The Hunters

by W. E. B Griffin

  “Why?”

  “I can’t answer that.”

  “You will forgive me if I suspect it has something to do with his wound,” Ordóñez said. “Which poses more questions, including the original one: from whom?”

  “We don’t know. The people who murdered Masterson, probably.”

  “They would be the same people who sent the Ninjas to the estancia, do you think?”

  “That sounds reasonable, but we don’t know.”

  “And from the Russian mafioso, Pevsner?”

  “Possibly, maybe even probably.”

  “Let me be honest with you, David. I am very relieved to find that Munz trusts you with the lives of his family. That means you can be counted among the good guys.”

  “I think we really are the good guys,” Yung said.

  “What are your plans to protect Señora Munz and the girls? Perhaps I can help.”

  “They’re going to the States,” Yung said. “Tomorrow.”

  “Alfredo will join them there?”

  “No. He wouldn’t go.”

  “If I didn’t believe you were the good guys, I might suspect that his family were hostages to his good behavior.”

  “That’s absolutely untrue,” Yung snapped. “He’s staying here to help us find out who these bastards are.”

  “Well, as step one, I will ensure that the Munz family is safe until they get on the plane with you and Lorimer’s casket.”

  Oh, shit! And I have to tell him!

  “They’re not going with me,” Yung said. “A private plane will come here sometime tomorrow. They’ll go on that.”

  “A Learjet?”

  He’ll find out anyway.

  “No. A Gulfstream.”

  “I thought Señor—or is it Major?—Castillo had a Learjet.”

  “Lieutenant Colonel Castillo has many airplanes.”

  “And you work for Lieutenant Colonel Castillo, do you, David?”

  Why deny that? It’s self-evident.

  “I do now.”

  “And my cousin Julio?”

  Yung nodded. “As of yesterday.”

  “And who does Lieutenant Colonel Castillo work for? The CIA?”

  “No. He doesn’t work for the CIA.”

  “Then whom?”

  “That’s another question I can’t answer.”

  “When you worked here as an FBI agent, were you really working for the CIA?”

  “No.”

  “What was—what is—your interest in Señor Lorimer?”

  “Money laundering.”

  “That’s all?”

  “I thought he was a Lebanese named Bertrand and I was trying to find out where he got all those American dollars.”

  “Nearly sixteen million of them,” Ordóñez said. “And did you find out?”

  Yung nodded.

  “Are you going to tell me?”

  “It’s money from that Iraqi oil-for-food scheme. Lorimer was involved in that.”

  “You know, I never even thought about that? That answers some questions, doesn’t it? And poses at least as many more. I’ll have to give this a good deal of thought.”

  “I’m sure you will.”

  “And do you know where that money is now?”

  “Next question.”

  Ordóñez smiled. “You did a very good job of concealing tracks at the banks when you came back down here, David, but not a perfect one. I have learned that the receipts—or whatever they’re called—for the money in Lorimer’s accounts here were negotiated through the Riggs Bank in Washington. That makes me think they were in Lorimer’s safe at the estancia and somehow taken to Washington. I would have been prone to think Señor Pevsner had something to do with that. But if that were so, why did you try to conceal the tracks?”

  “That was a rhetorical question, right? You didn’t expect an answer?”

  “Right.”

  “Boy Scout’s honor, José, I have never knowingly done anything that would in any way help Aleksandr Pevsner. From everything I know about the sonofabitch, he deserves to be behind bars. Or dead. I don’t know—can’t prove—that he’s after the Munzes, but I believe it.”

  “So do I. The question is why? Can you put me in touch with Alfredo?”

  “When I get to the States—that’ll be tomorrow—I’ll get word to Munz that you want to talk to him. And that you helped us get his family to the States.”

  “I would appreciate that. That leaves only two things for me to do.”

  “And what are they?”

  “I’ll make sure that no one gets close to the Belmont House tonight who shouldn’t be there. And then you and I will walk down there and say hello to my cousin Julio and you will tell him that you and I are agreed that we are the good guys.”

