The Hostage

by Griffin, W. E. B.

  Darby chuckled.

  Masterson got out of the car and half-trotted across the sidewalk to the Kansas entrance. He pushed his way through the crowd of people waiting to be seated and went up the shallow three-step stairs to the bar.

  Betsy was nowhere in sight, either at the bar or in one of the half dozen booths.

  Shit!

  One of the bartenders caught his eye and held up his hands in a helpless gesture. Jack walked to him.

  “You just missed her, señor,” the bartender said. “Not two minutes ago, she left.”

  Shit!

  Maybe I can catch her in the parking lot!

  “Muchas gracias,” he said, and then hurriedly went back through the entrance foyer and left through the door leading to the valet parking entrance.

  If she used valet parking, she might still be waiting.

  Betsy was nowhere in sight.

  Shit!

  Jack trotted into the parking lot and looked around.

  He didn’t see the Bus anywhere at first, and then he did, in the back of the lot. The interior lights were on, which meant she’d just gotten to the car.

  He took off at a dead run for the Bus.

  I don’t have any idea what she’s doing with the door open, but it means I probably can get there before she drives off.

  “Sweetheart, I’m sorry!” he called when he got to the Bus.

  Where the hell is she?

  There was no room to get to the driver’s door, and when he got to the passenger side, he saw that it wasn’t open, just not fully closed. That explained the interior lights being on.

  Where the hell is she?

  He slid the sliding door open enough so that he could slam it shut. He saw the purse on the seat.

  “Oh, Jesus H. Christ!” he said softly.

  He took his cellular from his shirt pocket and pushed an autodial button.

  Answer the fucking phone, Alex!

  “Alex Darby.”

  “Alex, I think you’d better come back here. Come to the rear of the parking lot.”

  Darby heard the tone of Masterson’s voice.

  “Jesus, what’s up?”

  “The Bus is here. The door was half open. Betsy’s purse is on the backseat. No Betsy. I don’t like the looks of this.”

  “On my way, Jack.”

  “Hand me the microphone and turn the speaker up,” Alex Darby said to his driver. “And then head back to the Kansas. Fast.”

  “Sí, señor,” the driver said, and took the shortwave radio microphone from where it lay on the passenger seat and handed it to Darby. The shortwave net provided encrypted voice communication.

  Allegedly, the encryption was unbreakable. Very few people believed this.

  Alex keyed the mic. “Darby to Lowery.”

  Almost instantly, the speaker came to life. “Yeah, Alex. What’s up?”

  “I just had a call from Jack Masterson. Something very unusual is going on at the Kansas on Aven—”

  “In San Isidro?” Lowery cut him off. “That Kansas?”

  “Right. His van is there, and his wife’s purse, but no wife. Jack sounds very concerned.”

  “I’ll call the San Isidro cops,” Lowery said. “I’m in Belgrano; ten, twelve minutes out. On my way.”

  “Thanks, Ken.”

  “Let’s hope she’s in the can, powdering her nose,” Lowery said. “See you there. Lowery out.”

  Jack Masterson, scanning the parking lot and making mental notes of what and who were in the immediate area, pushed another autodial button on his cellular phone.

  “Post One, Staff Sergeant Taylor,” the Marine guard on duty at the embassy said, as he answered the unlisted telephone.

  “This is Masterson. I need to speak to Ken Lowery now.”

  “Sir, Mr. Lowery has left the embassy. May I suggest you try to get him on the radio?”

  “I don’t have a goddamn radio. You contact him, and tell him to call me on my cellular. Tell him it’s an emergency.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  [FIVE]

  The Residence Avenida Libertador y Calle John F. Kennedy Palermo, Buenos Aires, Argentina 2110 20 July 2005

  “¿Hola?” Ambassador Juan Manuel Silvio said, picking up the telephone beside his armchair in the sitting room of the ambassadorial apartment on the third floor of the residence.

