Black Ops

by W. E. B Griffin

  Castillo saw the waiter approaching with what he guessed was his meal, and he remained quiet as the waiter placed it before him, then picked up the bottle of Saint Felicien and refilled Castillo’s large glass before leaving.

  “You really should try some of this, Mr. Montvale,” Castillo said, raising the glass in his direction. “It’s very nice and can get that ‘bad taste’ out of your mouth.”

  Montvale just stared back.

  “And if I don’t give you my word that you will be free to leave the embassy?” Ambassador Silvio asked.

  “Then I will have my lunch and leave.”

  “Colonel Castillo,” Colonel Remley said, his tone hard-edged, “I am about to give you a direct order—”

  Montvale held up his hand, interrupting him.

  “Drink your wine, Castillo,” Montvale said. “And have your lunch. Then we will go to the embassy.”

  Castillo looked at Montvale, then back at Silvio. “And have I your word, Mr. Ambassador, that I’ll be allowed to leave?”

  “You have my word,” Ambassador Silvio said.

  [THREE]

  Ambassador Silvio’s armored BMW was waiting at the curb when everyone in their party walked out of Río Alba fifteen minutes later.

  “I suggest that it would be easier to walk,” Silvio said.

  “Fine with me,” Castillo said. “If Mr. Montvale feels up to it.”

  Montvale glared at him, nodded at Colonel Remley to follow, and set off down the sidewalk.

  “The embassy’s this way, Mr. Montvale,” Castillo said, pointing his thumb in the opposite direction.

  Montvale stopped in his tracks, then turned. He walked past Castillo without looking at him and with Remley following suit.

  They all walked single file the one block to the employees’ gate in the embassy fence with the Secret Service following them, and the gendarmería SUV following everyone.

  The rent-a-cops passed everybody through the turnstile. Then one of the rent-a-cops went to the sidewalk to more than a little arrogantly wave the Mercedes away from what was a no-parking zone. One of the gendarmes got out of the vehicle and took up a position near the turnstile. The driver held up his credentials. The rent-a-cop immediately lost his arrogance and slinked back to his station.

  Castillo saw that this had not gone unnoticed and said, “Did you ever wonder, Mr. Montvale, what diplomats, members of the gendarmería, and six-hundred-pound gorillas have in common?”

  Montvale looked at Castillo in disgust mingled with a little confusion.

  “What did you say?” the director of National Intelligence asked.

  “They can park wherever they want to,” Castillo explained.

  “Good God!” Montvale said in disgust.

  Montvale followed the ambassador into the building. When Castillo followed him, the ambassador turned to them both.

  “May I suggest you use my office for your conversation?” he asked.

  “That’s very kind of you, Mr. Ambassador,” Castillo said. “And, sir, would you clear it with the switchboard in case we have to have a secure telephone?”

  “Of course.”

  They passed through a metal detector guarded by a Marine. Its alarm went off, but a nod of Ambassador Silvio saw them passed through anyway.

  They rode an elevator to the second floor and entered the ambassador’s outer office.

  “Unplug that, please,” Castillo said, pointing to the intercom box on the desk of the ambassador’s secretary. “And the telephone, too, if it’s capable of eavesdropping on the ambassador’s office.”

  Ambassador Silvio’s secretary looked at her boss in genuine surprise. And again Silvio signaled with a nod of his head to do what Castillo had requested.

  “Mr. Ambassador,” Castillo said, “with the caveat that what will be discussed in your office will be classified Top Secret Presidential and is not to be disclosed to anyone, including the secretary of State, you’re quite welcome to come with us.”

  Montvale answered for him: “Please do, Mr. Ambassador. I really would like a witness.”

  “Very well,” Ambassador Silvio agreed, with obvious reluctance.

  Castillo turned to Colonel Remley.

  “With respect, sir, I don’t believe you have the Need to Know.”

  “And what if I insist that Colonel Remley participate, Castillo?” Montvale said coldly.

  “Then we will not have our chat,” Castillo said evenly. “And, Colonel, with Ambassador Silvio as witness, I now inform Mr. Montvale that he is not to tell you what is said or what may transpire in the ambassador’s office.”

