Castro's Daughter

THIRTY-FOUR

Martínez went to get something from his car, leaving McGarvey and Otto alone on the ramp with Ruiz for the moment. “There was a gunfight back there,” the bandy-legged pilot said. He looked serious, even angry, as if he wanted to break something.

“It was a rescue party Raúl arranged for us,” McGarvey said, and he knew what was coming next.

“They’re probably all dead by now. Or being interrogated, which amounts to about the same thing. Was it worth it?”

“To get my friend back, yes. Beyond that, I don’t know yet, but we’re going to work on it.”

Ruiz looked at Otto. “You have a good friend, but what the hell were you doing in Cuba?”

“The DI kidnapped my wife in Washington and said they would kill her unless I cooperated. The agency’s director of operations wanted to talk to me.”

“About what?”

“That part we have to leave out for now,” McGarvey said.

Martínez came back with a thick envelope and held it out to the pilot.

“Are you going to hurt the bastards?” Ruiz asked, eyeing the envelope but not taking it.

“We probably won’t hurt the government, but if it works out, we just might be able to help the people,” Otto said.

“What are your chances?”

Otto shrugged. “Slim at best. But we’re gonna try, ya know.”

“Fair enough,” Ruiz said, and looked at Martínez and shook his head. “If you’re wanting to pay me, give it to someone who can use it. I have all I need. And maybe the trip was worth it. I hope so.”

“The fight’s not over with yet,” Martínez said, and the pilot nodded, and some secret knowledge passed between them.

They headed back up the island to the Key Largo Sheraton, where McGarvey had left his bag and his sat phone, traffic nonexistent at this hour of the morning. Martínez took his time driving; he was troubled.

“There’ll be reprisals,” he said to McGarvey. “What was it all about? What the hell did the DI want with you? And why didn’t the air force come after us? We must have shown up on their radar.”

“Someone knew your people were going to hit the colonel’s compound.”

“No shit, Mac. It was Colonel León.”

“I don’t think so,” McGarvey said. “I have a feeling she might have been on her way back, and might have stumbled into the mess. It had to have been her who ordered Louise to be released and let us make our escape.”

“Speculation,” Martínez said. “Because the timing makes you wonder. But back from where?”

“I don’t know,” McGarvey admitted.

“From her father’s compound,” Otto said. “I think she went out there to see if she could find some private files or maybe even a journal or daybook or something before someone else from the government beat her to it.”

Otto was sitting in the backseat, and Martínez looked at him in the rearview mirror. “What was she looking for?”

“You’re better off staying out of this,” McGarvey said. “Because at this point, you’re right: All we have is mostly speculation.”

“Definitely fringe,” Otto agreed.

“When word about the ambush gets back to Miami, which it probably already has, two things are going to happen. First of all, I’m going to get nailed. People are going to want to know what the hell I was doing down there, because from their perspective, it was me who was responsible for the mess. And you know what, I am responsible. And the second is the DI pricks are going to be all over us to find out who was behind it. Me again, which is something I can handle. But people will want to know why. Was it worth it? The same things I want to know.”

“Better start from the beginning,” Otto told McGarvey. “Okay?”

And he was right. “Colonel León was called to Castro’s deathbed because she’s one of his illegitimate daughters, and he had a dying wish for her to find me and ask for my help.”

“Dios mío!” Martínez said softly. “Help with what?”

“She didn’t know, and as a matter of fact, it was Otto who made the suggestion about the gold.”

“You’re not making much sense, Mr. M.”

McGarvey had not wanted to head in this direction, because in fact, they actually had very little to go on, but if the word got out, and it would, that there was the possibility of some fabulous treasure, there would be a stampede worse than any gold rush in history. A lot of people would get hurt. And yet Martínez had always been a steady hand, and because of his part last night, a lot of Cuban exiles in Miami would want answers that they deserved.

Starting with what Colonel León told them about her father’s dying words to bring McGarvey to Cuba for retribution and salvation, which was a complete mystery to her, to Otto’s suggestion about the gold possibly hidden somewhere in Mexico or perhaps the southern United States, McGarvey told Martínez essentially everything they’d learned.

“Apparently, it was an obsession of his,” Otto said. “He mentioned it both times he came to the UN.”

“If that’s what he meant on his deathbed,” Martínez said. “It’s thin.”

“But it fits with why she pulled this stunt,” McGarvey said. “And if Otto’s right about Fidel’s obsession, he might have kept files, or maybe even a diary, which is what I think the colonel was looking for last night. And I think she probably found something; otherwise, we would have been shot down before we’d left Cuban airspace.”

“What about the ambush? What makes you think she didn’t order it?”

“Her bodyguards who picked me up at the airport said they weren’t taking me downtown to DI headquarters, because they were in the middle of some kind of a faction fight,” Otto said. “But in order to pull off kidnapping Louise to lure me down to Havana, she must have confided in someone. Maybe her chief of staff. It could have been him who set up the ambush.”

“But why?” Martínez asked.

“A simple power play,” McGarvey said. “She’s a woman in a male chauvinist society, and she no longer has her father’s protection. If we’d been killed, she would have taken the fall. Probably the firing squad.”

“But they let us fly out of there.”

“She has her enemies, but she’s a bright, well-connected woman. And right now, we may just be her best hope for survival.”

Martínez was silent for the rest of the way until he pulled into the Sheraton’s driveway and parked away from the lights. “So let’s say, for the sake of argument, that there is this pile of gold buried somewhere. Maybe even somewhere in the Southwest — New Mexico or someplace. How do we find it, and what happens next? Because it sure as hell wouldn’t be turned over to Raúl Castro and his cronies, even if they could prove a legitimate claim against a third of it.”

“That’s what Colonel León wants to happen,” Otto said. “Be a feather in her cap. She’d be a star, untouchable, ya know.”

“If she lives that long,” McGarvey said. “Once it gets out what she did to get us down there, and then let us fly away, her own people will arrest her, and then it’ll just be a matter of time — maybe only a few hours — before they get the entire story.”

“That could be easily arranged,” Martínez said darkly. “So are you going to try to find the gold, or do you think it’s a fantasy?”

“I don’t think it’s a fantasy,” McGarvey said. On the flight across, he’d done a lot of thinking about it, and he’d come to a couple of conclusions, both of which addressed Martínez’s, “What next?” Because the treasure would certainly never be shipped to Havana. Not even a tiny portion of it. Washington would be perceived as supporting the regime. The Cuban exiles in Miami and across the rest of the country would in all likelihood rise up en masse, maybe riot like the blacks did in Detroit and L.A. in the seventies. Or at the very least rebel as a voting bloc.

Which had given him an idea. One that would be next to impossible to pull off, but one that had a certain symmetry because of something that Otto had told Colonel León.

“Yeah, we’re going to look for it,” he said.

“And if you find it?” Martínez asked.

McGarvey told them, and when he was finished, Martínez started to laugh and Otto shook his head.

“Oh, wow, kemo sabe.”

THIRTY-FIVE

Martínez had arranged for a CIA C-20G Gulfstream IV jet to meet McGarvey and Otto at Miami International’s private aviation terminal and fly them up to Andrews, and it was dawn by the time they touched down, both of them bleary eyed from the events of the past twenty-four hours.

McGarvey drank a couple of brandies neat and managed to close his eyes for a few minutes at a time, but Otto had borrowed a laptop from one of the crew and worked online for the entire two-and-a-half-hour flight until they taxied over to the hangar the Company used, and he broke out into a broad smile.

Louise Horn, looking crumpled in the same faded pair of jeans and tank top she’d been wearing when the kidnappers grabbed her, stood beside her dark blue Toyota SUV, waving at Otto in the window. A pair of Cadillac Escalades bracketed her car, four serious-looking men — dressed in suits, ties snugged up, their heads on swivels — waited with her.

“She looks okay,” Otto said, his voice full of emotion.

“That she does,” McGarvey said.

They thanked the crew, and as they stepped out of the aircraft, Louise let out a whoop of joy and came running, reaching Otto before he got two feet, nearly knocking him off his feet.

“Oh, wow, kemo sabe,” she said when they finally parted. “I was worried about you.”

“Did they hurt you?”

“Not as much as I hurt them,” she said, and she turned to McGarvey and gave him a long hug. “I told them that because of you, Otto was the last guy they wanted to mess with. Thanks for bringing him back in one piece.”

“How’s Audie?” McGarvey asked.

“She’s at the Farm for now. Until we get whatever this is settled.”

“They spoil her rotten,” Otto said, beaming, and McGarvey didn’t think he’d ever seen his friend more alive and animated and happy. His family was intact, and he had another mission.

One of the four men came over. “Welcome back, Mr. Director. I’m Don Young, and I’ve been assigned as protective detail supervisor for Ms. Horn.”

“Appreciate the help, but you and your people can stand down now.”

“Mr. Bambridge asked that we escort you back to the Campus to be debriefed. The FBI is starting to press pretty hard for some answers, and he thought that the operational details might have to be sanitized.” Young was being exceedingly careful choosing his words.

“Tell Mr. Bambridge that we’ll drive out tomorrow morning. But Otto and I haven’t had a decent night’s sleep in several days, so we’re going to crash until then.”

McGarvey started to turn away.

“Sir, I have my orders,” Young said.

McGarvey turned back. “I know. But I’m tired and I’m hungry, so don’t piss me off by trying to follow us. I’ll explain it tomorrow to Marty that I gave you different orders.”

Young clearly wanted to argue, but he thought better of it and finally nodded. “Yes, sir. Stay safe.”

“Thanks for your help, guys,” Louise said, and she and her husband and McGarvey got into the Toyota and drove off.

Otto lowered the front passenger-side window and adjusted the door mirror so that he could watch to the rear until they were out the main gate and on Suitland Parkway into the city. “We’re clear,” he said, closing the window.

“GPS tracker?”

“Not in this car.”

“Okay, so what’s all this about?” Louise asked.

“Not now,” McGarvey said from the backseat. “They may have bugged your car.”

“The Bureau?” she asked.

“Our people,” McGarvey said. The Cuba thing was just too big a deal, so out of the ordinary, that if he were in Marty’s shoes, it’s what he would have done.

“Shit,” Louise said, but she held her silence all the way through the city and across to Georgetown, where they maintained a three-story brownstone that Otto had bought and sanitized a year and a half ago to use as a safe house. The Company didn’t know about it, nor was it reasonable to think they could discover it, because Otto had been very thorough with the transfer of deed and with the monthly maintenance and utilities fees that were paid from a Paris bank on the account of a doctor with Médecins Sans Frontières who was always out of the country.

She pulled around to the back of the house, where she parked to the left of the small garden she maintained whenever they were in residence, and they went inside.

Otto motioned for them to keep quiet until he entered a code on a keypad in the mudroom just off the kitchen, and after a few moments, a green light came on.

“We’re good here,” he said. “No bugs.”

Louise put on a pot of coffee for them, then went upstairs to take a shower and change into some clean clothes. She looked beat up, and twice on the ride from Andrews, she had mentioned Joyce Kilburn’s death at the preschool. “It made absolutely no sense.”

“Could have been you,” Otto suggested.

“Or one of the kids, if the bullet had missed.”

They could hear the shower running upstairs, and Otto brought a bottle of brandy over and poured some into their coffee. “How much do you want to tell her?” he asked. He leaned against the sink, facing McGarvey, who was seated at the counter.

“Everything.”

“Okay. What about tomorrow, how much do we tell Marty? And the Bureau is bound to want some answers.”

“We tell them that it was a rogue operation to dig me out in retaliation for what I did at Guantánamo Bay.”

“Marty might swallow it, mostly because he won’t have much of a choice. He can’t send us to Saudi Arabia for interrogation. But Page will suspect that we’re being less than honest. He’ll press.”

“The woman is nuts. Her father was dead, which meant for the first time in her life, she was on her own, so she pulled this crazy stunt to make a big name for herself.”

“But it backfired, and the only real casualty was the teacher at Audie’s school. We can make them buy it. And then what, because if what you told me in Key Largo wasn’t just idle speculation, we could end up in some really serious shit? Not that I’d mind, if we had a chance of pulling it off.”

“First we have to find out if there really is any gold buried somewhere on, near, or across the Mexican border.”

“There’s gold, all right,” Otto said. “I did some more research on the flight up here about the mountain in southern New Mexico that I told the colonel about. It’s actually a part of Holloman Air Force Base and the White Sands Missile Range, about fifty miles north of the Mexican border, and about the same distance south of Trinity, where the first atomic bomb was tested in ’45. Anyway, a lot of gold and other stuff was found buried in some caves dug into the mountain. But nothing much came of it, and so the story goes the air force pulled out the gold and shipped it away. That’d be sometime in the early sixties.”

“So it’s gone,” McGarvey said. “And its information the colonel could have gotten online herself, right?”

“Right. But that’s not all. There’ve been rumors and legends about caches of gold all over the place in the same general area.”

“Rumors.”

Otto was nodding. “But rumors are all we’ll need for the first part of what you want to do, so long as we can find some sort of a paper trail.”

“Mexico City,” McGarvey said.

“Or Spain.”

“And the second part is, what happened to the original gold the air force took away?”

Louise appeared at the kitchen door in fresh sweatpants and a T-shirt, a towel wrapped around her wet hair. “What gold?” she asked.

“Castro’s daughter’s gold,” McGarvey said. “I think she’s going to come looking for it, and when she does, she’s going to be in for a very nasty surprise.”

“Two surprises,” Otto corrected. “One of which will come when the deal she’ll have to make with one or more of the Mexican drug cartels turns sour.”

THIRTY-SIX

In his office in the CIA’s Old Headquarters Building, Marty Bambridge brought up the encrypted Skype for Windows on his desktop computer, and in seconds was connected with Rául Martínez back in Miami.

“Are you someplace where we can talk?” Bambridge asked. It looked as if Martínez was seated at a table in a busy restaurant or coffee shop, using an iPad. It was noisy and people passed behind him.

“Sure.”

“You’re not alone.”

“No one is paying attention, Mr. Bambridge. Believe me, they’re more interested in their dominoes than in someone’s phone call.”

Bambridge was vexed because Martínez was independent like McGarvey, and a difficult man to deal with. But his presence, watching Cuban dissident movements in Miami and keeping an eye on the DI field officers running around the Calle Ocho was absolutely indispensable. Without him keeping a lid on things in Little Havana by cutting off the right people at the right time, the entire place could erupt in riots. The dissidents had been waiting for a very long time — some of them for their entire lives — to go back to Cuba. Many of them didn’t think of themselves as American citizens; they were exiles. Volatile at the best of times.

“What the hell happened down there?”

“Mac asked for my help to get Otto out.”

“One of our birds picked up what looked like a pretty fierce firefight just off the beach last night. Make my day and tell me that you weren’t involved.”

“I had help setting it up, but no, I personally didn’t fire a shot.”

“Well, thank God for small favors—”

Martínez cut him off. “A lot of very good people lost their lives. Without them, Otto and Mac would still be there.”

Bambridge forced himself to calm down. “The ones who survived will talk,” he said.

“No.”

“They won’t be able to help themselves. The DI is pretty good.”

“There weren’t any survivors.”

And Bambridge wanted to ask how Martínez could know for sure, but the look in the man’s eyes was cold. “Did they explain what they wanted with McGarvey?”

“You’ll have to ask Mac about that,” Martínez said. “If he’ll talk to you guys.”

“He says that he’s coming over tomorrow,” Bambridge said. “I’d like you here as well, so we can get this mess resolved. I don’t want any fallout.”

“I don’t have the time.”

Bambridge was angry. “That’s an order, mister.”

“The word that some of our people were shot to death outside Havana has already reached the streets, and there are some seriously pissed-off people around here who need calming down. And I expect that within the next twenty-four hours, we’ll have some DI goons running around, looking for the same answers you want. So I’m sincerely sorry, Mr. Deputy Director, but I have my hands full at the moment.”

Bambridge’s monitor went blank, and a moment later he was staring at his own image before he hit the DISCONNECT tab. “Sincerely sorry, my ass,” he muttered, and he called to see if Page was in his office.

“The question is why Colonel León pulled off some harebrained stunt like that in the aftermath of her father’s death,” Bambridge told the DCI.

“Hopefully Mac will shed some light on the matter in the morning,” Page said.

They were sitting in the director’s office on the seventh floor of the OHB, the big bulletproof and vibration-resistant windows looking over the wooded Virginia countryside. “If he and Rencke actually show up.”

“If he says he’ll be here, he will. But we’re going to take it easy with him. I’ve had a chat with three of my predecessors who worked with him, and they all said the same thing: Treat the man with respect — after all, he was the DCI, and he’s given a lot for his country. But if you lean on him, he’ll lean back. Hard. And that, we want to avoid.”

Bambridge had also talked to some people who had worked with McGarvey, and they had the opposite opinion. In their view, the man had always been a wild card, totally out of control. And as soon as his name popped up in an ongoing mission or investigation, bodies immediately began to pile up. But he kept his thoughts to himself and nodded. “I understand.”

“The thing is, we either trust the man or we don’t. Either way, we don’t have much choice.”

“I don’t trust him any farther than I could throw this building,” Bambridge said.

“I know,” Page replied.

THIRTY-SEVEN

María, in a fatigue uniform with bloused combat boots, entered Raúl Castro’s office, came to attention in front of his desk, and saluted crisply. “Colonel León reporting as ordered, Señor Presidente.”

The message to report had been on her desk when she arrived a half hour ago, and it did not come as a surprise. There was going to be some serious fallout after last night, and depending on how this went, she figured that she would have to make some tough choices.

Raúl was writing something on a pad, and he let her hang there for several seconds before he looked up. But he did not tell her to stand at ease or to sit down.

“Tell me what progress your department has made investigating the disappearance of the Amercian who showed up for the funeral.”

“The investigation is ongoing, sir. And I am happy to report that my department is nearing a successful resolution of the matter.”

“I’m told that you made a visit to your father’s house last night. Has it anything to do with your investigation?”

“No, sir,” María said.

“You are not to go there again without prior permission.”

“May I ask why?”

“Because I’m ordering it,” Raúl said, raising his voice.

A little bird had been whispering in his ear. Either her chief of staff or the little pansy Funetes or both of them. “I’m at a loss, Señor Presidente. What have I done to anger you, or bring my directorate’s policies or actions into question?”

“I don’t know yet. But I’m going to find out. I think you’re involved in something that very nearly cost you your life last night, and it was only through your chief of staff’s intervention that you were not assassinated.”

“I have not had the chance to thank him, or debrief him,” María said, sidestepping the issue. “I had no idea that such an attack was coming, nor did Major Ortega-Cowan say anything to me about it.”

“I want a full written report on my desk before the end of the day, including the real reason why you went to your father’s house, and what you took, if anything, because a full inventory is taking place at this moment.”

“As you wish, sir,” María said, and she saluted again, but didn’t bother to wait for Raúl to return it before she turned and went to the door.

“What bothers me is the coincidence of the timing,” Raúl said to her back. “That and the possibility that a light plane may have landed in the water near your compound. Include an explanation in your report.”

“Naturally, Señor Presidente.”

At that moment, Ortega-Cowan showed up at Fidel’s compound and was allowed to pass the guard post and drive up to the house, which was a beehive of activity this morning. Fuentes met him at the front door, and they walked together around to the pool.

“There were no survivors out there last night?” Fuentes asked.

“We made sure there were none,” Ortega-Cowan said. “And we had a bit of luck with the timing, her coming back to her house right in the middle of it. She called off the air strike before I had a chance to do it in her name myself.”

“Another nail in the bitch’s coffin,” Fuentes said with satisfaction. “Raúl will want to ask her about it.”

“His office called first thing this morning, and I personally put the message on her desk before coming out here,” Ortega-Cowan said, and he glanced over his shoulder. “Have you found out what she was looking for?”

“Fidel kept journals from the days before and during the revolution. We haven’t found those yet, so there’s a good chance she took them. And we’re sure that she went through his personal files.”

“How can you be sure?” Ortega-Cowan asked.

“Her file was missing.”

“What was in it?”

“I don’t know. I just know that the file was there after the funeral, and so far as we can tell, it’s the only one missing this morning.”

“You had the chance last week, and you didn’t read it?” Ortega-Cowan asked. He was astounded.

“I had more important duties to attend to. I didn’t think it was going anywhere. Anyway, it probably doesn’t contain much of interest for our purposes.”

“There’s no way of knowing that for sure,” Ortega-Cowan said. “What about Fidel’s journals? Did you ever get a look at what they contained?”

“He showed them to me once. Just after his second stroke, when he retired. He was sitting in his study, in his pajamas, when I came in to give my daily security report. ‘Take a look at this, Manuel,’ he told me. And he handed me the notebook, which was just about falling apart. ‘We were so young and foolish then.’”

“Did you find anything interesting?”

Fuentes shook his head. “Fascinating but useless. The usual day-to-day stuff about the revolution and about the early days with Che and the others in Mexico City. And his obsession with the gold. I didn’t read much of it.”

Some fabulous treasure had been something of a hobby of his, in the early days of the government. Ortega-Cowan remembered reading something about it a number of years back, when he’d worked in the Directorate of Intelligence as a junior officer whose duties had included keeping current files of foreign press clippings about Fidel. He had mentioned something about lost Spanish gold both times he’d been to the UN in New York, but no one had taken him seriously.

A glimmer of an idea came to Ortega-Cowan. “Can you be more specific?”

“About what?”

“The gold.”

Fuentes laughed. “Don’t be an ass. It’s a fairy tale. Right now, we need to concentrate on how to use this situation with the Americans to bring her down.”

“The real question is, why did she go to the trouble to arrange the kidnapping in Washington in order to lure the CIA computer expert here in the first place? She didn’t share her reasons with me. But they had to be important.”

“You’re her chief of staff,” Fuentes said. “Find out.”

“She’s staying at one of our safe houses in town until the mess at her compound is cleaned out. She’ll need new bodyguards and perhaps some new surveillance equipment.”

“And you’re just the man to supply them,” Fuentes said with admiration. “Keep watch on her — she’s bound to make a mistake.”

María was at her desk, fabricating a report that would make some sense to Raúl without revealing the actual details of the Rencke — McGarvey operation, when her chief of staff passed her door. She called him back.

“What the hell was that all about last night?” she demanded before he had a chance to sit down.

“Saving your life, Colonel. And it was damned lucky you weren’t at home when the attack began, because we might not have been on time.”

“They came after McGarvey and Rencke?”

