Dance with the Dragon (33 page)

“From Mexico. We have an organization here in Miami to collect money for our friends and relatives. We can’t send it from the States, so we fly people over to Mexico City once a week with cash for Havana or wherever.

“But it’s not a wire transfer. The Cuban government would take a hefty share as import duties if we went through normal channels. The money is given to a banker, who sends a message to a friend in Managua perhaps, or Bogotá, where U.S. dollars need to be laundered, with the amounts he has collected, and the people to whom they are to be delivered.

“Our banker in Mexico City distributes the cash in trade for a bagman from Bogotá to fly into Havana with the money he needs to launder and delivers it. The books are kept in balance that way.”

It was a method of transferring cash all over the world without having to use legitimate banks or mechanisms such as Western Union. Its use was widespread because it worked.

“I understand how the cash gets from Miami to Havana. But how do you get information back?”

“Lists of needs in code,” Marti said. “Let’s say a friend of mine working in the Air Force wants to send me a message. He will hand a personal letter for the Bogotá bagman to take out of Cuba. The letter is a list of items he needs money for. Maybe a special medicine for his parents that he can’t get in Cuba. Or money for building supplies, or to fix his car. Things like that. If the Cuban authorities discover the letters, and they do from time to time, they look like nothing more than innocent requests for help. Which most of the letters are. Not all of them contain codes.”

“Does the CIA know about this?”

Marti laughed. “They can’t help but know, but I’m told they don’t, or at least they claim not to know. So far as I can tell, no one in the DO has ever acted on any intel that was handed to them. ‘Unsubtantiated rumors. Local gossip. Unreliable information. Probably DGI disinformation.’”

“How long has this been going on?”

“Since after the Bay of Pigs,” Marti replied.

“I never knew,” McGarvey said.

“At first no one down here trusted the CIA. Not after that disaster. Later the CIA trusted no one down here because every second refugee was a DGI agent or informant.”

“You said that you learned something about your daughter that you wished you hadn’t.”

“When I got word that Gloria and Raul had probably been made by the DGI, I flew to Mexico City with five thousand in cash to be sent to one of my old Air Force friends. It was some serious money, so nobody objected when I told them I wanted to get a message inside. Two words: ‘Get out.’”

“What happened?” McGarvey asked.

“Nothing,” Marti replied tiredly. “I don’t know if they received my message; if they did, they ignored it.”

“The DGI might have picked it up. If you were infiltrated here in Miami, it’s likely that they were watching the Mexico City money operation.”

Marti nodded. “
Sí,
I thought of that, so I flew up to Washington and went out to Langley to talk to Don Nealy, my contact on the Latin American desk. He made a couple of phone calls while I was sitting in his office, and when he was finished he promised to see what he could do.”

“I’m surprised he even acknowledged the fact that your daughter and her husband were in Cuba,” McGarvey said. Nealy had risen to chief of the Western Hemisphere Division because he was a bright, capable officer who knew how to play by the book. He would not have divulged that sort of information even to a man such as General Marti.

“He didn’t,” Marti said. “Or at least not in so many words.”

“But he promised to help.”

“He promised to see what he could do. He looked me in the eye and told me that he had no idea where my daughter was stationed. It was possible that she was somewhere in the States. Maybe even in Little Havana. But wherever she was, he would see about getting a message to her.”

“What was the message you wanted him to deliver?”

“I wanted the Company to order her and Raul out of there because the DGI knew about them.”

“Did Nealy want to know how you came by your information?”

“He never asked.”

“And you didn’t volunteer.”

Marti was irritated. “Don knew the situation. Everybody on the Latin American desk did. It was an open secret. So long as the money going into Cuba stayed reasonably small and out of the public’s eye, and so long as it didn’t interfere with the CIA’s operations, everyone looked the other way. It was a humanitarian thing to do, so I was told. In fact, during my consulting days my contact officer never delved too deeply into how I was getting my information. Not after the bulk of what I’d handed over had been verified.”

