Black Ops

And if Otto didn’t, the blame for that was not Otto’s; it was his.

And now Billy knows it, and that hurts.

Otto has known the pecking order around Gossinger Beteiligungsgesellschaft, G.m.b.H., from the time he came here. He wasn’t in on Gossinger Beteiligungsgesellschaft, G.m.b.H., from the beginning; Billy was.

Even as a kid I knew that order: Grandpa—the Herr Oberst—was Lord and Master of all he surveyed. Then came Onkel Billy, Tier Two. Then Onkel Willi, Tier Three. And finally Otto, Tier Four.

Otto might’ve jumped to the top after Onkel Willi went off the bridge with Grandpa. But Grandpa’s will hadn’t left him much money—and not a single share of Gossinger Beteiligungsgesellschaft, G.m.b.H. And my mother didn’t marry him.

And since she didn’t have a clue on how to run the business, she turned to Uncle Billy, who not only knew how to run it but owned a quarter-share of it.

And the wisdom of that was confirmed when my other grandpa got in the act when my mother died. Otto moved into the Herr Oberst’s office, took on the titles and ran things—and was paid damned well for it. But Don Fernando’s bimonthly trips to Vienna and Billy’s bimonthly trips to San Antonio or Midland had nothing to do with Grandpa having discovered Wiener schnitzel or Billy having a new-found interest in the Wild West.

Grandpa controlled my three-quarter interest in the firm, and he and Billy decided between them that Otto, with the proper guidance, was well qualified to run the firm. And that they—with every right to do so—would provide that guidance to Otto.

It worked out well, and certainly a lot of the credit for its success goes to Otto. He’s paid an enormous salary and has a lot of perks. But the bottom line is that he doesn’t own any of Gossinger.

Billy and I own all of it.

Including this house.

I guess I should have gone into that when I was delivering the soap opera scenario in the car on the way here. The explanation would have helped to avoid the unease the others are feeling.

But I didn’t, and it’s too late now with Otto here.

There is, of course, a silver lining for me in the black cloud of Billy’s embarrassingly bad manners. He gave me what I so far hadn’t worked up the courage to ask him for: “The Tages Zeitung newspapers will do whatever we can toward that objective. Starting with doubling that reward to a hundred thousand euros. And—if I have to say this—by providing our Karlchen-the-intelligence-officer and his friends with whatever we have in the files that might help them to find these bastards.”

Kocian drained his glass of Slivovitz and looked around for Sándor Tor, who was nowhere in sight—probably taking Billy’s luggage to his room, Castillo decided—and then, muttering, headed for the bar, which was actually an enormous antique sideboard, obviously intending to get a refill.

Castillo got up and followed him.

“Easy on the sauce, Billy,” Castillo said softly.

Kocian raised one bushy, snow-white eyebrow.

“What did you say?”

“I said go easy on the Slivovitz.”

“You don’t dare tell me what to do, Karlchen!”

“I don’t like her any more than you do, Billy, but we don’t need to humiliate her, or Otto, and make everybody else uncomfortable. Including Hermann and Willi.”

“Go fuck yourself, Karlchen!”

Castillo shrugged.

“Suit yourself,” he said. “I know better than to argue with an old drunk wallowing in self-pity.”

“Self-pity? You arrogant little ...”

By then Castillo was halfway back to his chair.

That was not one of my smartest moves, Charley thought as he went.

Why the hell did I do that?

Not as a considered move.

I guess the Boy Scout in me suddenly bubbled up and escaped.

Well, I certainly managed to make things worse than they were.

Helena reappeared several minutes later.

“It’ll be just a few more minutes, Billy,” she said.

Castillo looked at Kocian, who he found was already glaring at him.

Kocian drained his second glass of Slivovitz.

“Helena,” Kocian said, “it has been pointed out to me that my behavior toward you and your family tonight has been shameful.”

“I don’t know what you mean, Billy,” she said.

“Pray let me finish.” He waited until she nodded, then went on: “I can only hope you can find it in your heart to forgive an old drunk wallowing in self-pity over the loss of a man who was like a son to him.”

“Billy, you’ve not said nor done anything to apologize to me for.”

“Otto,” Kocian announced, “your wife is a lousy liar. One with a kind and gracious heart. She’s much too good for you.”

Helena went to Kocian and kissed him.

Kocian looked at Castillo.

“In case you’re curious, Karlchen, that was my heart speaking, not the Slivovitz.”

Castillo felt his throat tighten and his eyes start to water. He quickly got out of his chair.

“Did you drink all the Slivovitz, Onkel Billy? Or can I have one?”

“I think,” Otto Görner said, “that we should get into the arrangements for tomorrow.”

[TWO]

Das Haus im Wald

Near Bad Hersfeld

Kreis Hersfeld-Rotenburg

Hesse, Germany

0830 27 December 2005

The drapes over the plateglass windows had been opened, and everyone at the breakfast table could see what Castillo was describing in what he called Lesson Seven, Modern European History 202.

“You see that thing that looks sort of like a control tower? In the middle of the field?”

“There was an airstrip, Charley?” Jack Davidson asked.

“No. And don’t interrupt teacher again unless you raise your hand and ask permission first.”

Hermann and Willi, sitting on the floor playing with the puppies, giggled.

Castillo turned to them. “And laughing at your godfather also is verboten!”

They giggled again.

“As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted,” Castillo went on, “was that that thing that looks sort of like a control tower was sort of the command post for half a dozen other, simpler control towers, three on each side. There were telephones in the smaller ones, and the larger one had telephones and radios connected to the next level of command—”

Davidson raised his hand.

“Yes, Jackie, you may go tend to your personal problem,” Castillo said. “But don’t forget—as you usually do—to wash your hands when you’re finished.”

Hermann and Willi giggled again.

“Why is it still there?” Davidson asked. “Too expensive to knock down?”

“Otto and I decided to leave it up, ‘Lest we forget,’ ” Kocian said. “It did cost a small fortune to take down the other towers and, of course, the fence itself.”

“Thank you, Professor Doktor Kocian,” Castillo said. “Turning to the fence. You see, about three hundred meters this side of the tower, a road—or what’s left of one?”

Everybody looked.

“The road is a few meters from what was the actual border. The fence was a hundred meters inside East Germany. They reserved the right—and used it—to shoot onto their land this side of the fence. They also tried to mine it, but were frustrated in that endeavor by good old American ingenuity.”

“You want to—” Captain Sparkman began, then abruptly stopped, raised his hand, and said, “Sorry.”

“You’re going to have to learn like Jackie here to take care of that sort of thing before coming to class, Sparky.”

That got the expected reaction from Hermann and Willi. Even Otto smiled.

“American ingenuity?” Sparkman pursued.

“As my heroes, the stalwart troops of the Fourteenth Armored Cavalry, made their rounds down the road, they could of course see their East German counterparts laying the mines. And they of course could not protest. But once the field was in, and grass sown over the mines so that those terrible West Germans fleeing the horrors of capitalism for the Communist heaven would not see the mines and blow themselves—”

“Onkel Karl is being sarcastic, boys,” Otto said. “The fence was built to keep East Germans from escaping to the West.”

“Onkel Karl, you said, ‘my heroes’?” Willi asked, his right arm raised.

“When I was your age, Willi, what I wanted to be when I grew up was a member of the Black Horse regiment, riding up and down the border in a jeep or an armored car or even better”—he met Otto’s eyes, then Billy Kocian’s—“in a helicopter, protecting the West Germans from their evil cousins on the other side of the fence. I could not tell my grandfather or my mother or anybody this, however, because, for reasons I didn’t understand, they didn’t like Americans very much.”

“Why?” Willi asked.

Otto and Kocian both shook their heads.

“Getting back to the minefields,” Castillo said. “Once the minefields were in—Bouncing Betties; really nasty mines—”

“Bouncing Betties?” Hermann asked.

“You didn’t raise your hand, but I will forgive you this once. When someone steps on a Bouncing Betty, it goes off, then jumps out of the ground about a meter, then explodes again. This sends the shrapnel into people’s bodies from their knees up. Very nasty.”

The boys’ faces showed they understood.

“Trying this one more time,” Castillo went on, “after the minefields were in and the Volkspolizei and the border guards and the Army of the German Democratic Republic were congratulating themselves, a trooper of the Fourteenth reintroduced one of the oldest artillery weapons known, the catapult.”

Willi’s hand shot back up.

“The what?”

“I will demonstrate.” Castillo reached for the sugar bowl, took out an oblong lump of sugar, and put it on the handle of a spoon. “What do you think would happen if I banged my fist against the other end of the spoon?”

“They get the idea, Karl,” Otto said. “You don’t have to—”

BAM!

The lump of sugar flew in a high arc across the table and crashed against the plateglass window.

Hermann’s and Willi’s eyes widened.

“That is a catapult,” Castillo said. “So what the troopers of the Black Horse did was build a great big one, big enough to throw four cobblestones wired together. They mounted it on a jeep and practiced with it until they got pretty good. And then they waited for a really dark night and sneaked the catapult close to the minefield—and started firing cobblestones. Eventually, one landed on a Bouncing Betty. It went off. There is a phenomenon known as sympathetic explosion, which means that one explosion sets off another. Bouncing Betties went off all over the minefield.

“The troopers got back in their jeep and took off. The Communists decided that they’d caught a whole bunch of dirty capitalists trying to sneak into their Communist paradise. Floodlights came on. Sirens screamed. Soldiers rushed to the area. All they found was a bunch of exploded Betties and some cobblestones.”

Hermann and Willi were obviously enthralled with the story.

Castillo was pleased.

“After that happened a couple of times,” he went on, “they started placing their mines on the other side of the fence. That was out of range of the catapult—”

“Excuse me, Herr Gossinger,” a maid said as she entered the room and extended a portable telephone to Castillo. “It’s the American embassy in Berlin. They say it’s important.”

“Thank you,” Castillo said, and reached for the telephone.

“Hello?”

“Have I Karl Wilhelm von und zu Gossinger?” a male voice asked in German.

Sounds like a Berliner, Castillo thought. Some local hire who will connect me with some Foggy Bottom bureaucrat too important to make his own calls.

“Ja.”

“My name is Tom Barlow, Colonel Castillo,” the caller said, now in faultless American English. “Sorry to bother you so early in the day, but the circumstances make it necessary.”

Okay, the American guy speaks perfect German. So what? So do I. So do Edgar and Jack.

But he called me “Colonel Castillo”?

“What circumstances are those, Mr. Barlow?” Castillo asked, switching to English.

“I thought that you would be interested to know that an attempt will be made on your life today during the services for Herr Friedler. Actually, on yours and those of Herr Görner and Herr Kocian.”

“You’re right. I find that fascinating. Are you going to tell me how this came to the attention of the embassy?”

“Oh, the embassy doesn’t know anything about it.”

“Okay, then how did it come to your attention?”

“I ordered it. I’ll explain when we meet. But watch your back today, Colonel. The workers are ex-Stasi and are very good at what they do.”

There was a click and the line went dead.

Castillo looked at his godchildren. They were looking impatiently at him to continue the stories of fun and games with Communists in the good old days.

[THREE]

When Castillo had been growing up in das Haus im Wald, he lived in a small apartment—a bedroom, a bath, and a small living room—on the left of the Big Room on the third floor. It had been his Onkel Willi’s as a boy. To the right had been “The Herr Oberst’s Apartment,” twice the size and with one more bedroom that had been converted into sort of a library with conference table.

Everyone still referred to it as The Herr Oberst’s Apartment, but it was now where Castillo was housed. Enough of the Herr Oberst’s furniture had been moved out to accommodate Karlchen’s bed and childhood possessions. The furniture removed had gone into the smaller apartment, which was now referred to as “Onkel Billy’s Apartment.”

Castillo had wondered idly who had made the decision for the change, but had never been curious enough to ask.

He remembered that now—probably because of the soap opera and history lectures, he thought—as he led everyone into The Herr Oberst’s Apartment.

The room assignment was to mark the pecking order.

Although occupied as a perk by our managing director and his family, the house in fact belongs to Gossinger Beteiligungsgesellschaft, G.m.b.H.

I am the majority stockholder thereof, and so have been given the larger apartment. And Billy, because he owns what stock I don’t, has the smaller apartment.

But who made the assignment—Billy or Otto?

“I hated to run the boys off that way,” Castillo said as he waved everybody into chairs around the conference table. “But I didn’t think they should hear this.”

“Who was on the phone, Ace?” Delchamps asked as he sat down and pushed toward Castillo an ashtray that had been made from a large boar’s foot.

“The name Tom Barlow mean anything to anybody?” Castillo asked as he found, bit the end off, and then carefully lit a cigar.

When everyone had shrugged or shaken his head or said no—or various combinations thereof—Castillo continued: “This guy told the maid—probably in German—that he was from our embassy in Berlin and wanted to speak to Gossinger. When I got on the line, he asked me—in German, Berliner’s accent—if I was Gossinger, and then, when I said I was, he switched to English—American, perfect, sounded midwestern—called me Colonel Castillo, said his name was Tom Barlow, and that he hated to call but thought I would be interested to learn that an attempt will be made on my life—and on Otto’s and Billy’s—during the Friedler funeral.”

“My God!” Görner said.

“I asked him how the embassy came into this information, and he said that the embassy didn’t know. Then I asked him how he knew. And he said because he had ordered the hits, and that he would explain that when we met, and that I should be careful as the hitters are ex-Stasi and good at what they do.”

“Why do I think we’ve just heard from the SVR?” Edgar Delchamps said. “I wonder what they’re up to.”

“You think this threat is credible?” Görner asked. “That the SVR is involved?”

“I think it’s credible enough for us to stay away from the funeral,” Castillo said.

“Prefacing this by saying I’m going to Günther Friedler’s services,” Billy Kocian said, “what I think they’re up to, Edgar, is trying to frighten us, and I have no intention of giving them that satisfaction.” He paused and looked at Castillo. “There will be police all over, Karl. The SVR is not stupid. They are not going to spray the mourners with submachine gun fire or detonate a bomb in Saint Elisabeth’s.”

“Uncle Billy has a point, Ace,” Delchamps said.

“Karl, what I think we should do is contact the police,” Görner said, “the Bundeskriminalamt. . . .”