“That’s what I was led to believe by my informants, who said the man who’d come ashore with McGarvey was Raúl Martínez, who’s been running our Miami operators around in circles for years. It was he who got some Cuba Libre bastards to attack from the highway while he came by boat to ferry the Americans out to the float plane.”

“Who are your informants?”

“A couple who run a small paladar near the waterfront. We had them in Quivicán a few years ago, where they learned that if they cooperated with us from time to time, we would allow them their freedom.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I only just found out last night, and when I tried to reach your cell phone, it was dead, something wrong with one of the towers. At any rate, they’re back in the States now, so can you tell me what the hell it was all about?”

“Not yet, Román,” she said. She didn’t think that she could trust him. He’d willingly helped set up the kidnapping, but he was a devious man, and it was more than possible that he’d covered his tracks so that when the time came, he would have something on her. And at this moment, she was hanging out in a very stiff breeze.

“Well, at least did you find out whatever it was you wanted to find out?”

“I’ll let you know as soon as I can. But for now, my biggest problem is Raúl. I have to write him a detailed report that’ll make some sort of sense.”

“Raúl may not be your only problem. Fuentes is gunning for you. He said you took something from Fidel’s study last night, and he’s threatening to make it public, along with the fact that you’re one of El Comandante’s illegitimate daughters.”

Her office was suddenly cold. “He doesn’t want to fight with me. He’ll lose,” she said quietly. “I want him here this afternoon. Six o’clock.”

“Now that he thinks he has something to use against you, he might refuse.”

“Then arrest him,” María said. “Who knows, maybe he’ll get shot trying to escape.”

THIRTY-EIGHT

Page was waiting in his office with Bambridge and the Company’s general counsel, Carleton Patterson, when McGarvey came up with Otto and Louise a few minutes after nine in the morning. They all stood around a grouping of couches and chairs in front of a coffee table.

The DCI gave Louise a chaste hug and a peck on the cheek. “I’m so glad to see that you survived your ordeal. No worse for the wear, I hope?”

“No, sir. None whatsoever.”

“I understand that your daughter is doing just fine at the Farm.”

“That she is.”

“Terrible business, involving an officer’s family,” Page said, and he directed them to sit down.

A staffer came in and poured everyone coffee from a silver server and then left.

“I thought that it would be more productive if we just had a little chat this morning to try to get to the bottom of this incident,” Page said. “Rather than submit you to a formal debriefing.”

“The FBI wants to talk to me,” Louise said. “It’s the no-ransom thing that’s driving them crazy. And I’m sure that Joyce Kilburn’s husband is wanting some answers.”

“She was the unfortunate woman shot to death at the day care center,” Patterson explained.

“That’s why we’re here,” Page said. “To find out what just happened and why, so that we can give the Bureau something to work on.”

“The kidnappers were DI operatives here from Havana, either through New York or Miami,” Otto said. “And by now, they’re back in Cuba. Untouchable. You can count on it.”

“Well, what the hell was this all about?” Bambridge demanded. “We’re sitting on the edge of our seats here. I mean, one innocent civilian shot to death in Georgetown, and we have no earthly idea yet how many casualties it took to get the two of you home. Martínez won’t tell us a thing. He claims to have his hands full in Miami, making sure the pot doesn’t boil over.”

“It might without him,” McGarvey said. “Leave him alone and he’ll manage, because it’s probably not over with yet.”

Bambridge started to say something, but Page motioned him back.

“I think we’re agreed that the reason Louise was kidnapped was to force Otto to fly to Cuba, where he was taken, which action precipitated Kirk to become involved,” Patterson said. “And from what we’ve learned so far, the operation was ordered by a colonel in the DI’s Directorate of Operations, María León, apparently an illegitimate child of Fidel Castro. And I think it’s a fair assumption to guess that all of this had something to do with Fidel’s death. Perhaps something he asked his daughter to do for him. A deathbed wish, because we’re told that she was the only one with him when he died.”

“That was exactly what it was,” McGarvey said. “He apparently told her that Kim Jong-il recommended me. Suggested that if Fidel ever found himself in a situation that even as supreme commander of Cuba he could not resolve, he was to ask for my help.”

“Extraordinary,” Patterson said. Very few people outside the Operations and Intelligence Directorates knew anything about the operation McGarvey had been on last year, in which he had been of some service to the North Korean leader, but the CIA’s general counsel was one of them.

Two police officers in Pyongyang had been assassinated, apparently by a high-ranking Chinese intelligence officer, and China was ready to start a war with North Korea. Kim Jong-il had threatened to launch his nuclear weapons if the Chinese moved against his regime.

North Korean intelligence had contacted McGarvey, and he’d agreed to look into what became, to this point at least, one of the most intense endeavors of his life.

“Fidel was on his deathbed — what did he want you to do?” Bambridge asked.

“Cuba’s salvation, he supposedly told his daughter.”

“Salvation from what?”

“She didn’t know, but she hoped I did, because Fidel told her to contact me. Which she did the only way she knew how, because I’d gone to ground in Greece. But she figured Otto knew, which was actually a pretty astute guess, so she targeted him by grabbing Louise.”

“Which was a big mistake,” Louise said with some satisfaction, and her remark hung on the air for a long moment.

“You met her face-to-face,” Bambridge said. “What did you tell her?”

“That I didn’t know what her father was talking about. But my guess was that he might have been talking about his country’s salvation from the Soviet economic model that he’d finally admitted wasn’t working, and never would. Five hundred thousand of the government’s labor force thrown into the private sector has pushed the country into an economic crisis at least as big as Germany’s at the end of WWI.”

“That’s it?” Bambridge pressed. “After killing an innocent bystander here in Washington and ultimately causing the deaths of however many people who came to your rescue, you’re sitting there telling us that the woman was merely going on a fishing expedition?”

“Something like that,” McGarvey said. “But I wasn’t in control of the situation. She initiated it.”

“Couldn’t have pleased her, your knowing nothing to help,” Patterson suggested.

“She threatened to kill us both,” Otto said. “She just never had the chance, ya know.”

“Extraordinary,” Patterson repeated himself. “Is the woman insane, in your estimation?”

“Almost certainly,” McGarvey said.

“How should we respond?” Page asked.

“We shouldn’t.”

Bambridge looked from Page to McGarvey and back, clearly frustrated just about beyond control. “That’s it?”

“What would you have us do, Marty?” Page asked.

“For one thing, if she’s as nuts as McGarvey thinks she is, we need to expand our presence in Miami. And have the Coast Guard step up its patrols in the strait, maybe send a navy destroyer on an unannounced visit to Gitmo.”

“Something like that would be viewed as provocative,” Patterson said.

“What are they going to do about it,” Bambridge practically shouted.

“We’re not suggesting anything quite so drastic just yet,” Page said. “What’s our operational status on the ground in Havana?”

Bambridge calmed down a little. “We have three assets at the moment: a mechanic at the air regiment in Playa Baracoa; a writer for the political magazine Carteles, which was reactivated a couple of years ago, when Raúl began relaxing the state’s restrictions on the media; and an old couple who run a little privately owned restaurant near the waterfront. They go back to the revolution as kids, and they apparently know just about everybody.”

“Have them keep their eyes and ears open, but stay out of it,” McGarvey said. “We’re not done with Colonel León.”

Bambridge glared at him. “You meant to say that you’re not done, right?”

“Something like that,” McGarvey said.

“Are you going to tell us?”

“Not yet.”

THIRTY-NINE

María changed into a print dress and flats around noon and left her office, where she had stayed last night to drive directly over to one of the DI’s safe houses, this one on the Avenue Antonio Maceo, commonly known as the Malecón, right on the bay. It was actually a large, nicely furnished apartment in a foreigner’s building that was sometimes used on a temporary basis to house visiting VIPs. The entire place was wired, and a listening post had been installed in the attic. She was in civilian clothes so as not to attract any attention.

She was the only one using the apartment now, and she’d made sure that the listening post was not manned before she tossed down her shoulder bag, poured a stiff measure of rum, which she drank down in one piece, then poured a second and went to the French doors that opened to a small balcony.

After her meeting with the president, she needed time to think out her next moves. Away from the office. Away from the prying eyes of her staff, and especially from Ortega-Cowan, who’d reported to the OD that he would be in sometime after lunch.

Her problem as she saw it was twofold. She wanted to find out about this gold business that Rencke had brought up and that she’d found mentioned in several places from what she’d read so far in her father’s journals. On his deathbed, he’d asked that she talk to McGarvey for Cuba’s salvation. But if it were that simple — that her father meant for her to ask McGarvey to help find the gold and make sure that Cuba somehow got its fair share — then her father had been crazy at the last. Perhaps dementia or some form of Alzheimer’s, because even if there was some fortune in Spanish gold buried somewhere in Mexico or the Southern United States, a man like McGarvey would never consent to find it and make sure the Cuban government got a percentage of it. That was beyond fantasy.

The second and most urgent part of her problem was Fuentes, who was making a run at bringing her down, no doubt with Ortega-Cowan’s help. Her chief of staff had always played both ends against the middle. Forcing McGarvey down here with his help — the only way it had been possible for her to do so — had left her wide open. Raúl had all but hinted at a charge of treason, which could very well stick without her father’s protection.

Traffic was fairly heavy, and the neighborhood stank of car exhaust even with the light breeze coming off the water. All of Havana smelled that way, and most of the time, neither she nor anyone else living here noticed. It was simply a fact of life. But she had become hypersensitive in the past few days; she was noticing just about everything.

Situational awareness, her Russian trainers had drilled her. Without it, the field agent is as good as dead.

The two problems — that of the gold and that of Fuentes — were linked, of course. But in order to save herself possibly from jail or a firing squad, she would somehow have to actually find the gold, and then turn the problem over to her government. Whether or not diplomacy — perhaps at the UN or even in the World Court at The Hague — would result in Cuba’s improbable claim being honored would not be her problem. No matter what, she would come out on top: the hero who’d made efforts above and beyond the call of duty for her government.

She could see the smug look on McGarvey’s face, and on Rencke’s, and it infuriated her. They were arrogant, self-assured men who’d actually pitied her and her country. Rencke had told her that he could hack into Cuba’s computer infrastructure any time he wanted to, but that it wasn’t worth the effort. She wanted to show them that she was just as good as they were.

But in order to find the gold, or prove that it was nothing but another dream of Cíbola, she would need to remain free to operate. Starting right now, before her situation here became impossible.

After draining the second drink, she left the apartment and went back to her office, where Ortega-Cowan hadn’t yet returned.

From her private wall safe, she got a stack of euros and American dollars amounting to ten thousand U.S.; an ID kit, which included a Mexican passport, driving license, and several credit cards in the name of Ines Delgado; along with a cell phone in the same name — all of which she stuffed into her purse. But she left her Russian-made compact 5 .45 mm PSM semiautomatic. If she got into a situation in which she had to shoot her way clear, she would already have lost. And taking a weapon across international borders was all but impossible, except for a sky marshal or someone carrying a diplomatic passport.

She had a Cuban passport, too, along with several others — for Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, and even Spain. But for now, she needed to go deep. Out of sight. Under the DI’s radar.

She’d gathered all the paperwork and other things over the past several years in part because of her Russian adviser, who’d cautioned her to always maintain the means for an escape. It was a cynical thing for him to have told her, but Russia had become a cynical place, as had Cuba. And she’d also followed his advice because in her estimation, just about every high-ranking official in the Cuban government, including her father, was, deeply paranoid. And paranoid people could be counted on to do the unexpected at any moment, especially turning on an insider who they perceived was anything less than absolutely loyal.

She’d told herself that actually, she was practicing sound tradecraft by maintaining alternate identities in case she had to go into the field.

Oretga-Cowan was just getting off the elevator at the end of the corridor to the right, in deep conversation with a pretty young woman who was one of the Directorate’s researchers, as María grabbed her fatigue uniform and boots and stepped out of her office. Before he had a chance to look up, she turned the other way and disappeared around the corner and down the stairs to the ground floor.

Someone would mention to him that the colonel had been in her office, but suddenly left again. He was smart; he would begin to sense that something was wrong. And when she hadn’t returned for her meeting with Fuentes, he might suspect that she had skipped.

And she was going to lead him to exactly that conclusion.

Back at the safe house, she telephoned Cubana de Aviación, booking a round-trip first-class seat for the morning flight to Mexico City, using the Delgado credit card. Flight 130 left at six thirty, which meant she had to be at the airport no later than five. Which would be easily doable.

Ten minutes later, making absolutely certain that no one had followed her, she left the safe house again and drove over to La Maison, which was a mini complex of upscale shops in an old mansion in Miramar, where she picked up a skirt and white blouse, along with a Hermès knockoff scarf, a pair of faded jeans, decent sneakers, and a few bangles. At another shop, she purchased a nice leather overnight bag and a pair of big glitzy sunglasses with rhinestones, and at a third, some panties and bras.

Her bag would be searched at the airport, and those sorts of items would be expected. Without them, questions might be raised, among them: How could a woman make a trip from Havana to Mexico City without at least a change of underwear?

Once again back at the safe house, still hopeful that Ortega-Cowan hadn’t jumped the gun and sent someone looking for her, she changed back into her fatigue uniform and packed her civilian clothes into the bag, including the things she’d just purchased, along with one of the courtesy toiletries kits from the bathroom.

It was nearly three by the time she left the apartment and drove out to the air regiment at Playa Baracoa, where she presented herself to Lieutenant Abeladro, the on-duty operations officer who jumped up from behind his desk and came to attention.

“I need to get to Camagüey in a big hurry,” she said. “Do you have any training flights scheduled for this afternoon?”

“No, Señora Coronel. As you can see, it is quiet here today.”

“Well, schedule one — I’m not going to wait all day. Your pilot is to drop me off and return in twenty-four hours.”

“My captain is off base at the moment, but I think I can find him,” the nervous lieutenant said, and he reached for the telephone. The only other person in the room that looked out toward the active runway was a clerk typist, who suddenly began typing furiously on an old IBM Selectric.

“This is official DI business, so the need to know is limited. Do you understand?”

The lieutenant wanted to say no, but he nodded. “I’ll have to log the flight.”

“Routine training mission on my personal request,” María said. “I’ll sign the flight orders. Now, get on with it, Lieutenant.”

María went outside to wait by her car and smoke a small panatela. Timing was everything. She needed to be on the ground and lost as Ines Delgado in Camagüey before Román sat up and took notice that something was wrong. That gave her a little more than two hours before she was supposed to be back in her office to meet with Fuentes.

It might take him a half hour or so to find out that she had cleared out of the safe house apartment, and maybe that much longer to find out where she’d flown to, but by then, she would have dropped out of sight. And in less than eighteen hours, she would be even more lost in Mexico City, from where she would launch her search.

A dark gray Gazik came from a small hangar across the field and drove directly to a much larger hangar, the main doors of which were trundling open, and disappeared inside.

María was just grinding out her cigar when the lieutenant came out and had her sign the flight order on a clipboard. “If you’ll give me just a moment, Colonel, I’ll drive you over to the ready hangar.”

“I’ll drive myself. I want to leave my car overnight.”

“Sí, Señora,” the lieutenant said, and he came to attention and saluted.

After he went back inside, María drove over to the hangar and parked out of the way of the small Czech-made Aero L-39C Albatros that a ground crew was prepping for flight. The aircraft was a two-seat trainer/fighter jet that could do well in excess of five hundred knots. Once they were up, flying time to Camagüey — which was only a little more than 550 kilometers to the southeast — would be about one hour.

The young pilot, whose name tape read MACHADO, looked up when she walked over with her shoulder purse and the leather overnight bag. He came to attention and saluted.

“Pardon me, Señora Coronel, but you should be dressed in a flight suit.”

“Not today,” María said. “I need you to get me to Camagüey as quickly as possible. So let’s get on with it, shall we?”

The pilot seemed uncertain, but he was a young lieutenant and she was a colonel. One of the flight crewmen helped her up the ladder and strapped her in the rear seat. He handed her the purse and leather bag, which she put on her lap, making for cramped seating, but there were no storage compartments in the jet. Finally, he helped her with the flight helmet, which he plugged into a panel at her left.

The pilot checked that she was properly strapped in before he climbed aboard, and within minutes, a towing tractor had pulled them out of the hangar, the engine was started, and they taxied down to the active runway.

“Are you ready, Señora Coronel?” his voice came over her helmet comms unit.

“Sí,” María said, and suddenly they were hurtling down the runway and lifting off, the city of Havana spreading out behind them, the waters of the Straits of Florida impossibly blue.

Camagüey, a colonial city founded in 1528, was a rat warren of narrow, twisting streets — a good place for someone on the run to get lost in. The pilot taxied over to a commercial hangar that at one time was used by the thirty-first Regimiento de Caza, which flew MiG-21MFs before the air force was downsized to only three bases. A man in white coveralls came over with a ladder and helped María out of the jet.

“I want you back here at sixteen hundred tomorrow,” she told the pilot. “Do not be late.”

A driver took her across to the civilian terminal, where she entered through the restricted baggage area, none of the employees paying her any attention. She found a bathroom, where she changed into her jeans, a blouse, and the sneakers, and then went into the arrivals hall. It was practically empty at this moment, again no one paying her the slightest attention; she was merely a passenger on her way somewhere.

At the Cubacar counter, she rented a small Hyundai Atos with less than five thousand kilometers on the odometer with her Delgado credit card and driving license. She drove into the city and parked near the train station. Inside, she bought a one-way ticket for tomorrow’s noon train to Santiago de Cuba under her real name.

The city was near enough to the American base at Guantánamo that when Ortega-Cowan got this far, he would be convinced that she was a traitor and would have DI officers all over the place, waiting for her to show up.

She walked across the street to the funky old Hotel Plaza just off the broad Avenida Carlos J. Finlay. It was just the sort of place that Ortega-Cowan would never think to look for her.

By five, she had checked in and paid for three days in advance under her real name. After she washed up, she went down to El Dorado, the hotel’s main restaurant, where she had chicken cordon bleu with a decent pinot grigio and then went up to her room and lay down for a few hours’ sleep.

The highway back to Havana was one of the better in Cuba, but she figured it would take her at least five hours to drive there.

She dreamed about McGarvey. They were having drinks at a sidewalk café in Paris, and he was smiling at her. Although she couldn’t quite make out what he was saying, she was certain that it was something nice.

She awoke at eleven, took a shower, and dressed in the blue jeans and sneakers. She folded her uniform and put it in the chest of drawers along with the boots, and bag in hand took the stairs down to the deserted lobby. Five minutes later, she reached the rental car and headed northwest through the outskirts of the city, some neighborhoods still busy, reaching the Santa Clara Highway by eleven thirty, and sped up to a reasonable hundred kilometers per hour, the night overcast, the air thick.

FORTY

McGarvey spent the afternoon catching up on his sleep at the Renckes’ brownstone while Otto and Louise worked on the computers, trying to find everything they could about the legends of Spanish gold in the southern United States, especially in southern New Mexico. But by six, he got up and looked in on them.

“Anything?” he asked.

The ground-floor workroom had actually been the brownstone’s sitting room, where in the early 1900s, the owners could receive guests. Now it was filled with electronic equipment. Some of it, including four wide-screen monitors and keyboards, was arrayed on two long tables, while antisurveillance equipment and sophisticated encryption devices sat on the floor or were mounted on racks against the walls. The windows covered with heavy drapes had been fitted with devices that prevented the detection of sounds, including voices by laser beams that could measure microvibrations in the glass, and by a white noise generator that blocked any other sort of mechanical eavesdropping. The entire house, attic to basement, was sheathed in a light copper mesh, most of it simply nailed to the wallboard and painted over. It had taken Rencke nearly two months to finish the job, which resulted in the entire structure being protected by a Faraday cage — totally impervious to electronic snooping.

“Possibly something,” Otto said, looking up. “I went back to the Victorio Peak legend I told Colonel León about. The one on Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico. There was evidently gold there, but it was apparently pulled out by the air force in the sixties and carted off shortly after F. Lee Bailey filed a lawsuit that would have forced the government to allow him to send a search team onto the base. But that died down, and the present whereabouts of the treasure is unknown. Probably in some high-security storage facility somewhere.”

“Was there more?” McGarvey asked.

“Milton Noss — his friends called him Doc — was the first one to find the gold, and he may have pulled out a few ingots. Where they are now is anyone’s guess. But he also found four leather-covered codices which he supposedly buried somewhere in the desert nearby.”

“Also lost?”

“Yup,” Louise said. “Lot of that going on.”

“But before he buried them, he wrote down what he called a ‘cryptic message’ he’d found in one of them.”

McGarvey moved around behind Otto so he could read what was on the screen.

Seven is the holy number … in seven languages, in seven signs … look for the seven cities of gold, seventy miles north of El Paso del Norte in the seventh peak, Soledad. These cities have seven sealed doors, three sealed toward the rising of the Sol sun, three sealed toward the setting of the Sol sun, one deep within the Casa de la Cueva de Oro at high noon. Receive health, wealth and honor.…

“None of that suggests anything about Spanish gold hidden by Spanish monks from Mexico City, and nothing about transshipment through Havana,” McGarvey said.

“No, but if you believe the message in the codices, the cache in Victorio may have been only one of seven. Could be a lot more out there, kemo sabe.”

“We’ll have to go to Mexico City,” McGarvey said.

“The National Archives. The curator there is Dr. José Diaz, and he’s agreed to talk to us about early Spanish explorers from New Mexico to Colorado. We’re from the Library of Congress Special Research Branch.”

“Do you think he believed you?”

“Doesn’t matter, we have an appointment with him tomorrow afternoon at six. I’ve booked us a suite at the Marquis Reforma.”

“Fair enough,” McGarvey said. “But first I have to get a few things from my place.”

“Do you think the Company is watching your apartment?” Louise asked.

“I’d be surprised if they weren’t.”

McGarvey’s third-floor brownstone apartment was located on Twenty-seventh Street just below the end of Dumbarton Avenue N W with a nice view of Rock Creek Park. It was actually less than a mile as the crow flies from Rencke’s house near Georgetown University, but he went over to Twenty-ninth Street, where he caught a cab, and had the driver drop him off around the corner from his place.

He’d bought the small, pleasantly furnished place after his wife and daughter were assassinated and before he went to ground in Greece. The house on Casey Key on Florida’s Gulf Coast that he’d shared with Katy was still up and running, with a service coming once a week to clean and make any necessary repairs, but he wasn’t quite ready to return there yet, nor did he want to sell it. For now, it was tough enough returning to Georgetown. He had a lot of memories here, too.

