse one hundred yards farther and pulled up short. The figure of a man was leaning on the railing, looking down at the sea one hundred feet below.

Apparently he’d walked up from town.

McGarvey had switched back to his Walther PPK, in the 9 mm version, more out of sentimental reasons than any other, and it was holstered at the small of his back. After the operation in Baghdad and finally Washington, D.C., when he’d been briefly jailed because he’d angered the president and a lot of other powerful people on both sides of the Beltway, he never went anywhere without it.

So he started down the path toward the lighthouse, wondering who the unfamiliar man was, and why he had come.

And McGarvey was curious, so his step quickened just a little — a sign, he supposed, that he was beginning to heal after losing his wife, daughter, and son-in-law all in the same operation. Their being so irrevocably gone still wasn’t real to him. And all the good, honest Greek food and wine, all the exercises and running and five-mile swims every day, even the shooting practice in the hills, which acted as sort of a relief valve to him, had really helped. Yet all of it had done little except hone his body and steady his aim. But at night he had his dreams — nightmares, actually — that he had to deal with during the days.

Some evenings he would walk down to the island port village and tourist center of Livadi, where he would have a light dinner with a half bottle of retsina, and try to convince himself that all he wanted, really needed for now, was some time and peace to heal. Of course, he was aware of his own failings, his impatience with doing nothing for so long after practically an entire lifetime in dangerous service to his country — for the most part as a field officer with the CIA. But like many spies before him, he also knew in his heart that he had become, had always been, an adrenaline junkie.

The biggest thing he’d learned over the past few months was that it is possible to run away from just about everything — except yourself.

The man at the rail straightened up and turned around as McGarvey came down off the path and stepped onto the patio. A tourist boat was coming around the east side of the island, making for the docks at Livadi, and it’s what the visitor had been looking at.

He was a short man, well under six feet, with a thin body, narrow pinched-nosed face, dark eyes, thick dark hair, and he seemed surprised about something. He wore boat shoes, faded jeans, and a lightweight white shirt with the sleeves buttoned up above his elbows. McGarvey figured him to be in his mid to late forties, and in pretty good shape.

He came forward and stuck out his hand. “Mr. McGarvey, I’m happy to finally meet you. Marty Bambridge, I’m the new DDO.”

McGarvey’s gut tightened. For a CIA directorate chief to come all this way, unannounced and apparently without bodyguards, was not good news. He shook the man’s hand. “How did you find me?”

“Otto gave us directions,” Bambridge said. He took out his CIA identification and held it up. “We’re in something of a hurry, so I’d like you to pack, and I’ll explain on the run.”

“What sort of trouble?”

“We’re not sure, but Otto’s wife was kidnapped two days ago, and we need your help.”

“What about my granddaughter?”

“The babysitters are taking care of her at the Farm. Otto thought it was for the best to get her out of harm’s way.”

“Where is he? Why’d he send you?”

Bambridge hesitated. “Well, that’s just the point. He flew down to Havana with a delegation from State to attend Fidel Castro’s funeral. But he’s disappeared and there’s been no further word from him or the kidnappers.”

“Was that part of their demands, that he was to go the Havana in exchange for Louise’s safety?”

“Yes, but there’s a lot more,” Bambridge said.

“There usually is,” McGarvey said, wondering just what insanity had to have gripped the DI to pull off such a stunt, and how the Administration was reacting. “Give me fifteen minutes.”

“Make it ten, I have a helicopter standing by for us in town.”

His bedroom was three-quarters of the way up the tower, with a 360-degree view of the approaches from the sea and land. After kicking off his running shoes, he went to the windows to see if Bambridge had actually come alone. Or if he had been followed.

Landing a helicopter, even one that took tourists around for a bird’s-eye view of the island was a fairly big deal, always attracting a fair amount of attention. But he spotted no one sniffing down the DDO’s trail.

He took a two-minute shower, then dressed in a pair of khaki slacks, a white button-up shirt, dark blue blazer, and loafers. Once he’d stuffed his pistol and silencer plus two spare magazines of ammunition into an overnight bag, along with a few pieces of clothing, a couple of spare passports, untraceable credit cards and driver’s licenses, about ten thousand in cash — all he had in his go-to-hell-kit — he hesitated at the door and looked back.

The islanders would be sitting up and taking notice of the man who’d leased the old lighthouse, and who one day without notice simply got in a helicopter and flew away. He wasn’t coming back here, he decided. Maybe his healing was over and done with. Maybe it was time to go home. He had an apartment in Georgetown, and the house on Florida’s west coast, and presumably a teaching post in French philosophers with emphasis on Voltaire, still open at Sarasota’s New College.

Time to go back, if for nothing and no one else but Louise and Otto and the baby, he thought, heading downstairs.

And because he had a fair idea now why Louise had been kidnapped, and it had nothing to do with Otto.

“I don’t know how long this is going to take, do you need to let someone know you’re going to be gone?” Bambridge asked. “A caretaker?”

“I’m not coming back,” McGarvey told him. “I assume we’re going to Andrews aboard a Company jet?”

“Yes. Are you carrying a weapon?”

“Among other things.”

“I was warned,” Bambridge said. “But we’ll not be bothered by customs.”

They didn’t talk on the forty-five-minute hike along the rocky path that wound around the hills down to Livadi, where an older French Aérospatiale EC120 helicopter with Aegean Air Tours markings on the side was waiting for them on the landing pad just to the west of the docks. Bambridge was a smoker, he explained, and his wind wasn’t as good as McGarvey’s.

They stopped within sight of the chopper.

“I’m assuming that the kidnappers contacted Otto and told him to fly to Havana,” McGarvey said. “Did they say why?”

“We had an asset in Castro’s compound. And the night the old man died, his last visitor was a woman whom the kidnappers identified as María León. Supposedly she’s one of his illegitimate children, though we’ve not been able to verify it. She’s also Chief of Operations for the DI, and this op is hers. She had Louise snatched in order to get Otto to Havana.”

“And you people let him do it?”

Bambridge was surprised. “You know him better than anybody. Do you honestly think we could have stopped him?”

“Is the Bureau making any progress finding Louise?”

“They’re looking for the Caddy the kidnappers used, but it’s disappeared. No one at the day care got a tag number.”

“Has the White House been informed?”

“No. It was one of Otto’s conditions.”

“Good, and we’re going to keep it that way,” McGarvey said. “Because they’re not interested in Louise or Otto. It’s me the DI wants, and luring Otto to Havana was the only way they could dig me out.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know, but I’m going to find out.”

“Just how do you plan on doing that?” Bambridge asked.

“I’m going to Havana to ask the woman why her dying father’s last wish was to make contact with me. And then I’m bringing Otto home.”

THIRTEEN

It had been several hours since Otto was picked up at José Marti Airport and finally brought in the back of an army truck to a lovely home on the beach near Cojimar, about eight miles east up the coast from Havana. The grounds were tropically lush, and from where he was seated at a poolside table, the sound of the surf just a hundred feet away was soothing.

But each hour that went by increased his anxiety about Louise a hundredfold because the woman who’d supposedly arranged the elaborate kidnapping had not shown up to explain her purpose, and his imagination, vivid at the calmest times, was running wild.

Except for the drama on the back road where he’d been picked up by the army and the DI Gazik had been destroyed, he’d been treated with a pleasant indifference.

The windows were open throughout the house, no screens or bars, but he was sure there were patrols on the grounds, in addition to the pair of tough-looking armed minders who were never farther than ten feet away.

In any event, he wasn’t here to attempt an escape; he’d come to find out what had possessed a high-ranking director of the DI to pull such a crazy stunt. And sitting now, sipping a cup of thick Cuban coffee with natural raw sugar, he was no closer to making sense of it than he had been when he’d first watched Louise’s video and talked to her kidnappers, which seemed like a thousand years ago.

Otto looked up as a slender woman, long black hair, oval face, large dark eyes, came from the house, said something to one of his minders, and then came over to him. She was dressed in a white polo shirt and khaki slacks, sandals on her feet. He recognized her from the pictures their asset in Castro’s compound had managed to send to Langley, and he got to his feet. “Colonel León,” he said.

“Sí,” María said. “We never counted on someone taking my photograph at my father’s compound.” She extended her hand, but Otto ignored it.

“Nice spot you have here,” he said. “Lots better than the average Cuban will ever see.”

“It’s the same in the States, and just about everywhere else,” María said. She motioned for Otto to sit down, and she took a seat across from him.

A young boy, maybe in his early teens, dressed in a white jacket came out with a silver tray on which was a bottle of Máximo Extra Añejo fine Cuban rum and two glasses, but no ice. “Good afternoon, Señora Coronel,” he said brightly. He set the tray on the table. “You’re home early. Shall I pour?”

“No. Leave us now.”

“Shall I tell Cook there will be two for dinner?”

“Yes, please,” María said, and the boy left.

Otto got the impression that the boy and the two minders — the only ones he’d seen in the house — were happy, not at all oppressed by their boss. Which was confusing, because he’d wanted to believe that the woman was a monster.

María was looking at him, a faint smile on her lips. “I’m not what you expected.”

“No. But then I suppose that insanity has a bunch of different faces, not all of them ugly.”

“A left-handed compliment, I suppose. But there’s nothing insane about this operation, except for its difficulty and, I suppose, improbability.”

“Your people kidnapped my wife — you can’t expect me to cooperate.”

“You’re here,” María said. “Anyway, you must have figured out that she wasn’t the target, even though she probably has some interesting information we could use.”

It was what Otto had been telling himself from the start. “Neither am I,” he said.

“Actually, no — although I know some people in our Technical Directorate who would like to spend a month or two talking to you.”

“I’d love to get at the DI’s computer system, but what I have in mind wouldn’t take much more than an hour or two, ya know.”

María poured a couple of fingers of rum into each glass, and handed Otto one. “This is among our better rums,” she said. And she delicately sipped hers. “But I’ve always been curious about something. With your expertise, I’ve always assumed that you could hack into our systems just about any time you wanted to do. Why haven’t you?”

Otto sipped his rum and nodded. “This is very good,” he said. “It’s never been worth the effort, at least not on my watch. And a lot of your data is stored the old-fashioned way — on paper in file cabinets — and we would have to run the risk of burning some of our assets to get at them. Again, not worth the risk. The Russians didn’t leave you enough for us to worry ourselves.”

María looked away for a moment. “It’ll have to end one day. The embargo. It’s so stupid.”

“We never pointed nuclear missiles at you.”

She looked back. “We didn’t invade your country. And we don’t maintain a military base on your soil.”

“We were willing to help in the beginning,” Otto said. “But your father chose the Russians instead of us.”

“Your government supported Batista—”

Otto waved her off. “Save it for the faithful. It’s not why I’m here, and frankly, I don’t give a shit about your internal politics. If you guys ever straighten out your act, you’d be surprised what we could do for you.”

“No thanks,” María said bitterly. “We’ve seen what you’ve done for Iraq and Afghanistan.”

