Hazardous Duty pa-8
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“It… This is so wild I hate to even suggest it,” Roscoe said. “But it may have something to do with the President’s announcement at his press conference that he was convening a Cabinet meeting right after the press conference to implement his out-of-the-box thinking vis-à-vis the Somali pirates and the Mexican drug problem. Maybe he had Charley—”
“That’s the best you can do, Roscoe?” Edgar interrupted.
“I swear to G— Yes, it is.”
Two-Gun said, “It’s really too far off the wall that Clendennen would want to involve Charley—”
“You’ve got to stop thinking like an FBI agent, David,” Edgar interrupted him. “And start thinking out of your little box. This is so far off the wall that I think there’s probably something to Roscoe’s analysis.”
He slid the glass of twelve-year-old Macallan to Danton.
Danton took a sip, then said, “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
“But as much as I hate to leave such pleasant company, I’m going to have to run along,” Roscoe said.
“And you’re going to have to start thinking out of your journalist’s little box, Roscoe. You’re one of us now. And when one Merry Outlaw appears to be in the really deep doo-doo, other Merry Outlaws rush to help — they do not go into hiding. Got it?”
“Got it.”
“Good. Just so we’re all on the same page.”
“What do we do now?” Roscoe asked.
There was an ordinary telephone — a base plugged into the wall with a cord and a handset — sitting below the two dinosaurs behind the bar. Delchamps went to it and dialed a number from memory.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Director, sir. This is one of your retired employees, sir, Edgar Delchamps. How are you this afternoon, sir?”
“What can I do for you, Edgar?” DCI Lammelle asked.
Twenty-plus years previously, on his first assignment as an officer of the CIA Clandestine Service, Lammelle had been sent to Athens, Greece, to work for the station chief there, Mr. Edgar Delchamps.
His orders had been to “shine shoes, make beds, and do whatever else Delchamps tells you to do. And be goddamned grateful for the chance to see him at work.”
“Well, Louise and I have been sitting around Lorimer Manor — you remember Louise, don’t you, Mr. Lammelle?”
Two assignments after Greece, Lammelle had been sent to Lima, Peru, where Louise Chambers had been the CIA station chief. His orders then had been “to wash dishes, make beds, and do whatever else Miss Chambers tells you to do. And be goddamned grateful for the chance to see her at work.”
“Yes, of course,” Lammelle said.
“Well, as I was saying, Mr. DCI, sir, Louise and I have been sitting around Lorimer Manor having a little taste, watching the grass grow, and wondering if anything interesting was happening at our former place of employment. So we thought we’d give you a call for Auld Lange Syne and ask.”
“I can’t think of a thing, Edgar, but it’s nice to hear your voice.”
“And it’s always a pleasure to hear yours, sir. I guess you don’t consider chartering a Gulfstream from Panamanian Executive Aircraft to fly to Argentina as interesting as Louise and I do.”
“How the hell did you hear about that?” Mr. Lammelle inquired, and then hung up.
Fifteen seconds later, Mr. Delchamps’s CaseyBerry buzzed.
Delchamps said, “I’ll put this on loudspeaker,” and then punched the appropriate buttons.
Mr. Lammelle’s voice on the CaseyBerry loudspeaker picked up the conversation where he had left it: “Casey told you, right?”
“A good Clandestine Service officer, even a retired one, never reveals his sources. I thought I taught you that,” Delchamps said.
When Lammelle didn’t reply, Delchamps went on. “Well, if you’re not willing to share this with us, Mr. DCI, sir — and by this I mean everything, of course — then I guess ol’ Roscoe Danton, who just happens to be sitting here with Louise and me, is going to have to ask Mr. Blue Jay Hoboken, President Clendennen’s—”
“His name is Robin, not Blue Jay,” Lammelle interrupted without thinking.
“Whatever. I’ve never been much of an ornithologist. We’ll just have Mr. Danton ask Mr. Robin Redbreast Hoboken what transpired at the President’s Cabinet meeting that might have an effect on Charley Castillo. You remember Colonel Castillo, don’t you, Mr. DCI, sir?”