Coming around the corner, he spotted a plain gray Taurus with government plates parked across the street, one man behind the wheel, but he ignored it and went inside.

No one had been here. In addition to the alarm system, none of his telltales had apparently been tampered with. Though he supposed that a good second-story man from the Company could have tossed the place, he didn’t think Page would have authorized it. There’d been no reason.

From a steel fireproof box with a combination lock he’d kept in plain sight on a closet shelf, he took out a spare 9 mm Walther PPK — a pistol he’d always favored because of its compact size, accuracy, and reliability — a suppressor, a spare passport in the name of Kevin McCarthy, along with a New York driver’s license and credit cards in the same name — and five thousand dollars in cash.

He still had the Federal Air Marshal ID he’d used to get down to Miami, which he would use again tomorrow, enabling him to fly to Mexico City armed. The DI’s presence was strong down there, and he wouldn’t put it past María to have an all-stations alert for him, with orders to shoot on sight. Mexico had become a very dangerous place, so it would be easy to cover up his and Otto’s murders as drug related.

He took a quick shower and changed into a pair of faded jeans, a white polo shirt, Top-Siders, and a black blazer, his pistol in a belt holster at the small of his back. His overnight bag with a few items of clean clothes and his shaving gear he’d brought back from Miami were at Otto’s, so there was nothing else he needed here.

Outside, McGarvey walked across the street and got in the Taurus on the passenger side. The driver, wearing a khaki sport coat, was of medium build, with a nondescript face and thinning dark hair. He didn’t seem surprised.

“May I see some identification?” McGarvey asked pleasantly.

The man was careful to keep his hands on the steering wheel, but he didn’t seem particularly nervous that he’d been outed. “All I’m carrying is a Langley driver’s license. Mr. Bambridge sent me over to be on the lookout for you.”

“Just you?”

“Three of us — four hours on, eight off. My shift started at six.”

“Now what?”

“I’ll report to Mr. Bambridge that you showed up, stayed around twenty minutes, and left.”

“Were you ordered to follow me if and when I showed up?”

“No.”

“Trust me, son. Don’t.”

The agent hesitated for just a moment, but then he nodded. “Yes, sir.”

McGarvey got out but turned back before he closed the door. “Doesn’t make a lot of sense for Marty simply to want to know if and when I showed up at my apartment.”

“I’m just following my orders, sir.”

“I’ve heard that before,” McGarvey said, and he shut the door and walked away.

The only explanation he could think of was that Marty figured that if McGarvey was going to make another move, he would have to return to his apartment for clothes, money, papers — exactly what he had done.

Watching his back, he walked around the block — traffic reasonably light at this hour — and at the last corner, he held up and looked down the street. The Taurus was still there, which made even less sense. Unless they were double-or triple-teaming him, in which case, someone on foot would be tailing him, and possibly someone in a van or a car with civilian plates. But he’d spotted no one in his 180.

Still, when he turned around and walked away, he took care with his tradecraft, until two blocks away he entered a small Italian restaurant just beginning to fill up, walked straight back to the kitchen and out the rear door into the alley. He didn’t think Marty would have gone to the trouble and fantastic expense to task a satellite, so from this point, he felt that it was reasonable to assume he was out clean. For now.

FORTY-ONE

It was coming up on five in the morning when María pulled into the short-term parking lot at Havana’s José Martí International Airport and left the Hyundai, its gas tank nearly on empty, in the middle of a row near the back. She was dead tired from the long drive but hyped up that she was close to getting out of Cuba.

She’d given a great deal of thought last night to what she was about to do, what her father’s deathbed order had really meant, and the terrible chance she had taken getting McGarvey down here and then letting him and Rencke escape. At this point, she had no other choice than to move forward. Mexico City first, and then she would have to get help because she couldn’t take the next steps on her own.

It was impossible for her to stay in Cuba, and she would never be able to return unless she succeeded in what she felt was most likely a fool’s errand. And yet the look in McGarvey’s eyes, the set of his shoulders, his arrogance and self-assurance stuck in her mind. She wanted to feel the same thing, and going ahead with this insanely quixotic quest was just about the only way she figured she could not only redeem herself, but also solidify her position and safety now that she no longer had her father’s protection.

And when the time came, if it came, she would personally sign the orders of execution for Ortega-Cowan and Fuentes.

She had pinned her hair up and covered it with the Hermès, and she headed across to Terminal 3, where on the upper level — busy at this hour of the morning — she showed her passport and driver’s license at the Cubana de Aviación counter to pick up her boarding pass. At the security checkpoint, she had to show her passport again and the boarding pass before her leather bag and purse were scanned and she walked through the arch.

She resisted the urge to look over her shoulder to see if anyone was coming after her until she was all the way through and on her way down the broad corridor past the gift shops, restaurants, and bars all open and crowded. She stopped to buy a bottle of water and glanced back toward the checkpoint, but no one she could identify as DI agents had shown up. To this point, it was still business as usual here; no one paid her the slightest attention.

She found her boarding gate area and sat down near an emergency exit in case she needed to run. It was just before five thirty, and the pilot and his flight crew showed up and the gate agent admitted them through the door to the Jetway. More people were arriving, some of them with children, and a few minutes later the agent announced Cuba Air’s flight 130 with nonstop service to Mexico, first in Spanish then in English, and invited first-class passengers to board.

Still no one paid her the slightest attention as she got up and joined the short line. With luck, Ortega-Cowan had fallen for her ruse in Camagüey, and at this moment had the train station staked out, with men also at Santiago de Cuba, in case she’d given them the slip.

The Airbus A320 was in reasonably good condition, and when she was seated alone in the fourth-row window seat on the right side, the handsome flight attendant brought her a glass of champagne.

“Welcome aboard, señora,” he said. “Is there anything else I can get for you?”

“No, I’m fine for now,” María said.

“May I stow your bag for you?”

María hesitated for just a moment, but then smiled and nodded. “Please. Is this a full flight?”

“No,” the attendant said.

“Then I may spread out here?”

“Sí, you’ll have this row to yourself this morning.”

It took twenty minutes for the boarding to be completed, and many of the people filing past her watched with a little resentment because of where she was seated and the fact she was drinking champagne, and that she was young, good-looking, and obviously rich.

Finally the front hatch was closed, and as the aircraft pushed back away from the gate and trundled down the taxiway to the runway, the attendants gave the seat belt — oxygen mask — emergency water landing drill, and María allowed herself to relax just a little.

She looked out the window, but there were no chase cars coming after them, and minutes later they were turning onto the runway, and immediately began their takeoff roll. She wondered if she would ever see Cuba again. She hoped so, because this was her country, and now that her father was finally dead, a lot of people, including her, had high hopes for the new revolution that was on the verge of unfolding.

But the key was going to be money. It had been about money when the Soviets propped up the sugar industry, but now it was more important than ever. She had seen reports, suppressed by the government, that people were actually starving to death. Not so many as in North Korea, but it was happening, and it made her want to cry. And made her want to try this crazy stunt that had nearly a zero chance of success.

But she’d heard the enthusiasm in Rencke’s voice, and the look in McGarvey’s eye, and it was enough for her.

An hour later, the island behind them, the Yucatán Channel below, María pulled out the file she’d taken from the cabinet in her father’s office, opened it, and began to read. The first pages were copies of her fitness and training reports, some of them in Russian with side-by-side translations into Spanish, many of them from her early schooling by private tutors. A single-page report outlined the rape, and her father’s handwritten instructions at the bottom.

No immediate disciplinary action will be taken. But the boys involved and all of their family members will be closely monitored for further actions against the state.

María looked up. The order had been cold, dispassionate. Her rape had been an “action against the state.” No father’s rage, no concern for a daughter’s well-being or continued safety at the school.

And yet from the moment she’d learned that Fidel was her father, she’d hung on every word he spoke in public because it was all she had. Unlike leaders just about everywhere else in the world, in Cuba, Fidel was a private citizen. Very few newspaper or magazine articles were written about his personal life, no streets or plazas were named in his honor, no statues had been erected, and he’d never lived in any grand castle or mansion.

And now he was dead. Gone from her forever.

She flipped to the next page, and for what seemed to be the longest time, she could only stare at the handwritten letter, dated simply Noviembre, with no year. But it had to have been fairly recent, because her father’s hand had shaken when he wrote it.

But the salutation clutched at her heart, and she had to look away for another longish time, because he had written: Mi queridisima hija, My most beloved daughter.

When she was finally able to turn back, she read the short letter in which he sent her apologies for all the years of being a neglectful father, and for all the letters he’d written but never had been able to send.

Perhaps we will finally meet and I can hold you in my arms, and smell your sweet perfume and look into your beautiful eyes.

The next letter was dated in January, again with no year but the same salutation, in which he wrote to her about the isolation he was feeling after the illness that had forced him to step down.

I have always loved you, and someday I will tell this to you in person.

The remainder of the documents in the file were letters to her, dated with months but no years and the same opening, but from the things he wrote about, she could see that they were in reverse chronological order: the Bay of Pigs, the missile crises, defections, and finally one dated on an October thirty-six years ago, when she’d been born.

“Mi queridisima hija,” he began, and he wrote about missing her birth in Santiago de Cuba in which her mother had died, but he was out of the country in Moscow and word had not gotten to him until it was too late. Conditions of state meant that their relationship had to be kept secret until someday in the future, but he would make sure that she was well cared for and would never want for a thing.

Except for a father.

She closed the file and looked out the window again. It was the first mention she’d ever heard about her mother, whose name she’d never known. There were times when she was young when she’d dreamed about her mother, being held in her arms, being told about becoming a woman, which was extremely important. Custom dictated that Hispanic females be prim and proper virgins before marriage, but Eves to their Adams afterwards. But no mother had been there to teach her.

She returned the file to her shoulder bag, laid her head back, and fell asleep staring out the window, dreaming again about a mother she’d never known, but only ever imagined. And in her dream, she was happy.

It was a few minutes before nine thirty in the morning local time when María was cleared through passport control at Mexico City’s Benito Juárez International Airport. The official welcomed her home and waved her through. At customs, she told the agent she had only her purse and the one carry-on bag, and she was cleared without an inspection.

Two other flights had come in about the same time, and the baggage claims area she had passed through had been busy, crowded with a lot of families and relatives waiting beyond the barriers.

A pair of men in light sport coats wearing hats and sunglasses were looking toward the people streaming from the baggage pickup area into customs, and María walked right past them. They had the look of cops, possibly even DI, and if the latter were the case, it meant Ortega-Cowan had been faster on his feet than she thought he would be.

Outside on the street, she glanced back as she got into a cab, but no one was coming after her. “Four Seasons Hotel, please,” she told the driver in Spanish.

Five minutes away from the airport, she got online with her cell phone and connected with Aeromexico’s Web site, where using her Delgado credit card she booked a round-trip first-class ticket to Miami, with no bags to check, on Flight 422, which left in less than three hours.

She had thought hard about this next move and whether she should leave her father’s journals and her file behind, but had decided she would almost certainly need them as proof. She would not be welcomed with open arms. Once it was known who she was, just about every tough guy living on and around Calle Ocho would come gunning for her.

“Driver, I’ve changed my mind. Take me back to Aeromexico. Departures.”

FORTY-TWO

It was noon when Delta Flight 363 from Dulles via Atlanta touched down at Benito Juárez International Airport and McGarvey, traveling separately from Otto because of his Federal Air Marshal credentials, was met at passport control by two men who identified themselves as Federal Agency of Investigation agents. He was taken to a small office nearby, where he had to produce his credentials, including his permit to carry a weapon aboard an international flight.

“You might want to let me phone my embassy,” McGarvey said.

“That won’t be necessary, Mr. McGarvey,” the dark, dangerous-looking of the two agents whose credentials identified him as Julio Mejía said. “We merely wanted to confirm your identification, and warn you that because of the increasing gun violence in Mexico, we take a very serious look at anyone carrying a firearm for any reason, no matter who they are, and not declaring it.”

“In addition, your reputation precedes you,” the other taller agent, whose name was Alberto Gallegos, said. “We know that you are traveling with Mr. Otto Rencke of the CIA. Why have you and your associate come here?”

“To speak with Dr. José Diaz, who is the curator of your National Archives. We have an appointment with him later today.”

“In regards to what?”

“Actually, we’re on an errand for our Library of Congress.”

“Concerning exactly what?” Mejía pressed.

“Electronic data sharing. Mr. Rencke is something of an expert.”

“Sí, we know this,” Gallegos said. “The question remains, why have you come to Mexico armed?”

“As you say, there is increasing gun violence here, and Mr. Rencke is a valuable asset. And a friend. I’m here to protect him.”

The agents exchanged a glance. “When will you be leaving?” Mejía said.

“First thing in the morning.”

“Take care that you violate none of our laws,” Gallegos said. He nodded at McGarvey’s overnight bag. “Anything to declare in addition to your weapon?”

“Change of socks and shaving gear.”

“May I look?”

McGarvey held out the bag. “Be my guest. And do you want my gun?”

But after a moment the agent shook his head, and McGarvey was allowed to leave. He joined the queue in the customs hall, where he was passed through without question.

Otto was waiting outside at the curb. “Your gun?”

“I still have it, but they wanted to know what we were doing in Mexico City. I told them that I was here to protect you, and you were here to talk to Dr. Diaz about electronic data sharing.”

Otto grinned.

They took a cab downtown to the art noveau Hotel Marquis Reforma, where Otto had booked them into a two-bedroom suite on the seventh floor, the balcony windows of which had a view of the Castillo de Chapultepec. The Company didn’t know it yet, but according to Otto, it was paying for this little bit of luxury.

“Anyway, we can charge a finder’s fee if we actually come up with the gold,” he said.

“Which you don’t think is likely.”

“Not a chance in hell. But you can’t win at lotto unless you put your money down.”

“Yet we’re here,” McGarvey said. “And unless I miss my guess, there were a couple of DI officers just outside customs. Makes you wonder who they were looking for.”

“I didn’t see them,” Otto said. “Do you want to go back and find out what they’re up to? I wouldn’t put it past Colonel León to put two and two together and show up. She’s an inventive woman who’s not afraid to take risks.”

“That she is,” McGarvey said. “But they didn’t follow us, so we should be clear unless the Mexican cops are helping out.”

After a late lunch in the hotel’s La Jolla restaurant, a very good Mexican beefsteak with mole chichilo, they took a leisurely walk along the broad Paseo de la Reforma to burn off some time and to see if anyone was taking an interest in them. Traffic was very heavy, and the air stank of diesel and gasoline fumes and something else that could have been burning garbage or something industrial. Surrounded by mountains, which caused air inversions that sometimes lasted for weeks or even longer, the city’s air quality was often as bad as Beijing’s.

After forty minutes or so, McGarvey was satisfied that they were not being tailed, and he and Otto went back to the hotel, where they cleaned up. Mac left his pistol in the room before they went down to the bar to have a drink. Otto had warned him that they would be required to pass through a security arch before going inside any of the government buildings.

“Lots of paranoid people these days.”

“Can’t blame them,” McGarvey said.

They took a cab over to the Palacio Nacional, the National Palace, located on the Zócalo, which was the largest main square anywhere in Latin America. Also here were a temple and museum dedicated to the Aztecs and the massive Metropolitan Cathedral, which had taken two and a half centuries to complete.

The palace itself, which had been built on the site of Montezuma’s home served as the seat of the government and the National Treasury. Also located in the same building were the National Archives, where Dr. Diaz had his offices, that included a smallish research library adjacent to a specialized restoration workroom where only the most delicate projects were brought. Everything else was sent to other restoration centers around the city, including the major one at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, which had been in existence since the mid-sixteenth century.

Checking through one of the entrances on the north side of the massive building that Otto had been instructed for them to use, they were required to pass through a metal detector and afterwards had to surrender their passports.

Dr. José Diaz, a tiny, stoop-shouldered old man with a shock of snow white hair — unusual for a Hispanic male — nut brown skin, and eyes that were wide, bright, and very much alive, shuffled to his office door and beckoned them inside. He was dressed in a tweed three-piece suit, the bottom button of his vest undone and a plain blue tie properly snugged up.

“The gentlemen from the Library of Congress,” he said, smiling furiously as if he were sharing some inside joke.

His inner office was a large room with broad windows that looked toward the Aztec museum. Books, folios, maps, and manuscripts, most of them very old, lay in piles everywhere — on his desk, on a couple of small tables, on the floor — or were stuffed in several overflowing floor-to-ceiling bookcases that appeared as if they were on the verge of tipping over. The place looked like it had not been swept or dusted in years.

He cleared off a couple of chairs that faced his desk, and they all sat down.

“We’re not actually from the Library of Congress,” Otto said.

“Of course not, though when I talked to Hiram, he said that he thought you might work for the CIA, which is actually quite intriguing for an old revolutionary such as me.”

“Hiram Stannard?” Otto asked. Stannard was the Librarian of Congress.

“Yes, we’re old friends,” Diaz said. “Do you actually work for the CIA?”

Otto nodded. “Were you actually a revolutionary?”

“I was on the edges when Fidel and Che and the Russian were here in the fifties,” Diaz said. “Exciting times. But they’re all gone now.” He turned to McGarvey.

“Kirk McGarvey, I used to run the CIA.”

Diaz smiled and nodded. “You must be here to ask about the Spanish gold the monks hid up north. The Jornada del Muerto. Victorio Peak, the seven signs, the seven cities, seventy miles north of El Paso del Norte.”

“Then it’s not merely a legend?” Otto asked.

“No, of course not. But why are you here now, unless it has something to do with El Comandante’s death?”

Otto quickly told him about María León and everything that had happened from the time of Louise’s kidnapping and his own research on the Internet.

“He was quite keen on finding the gold. I wanted to take up arms and go back to Cuba with him and the others, but he wanted me to stay here and do my research. Which, of course, didn’t yield much more than you apparently know. And in end, his daughter has sent you on the same quest. How odd, how tragic.”

“But you think the treasure exists?” McGarvey asked.

“I’m convinced of it,” Diaz said. “Six locations in addition to Victorio Peak on the New Mexican desert. Inaccessible now, of course, because your government continues to use the area as a testing range for missiles and other weapons including, of course, the first atomic bomb.”

“The treasure inside Victorio Peak has evidently already been removed,” Otto said.

“That’s common knowledge.”

“Which leaves the other six sites.”

“So you’ve come here to ask if I know their locations,” Diaz said. “If I did, why should I reveal them to agents of the U.S. government?”

“A claim could be made that one third of the gold belongs to Cuba,” McGarvey suggested.

Diaz threw his head back and laughed out loud. “The embargo, el bloqueo, has been going on since 1960. Don’t insult an old man by suggesting the U.S. would lift so much as a finger to help Cuba.”

“Not the government,” McGarvey said. “But Cuban the people. Only the people.”

“How?”

“I don’t know yet, but if the treasure actually exists as you say it does, and if we can find it, we might be able to make a case in Washington.”

Diaz, suddenly serious, looked away in thought for a beat. “My heart has always been with the people of Cuba. Batista was a monster, who was propped up in large measure by your government.”

“Fidel was no better.”

“At first he was. He was one of the people, he and Che. It was why the revolution succeeded.”

“And later?”

“And later,” Diaz said. “Moscow got to him before Washington. And after Che was gone, Uncle Fidel maybe went a little crazy.”

“Can you help us?” Otto asked.

Diaz looked at them, his mottled face sad, and he shook his head. “I have searched our National Archives, but no such records exist. In any event, it was a situation between the Mother Church and the Spanish government that lasted more than two hundred years. So the legend goes the monks made the trip up into New Mexico along the Jornada del Muerto many times, perhaps dozens. If there are any written records of those expeditions, they would be located in the Vatican Secret Archives in Rome, certainly not open to treasure hunters. But to my knowledge, the Church has never mounted a search to recover what it believes might be its treasure.”

“What about the Spanish government?” Otto asked.

“Now, that’s a different story. Records of the losses were undoubtedly kept, and would be in the Archivo General de Indias, where all the documents from the Spanish Empire in the Americas are maintained.”

“Madrid?” Otto asked.

“Actually Seville,” Diaz said, and he held up a hand before Otto could ask the next question. “I can’t help. It’s a very long story, but I have had disagreements with the staff ever since illegal notes I’d made were discovered and I was kicked out of Spain.”

“But you remember.”

Diaz nodded. “The records of the six treasure sites undoubtedly exist, because the Spanish government mounted two military expeditions to the region — the first in the late 1700s, and the second, undercover during the siege of Alamo to the east. Twelve soldiers in civilian clothes rode up into New Mexico along the Jornada del Muerto but only two returned, empty-handed except for expedition maps and journals.”

“If you can’t help us reach someone in Seville, we’re at a dead end,” Otto said. “None of that stuff will be digitized.”

“But you don’t need me.”

“No?”

“Not if you represent yourselves as treasure hunters willing to split whatever you find with the Spanish government. It would be something new for them, not having to take every successful American treasure-hunting corporation to court.”

Otto was grinning. “Greed,” he said.

“It’s something just about everyone understands,” Diaz said.

FORTY-THREE

Manuel Fuentes got off the elevator on the sixth floor of the Hotel Marquis Reforma and took the stairs up one floor. He hesitated for a moment to make sure the corridor was empty before he hurried down the hall to the suite where McGarvey and Rencke were staying and let himself in with a universal key that had been waiting for him in an envelope, courtesy of the AFI, Agencia Federal de Investigation, when he’d checked in this afternoon.

It was past six, and his DI contact on the ground had phoned to report that the two Americans had taken a cab over to the Palacio Nacional and were inside at this moment. Their purpose for going there was so far unknown.

Donning a pair of rubber gloves, Fuentes quickly went through the contents of the two bedrooms, coming up with a Walther PPK pistol along with a silencer in the overnight bag. These he pocketed, a glimmering of a plan already forming in his head.

In many respects, he felt like a puppet on a chain, his every move directed by Ortega-Cowan, a man he admired and respected and feared and loathed and perhaps even loved a little, all mixed together. But María’s chief of staff was a devious son of a bitch who knew exactly what he was doing.

Yesterday, when it seemed likely that the coronel had skipped, he’d opened her office safe and discovered that the Ines Delgado identification papers, along with a fair sum of money and a credit card were missing. From there, he’d traced her military flight from Playa Baracoa to Camagüey, where she’d registered at the Hotel Plaza.