“They have free elections,” Otto said. He finished his drink, Louise’s sweet face popping up in his mind’s eye, and it took everything he had not to jump up and start hopping from foot to foot as he usually did when agitated. The only other alternative was to grab the liquor bottle and try to beat her to death with it.

“I took a great risk getting you here, but it was the only way I could see to get Kirk McGarvey to come to me. I want you to get word to him.”

“It’s already been done.”

“Then you knew before you got on the plane?”

“Of course, just not the why.”

An odd look briefly crossed María’s eyes. “I haven’t an idea. It was my father’s deathbed wish that I get him to come here. He said something about retribution, and that McGarvey would know.”

“Know what?”

“Our salvation. My father’s exact words. And he told me something else that made no sense. He said that Kim Jong-il told him McGarvey could be trusted. Does that mean anything to you?”

Otto shook his head. “Sounds like the ravings of a lunatic to me,” he lied.

María bridled. “He was my father.”

“That’s something else you can save for the faithful,” Otto said, but he was intrigued. “Salvation from what? Did he say?”

“No. He made me promise to get McGarvey here and then he died.”

“No clue?”

“None.”

“What about his personal papers? Maybe a daily journal, something like that.”

“I don’t know.”

“Shit,” Otto said angrily. “You pulled off this stunt without doing your homework?”

“It’s not so easy here. Especially just now. The entire country is on high alert. Everybody is being closely watched. No one can afford to make a false move.”

“You don’t seriously think we’ll invade.”

“No one does. But Raúl and the people around him are afraid of a revolution. They’ve been paying close attention to what’s been going on in the Middle East, especially Egypt, and they don’t want something like that to get started here.”

“And yet you took the risk to kidnap my wife and bring me here so that you could get at Mac.”

“I suspect that he’ll come for you, and when he does, your wife will be released unharmed.”

“He’ll come for me,” Otto said. “But maybe not in the way you want.” And he was very afraid for Louise.

FOURTEEN

But instead of dinner with the American, Raúl’s secretary telephoned to order María back to Government Plaza for an urgent meeting. A military helicopter touched down on the lawn in front of her house and she was whisked into the city, where she was admitted to the president’s office, less than fifteen minutes after the call.

Raúl was alone in his office, and María, dressed in military fatigues, approached his desk and saluted. He was a pleasant-looking man in his eighties, though he didn’t look that old. His eyes were squinted behind square glasses, his hair gray, and just now the corners of his mouth were turned down, as if he’d been given disappointing news. He was dressed in a rumpled tweed sport coat and open-collared white shirt.

He sketched a tired salute and motioned for her to take a seat. “Thank you for coming at such short notice,” he said. “This is a troubled time we all knew was coming. And I’m asking for the cooperation of all my important … people.”

María thought he’d almost said friends. “I’m at your service, Señor Presidente.”

“You will attend the funeral tomorrow in civilian clothes, but no one else from your directorate must be there. You understand the necessity in order to avoid any speculation about your true identity.”

“Of course.”

“You will interact with no one, especially the American delegation,” Raúl said, and he looked away for a moment, a sudden expression of sadness, maybe even grief, coming to his face. “It’s not what I want. Not what your father would have wanted. Not the way any of us thought that this would turn out. None of it.”

María felt a little sorrow for him, though he was a wily old bastard, almost as adept at manipulating people as Fidel had been. He’d been there at the beginning of the revolution and as the youngest of the three Castro boys, he had learned his lessons well from the masters of the game, including Che Guevara and the Soviet spy Nikolai Leonov, whom he’d met in Moscow in the mid-fifties. But he’d lost a brother, and he was now fully faced with the nearly overwhelming task of pulling his country out of its abject poverty without appearing to cave in to Washington’s demands for political reform.

“I understand, sir,” she said. “I’ve always understood.”

“He loved you, as he did all his children.”

María lowered her eyes. The remark was unexpected. But she nodded. “I didn’t know it until he called me that night.”

“You were the only one with him when he passed?”

“Yes.”

“What did he say to you?”

María suppressed a smile. Calling her here tonight had nothing to do with the funeral arrangements. “Nothing that made any sense. He talked about the revolution, and before that Mexico City, and the good friends he’d lost. The Bay of Pigs and the missiles that were almost his.”

“And me?”

“He said your name, but I couldn’t understand the rest. He was very weak, but he held my hand and told me that I was a beautiful child.”

Raúl looked disappointed. “You know about the spy who took photographs of you and presumably sent them to the CIA?”

“Yes. But so far, there have been no repercussions.”

“How would you know something like that?”

“We have assets in Washington and New York, some of them quite effective. Had I been outed, the word would have spread.”

“Are you telling me that we have someone inside Langley?”

“No, but we have at least two close connections with people in their headquarters.”

“Will you share that information with me?”

Operational details were almost never part of a presidential briefing, and certainly the names of key people were usually kept secret, in case of an inadvertent slip of the tongue. “I will prepare a report first thing in the morning, Señor Presidente.”

“No need, if you are sure that your true identity has not been guessed.”

Raúl was probing, so the problem was what he knew and where he was getting his information. Only her chief of staff, Ortega-Cowan, and very few of her operational people knew the full extent of the Washington operation that got Rencke here, part of which was telling the CIA who she was. And when this op was over, the three kidnappers would disappear.

“No one knows my true identity,” she said, and she watched for a reaction, but there was none, except that Raúl nodded.

“I thought that perhaps your father might have told you something that could be useful,” he said. “These are troubled times, and I have a premonition.” But he trailed off.

“Sir?”

Raúl shook his head. “Nothing. Go back to your home. Tomorrow will be a fateful day for Cuba.”

Downstairs, María headed down the long corridor, most of the offices dark now, to the rear exit, where the helicopter was waiting. Ortega-Cowan came out of the shadows, giving her a start. “What the hell are you doing here?” she demanded.

“I was just leaving the office when I saw you get out of the helicopter. What did the great one have to say?”

“He doesn’t know about our little operation, if that’s what you mean,” María said, and she continued down the corridor.

“It’ll only be a matter of time.”

“Not if you keep your mouth shut and a tight hand on the operational assets.”

“Don’t worry about me, Colonel, but Washington could have been a disaster. Still might be if the FBI finds the woman.”

They stopped at the doors. “What’s this all about, Román? Are you getting cold feet on me?”

“If you would confide in me why El Comandante wanted Kirk McGarvey to come to us, I might be able to come up with another scenario that might not be so dangerous. If Washington falls apart, all our heads will be on the chopping block.”

“Make sure that it does not.”

“I cannot in all good conscience operate blind,” he said, and María almost laughed.

“When have you ever had a good conscience?” she said. “I’ll tell you one thing, this is important, but even I don’t know the full extent of it, nor will I until I actually get to speak with McGarvey face-to-face.”

Ortega-Cowan was still troubled, and it showed. “Is he close enough to Señor Rencke to come here?”

“I think so,” María said. “But if not, we’ll devise another plan, you and I. Maybe even meet him somewhere on neutral ground.”

“Mexico City?”

“It’s a possibility we might have to consider. Why don’t you work something out and have it on my desk after the funeral?”

“As you wish, Colonel,” he said, and he turned and walked away down the corridor toward the front doors and the parking lot in the plaza across the street.

On the way back to her house near Cojimar and her guest there, she had time to think about the question Ortega-Cowan had asked: Was Kirk McGarvey close enough to Otto Rencke to come here? And in time — before Washington unraveled or before someone on General Muñoz’s staff became interested in what María’s directorate was doing in the aftermath of the shooting last week in El Comandante’s compound?

The day after her father’s death, she had searched the DGI’s archives for everything the service knew about McGarvey. Much of it was little more than gleanings from newspapers — mostly in the United States, but elsewhere around the world as well, including London, Paris, Berlin, Prague, Moscow; but nothing in Tokyo, Beijing, and certainly not in Pyongyang.

A somewhat lengthy report concerned an operation in which McGarvey had taken part, at Guantánamo Bay — but it was mostly speculation, because the DI had no one reliable inside the U.S. Navy base, except that there were at least two night incidents in which gunfire had been reported.

She hadn’t waded through all the material — there was no time for it — but she’d read enough, including a few DI-generated reports from Washington and the UN, to notice that almost every time McGarvey’s name came up, Otto Rencke’s had also been mentioned.

Which had led her to Rencke’s file, which was curiously a much larger one than McGarvey’s because the DI had a great deal of respect for his computer genius. And a certain amount of fear, which was especially shared by the Venezuelan SEBIN.

“Bring that man here, and you might be letting a hornet’s nest into our living room,” Ortega-Cowan had warned.

“We’ll keep him for just as long as need be,” she’d said.

“Nowhere near any of our computers.”

“Of course not,” she’d agreed.

But Rencke had told her that he could break into Cuba’s systems anytime he wanted, except that it wasn’t worth the effort.

And she’d believed him.

FIFTEEN

At Langley, Bambridge escorted McGarvey up to the DCI’s office on the seventh floor. Page was new to the Agency since Mac had been in the Old Headquarters Building last, and it was he who’d appointed the new Deputy Director of Operations. “Welcome back, Mr. Director,” his secretary said.

“I’m not really back for very long,” McGarvey said, and he and Bambridge went in.

Page rose from behind his desk and came around to shake hands. “Good to finally meet you, Mr. McGarvey,” the DCI said. “I assume that Marty briefed you on the way over.”

“Yes, he did. Has the Bureau made any progress finding Louise?”

“Nothing overnight. But we’ve asked that it be kept low key as long as Otto is in Havana.”

“What’s the reaction from the White House?”

“I’ve not briefed Bible yet, so it hasn’t gotten to the president,” Page said. Madeline Bible was the new Director of National Intelligence, and the word on the street, even as far as Serifos, was that she was probably the last. That layer of bureaucracy created in the aftermath of 9/11 had proved ineffective. “I won’t be able to keep this under wraps for much longer, though.”

“What about the State Department’s delegation to Fidel’s funeral?”

“If you mean have they reacted to Otto’s disappearance, no, they have not. Officially, he wasn’t on the plane, but the aircrew reported that he was met by two men and they drove off once the delegation was gone. And that’s the last anyone has seen or heard of him.”

“Mr. McGarvey is of the opinion that the real target is him, not Otto,” Bambridge said.

Page was startled. “How did you come to that conclusion?”

“Otto doesn’t have anything they would understand, and he sure as hell wouldn’t cooperate with them by revising their computer systems,” McGarvey said. “They grabbed Louise, the easiest target, to force Otto to Havana, knowing I would go after him.”

“But why? Have you had any connection with this woman who runs their directorate of operations? Or Castro himself?”

“I was involved with something at Guantánamo Bay a couple of years ago, but this has to be something else, something important enough for them to go to these lengths.”

“And you intend on going to Havana?”

“Otto is a friend.”

Page didn’t seem surprised. “What can we do to help?”

“I need to borrow one of your people in Miami, because I’m going through the back door.”

“Or course,” the DCI said. “Who is it?”

And McGarvey told him.

