The Hostage pa-2

by W. E. B Griffin

  "Thank you very much, Eric," Castillo said, putting the envelope in his inside jacket pocket. "Seymour, you can put the pliers back in the tool kit. Dentistry is apparently not going to be necessary."

  "Ach Gott, Karl!" Goerner said.

  "You're aware, I'm sure, Karl, that the Hungarians taught the Machiavellians all they knew about poisoning people?" Kocian asked.

  "And with that in mind, Eric, what do you recommend? Gulyas lightly laced with arsenic?"

  "Wiener schnitzel," Kocian said. "The Karpatia serves the best Wiener schnitzel in the world."

  "Better than in Vienna?"

  "Actually, you can get better Hungarische gulyas in Vienna than you can here," Kocian said. "Things are not always what they seem, Karl. Do you know what the people in Hamburg call what you call a frankfurter?"

  Castillo shook his head, then asked, "A frankfurter?"

  "Right. And what do the people in Frankfurt call what you and the Hamburgers call a frankfurter?"

  "Don't tell me-a hamburger?"

  "A sausage," Kocian said. "And what do the Hamburgers call chopped and fried beef?"

  "I know they don't call it a frankfurter."

  "They call it fried chopped beef unless they don't fry it, and instead serve it raw, in which case it becomes steak tartar."

  "Actually, Eric, I have a real fondness for Wiener schnitzel. Do you suppose you could have the kitchen make up a dozen of them, and wrap them in foil so that we can take them with us on the plane?"

  "Won't they go bad?"

  "There's a little kitchen on the plane, with a freezer. The only thing in it right now is a bottle of beer and Colonel Torine's Viagra."

  "Oh, Jesus Christ!" Torine said.

  "My friend Karl," Eric Kocian said, "inasmuch as this is all going on Otto's American Express card, you can have anything your greedy little heart desires."

  "In that case, a dozen Wiener schnitzels," Castillo said. "Plus one for my lunch, of course. I really love Wiener schnitzel."

  XVII

  [ONE] Approaching Aeropuerto Internacional Jorge Newbery Buenos Aires, Argentina 0535 29 July 2005 Castillo was flying. The night was clear and he could see the glow of the lights of Buenos Aires as he began his descent. As he dropped lower, the lights became more distinct. What had looked like a single orange line pointing at the city became a double line, and he could see headlightsmoving along what he now recognized as Route 8 and the Acceso Norte leading from Pilar to the city.

  It had been quite a trip. The Lear was fast-its long-range cruise speed was three-quarters the speed of sound-but it was not intended or designed for flying across oceans. It had been necessary to make refueling stops within the limitations of the aircraft's range, about 1,900 nautical miles. The first leg-about 1,500 nautical miles-had been a three-and-a-half-hour flight from Budapest to Casablanca, Morocco. After refueling, they had flown 1,250 nautical miles in a bit under three hours to Dakar, Senegal, on the extreme west coast of the African continent.

  From Dakar, it had been a four-hour, 1,750-nautical-mile flight, the longest leg, southwest across the Atlantic Ocean to Recife, Brazil. This had been the iffy leg. There are no alternative airfields in the Atlantic Ocean on which to land when fuel is running low. They had approached the Point of No Return with their fingers crossed, but there had been no extraordinary headwinds or other problems to slow them, and Torine, who was then flying in the left seat, had made the decision to go on. What could have been a real problem just hadn't materialized.

  Recife apparently was not accustomed to either refueling small private jets or providing food at half past two in the morning, and it had taken them an hour and a half to get both. But with that exception, they had been able to land, refuel, check the weather, and file flight plans in remarkably little time everywhere else.

  From Recife they had flown south to Sao Paulo- 1,150 nautical miles in just under two and a half hours- and then begun the last leg, to Buenos Aires, which would be a just-over-two-hour flight covering 896 nautical miles.

  Alex Pevsner's down there, Castillo thought, and I have a gut feeling I'm going to need him. And by now, Howard Kennedy has told him that I'm not going to point him in Jean-Paul Lorimer's direction so he can give him a beauty mark in the center of his forehead. That will be a problem, one that I'll have to think about later. Right now I'm too tired to make difficult decisions.