At first, the hotel had seemed to be a mistake on her part because it was right across the street from the train station, where a pair of local DI officers discovered that she had booked a train ticket to Santiago de Cuba under her real name. The obvious conclusion was that she was defecting and would try to reach the American base at Guantánamo Bay.

But casting the net a little wider, the agents discovered the Cubacar rental Hyundai in the Delgado name parked near the train station, and Ortega-Cowan had gone searching for airline reservations first from Camagüey and then Havana, coming up with the Delgado reservations for Mexico City.

“Arrest the bitch at the hotel,” Fuentes had suggested. “We don’t need anything else. Shoot her trying to escape, and we’ve already won.”

“Not yet,” Ortega-Cowan had said. “We don’t know why she’s going to Mexico City, unless it’s to meet with McGarvey or Rencke.”

“What do we do, just let her go?”

“For now. But you’re leaving for Mexico City this evening, so you’ll be there before she does. I want you to organize a couple of teams at the airport to find out where she goes, and another team to watch for the Americans.”

“I’ll get help from a couple of El Comandante’s friends on the AFI.”

“Nothing hands on,” Ortega-Cowan warned. “We need to keep this completely below the radar. Because of the attempt on her life that very nearly succeeded, and her father’s recent death, the good coronel is working from seclusion for the time being. I merely want to know what the hell she’s up to.”

“What about the recording equipment at her house?”

“She switched it off.”

“Then she knew that she would be leaving the country and she wanted to leave no trace.”

Ortega-Cowan smiled patronizingly. “You’ll make a very good chief of staff. But first we need to bring her down.”

“Seems to me that she’s doing a good job of her on her own,” Fuentes said.

There was nothing else of interest in either bedroom, and five minutes after he’d entered the suite, he let himself out and went downstairs to his room, where he used his cell phone to place an encrypted call to Ortega-Cowan.

“Where are you at this moment?”

“In my room,” Fuentes said. “But listen, I found a pistol and a silencer in their suite.”

“I hope you took them.”

“Of course.”

“There’s been a new development. The coronel did not check into the Four Seasons where she had reservations. Instead she came back to the airport about the same time McGarvey and Rencke were arriving from Atlanta.”

“We didn’t spot her anywhere near them,” Fuentes said.

“I had a hunch and did a computer search of all flights leaving about that time — flights to anywhere. Ines Delgado flew out first class on an Aeromexico flight to Miami.”

Fuentes’s breath was all but taken away by the news. “The bitch is defecting after all.”

“I don’t think so. If she was, she would have gone to Washington not Miami. If she’s recognized on the street, she won’t last five minutes before someone puts a bullet in her brain.”

“What then?”

“I don’t know, but I want you to fly over tonight and take charge of DI operations on the ground. We need to know what she’s doing.”

“What do you want me to do about McGarvey and Rencke?”

“Where are they at this moment?” Ortega-Cowan asked.

“They were followed to the Palacio Nacional, evidently to meet someone there because they showed up at the north entrance, which at this hour is not usually for the public.”

Ortega-Cowan was silent for a long moment.

“Román?” Fuentes prompted.

“Give me a minute, I’m on my computer.”

A full minute passed before Ortega-Cowan was back. “It could be the Spanish gold after all,” he said, and he almost sounded as if he were out of breath.

“What nonsense are you talking about? It’s nothing but a fairy tale.”

“Maybe not. Because in addition to the government, the Palacio Nacional is also home to Mexico’s National Archives. The curator is Dr. José Diaz.”

Fuentes was startled. “I think I know this name from El Comandante’s journal. I think he was here in Mexico City with Uncle Fidel and Che and the others.”

“And where would men such as McGarvey and Rencke go to find out about Spanish gold in the New World?”

“Ay, Jesús,” Fuentes said. “I’ll go over there right now.”

“I don’t want you to interfere with McGarvey or Rencke. Wait until they leave, and then have a little chat with Dr. Diaz and find out what he told them.”

By chance, McGarvey and Rencke were just climbing into a cab when Fuentes was paying his taxi driver and getting out, not more than two car lengths away. McGarvey glanced over his shoulder and their eyes met, but if there was any recognition in them, Fuentes couldn’t see it. And moments later, they drove off.

Ortega-Cowan had sent a two-year-old photograph to Fuentes’s phone of Dr. Diaz taken from a National Geographic article on Aztec ruins, and as it began to get dark, he waited at the corner, where he had a good sight line of the Palacio’s north exit. But the plaza across the street, and the sidewalk in front of the building were busy, and as it was, Diaz walked right past him before he recognized the archive’s impeccably dressed curator.

Fuentes turned and started to follow the old man, but Diaz walked less than fifty feet to the bus stop. He was frail looking, not more substantial than a scarecrow, but he was carrying a bulging leather briefcase that had to weigh at least ten kilos.

When the bus came, Diaz boarded, told the driver he was going to San Esteban, paid his fare, and sat two rows back. Fuentes got on just ahead of eight or ten others in time to hear the doctor’s destination, which he repeated to the driver, paid his fare, and found a seat a few rows farther back.

The small community on Highway 57, which was part of Mexico City’s ring road, was located just beyond the Plaza de Toros, less than five miles as the crow flies from the Palacio, but with the heavy work traffic, it took nearly an hour to get there.

Diaz got off the bus with a dozen others and trudged a block and a half to a ten-story apartment building. Fuentes caught up with him just before the curator went inside. No one else was around.

“Dr. Diaz, I have come from El Comandante on a matter of some importance.”

Diaz turned, startled, but he was interested. “He’s dead.”

“Yes, and I was with him when he passed. He asked me to give you an important piece of information. But it had to be done in person not over the telephone or Internet. Is there someplace nearby where we can talk in private?”

“My apartment upstairs.”

“I think that the American CIA may have planted microphones sometime earlier today. It’s why I’m here to warn you about an American by the name of Kirk McGarvey, who may have been traveling with a partner. You’re not to talk to them under any circumstances.”

“But they were in my office this afternoon,” Diaz said. He was concerned.

“My God,” Fuentes said. “We have to talk.”

“Across the street, in the park,” Diaz said.

It was very dark and the park, though small, had many trees and benches here and there along a meandering path. Fuentes chose a spot that was completely out of sight of the apartment building, and he and the doctor sat down.

“This information was very important to El Comandante. What was it those two men came to see you about?”

“May I see some identification?”

“Of course,” Fuentes said, and he handed over his diplomatic passport, which Diaz had to hold up to a stray bit of streetlight filtering through the trees. “El Comandante warned me that the Americans would be looking for information about a treasure in Spanish gold buried somewhere in the U.S.”

“That’s exactly what they came to ask me about,” Diaz said.

“What did you tell them?”

“That I couldn’t help.”

Fuentes relaxed a little. “Very good, Doctor. You did the right thing.”

“You don’t understand,” Diaz said. “In truth I could not help, because I have no information.” He handed the passport back. “What is the Cuban government’s interest?”

“Some of that treasure belongs to us.”

Diaz smiled. “Fidel had the same thought, and I told him before the revolution that he was dreaming. Spain would never entertain such a claim. At best, you would be tied up in an international court for years.”

“Is that what you told the Americans?”

“I advised them that only a treasure hunter would have any possibility of convincing Spain to cooperate. In any event, none of that money would go to the Cuban government.”

“I think that you are wrong.”

Diaz smiled. “Old men often are.”

Fuentes got up and walked a few paces away, where he took out McGarvey’s pistol and screwed the silencer on the end of the barrel. He turned back as Diaz was getting to his feet, and shot the old man once in the forehead, killing him instantly.

Wiping the pistol down, he tossed it a few paces away into the bushes and walked through the park, where he found another exit, then went in search of a cab back into the city.

It was fairly late by the time Fuentes had the cabbie drop him off a couple of blocks from the hotel. He found a small café, where he sat at a sidewalk table, and after he had ordered a coffee, he phoned Ortega-Cowan and told him everything that had happened.

“It is about the gold after all.”

“But Diaz said he told them nothing, because he knew nothing. We could still be chasing a fairy tale.”

“Men such as McGarvey don’t believe in fairy tales,” Ortega-Cowan said. “You’re flying to Miami tonight, but first I want you to make an anonymous call to the police and tell them that you saw a murder being committed. They’ll find the pistol, and if they’re in time, they might just delay McGarvey long enough for you to find out what the coronel is up to.”

“If I find her, I think it would be best I kill her and we can get on with things.”

“No,” Ortega-Cowan said.

Fuentes had to laugh. “Don’t tell me that you believe in fairy tales?”

“El Comandante did. And maybe this isn’t such a fairy tale.”

FORTY-FOUR

McGarvey had been feeling odd all afternoon, and especially after their talk with Dr. Diaz. And during a light dinner in the hotel’s restaurant, Otto had commented on his mood, but he’d not been able to pinpoint any reason except that he was getting twitchy, as if someone were tailing them. Yet when he did a little tradecraft, double backs, feints — entering and immediately leaving buildings — or suddenly crossing against a light, he’d spotted nothing.

But looking in his overnight bag to see his pistol and silencer missing, he was not surprised that someone had traced them this far and had waited until they left the suite to get in and search it. It was a DI operation that obviously had help, possibly from the same Mexican federal cops who’d interviewed him at the airport.

It had been two hours since they left the Palacio, and suddenly this hotel was no longer safe for them, and he had a terrible feeling that Dr. Diaz was involved and that it had something to do with María León. He grabbed his bag and went out into the sitting room.

Otto was at the door to his bedroom. “Hey, I think somebody’s been through my stuff.”

“Get your things, we need to get out of here,” McGarvey said. He opened the door and checked the corridor, which was empty at the moment. It had been dumb to leave his gun in plain sight, but he’d not wanted to create a problem by trying to get into the Palacio with it, so he took a chance that the DI wouldn’t catch up with them so soon.

And now he was afraid that his mistake may have cost Dr. Diaz his life.

He and Otto took the elevator down to the hotel’s mezzanine level and from there checked out the lobby, where it seemed to be business as usual for this time of the early evening, before taking the stairs down. A handful of people were scattered here and there, and a young couple with two children were at the front desk, but there were no police.

Outside, they headed on foot east on the Paseo de la Reforma, crossed the broad boulevard a block later, and recrossed a block after that, McGarvey reasonably sure that they had not been tailed from the hotel.

“Where are we going?” Otto finally asked.

“Seville, but first we need to get out of Mexico. Whoever got into our rooms took my gun and silencer.”

“The DI?”

“That’s my guess. But I think they probably have help from the Mexican cops.”

“Do you think they traced us to Dr. Diaz?” Otto asked.

“Do you have his phone number?”

Otto got out his cell phone. “I’ll try his office first,” he said, but after a half a minute, he shook his head and pulled up another programmed number. “He lives in an apartment in San Esteban.” But again there was no answer.

“Does he have a cell phone?”

“None that I found,” Otto said. “Maybe he’s out to dinner somewhere.”

“I think he’s been shot to death with my gun, and once it’s found, probably close to the body, the AFI is going to take a real interest in me. We need to get out of the city and then the country. Let’s start with a car.”

“I’m on it,” Otto said, and he brought up an online air/car/hotel reservations site.

A half block later, they took a table at a sidewalk café, and before their coffee came, Otto showed McGarvey the screen. “Dodge Avenger, Hertz. We pick it up at the airport, is that okay?”

“I don’t think they’ll expect us back out there, especially not at the arrivals terminal,” McGarvey said. He saw that Otto had rented the car in the name of Richard Rank. “Separate passport?”

“Yup, but that’s my real name. Richard O. Rank.”

“I never knew.”

“I got a couple secrets, kemo sabe,” Otto said. “Anyway, if they’re looking for you to show up, it might take them a while to start looking for me, too.”

Their coffee came, and Otto went back to work on the Internet, coming up ten minutes later with a pair of first-class tickets from Miguel Hidalgo International Airport up in Guadalajara direct to Los Angeles. “Leaves at seven tomorrow morning, so we’ll have to hole up somewhere ’cause it’s less than two hundred fifty miles on a good divided highway.”

“We’ll chance a hotel up there,” McGarvey said. “What airline?”

Otto had to laugh. “You’re not going to believe this. We’re booked on Alaska Air’s 243.”

“We’re seriously going after a three-hundred-year-old treasure that probably doesn’t exist. So right about now, I’d believe almost anything.”

Otto looked away for a moment. “I hear you, Mac. But what about afterwards? What about if we do find it?”

“I have a couple of ideas.”

Otto went back online and after two minutes had hacked into the mainframes of the Protection and Transit Directorate, which was Mexico City’s largest police force responsible for day-to-day crimes, including murder.

“Two shootings have been reported in San Esteban in the past hour, but there’s nothing else except ‘Officers en route.’”

“No victim IDs, or probable causes?”

“Drug related is always the first assumption here,” Otto says. “But one of them could be Dr. Diaz, and they killed him because he talked to us. Colonel León.”

But McGarvey wasn’t all that sure it was her. He’d read something else into the crazy op she’d pulled getting him and Otto to Havana. Something between the lines, maybe something she’d said, or her attitude, or the fact that she allowed them to escape. It wasn’t adding up, and he knew that he was missing something.

They cabbed it out to the airport, where Otto rented the car from Hertz, and once they were away, he pulled over and let McGarvey drive. By then, they were heading north on 15D, which was a modern four-lane highway — traffic moderately light — and before they got out of cell phone range, Otto had made reservations with Iberia Airlines for their flight to Spain using a credit card that Louise maintained under her maiden name of Horn.

“We’ll get to L.A. tomorrow morning about nine thirty, which gives us a little more than an hour to catch the Continental flight to Newark, and from there Barcelona and finally Seville at five on Monday afternoon.”

“Long flight,” McGarvey said absently, his mind still on María León.

“First class, so maybe we can get some rest. I know I need it, ’cause I expect that there’s a whole lot more coming our way.”

McGarvey glanced over at his friend, and an almost overwhelming sense of loneliness for his wife came over him. But then he shrugged. “Always is.”

FORTY-FIVE

The Miami River Inn was a funky little Caribbean-style hotel right on the river at the edge of the Little Havana district, and by midnight, the evening was still warm and tropically humid, almost the same as in Havana. Only it was noisier here than at home, and María, alone at the pool, was amazed by the contrast.

She had arrived from Mexico City yesterday, and found this hotel listed in a rack of tourist brochures at the airport that described everything that there was to see and do by day or night in Coral Gables, Miami Beach, and Miami proper — including the neighborhood around the Calle Ocho, which was home to thousands of Cubans. Exiles, they called themselves, but in María’s mind they were defectors and traitors.

On the way here, she’d had the cabbie stop at a liquor store, where she’d picked up a couple bottles of Chilean merlot, which she was sipping now, an extra glass on the table beside her. The city was alive with street noises, cars honking, buses and trucks rumbling by, a baby crying somewhere, and in the distance in the general direction of Biscayne Bay, she’d heard what she thought was gunfire. Several shots, then nothing but the city’s background noise except until a couple of minutes later a siren and then others in the same general direction.

But the hotel itself, which looked nothing like the pictures in the brochure, was quiet for a Sunday night, in part she suspected because it was summer and the off season. But it was fine with her. Her room was pleasant, the staff at the desk friendly, the pool nice, and the peace good after the past few hectic days.

A perfect getaway, she thought, except she figured that sooner or later she would be recognized and someone would come to kill her. All she had to count on was the likelihood her assassin would be curious and want to know why she had come to Miami.

She was wearing jeans and a light blouse, her sandals off, and she was sitting back on a chaise lounge when something made her look to the right, where a figure stood in the deeper shadows by one of the cottages. Her hand shook for just an instant.

She raised her wineglass. “Won’t you join me?” she asked.

A slender man with fine dark hair and a thin mustache, dressed in jeans and a dark short-sleeve pullover, stepped out of the shadows. He was pointing a pistol in her general direction.

When she was able to see his face, she recognized him as the de facto chief of the Cuban dissident community’s unofficial intelligence service, and one of the DI’s highest-value targets. “Señor Martínez, it’s about time you finally showed up,” she said. “I didn’t know if you liked red wine, but I brought a second glass from my room. Unless you mean to shoot me first.”

“Kirk was right. You do have cojones.”

María was surprised. “It was you who came ashore with McGarvey. And it was you who directed the attack on my house.”

“I’m sincerely sorry that you were not at home, Señora Coronel.”

María’s anger flared. “Had I been, the outcome would not have been quite so certain for you.”

Martínez chuckled.

“Most of my house staff were gone.”

“They were never our targets.”

María believed him, and she nodded. “Thank you for that much.”

“We are at war with the government, not the people.”

“The people are the government—,” María said, but it sounded foolish even her ears.

“Spare me.”

María shrugged.

“What are you doing here? And give me one good reason why I shouldn’t put a bullet between your eyes.”

“I don’t know if you’ll believe me, but I’ll give you two good reasons. Kirk McGarvey and Spanish gold. You wouldn’t care about the third.”

Martínez stood ten feet away, staring at her. “Are you armed?”

“No. I was on the run through Mexico City, and in the limited time I had, it would have been too difficult to get a weapon through.” She nodded toward the wine bottle. “But I suppose if you got close enough and let your guard down, I might beat you to death.”

“Stand up.”

She put her glass down and stood up, her arms slightly away from her sides, and slowly turned around, until she was facing him again. “No place for me a hide a weapon. Unless you want me to strip so you can make sure.”

“The thought is there,” Martínez said. “You do it to our people in Quivicán and elsewhere. Full cavity searches, rubber hoses, broomsticks, electric shocks, ice water baths.”

“You didn’t mention waterboarding,” María said. “But then, that’s your interrogators’ methods.”

Martínez nodded. “Sit down, I’ll be right back,” he said, and he turned and disappeared into the shadows.

María sat down and picked up her glass, only this time her hand shook a little. She’d made it over the first hurdle, getting this far without being shot to death, but the next part — convincing Martínez and especially McGarvey and Rencke that she was sincere — would be even harder.

She was playing a dangerous game, not so much of cat and mouse but of balancing a fine line between the complete truth — which would end up with her immediate execution — and a partial truth, enough so that she would come across as credible.

Martínez was back almost immediately, his pistol holstered, and he came across to her, pulled a chair over, and sat down a few feet away. “I have people just outside to make sure that we are not disturbed.”

“You’re keeping me safe until you find out why I took the risk of coming here.”

“Something like that.”

“Safe from whom? The DI or your Cuban traitors?”

An expression came across Martínez’s face that María couldn’t quite read. Interest, perhaps, or maybe puzzlement.

“Are you trying to tell me that you’re attempting to defect?”

“No, it won’t be that easy. Not for you, not for me, and especially not for Kirk McGarvey and the CIA.”

“I’m listening,” Martínez said.

“How much have he and Rencke told you about what we discussed at my house, and the reasons I had them brought to Cuba?”

“I’m listening,” Martínez repeated.

FORTY-SIX

At the corner of SW Eighth Street, known locally as Calle Ocho, and Twenty-sixth Avenue SW, which turned into a one-way heading east, Fuentes sat in the backseat of an older Chevrolet van with DI operatives Eddie Hernández next to him and Abelando Parilla at the wheel.

“She’s here, but we’re not sure exactly where she disappeared,” Hernández said.

Fuentes was angry. “You saw her passing through customs yesterday but then you lost her? And twenty-four hours later, you’re no closer to finding out where she is hiding?”

“There was a problem with traffic at the airport,” Parilla said. “We were blocked by a bus and a couple of taxis. By the time we managed to get out of there, she was gone. So we thought it best if we came back to wait for you. And as you have seen, it’s almost impossible to get any cooperation out of these people. Every one we manage to turn ends up dead in a day or so, and the ones who say they’re helping us can’t be trusted.”

“Damned sloppy,” Fuentes said, fuming. They looked and sounded more like Americans than trained DI officers, and he made a note to have Ortega-Cowan recall them for retraining before they got their heads blown off.

At this time of the night, the streets were busy. This was practically the heart of what the Cuban defectors and traitors who lived here called Little Havana, and all the shops and coffeehouses where men were playing dominoes at sidewalk tables looked very much like what the real Havana looked like. Except that it was busier here — louder, more traffic, newer cars, bustling. And he could almost let himself feel the excitement.

“We have informants looking for her,” Hernández said. “Believe me, Captain, if she is anywhere here in the city, we’ll find her sooner or later. But if in fact she is trying to defect, as you say, she’s probably already on her way to Washington.”

“How? According to you she hasn’t shown up back at the airport.”

“She may have rented a car and driven to the airport at Fort Lauderdale. It’s only a half hour, depending on traffic, from here. And from there Washington.”

“Do you have people up there?”

“We’re stretched thin,” Hernández said. “We don’t have the manpower to spare.”

“If she’s still here as you think she is, she’s probably lying shot to death in some alley somewhere,” Parilla said. “Or perhaps her body was tossed into the Miami River with all the other trash. We’ll find her.”

“Give me a pistol and silencer — I’ll find her myself.”

“Not such a good idea, Captain. You won’t get two blocks without someone taking an interest.”

“I hope it takes only one block.”

Parilla gave him a Soviet-made 9 mm Stechkin pistol with a twenty-round magazine and a silencer. It was an old but reliable weapon that in the right hands at medium range was lethal. He checked the load, screwed the silencer on the barrel, and stuffed the pistol in his belt under his shirt.

“What do you want us to do?” Hernández asked.

“Stand by someplace close — I may need to be picked up soon,” Fuentes said, and he got out of the car and walked away to the west, deeper into the district.

He was dressed much the same as most of the other men here: slacks, an embroidered guayabera shirt, and leather sandals. He put a little swish into his walk. In the past, he’d learned that if he acted openly gay, most men, not just Hispanics, would underestimate him. It gave him an advantage at the start.

A block later, he figured that he had picked up a tail — two men, both of them as lean and fit-looking as soccer players — and at SW Twenty-seventh, he headed south, picking up the pace. After a couple of blocks he turned again, this time on Eleventh, a much quieter neighborhood of apartment buildings and a few shops, closed for the night.

A dog was barking on someone’s balcony near the corner as Fuentes ducked into the deeper shadows of the entrance to a men’s clothing shop, roll-down iron security grates covering the windows and doors.

Seconds later, the two men came running, and when they had passed, Fuentes stepped out. “Back here, sweethearts,” he said.

They pulled up short and turned around. “A fucking invertido,” one of them said, and the other laughed.

“You boys want some action?” Fuentes asked sweetly, and he stepped back into the doorway and pulled out the pistol, thumbing off the safety catch.