“Otto,” Castillo said, “we’re pressed for time. We don’t have time to convince the local cops or the Bundeskriminalamt that there even is a threat. All we have is the telephone call to me. And I’m not about to tell the local cops, much less the Bundeskriminalamt, that this guy called Gossinger is really ‘Colonel Castillo.’ And unless I did, they would decide that all we have is a crank call from some lunatic.”

“So what do you suggest?” Görner replied.

“The first thing we do is circle the wagons.”

“What?” Görner asked.

“Set up our own defense perimeter,” Castillo said. “Protect ourselves. Everybody’s here but the FBI. Now, we don’t know if these people know about Yung and Doherty, but we have to presume they do. So the first thing we do is get them out of the Europäischer Hof.”

“Get them out to where?” Kocian asked.

“Someplace in the open,” Castillo said. “Where we can meet them and where we can see people approaching.” He paused and then went on: “I think Billy’s right. We should not let these bastards think they’ve scared us. Which means we will go to Saint Elisabeth’s. You game for that, Otto?”

“Of course,” Görner said firmly after hesitating just long enough to make Castillo suspect he really didn’t think that was such a good idea.

“The boys and Helena?” Kocian asked.

“Surrounded by our security people,” Castillo said. “Not sitting with us. We have reserved seats?”

“Of course,” Görner said. “But I can change the arrangements for them.”

“Okay. Now, what we need is a place in the open not too far from Saint Elisabeth’s where we can meet. Suggestions?”

No one had any suggestions.

Finally, Castillo had one: “Otto, you know the place, the walk, just below the castle? That’s open, not far from the church. . . .”

Görner nodded.

“That’d do it,” he said.

“How quick can we get our security people over to the Europäischer Hof to take Yung and Doherty there?” Castillo asked. “They’re armed, right?”

“Yes, of course they’re armed,” Görner said. “And I can call the supervisor.”

He reached for the telephone on the table and began to punch numbers from memory.

“That raises the question of weapons for us,” Castillo said. He looked around the table and asked, “Weapons?”

Everybody shook his head.

“This is Otto Görner,” Görner said into the telephone. “Who’s in charge?”

“It would take a couple of hours to get the weapons from the Gulfstream,” Jake Torine said. “Presuming we could smuggle them off the airfield.”

“So that’s out,” Castillo said. “Damn!”

“Hunting weapons here, Charley?” Davidson asked. “Rifles, shotguns, anything?”

“There’s a cut-down single-shot Winchester .22 rifle in the wardrobe. Or there was the last time I looked. I didn’t see any cartridges.” Castillo paused in deep thought, listened as Görner finished his call, then said: “We have to get weapons from someplace. Otto, does the security service or whatever you call it have some sort of arsenal we can get into?”

Görner didn’t answer directly. Instead, he reported, “The supervisor will move four men from the church to the Europäischer Hof, and take your men to the Philipps Castle. Which means there will be that many fewer to protect the Friedlers.”

“The bad guys are not after the Friedler family,” Castillo said. “They’re after you and Billy. And me. Now, get back on the phone and call whoever you have in the Bundeskriminalamt and tell them you have learned of a credible threat to you and Billy and the Friedlers—no details—and to act accordingly. Let them deal with the local cops.”

Görner reached for the telephone.

“Before you do that, Otto,” Castillo said, “tell me about weapons. Is there anything here? Hunting rifles, shotguns, anything? Or can we get some from the security people?”

“I very strongly suggest we go to the police,” Görner said. “They know how to deal with situations like this.”

“Otto, right now I’m not asking for suggestions. I asked where we can get our hands on some goddamn weapons! Answer the question!”

“Cool, Charley, cool,” Davidson said in Pashtu.

“Otto,” Kocian said. “He may not look like it, but Little Karlchen is actually very good at what he does. If there are any guns, tell him.”

Görner’s face, which had been flushed, now turned pale.

“The Herr Oberst’s drilling is over the mantel in my living room. There are several shotguns. And the game wardens, of course, are armed.”

“Bingo!” Castillo said. “We have just found a Heckler & Koch submachine gun. Otto, get Siggie Müller on the line for me, please.”

“The guy on the road?” Delchamps asked.

“That was an MP7 under his coat,” Castillo said. “Maybe he’ll know where we can find something else we can use. I don’t want to walk into church trying to hide a drilling under my coat.”

“Siggie’ll know,” Kocian said as he reached impatiently for the telephone Görner had just finished dialing.

Castillo looked at Kocian with curiosity but didn’t say anything.

“What’s a drilling?” Sparkman asked.

“A side-by-side shotgun,” Castillo said. “Usually sixteen-gauge. With a rifle barrel, usually seven-millimeter, underneath.”

“I never heard of anything like that.”

“That’s because you went to the Air Force Academy, Captain Sparkman,” Castillo said. “At West Point, we learn all about guns.”

“Screw you, Charley,” Torine said loyally.

“Siggie, here is Eric Kocian,” Billy said into the telephone. “I need to see you just as soon as you can get here. We’re in the big room. Bring your weapon, preferably weapons.”

[FOUR]

Müller appeared five minutes later. By then Görner had spoken to the Bundeskriminalamt, and was just hanging up the phone after speaking with his security supervisor.

“You been in the attic lately, Siggie?” Kocian asked.

Müller looked uncomfortable. He nodded but didn’t reply.

“What’s in the attic?” Görner asked.

“Something the Herr Oberst and I put there and didn’t want you and Helena to worry about. Siggie did not like keeping it from you. I insisted.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“When the Herr Oberst and I escaped from the Russians—”

“Escaped from the Russians?” Castillo asked. “I thought you were captured by the English?”

“That’s the story the Herr Oberst told. He did not wish to further alarm his wife unnecessarily. We were captured by, and escaped from, the Red Army. We walked from near Stettin—now Szczecin, just inside Poland—to here. We saw the rape of Berlin. We saw the rape of every other place the Red Army went. It very much bothered the Herr Oberst.”

“I don’t think I understand,” Castillo said.

“I know I don’t,” Görner said.

“Let’s show them what we have in the attic, Siggie,” Kocian said.

“Jawohl, Herr Kocian.”

Müller led them to a closet off the sitting room. He took a chair into the closet, stood on it, put his hands flat against a low ceiling, and pushed hard upward. There was a screeching sound and one side of the ceiling folded upward.

“Over the years, there have been improvements to what was originally here,” Kocian said. “The ceiling—the door—is now hinged, for example. We used to have to prop it open. And there were no electric lights here in the old days.”

As if it had been rehearsed, Siggie stretched an arm into the hole. There was a click and electric lights came on. Then he heaved and grunted, and let down from the attic a simple, sturdy ladder.

He looked to Kocian for direction.

“I’m really too old to be climbing ladders,” Kocian said, then climbed nimbly up it.

Müller gestured for Castillo to go up the ladder. He did so and found himself in something he realized with chagrin he had never even suspected existed. The area was as large as the apartment beneath. The roof was so steeply pitched, however, that there was room for only three men standing abreast in the center.

Against each side of the room were six olive-drab oblong metal boxes on wooden horses, just far enough toward the center so that their lids could be raised.

On each box—on the top, the sides, and the front—was a stenciled legend, the paint a faded yellow. Castillo squatted to get a look.

STIELHANDGRANATE 24

20 STUCK

BOHMISCHE WAFFENFABRIK A. G. PRAG

It was a moment before he remembered that under the Nazis, Czechoslovakia had been the “Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia” and that the “Bohemian Weapons Factory” in Prague was the Czech factory that the Germans had taken over.

Kocian saw him looking.

“Hand grenades aren’t the first thing that comes to mind when you hear ‘Bohemia, ’ are they, Karlchen?”

“No,” Castillo replied simply.

Delchamps came off the ladder, saw the boxes, read the labeling, and said, “I was really hoping for something a little less noisy than potato mashers.”

Castillo and Kocian both chuckled.

Kocian went to one of the boxes and opened it with an ease that suggested this wasn’t the first time he’d opened a crate of hand grenades.

What the hell. Why not? He was a corporal in Stalingrad when he was eighteen. He’s probably opened several hundred ammo boxes like these.

Otto Görner, wheezing a little, came off the ladder.

“Ach, mein Gott,” he said softly when he saw the ammunition boxes.

Kocian took something wrapped in a cloth from the box and extended it to Castillo.

“I considered giving you this when you finished West Point. But I thought you would either lose it or shoot yourself in the foot with it.”

Castillo unwrapped the small package. It held a well-worn Luger pistol, two magazines, and what looked like twenty-odd loose cartridges.

“You know what it is, presumably?” Kocian asked.

West Point—or maybe Camp Mackall—came on automatically. Castillo picked up the pistol with his thumb and index finger on the grip, worked the action to ensure it was unloaded, then examined it carefully before reciting in English: “Pistol 08, Parabellum. Often referred to as the Luger. This one—made by Deutsche Waffen und Munitionsfabriken, Berlin, in 1913—is 9 by 19 millimeters. Also called 9mm-NATO.”

Castillo looked at Kocian.

“It was the Herr Oberst’s,” Kocian said. “He had that with him at Stalingrad. And before that, the Herr Oberst’s father, your great-grandfather, carried it in France.”

“Jesus!” Castillo said.

“It is now yours, Oberstleutnant Castillo,” Kocian said with emotion in his voice, and not a hint of his usual sarcasm.

“How the hell did it survive the war?” Castillo asked.

By then, without thinking about it, he had stuck his finger in the action and was moving it so that light would be reflected off his fingernail and into the barrel for his inspection.

“It’s been used, but there’s no pitting.”

“I have taken care of it, Karlchen,” Müller said. “Herr Kocian told me it would one day come to you.”

“I envisioned somewhat different circumstances from these today,” Kocian said, and Castillo heard the sarcasm now was back in his voice.

Castillo looked at Müller and again asked, “How the hell did it survive the war?”

“When the Herr Oberst—after he was freed from the hospital—was given command of the Offizier POW Lager, he left it here. He told me the war was lost, and he didn’t want his father’s pistol to wind up in the hands of some Russian commissar.”

“Here in the attic?”

“No. Actually, he had me bury it in a machine-gun ammo box under the manure pile behind the stable. It was after the war that it—that all this material—was moved and placed up here.”

“Tell me about that,” Castillo said.

“Karl, we’re pressed for time,” Görner said.

“Not that pressed,” Castillo said.

“I don’t know, Otto, if you’ve ever heard this story,” Kocian said.

“I have no idea what story you’re going to tell,” Görner replied.

“Well, by the time the Herr Oberst and I got here,” Kocian went on, “this house was occupied by a company of American engineers. So we went to a farmer’s house—Müller’s father’s house—on the farm. The Herr Oberst then became ex-Gefreite Gossinger, as he didn’t want to be rearrested by the Americans as he would have been as an oberstleutnant. When I came back here from Vienna, he and Siggie’s father were plowing the field with the one horse that had miraculously escaped both the German Army and hungry people.

“Two weeks after that, the Russians arrived. The border between the Russian and American Zones was then marked off, our horse stolen, and we were evicted on thirty minutes’ notice from Müller’s father’s house.

“We came to the big house. The Herr Oberst planned to beg the American officer, a captain, for permission to live in the stable, and perhaps to work for food.

“As we walked across the field, a small convoy of Americans arrived at the big house. Two jeeps, an armored car, and a large, open Mercedes. On seeing this, we turned and tried to hide. No luck. We were spotted. A jeep with three MPs and a machine gun caught us before we’d made a hundred meters.

“We were then marched in front of the jeep up to the big house. As we got close to the Mercedes, we saw there was a senior officer in it. The Herr Oberst said, ‘One star, Billy, a brigadier.’

“Then this brigadier general stood up and motioned for our captors to bring us close.

“ ‘I am General Withers, the Military Governor of Hesse-Kassel,’ he said in perfect German. ‘I came here today in what my staff told me was going to be a vain search for an old and dear friend. Hermann, the same bastards told me they had proof you had been murdered by the Gestapo!’

“The Herr Oberst . . .” Kocian went on, but then his voice broke. “The Herr Oberst . . . The Herr Oberst came to attention and saluted. General Withers got out of the car and they embraced, both of them crying.”

“I had not heard that story,” Görner said. “I knew that he knew the military governor, but . . .”

“The Herr Oberst was a proud man. He was ashamed that that friendship got him, got us, special treatment.”

“You mean,” Delchamps asked, “permission to start up the newspapers again? Charley told us about that.”

“That came later,” Kocian said. “That day, that very day, we were fed American rations—unbelievable fare; we had considered one boiled potato a hearty meal—and the engineer captain was told that his unit would be moved, and until it was, Herr Gossinger would look after the property. Staying in the apartment on the third floor.

“The Americans were gone a week later. A sign was erected stating the property had been requisitioned for use by the military governor. American rations mysteriously appeared on the verandah. American gasoline mysteriously appeared in the stable, in which captured German vehicles suitable for adaptation to agricultural purposes had also mysteriously appeared. Getting the picture?”

“What about the weapons?” Castillo asked.

“There had been several ack-ack—antiaircraft—batteries on the property,” Kocian explained. “We found some of the weapons, and all of the hand grenades in the magazine of one of them. And others turned up. The Herr Oberst believed—as did your General George S. Patton, by the way—that it would be only a matter of time before the Red Army came through the Fulda Gap. We had seen the raping of Berlin and elsewhere. The Herr Oberst decided many would prefer to die fighting than fall into the hands of the Reds. So we moved the weapons here. Fortunately, they weren’t needed. Until now.”

“What else is in the boxes, Billy?” Jack Davidson asked from behind Castillo.

Castillo looked at him in surprise; he hadn’t seen or heard him coming up the ladder. And then he saw something else that surprised him. Without making a conscious decision to do so, Castillo had been feeding the loose cartridges into his pistol’s magazine. One was already full, the other nearly so.

“A little bit of everything,” Kocian replied. “One of the boxes is full of hand grenades. Several kinds of maschinenpistols—MP-40s, MP-43s—plus a number of pistols, mostly Walther P-38s, but some Lugers. There’s even American .45s.”

“You just said the magic words, Billy,” Davidson said. “MP-43 and .45.”

“Jack, you can’t go anywhere near the church—you can’t go anywhere—with a Schmeisser,” Castillo said.

“I can, Karlchen,” Müller said. “I am licensed to have a machine pistol.”

“Which means,” Davidson said, “we can have a couple of spares for Herr Müller on the floorboard of the car he’s in.”

