“Instead of ‘interviewing them’ at length?” Davidson asked. “Getting a list of names? Some of them, I’ll bet, are still being worked.”
“A lot of them are still being worked,” Delchamps said matter-of-factly. “I had three in Paris. One in the Bulgarian embassy and two in the Russian.”
“At the risk of sounding paranoid, I think there’s a pattern to this,” Castillo said.
“Just because you’re paranoid, Ace, doesn’t mean that ugly little men from Mars—or from Pushkinskaya Square—aren’t chasing you with evil intentions.”
That got some chuckles.
“Pushkinskaya Square?” Doña Alicia asked.
My God, Castillo thought. She’s not just being polite; she’s fascinated with this business.
What kind of a man discusses multiple murders—or attempted murders—with his grandmother at the Christmas dinner table?
“It’s in Moscow, Doña Alicia,” Delchamps explained. “It’s famous for two things: a statue of Pushkin, the Russian poet, and an ugly building that’s the headquarters of the SVR, which used to be the KGB.”
“Oh, yes,” Doña Alicia said politely, then asked, “Does ‘garroted’ mean what I think it does?”
“Why don’t we change the subject?” Castillo said. “It’s Christmas!”
“Yes, dear,” Doña Alicia said. “I agree. But I’m interested.”
“They put a thing around your neck, Doña Alicia,” Delchamps said. “Sometimes plastic, sometimes metal. It causes strangulation. It was sort of the signature of the ÁVH, the Államvédelmi Hatóság, Hungary’s secret police. When they wanted it known they had taken somebody out, they used a metal garrote.”
“The sort of thing the Indian assassins, the thugs, used?”
“So far as I know, they used a rope, a cord, with a ball on each end so that they could get a good grip. What the Hungarians used was sort of a metal version of the plastic handcuffs you see the cops use. Once it’s in place, it’s hard, impossible, to remove.”
Davidson saw Castillo glaring at Delchamps.
“What kind of a garrote was used in Vienna, Charley?” Davidson asked innocently.
Castillo moved his glare to Davidson.
“How long does it take for someone to die when this happens to them?” Doña Alicia asked.
McGuire saw the look on Castillo’s face and took pity on him.
“You think there’s a pattern, Charley?” McGuire asked, moving the subject from people being garroted. “What kind?”
Castillo shrugged. “All these hits were on the same day.”
“First,” Delchamps went on, “the victim loses consciousness as oxygen to the brain is shut off. After that, it doesn’t take long.”
“Is it very painful?” Doña Alicia said.
“I would suppose it’s damned uncomfortable,” Delchamps answered. “But I would say it’s more terrifying; you can’t breathe.”
“How awful!” Doña Alicia said.
Castillo’s cellular rattled on the table as the vibration function announced an incoming call. He looked at the caller identity illuminated on its screen.
“Quiet, please,” he ordered, and pushed the SPEAKERPHONE button. “Homicide. Strangulation Division.”
“I don’t suppose you know, Gringo, you wiseass, where Abuela might be?”
“Abuela,” Castillo said. “It’s your other grandson. The fat one.”
“That’s not kind, Carlos. Shame on you!” Doña Alicia said. “And Fernando, you know how I feel about you calling Carlos ‘Gringo.’ ”
“Abuela, you could have told me you were going there.”
“I didn’t want to bother you, my darling. Merry Christmas!”
“I was worried sick. There was no answer at the house. I was just about to get in the car and go over there.”
“Nobody answered the phone because I gave everybody the day off. Did you have a nice Christmas dinner?”
“Very nice, thank you.”
“We had a wonderful dinner,” she went on as others around the table exchanged grins. “Billy Kocian is here and he made some sort of Hungarian dessert with cherries, brandy, and brown sugar with whipped cream. It was marvelous! And now we’re sitting around chatting. And having a little champagne, if it is the truth you really want. There’s no cause for concern.”
“When do you want to come home?”
“If it wasn’t for Carlos going out of town tomorrow, I’d stay awhile. But sometime tomorrow, probably.”
“I’ll come pick you up.”