The first showed up in the doorway, and Fuentes grabbed him by the shirt so that he wouldn’t fall backwards and shot him in the forehead at point-blank range, pulling him forward. He crumpled in a heap, dead before he hit the ground.

The second had just enough time to react and start to reach for something at the small of his back when Fuentes showed himself and pointed the Stechkin at the man’s face.

There was traffic passing a block away on Eleventh, but for the moment, everything was quiet down here.

“I need information,” Fuentes said. “If you lie to me, I will kill you without hesitation. If you tell me the truth, I’ll wound you but let you live.”

The man shrugged, almost indifferently. “What do you want?”

“Colonel León showed up here yesterday, but I lost her. Where is she at this moment?”

The man started to say something, but Fuentes stepped forward and placed the muzzle of the silencer directly on his forehead.

“Where is she?”

“I don’t know, but it doesn’t matter anyway.”

Fuentes lowered his pistol, as if he had changed his mind, but then shot the man in the right kneecap, knocking him to his left knee with a grunt.

“Bastardo!”

“Where is she?”

“Miami River Inn.”

“Here in Little Havana?”

“Sí, but if the hija de puta isn’t dead already, she soon will be.”

Fuentes grinned. “At least as far as she’s concerned, we’re on the same side,” he said. “And you’re right about me being gay, but I never much liked the word invertido. It’s vulgar.”

The man started to say something, but Fuentes shot him in the top of his head just at his hairline, and blood gushed out of his eyes as he fell over.

The street remained quiet, and Fuentes stuffed the pistol back in his belt, stepped out of the doorway, and as he headed down the street, called his DI operatives to come pick him up.

FORTY-SEVEN

Martínez sat listening to María León with a mixture of incredulity bordering at times on disbelief, and outright disgust. As chief of the DI’s Directorate of Operations, she had personally signed extrajudicial death warrants for dozens if not hundreds of Cuban dissidents — traitors, as she called them.

She had directed operations here in Little Havana and up in New York through the UN and in Washington that had resulted in more incidents of torture and death. It was under her direction that Otto’s wife, Louise, had been kidnapped, during which an innocent day care teacher had been shot dead.

And it was because of her that Martínez had become involved in a gun battle to free Mac and Otto, losing some good people in the operation.

Yet she had left Havana and come here, of all places, where she was on every Cuban exile’s hit list, and had simply checked into a hotel and waited for someone to come for her.

“Assuming you’re telling the truth, and you left Cuba to find some Spanish treasure, which even by your own admission probably doesn’t exist, or if it does would be unreachable, it’s impossible for me to accept that as a reason for you coming here to Miami.”

“Nevertheless, here I am, and you’ll have to do something about it before my presence touches off a riot.”

“I think I’d find it easier to believe if you told me that you were defecting.”

María sat forward. “You know the situation right now in Cuba. Since my father’s death, no one knows what’s coming next. The government is nearly in a shambles, and every other bureaucrat or functionary in just about every department, including the DI, is positioning themselves to make the deal of a lifetime. And without my father’s protection, I’m vulnerable.”

“According to you, it’s why you went to the trouble of getting McGarvey to Havana, some deathbed wish of your father’s. Mac told me all about it. But it still doesn’t explain why you came here. Why not Washington?”

“I need your help.”

“Me specifically?”

“If I’m right, someone from my directorate will trace me here, and probably send someone to kill me.”

“Does the name Manuel Fuentes mean anything?” Martínez asked, and he watched for her reaction.

Her left eyebrow rose slightly. “He was chief of my father’s security detail. And he was the one who killed the spy inside the compound.”

Martínez had thought as much, but hearing it from the head of the Operations Directorate made him want to take out his pistol and put a bullet between her eyes. He steadied himself. “He’s already here, and we’re keeping an eye on him.”

“Is there any chance he’ll find me?”

“He’s probably dead by now, but even if he were to get this far, I have two very good people just outside.”

“His coming here proves that at least something of what I’ve told you is the truth,” María said.

“Okay, I’ll buy that much that someone in the DI is after your scalp, but it still doesn’t explain why you left Cuba. Raúl is your uncle, and I would have thought that you’d be in a better position to defend yourself by staying put. Maybe even pushing back.”

“I need proof.”

“Of what—?” Martínez asked, but then it came to him all of a sudden. “You found something after Mac and Otto were gone. That’s why you left your house that night.”

“I went back to my father’s compound and looked through his personal files and journals. There is Spanish gold buried somewhere in New Mexico, and the proof is in Mexico City or maybe in Rome at the Vatican or in Spain.”

“You were in Mexico City?”

“I had no way of protecting myself there, so I came here, hoping to convince you to help.”

“Ave María,” Martínez said softly. “Did you manage to bring any of the files or his journals out with you?”

“All the journals, dating back to Mexico City, before the revolución.”

“You have them here?”

“Sí,” María said. She reached for her bag.

Martínez pulled out his pistol, instantly hyperalert. “Take anything other than a book or a file out of your bag, and I will shoot you.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” María said, and she very carefully took the first of her father’s journals out. “This is his writing from Mexico City, when he was with Che and the Russians, along with an historian by the name of José Diaz who knew about the Spanish gold.”

Martínez laid the pistol on his lap and took the notebook. “You have all of them?”

“Yes. He made the last entry days before he died.”

Martínez felt as if he couldn’t catch his breath. Having Fidel’s journal in his hands was akin to a Jew holding something written by Adolf Hitler. Monstrous, was all he could think for just a moment. And he understood that once he opened the journal and began to read, everything he thought he knew would be indelibly stained for everyone to see. There would be no going back once he looked into the mind of someone he’d always believed was a madman, an evil man, because even such men had inner thoughts and hopes and desires that sometimes were very much like any man’s.

María read something of that from his expression. “He was one of the people at first. Before the Communists got to him.”

Martínez nodded. “Makes what happened to Cuba all the more tragic.”

And María agreed with him. “Absolute power corrupts absolutely. It got beyond his control.”

“Macbeth.”

“Actually, Lord Acton,” María said. “I may have been a Communist from a poor country, but it doesn’t mean I wasn’t educated.”

For the first time in his memory, Martínez didn’t know what to do. Common sense told him that María León was an enemy to the Cuban people, and she deserved to die here and now. And yet something she hadn’t said was deeply troubling to him. If she were dead, he would never know what it was.

“Even if your government had a legitimate claim on some of the treasure, you can’t possibly believe that Washington would send a shipload of it to Havana. You’re educated, as you say, but are you stupid?”

“Not for the government,” replied María.

Martínez wanted to be angry, but again there was that something about her manner, about what she was saying, and the very fact of her presence here that was troublesome. “Save me the promise that the gold would be given to the people. Even if you wanted something like that, it would never happen.”

“Not without Kirk McGarvey’s help.”

“Tell me what you have in mind.”

FORTY-EIGHT

The Chevy van drove past the Miami River Inn, and a half block later, Fuentes ordered Parilla to turn down a narrow side street lined with tiny houses and cottages, most of them painted in funky bright colors, stopping at the water’s edge less than fifty yards off South River Drive.

A few lights were on back here, and there was some boat traffic on the river, but the tall condos, office buildings, and hotels on the other side dominated the night skyline. A man could get lost over there, Fuentes thought. Anonymous. But it would take money.

“Most likely she has someone with her,” he said. “I’ll go in first to make sure.”

“It’ll be Raúl Martínez,” Hernández said.

“I know about him.”

“Watch yourself, he’s a slippery bastard and for something like this operation, he’ll have backup muscle somewhere close.”

“Turn the van around and be ready to leave on a moment’s notice.”

“Do you want one of us to come with you?” Hernández asked.

“It’s not necessary. But I may be bringing Colonel León with me. Is there someplace secure we can take her?”

“Back to the motel in Hialeah, where you stayed last night. We own it.”

The place was a dump, but far enough from Little Havana to be reasonably safe. “Good enough,” Fuentes said.

He got out, went past the last house, took four stairs down to the walk that paralleled the river and gave access to boats tied up alongside the seawall, and headed back about one hundred meters to the hotel property bounded by a tall wooden fence. All his senses were alert for the presence of anyone, and he held his pistol, the silencer still in place, the safety catch off, at his side.

He’d expected that the Cuban traitors would send someone after him, which they had, just as he expected that Martínez would cover his back while he was somewhere inside interviewing the coronel; the bastard had the reputation of being very thorough. Not once had any DI operator here in Miami gotten close enough to take a shot with any reasonable expectations of making good an escape. On more than one occasion, Ortega-Cowan had suggested a suicide mission be mounted. A bomb in a café, a drive-by shooting, a poison dart fired from a dark alley. The assassin would pay with their life, but he suspected that any number of young, loyal officers would agree to do the job if they were given assurances that afterwards their families would be well taken care of. But each time, the coronel had denied her chief of staff’s sensible request.

“We don’t know who would replace him,” she’d said. “Better the enemy we know than the one we don’t.”

Fuentes had shared his suspicion with Ortega-Cowan that their DI Miami operatives were inept.

“Hand-picked by the coronel.”

“My point exactly,” Fuentes had said.

A large cabin cruiser, its salon lights ablaze, loud music with heavy thumping bass booming across the river, passed by as Fuentes reached the hotel fence and held up in the corner. A man stepped out of the shadows less than ten meters away and watched the boat.

Just behind the fence was a swimming pool, Fuentes could smell the chlorine, but the man was dressed in street clothes, not a swimming suit. And he’d been standing in the shadows, waiting for someone.

Fuentes raised his pistol and walked directly toward the man, who at the last moment sensing someone was approaching started to turn, but it was far too late. Fuentes shot him in the side of the head and he went down with only a grunt; that and the sound of the silenced pistol shot were completely drowned out by the fading noise coming from the cabin cruiser.

The one watchdog back here, if that’s what he was, and almost certainly another in front. Still holding his pistol in case someone was coming to investigate, Fuentes searched the body with his left hand, finding a 9 mm Beretta pistol favored by the dissidents because it was standard issue in the U.S. military and easy to come by — almost certainly supplied by the CIA.

He tossed the pistol into the river and went to the rear gate and looked through the gap, and nearly stepped away by instinct.

Raúl Martínez, seated on a chair at the pool, not ten meters away, a cell phone to his ear, was looking directly at the gate. But Fuentes steadied himself, because there was no way the hijo de puta could see anything, nor could he have heard anything over the noise the cabin cruiser had made.

But more surprising was María León seated on a chaise lounge next to him, sipping what looked like red wine as calmly as if she had rendezvoused with a lover or an old friend. The two of them were definitely not antagonists. Made her a traitor after all, just as he had suspected all along.

After a moment, Martínez turned back and the night became still enough for Fuentes to hear what he was saying.

“It was nothing,” he spoke into the phone. “What were they doing in Mexico City?”

Martínez could have been talking about anyone, but whoever it was had surprised María and she put down her wineglass.

“Are you talking to McGarvey?” she asked.

“Just a minute,” Martínez said into the phone. “This is Louise Horn, Otto Rencke’s wife. Mac and Otto were checking out something in Mexico City, but they’re on the run from the police now. You father’s historian, José Diaz, was shot to death apparently with McGarvey’s gun, which he brought into the county on an Air Marshal permit.”

“It’s the DI,” María said.

Martínez turned back to the phone. “Are they heading back to Washington?”

This time it was Martínez’s turn to be surprised; Fuentes could hear it in his voice. “What are they looking for in Seville?”

María was watching him closely, but he was quiet for a very long time, until finally he nodded, apparently coming to a decision.

“Colonel León is here in Miami. In fact, I’m with her right now, and she’s told me this story about Catholic monks from Mexico City hiding what could amount to billions of dollars in Spanish gold somewhere in southern New Mexico. It’s the same thing she told Mac and Otto in Havana, and it sounds like they’re taking it seriously and so is the DI, because one of her people has followed her here.”

Fuentes was astounded. Fidel had been searching for Cíbola or something like it for most of his life without success, and now his daughter with the help of the CIA was on to it.

“I need to get her out of Little Havana, I can’t guarantee her safety here. We have DI operatives running all over the place, and probably even a good number of exiles who are plants. I don’t know for sure who I can trust with something this big.”

Fuentes was torn between killing them both right now or waiting to find out as much as he could about the treasure. Bringing something like that back to Havana — something he was now sure that had been the coronel’s plan all along — would guarantee him her job, completely sidestepping Ortega-Cowan. And with that leap under his belt, he could think of many other possibilities from a more-than-grateful Raúl. With his success here and his command of the language, maybe even Minister of Foreign Relations after all.

“I want to put her in a safe house until Mac gets back. She says that she has a plan, or at least the start of one, that she wants to talk to him about. She wants some of the gold for the Cuban people, not the government.”

Fuentes almost laughed out loud. The coronel was an ambitious woman — every bit as ruthless as her father had been. The two of them had been cut of the same cloth. The Cuban people indeed.

“I agree,” Martínez said. “Send a plane for us, I don’t want to risk flying commercial.” He suddenly turned around and looked directly at the gate.

Fuentes stepped back, his grip tightening on the Stechkin.

“I’ll call you right back,” Martínez said. He pocketed his phone and got to his feet, a pistol in his hand. “Roberto?”

Fuentes wanted to kill both of them outright, but knew that he would have to allow the coronel to reach the safe house, probably somewhere close to CIA headquarters. Even with the might of the entire DI, he didn’t think that he would be able to find the treasure faster than her and McGarvey. But if he let them do the work, he could step in at the last minute, eliminate them, and take the credit.

He headed away from the gate and had just reached the stairs when someone came running behind him. Firing two shots over his shoulder, he made it up to the street and the van parked a couple of meters away.

The side door was open and he clambered aboard just as they took two shots, starring the rear window.

“Move it!” Fuentes shouted, and he snapped off three shots at a figure just at the top of the stairs, his aim spoiled as the van suddenly accelerated.

They took two more hits in the rear, but then they were turning onto South River Drive and heading away from the hotel.

Hernández was slumped forward against the back of the front passenger seat, blood soaking his neck and shirt.

“What happened, Captain?” Parilla demanded. He sounded shook up.

“I found out what I needed to find out. Have you been hit?”

“No. What about Eddie?”

“He managed to get himself shot to death by an hijo de puta,” Fuentes said. “We need to dump his body somewhere and then get back up to Hialeah and make this van disappear. I’m sending you home.”

“I’m sorry, Captain,” Parilla said.

“Don’t worry, you did nothing wrong. You’re just getting out of Miami for your own good.”

“Eddie and I were friends.”

“I understand,” Fuentes said. But the stupid bastard was dead because of his gross ineptitude, and Parilla would almost certainly not like the firing squad he would face for his own failures over the past twenty-four hours.

FORTY-NINE

Getting out of Mexico through Guadalajara had gone without a hitch, and while they’d waited in Los Angles for their flight, Otto took another quick look at the Mexico City police network, but the murder of Dr. Diaz still hadn’t shown up, which puzzled McGarvey all the way across the Atlantic. It was a loose end, something that usually signaled trouble was coming their way, and Otto agreed.

The Iberia Airlines flight touched down at Seville’s San Pablo Airport a few minutes after five, Monday afternoon. They’d already cleared passport control and customs in Madrid, so they were simply able to walk off the airplane and pass through the arrivals hall and baggage claim area to the waiting cabs.

Otto had made reservations for them at the Hotel Alfonso XIII, less than four hundred yards as the crow flies from the ancient Seville Cathedral with its bell tower that had been converted from a minaret in the thirteenth century and across the street from the building that housed the Archives, closed at this hour until ten in the morning.

He had not bothered using the onboard Wi-Fi service on the flight over, because it was too insecure, but even before their cab for the city had pulled away from the curb, he’d powered up his encrypted Nokia, where he found four messages from Louise, each asking him to call back. Urgent.

“Something up?” McGarvey asked.

“Louise wants me,” Otto said, and called her work number at the CIA. She answered on the first ring. “Me,” he said.

The cabbie, a younger man with long hair tied in a ponytail, looked at them in the rearview mirror.

“He’s right here,” Otto said, and he handed the phone to McGarvey.

“Are you someplace where you can talk?” Louise asked.

“In a cab heading into the city.”

“Okay, careful with what you say for now. You can call back later. There’ve been some developments. Colonel León was in Mexico City about the same time you and Otto were there. But she showed up in Miami late Saturday night, booked a room at a small hotel right on the edge of Little Havana. No one was expecting her, so Raúl didn’t get to her until last night.”

It was a surprise to McGarvey, and yet it wasn’t, because leaving Cuba, he was sure that they hadn’t heard the last of her. “What did she want?”

“To talk to you about the gold. She told Raúl that she has a plan to give it to the people and keep it out of the hands of the government.”

“I’ll bet she does.”

“But there’s a lot more,” Louise said. “A DI captain by the name of Manuel Fuentes showed up in Miami, killed a couple of Raúl’s people who were following him, and somehow found out where María was staying. He managed to take out another of Raúl’s soldiers before he was burned. But instead of sticking around to fight it out, he turned tail and took off.”

“Could be he and María are pals,” McGarvey suggested.

“Not according to her. Raúl wants to stash her someplace up here until you and Otto get back. But he thinks there is a possibility that Fuentes may have overheard some of the conversation that he had with the colonel, and possibly part of a cell phone call he had with me.”

“Where’s Audie?”

“Still at the Farm. I thought it was for the best until things settle down a bit.”

“Keep her there.”

“What do you want to do about Raúl and the woman? I’m still holed up at the brownstone. They could come here.”

“I don’t know if that’s such a good idea, but I don’t think she’d try anything. What about you, after everything?”

“I can handle her.”

“I’ll have Otto make that call,” McGarvey said. “Just take care of yourself, okay?”

“Will do.”

McGarvey handed the phone to Otto and sat back in his seat. That María got out of Cuba and showed up in Mexico City was no real surprise; he had gotten from her that her position in Havana was tenuous at best. But she had taken a very large chance going to Miami. Any number of Cuban expats would love to take someone like her down, and Little Havana had always been a hotbed for DI operations, whose operatives would be gunning for her if she’d defected.

The problem was Captain Fuentes, who was sharp enough to make his way to Little Havana, take out three of Martínez’s people, and get presumably within shooting range of María and yet he hadn’t taken the shot. It was almost as if the DI operative had managed all of that simply to get close enough to overhear a conversation. But at this moment, with what information McGarvey had to go on, the situation made no sense.

“We’re going to play tourists down here and probably up in Madrid for at least a week,” Otto said. “Should be home by Sunday, I think.”

McGarvey caught the cabdriver glancing in the rearview mirror again. Otto had evidently realized that the man was interested in what they were saying.

“We’ll check in, have some dinner, and get a good night’s sleep. Take care, sweetheart. And say hi to our guests for me when they arrive.”

The Hotel Alfonso XIII looked like a Moor’s dream of a palace of ornate brick arches surrounding a central patio, marble floors, wood-panel ceilings, stained glass, and ceramic tiles — and according to Otto, lots of well-heeled tourists. This was the place in Seville to see and be seen and it was outrageously expensive.

They got connecting suites, ordered up a bottle of fino, the very good local sherry, and while they waited for it to arrive, Otto got back on the Internet, checking first with the Mexican Police and then with Interpol, but still there was nothing about the murder of Dr. Diaz, nor had their names come up as persons of interest.

“Maybe the AFI isn’t that sharp,” Otto suggested.

McGarvey disagreed. “I registered the gun’s serial number on my Air Marshal international entry permit. And when I didn’t show up for the return flight, the connection would have become obvious.”

“Maybe Dr. Diaz wasn’t one of the victims at San Esteban, and maybe whoever took your pistol still has it. Could have been one of the hotel staff, maybe a maid who took it and sold it on the black market.”

“You may be right,” McGarvey said. But it had been sloppy on his part, though if it was a pro who’d gotten into his room, hiding the pistol wouldn’t have done much good.

“But you don’t think so.”

“The DI is popping up all over the place.”

“They followed the colonel to Miami — do you think they could have followed us here?”

“I think it’s a possibility we have to consider,” McGarvey said. “And so do you, the way you talked so the cabbie could hear you.”

“I guess some of your tradecraft is starting to rub off on me.”

“Makes you wonder if we were expected,” McGarvey said.

“It’d have to be as an old boy favor, a phone call friend-to-friend, ’cause it’s not on the Internet.”

“From Mexican Police?”

“And the Cubans. Ever since ’07, when Spain and Cuba started talking to each other, their security forces share info. Right now, Spain is Cuba’s third-largest trading partner. I’m sure their cops talk to each other.”

McGarvey had figured as much. “I’m going down to the concierge to rent a car for one week, with a drop-off in Madrid — we might have to get out of here in a hurry. In the meantime, if we’re going to present ourselves as treasure hunters tomorrow, I want you to set up a corporate presence on the Internet. Offices somewhere outside the Beltway.”

Otto brightened up. “I set it up before we went to Mexico City,” he said. He’d always loved a challenge, even a small one. “The company is Treasure Recovery Specialists, LLC.”

“Good. Call Louise back and have her arrange a CIA jet for us first thing in the morning.”

“Madrid?”

“No, Gibraltar.”

The car was a VW Jetta, which they left in parking lot a half block from the Archives; the morning cool, not a cloud in the sky. It was a Tuesday and the Barrio de Santa Cruz was busy, some of its twisty streets and narrow alleys that had once been the Jewish Quarter were alive with tourists shopping in antiques and souvenir stores, while most were residential and quiet.

McGarvey and Otto made their roundabout way to the museum to make sure that they were not being followed, but no one seemed to be taking any interest in them.

But at the Archives, when they presented themselves to a young woman at the information counter just inside the public entrance, it was a different story.

“Señores McGarvey and Rencke, finally,” the pretty dark-haired girl said brightly. “Dr. Vergílio has been expecting you, but we just didn’t know when.” She made a phone call.

McGarvey was surprised, but he didn’t let it show. Adriana Vergílio was the director of the Archives. Otto had looked her up on the Internet. She had spent years in the field as an archeologist in Mexico and the Southwestern United States, researching Spain’s early presence in the region. She was considered a leading expert in the field, and eight years ago had naturally taken this position when it was offered.

A young man escorted them upstairs to a second-floor suite of book-lined offices with windows that looked down on a beautiful central courtyard. An extremely short, slightly built older woman, salt-and-pepper hair up in a bun, the skin of her arms and face brown and leathery from too much time in the sun, stood up from behind her desk when they were ushered in. She was smiling more with curiosity, it seemed, than pleasure to see them.