  “Alex, Mr. Ambassador. We have a problem.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Everything points to Betsy Masterson having been kidnapped from the parking lot of the Kansas in San Isidro about an hour ago.”

  For a long moment, the ambassador didn’t reply. He was always careful with his words.

  “Ken Lowery is aware of this?” he asked, finally.

  “Yes, sir. I’m in Ken’s car, headed downtown from the Kansas.”

  “Jack?”

  “I talked him into going home, sir. My wife is on her way over there.”

  “Why don’t you and Ken come here, Alex?” Silvio asked. “And I think it might be useful if Tony Santini came, too. I could call him.”

  Anthony J. Santini, listed in the embassy telephone directory as the assistant financial attaché, was in fact a Secret Service agent dispatched to Buenos Aires to, as he put it, “look for funny money.” That meant both counterfeit currency and illegally acquired money being laundered.

  “I’ll call him, sir.”

  “Then I’ll see you here in a few minutes, Alex. Thank you,” the ambassador said, and hung up.

  “You’ll call who?” Ken Lowery inquired.

  “Tony Santini,” Alex Darby replied. “The ambassador wants him there, too.”

  “The residence or the embassy?”

  “Residence,” Darby replied, then added, “I guess he figures Tony is the closest thing we have to the FBI.”

  There were no “legal attachés”—FBI agents—at the embassy at the moment. There were a half dozen “across the river” looking for money-laundering operations. Money laundering in Argentina had just about dried up after the Argentine government had, without warning several years before, forcibly converted dollar deposits to pesos at an unfavorable rate and then sequestered the pesos. International drug dealers didn’t trust Argentine banks any more than industry did and moved their laundering to Uruguay and elsewhere.

  Darby punched an autodial button on his cellular to call Santini.

  Ambassador Juan Manuel Silvio was a tall, lithe, fair-skinned, well-tailored man, with an erect carriage and an aristocratic manner, and when he opened the door to the ambassadorial apartment Alex Darby thought again that Silvio looked like the models in advertisements for twelve-year-old scotch or ten-thousand-dollar wristwatches.

  He was a Cuban-American, brought from Castro’s Cuba as a child. His family had arrived in Miami, he said, on their forty-six-foot Chris-Craft sportfisherman with nothing but the clothing on their backs and a large cigar humidor stuffed with his mother’s jewelry and hundred-dollar bills.

  “My father was one of the few who recognized Castro as more than a joke,” he had once told Darby. “What he didn’t get quite right was how quickly Castro would march into Havana.”

  Darby knew he wasn’t boasting, but the opposite. Silvio was proud of—and greatly admired—his fellow Cubans who had arrived in Miami “with nothing but the clothes on their backs” and subsequently prospered. He simply wanted to make it plain that it had been much easier for his family than it had been for other refugees.

  Silvio graduated from his father’s alma mater, Spring Hill College, a Jesuit institution in Mobile, Alabama, with a long history of educating the children of upper-class Latin Americans, took a law degree at Harvard, and then a doctorate in political science at the University of Alabama.

  He joined the State Department on graduation.

  He joked, “My father decided that the family owed one son to the service of the United States. I am the youngest son, so, to my brothers’ delight, here I am, while they bask in the Miami sun.”

 
Alex Darby liked the ambassador both personally and professionally. He had served in other American embassies where the ambassadors—career State Department and political appointees alike—had demonstrated an appalling lack of knowledge of geopolitics and history, and had regarded the CIA especially, and the other embassy “outsiders”—the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the Secret Service and even the military attachés who worked under the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)—as dangerous nuisances who had to be kept on a very tight leash lest they disrupt the amiable ambience of diplomatic cocktail parties.

  It was a given to Ambassador Silvio that communism in Latin America was not dead; that it posed a genuine threat to the United States; that Islamic fascism was present in Latin America and growing stronger, and posed an even greater threat to the United States; and that the drug trade financed both.