“That’s if Siggie is willing to involve himself in this,” Castillo said.

“Ach, Karlchen!” Müller snorted, suggesting the question was stupid.

“See if you can find a P-38 for me in there, Billy,” Delchamps said.

“And a couple of .45s for me and Sparkman,” Torine said. “And for Charley, too. Charley is a real .45 fan.”

“Not today, Jake,” Castillo said, in the process of slipping the Luger into the small of his back as he approached the ladder.

[FIVE]

“The Castle Walk”

Philipps University

Marburg an der Lahn

Hesse, Germany

1040 27 December 2005

The castle of the Landgraves of Hesse-Kassel—now the signature building of Philipps Universität—had been built at the peak of a steep hill. What had probably been a path hacked out of the granite had been broadened over the years—most likely centuries—into a two-lane cobblestone road against the castle wall. Sometime later, an area perhaps two hundred meters long and thirty-five meters wide had been somehow added to the steep sides of the hill. A neat little wall kept people and cars from going over the edge into the city below.

Castillo, the collar of his trench coat up and buttoned around his neck against the cold, sat with his feet dangling over the wall, clenching an unlit cigar between his teeth. Max, his natural coat clearly making him immune to the cold, lay contentedly by the wall. Siggie Müller, the drape of his Loden cloth cape revealing the outline of what had indeed turned out to be a Heckler & Koch MP7A1 submachine gun, leaned against the hood of Otto Görner’s Jaguar.

Castillo was trying to follow his own advice—and for once being successful—which was that as soon as you have decided what to do, and put the decision into action, stop thinking about it and think of something else. That way, your mind will be clearer if you have to revisit your decisions when something goes wrong.

What he had decided to do was send Jack Davidson to have a look at the church. Davidson was a recognized expert in being able to spot places where a sniper—or something else dangerous, such as an improvised explosive device, or IED—might be concealed.

That decision had been implemented without even discussion. Edgar Delchamps suggested that it might be a good idea if he, too, went to the church and looked around. So both Jack and Edgar were at the church.

It had been Castillo’s intention to send Inspector Doherty and Two-Gun Yung to das Haus im Wald. Both had made it clear that anyone refusing the services of two FBI agents—one of them very senior and the other a distinguished veteran of the Battle of Shangri-La—in these circumstances was not playing with a full deck.

Doherty and Yung, now equipped with P-38s from the grenade cases in the attic, were melding themselves into the crowds of mourners and curious—mostly the latter, according to a telephoned report from Inspector Doherty—at Saint Elisabeth’s.

So were Colonel Jacob Torine and Captain Richard Sparkman of the United States Air Force, both of whom had shot down Castillo’s theory that it might be a good idea if they went to Flughafen Frankfurt am Main and readied the Gulfstream for flight, in case they had to go somewhere in a hurry.

“We’ll be ready to go wheels-up thirty minutes after we get to the airport,” Colonel Torine had said. “That’s presuming you can tell us where we’re going. And while you’re making up your mind about that, Captain Sparkman and I will pass the time in church.”

Eric Kocian and Otto Görner and his wife and children, surrounded by twice their number of security guards, had gone to Wetzlar so they could be part of the funeral procession. Castillo was more than a little uncomfortable that Willi and Hermann were involved, but that decision, too, had been taken from him. Otto had decided there was no way the boys could be left at home without telling Helena why, and he wasn’t up to facing that.

Otto said Helena would decide that if there was a threat to her and the boys, then there also was a threat to her husband, and he would just have to miss the Friedler funeral, something he had no intention of doing.

What Castillo was thinking of, to divert his attention from those things now out of his control, was “the castle walk” itself.

He had been here more times than he could count, from the time he was a small boy. He thought it was about the nicest place in Marburg. But when he had “suggested” to Otto that he have the security people bring Yung and Doherty here from the Europäischer Hof, he couldn’t think of its name. It hadn’t been a problem. Otto, an alt Marburger, had of course known where and what Castillo meant by “the castle walk.” But Castillo hadn’t heard him when Otto talked to the security people, so he hadn’t heard what name Otto had told them.

It had to have a name—Universitätstrasse, or Philippsweg, or even Universitätplatz—and not remembering—maybe not knowing—what it was annoyed Castillo. So as he drove Otto’s Jaguar up the hill, and then onto it, he started looking for signs. He had found none by the time he’d brought the car to a stop and he and Siggie had gotten out.

The castle walk was as he had remembered it, and he thought it had probably looked just about the same when his grandfather had begun his first year at the university. Or his great-grandfather.

Castillo remembered sitting here with his mother, eating a würstchen, and then, when his mother wasn’t watching, throwing the sandwich over the edge and watching it fall. It was a long way down. Twice, he had managed to hit a streetcar. He had never been caught.

“Karlchen,” Müller called softly, looking across the car and down the road.

Castillo looked over his shoulder.

A black Volkswagen Golf was coming up the road. The windows were darkened, and on its roof were multiple antennae neither available from nor installed by the manufacturer. It wasn’t the car that had taken Davidson and Delchamps to the church, but Müller obviously recognized it as a security car—he hadn’t bothered to move off the Jaguar, even when the Golf pulled in the parking space beside it—and Castillo was not surprised when Davidson and Delchamps got out.

Delchamps held a large, somewhat battered briefcase in his hand, and Castillo decided that was where he was carrying the P-38 he’d taken from the hand grenade box in the attic.

Castillo swung his legs off the wall and stood up. Max sat up, too.

“A very interesting development, Ace,” Delchamps said.

Castillo raised his eyebrow but didn’t say anything. Then he noticed that Delchamps was wearing gloves, some sort of surgeon’s gloves but thicker.

Delchamps went into the briefcase and came out with what at first looked to Castillo like a small unmarked package of Kleenex, the sort found on hotel bathroom shelves and which some petty thieves, including one C. G. Castillo, often took with them when checking out.

Delchamps went into the package and pulled from it another pair of the gloves. He handed them to Castillo.

“Rubber gloves, Ace. Never leave home without them.”

Castillo pulled them on.

Delchamps went back into his briefcase and took out a business-size envelope.

“Eagle Eye here spotted this in your prayer book,” he said.

“What?”

Davidson said, “Your seats—yours, Billy’s, and Otto’s—were in the second row, right side. There were prayer books, hymnals, whatever, in a rack on the back of the front row of seats—”

“Pew,” Castillo corrected him without thinking.

“Okay. Pew. A printed program was stuck in each prayer book. I saw this peeking out of the program in the center prayer book.”

“And you opened it?” Castillo asked. “You ever hear of ricin?”

“Edgar opened it,” Davidson said. “And yeah, Charley, I’ve heard of ricin.”

“I stole those gloves from the lab at Langley,” Delchamps said. “They’re supposed to be ricin-proof. And a lot of other things proof. When the lab guy showed them to me, he said they cost thirty bucks a pair.”

“Well, if we start soiling our shorts then dropping like flies, we’ll know he wasn’t telling the truth, won’t we?” Castillo said and reached for the envelope.

“I don’t think they want you dead, Ace. If they did, they would have just put whatever on the prayer books.” Delchamps pulled, then released the wrist of his left glove; it made a snap. “But ‘Caution’ is my middle name.”

He went into the briefcase again and came out with three red-bound books.

“Billy and Otto don’t get no prayer books,” he said. “They’ll just have to wing it.”

Castillo examined the envelope. It was addressed—by a computer printer, he saw; no way to identify which one—to “Herr Karl v. und z. Gossinger.”

The envelope had been slit open at the top with a knife.

Castillo reached inside and saw what looked like calling cards. He took them out. There were four, held together with a paper clip. They were printed, again by a computer printer. One read “Budapest”; the second, “Vienna”; and the third, “Berlin.”

An “X” had been drawn across “Berlin” by what looked like a felt-tip permanent marker. The fourth card had “Tom Barlow” printed on it.

Castillo looked at Delchamps and Davidson. Both shrugged.

Castillo handed the cards to Davidson, then took from the envelope a sheet of paper that had been neatly folded in thirds. He unfolded it.

It was a photocopy of two pages of the data section of a passport. Castillo saw first that it was a Russian passport, and a split second later saw that it was a Russian diplomatic passport.

Across the bottom of the first page was the legend SECOND SECRETARY OF THE EMBASSY OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION IN THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF GERMANY.

The second page had a photograph of a man of about Castillo’s age. His neatly trimmed, light-brown hair was nearly blond. He wore a crisp white shirt with a neatly tied, red-striped necktie.

He looks, Castillo thought, more Teutonic than Slavic.

It gave his name as Dmitri Berezovsky. It said he was born in the USSR on 22 June 1969.

Which makes him four days younger than I am.

What the hell does that mean—if anything?

Castillo looked at Delchamps, who met his eyes and then said, “I think the passport is real, Ace.”

Castillo waited for him to go on, and when he didn’t, said, “And? Come on, Ed!”

“None of that could be traced back to your friend Dmitri. All you’ve got is four blank calling cards on which the names of three towns and Tom Barlow have been printed by a cheap computer printer. Berlin is X-ed out. So far as the photocopy of the passport is concerned, that could come from the Germans or whoever else’s border Dmitri has crossed and had it stamped. Just about everybody routinely photocopies the passports of interesting people.”

“All of which means?”

“First wild-hair scenario,” Delchamps said. “What we could have here is a spy who wants to come in from the cold and has decided you have the best key to the door of freedom. And, of course, the CIA’s cash box.

“He’s proved that he knows who you are, knows where to find you, and suggests either Budapest or Vienna, but not Berlin, is where he would like to meet.”

Castillo grunted, and looked at Jack Davidson.

“This guy is good, Charley. If he wanted to take you out, I think he could have,” Davidson said.

“And Edgar’s scenario?”

“I think he’s on the money, Charley.”

“No second scenario?”

Davidson shook his head.

“I don’t know if this is a second scenario or not,” Delchamps said, “but I wouldn’t be surprised if this guy knows who whacked the Kuhls. And I’d sure as hell like that information.”

“So what do we do now? Go to Vienna or Budapest and wait?”

“Yeah,” Delchamps said. “But right now we have to go to the church. It’s supposed to start in ten minutes.”

“And you don’t think anything’ll happen at the church?”

“Dmitri told you he ordered the hit. And you responded the way he thought you would. The place is now crawling with cops and private security. I don’t think any Stasi guys are going to commit suicide to get you or Billy or Otto. Not when they can do it quietly elsewhere. So you stay alive, which is what Dmitri wants.”

Castillo looked at Davidson, who nodded his agreement.

“Okay,” Castillo said. “Let’s go to church.”

Delchamps held out his hand for the envelope, and when Castillo gave it to him, dropped it in his briefcase.

V

[ONE]

The Big Room

Das Haus im Wald

Near Bad Hersfeld

Kreis Hersfeld-Rotenburg

Hesse, Germany

1630 27 December 2005

Hermann and Willi Görner went straight from the elevator to Onkel Billy’s apartment, where Mädchen and the puppies had been left. Onkel Billy and everybody else went straight to the bar.

The service in Saint Elisabeth’s had lasted almost an hour. Otto Görner had delivered the eulogy. Castillo had heard only a little of it. He hadn’t known—as Otto conveniently had not mentioned his role in the services—that Otto was going to make himself a perfect target in the pulpit for almost ten minutes.

Castillo thought it quite possible—if unlikely—that Otto would be shot in front of his boys.

That didn’t happen. Nothing untoward happened in the church, or in the cemetery later, if you didn’t count the behavior of the goddamn press. When that had happened—both at the church and in the cemetery—Castillo suddenly had been conscious that press passes can readily be forged, and that the still and video cameras shoved in the mourners’ faces could easily have concealed a weapon, if not a modified firearm then a compressed air system to launch darts tipped with ricin or some other lethal substance.

That didn’t happen either.

The only thing out of the ordinary at the cemetery was that Eric Kocian told Otto Görner he was getting a little short of breath and felt dizzy and thought it would be best if he went back to das Haus im Wald rather than to the Friedler home.

Görner wanted to call for an ambulance, but Kocian insisted that he would be all right once he had lain down for a few minutes, and that he would ask Karlchen to drive him to Bad Hersfeld.

The minute Charley had driven the Jag carrying Billy, Max, and Jack Davidson out of the cemetery, Castillo had asked Kocian if he was sure he didn’t want to go to a hospital, or at least see a doctor.

“My medicine is in the house in the woods. Now just drive me there, Karlchen, at a reasonable speed, and spare me your concern. I know what I need.”

Castillo thought he heard a snicker from the backseat, but when he glanced in the rearview mirror all he saw was Max putting his head on Davidson’s lap and Jack ostensibly taking in the view of the glorious German countryside.

At the house, Delchamps, Torine, Yung, and Doherty were in the Big Room when Max led in Castillo, Kocian, and Davidson.

They all had watched as Kocian made a beeline for the liquor bottles and poured four inches of Slivovitz into a water glass, drank half, then smacked his lips and set the glass down.

“You want me to get you your medicine before you drink the rest of that?” Castillo said.

Kocian shook his head in disbelief, raised the glass, and finished off the Slivovitz.

“I just took my medicine, Karlchen, thank you very much.”

Castillo laughed. “You old fraud! You weren’t dizzy or short of breath!”

“Karlchen, which would have been kinder: To tell Gertrud Friedler that I thought I had expressed my sympathy enough and what I was going to do now was find the sonsofbitches who did this to him? Or to announce I wasn’t feeling well?”

“Touché.”

“Pressing my advantage, Karlchen, I suggest that in the morning you and I—and the dogs, of course—catch the nine-oh-five fast train from Kassel to Vienna.”

“You do?”

“That will put us—after a nice luncheon on the train—into the Westbahnhof a little after five.”

“You don’t want to fly down?”

“I don’t like to fly, period. And the dogs have suffered enough from the miracle of travel by air.”

“And have you a suggestion about what I should do with the airplane?”

“Aside from the scatological one that leaps to mind, you mean?” Kocian asked innocently, looked smugly around the room, then went on: “Jacob and Richard can fly the others to Schwechat, go to their hotel, the Bristol, and wait for us. Unless, of course, we get there before they do, which is a possibility. As soon as I have another little taste of the Slivovitz, I shall get on the telephone and ask Frau Schröeder to get us on the train.” He looked at Davidson. “And, Jack, I will call the manager of the Bristol, a friend of mine, to beg him not to put you and your friends in those terrible rooms he reserves for you Americans.”