“You’re not thinking of coming here in the plane, Fernando?”
“The plane” was the Bombardier/Learjet 45XR owned by the family company and piloted more often than not by one Fernando Lopez, the company’s president and Castillo’s cousin and Abuela’s grandson.
“Yes, I am, Abuela.”
“That’s very kind, darling, but I know what it costs by the hour to fly the plane; and that there’s no way that we can claim it as a business deduction and get away with it. I’m perfectly capable of getting on an airliner by myself. Now, get off the phone and enjoy your family at Christmas!”
“Fernando?” Castillo called.
“What?”
“A penny saved is a penny earned. Try to keep that in mind while you’re running our family business.”
“Gringo! You son—”
“ ’Bye, now, Fernando!” Castillo called cheerfully, and quickly broke the connection.
“You were saying, Edgar,” Doña Alicia said, “that being garroted is more frightening than painful?”
[TWO]
Signature Flight Support, Inc.
Baltimore-Washington International Airport
Baltimore, Maryland
0725 26 December 2005
Major (Retired) H. Richard Miller, Jr., chief of staff of the Office of Organizational Analysis, and Mrs. Agnes Forbison, the OOA’s deputy chief for administration, were in the hangar when the convoy of four identical black GMC Yukon XLs drove in through a rear door and began to unload passengers and cargo.
The first passenger to leap nimbly from a Yukon was Doña Alicia Castillo, who had been riding in the front passenger seat of what the Secret Service had been describing on their radio network as “Don Juan Two Four.” That translated to mean the second of four vehicles in the Don Juan convoy. Don Juan was the code name of the senior person in the convoy.
When the director of the Washington-area Secret Service communications network had been directed to add then-Major Castillo to his net, a code name had been required. For example, the secretary of Homeland Security, who was well over six feet and two hundred pounds, was code-named Big Boy, and the director of National Intelligence was Double Oh Seven. Having seen the dashing young Army officer around town—and taking note of the string of attractive females on his arm—the communications director had to think neither long nor hard before coming up with Don Juan.
Doña Alicia walked quickly to Miller and kissed his cheek. She had known him since he and Castillo had been plebes at West Point.
The second exitee—from Don Juan Four Four—was Max, closely followed by the Secret Service agent attached to him by a strong leash. Max towed the agent to the nose gear of a glistening white Gulfstream III, where he raised his right rear leg and left a large, liquid message for any other canines in the area that the Gulfstream was his.
Gulfstream Three Seven Nine actually belonged to Gossinger Consultants, a wholly owned subsidiary of Gossinger Beteiligungsgesellschaft, G.m.b.H., of Fulda, Germany, which had bought the aircraft from Lopez Fruit and Vegetables Mexico, a wholly owned subsidiary of Castillo Agriculture, Inc., of San Antonio, Texas, whose honorary chairman of the board was Doña Alicia Castillo, whose president and chief executive officer was Fernando Lopez, and whose officers included Carlos Castillo.
The Office of Organizational Analysis “dry leased” on an “as needed” basis the Gulfstream from Gossinger Consultants on an agreed price of so much per day,
plus an additional amount per flight hour.
OOA provided the crew and paid fuel, maintenance, insurance, and other costs, such as the hangar rent at Signature Flight Support. The Lorimer Charitable & Benevolent Fund reimbursed the OOA on a monthly basis for all of its aviation expenses involved with providing members of the LC&BF staff with the necessary transportation to carry out their charitable and benevolent duties.
It was the perhaps immodest opinion of David W. Yung, Jr.—BA, Stanford University, and MBA, Harvard Business School, who enjoyed a splendid reputation within the FBI and the IRS of being an extraordinarily talented rooter-out of money laundering and other chicanery—that if anyone could work their way through this obfuscatory arrangement he had set up, they would have to be a hell of a lot smarter than he was.
