Castro's Daughter (6 page)

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

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

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

“Let the police handle it,” Otto said.

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

“Something important?”

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

*   *   *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Does the Bureau have this?” Page demanded.

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

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

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

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

“Did you trace either ISP?”

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

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

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

“My wife’s life.”

“In exchange for what?”

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

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

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

“Did they give you a name?”

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

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

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

“Not by kidnapping,” Bambridge said.

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

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

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

“You fit the bill,” Bambridge said.

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

“They killed an innocent bystander!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Wars have started for less,” Patterson said.

“What about Mac?” Page asked.

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

“Is there a password?”

“The nickname of your first girlfriend.”

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

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

NINE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TEN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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