  Castillo pushed the TRANSMIT lever.

  "Jorge Newbery, Lear Five-Zero-Seven-Five. I am forty kilometers north at five thousand feet. Request approach and landing." "Lear Five-Zero-Seven-Five," Jorge Newbery ground control ordered, "at the end of the active, turn right, and proceed to parking area in front of the Jet-Aire hangar. Customs and immigration will meet your aircraft."

  "Seven-Five understands right at the threshold, taxi to Jet-Aire parking area," Castillo replied. "Wait for customs and immigration."

  As he approached the Jet-Aire hangar a ground handler in white coveralls came out and, with illuminated wands, directed him to park beside an Aero Commander.

  When Castillo had finished the shutdown procedures, he took a closer look at the Aero Commander. If the light, high-wing twin wasn't derelict, it was close. The fabric-covered portions of the rear stabilizer assembly were missing or visibly decayed. The tire on the left landing gear was flat. The left engine nacelle was missing.

  "I know just how that Commander feels," Castillo said to Colonel Torine, who was in the right seat. "Old, battered, and worn out."

  Torine looked at the Aero Commander and chuckled.

  "It has been a rather long ride, hasn't it?" Torine replied, in something of an understatement, as he unfastened his harness.

  "And here comes what looks like the local officialdom," Fernando said from the aisle behind them.

  Castillo saw two Ford F-150 pickup trucks with Grimes lights flashing from their roofs approaching them. Two uniformed men got out of the first, and a man in civilian clothing out of the second.

  "The civilian is SIDE," Castillo said. "I don't know his name, but I saw him somewhere."

  He unfastened his harness and stood.

  When Castillo went down the stairs to the tarmac, he saw both that the SIDE agent's eyebrows had risen when he saw him, and that he immediately had taken out a cellular telephone.

  Well, this time I'm arriving as C. G. Castillo, carrying a brand-new passport with no stamps on it at all.

  When the SIDE agent came to the Lear, he gave no sign that he had recognized Castillo, even after he had examined his passport. The customs and immigration procedures were polite but thorough. The aircraft and their luggage were submitted to testing for drugs and explosives, which might or might not have been standard procedure for civil aircraft arriving from outside the country. Castillo was glad that he hadn't brought any weapons from Fort Bragg.

  No questions were raised about Kranz's "satellite telephone antenna," which might or might not have been because Castillo had asked them if it would be safe to leave it on the aircraft while they were in Buenos Aires. Neither did the "laptop"-which actually controlled the radio and held the encryption system-cause any unusual interest. It had been designed to look like a typical laptop computer.

  The customs officer did, however, unfold the aluminum foil in which the Wiener schnitzel in the freezer was wrapped. It might have been idle curiosity or he might have been looking for a package of cocaine.

  "What is this?" he asked.

  "Wiener schnitzel," Castillo told him. "Sort of a veal milanesa."

  And if you hadn't gone in there and found it, I probably would have forgotten it, and with the juice turned off, when I finally remembered it, it would have been rotten Wiener schnitzel.

  "I think I'd better take that with me," Castillo said as the customs officer started to put it back in the freezer. He put it into his laptop briefcase.

  "Enjoy your stay in Argentina, gentlemen," the customs officer said.

  "We'll certainly try," Castillo said. [TWO] El Presidente de l
a Rua Suite The Four Seasons Hotel Cerrito 1433 Buenos Aires, Argentina 0605 29 July 2005 A sleepy-eyed Special Agent Jack Britton answered the door in his underwear.

  "That was a quick European tour," he said, offering his hand.

  "The last two hotels we were in, we didn't even get to muss the beds," Castillo said. "Except Kranz, of course. He's smarter than we are. Whenever he's not eating, he's sleeping."

  "I'm Kranz," Kranz said.

  "He's our communicator," Castillo said.

  "Jack Britton," Britton said as he shook Kranz's hand. "I'm impressed with your buddy Kensington. He's got that fantastic radio set up in his room. All he has to do is open the drapes and the window, and we're talking to Dick Miller."