Davidson laughed appreciatively, but said, “I’ll be going with you on the train, Billy. I’ll need a room where Charley’s staying.”

Kocian made a face no one would confuse with being friendly. “At the risk of sounding rude, Jack, I don’t recall inviting you to go along.”

“You didn’t have to. McNab did.”

Castillo chuckled.

“Who is McMad?” Kocian demanded.

“McNab. And if I told you, I’d have to kill you,” Davidson said.

Torine and Delchamps chuckled. Kocian glared at them.

“Think of him as Charley’s fairy godfather, Billy,” Delchamps offered.

“That,” Davidson put in, “is a very dangerous choice of words.”

“Yes, it was,” Delchamps agreed. “I hastily withdraw that description and replace it with ‘Charley’s guardian angel.’”

“I thought that the Boy Marine was his guardian angel,” David Yung said.

“Corporal Bradley is Charley’s guardian cherub, Two-Gun,” Torine went on. “General McNab is Charley’s guardian angel.”

Everybody laughed.

“Another very dangerous choice of words, Colonel,” Davidson said.

“But, oh, how appropriate!” Delchamps said. “Charley’s Cherub!”

“You do have a death wish, Edgar,” Davidson said. “If Bradley hears that you called him that, you’ll have one—probably two or more—Aleksandr Pevsner Indian beauty spots on your forehead.”

“I have no idea what any of you lunatics are talking about,” Kocian said.

Davidson took pity on him.

“Billy, General Bruce J. McNab,” he explained, “is who I work for. When he sent me to work with Charley, his orders were to keep Charley out of trouble and never let him out of my sight. I hear and I obey. It’s not open for discussion.”

Kocian looked at Castillo, who nodded.

“Jack goes,” Castillo said. “Jake, any problem about taking the Gulfstream to Vienna?”

“Not today. I’ve been—I am—tippling. But if I get to the airport by noon, I can probably be in Vienna about the time you get there. Unless the weather really gets bad, of course.”

Castillo turned to Inspector John “Jack” Doherty.

“Jack, any reason for the FBI—you and/or Two-Gun—to stick around here?”

“The guy from the Bundeskriminalamt showed us what they had, and what the local cops had. Conclusion—mine and Two-Gun’s—is that it was a professional hit by people—probably ex-Stasi—who knew what they were doing and who now are probably in Russia. He said if anything turned up he’d let Otto know.”

“So you guys can go to Vienna with Jake?” Castillo asked.

Doherty nodded.

“Okay, Billy,” Castillo said. “Call Frau Schröeder. Set it up.”

“Thank you,” Kocian said. “And there”—he pointed to a small table near the elevator—“is a second line you can use for your call, or calls.”

“And you have, I’m sure, a suggestion—or suggestions—of who I should call?” Castillo asked sarcastically.

“Well, Karlchen, I thought you might possibly be interested in learning what you can about Dmitri Berezovsky. Or is your relationship with the CIA one in which you feed them information, and they tell you only what they think you should hear?”

They locked eyes for a long moment, during which no one else even coughed.

Finally, Castillo said, “I would say ‘touché’ again, Billy, but that wasn’t a gentle tap with a fencing saber. You just nailed me to the wall with a battle-ax, and that’s my blood you see all over the carpet.” He paused. “I guess I forgot for a moment what a tough old codger you are.”

“Sonofabitch would be more accurate, Karlchen. I tend to be a real sonofabitch when someone doesn’t seem to be as anxious as I am to find the bastards who murdered someone very dear to me.”

Kocian walked to a coffee table, picked up the telephone there, then sat down on a small couch. Holding the telephone base on his lap, he began to punch a number.

Castillo pushed himself out of his chair, walked to the telephone by the door, and entered a long telephone number from memory.

“Lester,” Castillo said thirty seconds later, “this is Colonel Castillo. Is either Major Miller or Mrs. Forbison there?”

“I think the cherub answered the phone,” Delchamps said.

No one laughed.

[TWO]

Aboard EuroCity Train “Bartok Bela”

Near Braunau am Inn, Austria

1325 28 December 2005

They had two first-class sleeping compartments. Castillo, Jack Davidson, and Max were in one, and Kocian, Sándor Tor, and Mädchen and her puppies in the other.

Mädchen was missing one of her puppies, the male that Hermann and Willi had selected. She had decided that Max was somehow responsible and, when they were in sight of one another, either snarled or showed her teeth at him, making it plain she would like to remove at least one of his ears and very likely other body parts as well.

Max had assumed an attitude of both righteous indignation and self-defense. He obviously had done nothing wrong to the mother of their offspring and naturally felt obliged to show his teeth to let her know that he wasn’t too fond of her, either.

Under these conditions, having the “nice lunch” on the train between Munich and Vienna that Kocian had promised posed a problem. Because they could not leave the dogs alone, it was finally decided that Davidson and Castillo would eat first. Sándor Tor would move into their apartment to restrain Max. Then, after Castillo and Davidson had eaten, Castillo would ride with Mädchen and the puppies, and Davidson with Max.

The dining car was two cars ahead of theirs on the train. At the rear, where Castillo and Davidson entered, it was sort of a diner, with plastic-topped tables. Farther forward, separated from the diner by a bar and serving counter, was a more elegant eatery. There were tablecloths and wine bottles and hovering waiters.

Castillo and Davidson headed for the forward end of the car.

Castillo saw something that made him suddenly stop. At the split second that Davidson walked into Castillo, Jack saw what had stopped Charley, and, as a reflex action, nudged him.

At the last table on the right were four people, a man and three women. Or—more accurately, after they had a good look—a man, two women, and an adolescent girl.

The man, who had made eye contact with Castillo, held his fork halfway between his plate and mouth. Then, as Castillo resumed walking, he put the food in his mouth.

He looks older than his passport photo, Castillo thought.

But that’s not unusual.

It’s him.

Castillo walked to the table and said loudly in English, “Well, I will be damned if it isn’t ol’ Tom Barlow! How the hell are you, Tom?”

Castillo thrust out his hand.

“Carlos Castillo, right?” Dmitri Berezovsky said. He stood, took the extended hand, and pumped it enthusiastically.

“Actually, it’s ‘Charley,’ Tom, but what the hell! Jack, this is Tom Barlow. You’ve heard me talk about him.”

“I sure have,” Davidson answered, then shook Berezovsky’s hand. “Jack Davidson, Tom. Going to Vienna, are you?”

“A business conference,” Berezovsky said, and looked at Castillo. “Charley, I don’t think you’ve met the better half, have you?”

“No, I haven’t,” Castillo said.

“Honey, this is Charley Castillo,” Berezovsky said. “Charley, this is my wife, Laura, and our daughter, Sophie, and my sister, Susan Alexander.”

The girl’s about the age of Aleksandr Pevsner’s daughter, Elena, Castillo thought.

And my Randy.

Except that but for blood my Randy’s not my Randy.

The wife and daughter smiled a little uneasily, offered their hands, but said nothing.

The sister said, “How are you? Nice to meet you,” as she offered her hand.

Nice English, Castillo thought. But the Russian comes through.

And then he noticed that she was beautiful.

I missed that until now?

What is that, tunnel vision?

“Charley, you know what?” Berezovsky said. “I was going to see if I could find you in Vienna. A little business opportunity I’d like to discuss with you.”

“Oh, really? I’m always open for a good business opportunity.”

“Well, we’re still a couple of hours from Vienna. What I was thinking was if we could find someplace to talk. . . . I don’t like to talk business in front of my family.”

“I understand,” Castillo said. “Well, how about my compartment? That is, unless you don’t like dogs.”

“Excuse me?”

“I have my dog with me. Some people are afraid of dogs.”

“I love dogs,” Berezovsky said.

“We’re two cars back,” Castillo said.

Davidson took tickets from his pocket, looked at them, and announced, “Compartment four, wagon three.”

“Compartment four, wagon three,” Berezovsky repeated. “Say, in thirty minutes?”

“Fine,” Castillo said. He offered his hand again to Berezovsky’s wife and then to his sister. “It was nice to meet you. Perhaps we’ll meet again.”

He smiled at the girl, who smiled shyly back. Berezovsky’s wife again said nothing. The sister said, “That would be nice.”

“There’s a very nice Wiener schnitzel,” Berezovsky said. “And the beer’s Czech, from Pilsen.”

Castillo smiled at him, then turned and motioned for Davidson to go to a table across the aisle.

The waiter appeared almost immediately. They both ordered the Wiener schnitzel and, at the waiter’s recommendation, two bottles of Gambrinus, which he said came from eastern Bohemia and he personally preferred over the better-known Pilsner Urquell.

The beer was served immediately.

Three minutes later, as the waiter approached their table with the food, Berezovsky and party rose from their table and walked down the aisle.

Castillo waited until they were almost out of the dining car before asking, “Well, Jack, what do you think?”

“Nice ass on the sister.”

“Nice boobs, too, but that wasn’t exactly what I had in mind.”

Davidson sipped thoughtfully from his beer, then said, “We’ll just have to see what happens. I have the feeling that guy’s a heavy hitter.”

“Yeah. I think he is. And I think I’m in over my head with this. I wish Delchamps was here.”

[THREE]

Castillo and Davidson had been in their compartment no more than five minutes when there was a knock at the door.

Davidson opened it a crack, then slid it fully open.

The sister moved gracefully through the door. She held four beer glasses by their stems in one hand.

Max stood up and looked at her, wagging his stump of a tail.

“Hello,” the sister said.

“Hello,” Davidson said.

Berezovsky stepped into the compartment. He held two foil-cap-topped bottles of Gambrinus in each hand. Max stiffened, showed his teeth, growled deep in his throat, and looked poised to jump at Berezovsky.

“Sit, Max,” Castillo ordered sternly in Hungarian.

Max sat down but continued to show his teeth.

Berezovsky, who had frozen two steps into the compartment, smiled uneasily.

“Well, you know what they say, Tom,” Castillo said in English, “about dogs being good judges of character.”

“But I come bearing gifts,” Berezovsky said, raising—slowly—the beer bottles.

“And you know what else they say, ‘Beware of Russians bearing gifts’—or is that ‘the Greeks’?”

“It’s the Greeks and you know it,” the sister said in English.

Nice voice. Nice teeth.

She sat down and crossed her legs.

Nice legs.

“Let the nice man in, Max,” Castillo said in Hungarian. “I’ll let you bite him later.”

“Your Hungarian is very fluent,” Berezovsky said in Hungarian. “You could be from Budapest.”

“Yes,” Castillo agreed.

The sister smiled.

Castillo smiled back.

“May I sit down?” Berezovsky asked.

“Make yourself comfortable,” Castillo said.

Berezovsky sat down. Davidson slid the door closed.

The sister leaned forward and put the glasses on the small window-side table. Berezovsky almost ceremoniously opened a beer bottle and half-filled two of the glasses. Then he opened a second bottle and poured from it into the other two glasses. Then he passed the glasses around.

I would have opened all the bottles, Castillo thought, and handed everybody a bottle and a glass. Why did I notice the difference?

“What is it they say in New York?” Berezovsky asked in Russian. “ ‘Mud in your eye’?”

“Some places in New York,” Castillo replied in Russian, “they say, ‘Let us drink to the success of our project.’”

“Not only is your Russian as fluent as your Hungarian, but you know our drinking toasts.”

“Yes,” Castillo agreed.

And again the sister smiled.

And again Castillo smiled back.

“Not that you’re not welcome here,” Castillo said to her in Russian, “but I seem to recall my ol’ buddy Tom saying that he didn’t like to discuss business with the family around.”

“Well,” Berezovsky answered for her, “there’s family, Charley, and then there’s family. Permit me to introduce myself and my sister—that is, unless you already know who I am?”

“I know who you want me to think you are,” Castillo said. “And when we get to Vienna, I expect to learn not only if that passport is the real thing, but a whole lot more about you.”

“I’m sure there’s quite a bit of information about me—and my sister—in Langley.”

“In where?”

“In the CIA’s Order of Battle in Langley.”

“Well, there may well be, but—I don’t want to mislead you, Tom—I’m not CIA. If that’s what you thought.”

Castillo saw surprise in Berezovsky’s eyes.

“DIA?”

“And I’m not associated with the Defense Intelligence Agency, either.”

Castillo saw more surprise.

Hell, he thinks I’m lying to him, and that surprises him.

Or worries him?

Castillo held up his right hand, the center three fingers extended.

“What’s that?” Berezovsky asked suspiciously.

“Boy Scout’s Honor. I am not an officer of the CIA, the DIA, or, to put a point on it, any of the other alphabet agencies, such as the FBI, the ONI, or even the notorious IRS.”

Davidson chuckled, which earned him a dirty look from Berezovsky.

“You’re playing with me, Castillo,” Berezovsky said coldly. “And this is serious business.”

“What I’m doing is telling you the truth,” Castillo said.

“Then who do you work for?”

“That I can’t tell you.”

“If he did, Tom,” Davidson said conversationally, “I’d have to kill you.”

Berezovsky glared at him in disbelief, then stood.

“Let’s go, Svetlana. We’re wasting our time with these fools.”

Max got up and growled softly.

“I don’t think Max likes you, Tom,” Castillo said.

The sister, still seated, smiled at Castillo, then looked at her brother.

“Sit down, Dmitri.”

“I thought your name was ‘Susan,’” Davidson said innocently.

She smiled at him and shook her head.

“Permit me to introduce myself,” she said. “I am Lieutenant Colonel Svetlana Alekseeva of the Sluzhba Vnezhney Razvedki. Presumably, you know what that is?”

“The Russian Foreign Intelligence Service,” Castillo replied. “Sluzhba Vnezhney Razvedki—SVR—is the new name for the same branch of the Service for the Protection of the Constitutional System. If I didn’t know better, I’d think someone was trying to fool somebody.”

Her expression showed Lieutenant Colonel Alekseeva did not share Castillo’s sense of humor.

“Specifically, I am presently the rezident in Copenhagen. My brother, Colonel Dmitri Berezovsky, is the SVR rezident in Berlin. If I have to say so, he is also a member of the Service for the Protection of the Constitutional System. We are willing, if our conditions are met, to defect.”