And there was little question in the minds of the cognoscenti that Two-Gun Yung was one smart character. It was he who had first found and then invisibly moved into the LC&BF account in the Riggs Bank in Washington a shade under forty-six million dollars of illicit oil-for-food profits that Philip J. Kenyon III—chairman of the board, Kenyon Oil Refining and Brokerage Company, Midland, Texas—thought he secretly had squirreled away in the Caledonian Bank & Trust Limited in the Cayman Islands.
That transaction was described, perhaps irreverently, by Edgar Delchamps as selling a slimeball a $46,000,000 Stay Out of Jail Card.
Castillo, who had been riding in the front passenger seat of Don Juan Four Four, walked to Max at the nose of the Gulfstream.
“Sit,” he ordered sternly in Hungarian. “Stay!”
Max complied.
“Okay, Billy!” Castillo called, motioning with a wave of his arm.
Eric Kocian got out of Don Juan Three Four. He removed Mädchen—on a leash—and walked her to the rear of the Yukon. Edgar Delchamps and Sándor Tor next got out somewhat awkwardly, because they each held two of Mädchen’s pups, and also walked to the rear of the truck. By then the Secret Service driver had gotten out from behind the wheel, gone to the rear, and opened the door.
He took out a folded travel kennel. He expanded it, but not without some difficulty that bordered on being comical to those who tried not to watch. The pups were placed in the travel kennel, and then, as Billy Kocian and Mädchen watched warily, Sándor Tor and the Secret Service agent picked up the kennel and followed Delchamps to the stair door of the Gulfstream.
Delchamps went up the stairs and into the plane, then turned so he could pull the kennel through the door.
He swore in German.
“I could have told you it wasn’t going to fit through the door, sweetie,” Jack Davidson called in a somewhat effeminate voice from near Don Juan One Four. “If you’d only asked! You never ask. You think you know everything!”
Delchamps made an obscene gesture to Davidson, which Doña Alicia and Agnes Forbison, who by then had walked over to Castillo, pretended not to see.
“What this reminds me of is sending Carlos and Fernando off to Boy Scout camp,” Doña Alicia said.
“Yeah,” Agnes agreed.
“You didn’t have to come out here, Agnes,” Castillo said.
“No, I didn’t,” she said. “But I thought you might need a little walking-around money.”
She handed him a zippered cloth envelope marked RIGGS NATIONAL BANK. It appeared to be full.
“Thank you,” Castillo said.
When he had put it in his briefcase, she handed him a receipt to sign. He used the briefcase as a desk to sign it, and gave it back.
“How long are you going to be?” Agnes asked.
“I don’t know,” Castillo said. He paused. “Abuela, don’t let him know I told you, but Billy’s friend didn’t die of natural causes.”
“I’m not surprised. It was in his eyes.”
“What I’m saying is that Billy is now pretty angry, and that may help us with Otto.”
“I don’t think I understand,” Doña Alicia said.
“He doesn’t like us using the Tages Zeitung as a source of information.”
“But you’re the boss,” Agnes said.
“I don’t want to have to confront him more than I already have,” Castillo said. “I don’t want him to quit.”
“He wouldn’t do that,” Doña Alicia said. “Not only is the Tages Zeitung his life, but he loves you.”
“He also has the journalistic ethical standards he got from my grandfather, and he doesn’t think my grandfather would give the CIA the time of day.”
“But you’re not CIA,” Agnes said.
“I don’t think Otto believes that,” Castillo said. “Anyway, Billy was closer to my grandfather than Otto was—closer than anyone else ever was—and what I’m hoping is that he will go through the Tages Zeitung database like a vacuum cleaner on overdrive and Otto will get the message. We’ll see.”
The rear door of the hangar rose with a metallic screech.
“For what we’re paying for this place, you’d think they could afford a little grease,” Castillo said.
Three cars drove into the hangar. A total of five uniformed officers got out.
“Here comes the bureaucracy,” Castillo said. “I guess we can leave now.”
“Not until you arrange the dogs,” Agnes said. “How long is that going to go on?”
“Otto’s kids get one of the puppies, whether or not Otto likes it—”
“Carlos!”
“One pup I’m keeping for a friend of mine in Argentina,” Castillo went on. “That leaves two. One of which Delchamps says he wants.”
