Castro's Daughter (2 page)

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

“Come closer.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What does he know?”

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

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

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

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

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

“I promise,” she said softly.

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

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

TWO

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes.”

“Fidel is dead.”

“When?”

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

“How do you know that she is important?”

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

“Was she alone?”

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

“Send them now.”

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

“I have them,” John said. “Stand by.”

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

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

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

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

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

John had not disconnected.

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

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

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

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

“Roger, X-ray,” Carlos said.

“Good luck.”

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

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

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

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

“Alto!”
Halt! someone shouted from behind.

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

“Halt!” someone else shouted from ahead.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THREE

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

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

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

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

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

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