  “I find it hard to believe that you have the authority to order Ambassador Montvale to do anything,” Remley said.

  “With respect, sir, in this instance I do.”

  “Wait here, Remley,” Montvale ordered. “I have the feeling that shortly I will be able to point out to Colonel Castillo how far out of line he is.”

  Ambassador Silvio waved them into his office, followed them in, and closed the door.

  “Is there anything I can get for anyone?” Silvio asked.

  “I’d like a minute or two in there, Mr. Ambassador,” Castillo said, pointing to the ambassador’s private restroom. “The waiter in Río Alba kept pouring the soda water, and I kept drinking it, and my back teeth are awash.”

  “Jesus Christ, Castillo!” Montvale said in disgust.

  “Help yourself,” Ambassador Silvio said, not quite able to restrain a smile.

  When Castillo came out of the restroom, Silvio was sitting behind his desk and Montvale was on a couch. Castillo sat in an armchair upholstered in what appeared to be some type of silk fabric, took a leather cigar case from his trousers pocket, and went through the ritual of trimming and lighting a long thin black cigar.

  “If you’re quite through with doing that, may we begin?” Montvale asked.

  “I’m waiting for you, Mr. Montvale,” Castillo said.

  “All right, where are they?”

  “Where are who?”

  “Colonel Dmitri Berezovsky and Lieutenant Colonel Svetlana Alekseeva of the SVR.”

  Castillo saw interest jump into Ambassador Silvio’s eyes.

  “Next question?” Castillo said.

  “You’re not going to deny that you have them, for God’s sake?”

  “That would depend on what you mean by ‘have,’ Mr. Montvale.”

  “I’ll be goddamned! Now he thinks he’s Bill Clinton!”

  Again, Ambassador Silvio could not completely restrain a smile.

  “What this is about, Ambassador Silvio—and since Lieutenant Colonel Castillo . . .”

  Castillo thought his pronunciation of “lieutenant colonel” turned the rank into an obscenity.

  “. . . has elected to make you privy to this, I can tell you—is that Lieutenant Colonel Castillo, without any authority whatsoever, took it upon himself to completely ignore the carefully laid plans of the CIA station chief in Vienna to cause these Russians—important Russians; Berezovsky was the rezident in Berlin and the woman the rezident in Copenhagen—to defect and flew them here.”

  “Speaking hypothetically, of course,” Castillo put in, “what makes you so sure that the station agent in Vienna shared anything with me? I never laid eyes on her. How could I ignore something I didn’t know?”

  “Then what were you doing in Vienna, for Christ’s sake?”

  “Carrying out my orders to locate and render harmless those responsible for the assassination of Mr. Masterson.”

  “And Berezovsky and Alekseeva just popped into your life?”

  “Actually, that’s just about what happened. Hypothetically speaking, of course.”

  “You’re going to explain that, of course?”

  “If you think you can get your temper and indignation under control—and keep them that way—I’ll give it a shot.”

  Montvale made a grand Go to it gesture.

  “In a twenty-four-hour period starting the day before Christ
mas Eve, there were three assassinations. Two of them you called to ask me about: the garroting of the Kuhls in the Stadtpark in Vienna and—”

  “You told me you had never heard of the Kuhls,” Montvale interrupted.

  “And I hadn’t.”

  “Am I permitted to ask questions?” Ambassador Silvio said, then went on without waiting for a reply. “Who are the Kuhls?”

  “Were,” Montvale corrected him. “For a very long time, they were deep-cover CIA assets in Vienna. Primarily, they were involved in identifying Russians—and others—who could be influenced by others to defect. They had a number of successes over the years.”

  “And they were identified and killed?”

  “That’s what it looks like,” Montvale said.

  Montvale and Silvio watched while Castillo relit his cigar.