“Good morning, gentlemen,” she said, motioning for them to sit down. “Dr. Diaz spoke highly of you, suggesting that we might have a beneficial mutual interest.” Her English was good if a little flowery.

Diaz had told them that because of a past indiscretion here, he was all but persona non grata. “And he spoke highly of you, Doctor,” McGarvey said. “Did you work with him during your time in Mexico?”

“Yes, we were very close.”

“Then you know why we came to visit the Archives?” Otto asked.

“Yes, of course. You’re treasure hunters.”

“Jornada del Muerto,” Otto said. “Two military expeditions were sent to what is now New Mexico, one in the late 1700s, the other in 1836.”

“Actually the first was in 1787, under the orders of King Charles III; and the second began in 1835, under the orders of Queen Isabella. The records of the first are scanty because the soldiers never returned. All that remains are copies of their orders, and lists of their personnel, equipment, and provisions, their intended route. But two men from the 1835 trip did make it back: one of them a private, the other a sergeant.”

“They brought back the expedition’s maps and journals,” Otto said. “You have them here?”

“Yes.”

“What were they looking for?” McGarvey asked.

Dr. Vergílio smiled faintly. “Why, the same as you. Gold and silver. Hundreds of metric tonnes of it, extremely valuable in itself if it were to be melted down, but of inestimable worth as objects of history. Museums across the world, including ours, would pay just about anything to get their hands on even a part of it.”

“But that’s not the real issue,” McGarvey said. “The gold belongs to Spain.”

“Of course.”

“But the Catholic Church, whose monks buried it, might consider they, too, had a claim.”

“They stole the gold,” Dr.Vergílio said sharply.

“As the Spaniards did from the natives all across Central America and the Caribbean.”

“But there are no organizations that represent those people.”

“The Church might want to take you to court if the treasure were to be found and recovered,” McGarvey said. “And so might Cuba,” he added, looking for a reaction.

She pursed her lips slightly, and nodded. “They might try. But I doubt they would get far.”

“But we’re ahead of ourselves,” Otto said. “First we need to find the treasure.”

“For which you have an idea you think has merit — otherwise, you would not have come this far to see me.”

“It’s in New Mexico, most likely on White Sands Missile Range, maybe some of it even as far north as Trinity, the site of the first atomic bomb test.”

“You’re talking about the Seven Cities of Gold codices supposedly found in the desert. And subsequently lost there.”

“We think that the gold removed from Victorio Peak on Holloman Air Force Base was only one of seven caches.”

“Your company has access to the Missile Range?”

“We have a limited-time permit,” McGarvey said.

Dr. Vergílio started to say something, but then she sat back. “What do you want from me?”

“The records from the two military expeditions,” Otto said.

“And then what?”

“We find the gold.”

“I meant after that.”

“To begin with, we would naturally have a claim,” Otto said. “Along with Spain’s. After that, your government might be tied up in the courts.”

“As you and your company would certainly be,” Dr. Vergílio said. “Unless we had first come to an agreement. And we certainly would not consider allowing you to keep half, considering the legal embroglio we would likely find ourselves in.”

“One third would be fair,” Otto said. “We, too, would face property rights problems with the state of New Mexico and certainly with our federal government.”

“Your field work would have to be kept out of the media. Too many complications.”

“Of course,” Otto said.

Dr. Vergílio handed a five-page document held together with a red ribbon across the desk to McGarvey. “This is an Archives standard finder’s agreement in English,” she said. “If you sign it, you will be given copies of the expeditions’ documents, including the maps and journals.”

This was all wrong. In reality, they could have been given permission to view the records and take all the notes they wanted, or ask for copies. Neither the Spanish government nor the Archives would have offered such a document. In fact, no action would have been taken until after a treasure had been found and it origins verified, in which case, there would have been protests, some through diplomatic channels, and finally a court case.

Otto was about to say something, but McGarvey cut him off. “Of course,” he said. He untied the document, took a pen from a holder on the director’s desk and signed and dated the last page.

“Are you going to read it?” she asked.

“No need, Doctor,” he said, handing it back “If we were going to cheat each other, this wouldn’t make much difference.”

“That’s what I told … Dr. Diaz. But he suggested this would be for the best.”

They got up and went into the anteroom, where the same young man who had escorted them from the lobby was there with a thick accordion file folder, held shut with a brown string.

“I’ve included a copy of the agreement signed by me,” Dr. Vergílio said. “If you have any questions, please call me. And I’d like very much to hear of your progress.”

“Naturally,” McGarvey said, and he and Otto started to leave, but McGarvey turned back. “When did you and Dr. Diaz speak about us?”

“Yesterday,” she said. “Actually last night. Because of the time difference, he reached me at my home.”

“It must have been a fascinating conversation,” Otto said.

“Oh, it was,” Dr. Vergílio said. “Good hunting, gentlemen.”

“What was that all about?” Otto asked when they reached the car and headed south out of the city on the A4.

“She sure as hell didn’t talk to Dr. Diaz,” McGarvey said. “We’ve been set up.”

“By who?”

“I don’t know yet. But a few billion dollars or more makes for some strange bedfellows.”

“You knew it was coming. That’s why we’re leaving from Gibraltar and not Madrid.”

“I want to get out of Spain without complications.”

“Do you think the colonel knows what’s going on?”

“I think we should ask her.”

Two hours later, they parked the car on the busy street in front of the condo towers right on the bay in the town of La Línea, within fifty yards of the border crossing to Gibraltar.

“Were we followed?” Otto asked as they got out.

“Not unless the Guardia Civil is a lot better than I think they are,” McGarvey said, and carrying only the file folder, they walked to the line at the pedestrian crossing and when it was their turn they showed their passports to the bored officer on the Spanish side and were allowed to pass through the building to the British side.

A Brit in civilian clothes was waiting for them. “Welcome to Gibraltar, gentlemen,” she said. “Your aircraft arrived early this morning, I’ll take you there.”

FIFTY

The CIA jet was an older Gulfstream IV, this one on loan from VR-48, the Marine Air Support Detachment at Andrews. So far as María knew, the Cuban government never had anything quite so nice, not even to transport El Comandante, and she told Martínez as much to cover her nervousness.

They’d boarded in an empty hangar at Homestead AFB just south of Miami. The only crew were the marine pilot, copilot, and an efficient staff sergeant named Anderson, who’d offered them Bloody Marys once they took off, even though it was only a little after eight in the morning.

After the shooting at the motel, Martínez had moved her to a private apartment downtown, and although he didn’t say she suspected it was his, though she’d resisted the urge to poke around and find out when he’d gone out several times over the last twenty-four hours.

“We have a fairly sophisticated operation in the Washington area,” she said after they’d reached altitude out over the Atlantic. “Captain Fuentes will put them on alert to watch for me.”

“It’s a big city, lots of places to go to ground,” Martínez said. Since the hotel, he’d looked at her differently, his anger gone, replaced by a hunger as if he were a jungle animal getting ready to pounce. But when he spoke to her, he sounded indifferent.

“It won’t do after all of this for them to find me before I can talk to McGarvey.”

“I’m not taking you to the Campus or down to the Farm, if that’s what you’re talking about. But you’ll be reasonably safe for the time being, at least from your own people.”

“Well, give me a pistol so that I can defend myself if need be.”

“You’re not worth it,” Martínez said with supreme contempt. “As far as I’m concerned, the best possible outcome would be for someone to walk up behind you and put a bullet at point-blank range in the back of your head. Frankly, I’d like to have the job myself.”

María refused to look away. “I had a job to do. Just like you. My hands aren’t clean, but neither are yours nor McGarvey’s.”

“We don’t kill innocent people.”

“Tell that to the Iraqi citizens your army and the contractors you hire have gunned down.”

“They were reacting to the threat of suicide bombers.”

He was right, of course, though plenty of mistakes had been made. By everyone, including her own government. She knew the arguments against the revolución and the excesses over the past fifty-plus years. Sometimes alone at night, she would awaken from a sound sleep, thinking about things they’d done — the things she’d personally ordered — and wondered how she’d found the justification.

Martínez read something of that from the expression on her face. “You’re afraid of a bloodbath when the government fails?” he asked. “You should be. Me and a lot of other people outside of Cuba as well as millions inside are going to rise up, and job one will be opening every prison in the country.”

“At lot of them killers, even mass murderers.”

“Just like the ones you sent to us during the Mariel boatlift,” Martínez said viciously. “Only this time, they’re staying inside Cuba and we’ll arm them. Who better to do some of the work for us?”

“Insanity,” María mumbled, but she could see it happening and she could understand the why of it. The real problem would be the anarchy during the aftermath. Could very well be that the United States would send troops to help stabilize the new government.

Martínez threw his head back and laughed out loud.

But for the moment, it was less about Raúl’s government, because he had relaxed many of El Comandante’s restrictions, and more about money to feed the people, especially the five hundred thousand who’d been laid off from their government sinecure jobs.

The fortune in gold was for the people, not for Raúl, she kept reminding herself since reading her father’s journals and especially his letters to her. But that pipe dream seemed even more utterly unobtainable now than ever before.

María was turning over in her mind what she would have to say and do to convince McGarvey that she was sincere when they landed at Andrews Air Force Base and immediately taxied over to a hangar marked only with a number.

“Where will I be staying?” she asked.

“With a friend, someplace so secure, even the Company doesn’t know about it,” Martínez said.

Inside the hangar, the engines spooled down and the attendant opened the front hatch. María gathered her purse and overnight bag, and got up.

“I want to read your father’s journals,” Martínez said.

“As long as they’re not out of my sight.”

“I could take them.”

“Yes, you could,” María said.

Martínez nodded after a moment. “Have you read them all?”

“I just glanced through some of them. But so far as I can tell, he was pretty diligent with his entries and we’re talking about more than fifty years.”

“What about your file?”

“Mostly letters to me that he never posted.”

“Your ride is here, sir,” Sergeant Anderson said.

“Tell the driver to join us, would you?” Martínez said.

The door to the cockpit was open and the pilot was staring at them; he nodded and the sergeant went down the stairs.

“I’ll need a ride back to Homestead, if that’s possible,” Martínez said.

“When?”

“I’ll let you know in fifteen minutes.”

“Yes, sir,” the pilot said, and he turned and began talking on his radio.

“You’re leaving me here?” María asked.

“You’ll be safe for the time being,” Martínez said. “And Mac is already on his way, so you’d best have your story straight, because he’s a man who doesn’t take kindly to bullshit.”

“I know,” María said, and she told herself that she was looking forward to seeing him again and yet afraid of failing because she had no idea what would come next for her. Returning empty-handed to Cuba would mean a death sentence, yet the longer she was away, the greater the chances that Fuentes would find her again and this time kill her. He was a devious bastard, and if he and Ortega-Cowan had formed an alliance, which she was pretty certain they had, the resources of the entire DI would be at their disposal.

“Your coming to Miami the way you did has created a lot of problems. By now, too many people know that I’m helping you and they want to know why. Especially why I didn’t kill you myself after three of my people were gunned down, one of them not twenty feet away while I was sitting having a glass of wine with you. Half of Little Havana wants to hold an inquisition for me, while the other half is on the verge of rioting.”

“I understand,” María said.

“No, you don’t, puta,” Martínez said, keeping a measured tone, though it was obviously difficult. “Because they’re right, and it was you and people like you — just following orders — who’ve created this mess. We want to go home, we’re tired of being here, of waiting for a day that a lot of people are beginning to believe will never come.”

María didn’t know what to say, but she refused to look away or lower her eyes. The situation was what it was.

“Do you know what we did in Miami while your father’s funeral was taking place?”

“Celebrate, I imagine.”

Martínez glared at her, a deep, deep hatred in his dark eyes. “We were dancing in the streets. All day long, that night and into the next day. The monster was finally dead, finally there was hope, something worth dancing for.”

The sergeant came back aboard followed by a tall, slender woman, whom María immediately recognized, and all the air seemed to leave the cabin.

Martínez looked up and managed to smile. “Hi,” he said.

“Mrs. Rencke,” María said, barely able to get her voice.

“Actually I use my maiden name, Louise Horn. And I’ve been looking forward to meeting you, and spending some time together.”

“Do you want me to stay with you till Mac and Otto get back?” Martínez asked.

Louise shook her head. “You’ve got fires to put out in Miami. And besides, I’d like to get to know her better. Girl talk, you know.” And she smiled, but it was vicious. “We’ll be fine.”

FIFTY-ONE

Carlos López was a nondescript man of fifty, with black hair that was prematurely gray, wire-rimmed glasses, and a round, pleasant face that pegged him as anything but the Chief of Station for DI activities in Washington. He’d been dead set against the operation to kidnap Otto Rencke’s wife, and he was not afraid to repeat himself to Fuentes.

Operations was housed in the upstairs rooms of a well-established Chinese restaurant on M Street not far from Georgetown Park, the Potomac just a couple of blocks south. A half dozen officers worked here, including a couple of communications technicians, but most of the DI’s personnel worked under nonofficial cover — as cabdrivers, gardeners, a tailor, and even a Catholic priest who had taught at Georgetown University for the past eighteen years — and they communicated only in code via encrypted telephone, or for more secure operations via letter drops.

“Don’t push him,” Ortega-Cowan had warned. “He’s independent as hell, but he knows how to get things done. Tell him what you want and then step back and let him do his job.”

But he’d not been happy when Fuentes had shown up without warning last night and explained what he wanted. Nor was he happy now, perched on the edge of his worktable in the front room, looking down on the busy street.

“D.C. Metro and the Bureau were all over the place for three days after the kidnapping, but all of a sudden it was as if someone had pulled the pin, and it was business as usual,” López said. He was speaking Spanish, but his expressions were irritatingly American.

“I explained all of that,” Fuentes said. “Once Señor Rencke and then Señor McGarvey showed up in Havana, the CIA ordered the search called off. All that was left for the police was an apparent drive-by shooting at the day care center.”

“Which was still another colossal blunder. If I had been asked to mount the operation, the murder of an innocent woman would not have happened.”

“Ortega-Cowan felt, as did the coronel, that your overall mission here was too important to jeopardize it by a one-task operation.”

“Instead, you sent three idiots from Miami, none of whom had ever been to Washington, to do the job.”

“It was a success,” Fuentes flared.

López shook his head. “The death of this schoolteacher means nothing to you?”

Fuentes waved it off. “Collateral damage.”

“Take care, Captain, that someday you do not become collateral damage yourself.”

Technically, the station chief outranked Fuentes, but he was nothing more than a field officer. He’d never served at headquarters in Havana, and he certainly had never enjoyed the trust of El Comandante. Fuentes was about to tell him something of this when López handed him a Post-it note with an address in Georgetown written on it.

“Your coming here to tell me that Colonel León has defected is nothing short of unbelievable,” the station chief said. “Until this morning, I did not think it was possible.”

“What do you have?” Fuentes demanded.

“I spoke to Major Ortega-Cowan early this morning, who gave me two pieces of information that were vital. Something you should have known about.”

“Don’t toy with me,” Fuentes warned.

“The colonel is at that address.”

“Why wasn’t I told?”

“She got there less than ten minutes ago, and I needed the time to arrange for someone to accompany you, to make sure that you didn’t fly off and make another mess of things. The major told me that she would be arriving at Andrews Air Force Base sometime before noon. I had two teams standing by the main gate, and she was seen leaving the base in the company of a woman driving a blue Toyota SUV.”

For a long moment, the significance of what López had just told him didn’t sink in, but when it did, he was almost speechless. “Louise Horn, the woman we kidnapped?”

“The same,” López said. “But Raúl Martínez was not with them. He apparently flew up merely to deliver the colonel. Which tells us something beyond what I can decipher.”

“Your teams were not detected?” Fuentes asked to mask his own uncertainty.

“The two women gave no sign of it. Ms. Horn drove directly over to what turned out to be a brownstone here in Georgetown owned by a French medical doctor. We’re still looking for more information — telephone numbers, ISPs, utility records.”

“You have someone watching the house?”

“Of course.”

It bothered Fuentes that Ortega-Cowan had not given him the same information. “What else did the major tell you?”

“That Señors McGarvey and Rencke will arrive at Andrews from Gibraltar on another military VIP jet within the next two hours.”

It was another strike at his ego, and he had to wonder what sort of game Ortega-Cowan was playing at. The man was Colonel León’s chief of staff, but he knew too much; he’d had the combination to her safe, he hadn’t seemed at all surprised by the possibility that the colonel was El Comandante’s daughter, he knew that she’d flown up from Miami apparently on a military jet, just as he knew that McGarvey and Rencke had gone to Spain and for whatever reason were returning to Andrews from Gibraltar.

López was watching him. “What exactly is your mission here, Captain?”

“To find the colonel.”

“You’ve found her, now what? Do you mean to assassinate her?” López was filled with animosity, and it showed. “As you say, my station’s mission is too important to jeopardize over a defecting government official, even one so highly placed as Colonel León. Unless there is more to the situation than Major Ortega-Cowan was willing to share with me.”

And it suddenly came to Fuentes that Ortega-Cowan didn’t really give a damn about some fabled treasure supposedly buried in New Mexico. His only goal was to take over the DI’s Operations Directorate, and to do so, he wanted her out of the way and branded a traitor, with Fuentes taking the blame of aiding in her escape. For the moment, López was the key.

“Colonel León is El Comandante’s illegitimate daughter.”

“So what? His other illegitimate daughter defected to Spain and has even published a book. No one cares. And Uncle Fidel is dead.”

“Before he died, her father gave her a deathbed wish.”

“To kidnap a CIA officer?” López asked disparagingly.

“That’s part of it. But the main reason the woman was kidnapped was to force her husband, Otto Rencke — who is the CIA’s leading computer expert — to meet with Colonel León in Havana.”

“I know the name — everybody does. But what in God’s name did she think she was doing, pulling a crazy stunt like that?”

“Señor Rencke’s presence was required to lure Kirk McGarvey to Havana.”

“And he actually went down there? And you were a part of it?”

“Only at the edges.”

“Well, let me tell you something about Señor McGarvey. If you go up against him, you will die. And that’s not a guess, that’s fact.”

“The coronel did, and she not only survived the encounter, she made her way here and, as you say, she was picked up by the woman she ordered kidnapped, and McGarvey and Rencke are on their way as well.”

“What does the major want?”

“He wants her brought down so that he can take over the directorate.”

“And you, Captain?”

“I want what Colonel León wants, the reason she lured Rencke and McGarvey here, and why they apparently agreed to help.”

“You’re not here to arrest or assassinate a traitor?”

“Not unless I am given no other choice. But I’ll need your station’s help getting close enough to her and her new friends to find out what their next moves will be.”

“And all of this has to do with Uncle Fidel’s deathbed wish to his daughter? Including the apparent duel between you and Major Ortega-Cowan?”

“Sí.”

“Tell me,” López said.

And Fuentes did just that, leaving out only the possible size and location of the treasure.

“If what you’re saying is true, it will be a coup for you.”

“And anyone who helps me.”

FIFTY-TWO

Carleton Patterson was waiting in the backseat of an armored Cadillac limousine when McGarvey and Rencke showed up at Andrews Air Force Base, and his driver, a beefy man in a baggy suit coat, opened the rear door for them. The CIA’s general counsel was on a cell phone.

“They just arrived. We’ll be about a half hour.”

“Surprised to see you here, Carleton,” McGarvey said as he and Otto climbed in and the driver shut the door.

“Page would like to have a word with you. Marty wanted to send someone from security, but considering what’s been happening over the past few days, we thought you might have more need of a lawyer than a couple of extra guns.”

“Anyway, I’d be more cooperative with you,” McGarvey said.

“Something like that.”

They were waved through the main gate and got directly on I-495, the Beltway, weekday afternoon traffic heavy.

“Let me guess, there’s a warrant for my arrest for the murder of a museum curator in Mexico City, and Interpol in Spain was asked to cooperate.”

“It was your pistol, registered as an Air Marshal weapon on your flight to Mexico City.”

McGarvey explained how he had come to lose his weapon, because he hadn’t counted on the DI being so quick on the uptake. But it was the timing of the thing that bothered him.

“There weren’t warrants for our arrests until after we’d gotten out of Dodge through Gibraltar,” Otto said, giving voice to McGarvey’s thought. “Seems like the Mexican federales wanted us to get back here.”

“You met this Dr. Diaz?” Patterson asked.

“It’s why we went to Mexico City.”

“And Seville?”

“To see the curator of the Archivo General de Indias,” McGarvey said, and he handed over the copy of the agreement he’d signed with Dr. Virgílio.

“Good heavens,” the normally unflappable Patterson said. He quickly read through the five pages, went back to reread a couple of sections, and when he looked up he seemed puzzled. “This is not a standard finder’s agreement under any stretch of the imagination. In any event, it would have been in Spanish. So whoever put it together was pulling your leg. But Spanish treasure in the New World? What are you up to this time, and what’s it got to do with Cuban intelligence?”

“It’s got to do with why Louise was kidnapped and why I went to Havana,” Otto said. “And why Mac came to fetch me.”

“Louise sent one of our VIP aircraft to pick up you guys in Gibraltar, but she also sent a plane to Florida to pick up Raúl Martínez and an unidentified female, whom Louise met at Andrews a couple of hours ago. Is there any connection? It’s important, because of course, both of them have disappeared.”

“The woman is Colonel María León.”

“Well, three people who worked for Raúl have been gunned down, and little Havana is all but in armed revolt, worse than April 2000, when the boy Elián González was kidnapped by INS agents and returned to his father in Cuba. What’s going on, Mac?”

“Plenty, but I’ll save it for Page and Marty because you guys won’t believe me and I don’t want to explain more than once.”

Patterson gave both of them the oddest look. “No one’s ever had trouble believing either of you; it’s the accepting part that’s sometimes a little tough.”

At the CIA’s Old Headquarters Building, they parked in the underground ramp and took the VIP elevator direct to the seventh floor. As always over the past few years, it seemed strange to McGarvey to be back. He felt out of place, and yet he’d spent the majority of his adult life working for and sometimes with the people here. He knew the tone of the place, he could feel the energy, and very often the uncertainties that could and did eat people alive.

McGarvey, along with Otto and Patterson, was ushered into the director’s large office, where Page and Marty Bambridge were waiting for them.

“You two have been busy,” Bambridge said, by way of greeting. “Anything you’d care to share with us?”

“That’s why we’re here,” McGarvey said.

“Coffee?” Page asked.