  “Okay. I’ve got to give him a charger for his cellular, anyway.”

  “And one more thing,” Ordóñez said. He wrote something in a small notebook, tore out the page and handed it to Yung.

  “What’s this?”

  “The address of a good auto-body repairman. I told you I’d give it to you.”

  “Thank you,” Yung said.

  “And one last thing, David. I really wish you wouldn’t get on the phone and tell Colonel Castillo about our conversation.”

  “I’m going to have to tell him, José.”

  “Oh, I know. But if you call him tonight, your phones are tapped—cellular and regular—and I would rather not have a record of our conversation floating around. We both said, and are doing things, that we really shouldn’t be doing. Let’s keep that between us.”

  After a moment, Yung nodded.

  Ordóñez went on: “You’ll have a few minutes to speak with Colonel Castillo—or someone close to him—at the airport tomorrow. Maybe if he knows what I’ve told you, he will tell me something he knows that may help me sort all this out.”

  Yung didn’t reply.

  “Can Castillo get the Munzes into the United States if their passports do not have exit stamps from Uruguay?”

  Castillo could get them into the States if they arrived without passports.

  “I’m sure he can.”

  “Then we will have to get them on the Gulfstream tomorrow without them going through the normal immigration procedures. We have to presume that—I like your description, David —these bastards may have access to our immigration computers. If there is no record of the Munzes leaving the country, perhaps they will waste a little time looking for them here.”

  XII

  [ONE]

  El Presidente de la Rua Suite

  The Four Seasons Hotel

  Cerrito 1433

  Buenos Aires, Argentina

  0815 9 August 2005

  Colonel Jacob Torine, USAF, went into the master bedroom and gently shook the shoulder of Lieutenant Colonel C. G. Castillo, USA, who was asleep, lying spread-eagle in his underwear on the enormous bed.

  When that didn’t work, Torine grabbed Castillo’s left foot, raised it three feet off the bed, then let it go.

  That worked. Castillo sat up abruptly, his eyes wide-open at first, then glaring at Torine.

  “I just ordered breakfast, Charley. It’s quarter after eight,” Torine said.

  “Thanks,” Castillo said, without much enthusiasm, fell back on the bed, and then, grunting with the effort, sat up again and swung his feet out of the bed.

  He took fresh underwear from his bag and walked stiff-leggedly into the huge marble bath. He turned on the cold-water faucet in the glass-walled shower, took off his underwear, and stepped under the flowing water. He stood under the cold water for a full minute before, shivering with cold, deciding that he now was sufficiently awake and could adjust the temperature.

  Five minutes later, shaved and in trousers and shirt, Castillo went into the sitting room. Two waiters were arranging plates topped with chrome domes on a table.

  Castillo nodded at Torine and Fernando Lopez, then walked to the enormous windows overlooking the tracks of the Retiro R
ailroad Station, the docks beyond that, and the river Plate.

  “Nice view,” he thought aloud.

  “I’m glad my wife doesn’t know about this,” Torine said. “She doesn’t mind me freezing my ass on some snow-covered runway in the middle of Alaska, but this would make her jealous.”

  Castillo turned and smiled at him.

  “I guess Yung called?” he said.

  “Yeah. He said he was on his way to the Carrasco airport to pick up Artigas’s car, then would take the Munzes to the Belmont House. They’ll take turns guarding them. I didn’t want to wake you.”

  “You were really wiped out, Gringo,” Fernando Lopez said.

  “Understatement of the day,” Castillo said as he stretched his neck. He then added, “I’ve been thinking.”

  “That’s always dangerous,” Lopez said.

  Castillo walked to the table, sat down, and lifted one of the chrome-domed plate covers. The plate held an enormous pile of scrambled eggs. He spooned some eggs onto his plate, then found ham steaks under another dome and put one of them next to his eggs, meanwhile thinking: What I really have been thinking about is the time I spent in that bedroom with Betty Schneider. I thought about her just before I passed out. And I thought of her this morning, just as soon as I stopped being pissed at Jake for that leg-dropping wake-up call.