  Then, after exhaling a blue cloud of smoke, Castillo went on: “At just about the time the Kuhls were assassinated, a correspondent of the Tages Zeitung, Günther Friedler, was murdered in Marburg an der Lahn. That’s a small city sixty miles or so north of Frankfurt am Main, best known for Philipp’s University. The body was mutilated in an attempt to paint the murder as the result of a homosexual lover’s quarrel. Friedler was investigating the Marburg Group, a collection of German businessmen known to have profited from the Iraqi oil-for-food scam. Specifically, Friedler was looking into the connection between these people and a chemical factory operating on what had been the West German nuclear facility in the former Belgian Congo.”

  “May I ask how you know this?” Silvio asked.

  “I have an interest in the Tages Zeitung publishing firm,” Castillo said.

  Montvale smiled, then while looking at Castillo said: “Actually, Mr. Ambassador, in his alter ego role as Karl Wilhelm von und zu Gossinger, Castillo owns the Tages Zeitung publishing empire.”

  Silvio’s eyebrows rose in surprise.

  Castillo calmly went on: “I was, when we heard about this, in Washington with a man named Eric Kocian, who is publisher of the Budapest Tages Zeitung. An attempt to murder him in Budapest was made some time ago. Kocian was our man who reopened the Vienna Tages Zeitung after World War Two. And he was an old friend of the Kuhls. And he considered Friedler a close friend. He announced he was going to (a) go to their funerals and (b) find out who had murdered them. There was no way I could stop him, so we got on the Gulfstream and flew to Germany.

  “Going off at a tangent, there were, within the twenty-four-hour period I mentioned, two more assassination attempts, both of which failed. One was here—actually in Pilar; that’s about forty-five klicks from here, Mr. Montvale—when Comandante Liam Duffy of the Gendarmería Nacional and his family were leaving a restaurant. . . .”

  “I heard about that,” Ambassador Silvio said softly.

  “Duffy was in on the operation when we got the DEA agent back from the drug people in Paraguay. The second attempt, in Philadelphia, was on Special Agent Jack Britton of the Secret Service and his wife. They took fire from fully-auto AKs as they drove up to their home. For years, Britton had been a deep-cover Philly cop keeping an eye on an aptly named bunch of African-American Lunatics involved in, among other things, the lunatic idea of crashing that stolen 727 into the Liberty Bell and making mysterious trips to Africa—including the Congo—financed, we found out, with oil-for-food money.

  “Britton was on the Vice President’s security detail. When he was informed ‘of course, you’re off that assignment’ and otherwise made to feel he was being punished for having been the target of an assassination attempt, he said some very rude things to various senior Secret Service people, then told them what they could do with the Secret Service and came to see me before we flew to Germany. I sent him and his wife down here—”

  “And why did you think you had the authority to do that?” Montvale demanded.

  Castillo ignored the interruption and, looking at Silvio, continued: “I was initially thinking Jack would be just the guy to help protect Ambassador Masterson in Uruguay. And since Jack had, so to speak, burned his Secret Service bridge, I didn’t think—and still don’t think—that I had to ask anyone’s permission.”

  He met Montvale’s eyes.

  “So what happened in Germany?” Montvale said after a moment.

  “I was at the Haus im Wald, near Bad Hersfeld—it used to belong to my mother, but now Otto Görner, who runs Gossinger Beteiligungsgesellschaft, the holding company, lives there—when there was a call for me—as Castillo—from quote the U.S. embassy in Berlin unquote.

  “When I answered it, a guy asked in Berliner German if he had Gossinger—not Castillo—and when I said ‘yes,’ he switched to English—faultless American accent—and said, ‘Sorry to bother you, Colonel Castillo, but I thought you would like to know an attempt will be made on your life and Görner’s and Kocian’s during the Friedler funeral.’ Sometime during the conversation, he said his name was ‘Tom Barlow’ and that I should be careful as the workers were ex-Stasi.

  “And then he hung up.

  “Friedler’s funeral, the next day, was in Saint Elisabeth’s church in Marburg. We had reserved seats. Two of my guys checked them before the ceremony. They found an envelope addressed to me—Gossinger—in one of the prayer books. It contained a photocopy of Berezovsky’s passport and four cards with the name ‘Tom Barlow’ on one, and ‘Vienna,’ ‘Budapest,’ and ‘Berlin’ on the others. ‘Berlin’ had been crossed out.