“We had plenty on the way over. And we’re not staying long — there’s a lot more yet to be done. But I think you deserve an explanation.”

“Please,” Page said, and when they were settled, McGarvey took them through the entire story, beginning from his arrival in Cuba to the discussions with María León, their escape, and the meeting in Mexico City with Dr. Diaz.

“Who was found shot to death with your Air Marshal weapon,” Bambridge said. “The Mexican authorities issued a warrant for your arrest, as has Interpol in Spain.”

“After we had safely reached Gibraltar and were already over the Atlantic.”

“But you can’t be serious about the business with a treasure in Spanish gold,” Bambridge said, and for the moment, Page seemed content to let his DDO take the lead. “Sounds like the ravings of a senile old man. Someone with dementia.”

“The DI took it seriously enough to send someone to Mexico City to murder Dr. Diaz, and to get the cooperation of some police authority in Spain to keep the pressure on us.”

“To do what?”

“To find the gold,” McGarvey said. “The same reason Colonel León left Cuba and showed up in Miami.”

“Unbelievable,” Bambridge blustered. “Then it was her, or people under her direction who killed three of our people?”

“Not her. It’s a power struggle inside the DI. Whoever’s behind it wanted to get rid of her once she no longer had her father’s protection. But then when they realized that there might just be something to this business with the treasure, they changed tactics. Now they’re trying to herd us, while giving us enough room to actually succeed.”

Bambridge started to bluster again, but this time Page held him off.

“What do you think?” the DCI asked.

What did he think? McGarvey asked himself. “Until we met with Dr. Diaz, who was convinced that a treasure did in fact exist, I thought that it probably was nothing more than a fairy tale. As Marty said, the ravings of a senile old man on his deathbed. But in Seville, we met with the curator of their national museum and document repository dedicated to the Spanish empire in the New World who said that she had personally spoken with Diaz, who urged her to help us. But that was after he’d been killed, so she was lying. In any event, Diaz told us that he was persona non grata at the museum for some past indiscretion.”

“But she believed in the existence of this New World treasure?”

“We presented ourselves as treasure hunters, and she had us sign a finder’s agreement,” McGarvey said.

“I looked at it,” Patterson said. “It’s a phony, couldn’t possibly hold up in any court of law, so this woman apparently has her own agenda, or possibly a deal with the DI.”

“And now?” Page prompted.

“I think that there’s a very real possibility that something’s buried out there, and Castro’s daughter has put her life on the line looking for it,” McGarvey said.

“Otto?”

“I have to agree with Mac, Mr. Director, although I didn’t at first. Not until Spain, and not until we found out that the colonel not only left Cuba and showed up in Miami but also insisted on coming here to talk to us.”

Bambridge sat forward. “Good Lord, she’s here in Washington?”

“Yes,” McGarvey said.

“Well, let’s have her, at least for ordering a murder and kidnapping.”

“Not yet. Not until we find out why she took the chance of skipping out, and the even bigger risk of showing up in Miami.”

“If the DI traced her to Miami as you say it did, then it’s likely they’ll trace her here.”

“I hope so,” McGarvey said.

“You want us to sit on it?” Bambridge asked. “Just like that?”

“Just for now.”

“You have to be kidding,” Bambridge said, but again Page held him off.

“For now, this has nothing to do with national security, so it’s not in our brief. But blood has been shed in Miami, and Interpol has listed you as a person of interest, so at the very least, the Bureau is interested in having a word with you and Colonel León. But I think I can hold them off for twenty-four hours.”

“Forty-eight,” McGarvey said. He’d gotten what he wanted: the CIA’s interest and some breathing room.

“I’ll see what I can do,” Page said.

From the CIA, they took a cab into downtown Washington, getting out at Union Station and walking down to the Hotel George, where they had a drink at the bar. McGarvey was nearly 100 percent sure that they had not picked up a tail, but it had always been suspected that the DI as well as a number of other foreign intelligence agencies kept a lookout in the vicinity of the CIA’s main gate, so he had to consider the possibility that he and Otto had been spotted.

Otto phoned Louise to make sure that she’d run into no problems and that Colonel León was behaving herself, while McGarvey phoned Martínez.

“Where are you?”

“Driving up from Homestead. Are you back in Washington?”

“Yes. Page has agreed to give us a little space — forty-eight hours, does that give you enough time to settle your people down and explain what they need to do?”

“I can be pretty convincing when it’s necessary. What about Seville?”

“It was a setup, but the curator seems to think the story is plausible. The next step will be to convince Colonel León for the ruse to have any chance of working,” McGarvey said.

Martínez laughed. “She came to us this time. I think she’s ready for what you have to tell her. But the DI up there will be on your case, so watch your step.”

“You, too,” McGarvey said.

FIFTY-THREE

María came downstairs to the kitchen from where she’d taken a shower and changed into a pair of jeans and white blouse but nothing on her feet. She’d done her hair up in back, and Louise thought she looked stunning — fresh, pretty in a dark island girl way. But it was just looks, after all; the woman was a killer, or at the very least she’d signed orders for innocent people to be arrested, interrogated, and then executed.

Louise was leaning against the counter. “You found everything okay?”

“Yes, thank you,” María said. “Could I have something to drink?”

“Water, coffee, tea, wine, or beer.”

“Anything stronger?”

Louise kept her temper in check. Mac wanted her here in one piece, and it was she who had apparently defected from Cuba and come to them. “We have some cognac, but it’s for Mac when he shows up.”

“He’s gotten word that I’m here?”

“He and my husband are on their way.”

“Can you tell me what they’ve been doing?” María asked.

Louise just stared at her for a longish moment, trying to find some measure of the woman, trying to find something in her eyes that would indicate what she was, what she’d done. But only a wariness mixed with weariness and a little hesitancy showed.

María shrugged. “A beer will be fine,” she said.

Louise motioned for her to have a seat at the counter, and she opened a couple of Red Stripes and got a couple of glasses.

María raised her glass. “I’m not exactly what you think I am.”

“What do I think you are?” Louise asked, holding her temper in check. Her fingers were still beat up from trying to remove the screws from the window where she’d been held.

“A fanatic, a monster.”

“The men who kidnapped me did so on your orders.”

“To convince your husband to come to Cuba. It was the only way I could get Mr. McGarvey to come talk to me.”

“You could have left Cuba and met him on his turf.”

“He’d gone to ground — we knew that much, but not where.”

Louise wanted to throw the beer bottle at the woman. “Joyce Kilburn was the name of the woman shot to death at the day care center. By your men, operating under your orders.”

“It was an accident.”

“If I brought her husband and three children here, what would you say to them? Oops?”

“I don’t know this word. But I would tell them that I was sorry, and that if it were in my power, I would change everything for them.”

“Including my kidnapping?” Louise shot back.

Still María did not look away. “No, that I would not have changed. You were a means to an important end that had to be accomplished as quickly as possible.”

“They drugged me.”

The faintest of smiles raised the corner of María’s mouth. “They were idiots. But you gave a good account of yourself. They were finally very glad to be rid of you. Pavorosa, was the word they used. Formidable, dreadful.”

“Where are they now?”

María shrugged. “Havana, I suppose. I didn’t have the time to deal with them.”

“But you let Mac and my husband escape. Why?”

“It was a little more complicated than that. My house was under attack, and had I been there, the same consideration wouldn’t have been given to me.”

And there it was, the crux of the matter in Louise’s mind. A constant, almost an axiom, that people of María’s stripe held dear: The United States was expected to play fair, to play by the rules, while everyone else could do whatever they wanted, including 9/11. They could kidnap anyone and cut off their head. But God forbid we grab them and take them to a place like Guantánamo Bay, clothe them, house them, feed them, supply them with Korans, and find out — by sometimes admittedly harsh means — information needed to save American lives.

Impossible, Louise thought, to argue religion with a believer.

“My questions stand: Why did you let my husband and Mac get away, and why did you give the order to have me released?”

“Because I’d found out what I needed to know, and I found out that my father had been right when he’d promised that Mr. McGarvey was an honorable man who might be persuaded to help if he understood the true nature of what he was being asked.”

It sounded like a carefully rehearsed speech. “So you’ve made it this far, what next? Because if you think that by some twisted sort of logic, you’re going to convince him to find a treasure and turn it over to your government, you’re deluded. Worse than that, nuts.”

“Not to the government, to the people.”

“Save it for the gullible, Colonel, because when Mac gets here, he’s going to want the truth, not bullshit.”

“I am telling the truth,” María flared. “I burned my bridges in Cuba to come this far.”

“You burned your bridges because you found yourself in the middle of a power struggle. With your father’s death, you were vulnerable. It would have been only a matter of time before you found yourself behind bars, probably in front of a firing squad. You ran for your life.”

“And the lives of my people!”

“Your people,” Louise shot back. “Who the hell are you trying to kid? What did you really come for? Political asylum in trade for secret information from inside the DI? The true skinny on your father’s monstrous treatment of your people?”

“Mr. McGarvey believes me,” María said. “And so does your husband.”

“Right.”

“Otherwise, why did they go to Mexico City to see Dr. Diaz, the historian my father wrote about in his journals? And why did they go to Seville? It means something.”

“It’s not the possibility of a Spanish treasure hidden somewhere after several centuries that is under serious question. It’s your motivation, Colonel, that nobody believes.”

“Well, someone does, because the DI tried to get to me in Miami, and there’s little doubt that they’ll try to find me here.”

“To do what, give you legitimacy?” Louise demanded. She found that she was becoming disturbed, not just by what the woman was saying, but also by what she wasn’t. No apologies, no defense for her actions. María León was a believer, but of what?

“Maybe just that. Or maybe if the DI succeeds in assassinating me, you’ll finally believe that I was telling the truth.”

“You’re a mass murderer.”

“An apparatchik, a functionary,” María said weakly.

And Louise laughed. “Delusional. And it would almost be comic if people like you didn’t have actual power.” Otto had told her that María had almost certainly been trained by the KGB in Moscow. “Is that what you learned in Russia? To blame the system for your excesses — or would you rather call them mistakes?”

A look of genuine anguish made María’s face drop. “I was alone for most of my life.”

“Save it for the confessional,” Louise said harshly.

“I’m here to help.”

“To help yourself.”

“No,” María said. “You have to believe me.”

“We’ll see,” Louise said, and she glanced out the window at the deepening gloom of late afternoon, wishing that Otto and Mac would get here soon. She’d felt competent all the way to this point, even through the ordeal of her kidnapping, But now she felt as if she were in over her head, and she needed help.

FIFTY-FOUR

Fuentes sat in the back of a Capital City Florist windowless van just around the corner from the brownstone where López’s operatives had traced the two women. From here, the sophisticated low-lux cameras and surveillance equipment sensors and antennas had clear sight lines to the rear and west sides of the three-story structure. But nothing electronic, mechanical, or infrared was showing up on the scanners. All they had was the dim early-evening visual image on one of the monitors, and although he was disappointed, he wasn’t surprised; the woman and her husband were technocrats.

Ariel Garcia in white coveralls with the florist company’s logo on the back sat next to Fuentes. He and Hector Vásquez making passes in a Yellow Cab were the only two men López had allowed for the initial stage of the assignment, something else that Fuentes was angry about. But both men were heavily armed with Glock 17 pistols, and the silenced version of the Russian AKS-74U, and both seemed competent.

“If it occurs that we must assassinate her, then we will do it quickly and leave before the authorities arrive,” Fuentes had told the chief of station.

“I won’t allow more killings,” López said angrily.

“The FBI won’t care very much if a Cuban defector — one such as Colonel León, who has signed so many death warrants and whose father was El Comandante — is gunned down.”

“If McGarvey becomes involved—”

“I will take full responsibility,” Fuentes had said, and López reluctantly agreed. Maybe not reluctantly enough, and watching the brownstone from the back of the van, he had to wonder what else the station chief hadn’t told him. That Ortega-Cowan was playing some sort of a game was a foregone conclusion: it was the man’s nature. But the major had never studied under Uncle Fidel, the master of artifice, and Fuentes found that he was almost beginning to enjoy himself. They were in the middle of a game of chess in which the stakes were the highest. And he possibly had the checkmate move.

He had done a lot of thinking in Mexico City and Miami and on the way up here. The operation hinged on whether or not an accessible gold treasure was a possibility. If it wasn’t, the best course would be to assassinate the coronel as a traitor and return home the avenging hero. If the gold actually did exist, which apparently McGarvey and Rencke believed it did — otherwise, why did they travel to Mexico City and then Seville? — then finding it and reporting back to Havana would make him a hero of a much larger sort.

The problem, of course, was Ortega-Cowan and what designs he’d made to manipulate the situation to suit his own ambitions.

First, then, was to somehow find out if the gold existed, and if it did, eliminate McGarvey, who was the only real physical danger; kill the coronel, who would have fulfilled her function by getting them to this point; and finally hold Louise Horn at gunpoint again to ensure her husband’s cooperation. Where McGarvey was a man of action, Rencke was an intellect, a man of the mind, who would find the treasure.

“Base, two.” The radio came to life. It was Vásquez in the cab. He was a short, stocky man with a bull’s thick neck and a raspy smoker’s voice.

Fuentes’s headset was on vox. “Go ahead, two.”

“Two male subjects on foot just went down the driveway to the rear of the location.”

“Can you make a positive ID?”

“A high-probability match.”

It was finally coming together. “Get out of there. But don’t go far. I may need you.”

“Sí,” Vásquez came back.

Fuentes pulled off his headset. “Anything from the house?”

“No.”

López had supplied all three of them with E71 encrypted Nokia cell phones and Bluetooth headsets. The phone’s software, with dual-layered RSA 1024-bit and AES 256-bit military-grade encryption was older generation, but for all practical purposes still unbreakable.

Fuentes speed-dialed Garcia’s phone so he would have continuous contact with the van, and when the connection was made, pocketed the phone and hooked the small headset over his left ear. “Keep me posted if you get anything from the house, or if Hector notices anything I need to know about.”

Garcia was a little flustered. “Where are you going, Captain?”

“We’re getting nothing here, so I’m going in on foot,” Fuentes said, and before the DI Washington field officer could object, he jumped out of the van and headed down the block to the corner.

The brownstone was a three story, well kept but anonymous, the blinds on its front windows tightly drawn. A driveway closed by a tall iron gate on the east side of the building led to what looked like a garage in the rear. From the van, they’d seen a tall stone wall at the back, but it had been impossible to see if there was a gate or opening to the adjacent property.

At the end of the block, Fuentes stopped to light a cigarette. This shaded avenue of residences was well enough away from busy M Street NW with its shops and restaurants, so that there was only light traffic at this hour and no pedestrians. The curb was wall-to-wall parked cars, lights showing in many of the houses; people were home from work, their children home from school. Pleasant, established, traditional, rich, and above all tidy. The electric, phone, and cable lines were all underground.

“Anything from the house?” he asked Garcia back at the van.

“Nothing has changed, Captain. What do you want to do?”

“Stand by,” Fuentes said. He broke the connection and phoned López, who answered on the first ring.

“Good evening.”

“I’ll need help, four additional officers,” Fuentes said, and he explained what he had in mind.

“So you’re going to kill her and McGarvey after all.”

“It may be for the best.”

“What about the treasure?”

“I think that if we’re holding Louise Horn again, it will give her husband incentive to work in our behalf.”

“You’ll need another safe house to keep her.”

“Yes. Will you help?”

“Do I have any choice?” López asked, but it was rhetorical. “I’ll send you two men, but it’ll take one hour. And you must understand that I am merely complying with your orders, nothing further. It something goes bad, you’re on your own, Captain.”

“Sí,” Fuentes said. But when this mission was completed, López would stand in front of a firing squad right next to Ortega-Cowan, if for nothing else than his incorrect attitude.

FIFTY-FIVE

In the brownstone, Mac went directly upstairs to clean up after the trip, and after he’d finished watched from a front window as a man wearing a dark sport coat walked slowly past and at the corner stopped for a minute or so as he spoke on a cell phone before he walked away.

“Looks as if we have company,” he’d told Otto on the first-floor landing before they went back to the kitchen, where Louise had nuked a couple of pizzas.

“Want to call for backup?” Otto asked.

“I want to know how they tracked us. And the only way is to ask them.”

“I don’t want Louise in harm’s way again.”

“They came for Colonel León, and if it comes to it, we’ll offer a trade.”

Otto grinned, even though he was concerned for his wife’s safety. “But you have no intention of giving her up.”

McGarvey shook his head. “We’re going to end up needing her just as much as she needs us.”

“What about our company?”

“When I ask for a cognac, I want you to turn off your security systems. But don’t say anything to the colonel. We’re going to stage a little drama for the DI, and she’s going to be the star.”

Otto opened a gun safe in the hall closet and took out a Walther PPK, a silencer, and two magazines of ammunition for McGarvey; and a subcompact Glock 29 that fired a 10 mm round, and another silencer, which he pocketed along with two magazines of ten rounds each.

“If this goes down, I want you to take the women out of here. Over the roofs,” McGarvey said, as they went back to the kitchen.

“I’ll shoot back if need be,” Otto said, and he was resolute.

Louise had laid out the plates and glasses, and María was opening a bottle of red wine, and they looked up.

“Home again at last,” Louise said. “Did anybody on Campus give you guys trouble?”

“Marty tried to be his usual self, but Walt held him off,” Otto said. “At least temporarily. Gave us forty-eight hours.”

“To do what?” María asked. “Or did you find out what you went looking for in Seville?”

“Enough to convince us that the gold actually does exist,” McGarvey said.

“Well, you better sit down and tell us all about it,” Louise said. “Do you want a cognac?”

“A glass a wine will do for now,” McGarvey said, and he and Otto sat at the counter, and between them they told Louise and María everything that had happened, beginning in Mexico City and their flight out of the country when Mac’s gun had gone missing and they suspected that Dr. Diaz had been assassinated with it.

“It was a DI operation,” McGarvey said, and María protested, but it was obvious she didn’t believe it herself.

“Román isn’t that good, and neither is Manuel,” she said.

“They had to have tracked you to Mexico City, where they probably stumbled across us, and from there they followed us to our meeting with Diaz and managed to dig you out in Miami.”

“Maybe this is just a big scam,” Louise said. “All started by kidnapping me, getting my husband and Mac to come running to your little house by the sea, and then, in a really magnanimous gesture, letting them waltz right out.”

“No reason for it.”

“Hounds and hares? Is that it? Once they took you at your word, you hopped a plane — just that easy — flew to Mexico City, where you figured they’d follow you, and from there Miami, where you could out Raúl. The point of the entire operation. Right?”

María was shaking her head. “I swear that’s not it. I wanted to come here to ask for Mr. McGarvey’s help. I wanted to tell him that I believed him about the gold, and I wanted him to believe that I was only interested in the treasure for my people. Not for the government. ”

“The DI was coming after you in Mexico City and Miami, not Raúl? Is that right?”

“They wanted me dead. Major Ortega-Cowan wants to run operations now that I no longer have my father’s protection.”

“Then why did they kill Dr. Diaz in Mexico City and not you?” Louise hammered. “And again in Miami, your old pal Manuel had you and Raúl in his sights at the hotel — according to what you told me — why didn’t he take the shot? Could have eliminated two big problems, you and Raúl, who’s given the DI fits for the past ten years. And the guy was certainly capable of it — he’d already proved that much by taking out three of Raúl’s people.”

Throughout all of that, McGarvey got the impression that for all her training and experience, María was a little naïve. She’d been sheltered from the real world for most of her life; even though she had risen remarkably fast in the Cuban intelligence service, she’d never wanted for anything, her orders were obeyed, she was treated with a real respect to a measure that most women in the country didn’t enjoy, and her future had never been uncertain — at least not in her mind — until her father had died. Yet she had risked everything merely on a speculation that Otto had proposed.

“She could have come straight here from Mexico City,” McGarvey said. “But she took a big risk going to Miami first. Lot of people down there would like to have put a bullet in her head. If not to out Raúl, why’d you do it?”

María looked grateful. “It was the only way I thought I could prove my intentions.”

“Save us,” Louise said, rolling her eyes.

“Just a minute, I want to hear what she has to say,” McGarvey interrupted. “What are your intentions?”

“To find the gold—”

“You’ve already said that. But just how do you envision getting the gold, if we find it, to your people? It’s in the U.S., on a military reservation, so just getting to it is the first big hurdle. It has to be dug up, maybe loaded aboard trucks — or were you planning on using helicopters? — and then driven where? Across the border into Mexico, right where it started from a few hundred years ago? All of this would have to be done under cover of darkness, of course, and without the air force or border patrol learning about it — so I guess that would leave out helicopters, unless they flew very low.”

María held her silence, as did Otto and Louise.

“So now the gold is in Mexico, maybe several hundred tons of it. The Cuban air force could send some transport aircraft, except even if you had enough airplanes capable of landing in the desert for the job, which I doubt, someone would take notice and want to know what was going on. Our people watch your excursions out into the Gulf pretty closely, and I’m sure that the Mexican air force would be curious about what might look like an invasion or at the very least a smuggling operation.”

María managed a faint smile. “Something like that,” she said, and McGarvey knew then that he had her. “But it’s going to depend on you to not only find the gold, but allow me to bring some of it home, too.”

“But not to Havana.”

“To a processing and distribution center at Guantánamo Bay at first,” she said.

“With my government’s cooperation for a piece of the pie.”

“I’d need that, too.”

McGarvey nodded. “I’ll tell you how we’re going to find the gold, and you’re going to tell me how you’re getting it out of Mexico and across to Guantánamo Bay.” He glanced at Louise. “But first I think I’d like that cognac after all.”

FIFTY-SIX

After his walk around the block, Fuentes ended up back at the van, where Garcia was about to call him on the phone. The surveillance technician had shoved his headset off one ear and had the Nokia out, ready to dial, and he was excited. Fuentes slipped into the seat next to him.

“Something’s finally coming through,” Garcia said.

Fuentes snatched a headset, and though he was hearing voices and some other sounds, it took several seconds for him to begin to make some sort of sense of exactly what was coming from the house, and he suddenly recognized María’s voice, and that of a man, perhaps McGarvey. “I hope you’re recording this,” he said.

“It kicked on automatically,” Garcia said. He adjusted something on one of his panels, and the voices became clearer. “I’m getting bounce from one of the rear windows — a kitchen, I think. They’re having something to eat.”

“You’d need the help of the drug cartels along the border,” McGarvey was saying. “That might create a problem.”