  But that’s personal.

  This is business.

  “When we came in here last night, they called me Gossinger,” Castillo said. “And I remembered that I rented this place as Gossinger of the Tages Zeitung and they’re getting the bill. And that Otto Görner sent the German embassy here a wire—maybe an e-mail, maybe he even called—asking that I be given every courtesy.”

  “So?”

  “Hiding Billy Kocian is going to be as easy as hiding a giraffe on the White House lawn.”

  “True,” Torine said. “The old guy is spectacular. I love his hat.”

  He mimed Kocian’s up on one side and down on the other hat brim.

  “You’re going to move him in here,” Lopez asked, “after all that business about renting the safe house right now?”

  “No. But I’m going to keep this apartment and tell the hotel that Mr. Eric Kocian of the Tages Zeitung newspapers will be staying here —when he is not staying in a Pilar country house that the newspaper has rented for him— and to continue to send the bills to the newspaper. And when I get out to the safe house and can get a secure line to the White House switchboard, I’m going to call Otto and tell him to call the German ambassador to tell him who Eric is and that he’s here—and why—and to…”

  “Why is he here?” Torine asked.

  “He’s working on three stories,” Castillo said. “One, some character from Hamburg is going to try to raise the Graf Spee from its watery grave off Montevideo. Two, he’s going to do a piece on the German sailors from the Graf Spee who stayed here. And, three, he’s naturally interested in the story of the murdered American diplomat, which is of great interest in Germany.”

  “What are you trying to do, Gringo, make him a really visible target?” Lopez asked.

  “Exactly. One so visible that SIDE will decide it’s in the national interests of Argentina to see that nothing happens to him. The Argentine government doesn’t want any more headlines about foreigners being murdered here. And a foreign journalist? If anything happened to Billy, it would be on front pages all over the world.”

  “You’re devious, Colonel Castillo,” Torine said.

  “I like to think so,” Castillo said. “Thank you, sir.”

  “They whacked the sergeant and almost whacked your girlfriend when they were riding around in an embassy car,” Lopez said. “Not to mention Masterson.”

  “They weren’t expecting trouble,” Castillo said. “Billy will have at least Jack Davidson and Sándor Tor with him all the time and they know what they’re doing. And there will be others, too.”

  “What’s Eric Kocian going to think of this brainstorm of yours?” Lopez asked.

  “I won’t know that until I ask him,” Castillo said. “So this is what’s going to happen. Darby’s going to pick me up here at nine. I’ll get Billy Kocian settled in Mayerling and make the phone calls. You go to Jorge Newbery and get the plane ready.”

  “I think it would be better to have three flight plans,” Torine said. “One from here to Carrasco, a second from Carrasco to Quito, and a third from Quito to San Antonio, rather than one with legs.”

  “Fine,” Castillo said.

  “It’s only about thirty minutes from Jorge Newbery to Carrasco,” Torine went on. “We won’t have to take on fuel, but it would be better if we did. It’s almost six hours to Quito from Montevideo.”

  “Let’s err on the side of caution,” Lopez said.

  “Agreed,” Castillo said.

  “It’s another five and a half hours from Quito to San Antonio,” Torine said. “Figure an hour on the ground at Quito, that makes twelve and a half, call it thirteen, from wheels-up in Montevideo until touchdown in San Antonio.”

  Castillo nodded and said, “We’ll need food and something to drink.”

  Torine nodded. “It would be better if we got that in Montevideo.”

  “I’ll call when I’m leaving Mayerling. Then you call Yung and tell him to pack a picnic lunch but not have the hotel do it.”

  He looked down at his plate and saw that he had eaten everything he’d put there.

  “I better get dressed.”

  “Gringo, I’m still not happy about taking the Munzes to Midland,” Lopez said.

  “Right now, I don’t see another option. But when I get on the radio, I’ll call Abuela and make sure she stays in San Antonio.”

  Castillo went into the master bedroom to finish dressing.