“Wow!” Castillo said, then parroted: “ ‘If our conditions are met’!”

“Come, Svetlana,” Berezovsky said. “We don’t have to put up with this.”

“It is said that Dmitri would already be a general if his brilliance were not tempered with his impatience,” Svetlana said, then added to her brother, “Sit down!”

She turned to Castillo and locked her eyes on his.

“Are you interested?” she asked evenly. “More importantly, if you are, are you in a position to deal?”

She does that look-you-in-the-eye thing like Aleksandr Pevsner does.

Does it come naturally? Or did somebody teach them how to do it?

She has eyes like Alek’s, too. Light, sky blue. Very attractive.

“Am I permitted to ask why you would like to defect?” Castillo asked, his tone now serious.

“If I told you the truth, you wouldn’t believe me,” she said. “So I will say financial considerations.”

“What figure did you have in mind?”

“Two million dollars,” she said simply.

“And what would we get for our two million dollars?”

“That implies you have access to that kind of money,” she said.

“And if I did, what would it buy me?”

“Our complete cooperation.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“The name, for example, of the officer who is replacing Lieutenant Colonel Viktor Zhdankov,” she said. “Other names . . .”

“Viktor who?”

“The man . . .” she began, then stopped. “You know very well who I’m talking about, Colonel.”

“The two million is the only consideration you’re talking about?” Castillo asked.

She looked at her brother. He shook his head.

Castillo said, “While you two are mulling over answering that question, Colonel, why don’t you tell me the reasons that I won’t believe why you’d like to defect?”

She met his eyes again.

“I’ll tell you that when I think you will believe me,” she said. “After we go forward with this situation. If we go forward with this situation.”

“That would depend in large measure on your other conditions,” Castillo said.

“You’re on the train,” Berezovsky challenged. “Where is your airplane?”

“Assuming Schwechat is open, it should be there by now,” Castillo said.

“And is it in condition to make a long flight on short notice?”

Which obviously translates to mean that you not only want to defect, you want to defect now.

Which means that you think somebody suspects that you want to defect.

And that would further translate to “I’ve got you now, Tom, ol’ pal.”

If the Service for the Protection of the Constitutional System and the Fight Against Terrorism is onto you, I don’t need two million dollars to get you to change sides.

All I have to do is provide a way for you to keep running.

Where’s the elation that’s supposed to come with learning something like this?

Did I just fall into Svetlana’s sky-blue eyes?

Well, what the hell. James Bond is always having some damsel in distress throw herself into his arms. Why not me?

“How close behind you are they?” Castillo asked, this time turning the tables on Lieutenant Colonel Alekseeva of the SVR and looking deeply and intently into her eyes.

“Are you going to answer the question?” Berezovsky asked angrily.

“We don’t know that they are,” Svetlana said.

“But the death of the Kuhls makes you think there’s that possibility?”

He saw in her eyes that the question had touched a chord.

“Who?” Berezovsky said without much conviction.

“Come on, Colonel,” Castillo said. “You know damned well what I mean.”

“You just admitted you’re CIA, you realize,” Berezovsky said. “How else would you know about him, about them?”

“If you want to think I’m with the agency, suit yourself. But I just saw in Svetlana’s eyes that I hit home when I asked about the Kuhls. . . .”

Berezovsky’s eyes flashed to his sister.

And so did that look, Tom, ol’ buddy.

“So, answer my question: How close behind you are they?”

Berezovsky gave him an icy look.

“We don’t know that they are,” Svetlana repeated evenly.

Castillo met her eyes.

“But the termination of the Kuhls makes it a possibility?”

“It is likely what happened to the Kuhls was intended as a message to somebody. It could be a message to us.”

“Are you a believer in the worst-case scenario, Colonel?” Castillo asked, and then made a clarification: “Colonel Alekseeva?”

“Sometimes that’s useful,” she said.

“Do they know you’re going to Vienna?”

She nodded. “The Hermitage is loaning to the Kunsthistorisches Museum Bartolomeo Rastrelli’s wax statue of Peter the First. Do you know it, by chance?”

Castillo nodded. He had seen the early-eighteenth-century Madam Tussaud-like wax statue in the museum in Saint Petersburg.

“I’m surprised that the Hermitage would let it out the door,” Castillo said.

“As a gesture of friendship and a hope for peace between old enemies,” she said evenly. “Mr. Putin is now a friend of the West, in case you hadn’t heard.”

“I have heard that, now that you mention it.”

She smiled at him again.

“It is very well-packed and traveling under heavy guard by road. From Vienna it will go to Berlin, then Copenhagen . . . and some other cities. This gives us a chance to see people we sometimes don’t often get to see.”

“The worst-case scenario being they will grab you at the Westbahnhof?”

“Or wait for confirmation of our treason when we meet our contact, or our contact tries to contact us. Both scenarios, of course, presume they know our intentions.”

So this Let’s Defect business didn’t start last week, huh?

I should’ve known it didn’t. . . .

“Who’s your contact in Vienna?” Castillo asked.

“I’ve answered all of your questions,” Svetlana said. “Now answer my brother’s question about your airplane.”

“Okay. What was it you wanted to know, Tom?”

“First, is it under your control?”

Castillo nodded.

“Is it available on short notice for a long flight?”

“Define ‘long flight.’ ”

“Twelve thousand kilometers.”

“Not without a fuel stop. The range is about thirty-seven hundred nautical miles. Where do you want to go?”

“Twelve thousand kilometers from Vienna,” Berezovsky said.

“Buenos Aires,” Svetlana added.

That shouldn’t have surprised me—she mentioned Zhdankov—but it did.

“Why there?”

“That’s none of your business,” Berezovsky said.

“It is if I’m going to take you there. . . .”

“We have family there,” Svetlana offered, “who can help us vanish.”

“I’ll need the details of that,” Castillo said.

“When we’re under way,” she said. “At the fuel stop, I’ll tell you.”

Am I supposed to believe that?

“You are going to take us there, aren’t you?” Svetlana asked.

She said, staring soulfully into my eyes.

Nice try, sweetheart.

Somebody must have told you of my reputation for being a sucker when beautiful women in distress stare soulfully into my eyes.

Who was it who said that the most important sex organ is between the ears?

But I’m not a sucker right now, thank you very much.

What I have to do right now is scare them a little.

“What I have to do right now is confer with Mr. Davidson to decide if what I might get out of helping you outweighs what you’re trying to get out of me,” Castillo said.

He saw disappointment in Svetlana’s eyes.

And that makes me feel lousy, sweetheart.

But right now I’m doing what I know I have to.

Castillo went on: “So, what I think you should do now is go back to your compartment. On the way, see if anybody’s tailing you. In twenty minutes, one of you—not both—come back, having decided between you what else you’re going to tell me besides the name of a dead SVR officer’s replacement to entice me to stick my neck out by not only trusting a couple of SVR agents I have never seen before and know nothing about in the first place, and then flying them halfway around the world with their former comrades in hot pursuit.”

He stood, said in Hungarian, “Stay, Max,” then stepped to the door, unlatched it, slid it open, and almost mockingly waved Berezovsky and Svetlana to pass through it.

“Twenty minutes should give you enough time to talk things over,” he said.

Berezovsky gave him a dirty look as he left. Svetlana avoided looking at him.

Castillo slid the door closed after them, then looked at Jack Davidson.

“Give them ninety seconds to get off the car, then we’ll see if Sándor can come up with some way to get them safely off the train.”

“You got thirty seconds to listen to me, Charley?”

“Sure.”

“Prefacing this by saying you did a good job with those two—which, considering the make the lady colonel was putting on you, couldn’t have been easy. . . .”

“If you have something to say, Jack, say it.”

“The only way I could get McNab to send me to work for you, Charley, was to promise on the heads of my children—”

“You don’t have any children.”

“Well, if I did . . . you get the point. I had to promise McNab—and mean it—that I would sit on you when it looked to me like your enthusiasm was about to overwhelm your common sense, as it has been known to do. I think that time has come.”

Castillo looked at him for a moment.

“As a point of order, Jack, when the hell was the last time my enthusiasm overwhelmed my common sense?”

“Oh, come on, Charley! I don’t know when the last time was, but I was there when you stole the helicopter.”

“I didn’t steal it. I borrowed it. And if memory serves, you were enthusiastically manning the Gatling in the door of that helicopter when we went after Dick Miller.”

“I knew I couldn’t stop you, Charley.”

“And you can’t stop me now, Jack. I think those two are just what we’re looking for.”

Davidson met his eyes for a moment, then shrugged.

“Okay. I tried. I’ll go see if Sándor knows how we can get Mata Hari and her brother off the train.”

[FOUR]

Castillo was surprised fifteen minutes later when he slid the compartment door open a crack and saw that both Berezovsky and Svetlana were standing in the corridor.

He expected to see Berezovsky alone—Berezovsky was, after all, the full colonel and she the lieutenant colonel and kid sister—or Svetlana alone, playing the damsel in distress.

He glanced over his shoulder at Jack Davidson, made an angry face that said, What the hell?, then motioned them inside and closed and latched the door.

“If this is going to go any further,” Castillo said sharply, “you’re going to have to learn to take orders. I said I wanted one of you back, not both. Now one of you leave.”

“I don’t want my brother making decisions with my life,” Svetlana said evenly. “Either we both stay or we both go.”

He met her eyes, hoping she would think he was doing so coldly.

After a moment, he nodded.

“Okay. What are you offering besides blue sky?” Castillo said.

“ ‘Blue sky’?” Svetlana repeated.

“All I have to do to find out who’s replaced Colonel Zhdankov is get on the telephone. I don’t have to risk anything.”

Brother and sister looked at each other for a moment, and then Berezovsky asked, “What do you want, Colonel?”

“The names of the people who eliminated Friedler; ditto for the Kuhls.”

“As you may have guessed, Friedler was dealt with by ex-Stasi,” Berezovsky said. “I can give you the names they used, but they won’t do you any good. Their papers were phony. I borrowed them from the Special Center. There was no reason for me to know their names, and they weren’t given to me.”

“You borrowed them for that one job?”

Berezovsky nodded. “I didn’t want to run the risk of exposing my own people for that job. General Sirinov agreed and sent me men from the Special Center pool.”

“Why did you eliminate Friedler?”

“If your question, Colonel, is why was he eliminated, I think you know. He was asking the wrong questions of the wrong people—the Marburg Group—about their past activities in the international oil trade and the medical-supply business. If you meant to ask why did I execute the operation, General Sirinov delegated that action to me.”

“I’ll want the names of your men.”

“I understood that. But they won’t be of much use to you. Once I turn up missing, they will be transferred. The unlucky ones will be shot for failing to learn what I was planning.”

“And the Kuhls?”

“I can’t help you with the Kuhls, except to say that that action was most probably carried out by the rezident in Vienna on orders from Sirinov. He probably used Hungarians—ex-Államvédelmi Hatóság—because I read in the paper that a metal garrote was used.”

“You knew nothing about that action?”

Berezovsky shook his head. “Nyet.”

“But you think it may have been a warning to you?”

Now Berezovsky nodded, and exchanged a long glance with his sister. “Svetlana thinks that may be. And it may have been. On the other hand, it may have been decided it was finally time to reward the Kuhls for their long service to the CIA.”

You really are a cold-blooded bastard, aren’t you?

Castillo looked at Svetlana.

And what about you?

A cold-blooded bitch, a chippie off the same block?

“So, what else have you got to offer me?” Castillo asked.

“I will answer—Svetlana and I will answer—any questions put to us to the best of our ability.”

“And, of course, volunteer nothing,” Castillo said. “I have heard nothing that sounds like it’s worth two million dollars and putting my South America operation at risk.”

“What I have to tell you is worth the two million dollars,” Berezovsky said. “And more.”

“Unfortunately, Tom, ol’ buddy, you’re operating in a buyer’s market,” Castillo said unpleasantly, “and this buyer doesn’t think so.”

“Tell him,” Svetlana said.

Berezovsky didn’t respond.

“Tell me what, Svetlana?” Castillo asked.

“There is a chemical factory in the former Belgian Congo,” she said.

“There’re also several in Hoboken, New Jersey. So what?”

“Weapons-of-mass-destruction chemical factory,” she said.

Castillo felt the muscles at the nape of his neck contract involuntarily.

“That sounds like more blue sky,” he said.

“If you’ve made up your minds not to help us,” Svetlana said, “please be kind enough to tell us.”

“Tell me more about the Congo.”

“We know which German companies sold chemicals to it before Iraq fell,” Berezovsky offered reluctantly, clearly unhappy, if not uncomfortable, that that chess piece had been put into play. “We know which German companies are selling chemicals to it now. And running it, of course.”

“Running it for whom?”

“Who would you think, Colonel?” Berezovsky asked sarcastically.

“Answer that question, Colonel, and any others I might pose, or get the hell out of here.”

Berezovsky glared at him for five full seconds.

“Iran, of course,” he said.

“Why isn’t whatever is being made for the Iranians in this factory in the Congolese jungle—”

“I didn’t say it was in the jungle,” Berezovsky interrupted.

“—not being made in Iran?” Castillo finished.

“How modest of you,” Berezovsky said. “Because if it were, that information would have been in Langley years ago. The CIA is not nearly as inept as they would have us believe.”

Castillo had a quick moment to look at Davidson. It was enough to see in his eyes that he, too, believed what they were being told.

“You know where this factory is?” Castillo said.

Berezovsky nodded. “Somewhere between Kisangani and Lake Albert.”

“That’s a large, empty area.”

“That’s why it was chosen in the first place.”

“Chosen by whom?”

“Some chemical manufacturers in what was then known as East Germany. They said they wanted the land to grow various products for medicinal use.”

Castillo looked at Davidson and mimed flipping a coin in the air and then looking to see how it came up.

“You just won, Colonel,” he said. “That’s the good news. The bad news is that if I find out you’ve been less than truthful with me, I guarantee that I personally will hand you over to the Federal’naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti.”

Berezovsky nodded calmly.

“Like yourself, Colonel,” he said, “I am an officer. You have my word.”

Jesus Christ, does he believe that? Does he think I will?

“You ever hear that Roman Catholic priests assigned to the Congo—at least in the old days—were excused from their vows of celibacy?” Castillo asked.

Berezovsky looked at his sister and chuckled.

“Is true, Svetlana.”