  "That's great," Castillo said. "Even if it may require yet another shuffling of living arrangements."

  "I'm in your bed…" Britton said.

  Yeah, you are, and I don't like to think of anyone else sleeping in the bed where Betty and I were.

  "Not for long," Castillo said. "When I told the desk I needed more rooms, they told me this suite is expandable. So I took a three-room expansion. But I forgot about Sergeant Kensington."

  "I can bunk with Kensington, Major," Kranz said. "Not a problem."

  "Dibs on that bed," Fernando said, pointing through the door at the huge bed in the master bedroom from which Britton had just risen.

  "Like hell; that's mine. I'm now the chief, and you're just a lousy airplane pilot, in any interpretation of that term you may wish to apply."

  Fernando, shaking his head and smiling, gave him the finger.

  Castillo walked to the telephone and picked up the handset and punched the FRONT DESK key on the base.

  "I'm going to need one more room," he said. "And send up several large pots of coffee." He hung up and turned to Britton. "Did Tony Santini get you a cellular phone?"

  Britton nodded. "Me and Kensington."

  "With his number and Darby's on them?"

  Britton nodded again.

  "May I have it, please?" Castillo asked.

  Britton went into the master bedroom.

  "You're going to get Santini out of bed at this unholy hour?" Torine asked.

  "Santini and Ricardo Solez and Alex Darby, and then as soon as one of them tells me how to get him on the phone, Special Agent Yung in Montevideo."

  "I am awed by this very early morning display of energy," Torine said.

  "Jake," Castillo said, very seriously, "if Jean-Paul Lorimer is here, and I have a gut feeling he is, I want to find him before anyone else does."

  "Point taken," Torine replied. "I wasn't thinking. Sorry, Charley."

  Britton, now wearing trousers but no shirt and still barefoot, came back into the room and handed Castillo a cellular telephone.

  "Santini's on two," he announced. "And Darby on three."

  "And Ricardo Solez?"

  "After you left, he went back to drugs," Britton said. "I don't have a number for him."

  "I've got his home number," Fernando said.

  "Yeah, that's right, Don Fernando, you would have it," Castillo said, not very pleasantly. "Well, get on the phone, call him, tell him to call in to the embassy that he'll be late, and to come over here. And because you'll be on an unsecure cell, figure out some way without using my name to tell him not to tell anyone I'm back."

  "Is that a secret?" Fernando asked.

  "For the time being," Castillo said, and punched autodial button two on Britton's cellular. Then he said, "Shit!" and pushed the END button. He went to the minibar in one of the cabinets, took the ice trays from it, and in their place put the foil-wrapped Wiener schnitzel. Then he pushed the cellular's autodial button two again. Tony Santini arrived first.

  "Looks like old home week," he said when he saw everybody. "Welcome back to Gaucholand. I guess you got something in Europe?"

  "I'll have to remember to tell Tom McGuire to button his lip," Castillo said.

  "Tom and I go back a long way, Charley. But while we're on the subject of what Tom told me, where do I go to enlist?"

  "Excuse me?"

  "I hadn't planned to make this pitch with anybody listening, but what the hell. I'll eventually go home, but they'll never assign me to the presidential protection detail again. Falling off a limo bumper is just about as bad as goosing the first lady. People aren't supposed to snicker when the motorcade rolls by. From what Tom told me about what you're going to be doing, that'll be at least as interesting. How about it?"

  Do I have the authority to just say, "Yes, sure"?

  I do until someone-and that means the President- tells me I don't.

  "Welcome aboard, Tony," Castillo said. "That's presuming someone important doesn't say 'Not only no, but hell no you can't have Santini.'"

  "We'll worry about that when it happens. From what Tom told me, I don't think it will. So what's up?"

  "You have a look at the package from Fort Bragg?"

  Santini nodded. "Very impressive weaponry," he said. "And black jumpsuits. And those face masks! This may be an indelicate question, but who are we going to whack?"

  "The answer to that is Top Secret-Presidential, Tony," Castillo said, seriously.

  "Okay," Santini said, his voice now serious. "Understood."

  "My orders are to locate and render harmless the people who murdered Masterson and Markham."