  His attitude toward and support of Darby and the other outsiders made their work easier, even if it did tend to annoy the “real” Foreign Service staff at the embassy.

  The ambassador heard out Darby’s report of what had happened, considered what he had heard for a long moment, and then asked Lowery and Santini if either had anything to add.

  Lowery said, “No, sir,” and Santini shook his head.

  “The priorities, as I see them,” the ambassador said, “are to get Betsy back to her family, and then to help Jack through this. Any comments on that?”

  All three men shook their heads. Lowery said, “No, sir,” again.

  “The Policía Federal are in on this, I presume?”

  “Yes, sir,” Lowery said.

  “Were you considering involving SIDE, Alex?”

  “I think SIDE already knows what’s happened, sir,” Darby replied. “But I can make a call or two if—”

  “Let’s hold off on that for a while. Do you think SIDE has informed the Foreign Ministry?”

  “I think we have to assume they will, sir. The Policía Federal probably already have.”

  “Do you think this is politically motivated? Do we have any reason to suspect this is a terrorist act?”

  “It may be, of course,” Darby said. “But we’ve always thought that if the rag-heads were going to do anything, it would be a violent act, either a bomb at the embassy or here, or a drive-by assassination attempt on you—”

  “You think it may be a run-of-the-mill kidnapping?” Silvio interrupted.

  “Sir, I don’t know what to think. But if I had to make a choice, that seems most likely.”

  “But kidnapping not only an American, but one with diplomatic status . . . that doesn’t strike me as being smart.”

  “It will certainly get SIDE and the police off their a— Get them moving,” Lowery said. “This is really going to embarrass the government.”

  “Mr. Santini? You have any thoughts?”

  “Not many, sir. But my experience with what the sociologists call the ‘criminal element’ has been that they often do stupid things because they’re usually stupid. I wouldn’t be surprised if these guys missed the diplomat tag on the car.”

  “And when they learn who Mrs. Masterson is? You think they may let her go?”

  “I hate to say this, sir,” Santini replied, “but I think it’s better than fifty-fifty that they won’t. She can identify them.”

  “Jesus Christ!” Lowery said.

  “Another scenario,” Santini said, “is that they won’t care about her diplomatic status, and may just demand a ransom, and if paid, let her go. We can assume only that they’re willing to break the law, not that they are going to act rationally.”

  The ambassador asked, “Is this going to be on television tonight, and on the front page of Clarín in the morning?”

  “Very possibly,” Darby said. “Unless there is strong pressure from the government—the foreign minister or maybe the President or one of his cronies—to keep it quiet.”

  “That would be—pressure from on high—more effective in keeping this out of the press than anything we could do, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yes, it would,” Darby said, simply.

  “I’ll call the foreign minister right now,” the ambassador said. “Before I call Washington.”

  “I think that’s a good idea, sir,” Lowery said.

  “Alex, why don’t you stop by Jack’s house? Tell him that everything that can be done is being done? And that he’s in my prayers?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’ll call him myself just as soon as I get off the phone—I may even go out there—but . . .”

  “I understand, Mr. Ambassador,” Darby said.

  “I don’t think it needs to be said, does it, that I want to know of any development right away? No matter what the hour?”

  [SIX]

  “Reynolds,” the man answering the telephone announced.

  “This is the Southern Cone desk?” Ambassador Silvio asked.

  There was a more formal title, of course, for that section of the State Department charged with diplomatic affairs in the republics of Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina, but “Southern Cone” fit to describe the three nations at the southern tip of South America and was commonly used.

  “Yes, it is. Who is this, please?”

  “My name is Silvio. I’m the ambassador in Buenos Aires.”

  “How may I be of service, Mr. Ambassador?” Reynolds inquired. His voice sounded considerably more interested than it had been when he answered the telephone.