  “What it looked like was that Berezovsky wanted to meet me in either Vienna or Budapest and would be using the name ‘Tom Barlow.’ ”

  “You mean he wanted to defect?” Montvale asked, his tone now somewhat civil.

  “It didn’t say that, but we thought that was likely.”

  “And it never occurred to you to contact the station agent in either Berlin or Vienna or Budapest?”

  “I considered that and decided against it.”

  Montvale shook his head in obvious disgust. “So you went to Vienna to see what would happen?”

  “Let me tell this through, please,” Castillo said, and after a visibly annoyed Montvale nodded his assent, went on: “Nothing happened at the church, possibly because my people and the local cops were all over it. Afterward, Kocian said he wanted to go to the Kuhl funeral in Vienna and wanted to go there on the train. I sent the airplane ahead to Vienna, and Kocian and I—plus Kocian’s bodyguard and one of my guys—caught the train in Kassel.”

  “Which one of your guys?” Montvale said.

  “That’s not germane.”

  “The one General McNab sent to make sure you didn’t do anything stupid, as you’re so wont to do? The one sitting in there with the gendarmes? Sergeant Major Davidson?”

  “We went to lunch on the train,” Castillo said, ignoring the question. “Berezovsky, his wife and daughter, and Alekseeva were having their lunch. I recognized him from the photocopy of his passport picture and spoke to him. He said he would like to talk a little business, so I invited them to my compartment.

  “Thirty minutes later, they showed up—just Berezovsky and Alekseeva—told me who they were, and said they were willing to defect for two million dollars. I asked him what he had that was worth two million dollars, and he promised to tell me all about the chemical factory in the Congo once he was where he wanted me to take them in the Gulfstream.”

  “Where did he want you to take them?”

  “Next question?”

  “Okay. And at no time during all this did it occur to you that you were in way over your head with something like this, and what you should do was take these people to the U.S. embassy in Vienna and turn them over to the CIA station chief? Or call me, for Christ’s sake, and ask me what you should do? I thought we had an agreement.”

  “That implies that you have some authority over me, and we both know you don’t,” Castillo said. “We do have an agreement, but I came to understand that this did not fit its guidelines. Berezovsky and Alekseeva were antsy, and it came out they knew that th
e Kuhls had been whacked, and I decided that’s why they had come to me. They were afraid of what they were going to find in Vienna—from anyone who ultimately reports to you. Thus, the loophole in our agreement.”

  Montvale didn’t say anything for a moment as he looked across the room in thought. It was clear he was not happy with what he was hearing. He then said: “How did they come to contact you in Germany?”

  “My theory at the time was that Berezovsky went to Marburg to see that the ex-Stasi guys did a good job on Kocian and Göerner. Then—in what sequence, I don’t know—they saw my picture—Gossinger’s picture—in the Tages Zeitung—”

  “What was that all about?”

  “There was a front-page story that announced that the publisher—Gossinger—had returned to Germany from the States for Friedler’s funeral and was offering a reward—a large reward—for information leading to the people who had taken him out.

  “I decided that Berezovsky knew who Gossinger is—who I am—and saw in the newspaper photograph that I was traveling in the Gulfstream, and decided I was his safe ticket out of Europe.

  “What I guessed then turned out to be pretty much on the money. They told me that they had heard about the Kuhls, which suggested the SVR would be waiting for them in Vienna. And they had very little faith in the CIA station chief in Vienna, fearing that she would leave them hanging in the breeze if the SVR was onto them.

  “So I slipped them out of the West Bahnhof in Vienna, onto the Gulfstream, and got them the hell out of Dodge.”

  “And brought them here,” Montvale finished for him. “Where are they, Charley? To salvage anything from this mess, we have to get them to Washington and turned over to the agency just as soon as possible.”

  “No. That’s out of the question, I’m afraid. They are not going to turn themselves over to the agency.”

  Montvale exhaled audibly.

  He said: “You’re telling me that you offered to give them two million dollars to tell you all about the chemical factory in the Democratic Republic of the Congo? God, you don’t even know its name!”