The Hostage

by Griffin, W. E. B.

  “No, sir. That’s for you, sir.”

  “The ambassador thought I needed a shave?”

  “It’s a weapon, sir. A pistol.”

  “Really?”

  Castillo unzipped the bag. It held a GI 9mm Beretta semiautomatic pistol.

  That was a damned nice thing for Silvio to do for me.

  Castillo took the pistol from the bag and pressed the magazine release button. The magazine did not slip out. He looked. There was no magazine.

  “Sir, that’s a Beretta Model 92 semiautomatic pistol, caliber nine millimeter.”

  “I’ll be damned.”

  “Yes, sir. It will fire fifteen rounds just as fast as you can pull the trigger.”

  “This one won’t.”

  “Sir?”

  “There’s no whatchacallems? ‘Bullets’?”

  “Sir, the cartridges are held in a magazine.”

  He held up a full magazine for Castillo’s edification, and only then began to understand his chain was being pulled.

  “What is it, ‘Sergeant’?” Castillo asked, reaching for the magazine.

  “Staff Sergeant, sir.”

  He more than reluctantly let go of the magazine. Castillo took it, checked to see there was no round chambered in the pistol, and then slid the magazine into its place in the handle.

  “I don’t want this to get any further than it has to, Sergeant, which means that was the last time you call me ‘sir,’ but the cold and unvarnished truth is that I’m a soldier.”

  “Sir, the ambassador didn’t say anything—”

  “What part of don’t-call-me-‘sir’ didn’t you understand?”

  “Sorry, s—”

  “I don’t think the ambassador knows I’m a soldier. Actually—the reason I can give you orders—I’m a major.”

  “Yes, s—” the sergeant said, and then, “Major, it comes automatically. I say ‘sir’ to civilians all the time.”

  “Well, try not to say it to me, okay?”

  “Yes, sir. Oh, shit.”

  “I’m sorry I brought the subject up,” Castillo said, chuckling. “Let’s go, Sergeant.”

  [FOUR]

  Room 677 The German Hospital Avenida Pueyrredón Buenos Aires, Argentina 0940 23 July 2005

  There were half a dozen uniformed Policía Federal in the lobby of the hospital, and when Castillo asked for Mrs. Masterson, one of them, a sergeant, walked up to him somewhat menacingly.

  “Señor,” he began.

  A tall, well-dressed man walked up.

  “Señor Castillo?”

  Charley nodded.

  “Come with me, please, señor.”

  “Get yourself a cup of coffee,” Castillo said to the Marine.

  “The ambassador said I’m not to let you out of my sight.”

  “Good, no ‘sir,’” Charley said. “Tell the ambassador I was difficult. Not to worry.”

  Almost biting his lip not to say “sir,” the Marine said, “I’ll be right here.”

  The tall man waved Castillo onto an elevator, nodding at another well-dressed man already on it as they entered. The man pushed the button for the sixth floor.

  There was a sign saying Seimens had built the elevator.

  And the lobby was spotless, waxed, and shiny. And that RAUCHEN VERBOTEN! sign in black and red!

  When they say “German Hospital,” they mean German hospital.

  When the door opened, Castillo saw more uniformed police and several other well-dressed men who he decided were almost certainly SIDE agents.

  The tall man led him down a corridor to a door, opened it, and waved Castillo in.

  Colonel Munz was in the room, which was some sort of monitoring center. There was a row of television sets—all of German manufacture—on the wall.

  “I thought it would be best if Señor Darby and Señor Lowery spoke with Mrs. Masterson,” Munz greeted him, “as I don’t think she feels kindly about anything Argentine right now.”

  He dismissed the tall man with a wave of his hand, and then pointed to the television monitors. On two of them Castillo could see Mrs. Masterson. She was in a hospital gown, sitting up in a bed. Lowery was on one side of her and Darby on the other. Something from a limp plastic bottle was dripping into her arm. He could hear Darby talking to her, but he couldn’t make out what he was saying.