“Oh, shit!” DCI Lammelle said, and then, biting the bullet of recognition that he had no other choice, reported all he knew.
When he had finished, and there was no reply from Delchamps, Lammelle said, “Okay, Edgar, now it’s your turn. What do you know that I don’t?”
“Not a thing.”
“What are you thinking?”
“I think we have to wait until we learn what happens in Argentina. I can’t believe Charley would go along with a recall to extended hazardous duty, but he’s surprised me before.”
“That’s all?”
“Why don’t you call Panamanian Executive Aircraft and have them bill the LCBF Corporation for the charter? Why did you volunteer to have the Agency pay for it, anyway?”
“Because I didn’t think Jake would fly his airplane down there pro bono. Why does LCBF want to pay for it? Isn’t that robbing Peter to pay Paul?”
“LCBF isn’t going to pay for it. Casey got Those People to advance us a million dollars for our expenses in this.”
“So Casey is where you got your information?”
“No. I just got it from the CIA. Nice to talk to you, Mr. Director, sir. Let’s take lunch sometime when your busy schedule permits.”
“Edgar, I’m asking as nice as I know how. Please don’t do anything rash.”
“Have I ever done anything rash as long as you’ve known me?”
Lammelle grunted.
“I will pass on to you anything I hear, Edgar, if you do the same. Deal?”
“Deal.”
[THREE]
Aeropuerto Internacional Teniente Luis Candelaria
San Carlos de Bariloche, Río Negro Province, Argentina
0045 6 June 2007
The Gulfstream 550 touched smoothly down after a five-hour-and-twenty-six-minute flight — mostly at forty-five thousand feet and averaging 475 knots — from Panama City, Panama.
The co-pilot, who had made the landing, was a thirty-six-year-old, six-foot-two, 220-pound, very black native of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. When he had taxied the Gulfstream to the visiting aircraft tarmac and started to shut it down, he turned to the pilot, a forty-seven-year-old, six-foot-one, 170-pound, pale-skinned silver-haired native of Culpepper, Virginia.
“Candelaria was the first guy to fly over — I guess, really through—the Andes,” the co-pilot, Major H. Richard Miller, Junior, USA, Retired, announced. “Very large set of gonads.”
“Who was? And he did what?” Colonel Jacob D. Torine, USAF, Retired, asked.
“Lieutenant Luis Candelaria,” Miller clarified. “On April thirteenth, 1918, he took off from Zapala, Argentina, in an eighty-horse Sounier Morano Parasol, and two hours thirty later put it down the other side of the mountains in Cunco, Chile. He was Argentina’s first military aviator.”
“Thank you for sharing that with me, Dick. I always like to begin my day with little nuggets of aviation history.”
“You’re welcome.”
“And you are going to tell me, right, why you chose to enrich my life with that particular nugget at this moment in time and space?”
“Because that’s where we are,” Miller said. “Aeropuerto Internacional Teniente Luis Candelaria.” He pointed to a sign on the terminal building that said so. “The first time I came in here I saw that and figured I’d landed at the wrong airport — the Garmin screen said it was lining me up to land at Bariloche International — so I looked it up.”
“Experienced Air Force pilots such as myself never fully trust computerized navigation systems. I thought I’d taught you that.”
A glistening black Bell 429XP helicopter sat on the grass just off the tarmac. Beside it were two official trucks and eight men in an assortment of uniforms.
“I was afraid of that,” Torine said. “McNab told me that when he told Charley we were coming down here to talk about what the President wants him to do, Charley said unless Clendennen wanted to help him commit hari-kiri, he wasn’t interested in doing anything for him. When McNab said we were coming anyway, Charley said we would be wasting our time. And then he said, ‘Nice to talk to you, sir,’ and hung up.”
“So,” Miller interrupted, “when Charley got word we were an hour out, he came here in that 429, loaded Sweaty and Max into that adorable little three-million-dollar Cessna Mustang Sweaty gave him for his birthday, and the two of them took off…”
Torine took up the thought: “… and right about now he is making his approach to Santiago, Chile, or Punta del Este, Uruguay, or some other exotic South American dorf—”
“Where they will register in a nice hotel as Señor and Señora José Gonzales of Ecuador,” Miller finished the scenario.