  He had just finished tying his necktie when the doorman called to say his car was waiting for him.

  [TWO]

  Mayerling Country Club

  Pilar, Buenos Aires Province, Argentina

  1020 9 August 2005

  The entrance to the Mayerling Country Club was very much like the entrance to the Buena Vista Country Club, four miles or so away on the other side of Route 8, where Aleksandr Pevsner lived. There was a guardhouse, with armed guards controlling a barrier pole. And, like Buena Vista, there was a shrubbery-shrouded, twelve-foot-high chain-link fence topped with razor wire, behind which the roofs of only a few houses were visible from the road.

  There was immediate proof that the security was good when the guards refused to pass Alex Darby’s BMW until they called the house and got permission from someone—they later learned it was Mr. Sieno—to pass.

  “Would they have passed us if you had CD plates on this?” Castillo asked as they drove slowly along the curving country club road at the prescribed thirty-kilometer-per-hour speed limit announced every one hundred meters by neatly lettered signs and reinforced by speed bumps every two hundred meters.

  “No. And I didn’t put my name on the frequent visitor list, either,” Darby said. “The image I want to give is that the house is rented by the Sienos, a nice young Argentine couple of means from Mendoza.”

  “Is her—their—Spanish good enough to make that credible?”

  “Yeah. She did almost a year, clandestine, in Havana. She’s good, Charley. They’re both good. They had bright futures until he caught a bad case of career suicidus.”

  “Of what?”

  “An uncontrollable urge to tell Langley things Langley doesn’t want to hear. I had a pretty bad case of it myself.”

  “You mean you’re here for the same reason?”

  Darby nodded.

  “You never said anything, Alex.”

  “You didn’t ask, Colonel. It’s sort of a two-sided coin. Life is a lot nicer here than other places you and I have been to. And the people who work for me are really first-class. I wonder sometimes, however, how much useful information comes out of the good boys and girls in the unpleasant places who tell Langley what it wants to hear.
”

  “Tell me about Edgar Delchamps,” Castillo said.

  “How’d you get along with ol’ Ed, Charley?”

  “Very well, I think.”

  “He’s one of the good guys. I thought you two probably would get along.”

  “How did he avoid getting a dose of career suicidus?”

  “He had it. I would say he had a nearly fatal case of it.”

  “Then what’s he doing in Paris? Don’t tell me that’s the agency’s version of Siberia.”

  “Maybe not Siberia, but it’s one of those places where the good boys and girls don’t want to go because you can’t help but learn all sorts of things the Fran-cophiles in Virginia don’t want to read about while they’re humming ‘April in Paris.’ And Ed knows where a lot of the bodies are buried. When they yanked him out of Germany, he said that’s where he wanted to go and they backed down. They have sort of an understanding. He writes what he wants to and they don’t read it.”

  Castillo grinned but shook his head in disgust.

  he said, “How much do you think Delchamps would know about Colonel Pyotr Sunev of the KGB?”

  “Probably a lot more than Langley wishes he does,” Darby said. “They got more than a little egg on their face when the defector they marched before Congress turned out to be quite the opposite. One of the reasons they’re annoyed with Ed is that he warned them the guy was bad news. Nobody likes ‘I told you so.’”

  “That means he knows something about Russian suitcase nukes?”

  “As much as anybody, Charley,” Darby said, then pointed out the window.

  “Chez nous, mon colonel,” he went on. “And a bargain at four grand a month, especially since Monsieur Jean-Paul Lorimer-Bertrand is paying for it.”

  Castillo saw a sprawling brick house with a red tile roof sitting fifty feet off the road on a manicured lawn.

  “Surrounded by nice shrubbery concealing more razor wire and motion detectors,” Darby added. “It has a pool, a croquet field, and a very nice quincho, in which Sergeant Kensington has set up shop.”

  The house also had a three-car garage. As Darby’s BMW entered the cobblestone drive, the door to one of the garages opened and he drove inside.

  Susanna Sieno was waiting for them at an interior door, which led from the garage into the house.