  “How long has she been out of it?” Castillo asked.

  “About ten minutes,” Munz replied. “They found a drug in her blood. They’re giving her something to neutralize it. It’s obviously working.”

  “I can’t hear what they’re saying.”

  Munz walked to one of the monitors and increased the volume.

  Darby was assuring her that the children were all right, that they were under the protection of both Argentine police and security people from the embassy.

  Castillo got the feeling that Darby was repeating his assurances, meaning she had not yet completely come out from under the effects of the narcotic.

  He heard Munz’s cellular buzz.

  Munz said, “¿Hola?” but then switched to German.

  It soon became obvious that he was speaking with someone who was not overly impressed with Colonel Munz of SIDE, or more likely not impressed at all. His explanations that something had happened that had kept him from coming home as promised, and from at least calling, apparently were not falling on appreciative ears. The odds were that El Coronel Munz was speaking with Señora Munz.

  He turned his attention back to Darby’s gentle interrogation of Mrs. Masterson.

  She didn’t have much to tell him. From the time she was grabbed and felt what was the prick of a hypodermic needle in her buttocks, she remembered practically nothing until she had woken up in the taxicab sitting beside her dead husband.

  She did not get a good look at her abductors; she didn’t even know how many of them there had been. She had no idea where she had been taken. She could not describe the room in which she had been held.

  Castillo had just had an uncomfortable thought, one that shamed him—Jesus, she’s still probably full of that drug—when Munz spoke to him, in German.

  “Why do I suspect you speak German, Herr Castillo?”

  Castillo turned to look at him.

  “While I was talking to my wife, in a thick Hessian accent, I saw your reflection on one of the monitors. You were smiling.”

  Why the hell is she lying? And to Darby, who is an old and close friend?

  “Guilty,” Castillo said, speaking German. “My mother was German. A Hessian, as a matter of fact.”

  And I’ve got to get an e-mail off to the Tages Zeitung, which I don’t think I’ll mention to Munz.

  And I want to call Pevsner.

  I should have gotten his phone number; all I have is Kennedy’s cellular number.

  Well, he can either give me the number or have Pevsner call me.

  Maybe she’s just scared. She has every right to be.

  She must know that Darby’s the resident spook, and that she is now safely in his hands.

  “Really?” Munz said. “Where in Hesse was your mother from?”

  Jesus, is he onto something? Has he connected me with Gossinger at the Four Seasons? Both Santini and Darby said SIDE is good.

  “A little town called Bad Hersfeld.”

  “I know it. My father’s family was from Giessen, and my wife’s family from Kassel.”

  “How’d you wind up here?”

  “I was born here. One day, maybe, I’ll tell you how my mother and father got here. And my wife’s parents.”

  “Okay.”

  She’s not drugged. She’s making decisions. She’s lying.

  Munz changed his mind.

  “You ever hear of the Gehlen Organization?”

  Castillo nodded.

  Immediately after World War II, a German general staff officer, Reinhardt Gehlen, who had been in charge of “Eastern Intelligence,” had gone to the Americans and offered to turn over not only his files, but his e
ntire intelligence network—which included, among other things of great intelligence value, in-place spies in the Soviet Army and in Moscow.

  His price was that none of his officers be tried as Nazis, and that the Americans arrange to get their families out of Germany to somewhere safe—like South America, Argentina being preferred—with their husbands to join them later.

  The deal was struck.

  When Castillo had first heard the story, as a West Point cadet, he had been fascinated. He had wondered then who had made the decision to deal with Gehlen; it had to have been someone really senior. If the story had gotten out, there would have been a political eruption.

  He had been trying ever since—and for years he had held security clearances that gave him access to a great deal of heavily classified files—to find out more. He hadn’t learned much. The conclusion he had drawn, without any proof whatsoever, was that the decision to deal with Gehlen had been made by President Harry S Truman himself, probably at the recommendation of General Eisenhower, who at the time was commander in chief in Europe. Almost as soon as Roosevelt had died, and Truman had started dealing with the Soviet Union, he had recognized the Soviet threat.

