The Hunters

by W. E. B Griffin

  “I don’t know if it’s smuggling or not, Colonel,” Artigas said, “but they wouldn’t have to go through immigration to get to Uruguay. All they need is their National Identity Card to get on an airplane or the Buquebus ferry. They don’t take names.”

  “He’s right, Charley,” Santini said.

  “The Buquebus would be better,” Munz said.

  “Okay, we’ll do that,” Castillo said. “First we get their passports stamped, very quietly, with a…”

  “…five-year, multivisit visa,” Ambassador Silvio furnished. “You get me the passports, Colonel Munz, and I’ll take care of that.”

  “Thank you,” Munz said.

  “First we get them visas and then on the Buquebus,” Castillo said. “Then what?”

  “I’ve got to go back to Uruguay,” Yung said. “And so, come to think of it, does Artigas, so he can look very surprised when McGrory tells him he’s been transferred over here. One or both of us could go on the Buquebus with them.”

  “Why do you have to go back to Uruguay?” Castillo asked.

  “I’ve got to get Lorimer and his casket from the undertakers and out to the airport.”

  “Jesus, I forgot all about him,” Castillo said, then heard what he had said and smiled and shook his head. “Mr. Ambassador, there’s another example that I’m playing with far fewer than fifty-two cards in my deck.”

  Silvio said, “That’s only proof, Colonel, that you forgot the details of the repatriation of Mr. Lorimer’s remains.”

  Castillo raised an eyebrow, then turned to Yung. “Tell me about those, Dave,” he said.

  “The casket will go on American Airlines flight 6002 at five after nine tomorrow night. It could have gone tonight, but the body wasn’t ready.”

  “‘The body wasn’t ready’?” Castillo parroted.

  “I was afraid the bastard’s father might insist on opening the casket. When I saw the body in the English hospital, it looked awful. So I took some clothes from the estancia and told the undertaker to dress him, and to do a better job of sewing him up than the hospital did after the autopsy.”

  “That was a very nice thing for you to do, Mr. Yung,” Ambassador Silvio said.

  “And it would have been even nicer if you hadn’t called the deceased ‘the bastard,’” Castillo said.

  Yung looked at him, ignored the comment, and continued: “The airplane stops at Ezeiza, then goes to Miami. Then the casket’ll be transferred to an American Airlines flight…I’ve got the number somewhere if that detail’s important…to New Orleans.”

  “And you have to go with it,” Castillo said.

  “I wanted to talk to you about that,” Yung said. “I’d much rather stay here.”

  Jesus Christ, Castillo thought, he’s really done a one-eighty!

  “If you’re not on that airplane with the body,” Castillo said, “Ambassador McGrory—and others—are going to suspect you didn’t come down here to repatriate the remains. So you will be on it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He’s really disappointed.

  “And you will stay through the funeral. There’s no telling who might show up for that.” He paused, then looked at Santini. “Tony, could we get the Secret Service to make the plates of the cars at that funeral? Maybe the people themselves?”

  “Not a problem. Who are we looking for?” Santini said.

  “Names and addresses—and photographs, if that can be done discreetly—to feed to our database,” Castillo said. “Anything. Right now all we have is the database.”

  “I’ll get on the horn,” Santini said.

  “After that, Dave,” Castillo said, “if you still want to come back here, we’ll see what can be worked out.”

  He saw that Yung was pleased with that.

  Congratulations, Second Lieutenant Castillo. You remembered that from Leadership 101: “If at all possible, do not discourage enthusiasm.”

  “Okay, so where does that leave us?” Santini said. “The passports and what else?”

  “The pancake flour and maple syrup,” Castillo said.

  Artigas thought, The what?

  “I got it,” Santini said. “What’s that all about?”

  “Where is it right now?” Castillo asked.

  “In the trunk of the embassy BMW,” Solez said.

  “It’s for Putin,” Castillo said. “I promised it to him.”

  Artigas thought, incredulously: He promised pancake flour and maple syrup to Aleksandr Pevsner, international thug?