“I see that our great minds are still marching down the same path,” Torine said. “So what do we do when we learn Charley is not available to be convinced he should trust the Commander in Chief and answer his call to extended hazardous active duty? And incidentally, what’s that ‘hazardous duty’ all about?”
“Hazardous duty pays an extra two hundred a month, and the President thinks that will entice Charley to accept the offer.”
“I forgot that. He must know how desperately Charley needs another two hundred a month. So, what do we do when we can’t find Charley?”
“We will get on our CaseyBerrys and have Junior tell his daddy and have Vic D’Alessandro tell General McNab. They are accustomed to being screamed at by them.”
“Colonel Naylor doesn’t like it when you call him ‘Junior,’” Torine said.
“I know. Payback. When we were at the Point, he encouraged my roommate to call me that. He knew I didn’t like it.”
“And what did he call you at West Point?”
“‘Sir.’ Junior was a year behind Charley and me.”
Torine pushed himself out of the pilot’s chair.
“Let’s go get the bad news,” he said.
Comandante Liam Duffy of the Argentine Gendarmería Nacional was waiting at the foot of the stair door. He warmly embraced both Torine and Miller.
“So tell me,” Miller said, “what’s my favorite Argentine-Irish cop doing out here in the boonies so far from the crime and fleshpots of Buenos Aires?”
“You mean in addition to greasing your way through Immigration and Customs?” Duffy replied in English that made him sound as if he had been born and raised in South Boston.
“Yeah.”
“I hoped you would ask,” Duffy said. “I am making sworn on the Holy Bible statements to His Eminence Archbishop Valentin and his chief of staff, Archimandrite Boris, of the ROCOR — which I’m sure you know is the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad — vis-à-vis Sweaty’s late husband—”
“What the hell is that all about?” Miller asked.
“Even a heathen like you should know that the Holy Scripture — specifically First Corinthians chapter seven, verse nine — clearly says that it’s better to marry than to burn.”
“What the hell are you talking about, Liam?”
“I’d love to clear things up, but they’re holding dinner for us.”
“‘Us’ including Charley, Liam?” Torine asked.
“Of course. He’s the one burning to get married. I wouldn’t do what I’m doing for anyone else. Get in the helicopter. We’ll take care of the luggage.”
“Who’s driving?” Miller asked.
“I am,” a pleasant-appearing man about Miller’s age said. “Colonel Castillo said that you would probably ask. Former Major Kiril Koshkov, onetime chief instructor pilot, Spetsnaz Aviation School, at your service, Colonel Junior Miller.”
Torine laughed and put out his hand.
“Jake Torine, Major. Pleased to meet you.”
“An honor, Colonel,” Koshkov said. “Would you like to ride in the left seat?”
“Thank you,” Torine said. “Junior, why don’t you get in the back with Vic and the other Junior?”
Two minutes later, they were airborne, and flying up the east shore of Lake Nahuel Huapi.
As a young officer, Torine had read a book—Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler, by two Englishmen, Simon Dunstan and Gerrard Williams — that posited that Adolf and Eva Braun had not committed suicide in the Führerbunker but rather had made it to Argentina, where they had lived on Estancia San Ramon, east of Bariloche, until the early 1960s.
That was right about where they were now.
He had dismissed the book as bullshit then and continued to do so until his first visit to Aleksandr Pevsner’s La Casa en Bosque — where they were headed now — several years before. The house was well named. It had been built on 1,500 hectares of heavily wooded land on the western shore of Lake Nahuel Huapi.
The moment he walked into the mansion, Torine had had the feeling he’d either been there before, or seen photographs of the foyer. This was damned unlikely, as Aleksandr Pevsner’s desire for privacy was legendary, and there was no chance he would have allowed a photographer from Better Homes and Gardens or Country Living or Architectural Digest anywhere near the place.
But the “I know this place” feeling didn’t go away, and the next day Torine mentioned it to Charley Castillo.
“Really?” Castillo had asked, smiling, and then he went into the false top of his laptop where he kept various things he didn’t want people to see and came out with a somewhat battered photograph.