  “My mother came here in 1946, and my father in 1950,” Munz went on. “He became one of the few civilian instructors at the military academy. When he died several years ago, he was buried here quite close to a man named Hans von Langsdorff. That name ring a bell?”

  “The Graf Spee captain,” Castillo said.

  Why is he telling me this?

  To let me know he’s one of the good guys?

  Maybe Darby has him in his pocket, and he wants me to know?

  Or maybe he wants me to think that he’s muy simpatico, and I will thereafter regard him as a pal and tell him things I shouldn’t.

  Well, I don’t have time to stay here and play games with him.

  “When Mr. Darby comes out of there, would you ask him to give me a call? I don’t see any point in hanging around here.”

  “Certainly,” Munz said.

  [FIVE]

  Room 1550 The Four Seasons Hotel Cerrito 1433 Buenos Aires, Argentina 1035 23 July 2005

  “Why don’t we go in the bar and get you a cup of coffee while you’re waiting for me?” Castillo said to the sergeant as they entered the hotel lobby.

  “We’re back to the ambassador saying I’m not supposed to let you out of my sight.”

  “I need thirty minutes out of your sight,” Castillo said. “If you think you have to, Sergeant, call the ambassador and tell him I said that. Otherwise, your waiting in the bar will be our little secret.”

  “I would say, ‘Yes, sir,’ but you told me not to. Just don’t take off on me, please? That would put my ass in a crack.”

  “I’ll be down in thirty minutes, maybe a little less,” Castillo said.

  He walked the sergeant into the bar, got a bar tab, signed it—making sure the sergeant didn’t see the Gossinger signature—and then rode the elevator to his room.

  There was no fax press release from the embassy for Herr Gossinger waiting in his room; nor, when he called, was it waiting downstairs to be delivered. He wondered if Ms. Sylvia Grunblatt had overlooked sending it, or had intentionally not done so. Castillo knew that that didn’t matter right now. He got out his laptop computer, and, working from his memory of the press release, wrote the story of the murdered diplomat, and then e-mailed it to Otto Göerner at the Tages Zeitung. He thought about calling him immediately, but decided that he might not read it right away, and that he would call him after he talked to Pevsner.

  Alex Pevsner answered Kennedy’s cellular on the second buzz.

  “¿Hola?”

  “That you, Alex?”

  “I heard what happened about thirty minutes ago. I thought you would call, and I knew you didn’t have the number here, so I asked Howard for his cellular. I should have given the number to you. How is Mrs. Masterson?”

  “You heard about that, too?” Castillo replied, and then went on without waiting for an answer. “They doped her—bupivacaine, I’m told—and she doesn’t seem to remember much of what happened.”

  “But she’ll be all right?”

  “I think so. Yes.”

  “Anna was concerned.”

  “I don’t suppose you’ve heard anything?”

  “My source—and he’s close to a man named Munz, who is the power at SIDE—tells me he doesn’t think this is a kidnapping for ransom.”

  “He say what he thinks it is?”

  “He doesn’t have any idea, and neither, apparently, does Colonel Munz. If I hear anything, I’ll let you know. Is it all right if I call your cellular number?”

  “Of course.”

  “Let me give you the numbers here,” Pevsner said, and did so.

  “Göerner.”

  “Did you get my Masterson story?”

  “I’m fine, Karl. And how are you? I’ve been a little concerned.”

  “About what?”

  “I got your story. Very interesting. So far, there’s nothing on the wires or CNN.”

  “There will be shortly.”

  “I’m impressed with your—what do they say in the States? Your ‘scoop.’”

  “Well, I try to earn my keep.”

  “I hope you haven’t had time to work on the oil-for-food scandal I mentioned.”

  “I haven’t. Why do you ask?”

  “I got a story from our guy in Vienna yesterday. I would have called to tell you about it, but, as usual, I didn’t know where to find you. If you check your e-mail, you’ll find a rather anxious message from me. There’s also a rather pointed message on your voice mail at the Mayflower in Washington.”