“You sent a message to your contact in Havana, and you let the Company know that a pair of its field officers had probably been burned. What did you do next?”

“I flew down here, picked up some more money, and went back to the banker in Mexico City. Every day I sent one thousand dollars in, with a query for word about my daughter and her husband.”

“How long did it take before you heard something?” McGarvey asked.

“I started getting bits and pieces within a day or two. Their address in an apartment building. The old Dodge they were trying to buy. The jobs they supposedly worked at. She was a waitress at a small music club, and Raul was an electrician for the state. It was their cover, of course, because it would have been impossible for either of them to actually get a job. They were visible for their neighbors’ sake, but below the radar as far as official Havana was concerned.”

“But you never found out if they had been warned?”

“No,” Marti said. “But of course I continued to send the same message every day: Get out. And I continued to hear back about them. They had been spotted dancing at a street party. They had been spotted on the beach.”

“All of which could have been DGI-engineered messages to you.”

“I considered that possibility as well. But it made no difference. I had to try to get the word to them.”

Traffic on the street below had begun to quiet down, and a wet blanket of humidity had descended over the city, as it did most evenings in Miami. McGarvey had to wonder if Marti had played the part of the worried parent in Mexico City because he’d been concerned for the safety of his daughter and her husband, or because he’d been concerned about his own safety. If Gloria had been arrested by the DGI, they might have tried to use her as a lever to bring the general back to Havana.

McGarvey didn’t think that Marti would have returned to Cuba, even to save his daughter’s life. But he must have been worried that his image would have taken a serious hit had he not sacrificed his freedom for his daughter’s.

Marti was a big man down here in Little Havana. A star among his people. A man to be looked up to, a man to be respected. He stood to lose that position if his daughter got into trouble in Cuba and he did nothing to help.

“In the end it didn’t matter if my messages got through or not. Raul was arrested one night at their apartment about twenty minutes before Gloria was supposed to come home from her job.

“She disappeared, and three days later Raul was shot to death while trying to escape from a DGI interrogation center. Three days after that Gloria showed up right here in Miami, and before I could get back from Mexico she’d flown up to Washington.”

“You never saw her,” McGarvey said.

“I never even talked to her,” Marti said. “But I tried. I think she was hiding out at the Farm while she was being debriefed. But nobody would tell me.”

“You must have been relieved that she got out after all.”

“It was a father’s comfort.”

“I imagine it was,” McGarvey said, but Marti apparently did not catch the sarcasm. “What did you learn about your daughter?” he asked again.

FIFTY-FOUR

THE APARTMENT

The question hung in the air, and it didn’t seem as if Marti was going to answer it. He finished his drink, and snipped the glowing end off the cigar with a silver cutter. “Good cigars have become hard to find, even for me.”

“That’ll change when Cuba finally opens,” McGarvey suggested.

“It’s time to go,” Marti said, getting up.

McGarvey got to his feet. “I still don’t know about your daughter.”

“Neither do I,” Marti said, and he ushered McGarvey to the front door, where one of the bodyguards was there with his pistol.

“I’d hoped that you would help me.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t want to make a mistake with her. A lot of lives could be at stake.”

“Yours?”

It was the sort of question McGarvey had expected from a man such as Marti. He nodded. “Yes, mine, and Gloria’s and some others.”

“It wasn’t long after she’d gotten out that I began to hear things from my friends in Cuba. At first I didn’t believe any of it. As you suggested, I thought the rumors were nothing more than the DGI’s crude attempt at disinformation. They knew I was getting the messages, and maybe they wanted to discredit my daughter in my eyes.”

“For what reason?”

“I truly do not know,” Marti admitted. “But it became a moot point when a man claiming to be a former DGI case officer showed up here at my door. My people came close to killing him, until he convinced them that he had escaped from the island, and that he had something I needed to see. It was a document he’d smuggled out.”

“Something about your daughter?”