After the flight across the Atlantic and the meeting in the DCI’s office, McGarvey was dead tired and in need of a shower, but using the Company’s travel agency to book him a flight direct to Miami, he cabbed it directly out to Dulles. Louise and Otto were in harm’s way, and he would catch up on his sleep later.

He was traveling on his Federal Air Marshal Service credentials, so he had no trouble bringing his weapon through security, and the pilot and copilot nodded but said nothing when he boarded. Crews on every commercial flight were more than happy to have an air marshal aboard, but they were to be given no special attention. They were to be anonymous to the passengers.

The two-and-a-half-hour flight got him to Miami International Airport a few minutes after three, where he was met by Raúl Martínez, the CIA’s chief of deep-cover operations in the Little Havana section of the city, centered around the Calle Ocho. It was a job the slender, dark-complexioned man had held for a number of years. He and McGarvey had worked together more than once, and they’d built up a mutual trust.

Martínez was dressed in dark slacks and a white guayabera shirt with intricate embroidery around the pockets and along the button line; he didn’t smile when he and McGarvey left the terminal and got in his Cadillac Coupe de Ville parked illegally out front. He nodded to one of the cops, who looked the other way, and they took off south toward the Dolphin Expressway.

“Okay, Mr. M, you’re not here for a vacation, though it looks like you could use one,” Martínez said. “Must be about Otto.”

“What have you heard?”

“Nothing official from the Building, if that’s what you mean, except that you were on your way down and I was supposed to cooperate. But I saw the squib in the Washington Post about the shooting at the day care center your granddaughter attends, and a friend of mine up at the Farm told me that she was there and Otto was in a big rush to get out of town.”

“The DI kidnapped Louise and told Otto that he needed to get down to Castro’s funeral.”

“That’s about an hour from now, but I don’t think he’s going to make it.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Word on the street in Havana is that an American who flew in aboard a State Department plane was picked up at the airport by a couple of guys in a Gazik that was found blown to hell on a back road somewhere up around Habana del Este. No bodies. But the American showed up that night at a house on the beach outside Cojimar owned by some government functionary.”

“Colonel María León, she runs the DI’s Directorate of Operations.”

Martínez glanced at him. “No shit,” he said. “No one down there knows exactly who the American is, but everyone seems to have the impression that Langley has to be kept out of it for the time being. The American’s — Otto’s — life depends on it.”

“Sounds like DI backspin.”

“That’s what I thought,” Martínez said. He shook his head. “So they grab Otto’s wife, but the operation is sloppy and a bystander gets shot to death in the process. Nonetheless, they got her, so Otto can’t do anything but get down to Havana, where he’s snatched by the deputy director of operations in such a way that his presence is supposed to be a secret. Supposedly, dissidents killed him and the two guys who picked him up. And the DI spreads the rumor that whatever the situation might look like, it has to be kept away from the CIA. And that doesn’t sound loco to you?”

“Muy loco,” McGarvey said. “But it’s worse than that.”

Martínez worked it out in a split second. “Hijo de puta. Otto’s just the bait. It’s you they want.”

“That’s what I think.”

“Why? They can’t still be pissed off about the Guantánamo operation. That makes no sense.”

“I don’t have a clue, but I’m not going in the front door.”

“The air force has good radar of the entire strait, and the navy doesn’t screw around. The second we take off from Largo or the Matecumbes — by float plane or boat — they’ll know we’re coming.”

“I’m counting on it,” McGarvey said. “And if I’m right, they’ll wait to pick us up from the beach.”

“If you’re wrong, you’ll find out what the inside of a Cuban prison is like.”

“You just need to get me somewhere in the vicinity of Cojimar and then head back. They won’t interfere with you.”

“And then what?” Martínez said. “At some point, you and Otto will have to get out of there, unless this colonel has something else in mind for you. I mean, it makes no sense. None of it. The risk they’ve taken is beyond insanity.”

“Unless it has something to do with Castro’s death,” McGarvey said, and he told Martínez the incident with the CIA asset at the compound that night, leaving out the speculation that Colonel León was Castro’s daughter.

Martínez was angry. “I know Carlos’s family here in Miami,” he said. “No one told me, so I could go to them and tell them about their son. They worry about him all the time. They need to know what happened.”

“Not yet,” McGarvey said. “This is an ongoing op.”

“Soon,” Martínez said without taking his eyes off the road.

“Soon,” McGarvey agreed.

Martínez headed east toward the turnpike, which was the fastest route down to the Keys. “I have a friend who has float plane on Key Largo. Depending on how long he wants to stay low and follow the Keys west before he turns straight south, could take maybe an hour and a half.”

“We’ll go tonight,” McGarvey said. “Sometime after midnight.”

SIXTEEN

Standing alone, one hundred feet from her father’s simple mausoleum in the Colón Cemetery, María was also alone with her thoughts and remembrances. A priest was saying something, his words muffled by a huge crowd of several thousand people, most of them Cubans, but many of them from around the world, including the Americans, so she couldn’t make out what he was saying.

But it didn’t matter. El Comandante was officially an atheist, and the priest was here only for state decorum, the necessity of which her father would have understood, as he understood just about everything.

Except for his daughter’s needs — until the last minutes of his life, when he’d called her a beautiful child. Too little too late.

In the eighth grade, she was the only girl in the special class of thirteen boys who had teased her from the very beginning. But she’d begun to develop that summer, and by midyear she was finally having her periods, her hips had rounded out, and she’d developed breasts, and the boys had began taking her seriously — too seriously. Grabbing at her in the hallways, and outside on the playing fields, and in the swimming pool. Although she had her own tiny section of the dressing room, she’d become aware that peepholes had been drilled and that they watched her in the shower. And she’d wanted to go to someone, a father or mother, to ask for advice, because she truly didn’t know what to do.

The situation came to a head in the early spring, when one evening, five of the boys slipped into her sleeping quarters, and before she was fully awake they’d thrown off the covers and pulled off her nightdress. Two of the boys held her down while another dropped his pajama bottoms and started to rape her.

“Wait,” she said sharply, but not loudly enough to alert the dorm’s night matron, who was asleep at her desk at the front door.

The boys were startled.

“We can do this one at a time and no one will get hurt,” she said.

The boy hovering between her legs didn’t know what to say or do. She got a hand free, and she reached up and touched his erect penis and he almost jumped out of his skin.

“I’m a virgin, so I don’t know what’ll happen. But I know that I need privacy. So the rest of you go back outside and wait until we’re done.”

She had a hold on the boy’s penis and she could feel him shivering.

“Go on now,” she said.

“Get the fuck out of here,” the boy over her ordered. He was one of the class leaders and the school’s best soccer player. The others, including most of the teachers, had a lot of respect for him. He was almost certainly the son of someone important in the government or military.

The boys took a last lingering look María’s body but then filed out of the room and quietly closed the door.

“Now,” María said softly, and she guided the boy’s penis inside her, a very sharp pain stabbing at her gut, much worse than her monthly cramps, nearly causing her to cry out.

But it was over nearly before it began, and the boy stiffened and shuddered in her arms, thrust hard one more time, and then pulled away, heaving a deep sigh.

He started to say something, but María rolled over on top of him, clamped her legs around his waist to hold him down, and strangled him, her thumbs crushing his larynx, her fingers cutting off the blood to his brain through his carotid arteries.

The attack had been so sudden, so unexpected, so powerful that the boy only thrashed around for a few seconds before he blacked out, and still María did not release her grip for at least two full minutes, when she was sure he was dead.

Afterwards, she’d walked out without getting dressed, blood running down her legs from her vagina, past the boys who made no move to stop her, and reported the rape and defensive murder to the matron.

And almost nothing came of it, her father more important than the boy’s father, other than an examination to make sure she wasn’t pregnant, a brief visit with a Russian psychologist on staff, and a long, fatherly talk with the school’s KGB headmaster, during which he’d actually used the word pride.

No one had bothered her after that incident, which garnered a little respect: You think you’re man enough, go ahead and have a go, see how well you fare.

Academically she excelled, finishing each form at or near the top of her class. She played soccer and baseball well enough so that she started most games, and she won a gold medal her third year in the South American Swimming Confederation in Buenos Aires.

By the time she’d finished prep school and gone off to university in Moscow, she was considered to be among the KGB’s better recruits; she had the rare combination of intelligence, athletic ability, and beauty. But instead of becoming a field officer as had been suggested, her father kept her close to home, in the DI. It was an order she hadn’t learned until a couple of years ago. But it was just as well, and she’d accepted the possibility that she might one day run the spy agency.

Until her father died.

El Comandante’s coffin was moved into the mausoleum and the crowd began to disperse. Most of the diplomats and government dignitaries were dressed either in uniforms or in black suits. For anonymity’s sake, María wore a simple cotton dress and plain shoes much like the vast majority of commoners lining the narrow walkways that honeycombed the cemetery and spilling out of the main gate and into the streets. At least as many as one hundred thousand people, she figured. Despite the islanders’ poverty, Fidel was well loved.

She moved back and blended with the crowd as the diplomats moved up the long walk to the waiting limos outside the gate, no one paying her the slightest attention. And twenty minutes later, it was over — just a few people, mostly women, with lit candles staying behind for a last few minutes in the cemetery.

“Nothing will ever be the same,” she heard one woman tell another.

On the evening she’d told Ortega-Cowan that she was Fidel’s illegitimate daughter, she had the impression that he wasn’t surprised. But she had let it go because, of course, she’d needed him to implement the operational details in Washington to get Rencke here. And returning to her office after the funeral, she’d got the impression again that nothing was coming as a surprise to him, and she had to think that he might know a lot more than he was letting on. And it was bothersome.

“How was the service?” he asked, standing in her doorway.

“Boring,” she said. She went into her private bathroom and without closing the door she splashed some water on her face. The morning sun had been warm.

“I watched it on television,” Ortega-Cowan said. “Quite a crowd.”

“Us or them?” she asked.

“Both. But it was too bad that you couldn’t have been in uniform in front.”

She came out. “What are you getting at?”

“Ibarra called this morning about twenty minutes after you’d left.” Julio Prieto Ibarra was Raúl’s chief of staff. “He wanted to know how we were involved in the kidnapping yesterday of an American here in Havana. I denied it, of course. But I promised that we’d look into it.”

“Evidently he saw the police report. But how did he connect it to us?”

“I didn’t ask him,” Ortega-Cowan said dryly. “But maybe he has a little bird whispering secrets in his ear.”

“Someone here on my staff?”

“Or at Cojimar.”

María had worried about this possibility, because no operation was absolutely waterproof. Leaks were common, and the higher the stakes, the greater possibility of a breakdown.

“I don’t think McGarvey will wait very long to come to his friend’s rescue,” she said. “So time is on our side.”

“Perhaps not.”

“What else did Ibarra say to you?”

“Raúl wanted to talk to you as soon as you returned.”

“In person?”

“A phone call will do.”

“Any hint?” María asked.