It showed two men, Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring and a Wehrmacht colonel, standing with their hands folded in front of them in the foyer of La Casa en Bosque.
“The man with Göring is Oberst Hermann Wilhelm von und zu Gossinger,” Castillo said. “My grandfather.”
Confused, Torine had blurted, “But how could that have been taken here?”
“That was taken at Göring’s Karin Hall estate in Prussia,” Castillo said. “Shortly after Grandpa managed to get on the last plane out of Stalingrad.”
“What is this place, Charley? A clone of Karin Hall?”
“It certainly looks like it. All I know is that Pevsner bought this place from an American woman when he got out of Russia. After I showed him this photo, he told Howard Kennedy—”
“The ex — FBI agent who worked for Pevsner?” Torine interrupted. “The one someone slowly beat to death with an angle iron in the Conrad Hotel and gambling joint in Punta del Este? That Howard Kennedy?”
Castillo had nodded.
“Aleksandr explained to me that both Mr. Kennedy’s death and the painful manner thereof was necessary pour l’encouragement des autres not to think they could get away with setting the boss up to be whacked.
“Anyway, Kennedy couldn’t find the American woman who sold him this place and he looked very hard. As you well know, when Aleksandr tells somebody to do something and they don’t do it, or screw it up, his tantrums make the famous tantrums of General McNab in such circumstances look like a small, disappointed frown.
“But Aleksandr did manage to get the plans for Karin Hall from a dishonest German civil servant, and they looked like a Xerox copy of the plans from which this place was built. Or vice versa.”
“You think Göring was going to try to come here?” Torine asked.
“I don’t know, Jake,” Castillo had said, “and I don’t think anyone ever will.”
The Bell 429 made a sudden turn to the left, still close to the water, and both Jake Torine and Dick Miller decided it was some kind of evasive maneuver, and both wondered what they were
evading.
Three minutes after that, Koshkov turned on the landing lights, and ten seconds after that floodlights came on in what a moment before had been total blackness, and a moment after that a sign illuminated, giving the wind direction and speed.
And forty-five seconds after that the 429 touched down. As soon as it had, the floodlights and the sign went off, replaced by less intense lighting illuminating the helipad.
Janos Kodály, Aleksandr Pevsner’s hulking Hungarian bodyguard, was standing at the front fender of a Land Rover. Behind the Land Rover was a Mercedes SUV, beside which stood four men with Uzi submachine guns hanging from their shoulders.
It was a five-minute ride through the hardwood forest to the mansion, where Janos led them through the huge foyer to the library. There the females of the family were waiting for them.
One was the mistress of the manor, Aleksandr Pevsner’s wife, Anna. The second was their fifteen-year-old daughter, Elena, who, like her mother, was a fair-skinned blonde. The third was Laura Berezovsky, now Laura Barlow, wife of Tom Barlow, formerly SVR Polkovnik Dmitri Berezovsky. The fourth was their fourteen-year-old daughter, Sof’ya, now Sophie Barlow. The fifth was former SVR Podpolkovnik Svetlana Alekseeva, now in possession of Argentine documents identifying her as Susanna Barlow. Susanna and Tom Barlow were brother and sister. The Barlows and the Pevsners were cousins, through Aleksandr Pevsner’s mother.
They were all wearing black dresses, buttoned to the neck and reaching nearly to their ankles. The dresses concealed the curvatures of their bodies. Each had a golden cross hanging from her neck. Simple gold wedding rings on Anna’s and Laura’s hands were the only jewelry visible on any of them.
On the flight from Panama City, Lieutenant Colonel Naylor, who had never met either, asked Vic D’Alessandro what Mesdames Pevsner and Berezovsky looked like.
“Typical Russian females. You know, a hundred and sixty pounds, shoulders like a football player, stainless steel teeth…” D’Alessandro had replied, and then when he got the shocked look he was seeking from Colonel Naylor, said, “Think Lauren Bacall in her youth, dressed by Lord and Taylor, and bejeweled by the private customer service of Cartier. Truly elegant ladies. And the girls, their daughters, Elena and Sophie, look like what their mothers must have looked like when they were fourteen. Four attractive, very nice females.”