“Of course he does! Didn’t you see him on his knees with the puppies yesterday?”
“And Billy says he wants one to keep Mädchen company. So that’s it. Once we get Billy back to Budapest, no more airborne Noah’s ark.”
“And you keep Max?” Doña Alicia asked.
“It will be Max and me alone against the cold cruel world.”
“Billy doesn’t want him? Or he’s just saying that to be nice to you?”
“I don’t know, Abuela,” Castillo said. “I asked him. He said he doesn’t think Mädchen will betray him the way Max has.”
“He doesn’t mean that,” Doña Alicia said.
“Yeah, I know. But he’s already named the pup Max, making that his Max the Tenth or Twelfth.” Castillo looked at Agnes and changed the subject. “Are you going to put my grandma on her plane?”
“After we have a nice lunch in the Old Ebbitt Grill, I will,” Agnes said. “What do I do about the apartment in the Mayflower?”
“When does the lease run out?”
“The end of next month; you have to give them ten days’ notice.”
“Well, let’s see what happens toward the end of next month,” Castillo said. Then he saw Jake Torine and Dick Sparkman walking across the hangar floor toward them. “Well, here come the airplane drivers. I guess it’s time to go.”
[THREE]
Above Antwerp, Belgium
2045 26 December 2005
Jake Torine said, “You’ve got it, Dick,” then removed his headset, unstrapped himself, and went into the passenger compartment.
It was crowded. The travel kennel was in the aisle at the rear. Mädchen was lying in the aisle in front of it, keeping an eye on Max, who was lying in the aisle just inside the passenger compartment—and attached to Jack Davidson by a strong leash. Max was having trouble understanding not only that the honeymoon was over, but that the mother of their offspring had decided that he was a bad influence on their progeny and didn’t want him anywhere near them.
There were two couches, one on each side of the aisle. Billy Kocian—in a red silk dressing gown—was sprawled regally on one of them, reading, and Jack Doherty was on the other, snoring softly with his mouth open. David W. Yung was in the right forward-facing seat and typing on the computer in his lap. Edgar Delchamps was sitting, asleep, in the forward-facing seat nearest the stair door. Sándor Tor, also asleep, sat in the rear-facing chair across from Delchamps.
Ac
ross the aisle, Davidson, with Max attached to him, was sitting in the rear-facing seat across from Castillo, who was on the telephone. When Castillo saw Torine, he held up a finger to signal Jake to wait.
“I don’t think there’ll be a problem with our ambassador,” Castillo said. “But this will make sure there’s no problem with the other one.” He paused to listen, then said, “Thank you very much, ma’am.”
This strongly suggested to Torine that Castillo was talking to Secretary of State Natalie Cohen.
“Yes, ma’am, I will,” Castillo said. “Thank you again, Madam Secretary.” And then he said: “Break it down, please, White House,” and put the handset in its cradle on the bulkhead.
“What was that all about?”
“The secretary of State is about to telephone our evil leprechaun in Montevideo—”
“I thought Duffy was our evil leprechaun.”
“Comandante Liam Duffy is our evil leprechaun in Argentina. I was referring to our evil leprechaun in Uruguay, one Ambassador Michael A. McGrory.”
“Oh. Thank you for the clarification. And what is the secretary going to say to the ambassador?”
“That she is dispatching a Secret Service agent by the name of Britton—recently a member of the Vice President’s Protection Detail—to ensure the safety of Ambassador Lorimer, and that he is to be given what support he asks for and not to be assigned other duties.”
“Did you happen to mention the circumstances under which Britton left the protection detail?”
“Yeah. I don’t try to con her. She’s (a) too nice and (b) too smart. I told her just about everything except his rudeness to the SACs. And then I asked her what she thought about sending him to check on the ambassador’s security arrangements, and she thought that was a splendid idea.”
“You knew she would. She really likes the old guy. You don’t consider that conning her?”
“No, I don’t.”
Torine shook his head.
“You noticed that thanks to a lovely tailwind we didn’t have to land for fuel?” Torine asked.
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