“Well, much the same thing happens to West Pointers such as myself. When they give us jobs like mine, we are perfectly free to lie, cheat, steal, and get to be pals with other people who do.”

Berezovsky thought that was amusing. Castillo saw in Svetlana’s eyes that she did not.

“Okay, what happens now is that when the train pulls into the Westbahnhof, there will be Wiener Tages Zeitung trucks on each platform.”

“ ‘Each platform’?” Svetlana parroted.

“You’re familiar with the station?” Castillo asked.

Both nodded. Vienna’s Westbahnhof—Western Station—was a major Austrian railway terminal.

“There’re two tracks between the platforms. There will be a truck on each one. Nothing suspicious about them; they’re there every day to load newspapers on the trains for the boonies—the countryside.

“When the train pulls in, you will already be at the end of the car with your luggage. If everything looks kosher—looks all right—two men will come to the car from the truck on the platform you’d normally use. They will load you into the truck.

“However, if it appears that people are looking for you on the platform, the men in the truck will create a diversion, and you will leave the train by the other door, which means you’ll have to jump onto the tracks, get onto the other platform, and then get into the truck on the other side.”

“And what if there is a train on the other track?” Svetlana asked.

“Then a man will help you pass through it,” Castillo said.

“Where will they take us?” Berezovsky asked.

“I honestly don’t know,” Castillo said. “Somewhere safe. A man named Sándor Tor will be with you. I don’t think we should risk being seen together.”

“Is this man good at what he does?” Berezovsky asked.

“He was a Budapest police inspector and, before that, he did a hitch in the French Foreign Legion.”

“I wish you were coming with us,” Svetlana said.

So do I, sweetheart!

But are you saying that just to save your ass?

Or did those sky-blue eyes just tell me you meant it, that you’re back to putting the make on me?

Careful, Don Juan!

“I think you should leave one at a time,” Castillo said. “You first, Svetlana.”

[FIVE]

The corridor side—as opposed to the compartment side—of the sleeping car was next to the platform as the “Bartok Bela” backed into the Westbahnhof.

Castillo waited until he saw that both trucks with Tages Zeitung logotypes on their sides were on the platforms and then stepped into the corridor. The trucks were much smaller than he expected; it was going to be a tight fit with four people and their luggage.

As Davidson waited in the compartment, Castillo looked up and down the platform but couldn’t see anyone he wanted to see.

It would have been helpful, 007, if you had asked the nice people which car they were in!

Then he saw something he didn’t want to see.

A departing passenger, a well-dressed stout gentleman of about forty, was suddenly hit in the stomach by an eight-inch-thick bound stack of the newest edition of the Tages Zeitung. The mass of newsprint knocked him onto his rather ample gluteus maximus and caused him to say very unkind things in a very loud voice to and about the cretins in the newspaper truck.

Castillo moved quickly back into the compartment. Davidson pointed.

Berezovsky was hoisting his wife onto the adjacent platform by her hips as Sándor Tor did the same for the girl. Svetlana was throwing their luggage onto the platform. A man in a gray smock took the luggage and threw it into the Tages Zeitung truck there.

Almost simultaneously, Berezovsky and Tor hoisted themselves onto the platform. Tor directed Berezovsky to the truck, then extended his hand to assist Svetlana onto the platform.

She was well ahead of him. She had hoisted her skirt to her waist, which revealed that she was wearing both red lacey underpants and, on her inner thigh, some sort of small semiautomatic pistol in a holster.

She then leapt to the platform with the agility of a gazelle, and, adjusting her skirt in the process, ran quickly to the truck and got in.

“I have always been partial to women in red panties,” Davidson said.

“Being a professional, I was of course more interested in the pistol.”

“You didn’t notice the red panties, right?”

“In passing, of course.”

“I noticed the pistol in passing. I have no trouble walking and chewing gum at the same time. It was more than likely a Model 1908 Colt Vest Pocket, in more than likely .25 ACP, although they made some in .32 ACP.”

“It was my in-passing snap judgment that the garment in question was Victoria’s Secret Model 17B, which comes with a label warning that there is not enough material in the garment for it to be used to safely blow one’s nose.”

“You don’t think she gets cold, do you?”

“Russian women have a reputation for being warm-blooded.”

“You better keep that in mind, Charley. I think that dame is trouble.”

Castillo grunted. “That would appear to be the understatement of the day.”

He picked up his briefcase and waved Davidson ahead of him out of the compartment.

There were three burly men in the corridor. Two of them were carrying the travel kennel. It now had Mädchen inside with her pups.

That was a good idea, Charley thought. If Mädchen and Max had gotten into a fight, that would’ve been a real diversion.

The third burly man blocked their way until Billy Kocian came out of the compartment and vouched for them.

As they walked down the platform and then down the stairs to cars waiting for them on the street, Castillo saw four different groups of men—two pairs, one trio, and one quartet—who could have been waiting for Berezovsky and the others. Or who could be waiting for anyone else.

The trio seemed unusually interested in Billy Kocian and the procession following him. Which of course could be attributed to Max and Mädchen, who were growling at each other.

A silver Mercedes S600 with Budapest tags was waiting at the curb. Kocian opened the kennel, motioned Mädchen inside the automobile’s backseat, took a pup in each hand, and followed. A burly man closed the door, and the car immediately drove off.

A much smaller and older Mercedes pulled up. The burly man opened the front and rear right-side doors and motioned for Davidson and Castillo to get in. Max did so first, taking his place in back.

“Where are we going?” Davidson asked as the vehicle lurched forward.

“The Sacher,” Castillo said.

“As in Sachertorte? The cake of many layers?”

Castillo nodded. “It was invented there. Billy has an apartment there.”

“Room enough for us?”

“Room enough for us and half a dozen other people.”

[SIX]

The Bar

The Hotel Sacher

Philharmonikerstrasse 4

Vienna, Austria

1925 28 December 2005

Colonel Jacob Torine was surprised to find Castillo feeding Max potato chips in the bar when he walked in, so surprised that he opened the conversation with the question: “They let dogs in here?”

“Only if they like you,” Castillo said.

Sparkman and Delchamps chuckled; Torine shook his head.

“Let’s get a table,” Castillo said, nodding to a table in the corner of the red-velvet-walled and -draped room.

“When did you get here?” Castillo asked. “More important: Have you got something for me?”

Delchamps handed him a padded envelope sized to ship compact discs.

Castillo took his laptop computer from his briefcase, laid it on the table, and booted it up. He then pulled an unmarked recordable CD from the envelope and fed it to the computer.

“We were here—over in the Bristol—at eleven,” Torine said. “Did you have a nice train ride down here?”

“A very interesting one,” Castillo said.

Delchamps moved so he could see the laptop screen.

“I was about to mention that that disc is classified,” Delchamps said. “But I see I won’t have to. It’s not working. What the hell happened?”

“ ‘United States Central Intelligence Agency,’ ” Castillo read off the screen. “ ‘Foreign Intelligence Evaluation Division. Top Secret. This material may not be removed from the FIED file-review room or copied by any means without the specific written permission of the Chief, FIED.’ ”

“How come I can’t see that?”

“You’re getting a little long in the tooth, Edgar. When was the last time you had your eyes checked?”

“Come on, Charley!”

“It’s got a filter over the screen,” Castillo said. “Unless you hold your head in exactly the right position—dead straight on—you can’t read the screen. More important, other people can’t read your screen.”

“Where’d you get it?”

“Radio Shack,” Castillo said. Then: “Really. I think it cost four ninety-five.” Then he said, “Oh, good, this has got Lieutenant Colonel Alekseeva’s dossier on it.”

“You know about her?” Delchamps asked, surprised.

“Charley and I can even tell you the color of her underwear,” Davidson said. “Professionally, of course.”

Delchamps looked at him, shook his head, but didn’t respond exactly.

“We had some trouble getting that disc, Charley,” he said.

“Tell me,” Castillo said, not taking his eyes from the laptop screen.

“Well, we got on the horn the minute we took off from Frankfurt. I told Miller what you wanted, and he said, ‘No problem. I’ll put Lester in a Yukon and send him over there. He’s feeling underutilized anyway.’”

“And then?” Castillo asked.

“Dick called me back as we were about to land here, and said Langley was giving Lester trouble and the best way he could think to handle it was to go over there himself. That raised the question of how we were going to get the data without taking one of the AFC portables to the hotel and going through all the trouble of setting it up.

“Then Sparkman volunteered . . .”

Sparkman snorted.

“. . . to stay at Schwechat and get the plane fueled, etcetera, and listen to the radio.”

“That came in about an hour ago, Colonel,” Sparkman said. “Major Miller said he had to call Ambassador Montvale to have him personally call the DCI.”

“Montvale was supposed to have told Langley to give us whatever we ask for,” Castillo said.

“That was my impression, too, Ace, but that’s what Miller told Sparkman,” Delchamps said.

Sparkman nodded and went on: “Major Miller said that some guy he didn’t know said something about not wanting to interfere in any way with an ongoing operation of the highest importance. He wouldn’t say what that operation was. Miller said the guy shit a brick when the DCI said, ‘Give him the dossiers.’

“And Miller said that’s when, reluctantly, they gave him the female’s dossier. What he said was that, when the DCI was in the file room, he said you wanted everything, and the DCI said, ‘Give them everything.’ That’s one good-looking woman; who is she, Colonel?”

“Berezovsky’s sister,” Castillo said, then asked, “Edgar, how’d things go with the local spook?”

“Bad karma, Ace. Your reputation has preceded you.”

“Explain that,” Castillo ordered.

“Well, the spook is a her. Miss Eleanor Dillworth, ostensibly the counselor for consular affairs. She’s a friend of Alex Darby’s—or so she said; I’d like to check that with Alex—and I’ve never heard anything bad about her. But she was not what you could call the spirit of enthusiastic cooperation when I asked her what she could tell me about the Kuhls. And that was before your name came up.”

“How did my name come up?”

“She asked what I was doing in Washington, and I told her I worked for you.” He paused. “Ace, to respond to that pissed off look on your face, OOA is no longer a secret within the intelligence community.”

“Shit. I guess I’ve got to get used to that. Okay, so how did she respond when my name came up?”

“She said, and this is almost verbatim, ‘I know all about that sonofabitch and I want nothing to do with him.’ I naturally inquired of the lady what she meant, and she said that, first, you ruined the soaring career of a Langley pal of hers and, second, you actually got said pal fired.”

“Is that so?” Castillo said, his tone somewhat sarcastic. He looked at Delchamps. “She give you a name?”

“No. Is this none of my business?”

“The lady in question is Mrs. Patricia Davies Wilson. She was some kind of an analyst at Langley, and when she fucked up doing what she should have done with that stolen airliner, she tried to put the blame on the local spook. She said that not only was the local spook incompetent but a drunk, the proof of that being that while in his cups, he made improper advances to her, knowing full well she was a married woman. She probably would have gotten away with it had she not been, at the time Dick Miller was supposedly trying to rape her—”

“Our Dick Miller?” Delchamps interrupted.

Castillo nodded. “—Had she not been fucking me at the time. She lied that Miller was working his wicked way on her. That got her transferred. Then she went to C. Harry Whelan, Jr., the infamous journalist, and tried to blow the whistle on me. Whelan then went to Montvale with the dirt that he had on me, which was what Mrs. Wilson had leaked to him.

“Montvale—and I owe him big-time for this, as I frequently have to remind myself—not only turned Whelan off but taped their conversation, in which Whelan referred, several times, to Mrs. Wilson as ‘his own private mole in Langley.’ ”

“Jesus Christ,” Delchamps said disgustedly.

“Then Montvale played the tape for the DCI. And that’s what got her fired.”

“Women in this business are dangerous,” Delchamps said.

“I was saying exactly the same thing to Charley earlier today,” Davidson said innocently.

Castillo slid the laptop to him.

“Take a quick look at this, Jack, and tell me what you think.”

Delchamps said: “I don’t think the truth would impress Miss Dillworth very much, Charley. You’re an unmitigated sonofabitch. What I think I should do is get on the horn to Alex Darby and get his take on the lady. Then I think I can deal with her. I’ll start out by telling her what a sonofabitch I know you to be.”

Castillo held his hand up as a signal for Delchamps to wait. He was looking at Davidson.

Finally, Davidson raised his eyes from the computer screen.

“It looks like the Big Bad Wolf and Little Red Under Britches are who they say they are, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah, it sure does,” Castillo said. “Jake, how soon can we go wheels-up?”

“I told you before: thirty minutes after we get to the airport. Where are we going?”

“Edgar, you can discuss Miss Moneypenny with Alex personally,” Castillo said.

“Why are we going to Buenos Aires, Charley?” Delchamps asked warily.

“Because when Colonel Berezovsky and Lieutenant Colonel Alekseeva, the spies who want to come in from the cold, do come in from the cold, that’s where they want to go.”

“He’s already been in touch? Christ, you just got here.”

“I work fast,” Castillo said. “Can we get out of here tonight, Jake?”

Torine nodded, and repeated, “Thirty minutes after we get to the airport.”

Castillo looked at his watch. “It’s seven-forty. Let’s shoot for a ten o’clock takeoff. Sparkman, get out there and file a flight plan to Prestwick, Scotland. Then we file a new en-route flight plan to Morocco or someplace else that’s our best and safest route to Buenos Aires. That’ll work, Jake, right?”

Torine nodded. “Let me get this straight. We’re taking this Berezovsky character with us?”

“And his wife and daughter. And, of course, Little Red Under Britches.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Delchamps asked. “Why are you calling the sister that?”

Castillo exchanged glances with Davidson and grinned. “That’s undercover spy talk, Edgar. You wouldn’t understand.”

“And if we told you, we’d have to kill you,” Davidson added.

“Until this moment, Jake, I thought we were having our chain pulled,” Delchamps said. “Now I don’t know.” He looked at Castillo. “You’ve actually got the SVR’s Berlin rezident in the bag?”

“Plus the Copenhagen SVR rezident.”

“I’ll believe this when I see it,” Delchamps said.

“Oh, ye of little faith!” Castillo said.

“If you think they hate you at Langley now, Ace,” Delchamps said, “wait until they hear about this.”

VI

[ONE]

General Aviation Apron West

Schwechat Airport

Vienna, Austria

2145 28 December 2005

“Work the radios, First Officer,” Colonel Jake Torine said.