“No, but I’d guess he wants to ask you about the kidnapping,” Ortega-Cowan said. “What will you tell him?”

“I’ll think of something.”

She called on Raúl’s private line that only he answered. But it was four rings before he picked up. “Good afternoon, Colonel. Thank you for returning my call so promptly.”

“Yes, sir. I only just got back to my desk from the funeral.”

“It was a moving ceremony.”

She didn’t know what to say.

“I want to know what sort of a game you are playing,” Raúl said, a harsh edge to his voice. “Your chief of staff is evidently in the dark, which leaves only you to explain why a ranking officer of the American CIA was kidnapped and has disappeared.”

“The police report came across my desk this morning. But I wasn’t aware that the man worked for the CIA. Was he a spy?”

“Who better to know than you, if you are in complete control of your department.”

“There’s been no reaction from my contacts in Washington. Maybe he faked his kidnapping so that he could go to ground here. It’s a possibility that we shall look into immediately, Señor Presidente. He may have had help from the CL.” Which was Cuba Libre, “Free Cuba”—the organization, not the drink. “He may even have been killed, for all we know.”

“I’m ordering the police to stop their investigation. Your directorate is to take charge, either to find the man and arrest him, or to find his body and return it to Washington.”

“Yes, sir,” María said. Pulling the police off the case was actually a break.

“There has been no official reaction from Washington because although the man arrived aboard the State Department aircraft, his name was not on the manifest; therefore, he came here unofficially. But before I lodge a formal complaint, you need to find him. Am I clear on this?”

“Sí.”

“All eyes are on us,” Raúl said. “On you. Your father is dead, so you no longer have his protection.”

María flared. “My father has been dead since my conception,” she said bitterly, but Raúl had already broken the connection.

When she put the phone down, Ortega-Cowan offered a sympathetic smile. “That should hold him for a day or two, but not much longer,” he said.

“Well, the cops are out of it for now, but I think that McGarvey will come either by boat or most likely by seaplane. I want you to coordinate with the navy to alert us when and where he shows up, but he is not to be interfered with.”

“What if he’s not alone?”

“I want him picked up and brought here undamaged,” María said. “There will be no other considerations.”

SEVENTEEN

At the Sheraton Key Largo, Martínez got them a room overlooking the Bay of Florida for five days and made a few phone calls before he left, suggesting that McGarvey get a couple hours of sleep before they headed for Cuba.

“This guy who’s going to fly us over is cautious,” Martínez said. “If the Cubans catch him, he’s a dead man, so I’ll have to be convincing.”

“What’s his story?”

“He was a Cuban air force pilot, but his wife apparently was mixing with the wrong people — the anti-Castro crowd — and she was arrested and died on the way to prison. They were coming after him when he took off with his MiG-25 and flew it to Key West.”

“Ernesto Ruiz,” McGarvey said. “About twenty years ago. I remember it was a big deal because he came in so low and so fast, no one knew he was coming until he’d touched down. And the fighter was loaded with air-to-air and air-to-surface missiles.”

“And a new Russian radar jamming system that caught us by surprise. So the DI wants him in a big way. As a result, he’s become a careful man.”

“There’re a lot safer places for him to live than Key Largo.”

“That’s true, but he changed his name and appearance and runs a nice little charter service for fishermen who want to work the flats in the bay for bonefish. He told me that he likes being this near to home, and that sometimes on a day off when it’s clear, he’ll fly close enough so that he can catch a glimpse of the island. It’s enough for him.”

“What makes you think that he’ll take the risk to fly me down there?”

“If he thinks doing it will somehow stick it to the regime, he’ll jump at the chance,” Martínez said, and he smiled. “I’ll tell him about Carlos, but just leave that part to me.”

McGarvey was sitting in the dark on the balcony, looking at the running lights of a slow-moving boat out in the bay, music drifting down from the Fishtales Lounge on the top floor, people in the pool below, when someone was at the door. He got to his feet, picked up his pistol from the low table beside him, and stepped farther into the shadows.

Martínez was at the door, framed by the lights in the corridor. “It’s me,” he said softly.

“Are we good to go?” McGarvey asked, showing himself as he holstered the pistol at the small of his back.

Martínez came the rest of the way in and closed the door. “He’s gassing up and preflighting the plane right now. Were you expecting trouble?”

“I’m sure the DI would like to catch you at something. They might have followed you back here.”

Martínez laughed. “Those putos in Miami couldn’t find their asses in a lit room with instructions. You going to take your gun with you?”

“They’ll expect me to come in armed.”

“Might come in handy if something goes south. You can never tell.”

McGarvey grabbed his dark blue Windbreaker and, leaving his overnight bag behind, went with Martínez, and they drove down to the tiny village of Rock Harbor, where Bay Flats Air Tours maintained a hangar up a one-hundred-foot concrete ramp from the water’s edge on the bay side.

The plane, already on the ramp, was a sturdy short takeoff and landing de Havilland Beaver that had once been used all over the world, but especially up in Alaska, for back country flying. It could carry the pilot and up to six passengers and gear at a cruise speed of a little over 140 miles per hour, its floats equipped with wheels that allowed it to take off and touch down on land or sea. The little aircraft was all but indestructible.

Ruiz was a short slope-shouldered man with a belly, bandy legs, and thinning gray hair over thick black eyebrows and mustache. He was trundling the hangar door closed when they drove up.

“I’ve read about you in the papers,” he said, shaking McGarvey’s hand. “Pretty risky for a former DCI to be going into harm’s way.”

McGarvey instantly liked him. “That’s why I get the big bucks.”

Ruiz laughed. “They’re mostly a bunch of fine people over there saddled by a fucked-up system. But don’t think they’re incompetent because the Russians are gone and just about every governmental agency is broke. They’ve got a good coastal navy, and some damned effective radar installations.”

“You’re taking a bigger risk than I am.”

“Acceptable, given the mission.”

McGarvey didn’t ask what the man understood the mission to be.

Ruiz pulled a chart out of the plane and illuminated it with a small red flashlight. “Raúl says that you need to get somewhere in the vicinity of Cojimar, which is just east of Havana. Not so many people there, but the navy will be active, especially if they have an idea that you’re on the way, specifically to that spot on the beach.”

“They know I’m coming,” McGarvey said. “And the DI knows exactly where.”

“In that case, they probably won’t start shooting until you’re safely ashore.”

“Getting out might be a different story,” Martínez suggested.

“Might be interesting,” Ruiz said without hesitation. He turned back to the chart. “We’ll fly down to Big Pine Key, about three quarters of the way to Key West, then head a little west of south, low and fast. Fifty miles to Big Pine and from there a hundred miles to Cojimar.”

It was just midnight.

“Should set down just outside the surf line a little before two. You can take the rubber raft, so by the time you’re ashore, I’ll back in international waters.”

“Wait for us at Newfound Harbor,” Martínez said. It was south of Big Pine Key. “I’m going ashore with him.”

It was about what McGarvey had expected. “You’re a high-value target.”

“And you’re a gringo, so somebody has to hold your hand.”

Ruiz laughed out loud. “I think I like crazy people better than sane people, because I feel that I’m among friends.”

Heading southwest, they flew at an altitude of about five hundred feet, high enough for them to see twenty-five miles in any direction, the keys an irregular necklace of lights like jewels on a black velvet backdrop. The moon had set, and in the distance they spotted the rotating beacon of an airfield.

“That’s the airstrip at Marathon on Key Vaca,” Ruiz told them.

They wore headsets so they wouldn’t have to shout. McGarvey and Martínez were in back, where the two middle seats had been removed, leaving space for the small inflatable boat in a bright yellow soft valise.

About fifteen minutes later, they spotted what looked like a barrage balloon, a large Goodyear-type blimp, at a much higher altitude than they were flying, tethered on Cudjoe Key behind the harbor.

“Fat Albert,” Ruiz explained. “Aerostat radar system. Watching for illegal traffic coming across the strait.”

“Will it cause trouble for you when you fly back?” McGarvey asked.

“They know who I am.”

Just past the surveillance blimp, Ruiz banked to the southwest and headed down to fifty feet above the wave tops. The sea was fairly calm, five- to six-foot swells, and after ten minutes he eased the small plane even lower, and looking out the side windows McGarvey got the impression that they were hurtling along like a speedboat, actually leaving a wake behind them. The slightest downdraft, the least little mistake, and they would crash.

Martínez looked at him. “Ernesto has done this before.”

“Glad to hear it,” McGarvey said. “Now, tell me everything you know about Colonel León’s house, and who’s likely to be there.”

Martínez gave him the general layout of what in effect was a smallish beach house once owned by the daughter of a pre-Castro sugar baron who’d sent her to Cojimar in exile for some indiscretion that no one remembered. The state had given it to María when she returned from Moscow and took up her DI duties as department chief in signals intelligence in the late 1990s. Since then, she’d put a fair amount of money into remodeling and furnishing the house and grounds, adding a west wing, the pool, and a small cabana. But all of the work had been done over a fairly long period of time, in bits and pieces, slowly, so as not to excite much interest. It didn’t do to flaunt one’s money.

“We have people down there keeping their eyes and ears open,” Martínez said.

McGarvey had never remembered seeing such detailed information when he was deputy director of operations or as DCI. “By we, do you mean the Company or your exiles in Miami?”

Martínez just shrugged. “Anything important gets to Langley. Nothing is going to change the system until we can go home. Trouble is a lot of people are dying of old age, waiting for the day.”

Ruiz had been listening to the exchange, and he glanced over his shoulder. “I won’t go back,” he said.

“Why?” McGarvey asked.

Apparently Martínez already knew the answer because he said nothing.

“There’s a lot of resentment. Years of it. And when the regime finally falls, there’ll be a bloodbath in the streets. I don’t want to be a part of it, because my hands wouldn’t stay clean.”

“Nor will mine,” Martínez said. “But wild horses couldn’t keep me from going back.”

“Look,” Ruiz said, and McGarvey and Martínez leaned forward to see out the windshield.

A soft glow lit the horizon slightly right of the aircraft’s nose.

“Havana,” Ruiz said. “You might want to take the raft out of the valise — we’ll be landing in about fifteen minutes.”

EIGHTEEN

María sat at her desk, alone in the west wing of her house, staring at the images on the computer monitor that were relayed from Coastal Radar Station Guanabacoa and listening to the chatter on the navy’s guard channel. A small single-engine aircraft had suddenly popped up on the screen coming from the north, its image breaking up because of its proximity to the water, and the sector commander aboard the Russian-built missile patrol boat Osa II was asking for orders to blow the bastard out of the sky.

“Stand by and observe,” the squadron’s watch officer at Station Santa Cruz del Norte radioed. “Acknowledge.”

“Copy,” the skipper replied, though it was clear from the strain in his voice he wasn’t happy with his orders.

Lieutenant Miguel Vera, the young commander at Santa Cruz, was intimidated by the DI, especially since María had mentioned to him that she knew of his great-uncle’s support for the Batista regime back in the late fifties. It was the same sort of power that the Stasi had wielded over the East Germans, and that de facto branch of the KGB had been one of María’s major interests of study. Information — didn’t matter if it was true or simply implied — was power.