“Not at all,” María said. “Tell me one segment of your society where someone doesn’t at least smoke pot, or better yet, snort cocaine? And who better to spy for us than the boots on the ground, small-time dealers?”

“In exchange for what?” Louise asked.

“Safe haven when it’s needed and transportation from Colombia to more than a dozen airstrips, some within fifty miles of the U.S. border. Which is how we’ll get the gold out, using the cartels’ own aircraft but with protection once they enter our airspace.”

“Does anyone on Campus know about this?” McGarvey asked.

Otto answered. “I didn’t.”

“The CIA doesn’t have a lock on intelligence operations,” María said. “Sometimes the DI stages its own little coups.”

“Big coups,” Louise said. “We’ve been monitoring the air activity for the past three years, but we figured the flights from Cuba were smuggling Cubans who could get across our border into Texas, New Mexico, or Arizona, easier than across the strait into Florida. And we catch a few of them every now and then. Mostly convicted felons.”

“It’s background noise. You’re supposed to catch them.”

“Still leaves you two problems,” McGarvey said. “First you have to convince the cartels not to simply take the gold away from you when they get it across the border from New Mexico.”

“You know where it is?” María asked.

Fuentes held the earphones closer, barely able to contain his excitement. He’d hit the jackpot. Maybe even something bigger for him than the Operations Directorate.

“Yes.”

“Even if we managed to take a lot of gold out of there, those guys won’t risk an ongoing business that nets them in excess of forty billion dollars per year. They’ll let us keep our gold, and continue to spy for us, because we’ll continue to work as their state-sponsored support mechanism.”

“An arrangement that even your own directorate wouldn’t interfere with, no matter how high a priority bringing you down is for them,” McGarvey said.

“Something like that,” María said. “You said two problems.”

“Where do they usually land once they reach Cuba?”

“They’re coming back empty most of the time, so they land wherever their next drug pickup is scheduled, which can be just about anywhere for security reasons, but usually somewhere in the southwest. It’s a thousand kilometers from there to Columbia’s north shore west of Riohacha, and about eight hundred if they use the route through Nicaragua. No reason for the DI to suspect the inbound aircraft aren’t empty.”

“We’re talking about several hundred tons of gold that the U.S. is going to want back — assuming you manage to get it across the border,” Otto said. “Means you’re not going to have a lot of time before the Mexican army drops in to find out what’s going on. You’ll have to send an armada of aircraft to get in, load the gold, and get out all in one night.”

“And if the army does show up in force, it won’t make your cartel pals very happy,” Louise added. “Have you figured out how you’re going to handle that issue?”

“We’ll assemble the planes at a half dozen airstrips a few at a time over a period of several days, before we grab the gold and bring it across. We can have it distributed and loaded in twenty-four hours or less.”

“It would be cutting it close,” McGarvey said.

“Even if we get only half of it out, I’d win.”

“I’d win?” Louise asked.

“I meant we.”

“What happens after you get the gold back to Cuba? Have you figured out how to distribute it?”

“I’ll need your government’s help.”

“You’ve already said that,” McGarvey said. “But exactly what help? Physically, what are we supposed to do?”

“First we need to get the gold to your base at Guantánamo Bay, and from there it can be auctioned for hard currencies, which can be distributed to the people.”

“Naïve,” Louise muttered. “What about the political fallout? Or do you expect your government will sit on its hands? And even if you could pull off this stunt, and actually get some of the money to the people, what would stop your military from simply confiscating it?”

“From a population of ten million?” María asked.

“Put it in any bank, and it would be gone in a heartbeat.”

María sounded frustrated. “Fly over and drop it from the air like propaganda leaflets. Send it ashore in bales. Distribute it with the marijuana and coke. I don’t have all of the answers.”

“Why should we cooperate?” McGarvey asked.

But Fuentes knew what the answer would have to be, and he had to admire the woman. Like her father, she was just as devious as she was ruthless.

“Think about what that kind of money would do in Cuba. Certainly Raúl’s government would fall. When the army moved in to try to grab whatever it could, the people would fight back. And the army is made up of ordinary Cubans who would themselves share the wealth, so I think mass desertions would speed up the overthrow. And it wouldn’t cost the U.S. a centavo. Maybe even make a profit by brokering the auction.”

“Revolution,” Fuentes whispered.

“Revolution,” Otto said. “Just like in Egypt.”

“What Washington has tried and failed to do ever since the Bay of Pigs fifty years ago,” María said. “No reason for your government not to cooperate.”

Fuentes pulled the headphones away and called the two people López had sent. They were waiting in a Potomac Electric Power Company maintenance van two blocks away. Bruno Murillo answered on the first ring.

“Sí.”

“Move in now,” Fuentes said.

“Give us ten minutes.”

“When you’re finished, I want you to stand by for backup.”

“As you wish,” Murillo replied.

He and José Cobiella were highly trained to hack into and disrupt any sort of electronic signals, fiber-optics or ordinary copper phone lines, cell phone towers, and in this case, electrical service to individual buildings or entire blocks or neighborhoods. López had guaranteed that, in addition, they were both more than competent marksmen.

Fuentes donned the headset again in time to hear Louise Horn speaking.

“… where the gold is buried in New Mexico, and getting to it are two different things. How in the world do you expect to bring in the trucks you’d need to get it across the border without detection?”

The room fell silent and it was nearly a full minute before María answered, and when she did, Fuentes could do nothing more than laugh. The coronel was devious and ruthless, and even brilliant, but she was crazy — certifiable.

“The Mexican people are going to invade the United States, and your government is going to allow it to happen.”

FIFTY-SEVEN

The lights went out, pitching the kitchen in near absolute darkness. The refrigerator motor stopped working, but all the alarms, motion sensors, and antisurveillance gear switched over to emergency battery power, and they were once again safe from eavesdropping.

Otto switched on a small penlight, but directed its beam at the floor, which made it less likely to be seen outside through the blinds. “Just what you figured, kemo sabe.”

McGarvey went to the hallway, which ran the length of the house, and cocked an ear to listen before he went to the front door and carefully peered out one of the flanking narrow windows in time to see one man in dark coveralls and a hard hat jump out of a Pepco utility van and enter an apartment building across the street. He carried a nylon bag slung over his shoulder. The van parked a few yards away, and the driver in the same type of uniform got out and hid behind it.

Otto stood at the kitchen doorway. “Company?”

“A Pepco van twenty yards away. Two men in coveralls. One just went into the building across the street, probably heading for the roof. The other is behind the van.”

“The guy you spotted earlier wasn’t wearing coveralls, was he?”

“No,” McGarvey said. “So there’s at least three, and probably more. Is there a basement exit to the rear?”

“West corner. What do you have in mind?”

“I’m taking the fight to them as soon as you and Louise and María are out of here. But stay low on the roof, because the guy across the street was carrying a bag, probably a sniper rifle. He’s most likely covering the front door and windows, but if he spots you, he’ll let the others know and you’ll be stuck.”

“I’ll call for backup,” Otto said, pulling out his cell phone.

“Not unless you absolutely need it,” McGarvey said. He wanted at least one of them to get away and get the message back to Havana, and he could see that Otto understood the reason why. “Just get out of here. I’ll give you five minutes.”

“My life’s on the line,” María said at Otto’s shoulder. “Give me a gun, I’m going with you.”

“Not a chance,” McGarvey said.

But María pushed past Otto, her features barely visible in the dim penlight. She seemed driven. “I know how they operate. Fuentes is out there, but he’s almost certainly got the help of Carlos López. He’s our Washington station chief. Good man. Conservative. Won’t waste his assets on a short-term operation.”

“His people kidnapped Louise.”

“Wasn’t him. He didn’t want to jeopardize the long-term mission here, so we had to use a team from Miami,” María said. “I’m telling you that these guys aren’t going to stick around if there’s any chance that the cops are going to show up.” He turned back to Otto. “Use your cell phone and call nine-one-one.”

Otto shook his head. “I’m getting no signal.”

“Whatever,” María said. “You want to take the fight to them, fine. Give me a pistol and I’ll go with you. If we make enough noise, they’ll cut and run. If that’s what you want.”

“Fuentes, too?”

“Especially him. The flojito has no stomach for a standup fight.”

McGarvey considered what she was saying. In order for his plan to work, someone needed to get word back to Cuba. If the DI had monitored their conversation over the past several minutes, which Mac was sure they had, María had become expendable as far as they were concerned. DI operations under her chief of staff’s direction could conceivably take care of the situation in Mexico with the drug cartels, including the invasion of New Mexico, as completely crazy as that concept was.

And maybe she knew it or felt it. The timing of the team’s move immediately after she’d stated her plan was way too coincidental. She had to expect surveillance equipment had picked up at least some of it. Her only option at this point was to take them out, or at least take Fuentes down.

“Give her your gun,” he told Otto.

Otto handed over the Glock, which María expertly checked, and then the silencer and two spare magazines, which she pocketed. “How do you want to play this?” she asked.

“You’re going up on the roof.”

“I’m coming with you—”

“You’re going to do as you’re told for a change,” McGarvey said. “My friends are going into harm’s way for the second time because of you. And now you’re going to make yourself useful by taking out the sniper on the roof across the street. Or at the very least, keep him busy. And make all the noise you want.”

María said something under her breath, but then glanced over her shoulder at Louise right behind her. “Show me the way,” she said.

“Careful where you aim,” Louise told McGarvey. “We have a lot of innocent neighbors.”

“Give me the keys to the Toyota,” McGarvey said.

“What have you got in mind?” Otto asked.

“A diversion.”

Louise fetched her car keys. “Think they’ll buy it?”

“Might make them wonder about what’s going on. Just keep your heads down,” McGarvey told them as they headed upstairs.

“I’ll be seeing you in a few minutes, so don’t shoot me when I show up,” María called back.

“Don’t tempt me,” McGarvey muttered.

He waited until they had disappeared, then went to the window and checked out the street again, but nothing had changed. So far as Fuentes’s people were concerned, the front of the brownstone was covered from street level as well as from above.

Which left the rear courtyard, where Louise’s Toyota SUV and Otto’s battered old Mercedes sedan were parked. The only way out was the driveway around the east side of the house to the gate that opened to the street. Or over the tall brick wall to the narrow alley.

The stairs to the basement were off the back pantry in the kitchen, but before he went down, he checked out a window, but nothing moved yet in the courtyard, though he was pretty sure that Fuentes had to have placed at least one shooter, maybe more at the rear. The problem was his intention.

By now he knew María’s plan — the timing of the power cut was not coincidental — so it was almost certain that he wanted her dead. But he would also understand that the only ones who knew where the treasure was buried were McGarvey and Otto and possibly Louise. So at all costs, one of them would have to be taken alive. And if it were McGarvey’s choice, he would pick Louise again.

A dim light showed through a narrow, dusty window high on the rear wall just beneath the ceiling joists. Except for the oil furnace, water heater, and washer and dryer, plus a workbench in one corner and what had probably served as a wine rack along the opposite wall, the basement was empty. No crates or boxes or old furniture. Everything of interest to Otto and Louise, including each other, was upstairs.

The door to one of the bedrooms on the third floor had been open when McGarvey passed and looked in earlier. A tiny bed with side rails and a bright pink elephant spread that matched the curtains were waiting for their adopted daughter, Audrey, when this business was all over and she could come back home.

Pretty much most of his adult life, he had moved from one crisis — like this one, in which his friends and family had been put in harm’s way because of him — to another, in a seemingly never-ending stream. Sometimes, like just then looking at his granddaughter’s bed, he got the feeling that he’d had enough of it. Yet a number of years ago, he told someone who’d asked why he just didn’t turn his back and walk away that he did what he did simply because it was who he was.

But then and now, he was brought up against a question he’d asked himself from the beginning: Had he made a difference?

He hoped so.

But even if he hadn’t, it was impossible for him to walk away from this situation.

The exit out of the basement was tucked in the west corner. The steel door lifted upward at an angle, and McGarvey, expecting that Fuentes or at least one or more of his people would be either coming up the driveway or most likely over the wall from the alley, switched the Walther’s safety lever off and eased the door open far enough so that he had a clear angle on the back wall.

But as before, nothing moved. Fuentes was either very slow, or he was very smart and had laid a trap.

McGarvey opened the door the rest of the way, hesitated for just a moment — expecting to take incoming fire — but nothing happened so he slipped outside and, keeping low and in the deeper shadows next to the house, hurried to the east side, where he checked the driveway.

The electrically operated gate was unlatched, but still closed. A Yellow Cab passed slowly as if the driver were looking for an address. No one was in the backseat.

McGarvey started to turn away when he caught two muzzle flashes from the roof of the brownstone across the street, and he was in time to see the silhouette of the shooter falling back, a rifle pitching over the edge of the roof and landing with a clatter on the curb, just missing a parked car.

It had to be María’s doing. Exposing herself to draw the two shots, and then taking the sniper down. Twenty-five yards with a silenced pistol. A damned near impossible shot unless it had been a setup, but for the life of him, he couldn’t understand why, or what the arrangement with Fuentes could be.

He went back to the basement door and waited for her to show up, all his senses heightened. The woman was the head of the DI’s Directorate of Operations, and by all accounts plus what he’d witnessed firsthand, she was bright, devious, and extremely driven to secure her own survival in the new Cuba. Most telling was the fact she’d used the silencer.

“Kirk,” she called softly from inside the basement.

McGarvey raised his pistol. “Come.”

FIFTY-EIGHT

Fuentes, standing in the shadows at the opening of the alley from where he had a clear sight line to the wall behind the brownstone, answered his cell phone on the first ring. “Sí.”

It was Vásquez, who’d just made a pass in his Yellow Cab. “José is down.”

“What do you mean, down?”

“They have a shooter on the roof. Looks like José took a couple of shots, and the last I saw as I made the corner was him falling back. And I think he dropped his rifle on the street.”

“Turn around right now,” Fuentes ordered. “I think they’re trying to get out from the front.”

“On my way.”

“Rápido,” Fuentes said. He speed-dialed Murillo’s number, and the agent hiding behind the Pepco van answered on the first ring.

“They have a shooter on the roof,” he said. “José is down. And the imbécil dropped his rifle on the sidewalk. What do you want me to do?”

“Vásquez is on his way to back you up. Has anyone taken notice?”

“Not yet.”

“Stay where you are. I think there’s a good chance they’re going to come out the front way.”

“They’d be fools.”

“Don’t underestimate these people, especially Colonel León.”

“What about you?”

“I’m at the alley, in case they come this way,” Fuentes said.

“That’s a comfort,” Murillo said, and before Fuentes could respond, the agent broke the connection.

Garcia called. “I saw gunfire from the roof across the street.”

“Start the van and get ready to go,” Fuentes said. “I think they’re going to try to leave the front way.”

“They’d be fools.”

“I’ve heard that before. Just start the van and stand by.”

“Sí.”

Holding his pistol tightly, Fuentes started down the alley toward the brownstone, his stomach sour, his mouth dry. His ace in the hole had been the sniper on the roof across the street, who was supposed to keep them bottled up, leaving them only one way out. Right into his arms, where he would have been waiting at the corner to take them out one at a time as they came over the wall.

But Cobiella had made a mistake and they’d taken him down, and Fuentes was seething with rage. He knew the colonel’s plan, and as insane as it was, he thought that with Ortega-Cowan’s help, they might be able to pull it off. But not before learning where the treasure was hidden. Somewhere in southern New Mexico, they knew that much, but they needed the exact location. It was the one piece of information apparently known only to McGarvey, Rencke, and Louise Horn.

No matter what, then, McGarvey and the colonel had to be eliminated — priority one, because they were too dangerous. Which would leave only Rencke and his wife — an egghead and a woman.

FIFTY-NINE

María took her time coming up the stairs from the basement, and when her head and shoulders emerged, she looked up directly into the muzzle of McGarvey’s pistol and reared back, her eyes wide in the darkness. “Are you going to shoot me?” she asked, keeping her voice low.

McGarvey was having a hard time reading her. Right now she was cautious but not fearful. And the corners of her mouth turned up in a half smile. Triumph? “The thought occurred,” McGarvey said, lowering his gun.

“May I come up?”

“Yes. What about Otto and Louise?”

“Out of danger for the moment,” María said. “I took out the sniper. Do you mean to take the fight to them, or will you wait until they come over the wall?”

“A little of both,” McGarvey said. He still didn’t know if he could trust her, which on the face of it was stupid. She might be running for her life, but she was Castro’s daughter, and following her father’s deathbed request. For Cuba’s salvation, or for her own personal rescue. She had to figure that if she actually pulled this off, actually got at least some of the treasure across the border and back to Cuba, she could return to Havana on a white charger, a hero of the state.

“What do you want me to do?”

“Cover the rear wall,” McGarvey said. “I’ll be right back.”

He headed to the driveway and, keeping low and as much as possible in the shadows, reached the gate. The Pepco van hadn’t moved from its spot about thirty yards on a diagonal across the street, nor did the shooter hiding behind it show himself.

After screwing the silencer on the end of the Walther’s barrel, he yanked the gate open as he fired two shots, aiming for a spot on the pavement beneath the van just behind the front tire. But if the ricochet shots found their mark as he thought was only an off chance, the Cuban agent didn’t cry out, nor did he return fire.

He hurried back to the house. “It’s me,” he called softly around the corner.

“Clear,” María replied.

She was watching the top of the wall from where she crouched in the shadows behind Otto’s car when McGarvey came around the corner and went to Louise’s Toyota SUV and opened the driver’s-side door.

“Get ready to move,” he told her. “We’re going over the wall in about one minute.”

“We’re not driving out?”

“No,” McGarvey said. Pocketing the pistol in the waistband of his jeans, he got behind the wheel, started the engine, backed out from where the car was parked nose in to the wall, and when he got it turned around, dropped it into drive and headed toward the open gate, jumping out only at the last minute just before the nose of the vehicle cleared the opening.

Several silenced shots hit the windshield as the SUV slowly moved across the street, where it came up against a parked Chevy Impala and stopped.

McGarvey raced back to where María was still crouched. “We’re going over the wall now.”

“Me first?” she asked.

“Together,” he said. “Before they figure out the Toyota was a bluff.”

SIXTY

Fuentes ran to the end of the alley and, making sure no traffic was coming up the street, hurried around the corner, past the van where Garcia was waiting with the engine running.

He was still connected with Murillo across the street from the brownstone.

“Bruno. What’s going on? Talk to me.”

“I’ve been hit in the leg,” Murillo came back.

“Did they get past you?” Fuentes demanded. “Are they gone?”

“No, no, it was a trick. They opened the gate, someone fired a couple of shots, and a minute later the SUV came out of the driveway and I started shooting at the driver. But there was no one behind the wheel. The bastard just came across the street and crashed into a parked car.”

“Have you attracted any notice yet? Anyone come snooping to find out what’s going on?”

“Not yet,” Murillo said, and he sounded steady, but in pain.

Fuentes ducked behind a parked car three down from the florist van and looked back to check the shadows toward the alley. But so far, there was no movement. “Stand by,” he told Murillo.

“What do you want to do, Captain? This situation will not last more than a few minutes.”

“Stand by,” Fuentes repeated, and he speed-dialed Garcia. “Have the police been notified?”

“I’m picking up nothing yet,” Garcia came back. He, too, sounded steady. “Where are you?”

“Behind a car about twenty meters to your south. I think they might be coming from the back after all. Are you getting anything from the house?”

“Nothing. But listen, Captain, I think we need to get out of here.”

“Hold your position, you bastard, until I say we head out!” Fuentes shouted.

He speed-dialed Vásquez in the Yellow Cab. “Where the hell are you, Hector?”

“At the end of the street from Bruno’s position, still covering the front of the house. What do you want to do, Captain?”

“Just hold where you are until I give the order to move out. This is still my operation.”

“The hell it is—”

“Hijo de puta, do as you’re told or I’ll have you in front of a firing squad in Havana for dereliction of duty, failure to obey the direct order of a superior, and for cowardice in the middle of an operation vital to the state.”

Murillo made no reply.

Fuentes turned again to watch where the alley opened to the street, but still saw no one coming out. It was possible that they had crashed the SUV to get someone’s attention, figuring that they would call the police. Time was running out and he was frustrated and fast losing his patience. Everything was falling apart.

“Do you understand what I’m saying?” he sputtered. “Answer me!”

“I’m calling López.”

“Hold your position!” Fuentes shouted, when the muzzle of a pistol was placed against the back of his head.

“Tell him and the others to leave,” McGarvey said. “Or I’ll put a bullet in your brain.”

Fuentes froze for a moment. “We have a development,” he told Vásquez. “Leave right now, and tell the others to pull out.”

McGarvey grabbed the cell phone out of his hands, tossed it across the street, and stepped back. “Your man in the florist van?”

“Sí,” Fuentes said, and he looked over his shoulder at McGarvey, whose face he’d only ever seen in photographs. But he’d not been prepared for the man’s bulk, or the look of confidence and even contempt in the American’s eyes. And instantly, he realized that he had made a very large mistake underestimating the man.

“You were in Mexico City and then Miami — why did you come here?”

Fuentes hesitated.

“Give me one good reason not to blow you away.”

“We came for Colonel León. She’s a traitor to the state.”

“To arrest her or kill her?”

Fuentes came down a little. Evidently, McGarvey was more interested in information than anything else. “It didn’t matter which, though we would have preferred to take her back to Cuba to stand trial.”

“Because she no longer has her father’s protection?”

“Qué?”

“She’s Castro’s daughter.”

Fuentes laughed. “She is simply a traitor to the DI, and to the state. She’s been stealing and extorting money from a wide range of low- and midlevel government officials for years. Trading on her father’s name, threatening them with arrest and even torture if they refused to cooperate. What story did she try to sell you?”

“That’s not a matter for the U.S. court system, whoever the hell you are and what your real purpose here is, but the murder of three people in Miami is.”

“Traitors,” Fuentes said, but then he glanced across the street and saw María standing between two parked cars. She was holding something in her right hand.

“She wants to kill you,” McGarvey said. “She told us some story about a treasure of gold somewhere just across our border with Mexico. She claims that you’ve come here to kidnap her and force her to tell you where it is.”

“And you believe that?”

“We’re looking into it,” McGarvey said. “Which leaves you two choices. And two only. Leave now, return to Cuba immediately, and you’ll have your freedom, because at this point my government is not involved nor should it be.”

“What about the people in Miami you claim I shot to death?”

“I didn’t say anything about how they were killed.”

“What’s my second choice?”

“Die.”