  “I’d love to know what that’s all about, Charley,” Santini said.

  “Alfredo,” Castillo said, “is there any way you can communicate with your wife without using your home phone?”

  Munz nodded. “I can call her and give her a message, something innocuous, that tells her to go to the phone in the kiosk around the corner from the house.”

  “How is she about taking orders without question?”

  “Ordinarily, not good at all,” Munz said, smiling. “But under these circumstances…” He paused. “She knows I didn’t shoot myself cleaning my pistol. And she’s seen the cars.”

  “What about your daughters?”

  “They’ll do what their mother tells them to do.”

  “How do you think this would work?” Castillo began. “You get her on the kiosk phone and tell her to pick up your daughters and their passports—and nothing else, that’s important—and take a taxi to Unicenter. Is there a place you could meet her there?”

  “In the food court,” Munz said. “Or, for that matter, the garage.”

  “The food court would probably be better,” Castillo said. “I’ll drive you back there and we’ll sneak you in the way we sneaked you out. You will meet them in the food court. I’ll follow you up there and so will Ricardo, Yung, and Artigas. You will point us all out to them so they understand we’re the good guys. You get the passports…”

  Munz held up his hand and Castillo stopped.

  Munz thought for a long moment, then said, “Okay so far, Karl. Go on.”

  “You tell them to go shopping,” Castillo continued. “Underwear, maybe dresses, whatever else they’ll need for two, three days. No luggage. Shopping bags only.”

  “They won’t be going back to the apartment?” Munz asked.

  “No. They’ll take a cab to the Buquebus terminal, arriving no more than ten minutes before they have to…”

  “There’s a ferry leaving at nine-thirty,” Munz said. “It gets to Montevideo about one in the morning. Which means they would have to be there at nine-fifteen. Considering the traffic, they’d have to leave Unicenter no later than eight-thirty.” He looked at his watch. “It’s now ten to six. It’ll be tight but that much can be done. What’s the rest?”

  “Artigas will have taken a cab to Buquebus right after you point out him and Yung to your family. That’s (a) so he can buy the tickets and (b) in case Yung, who will stay in Unicenter with your family—and follow them in another taxi to Buquebus—somehow gets separated from them. In other words, Artigas’ll be at the terminal with their tickets and passports when your family gets there. That should reassure them a little. And they’ll stay with them as long as they’re in Uruguay.”

  “I’m not going to drive them?” Ricardo Solez asked.

  “You’re going to take the passports, bring them here, have them stamped, and then take them to Artigas at the Buquebus terminal.”

  “Got it.”

  Castillo went on: “Alfredo is going to get in his car—he left it in the Unicenter parking lot—and take Putin the pancake flour and maple syrup…”

  Artigas decided, Pancake flour and maple syrup have to be code names for something—something they don’t want me to know about. But what?

  “…And he’s going to tell Putin that I called him, had him meet me at Unicenter, and gave him the flour and syrup, then asked him to take it to him. He will also cleverly drop into their conversation that I told him I was going to the States either tonight or tom
orrow.”

  Munz nodded.

  “I’m going to follow him out there—and I think I better have a weapon—Tony?”

  “I just happen to have a spare Glock in my briefcase,” Santini said.

  “I’m going to wait for Alfredo in the supermarket parking lot near where Putin’s holed up. You know where I mean, Alfredo?”

  Munz nodded.

  “When Munz comes back from delivering the flour and syrup to Putin, he will drive to his apartment with me following him. There he will put his car in the garage, go to his apartment, and turn on the lights, then turn them off again and go out of the apartment and to the kiosk around the corner. Somehow, during this time, he will get into the backseat of the Cherokee without being noticed and I’ll take him to the apartment on Arribeños.”

  “What’s that?” Munz asked.

  “It’s where you’ll spend tonight,” Castillo said. “Tomorrow, presuming nothing went wrong with renting it, you—and Eric Kocian, Max, and Kocian’s bodyguard—will as quietly as possible be moved to a safe house in the Mayerling Country Club in Pilar.”