They’d watched for small aircraft in the Keys, looking for the one that would turn south at some point and then disappear in the surface clutter. It was exactly how she figured McGarvey would be coming to her, and she’d called Santa Cruz to keep whatever patrol vessel was in the sector to stand down.

“Pardon me, Colonel, but what happens if the aircraft you say will be coming picks up defectors?”

“Then you would be authorized to blow them out of the sky when they took off,” María said. “But I believe this aircraft will be landing someone on the beach.”

The squadron commander was impressed. “A spy?”

“We think so, in which case, the matter belongs to the DI.”

“What about the aircraft?”

“You would allow it to return to the States, so that they would think their mission was a success.”

“I see,” the young man said, even more impressed. “I’ll have a patrol vessel with night-vision capabilities standing by.”

That was earlier this evening. Now her telephone rang, and it was Lieutenant Vera. “A single-engine civilian aircraft has just landed one hundred meters from the beach north of Cojimar.”

“Yes, I have a feed from Guanabacoa, and I’m monitoring your radio traffic.”

“Stand by, Colonel.”

“Base, this is vessel two-zero-niner on station, with a sitrep.”

“Roger, two-zero-niner, report.”

“I’m seeing two people climbing into a small inflatable. Looks like they mean to come ashore. What are my orders?”

“Did you get that?” Lieutenant Vera asked.

“Yes, I’m still monitoring your radio traffic. Don’t interfere with them.”

“Sí, Coronel.”

“You’ve done well this evening, Lieutenant. I will not forget,” María said, and she hung up.

Moments later, the watch officer at Santa Cruz relayed the orders to the skipper of the missile boat.

“Once they are ashore, this becomes a matter for the DI,” the officer said.

“What about the aircraft?”

“Let it go.”

As soon as the aircraft had shown up on radar heading south from Big Pine Key and then disappeared from radar, María put Ramiro Toro and Salvador Gonzáles, her two bodyguards, on standby to fetch McGarvey, if that’s who had landed. The problem was the second man. She hadn’t counted on him. Rencke was safely locked away in a small room here in the west wing, so he couldn’t cause any mischief tonight.

She called them over from their quarters and told them what was happening. They’d been shown photographs of McGarvey. “If it’s him, bring him here. I don’t think he’ll give you any resistance.”

“What about the second guy?” Toro asked. He was a large man by Cuban standards, over six feet, with a square jaw and mean eyes. He’d been the Cuban All Services boxing champion three years in a row not long ago, and he still had the edge. It’s why she’d picked him.

“Kill him, and leave the body in the bush,” María said.

“And if neither man is McGarvey?”

“One of them will be.”

“Sí, Coronel,” Toro said, and he and the much smaller Gonzáles, one of the DI’s better marksmen, turned and left.

María watched the radar feed and listened to the routine radio traffic for a couple of minutes, but then went back to where Otto Rencke was being kept. She opened the door, and Rencke, who’d been lying on his small cot, opened his eyes.

“It would appear that your friend McGarvey has arrived by small float plane a few miles from here,” she said. “We’ll begin the questioning tomorrow.”

“The sooner, the better,” Rencke said. “I’m sure Mac has a few questions himself. And he doesn’t take to liars.”

“Neither do I,” María said.

She walked back to the pool, where she heard the Gazik her bodyguards used sputtering off in the night, which became still except for the sounds of the surf thirty meters down the slope on the beach.

Retribution and salvation. It’s what her father had said to her on his deathbed, and it made no more sense to her now after questioning Rencke. McGarvey was supposed to have the answers, and her father’s unlikely source for this opinion had come from Kim Jong-il, possibly the most unstable government leader in the world.

And she was having some serious second thoughts, even though to this point everything was going according to the plan that she and Ortega-Cowan had worked out last week. But she was terribly unsettled. There were so many things that she didn’t know or understand, especially her father’s insistence that McGarvey be enticed to come here.

Twenty-four hours, she told herself. Forty-eight at the most, and she would have the answers, though what they might be, she hadn’t the faintest idea.

NINETEEN

It was nearly two by the time the small rubber raft, in black Hypalon, pulled up on the beach and McGarvey and Martínez got out. The night was quiet, this spot deserted. They could make out the silhouettes of houses a hundred yards to the east and a little closer to the west, but very few lights were on at this hour. The sky to the west was lit with the glow from Havana, but there seemed to be no life here just now.

“Ruiz picked a good spot,” McGarvey said.

“He knows his business,” Martínez said. “But that patrol boat out there was waiting for us, you do know that.”

“I was counting on it,” McGarvey said. The night odors of lush vegetation mixed with the sea smells at the tide line were the same as the beaches of South Florida, except here he was sure that he smelled burning garbage, and maybe the exhaust of a diesel generator or boat somewhere into the sea breeze. Possibly the patrol vessel, though he couldn’t hear the sounds of her engines or make out the silhouette of her superstructure.

But it did nothing to explain why the DI colonel wanted him here, though he was more certain now that they didn’t mean to assassinate him. If they’d wanted that, the patrol boat could have blown the plane out of the sky, and been well within its rights to do so. The U.S. would have had absolutely no recourse.

“So what’s next, Mac?” Martínez asked. “The colonel’s house is less than two miles to the west, so if you want, we can get there on the beach. But she probably has security that we’d have to deal with.”

In the very far distance, a stray bit of breeze brought the fading sound of the Beaver heading back to Florida, but then it was gone. Ruiz was safely back in international waters, something else he’d counted on. And something else that made no sense to him. The Cubans would consider Ruiz a high-value target, but they let him fly away.

“We’re going to walk up to the highway — our ride should be along any minute now,” McGarvey said, and he started toward the line of tall sea oats and grasses that grew just above the high-water line, but Martínez stopped him.

“I’m not coming with you,” Martínez said. “The DI wants you tonight, not me.”

“You should have gone back with the plane.”

“No disrespect, Mac, but I think getting you here was a hell of a lot easier than getting you out will be. So I’m going to stick around until it’s time to bail.”

“I’ll try to get to a radio.”

“No need,” Martínez said. “You’ll know it’s time when the shooting starts.”

McGarvey had to smile. “It’s good to have you around.”

McGarvey patted him on the shoulder and headed up to the sea oats, but when he looked back, Martínez had already disappeared, and except for the sounds of the surf, the night was even quieter than before.

The narrow two-lane coast highway was less than one hundred yards from the high-tide line, and when McGarvey made it that far and stepped out onto the pavement, a pair of headlights switched on about that far to the west and slowly came his way.

No other traffic was on the road, and as the Gazik pulled up a few feet away, McGarvey raised his hands over his head.

Two men in civilian clothes got out of the jeep; the smaller of the two armed with what looked like a Soviet-made 5 .45 mm AKR compact submachine gun remained behind as the bigger man cautiously approached.

“Señor McGarvey, are you armed?” he demanded.

“Yes.”

“Please hand me your weapon, we mean you no harm this morning.”

“Why is your partner pointing a weapon at me?”

“Why did you bring a gun into Cuba?” Toro asked reasonably. But he seemed a little uncertain, and his eyes kept darting to the bush along the side of the highway.

“I didn’t know what I might be walking into,” McGarvey said. He reached with his right hand for his pistol at the small of his back and held it out handle first to the Cuban DI officer, who took it.

“Are you carrying anything else that might harm me?” Toro asked, making sure the Walther’s safety lever on the left side was engaged before he stuffed it into his belt.

“No.”

“Someone else got off the airplane and came ashore with you. Where is he?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” McGarvey said. “As you can see, I’m alone.”

“You were observed from the deck of a patrol vessel.”

“Yes, we saw the boat. Perhaps if whoever was watching had been paying attention, he would have seen the pilot help me deploy the raft before he took off.”

“He came ashore,” Toro said patiently. “And we’ll find him. This is our island.”

“Maybe not for long if things keep going the way they are,” McGarvey said irritably. He was tired of screwing around. “The ball’s in your court, gentlemen. Either shoot me or take me to see Colonel León so we can find out what the hell this is all about.”

Toro started to say something, but then stepped aside and motioned McGarvey to get in the backseat of the Gazik, and he climbed in beside him.

Martínez crouched in the bush just a few feet from the side of the highway, and less than twenty feet from the Gazik. McGarvey had gotten into the backseat with the larger of the two DI officers.

He almost laughed out loud. Either the two guys were the dumbest security people in the business or they had no real idea whom they were dealing with. It would be like taking candy from babies for Mac to disarm and disable the two men — kill them, if need be — and make his way to the colonel’s house, disable or kill her, rescue Otto, and wait on the beach for Ruiz to fly back and pick them up. They could all be back in Key Largo in time for breakfast and Bloody Marys.

But that’s not why they’d come down here, and Martínez was just as curious as McGarvey was to find out what this was all about. But in the meantime, he had a bit of work to do himself.

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.

Kate tells Butterfly’s maid, Suzuki, that she’ll care for Butterfly’s son as if he were her own.

“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.

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 bodies 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, so 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.

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 Spanish 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.

The room was mostly in darkness, only a single small bulb lit in the bathroom, the door ajar. This place would end up a holy shrine for many Cubans, especially the older ones who remembered firsthand not only the revolution but also the brutalities under Batista, even though her father hated such sentiments. But she could almost feel his spirit here, even though she’d been raised not to believe in ghosts, hobgoblins, spirits, or gods of any sort.

She crossed the room and went through a door opposite the bathroom, which opened into a short corridor, nothing but shutters on the broad windows, to another door, which led to her father’s private study. She’d never been in this room, though she knew about it from Fuentes, who liked to brag to Ortega-Cowan how often El Comandante called him here for advice.

It was ludicrous, of course, nevertheless María had counted on the room being left unlocked with no security standing by. More than sloppy, it was criminal.

The study was small, maybe ten by fifteen, with only one small window double-glazed to prevent electromechanical eavesdropping and bulletproof against assassination. Three walls were covered by floor-to-ceiling bookcases, the fourth lined with tall, old-fashioned, eight-drawer steel file cabinets, none of them secured with locks, which was another surprise to María. But then her father might have felt safe here, inviolable.

A small desk sat on a Persian carpet in the middle of the room, with only the one lawyer’s chair, a worn cushion on the seat, behind it. Visitors to this room, for whatever reason, were meant to stand in El Comandante’s presence like children called before a principal. A floor lamp stood beside the desk.

María closed the wooden blinds over the window and went back and closed the door before she switched on the light. This place, too, smelled like cigars and the hints of a dying old man, though that part she figured was her imagination, as what she felt was a deep chill.

She put her shoulder bag down and started with the desk, not really knowing what she was looking for, but hoping that her father might have kept a diary or some sort of a daily journal that might point her in the right direction. Rencke had talked about Spanish gold, something her father had apparently mentioned twice during his visits to the UN in New York. And if even one tenth of what the American had suggested had a grain of truth to it, the find would be fabulous for cash-strapped Cuba.