  “I want you to prepare a memorandum of this call for the secretary of state. If she is available, get it to her now. I want her to have it, in any event, first thing in the morning. Is that going to pose any problems for you?”

  “None at all, Mr. Ambassador.”

  “We have strong reason to believe that Mrs. Elizabeth Masterson, the wife of my chief of mission, J. Winslow Masterson, was kidnapped at approximately eight P.M., Buenos Aires time. Beyond that, little is known.”

  “My recorder is on, Mr. Ambassador,” Reynolds interrupted. “I should have told you. Would you like me to turn it off and erase what it has?”

  “No. A recording should help you prepare the memorandum.”

  “Yes, sir, it will. Thank you, sir.”

  “The federal police are aware of the situation,” Silvio went on. “So it must be presumed that the minister of the interior and the foreign minister have been told. However, when—just now—I attempted to telephone the foreign minister to inform him officially, he was not available. His office told me they will have him call me as soon as he is available, but that I should not expect this to happen until tomorrow morning.

  “I interpret this to mean that he does not feel he should discuss the situation with me until he learns more about it and/or discusses it with the President.

  “All of my staff concerned with intelligence and legal matters are aware of the situation. Their consensus, with which I am in agreement, is that there is not presently enough intelligence to form a reasonable opinion as to motive. In other words, we do not know enough at this time to think that this is, or is not, a terrorist act, or that it is, or is not, an ordinary kidnapping, or may have some political implications.

  “Mr. Kenneth Lowery, my security chief, has been directed to compile a report of what we know to this point, and that will be sent to Washington by satburst almost certainly within the hour.

  “I will furnish the department either by telephone or by satburst with whatever information is developed as soon as it comes to me.

  “I have spoken with Ambassador McGrory in Montevideo. He is presently determining if any of the FBI agents attached to his embassy have experience with kidnappings, etcetera, and if any of them do, he will immediately send them here.”

  He paused, then said, “I think that covers everything. Unless you can think of anything, Mr. Reynolds?”

  “No, sir, Mr. Ambassador. I think you have everything in there. I’ll get this to the secretary as soon as possible.”

  “In that connection, Mr
. Reynolds, while I have no objection to an appropriate dissemination of what I’m reporting, I want your memorandum of this call to go directly to the secretary. You understand what I’m saying?”

  “Yes, sir. Directly to the secretary. Not through channels.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Reynolds.”

  Ambassador Silvio hung up the secure telephone and picked up the one connected to the embassy switchboard. He punched one of the buttons.

  “Silvio here. Will you have a car for me at the residence immediately, please? And inform Mr. Lowery that I will be going to Mr. Masterson’s home?”

  [SEVEN]

  The Breakfast Room The Presidential Apartment The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW Washington, D.C. 0815 21 July 2005

  “Let me have that business about the diplomat’s wife again, please,” the President of the United States said to the deputy director of Central Intelligence, who had just finished delivering the Daily Intelligence Summary.

  The DDCI read again the paragraph of the DIS reporting the kidnapping of Mrs. Masterson. It was essentially a condensation of the memorandum prepared by the Southern Cone desk officer for the secretary of state.

  When he had finished, the President asked, “That’s all we have?”

  “We have just a little more, Mr. President, not in the DIS.”

  The President gestured, somewhat impatiently, with the fingers of his left hand, that he wanted to hear it.

  “When I was at Langley earlier, Mr. President, our station chief in B.A. called. Five-thirty our time, six-thirty in B.A. I talked to him myself. He said that the Argentine cops were really active—the phrase he used was they ‘had rounded up all the usual suspects’—and that there had been no word from the kidnappers, and that two FBI agents from the Montevideo embassy had been on the first flight.”

  “What’s that about?”

  “Apparently there are no FBI agents in the B.A. embassy, Mr. President. There’s half a dozen in Montevideo.”

  “What the hell is this all about, Ted?” the President asked.

  “I just don’t know, Mr. President. But I’m sure there will be more details very soon.”