Castillo checked the commo panel, saw that the radio was set to the correct frequency, and pressed the TRANSMIT button on the yoke.

“Vienna Delivery, Gulfstream 379,” Castillo announced.

“Gulfstream 379,” the traffic controller replied in English, “this is Vienna Delivery. Go ahead.”

“Gulfstream 379 at Block Alfa Six-Zero. We are a Gulfstream Three with ATIS information Bravo. Request clearance to Prestwick, Scotland, please.”

“Gulfstream 379, Vienna Delivery. Your clearance is ready. Advise when ready to copy.”

“Gulfstream 379 ready to copy.”

“Roger, Gulfstream 379. You are cleared to Prestwick, Scotland, via the Lanux One Alpha Departure, then flight-planned route. Expect flight level three-four-zero ten minutes after departure. Squawk code 3476.”

“Roger, Vienna Delivery. Understand we are cleared to Prestwick via the Lanux One Alfa Departure, flight-planned route, expect flight level three-four-zero, one-zero minutes after departure. Squawk three-four-seven-six.”

The routing they had been given would take them briefly across the airspace of Czechoslovakia, Germany, and Belgium. Then, after crossing the English Channel, they would fly over the British Isles. Finally, they would be “handed off” to Scottish control for their final routing into Prestwick.

“Gulfstream 379, read-back is correct. Advise when fully ready.”

“Vienna Delivery, Gulfstream 379 fully ready.”

“Gulfstream 379, contact Vienna Ground on one-two-one-decimal-six for engine start and taxi.”

“Gulfstream 379. Roger. Good day.”

Castillo punched in 121.6 on the radio control panel, then keyed the yoke’s TRANSMIT button.

“Vienna Ground, Gulfstream 379 at Block Alfa Six-Zero. Request engine start.”

“Roger, Gulfstream 379. Engine start-up approved. Advise when ready to taxi.”

“Gulfstream 379. Roger.”

Castillo looked at Torine, raised an eyebrow, and drew circles with his index finger.

Torine shrugged, said, “Why not?” and reached for the Number One Engine start button.

“Vienna Ground, Gulfstream 379 ready to taxi. Block Alfa Six-Zero with information Bravo.”

“Gulfstream 379, Vienna Ground. Taxi to Runway One-One via Alfa One-Two. At runway holding point, contact tower on frequency one-one-nine-decimal-four when ready for departure.”

“Roger. Gulfstream 379 taxi to Runway One-One via Alfa One-Two.”

“Gulfstream 379, Vienna Ground. That is correct. Have a nice flight.”

“Gulfstream 379. Roger. Good day.”

Castillo reached to dial in the new radio frequency of 119.4 as Torine rolled the aircraft to the threshold of Runway 11.

“Vienna Tower, Gulfstream 379 ready for takeoff Runway One-One at Alfa One-Two.”

“Gulfstream 379, Vienna Tower. You are cleared for takeoff Runway One-One.”

“Gulfstream 379 cleared for takeoff Runway One-One. Roger. Three-Seven-Nine rolling.”

The Gulfstream began to move.

“Take it, Charley,” Torine said. “You need the practice.”

Castillo put his right hand on the yoke and his left on the throttle quadrant.

“I have it,” he said.

Torine held up both hands in the air to show that he had relinquished control.

Billy Kocian had suggested, at just about the moment the same thought had occurred to Castillo, that Inspector Doherty and Two-Gun Yung would be more useful in Europe tracing the money trail than they would be in South America, so they had stayed in Vienna.

The only problem Castillo had with that was that he worried Two-Gun might not be as capable as Two-Gun thought he was in setting up the AFC satellite communications device. Two-Gun assured Castillo that Corporal Lester Bradley had taught him everything he needed to know about the radio, which forced Castillo to consider again that, as Two-Gun was not the typical FBI agent whose primary expertise was in tracing dirty money, Lester had skills far beyond those expected of a Marine Corps corporal two years short of being legally able to purchase intoxicants in the country for which he served.

For example: Having been tutored in the use and maintenance of the AFC satellite communications device by its inventor, Aloysius Francis Casey, Ph.D., MIT.

Casey—once a Special Forces A-Team commo sergeant in Vietnam and now chairman of the board of the AFC Corporation—maintained his association with the Green Berets by providing Delta Force—free of charge—with the absolute latest developments in communication.

The proof of that came thirty minutes after they had taken off. Two-Gun had called on the device to report, somewhat smugly, that he and the device had arrived in his room at the Bristol forty-one minutes before, and here he was already bouncing the deeply encrypted signal off a satellite twenty-seven thousand miles away.

Once contact with Vienna was in place, Castillo used the device to call Sergeant Bob Kensington, the Delta Force communicator who had been left behind in Argentina to man the device in Nuestra Pequeña Casa—OOA’s safe house in the Mayerling Country Club in Pilar.

He told Kensington to give Alex Darby, Alfredo Munz, and Tony Santini—and absolutely no one else—a heads-up that they were coming, his best guess of their ETA, and to lay on wheels at the Jorge Newbery airport to transport eight people, plus Max, to the safe house.

He asked Kensington the whereabouts of the Sienos and was disappointed to learn that they were in Asunción, Paraguay. Susanna and Paul Sieno didn’t have an AFC radio. Castillo told Kensington to get word to them as quickly as he could that he wanted the husband and wife at the safe house as soon as possible—preferably both together, but the wife absolutely soonest.

Susanna—a trim, pale, freckled-skin redhead—and Paul—with olive skin and dark hair—were CIA agents in their thirties. They had worked before for Castillo—for the OOA—but after the last operation Castillo had returned them to the CIA. Now he needed them back, especially Susanna.

Naturally, Kensington had asked what the hell was going on.

“I’ll tell you when I see you, Bob. Right now, the fewer people who know we’re coming the better.”

Then Castillo made a final secure call on the AFC device, one to the safe house in Alexandria, Virginia. Corporal Lester Bradley answered the radio.

Castillo asked him to tell Major Dick Miller where he was headed, but again not why, and when Lester said, “Yes, sir,” Castillo gave in to an impulse.

“And tell him to get you on the next flight to Buenos Aires, Lester. Go directly from the airport to the safe house there.”

“Yes, sir,” Bradley replied with considerably more enthusiasm than he had with his previous use of the words.

Castillo took off the headset and unstrapped himself. He looked at Jake Torine, who was in the pilot’s seat.

“And was the cherub happy?” Torine asked.

Castillo gave him the finger. He pushed himself out of the co-pilot seat and went into the cabin. Sparkman then got out of his seat and went into the cockpit.

Castillo looked around the cabin.

Lora Berezovsky was sleeping on the left couch, daughter Sof’ya on the right. Both puppies were cuddled asleep with the girl. Max had begun the flight on the corridor floor next to them, but then apparently had—without disturbing either the girl or the pups—moved onto the foot of the couch, where he was curled up and asleep.

Colonel Dmitri Berezovsky was dozing in the forward-facing seat in the rear of the cabin. Lieutenant Colonel Alekseeva was in the rear-facing seat by the forward bulkhead, with Edgar Delchamps in the seat facing opposite to hers. Lieutenant Colonel Alekseeva was reading People magazine, shaking her head in disbelief from time to time.

As Castillo moved into the seat Sparkman had been using—the forward-facing seat across the aisle from her—this caused him to wonder, Where the hell did that magazine come from? I hope she doesn’t think it’s mine.

Jack Davidson walked up the aisle from the galley and went into the cockpit. He liked to watch the pilots—their piloting. Jack had a lot of time in the co-pilot seats of various aircraft that Castillo had flown, and he was actively working on somehow getting into flight school and staying in Special Operations at the same time. Everybody said that was just about impossible, but everybody didn’t know Davidson as well as Castillo did.

Thirty-five minutes later, the public-address system speaker beeped three times, signaling that something was to be fed to the passengers.

“Rhine Control, Gulfstream 379,” Torine’s voice came over the speaker.

“Gulfstream 379, Rhine Control. Go ahead.”

“Gulfstream 379. We need to amend our flight plan with a destination change. Our new destination is Dakar, Senegal, Identifier Golf-Oscar-Oscar-Yankee. Request present position direct Geneva. Over.”

“Ahhh, roger, Gulfstream 379. I can clear you with routing direct Geneva, but I do not have the authority to clear you beyond Rhine airspace. You must coordinate further routing with Euro-control for clearance beyond Geneva. I suggest you contact Euro-control on frequency one-three-two-decimal-eight-five-zero for further clearance. Once I have received further clearance, I will contact you on this frequency. For now you are cleared present position direct Geneva. Maintain flight level three-four-zero.”

The tone of the controller’s voice suggested he had neither the time nor the inclination to deal with such a significant change to a cleared routing.

Torine didn’t mind. What he wanted to do was at least get the Gulfstream pointed in the right direction—toward Senegal. He knew that Geneva was on the edge of Rhine Control’s airspace boundary and probably would not be cleared beyond that. Also, he knew that making such a major change in their flight plan would take some time to coordinate with air traffic control. While en route to Geneva he would have Sparkman coordinate a new routing that would take them, after Geneva, over Toulouse, France; Malaga, Spain; Casablanca, Morocco; Tenerife, in the Canary Islands; then down the Atlantic Ocean just off the west coast of Africa; and finally into Dakar, Senegal.

“Roger, Rhine,” Torine replied cheerfully. “Gulfstream 379 cleared direct Geneva. Maintain flight level three-four-zero. We will coordinate our request with Euro-control and will remain on this frequency. Thank you ever so much.”

Castillo looked back into the cabin. Berezovsky’s eyes were wide open.

What the hell, I’m a very light sleeper myself when my ass is in a crack.

Berezovsky was still awake and alert when the loudspeakers beeped three times again.

“Gulfstream 379, Rhine Control. I have your revised clearance. Advise when ready to copy.”

“Gulfstream 379 ready to copy.”

“Gulfstream 379, you are now cleared to Golf-Oscar-Oscar-Yankee. After Geneva direct Toulouse, direct Malaga.”

This time, when Castillo glanced down the aisle to see if Berezovsky was showing any reaction to hearing the air traffic control conversation, the Russian was coming down the aisle. He reached Castillo and squatted beside him.

“I presume this aircraft has GPS capability?”

He has to ask?

Are the Russians really that backward?

Hell, he’s my age; GPS has been around our generation practically forever.

Castillo nodded.

“May I see it?”

Castillo considered yelling for Davidson to open the cockpit door, then looked around the aircraft. Most everyone, including the women and child, were sleeping. He reached behind him and picked up the aircraft intercom phone.

“Jack!”

Davidson appeared in the cockpit door a moment later. He held a phone handset to his ear.

“Show the colonel where we are on the GPS,” Castillo ordered into the phone.

Davidson waved Berezovsky into the cockpit.

The Russian went up the aisle and into the cockpit.

A minute or so later, Berezovsky reappeared and approached Castillo.

“Tom, you’re just going to have to learn to trust me, ol’ buddy.”

Berezovsky didn’t reply. He simply walked back to his seat.

Castillo sensed Svetlana’s eyes on him.

Guess she wasn’t exactly sound asleep.

“We have a training tape, a simulator, that shows that we’re approaching Sheremetyevo,” Castillo said to her, referring to the Moscow airport. “I should have had that running.”

Svetlana shook her head. But he thought he noticed a smile.

“You’re going to have to remember that he’s a senior SVR colonel,” she said.

“Was a senior colonel. Now he’s what’s called a defector.”

“And that makes me?” she asked.

“Former Lieutenant Colonel Alekseeva, a much prettier defector,” he said. “Who should also learn to trust me.”

“Trust has to be earned, Colonel.” She held up the People magazine. “You read this all the time?”

“From cover to cover,” he said.

She smiled.

“Are you about to tell me the real reason—that I won’t believe—why you’re defecting?” Castillo asked.

“I told you that I’d tell you why we are—why we have—defected when the time was right. That’s not yet.”

“You promised to tell the details of the family you have in Argentina.”

“I told you that I would tell you that at the fuel stop. We’re not at the fuel stop, are we?”

“No, we’re not.”

“Where is the fuel stop?”

“Dakar, Senegal. From there we’ll go to São Paulo, Brazil, then down to Buenos Aires. If we’re lucky we should be in B.A. about five in the afternoon, which is noon in B.A. And since December is the middle of winter in Vienna, it will be the middle of summer in B.A. In other words, hot, very hot, and humid.”

There’s always a silver cloud. I’ll very probably get to see Little Red Under Britches in a swimsuit at the safe house pool.

“We’ll be flying through most of the night and most of what would be the day in Vienna. You might consider getting some sleep. That seat goes down almost flat.”

“I think I will,” she said with a smile.

“It might be easier to sleep if you took off your pistol.”

She looked at him with what could have been surprise or indignation—or both.

“That holster must be uncomfortable,” Castillo went on. “And you’re really not going to have to shoot anybody anytime soon.”

I’ll be damned; she’s actually blushing!

“Or would you rather I took the holster off?” Castillo added.

Svetlana’s eyes turned to ice.

She unfastened her seat belt, stood, then marched down the aisle to the lavatory. Ninety seconds later, she was back. Without looking at him, she dropped the holstered pistol in his lap, got back in her seat, adjusted it almost flat, then turned on her side, facing away from him, and closed her eyes.

When Castillo took the pistol from the holster he saw that Davidson had been right: It was a 1908 Colt Vest Pocket. But chambered for .32 ACP, not .25 as Jack had guessed. He carefully ejected the magazine and worked the action. A cartridge flew out. He tried but failed to catch the live round, so he went looking for it. He found it under the seat, put it into the magazine, then put the magazine back in the pistol and the pistol back in its holster.

The elastic straps were still warm from her body, and he had a quick mental image of her leaping onto the platform at the Westbahnhof.

Careful, Charley.

Little Red Under Britches is a professional. One proof of that being she carries her pistol with a round in the chamber, just like big boys do.

He put the pistol into his briefcase, lowered his seat, and promptly fell asleep.

When they landed at Yoff-Léopold Sédar Senghor International Airport in Senegal, and Max made his routine visit to the nose gear, both pups and the girl followed him. Delchamps followed the pups. Castillo had thought that the only words to really describe the pups bouncing happily after Poppa, and then trying—and failing—to emulate his raised high leg, were cute as hell.