An appointment book lay open to a date ten days ago, Fidel’s final notation made at nine in the evening: Arrange for M to be summoned. Soon. María shivered, the M was very possibly her, and Soon could have meant that he knew he didn’t have long to live.

But there was nothing indicating what he intended to say to her, what he intended asking her to promise on his deathbed. Nor was there anything of interest in the four drawers, other than stationery, a well-thumbed Spanish — English dictionary, a box of cigars, several boxes of wooden matches, and a collection of pencils, erasers, pens, paper clips, a couple of folded maps of Cuba, and of the southeastern section of the United States, along with street maps of Manhattan and downtown Washington, D.C. The only thing that she found odd was a small paper bag filled with what she recognized as votive candles, some partially burned down. But she couldn’t wrap her mind around what they might mean, nor did she want to go in that direction.

Next she went to the files, starting with the top drawer of the leftmost cabinet, which contained a series of folders, some of them quite thick, labeled with names in alphabetical order, beginning with ACOSTA, HOMERO, who was the current Minister Secretary of the Council of State, followed by hundreds of names — most of which she did not recognize — for whom her father had kept dossiers.

Under K, were three fat folders for the Kennedy brothers, starting with the president, whose dossier actually filled nearly half of one drawer. He’d kept files on a lot of figures before and after the revolution, including Batista and the people in his regime, plus a dozen or more U.S. gangsters, among them Meyer Lansky and Santo Trafficante. A lot of history from Fidel’s point of view that would probably never see the light of day.

And in a lower drawer of the second cabinet, she came across a thick file marked LEÓN, MARÍA, which she passed by, not wanting to know what it might contain, her chest tight, her throat constricted. And she felt like a total fool because of her reaction. Stupid, actually.

In the hour and a half it took to go through the files, she’d found no references to Spanish gold or the speeches he’d made at the UN, only names. If there was any mention, she would have to read through every file, which could take weeks, probably months. Time that she didn’t have.

After closing the last file drawer, she went to the window, eased one of the wooden slats aside, and looked out. The compound was quiet.

The floor-to-ceiling bookcases held what María guessed had to be at least three thousand books, some of them stacked double deep on the shelves, other larger books lying flat. They weren’t arranged in any specific order, and many of them were old and dog-eared, especially the paperbacks, most of which were falling apart. A lot of the books were novels — many of them American Westerns or Mexican and Spanish science fiction. Some were history books, of Cuba and Spain and other countries, including the Soviet Union, with several shelves containing nothing but histories of the United States and its leaders beginning with Washington, Franklin, and the other revolutionaries, and of Lincoln and Davis and the Civil War.

But she found what she was looking for in less than ten minutes. A series of notebook-sized lined journals — Moleskines, similar to the notebooks that Hemingway had used to jot down his ideas — were stacked behind a full shelf of books on military history and strategy, including von Clausewitz and Sun Tzu. A dozen of them — apparently in chronological order, because the ones toward the bottoms of the stacks were old, the covers tattered, some of them moldy, while the ones near the top were new, even shiny.

María opened one of them, and she recognized her father’s distinctive handwriting from documents and drafts of his speeches she’d studied at university. The notebook entries began three months ago, detailing a series of meetings he’d had with his brother and with Darío Delgado, who was the Attorney General, on the advisability of hiring lobbyists to deal directly with the U.S. Congress concerning the trade and tourism embargo. Nothing concrete had come of the meeting, and her father’s notes made it seem as if he were vexed, not only by his apparent ineffectiveness in the day-to-day running of his government, but also because of his age and failing health.

R seemed sympathetic but Gen DD didn’t want to listen to anything but his budget concerns. Defense is a must, but whom does he think he’s going to war with?

An entry dated two weeks ago was the last, his handwriting nearly illegible.

Must talk to my people. Much to tell them, much to suggest, to give them hope.

She took all twelve of the notebooks off the shelf and brought them back to the desk, careful to keep them in the same order. If he’d left any clue to his search for the Spanish gold, she was sure it would be somewhere in his journals.

Then she rearranged the military books so that it wasn’t apparent that something had been removed, and went back to the desk. Some of the notebooks were held shut by an elastic band attached to the back cover. Some had a nylon string attached to the spine that could be used to mark a page.

The journal entry marked in the second book from the latest took María’s breath away. It was under a date in mid-September last year.

J-i’s letter arrived by secret courier today, and he’s given me much needed detail about the incident in Pyongyang with the former DCI. Incredible. J-i says the man is to be trusted, even though he is the enemy — former DCI and contract assassin. Was involved two years ago at Guantánamo Bay. J-i promises that KM is willing to cut through any bureaucracy, including his own if he believes the truth of a thing. Might be able to help in your quest. But the right man would have to approach him, in the right way. Very important. Salvation and especially retribution can be extremely costly. Something I’ll have to think about, but for now there is only one person in all of Cuba I can trust.…

J-i was Kim Jong-il, and KM was Kirk McGarvey, but it was the last four words in that entry that rocked her to the core. Her father had written:

She’s not ready yet.

She went to the window again and looked outside, but the compound was still quiet. Evidently the security detail had not been able to reach Fuentes, otherwise he would have been here by now. But the situation would not last, and she didn’t want to have to deal with him tonight.

Starting with the first entry in the first journal, dated June 15, 1955, in Mexico City, her father wrote about meeting a very bright and eager medical doctor from Argentina named Ernesto Guevara, known as Che, which was nothing more than a speech filler in Argentine, meaning “hey.” The next pages were filled with long discussions he and his brother Raúl had with Che, and with a dozen other people, including Alberto Bayo who’d been a leader of the Republican force in the Spanish Civil War and who agreed to help train the Cuban rebels.

But it was something near the end of the first notebook that caught her attention. Her father was writing about how to come up with the money for arms and ammunition when he met a young Mexican history major studying for his Ph.D., identified only as Dr. José D, or sometimes simply as JD.

JD has a far-fetched idea that intrigued me last night, though Che and Raúl think very little of him. He talked about gold — as much as tons — buried somewhere in northern Mexico or perhaps even farther north. Not Cíbola, but caves filled with gold, brought by monks from Mexico City that in some cases should have been transshipped to Spain via Havana.

María pulled out the chair and sat down, her heart racing, her mouth dry, and she started thumbing through the notebooks, starting with the first one, looking for any mention of the gold, or of Dr. Jose D or JD. One entry in the middle of the second journal date late in December 1956 briefly mentioned the doctor:

Dr. José D wanted to come with us because he wanted to be a part of history instead of merely studying it. But Che was with me in arguing for him to stay in Mexico City, to continue his work. Che later told me JD would be a liability to us, but I thought he would have a better chance of finding Cuba’s gold at the National Archives. JD agreed and he agreed to try to keep me informed.

The next three notebooks were filled mostly with entries from the revolution and the months following when her father was trying to organize the country. But she came across two brief mentions of JD, one of them having to do with the mystery of a place called Victorio Peak in southern New Mexico.

… Doc Noss deer hunting found a rock that had been worked with tools, beneath which was a hole that led straight into the mountain where he discovered notes and maps and gold.

In the second entry, her father wrote that JD had promised a full report, but that there was some doubt as to the authenticity of the find. At the end of that entry, her father promised not to give up.

… clutching at straws. But the gold could solve a serious problem for us — whom to choose as our ally — the US or USSR. Ideology would make it easy to choose. But more importantly we need help to reverse B’s destruction of the economy. I will continue.

Headlights flashed across the drawn blinds, and María heard a car pull up at the front of the house. She hurriedly stuffed the notebooks in her shoulder bag and started for the door, but then turned back to the file cabinets, where she retrieved her file, put it in her purse, then turned off the light and left the room.

Fuentes was charging across the living room when she emerged from the bedroom, and he pulled up short. “What are you doing here?” he demanded harshly. She thought he looked more frightened than angry.

“The real question, Captain, is what you haven’t been doing. There is no security here other than your two buffoons at the gate. Anyone could simply walk in and take whatever they wanted to take. Souvenirs, perhaps.”

“That’s impossible.”

“You let an American spy in here, why not a tourist?”

Fuentes had nothing to say.

María arched an eyebrow. “I’m getting tired of calling you to my office to report on mistakes that you have made. But I want you downtown within twenty-four hours with a complete operational directive for security. How exactly you plan on safekeeping the national treasures here while managing what is expected to be a horde of visitors.”

Fuentes looked beyond her to the open bedroom door and the door to Fidel’s study beyond.

“Am I clear?”

“Sí, Coronel,” Fuentes said.

And María could see the cunning in his eyes. He had become a real enemy, but rather than fire him, she wanted to keep him very close so that she would have a reasonable expectation of knowing what he was up to.

TWENTY-NINE

The fishing boat was ancient, even older, Martínez figured, than most of the derelict cars on Havana’s streets, but the diesel engine was in perfect tune and very well muffled. “Not very fast or pretty,” Luis Casas said, “but she is as reliable as a whore with the scent of money in her nostrils.” He was at the wheel, smoking a cigarette, cupping the glowing tip in his hand.

They ran without lights about one hundred yards offshore, and Martínez standing in the back, bracing his hip against the gunwale, looked through a pair of binoculars at a red flashing light a couple of miles inland to the west.

Pedro Requeiro was at his elbow. “Anything yet?”

The red light was atop the cell phone tower, and they were waiting for it to go out, which would indicate that Jorge had managed to cut power to the installation.

“No,” Martínez said, but then the light went out. “Okay, he’s done it.” The time on his watch was five minutes until midnight. He motioned for Luis to head toward the shore.

If the eight men that the de la Pazs had arranged had not run into trouble, the attack on María León’s compound would begin any minute, starting with cutting the electricity and taking out the antennas on the roof. As soon as the first shots were fired, he and Pedro would go ashore.

His speed-dialed Ruiz’s sat phone number. “It has begun.”

“I’m on the deck twenty minutes out.”

“Anything on your radar?”

“A couple of fishing boats to the west, and a strong military target about fifty klicks to the east. But I don’t think I’ve been painted yet. Leastways, nobody’s heading this way in any big hurry. How did you get word to Mac?”

“I didn’t. But he knows I’m here, and soon as he hears the first shots, he’ll understand what’s happening.”

“I’m on my way.”

Martínez broke the connection, as Pedro finished attaching the 9.5 horsepower outboard to the four-man inflatable, and he helped ease it over the side of the slow-moving boat. They were headed toward the beach directly below the León compound, the diesel at dead slow, its exhaust noises almost nil.

“Ernesto is on his way?” Pedro asked.

“Sí. Twenty minutes.” Martínez looked at the man’s weathered face, crinkled now in a slight smile. “There’s room in the plane to take you back to the States.”

“What would I do there? Go back to washing dirty laundry?”

“It’s going to get hot after tonight.”

Pedro laughed. “This is the tropics. But you know all about that.”

“The war won’t end tonight. Maybe not in our lifetimes.”

