Castro's Daughter (12 page)

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

“And if neither man is McGarvey?”

“One of them will be.”

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

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

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

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

“Neither do I,” María said.

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

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

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

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

NINETEEN

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

“Ruiz picked a good spot,” McGarvey said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You should have gone back with the plane.”

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

“I’ll try to get to a radio.”

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

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

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

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

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

Two men in civilian clothes got out of the jeep; the smaller of the two armed with what looked like a Soviet-made 5.45 mm AKR compact submachine gun remained behind as the bigger man cautiously approached.

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

“Yes.”

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

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

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

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

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

“No.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

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

He watched as the Gazik turned around and headed back west before he stepped out on the highway and headed for his contact’s fishing shack a couple of klicks in the opposite direction. He wanted to be in Havana before dawn.

*   *   *

No security was evident along the broken seashell road from the highway to the long, low ranch-styled house, very few lights showing. A helicopter pad, empty, its windsock barely fluttering was to the east, while a pair of buildings—one of them McGarvey took to be a garage, the other possibly living quarters for the staff—was off in the copse of trees fifty yards to the west.

They pulled up in front of the main house, and McGarvey was escorted inside to a small windowless room in the west wing that was pleasantly furnished with a comfortable-looking double bed, a dresser, mirror, hand-woven rug on the floor, and some decent Picasso prints on the painted plasterboard walls. A change of clothing, his size, was laid out on the bed, and the small but spotlessly clean bathroom was equipped with a luxury hotel range of toiletries.

The sturdy door and large dead bolt made the purpose of the room clear.

“The colonel is away from the compound tonight and for a part of tomorrow, but she is most anxious to speak to you,” Toro said.

“What’s wrong with right now?”

“We weren’t quite sure exactly when you would be showing up. She asked me to apologize for your inconvenience and to assure you that we mean you no harm.”

“I want to see my friend.”

“Tomorrow.”

McGarvey thought about it for a moment. He could take the security officer down; he had little doubt of that. But such an act would only accelerate the violence. First he wanted to find out what the hell this was all about.

He nodded. “Bring me a couple of Dos Equis lagers, with limes, and a little something to eat.”

Toro bristled, but he nodded.

“And I want to take a swim in the morning before breakfast, around six would be fine.”

When Toro was gone, McGarvey made a quick tour of his room, looking not only for a way out, but also for a weapon. Behind the plasterboard was cinder block, which could be breached, though it would take time. The mirror in the bathroom was polished stainless steel, and the light fixtures and wall sockets were attached with headless screws.

A lot of thought had gone into this cage, and looking up at the screwheads holding the slow-moving ceiling fan in place, he smiled and nodded.

TWENTY

María’s bedroom in the east wing faced the ocean, and the sliders were open, admitting a gentle sea breeze that ruffled the diaphanous gauze drapes. She always had trouble sleeping, or at least she had since the rape at school, but she’d never taken drugs to help. She considered that a sign of weakness.

Standing now at the open window, wearing only a man’s T-shirt too big for her, she tried to take her mind off McGarvey for just a minute or two. She’d read his DI file and the press clippings from the
New York Times
and
Washington Post,
but the measure of the man she thought she’d had went completely out the window in the first five minutes of watching him in his room.

It had struck her that he wasn’t the caged animal she thought he would become once he realized that his freedom had been taken from him and that he was at the complete mercy of his captors.

He’d looked up directly into the closed-circuit television camera lens concealed in the base of the ceiling fan and smiled patiently, as if he were a man with all the time in the world—but even more important, a man who understood things, a man who’d been around long enough, who’d been through enough, including the assassinations last year of his wife, his daughter, and his son-in-law.

Until her own father’s death, such a loss had been meaningless at a gut level. But now, thinking about McGarvey in his cage, seeing the look in his eyes, the set to his handsome mouth, and the squaring of his shoulders, she did understand, at least a little. And she couldn’t help but admire the man for coming to rescue a friend. It was something no one would do for her.

She’d set up a laptop at the foot of her bed to monitor McGarvey, and she sat down cross-legged as Toro went in with two beers and a tray with a bowl of what looked like black bean soup and a couple of bread rolls, plus a spoon. He would have had to heat the soup himself unless he roused the cook, and he’d acted out of loyalty to her rank, not to her personally.

McGarvey said thanks and opened the first beer after Toro left the room.

It was a mistake, of course, feeding him. Now he had weapons—the beer bottles and the spoon—and possibly a means of freeing himself.

But watching him sitting back on the cot while she sat mostly naked on her own bed maybe fifty feet away, she was struck with the totally irrational and erotic thought of going to him, just as she was, to begin their conversation. It had been more than a year since her last partner, an air force lieutenant who’d come back from liaison duty in Caracas, was beaten to death, supposedly by CL dissidents. Actually, she’d killed him herself down south where they’d taken a little vacation halfway up Pico Turquino, Cuba’s highest mountain in the Sierra Maestras. He’d told her that they should get married, that she should quit her job, which he believed was as a functionary of some sort in the DI, and settle down and have babies and let a man do the man’s work of running a household. She’d said no, he’d insisted, and she’d tossed him off the mountain into a rock-strewn gully three hundred feet below.

He’d just been a kid filled with
machismo Cubano
—unearned machismo—where just looking at McGarvey, she
knew
in her gut that he had earned his chops.

And she lay back and drifted off to sleep, wondering how it would be when she finally met him face-to-face. But not too soon. She wanted him to wonder as well.

TWENTY-ONE

From fifty yards offshore, McGarvey was just able to make out the figure of the smaller of the two men who had picked him up last night sitting on a wooden structure that could have been a lifeguard tower. Standing guard with a Russian-made 7.62 mm Dragunov sniper rifle, any shot at a human-sized target out to 650 yards was a guaranteed no-miss.