  “Who are those people?” Munz asked.

  “One is a man named Eric Kocian. He’s a journalist. He’s got a lot of material I want you to go through to see if we can make a connection.”

  “I don’t like journalists much myself,” Munz said. “But he needs a bodyguard?”

  Castillo nodded. “They tried to kill him twice in the last week. They also tried to stick a needle full of phenothiazine in him. You’ll like the bodyguard. He used to be an inspector in the Budapest police department, and, before that, a hitch in the French Foreign Legion.”

  “They speak Spanish?”

  “German and Hungarian.”

  “And the third one? Max Something, you said?”

  “Max Bouvier,” Castillo said. “He doesn’t talk much.”

  “Another bodyguard, Karl?”

  “Oh, yes,” Castillo said.

  “Jesus Christ, Charley!” Santini said, shaking his head. “Alfredo, he’s pulling your leg. Max is a dog. An enormous dog.”

  Munz looked at Castillo.

  “True,” Castillo said. “Which just made me think of something. I was planning to move Kocian to the master bedroom in the suite in the Four Seasons. He’s in his eighties, has two 9mm holes in him, and just flew from Budapest. But I can’t do that, obviously, with Max. He’s going to have to stay in that apartment. And won’t like it.”

  “Leave the dog in the apartment,” Solez said.

  “Not an option. Where Kocian goes, so does Max. He even had him in his hospital room in Budapest.”

  “Which just made me think of something,” Santini said. “What do we do with Familia Munz in Montevideo until you can pick them up with the Gulfstream?”

  “Alfredo took me to a first-rate hotel in Carrasco…” Castillo began.

  “I sent you there,” Ambassador Silvio said. “The Belmont House. I’ll call over, and get them a suite.”

  “No,” Castillo said. “That would involve you personally. I don’t want that. I’ll call. We’ll have to get them to hold the room anyway if that boat doesn’t get over there until one o’clock in the morning.”

  “And where is Familia Munz going in the States?” Santini asked. “Washington?”

  Jesus, I didn’t even think about that! Castillo thought.

  He then said, “Not at first. At first, we need something in the boonies.”

  “Carlos,” Solez said. “The ranch?”

  “My first thought just now was to take them to the plantation—there’s people already there sitting on the Masterson family—but obviously that wasn’t one of my brighter ideas.”

  “When Doña Alicia sent me the e-mail about you getting promoted, she said she had just been up to the ranch and it was so hot she wasn’t going back until November.”

  Castillo chuckled. “It does get a bit warm in Midland in August, doesn’t it? Okay, I’ll give Abuela a call and ask her to stay away until further notice. Tony, can we get some Secret Service people to go to Midland until I can make better arrangements for Alfredo’s family?”

  “You can, Charley,” Santini said and pointed in the general direction of the secure telephone.

  Artigas thought: The Ranch? The Plantation? Doña Alicia? Abuela?

  For Christ’s sake, abuela is Spanish for “grandmother.”

  Does everything these people do come with a code name?

  And how I am supposed to figure out what they mean?

  “Okay,” Castillo said, “I’ll do that. I’ll call Doña Alicia and Miller right now. And while I’m doing that, make sure everybody has everybody else’s number on their cellulars. And when you use them, remember to use the code names. Which reminds me, we’ll need one for Familia Munz. How about ‘Mother’?”

  “That’s easy to remember,” Santini said, drily. “Give me your cellular, Charley, and I’ll make sure you have all the numbers.”

  Castillo handed it to him, then looked at Ambassador Silvio, wordlessly asking permission to use the secure telephone.

  Silvio nodded and said, “Of course.”

  “That was a hell of a lot easier than I thought it would be,” Castillo announced when he came back into the room several minutes later.

  He looked at Santini and went on: “Joel was there. He said no problem, and gave me a number to call when we know when we’ll be at the ranch and they’ll be waiting for us. He said to tell you hello.”