“Perhaps not, but you’ve told us that this battle is worth the effort.”

“Sí.”

“Then let us take it to them.”

THIRTY

María had stormed off just after dark, and hadn’t returned yet. The cook and houseboy had retreated to their quarters, leaving McGarvey, who’d been unable to sleep, seated outside at the pool, drinking a Red Stripe beer. Otto had been locked in his room, insurance against McGarvey trying anything, and a second pair of security officers had shown up around nine, one of them manning the radio room.

The sea breeze had died to nothing a couple of hours ago, and the night was hot and humid under an overcast sky, only occasionally lit by distant lighting to the northwest out in Hemingway’s Gulf Stream, and McGarvey felt that something was about to go down. Soon. He could almost sense Martínez somewhere close.

He glanced over at Gonzáles leaning against the slider frame just inside the dark living room, a Kalashnikov slung over his shoulder. The only light came from the west wing, where Otto was being kept and where the compound’s communications and security center was located.

McGarvey thought that Gonzáles and Toro had seemed nervous all day, and especially since María had taken off and the second pair of muscle had shown up. The entire compound should have been lit up like day, no shadows to provide places to hide. And at the very least, he should have been locked up in his cell, not allowed to have the run of the house.

Except for the beach, which was lit up as if for a party. If something was going to happen tonight, the security staff expected it might be coming from the sea.

In the distance to the north, McGarvey thought he might be hearing the sounds of a diesel engine running at dead idle, and somewhere in the opposite direction, toward the highway, he was sure he could hear something else; something new, a very faint clank of metal against metal.

Gonzáles may have heard something, too, because he turned away for just a moment.

“Señor,” McGarvey said, getting up. He started toward the security officer.

Gonzáles snapped around, suddenly alert, wary.

“Do you speak English?” McGarvey asked.

“Yes.”

“Will Colonel León be returning tonight? There’s something I need to tell her.”

“I’ve not been told.”

“Can you find out? It’s important. Something she needs to know about the gold we were talking about this afternoon.”

“Stop there, please,” Gonzáles said, and McGarvey stopped a few feet away as the guard took a cell phone/walkie-talkie out of his pocket and keyed the SEND button. “Ramiro.”

The walkie-talkie was silent.

“Ramiro, this is Salvador, come back.”

At that moment, the lights on the beach went out, and Gonzáles swung his rifle off his shoulder as he fumbled with the walkie-talkie. Before he could bring it to bear, McGarvey was on him, snatching the weapon and slamming the insole of his foot into the man’s left leg, dislocating his kneecap.

Gonzáles cried out as he fell back, grabbing for the rifle, which discharged one shot, catching him under his chin, the back of his skull blowing out.

Someone came running from the west wing at the same time as what sounded like a powerful engine came to life, and the lights on the beach flicked back on.

McGarvey stepped into the living room into the deeper shadows of a corner a couple of feet away from the open slider, when a series of three explosions came in rapid succession outside in front, in the direction of the west wing. The sounds of the engine — which was likely driving the compound’s emergency generator — died, and the lights went out again.

“Salvador!” someone shouted from the corridor.

McGarvey got the impression of a hulking dark form emerging into the living room, and a second later, a flashlight came on, the beam finding Gonzáles’s body.

“Puto,” the man swore. It was Toro.

McGarvey fired two shots from the hip about where he figured the security officer’s center mass would be: one to the left of the light beam, the other to the right. Toro grunted and his pistol discharged as he was driven against the wall, and he dropped the flashlight, the beam skittering across the floor.

Someone opened fire from out front in the direction of the highway, what sounded like at least a half dozen guns, the bullets slamming into the front of the house, window glass shattering, and a floor lamp exploding a couple feet from where McGarvey stood.

The two security guards in the west wing began returning fire, the chatter of their Kalashnikovs distinct, as McGarvey, moving fast, made his way across the living room and momentarily held up where Toro’s body lay partially blocking the corridor.

More firing started up outside from farther away, up toward the highway. Kalashnikovs, which probably meant Cuban troops catching the rescue party Martínez had organized from behind.

“Otto, down!” McGarvey shouted, and he ducked back around the wall.

“Right,” Otto replied from his cell.

One of the security officers fired a long burst down the corridor. When the man’s weapon went dry, McGarvey stuck his Kalashnikov around the corner and fired a short, controlled burst. A man cried out in pain, and the firing from inside the house stopped.

Outside, the battle was heating up, the rescuers turning their attention away from the house in an effort to defend themselves from the attack at their rear. It sounded to McGarvey as if they were greatly outnumbered.

McGarvey raced down the corridor into the west wing, where at the open door to the radio room, the guard illuminated by the dim light coming from the front panel of what was a battery-driven portable radio looked over his shoulder, a microphone in his hand.

The man said something urgently as he turned around, a pistol in his other hand, but before he could fire, McGarvey squeezed off a half dozen rounds, two catching the man in his shoulder and driving him to the left, a third catching the side of his head, and at least two slamming into the radio.

The fight outside was intensifying but moving away, back toward the highway. The rescuers were sacrificing themselves to give McGarvey and Otto time to get away.

“Mac!” Martínez shouted from the sliders to the pool.

It was a boat’s diesel engine McGarvey had heard. “House is clear!” he shouted. “I’m getting Otto.”

“Move it, amigo.”

The heavy door to Otto’s cell was secured by a thick steel bolt, which McGarvey pulled back. Otto was there, a deep, troubled scowl on his owlish features, his long red hair flying everywhere.

“If something’s happened to Louise, nothing on this planet will stop me from crashing every system in this bastard of a country! I’ll drive ’em back to the Dark Ages, kemo sabe, I shit you not!”

“One step at a time,” McGarvey said, hustling Otto out of his cell and down the corridor to the living room. “First we have to get out of here in one piece.”

Otto suddenly pulled up and turned toward the front door.

Martínez was there at the open sliders. “Mac, rápido.”

“They need help,” Otto said.

“They’re dead!” Martínez shouted bitterly. “Now, move your ass!”

Otto was torn, but McGarvey grabbed his arm and hauled him across the living room, and Martínez led them in a dead run down to the beach, where they clambered aboard the inflatable and headed out toward the dark form of the fishing boat a hundred yards offshore, as the de Havilland touched down fifty yards farther out.

“The dirty bastards,” Otto muttered.

“What about the colonel?” Martínez asked.

McGarvey shook his head. “She left about four hours ago.”

“Our guys walked into a trap, and she probably set it up.”

“I don’t think so,” McGarvey said. “She wanted more from us.”

“Well, someone knew we were coming.”

THIRTY-ONE

María had spotted the bright flashes and heard the intense gun battle a couple of kilometers away from her compound, and parked now at the side of the highway behind a pair of troop trucks a few meters from her driveway, her heart hammering, she monitored the unit’s tactical frequency.

From what she could gather, they were a small specials ops unit out of the army’s Western Command, Seventieth Mechanized Division, based in Havana, but who’d ordered them out here, and whom they were engaged with made almost no sense to her. Unless she was the target.

She tried to use her cell phone to call Ortega-Cowan, but there was no signal. Nor could she reach the OD in the Operational Center.

But it came to her all at once, and suddenly it all did make sense to her. The man who come ashore with McGarvey and disappeared into the bush had mostly likely engineered the attack. It was a rescue mission that had been worked out in advance.

Even now, her people in the compound were most likely dead, and McGarvey and Rencke were on their way out to the same light plane that had landed just offshore the other night. The firefight, which had gradually moved closer to the highway — away from the house and the beach — was starting to die down, lending even more credence to her speculation.

Which left her with a problem that she would have to solve immediately. Within minutes, because whatever force was driving the special ops troops away from the house probably wouldn’t survive much longer. Most of the special ops reports she’d read — the honest ones — generally used the same words to describe the overall efficiency of the two battalions: ineficaz y inepto, “inefficient and inept,” but each truck she was parked behind held sixteen men — thirty-two plus an officer. Even inept, they couldn’t possibly lose against whatever ragtag force McGarvey’s people had managed to muster.

Rencke had not lied about the fortune in gold or about her father’s interest in finding it to help Cuba’s financial recovery — from Batista and from her father’s own destructive fascination with socialism. But if he and McGarvey were to be captured and become military prisoners, CIA spies, the trial would be short and sweet. They would be found guilty and executed.

And she would fall with them. Raúl had warned her about involvement with the American who’d arrived aboard the U.S. State Department aircraft and disappeared. Find him and return him or his body. Fast.

Your father is dead, so you no longer have his protection, Raúl had warned her the afternoon of the funeral.

María switched frequencies to the Santa Cruz del Norte surveillance channel and asked for Lieutenant Vera. When he came on, he was just as helpful as usual. If word had begun to circulate that the head of DI’s Operations Division was on the way out, which was the way things usually worked, it hadn’t filtered down to Santa Cruz.

“Sí, Colonel, Station Guanabacoa has reported the landing of another small aircraft near your compound.”

“Is there a patrol vessel within reach of that location at this moment?”

“Unfortunately not within fifty kilometers. I was just about to dispatch an air asset from Playa Baracoa.” It was home base outside Havana to the 3405 Regiment, which maintained a few MiG-21Bs and -23MFs.

“Don’t,” María told him. “The aircraft is transporting two of our deep-cover spies back to Miami and then Washington. It’s important that they are not interfered with.”

“I understand,” Lieutenant Vera said, “but there may be a fishing boat involved this time. What shall we do with it?”

“Destroy the boat.”

“And the crew?”

“They’re traitors who will try to get word to the FBI that we’re sending people north. They mustn’t be allowed to live to send the message.”

“Sí, Coronel,” the lieutenant said, and he signed off.

Two shots from what sounded like a pistol came from somewhere in the woods to the left, as María switched back to the unit’s tactical frequency, and then the battle seemed to be finished. She keyed the microphone.

“Special ops on-scene commander, this is Colonel León standing by on the highway. Report your situation.”

The radio was silent for several beats, and she was about to resend her message, when someone came back. “I’ll need to confirm your identity,” he said. He sounded out of breath.

“You’re at my house, you idiot, and apparently somebody wanted to assassinate me tonight. I’m on the highway right now, parked behind your unguarded trucks.”

“Stand by.”

Still holding the microphone, María got out of the car. The night was quiet; not even the cicadas were chirping.

“This is Lieutenant Abel Cobiella, I’m the unit CO for this operation. If you’ll stand by, Colonel, we’re making our final sweep.”

“Who ordered this operation?”

“Major Ortega-Cowan. He was concerned that he could not reach you and you might be in trouble. As it turns out, if you had been at home we might have been too late.”

“Thank you for your concern, Lieutenant. I want to know about my house staff. And I had two bodyguards.”

“I’m told that your staff is unharmed, but we have found four men so far who’ve been identified as probable security officers.”

“I only have two on permanent staff, so it’s likely that Major Ortega-Cowan sent the other two. Have you interviewed them yet?”

“Negative, Colonel. They’re all KIAs. But there’s something else. It looks as if they were taken down by someone inside the house. We’re working on it.”