  "It's about time we started playing by their rules," Santini said after a moment.

  "The President apparently has made that decision," Castillo said.

  "Now all we have to do is find them, huh? How do we do that?"

  "You remember Mrs. Masterson's brother, the UN guy we couldn't find to tell him about Masterson?"

  Santini nodded.

  "It seems he was the head bagman for the oil-for-food payoffs," Castillo said. "He went missing-probably from Vienna-immediately after he found one of his assistants dead of a slit throat in Vienna. Nasty. Before they killed him, they pulled several of his teeth with a pair of pliers.

  "The CIA guy in Paris and my source in Vienna think Lorimer is probably in the Seine or the Danube. I don't."

  "Why not?"

  "Wait until you hear this. When we landed in Mississippi, Mrs. Masterson told me the reason she was abducted was because they thought she would know where her brother was. They killed Masterson to show her how serious they were about wanting to know; the Masterson kids would be next. And I think they whacked Sergeant Markham and almost whacked Schneider to show her they could get to whoever they wanted to."

  "I had a gut feeling at the time they were after you," Santini said. "It was your car."

  "That thought has run through my mind," Castillo said.

  "She didn't know where he was? Or she figured her kids were more important? Which?"

  "She didn't know," Castillo said.

  A knock at the door announced the arrival of Alex Darby.

  "Why do I feel I'm late for the party?" Darby asked, and then looked at Fernando and Kranz.

  "Fernando Lopez, Seymour Kranz, Alex Darby," Castillo said.

  "And these gentlemen are?" Darby asked.

  "Mr. Lopez is an airplane pilot under contract to the Office of Organizational Analysis," Castillo said.

  "To the what?"

  "The Office of Organizational Analysis. You don't know what that is?"

  "Never heard of it," Darby confessed.

  "I'm surprised. It's in the Department of Homeland Security."

  "I told you, Charley, I never heard of it," Darby said.

  Using my miraculous powers to judge a man's thoughts by looking into his eyes, I deduce that Darby really doesn't know.

  "There's been a Presidential Finding, Alex," Castillo said. "A clandestine and covert organization charged with finding and rendering harmless those responsible for Masterson's and Markham's murders has been set up within the Department of Homeland Security."

  "And who was put in charge of this It's About GoddamnTime for Payback organization? And why didn't I hear about
it?"

  Torine pointed at Castillo and said, "Say hello to the chief, Alex."

  "The answer asks more questions than it answers," Darby said, "starting with why didn't I hear about it?"

  "I just told you about it," Castillo said.

  "And who's Kranz?"

  "He's our communicator."

  "There's a rumor floating around that there's already a special communicator down here," Darby said.

  "Now there's two. They call that redundancy."

  "I'm getting the feeling you know who these bastards are," Darby said. "And I would really like to help you render them harmless."

  "We don't know who they are," Castillo said. "But there's a guy I think is here who can probably tell us."

  "Who?"

  "Jean-Paul Lorimer."

  "I thought they couldn't find him in Paris. What's he got to do with this? He's here?"

  "I think so. Somewhere here in the Southern Cone. What he has to do with it is that he was the bagman for Oil for Food. Not only did he skim a large sum-sixteen million, according to one source-from the bribe money, but he knows who got how much, when, and what for. That's what the whole thing was about. The people who want his mouth permanently closed-and their money back-really want to find him."

  "That sounds pretty far-fetched, Charley. Lorimer-I told you I met him-is a typical UN bureaucrat. I can't imagine him being involved in something like that. Where'd you get it?"

  "I got the fact that people are looking for him from Mrs. Masterson. They kidnapped her because they thought she would know where he is. I think they believed her when she said she didn't. But they think he'll contact her. They told her that they'll kill her children if she does find out where he is and doesn't tell them. Masterson was blown away to make the point that they will kill to get what they want."

  "You got that from Betsy Masterson?"

  Castillo nodded.

  "Why didn't she tell me?"

  "She didn't tell me until we landed in the States. Her primary concern was protecting the children, and God knows she had reason not to feel secure in Argentina. I guess when she saw the Globemaster surrounded by Delta Force shooters she felt secure enough to tell me."