  “What sort of a story?”

  “The Vienna police were called to an apartment on the Cobenzlgasse to investigate a terrible odor. It came from the decomposing corpse—he’d apparently been dead for ten days or so—of a Lebanese man named Henri Douchon.”

  A mental image of the Cobenzlgasse, the cobblestone street in Grinzing leading up the hill to the Vienna Woods, popped into Castillo’s mind. He had met Alex Pevsner for the first time at the top of the hill.

  “Who’s he?”

  “From what I’ve been told, he was a middleman, a very important middleman, in the oil-for-food arrangement; the illegal part.”

  “What’s that got to do with me?”

  “According to my man, before they cut Herr Douchon’s throat—almost decapitating him—they pulled several of his fingernails out, and several of his teeth. He was strapped into a chair.”

  “Jesus!”

  “I don’t want anyone pulling your teeth out with a pair of pliers, Karlchen, much less cutting your throat. I want you to forget everything I told you about there possibly being an Argentine connection.”

  “That cow is out of the barn, Otto.”

  “If I had known how to reach you yesterday, I was going to tell you not to make inquiries, discreet or otherwise, about Oil for Food, moving money to Argentina, or anything remotely connected with either.”

  “Not to worry, I won’t have time now. I’m on the kidnapping story.”

  “Yes, I’m sure you are,” Göerner said.

  That was a not-very-well-veiled reference to what he knows I do for a living.

  “One of the reasons I called was to ask what—off the top of your head—you think might entice someone to kidnap a diplomat’s wife?”

  “When I gave your story to the foreign news editor— it will run in all the papers, with your byline and photograph—he asked me, ‘Isn’t Masterson that football player who got seventy-five million dollars after he was run over by a coal truck?’”

  “Basketball, sixty million, and a beer truck,” Castillo said.

  “That wasn’t in your story, Karlchen,” Göerner said. “We’re going to see if the AP or CNN or BBC mentions it. Then we’ll either quote them in our wrap-up, or run it as a sidebar.”

  Why the hell didn’t I mention it? I was writing a ne
ws story, not an embassy press release.

  Because you are not a bona fide journalist, that’s why.

  “It should have been in the story,” Castillo said.

  “What did you say, sixty million? That would inspire a kidnapper, I’m sure.”

  “One of my sources, a good one”—you know who he is, Otto. Alex Pevsner—“just told me there is some doubt in the minds of the senior cops here—they’re called SIDE, sort of a combined CIA and FBI—that the abduction and the murder had anything to do with collecting a ransom.”

  “Even more reason that you not ask penetrating questions when you are far from home. There are some very unpleasant people in the world, Karlchen. People who are willing to attract all the attention that kidnapping an American diplomat’s wife, and then killing the diplomat, would bring to them would not hesitate before killing a journalist from a not very important German newspaper if they thought he was asking impertinent questions.”

  “Hey, I’m a big boy, Otto.”

  “Who has always been too big for his pants,” Göerner said. “There was something else I found missing in your story, Karl. What happens now?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “ ‘Ambassador Joe Blow said the remains of Masterson will be flown to the United States for burial in Arlington National Cemetery.’ Something like that.”

  “I don’t know, Otto. But I’ll find out and send it to you.”

  “Your editor would like you, if possible, to accompany the remains to the United States, and provide the full story of the funeral.”

  “I’m not sure that will be possible.”

  “I’m not sure you would go if it was possible. But I am a foolish old man who worries about the godfather of his children, and thought I should ask.”

  “Otto . . .”

  “Hold it a minute,” Göerner said, and a moment later, “It just came in on Agence France Press,” he said. “They say seventy million and baseball player.”

  “Trust me, it’s sixty million and basketball.”

  Castillo’s cellular buzzed.

  “My cellular just went off. I have to go, Otto. I’ll keep you up to speed.”

  “After you give me that cellular number and where you’re staying,” Göerner said.