“That won’t be necessary, Lieutenant. I know exactly what happened and why.”

“Señora?”

“One of the two men Major Ortega-Cowan sent was obviously a traitor,” María said. “Did it look as if there was a shoot-out between them?” Once the attack from outside the house had begun, she had little doubt that McGarvey seized the opportunity to take one of them down, disarm him, and kill the other three.

“Stand by,” the lieutenant said.

Every minute of delay here and now gave McGarvey and Rencke another minute to get out of Cuban airspace. And then what? she asked herself. What next? What was her next logical move? She didn’t think her position would remain stable much longer. But like her father, she could feel gold fever coming over her. Not for personal wealth. For the people. Or that’s at least what she wanted to believe.

“One man is down just inside the house from the pool, another on the opposite side of the living room, one in the corridor, and the fourth in the radio room. So you could be correct, Colonel. But I would guess that it’s also possible there were one or more other people inside the house, who might have done some of the shooting.”

“It’s also possible that the attacking force infiltrated my compound, killed the four security officers, and when they realized that I was not home, and that their mission was a failure, they tried to leave, but then ran into your unit. Any survivors among them?”

“No, señora,” the lieutenant said. “Give us another hour to make certain that your compound is secured.”

And in that moment, María made her decision, one that she suspected would eventually put her head-to-head with Kirk McGarvey. It was a prospect she found strangely disquieting while as the same time exciting.

“Take your time, Lieutenant. I’ll spend the night in the city. You can contact me at my office when you’re finished, and I’ll oblige you to keep some men posted here until I can send out a new security detail.”

“Colonel, I’m sorry, but leaving men here is not in my orders.”

“It is now,” María said.

She got back in her car, switched the radio off, and headed back into the city, where she could find a telephone that worked, so that she could order the immediate release of Otto Rencke’s wife. McGarvey was a formidable enemy, but from what she had learned, he was a fair man. But Rencke, if he were motivated, could do much harm to Cuba, devastating harm.

THIRTY-TWO

Louise thought it had to be very late at night when she awoke from a sleep in which she had dreamed Audrey was being taken away from her because she was an unfit mother. And no matter how much she pleaded with the two child welfare officers, she knew nothing was going to work.

Someone was at the door, and she managed to roll off the mattress and get shakily to her feet, when the man who called himself Rodrigo was there with another man who she recognized was the one at the day care center and who had shot Joyce.

They had not brought her food or water, which wasn’t a good sign.

“Two against one?” she demanded. “Not a pair of balls between you?” She took a step toward them.

“Our mission has been accomplished,” Cruz told her.

Louise’s heart sank. Her dream hadn’t been so far off the mark after all. She would never see Audie or Otto again because these two were going to kill her tonight. “Goddamn you to hell,” she whispered.

“It’s not what you think, Mrs. Rencke,” Cruz said. “We’ve been ordered to release you unharmed. We’re going to drive you to the Lincoln Memorial this very moment.”

“A bullet in the back of my head and then dump my body to freak out the tourists? Is that how you sick bastards think?”

Cabrera said something in Spanish that Louise didn’t catch.

“Sí, I wasn’t exaggerating,” Cruz said. “As much as that thought has crossed my mind, because you have been nothing but a royal pain, we have our orders. You are to be set free tonight. Right now. If need be, we’ll tie you up and gag you.”

She couldn’t believe them. She’d seen the man raise his pistol and shoot Joyce, and the teacher was in all likelihood dead. For doing nothing. For simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The third man showed up. “What’s the problem?”

“She’s crazy,” Cruz said. “Thinks we’re going to kill her.”

Álvarez looked at Louise. “Not such a bad idea. But we don’t have time. Tape her hands behind her back and tape her mouth shut. I’ll pull the van around front. Be quick.”

“Bastards,” Louise croaked, and she rushed the men, nearly stumbling and falling down.

Before she could do a thing, they’d easily taped her wrists together, and Cabrera held her head still while Cruz slapped a piece of duct tape across her mouth.

Otto’s sweet face swam into her mind’s eye. What would he do? What would Mac do?

Before Cruz could step back, Louise lunged forward and with all of her strength head-butted him in the nose.

“Dios mío!” he swore, a little blood seeping from his nose. He grabbed Louise’s left arm and roughly hauled her out into the narrow corridor. “Maybe we’ll say the hell with our orders. Maybe we’ll kill you after all.”

THIRTY-THREE

Martínez had gotten word to Langley that he would make a try for McGarvey and Rencke around midnight, and Marty Bambridge waited in the long, narrow operations center called the Watch, located down the corridor from the DCI’s office on the seventh floor of the Old Headquarters Building, until word came that they were safely out.

It was nearly two in the morning, and he’d been smoking heavily and drinking black coffee since he’d come in around ten and he felt like hell. Especially now, this late with no news, good or bad.

Tony Battaglia, the Watch officer, walked back to where Bambridge was sitting at a small desk just within the open door from the corridor. He was a slightly built man with a white shirt, tie loose, jacket off. The heels of his loafers were worn down, and like the other five specialists who worked twelve-on, twelve-off — usually for five or six days in a row — he looked like he was sick or used up, not enough sleep, not enough mental rest, but like he was fond of saying, “This is the greatest job in the world because we get to know everything.”

The Watch was connected by satellite feeds and highly encrypted computer links to every CIA asset around the world, plus information from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency over at Reston, in addition to most of the U.S. intelligence agencies, including the FBI. Flat-panel monitors mounted on the walls displayed just about everything that was going on just about anywhere in the world. It was this room where the raw information to generate the daily National Intelligence Estimate used to brief the president was collated.

“We’ve finally got a confirmation that what our KH-14 picked up on the coast just east of Havana about an hour and a half ago was a firefight at the DI’s ops director’s house, just like you thought it might be,” Battaglia said.

“How’s our confidence?”

“High.”

Bambridge glanced up at the clock mounted from the ceiling halfway down the room. “Anything from our other assets?”

“We’re sifting.”

A sour burn rose from Bambridge’s gut. “We should have heard by now if they got out. Christ.”

Battaglia’s phone buzzed, and he walked over to his desk and picked it up. After a brief conversation, he held out the phone. “I think you’ll want to take this. Line one.”

Bambridge answered. “Yes.”

“Marty, it’s Louise.”

Bambridge’s head instantly cleared. “Where are you?”

“Lincoln Memorial. A Metro D.C. cop found me about ten minutes ago, where I was dumped on the north side of the building, my hands and ankles and mouth taped.” Her words sounded slurred to Bambridge.

“Are you okay?”

“They didn’t beat me, but I’ve been drugged, and I’m still groggy. What about Otto, is he out?”

“We don’t know yet,” Bambridge said. “Are the cops still there?”

“Yeah, they want to take me to the hospital, but I have to come out to the Campus. Convince them.”

A moment later, a MPDC officer came on, and Bambridge identified himself. “I’ll have to confirm that, sir.”

“Of course. But in the meantime, how does Mrs. Rencke appear to you?”

“A little messed up, but actually not bad.”

“Has the FBI been notified?”

“Yes, sir. They’re sending someone to debrief her.”

“Fine. I want her taken to All Saints Hospital, no matter what she says. It’s in Georgetown.” The private hospital was used exclusively by U.S. intelligence officers — mostly CIA — hurt in the line of duty. The small staff was among the best anywhere in the world, as was the equipment.

The cop was impressed. “Yes, sir.”

“Let me talk to her again,” Bambridge said, and when she came back, he explained what would have to happen next. “For now, this has to be the Bureau’s case. You don’t know why you were kidnapped, except that you and your husband work for us, and you’re pretty sure that they were Hispanic. Nothing more than that.”

“I want to come in, goddamnit. It’s my husband we’re talking about.”

“Kirk is with him, he’ll be okay. But first I want the docs to check you out and as soon as you’re cleared, I’ll send a car for you. I need you to do this for me.”

Louise was silent for a moment. “Okay, I’ll do it. Here come the federales.”

“This’ll all work out,” Bambridge said. “All the shooting is over with for now.”

“What the hell do you mean by that?” Louise demanded. “What’s going on?”

“Anything comes up, I’ll let you know. Promise. But for now, you have to keep it together. This is important. Do you understand?”

“Let me know,” Louise said.

Bambridge hung up the phone and fished for a cigarette, when Battaglia motioned for him to pick up on two. It was McGarvey.

“Figured you’d be there,” McGarvey said, a lot of noise in the background. “But I’m using a nonsecure phone.”

“Where are you?”

“Just touching down in the Keys.”

Bambridge was relieved but irritated that Rencke, but especially McGarvey, had played it so loose. “I need both of you up here pronto for debriefing.”

“As soon as possible,” McGarvey said. “Any word about Louise?”

Bambridge wanted to insist, but he knew better. McGarvey was living up to his reputation as a loner, an independent operator, and Rencke would be even more impossible when he got back. “I just talked to her, she’s fine. They tied her up and dropped her off at the Lincoln Memorial a couple of hours ago. MPDC found her, and she called me. The Bureau’s with her now. When they’re done, we’re sending her to All Saints.”

“Soon as possible, let her know we’re back,” McGarvey said.

“Will do,” Bambridge said. “When can we expect you?”

But McGarvey broke the connection.

Bambridge held the phone in his tight fist for several beats.

You gotta go with the flow, ya know, Rencke had told him a few months ago. Bambridge had come over from operations at the National Security Agency’s headquarters in Fort Meade, Page’s hire, and it was obvious to everybody from the get-go that he had the NSA mentality — a little aloofness, a sense of superiority.

Fight the battles you can win, and save everything else until later when you’ve gathered enough ammunition. Otherwise this place will eat you alive. Capisce?

But Bambridge didn’t think he’d understood until just this instant. McGarvey and Otto were who they were, odd ducks, dangerous, and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it, except follow the one other piece of advice he’d been given at the start, this from Page.

They’re valuable assets, Marty, but handle them with kid gloves and don’t be surprised what they bring back to you. Or how they deliver it.

Bambridge telephoned All Saints to give them the heads-up that Louise Horn was coming in, and asked them to tell her that her husband and Mr. McGarvey were out safely. “She’ll understand.”

Next he telephoned Walter Page on the DCI’s secure line at his home in McLean. “They’re back, and Louise has been released apparently unharmed.”

“Did Mac tell you what it was all about?”

“No, sir. Said they were just landing in the Keys, but he was calling from a nonsecure phone.”

“Did he agree to be debriefed?”

“Soon as possible, his words,” Bambridge said. “But it sounded like he was on a mission. Hung up on me.”

“Well, we’ll find out when the bodies start to pile up,” Page said.

“Already started. We tasked one of our birds to take a couple of passes over the island and picked up a firefight at the colonel’s compound. No doubt, it was McGarvey’s doing.”

“No doubt,” Page said. “Keep me posted, will you, Marty? No matter the time.”

“Yes, sir,” Bambridge said, and hung up, and he had to wonder what the hell was coming their way this time.