  Santini nodded.

  Castillo turned to Solez. “Doña Alicia sends you a kiss. She made me promise to get a little rest while I’m having ‘our meeting’ at the ranch.”

  Solez nodded.

  Castillo turned to Munz.

  “The ranch is outside Midland, Texas, Alfredo. It’s been in my family for a very long time. It’s pretty large, even by Argentine standards. The reason for that is here you wonder how many head you can graze on one hectare. Out there, we wonder how many hectares it will take to feed one steer enough so that we can move him to a feeding pen. There’s a nice house; your family will be comfortable. Most important, it’ll be absolutely safe. There’s an airstrip which can’t be seen from the nearest road. No one will know who’s there. And you heard what I said to Joel about the Secret Service?”

  Munz nodded. “Thank you, Karl.”

  “Is that about it? Are we ready to move? Have we forgotten anything?”

  “You can bet on that,” Santini said. “But, yeah, we better get moving.”

  [FIVE]

  Unicenter

  Panamericana Highway

  Buenos Aires, Argentina

  1830 8 August 2005

  David W. Yung, Jr., was more than a little embarrassed at the emotions he was feeling as he sat drinking a cup of hot chocolate with Julio Artigas at a small table in the food court, a collection of fast-food vendors on the top floor of the vast, multilevel shopping center.

  He was sad and angry, emotions he knew were inappropriate for a special agent of the FBI, and especially for one who had just been assigned to the OOA and really wanted to stay there, which meant that he was going to have to prove he had the ability to be really calm and professional under pressure—not sad and really pissed-off.

  He had just watched Colonel Alfredo Munz casually get up from another small round table forty feet away—one with a woman and two teenage girls sitting at it—and walk to the men’s room.

  Except going to take a leak and wash his hands wasn’t what Munz was really doing.

  What Munz was doing was carrying his family’s passports to Solez, who was waiting for him in the men’s room. What that in effect meant was that Munz was saying good-bye to his family for God only knew how long, turning them over to the protection of people—including a Chinese man with a bandaged hand—whom they had never seen before.

  This showed on the girls’ faces. They were young and pretty, Yung thought. One was about sixteen years old, the other a little older—on the cusp of y
oung womanhood—and they were clearly frightened.

  They should not be involved in something like this.

  Goddamn these bastards!

  The younger girl glanced at their table. Yung caught her eye and smiled at her, hoping it helped in some way tell her, It’s going to be okay.

  She looked startled for a moment, then looked away.

  I shouldn’t have done that. Someone may have seen it.

  But, dammit, I wanted to give her some sign of encouragement.

  As choreographed, Solez came out of the men’s room, fumbled through his pockets, and just perceptibly nodded at Yung and Artigas. He took a package of cigarettes from his pocket and, taking his time about it, lit one with a Zippo lighter.

  Munz, also as planned, came out a moment later, took a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, put one to his lips, then looked unsuccessfully for a lighter or match. He looked at Solez, then asked for a light. Solez produced his Zippo and lit Munz’s cigarette.

  Munz looked very quickly at his wife and daughters, then headed for the escalator. Solez walked in the other direction, toward the elevator. This, too, was according to plan.

  Castillo now appeared from the direction of the escalator. He feigned pleasant surprise when he noticed Yung and Artigas and walked to their table. They shook hands, patted backs, and made kissing gestures in the Argentine manner.

  Now Señora Munz and the girls had seen all the players.

  Castillo walked toward the elevator.

  Artigas murmured, “See you at the terminal,” and got up and walked toward the escalator.

  Señora Munz waited until Munz had disappeared into the crowd that was waiting to get on the escalator, then collected her purse and stood, motioning for the girls to get up, too.

  Yung fished a bill from his pocket and laid it on the table as a tip for the busboy. He stood up and felt the weight of his semiautomatic pistol as it shifted slightly.

  Jesus Christ, he suddenly remembered. I don’t have a round in the chamber!

  It’ll take forever to work the action with this goddamned bandaged hand!