Marti nodded. “It was a signed confession that she and her husband were a CIA team. In exchange for her freedom, she promised to come back to the States and either convince me to return to Cuba or kidnap me and bring me back. The guarantee was to be her husband, who would be placed in ‘protective custody.’ But no one counted on him trying to escape.”

“It was probably a forgery,” McGarvey said. “I can’t imagine her signing something like that, or for the DGI to let it walk out the door with a defector. Did you recognize her signature?”

“I don’t know my daughter’s signature.”

“Did you bring it up to Langley?”

“No one had been willing to help get them out of there, and I didn’t think they’d changed their thinking even if one of their officers had been shot to death in Havana,” Marti said. “In any event, by the time I got the confession Gloria had already had a chance to tell her own story.”

“You could have brought the DGI defector up to Langley.”

“He was shot to death out on the street not fifty feet from my front door,” Marti said.

All of it was too convenient, yet there was a certain symmetry to Marti’s story, and to Gloria’s psyche reports after Cuba. “Was that why you went to Paris? To confront her with the story?” McGarvey asked.

“Sí.”

“What did she say?”

“She looked at her confession and handed it back to me. ‘Is this why you came to Paris,
Papá
?’ she asked me. If she’d been angry, or sad, or confused—anything like that—I would have understood. If she had denied that it was her signature, I would have believed it. Her husband had been shot to death, and her father was asking her if she was a spy for the Cuban government, and she was neutral. We could have been discussing the weather.”

“What did you say to her?”

Marti shook his head. “I don’t remember. Maybe something like, ‘What is a father to do?’ I had dinner reservations for us at the Restaurant Jules Verne, but she couldn’t make it. She was too busy. The next day I flew back to Miami.”

For the first time this evening, McGarvey saw a genuine sadness in the general’s eyes, and in the set of his shoulders. He was carrying a burden, and because of the lateness of the hour, or because of McGarvey’s probing, the weight had become almost too great to bear.

“I didn’t know the woman my daughter had become,” Marti said. “She was a total stranger to me.”

“And now?” McGarvey asked.

“You came here wanting to find out if you could count on my daughter. If you could trust her,” Marti said, his voice softened by emotion.

McGarvey had come to hear a father’s assessment of a daughter. But Marti admitted he didn’t know her as a woman, which was not surprising, since he hadn’t known her as a child.

“Whatever happened in Havana, she managed to save her own life,” Marti said. “That in itself doesn’t make her a bad person, merely a survivor.”

McGarvey held his silence, though there were a few dozen points he could have made.

“She’s been involved in at least one operation with you. What’s your read?”

“I think she’s confused.”

Marti shrugged. “She’s not confused about you. Unrealistic, now that I’ve met you, but not confused.”

“Do you trust your daughter?” McGarvey asked.

Marti took a moment to answer. “I love her with all my soul. I’m sure of that much, although since my wife’s death, perhaps my definition of love and yours may be different.”

“Do you trust her?”

Marti lowered his eyes after a beat. “No.”

FIFTY-FIVE

EN ROUTE TO SARASOTA

After an uneasy night at the Park Central Hotel, McGarvey had Martinez arrange for a rental car under a work name, and he checked out and headed across the state on Alligator Alley. Traffic was almost nonexistent on the divided highway that ran straight through the Everglades; no curves, no hills, only the sawgrass in every direction out to the horizon, and showers falling out of a few small clouds in the distance.

He’d not called Katy to tell her that he was on his way back to Sarasota, and he felt a little guilty about it. But he was in full swing, and he needed to stay focused.

He had almost all the pieces now to find out what Liu and the Chinese had been doing in Mexico for the past ten years. Very soon being around him would get dangerous, and he wanted to insulate his wife as much as possible by keeping his distance from her.

Later he would explain it to her, but for now he was on the hunt, and the next steps he was going to take would not be pretty.

First came Gil Perry.

A few miles outside of Naples, McGarvey used his cell phone to call the Mexico City chief of station. Perry’s secretary answered on the first ring and immediately put him through, as if they were expecting his call.