Castillo had glanced at Svetlana. She was smiling at the scene warmly, maternally, causing Castillo to think, She sure don’t look like no SVR rezident who goes around with a pistol next to her crotch.

Svetlana didn’t volunteer any information about her family when they had a mostly unsatisfactory French breakfast—bitter coffee and stale, too sweet croissants—making Castillo wonder if that was something she had invented to explain why they wanted to go to Argentina, and that there was, in fact, no family to help them disappear.

He didn’t press her.

[TWO]

Aeropuerto Internacional Jorge Newbery

Buenos Aires, Argentina

1240 29 December 2005

Castillo had taken his turn at the controls on the Vienna-Dakar leg and again on the last, short leg from São Paulo, Brazil, to Buenos Aires. On the latter—having relieved Jake Torine, which put him in the left seat—he had, without thinking about it, made the approach and landing.

At the end of the landing roll, he glanced at Dick Sparkman in the right seat and saw the look on his face.

“I hope you were paying attention, Captain,” Castillo said straight-faced. “If after much practice and study you can make a landing like that, then there may be hope that one day you can sit in the captain’s seat yourself.”

Sparkman shook his head, started to say something, and stopped.

“You may speak, Captain Sparkman.”

“I don’t know how to say this. . . .”

“Give it a shot.”

“Colonel Torine told me . . .” He paused again, then said, “How many landings have you made in a Gulfstream?”

“Not many. Torine usually takes it away from me whenever we get within fifty miles of our destination.”

“How many?”

“You could count them on my fingers. With a thumb, maybe both thumbs, left over.”

“Colonel, you had a gusting crosswind, thermals, everything that usually adds up to a bumpy landing—and you greased it in. Colonel Torine said you were a natural pilot. I didn’t know what he meant. Now I do.”

“Flattery will get you everywhere, Sparkman.”

“That was more surprise, maybe even awe, than flattery, Colonel.”

As Castillo taxied to the private aircraft tarmac, his pleasure at the compliment was more than a little tempered by some reflection. If all the threats to a smooth landing that Sparkman mentioned had indeed existed—and Castillo had no doubts about Sparkman’s judgment as an aviator—he hadn’t seen them.

Which means I hadn’t been paying attention as I damned well should’ve been.

That sobering thought left his mind as he approached the general aviation complex. He could see their welcoming party. In addition to immigration and customs officials, and their vehicles, he saw Alfredo Munz, Alex Darby, and Tony Santini standing in front of the wheels he had asked them to bring.

All I have to do now is get everybody through customs and immigration, off the airport, and to the house in Pilar without calling to us the attention of anybody really important—say, the Buenos Aires SVR rezident or Comandante Duffy of the Gendarméria Nacional.

How he was going to deal with Duffy—when he inevitably had to—was one of the things he had been thinking about when he had not been thinking about gusting crosswinds and thermals rising from the runway baking in the noonday sun.

“Shut it down, Sparkman. And keep everybody on the plane until I see what the hell’s going on outside.”

When Castillo opened the stair door, and the decreasing whine of the engines filled the cabin, he called out, “Everybody stay on the plane until I give the okay.”

He went down the stair door and then across the tarmac. He saw Alex Darby, Tony Santini, and Alfredo Munz start walking on the heels of the Argentine officials who were already headed for him and the Gulfstream.

At the top of the stairs, Max shouldered Sparkman out of the way. He made his way down the stairs for his ritual visit to the nose wheel. One of his pups followed him, and then the other. Sof’ya Berezovsky went after the pups. Former Lieutenant Colonel Svetlana Alekseeva of the SVR, in her role as aunt, went after Sof’ya. Edgar Delchamps went after Colonel Alekseeva.

One of the Argentine officials, not smiling, put out his hand. “Documents, please.”

“I’ll have to get them,” Castillo said in Spanish with a smile. He hoped that if he sounded like a Porteño he might get a smile in return.

He turned and saw for the first time that Delchamps, Svetlana, Sof’ya, and the dogs were off the airplane.

He walked back to Svetlana, who was standing at the foot of the step door.

“Get back on the airplane,” he ordered. “Get everybody’s passports.” He looked up and into the airplane and saw Davidson. “Jack, get the airplane’s papers and the Americans’ passports.”

Svetlana went up the stairs.

A moment later, Davidson and Sparkman came down the stairs with all the passports and the aircraft’s documents.

They formed a fire-bucket line, and their luggage began to come off the plane. Castillo saw that Svetlana had taken her place in the line.

And then he saw that Svetlana’s skirt was either Loden cloth or something heavy like it.

Jesus, that’s about the worst thing she could be wearing here.

This is the hottest part of the summer.

The customs officer began a perfunctory inspection of the luggage. A man from Jet Aviation Service began to deal with Torine about landing fees, parking fees, and fuel.

“Very nice, Charley,” Santini said to Castillo, vis-à-vis Lieutenant Colonel Alekseeva. “I have always been partial to redheads.”

Redhead?

Castillo looked. What had looked like dark brown hair now indeed, in the bright sunlight, looked red. Dark red, but red.

“My relationship with the lady is purely professional, Tony,” Castillo said.

“Sure it is.”

“She is—they are—people I want to get to our house in Pilar safely and without attracting attention. When that’s done, I’ll tell you all about them.”

“Who are they?”

“Later, Tony.”

Santini heard the tone in his voice and didn’t push.

“Wheels?” Castillo asked.

“I have my car and an embassy Suburban,” Darby said, offering his hand. “Welcome back, Charley.”

“And I’ve got my car,” Tony Santini said. “And Munz has his.”

Munz saw there was some problem with the customs or immigration officers and went to deal with it.

“The Sienos?” Castillo asked.

“He’s not coming,” Darby said, “and she couldn’t get on the morning plane. She may not be able to get a seat on the afternoon plane, either.”

“Shit!”

“Kensington said that Miller called and said Bradley would be on the Aerolíneas Argentinas flight out of Miami tonight.”

“What’s going on, Charley?” Darby asked.

“It’ll have to wait until we’re in Nuestra Pequeña Casa,” Castillo said, nodding toward Munz, who was walking back to them, his left fist balled with the thumb extended, signaling that all was okay.

[THREE]

Nuestra Pequeña Casa

Mayerling Country Club

Pilar, Buenos Aires Province, Argentina

1545 29 December 2005

“Our Little House” in the exclusive Mayerling Country Club in the Buenos Aires suburb of Pilar had been rented on a two-year lease for four thousand U.S. dollars a month by Señor Paul Sieno and his wife, Susanna. The owner believed them to be fellow Argentines, an affluent young couple from Mendoza.

That the attractive pair was affluent seemed to the owner to be proven when they didn’t try to bargain about the monthly rent or his demand that he be paid the first and last months’ rent plus a security deposit equal to another two months’ rent before they moved in. He had the money in hand—sixteen thousand dollars, in U.S. currency—the day after he had asked for it.

Nuestra Pequeña Casa—the owner had named it—could fairly be described as a mansion in a neighborhood of mansions. Mayerling was several kilometers off the Panamericana, a toll superhighway, and fifty-odd kilometers from Plaza del Congreso, the monolith in front of the Congress in central Buenos Aires, from which all distances in Argentina are measured.

Argentine law defined “country club” as a gated community in which at least thirty percent of the land was given over to such things as polo fields, golf courses, and other green areas. Further, a “gated community” in Argentina meant a private neighborhood enclosed by ten-foot-tall fences topped with razor wire, equipped with motion-sensing devices, and patrolled by private security guards armed with pistols, shotguns, and in some cases Uzis.

Mayerling far exceeded the minimum green-space requirements of the law. There were five polo fields and two Jack Nicklaus-designed golf courses. The smallest lot within its ten-foot walls was one hectare, or 2.45 acres.

“Mayerling,” Castillo had noted when the Sienos first rented the property, was also the name of the Royal and Imperial hunting lodge outside Vienna where—depending on which version one chose to believe—Crown Prince Rudolph had shot his sixteen-year-old mistress and then himself, or Crown Prince Rudolph had been shot at the orders of his father, Emperor Franz Josef, who believed young Rudy was planning to split the Austro-Hungarian Empire by becoming King of Hungary.

Many of the homes in Mayerling were built on two or more lots. Nuestra Pequeña Casa was built on two, and had six bedrooms, all with bath and dressing room, three other toilets with bidets, a library, a sitting room, a dining room, a kitchen, servants’ quarters (for four), a swimming pool, and, in the backyard near the pool, a quincho.

A quincho was something like an American pool house, except that it was primarily intended as a place to eat, more or less outdoors, and had a wood-fired grill for this purpose.

Our Little House’s quincho was solidly built of masonry and had a rugged roof of mottled red Spanish tiles. It had a deep verandah, which also was covered by the tile roof, and a wall of sliding glass doors that overlooked the pool.

Like most of the houses in Mayerling, Nuestra Pequeña Casa was individually fenced on three sides, the fences concealed in closely packed pine trees. They, too, had motion-sensing devices. Motion-sensing devices also protected the unfenced front of the house.

The house—indeed all of Mayerling—had been constructed on a cost-be-damned basis to provide its residents with luxury, privacy, and, above all, security, as kidnapping of the rich was one of the more profitable cottage industries in Argentina.

And all of this, of course, made Nuestra Pequeña Casa ideal for the Office of Organizational Analysis, which needed a safe house. Within the intelligence community, a safe house was defined as a place the bad guys didn’t know about, a place where one may hide things and people.

Jack and Sandra Britton and Bob Kensington, all in bathing suits, were standing on the verandah of Nuestra Pequeña Casa when the little convoy rolled up. The housekeeper and a maid stood behind them.

The moment Castillo opened the door of the embassy Suburban, the heat and humidity of an Argentine summer afternoon hit him. He stood there and again thought of the Russian women in clothing intended for winter in Northern Europe.

Castillo slammed the door shut and walked up to the house.

“Well, we didn’t expect to see you so soon,” Britton greeted him, putting out his hand.

“Unexpected things happen,” Castillo said lightly, then changed his tone. “From this moment, we’re going to run this place tight. First thing: We get everybody out of the vehicles and into the foyer. Kensington, get a weapon.”

Sergeant Kensington took one step backward into the house, reached down, and came up holding an Uzi at his side.

“I should have known better, Bob. Sorry.”

Castillo saw Sandra Britton looked like she was about to say something. “Sandra, please go inside and save your lip for later.”

She gave him a dirty look, glanced at her husband, but went into the house.

The expression on Jack Britton’s face showed he didn’t like Castillo’s curtness to his wife, though he didn’t say anything.

“Bob,” Castillo went on, “stay where you are. Jack, go to the Suburban and open the rear door. Tell the people in there to get out and into the house.”

“Who are they?” Britton asked.

“Indulge me, Jack. Just do it.”

Max erupted from the Suburban the moment the rear door was opened and ran into the house. Then Sof’ya, holding one of the pups, slid off the seat and to the ground.

“Bring him into the house, sweetheart, please,” Castillo called to her in Russian.

The smile on Sof’ya’s face vanished when she saw Kensington and the submachine gun. She looked back at the Suburban, then at Castillo.

“It’s okay, sweetheart,” Castillo called as Sof’ya’s mother, holding the other puppy, slid awkwardly off the Suburban’s high seat and onto the ground.

“Right this way, please, Mrs. Berezovsky,” Castillo said, and then, switching to English, called, “Now the Mercedes, Jack. Watch this one!”

Kensington went to the second vehicle, Alfredo Munz’s Mercedes 230 SUV. He opened the front passenger door, then, seeing no one in the front passenger seat, closed it and opened the rear door.

Lieutenant Colonel Alekseeva got out, with a show of leg, and looked around.

“Over here, please, Colonel,” Castillo ordered in Russian, gesturing toward the open door.

She walked quickly to the house and went inside without looking directly at Castillo.

“And now Santini’s car,” Castillo called in English. “And really watch this one.”

Britton opened the passenger door of Santini’s Peugeot sedan. Colonel Berezovsky got out and looked around. Santini came quickly around the front of the car as Edgar Delchamps got out of the backseat.

Delchamps gestured for Berezovsky to go into the house. After a moment—long enough to demonstrate that he wasn’t going to jump at anybody’s command—Berezovsky walked to the house and went inside.

Castillo followed Berezovsky into the foyer.

“We’re now going to move to the quincho,” Castillo announced in Russian. “Before we go out there, I want to tell you the area is fenced. You are forbidden to get closer than two meters to the fence. If you do, you will be shot.”

He turned to Jack Davidson. “Get a weapon . . .”

“Behind you in the closet,” Kensington offered.

“. . . and take them out there. I’ll have something cold sent out for them to drink. And while you’re doing that, and the luggage is being brought in from the cars, I’ll bring everybody up to speed.”

[FOUR]

“Okay,” Castillo said, winding up his briefing of Alex Darby, Tony Santini, and the Brittons in the main house. “That’s about it.”

“It’s hard to believe that woman is a Russian spy,” Sandra said.

Castillo flashed her a cold look, and then, seeing her face, immediately recognized he was wrong. Sandra wasn’t being clever; she was stating the obvious.

“Well, she is, Sandra,” he said. “And what is it they say about ‘the female being the deadlier of any species’?”

Sandra almost sadly nodded her understanding.

“Oops,” Castillo said. “Code names. I don’t want anybody using their real names or the phrase ‘the Russians’ or anything like that. So, from this moment, when you’re talking about them, Berezovsky is Big Bad Wolf. His wife is Mrs. Wolf. Sof’ya is the Cub. Colonel Alekseeva is Little Red Under Britches.”

Sandra’s eyebrow rose at that, but she didn’t say anything.

“Dealing with Little Red Under Britches is going to be a problem until Susanna Sieno can get here from Asunción, probably before noon tomorrow. Until then, we’re fucked.” He heard what he had said. “Sorry, Sandra. It’s been a long couple of days, and I’m a little . . .”

“ ‘Fucked up’?” Sandra replied. “I’ve heard the word, Charley. Not only am I a semanticist, for many long and painful years I have been married to a Philadelphia cop. They tend to use the ‘For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge’ acronym at least once every sixty seconds.”

He smiled at her. “Is that what it means?”

“According to Sherlock Holmes, that’s what the London bobbies wrote on their blotter when they locked up a hooker for practicing her profession.”

Castillo glanced at Jack Britton, then said, “According to your Sherlock Holmes, you mean?”

“I think the other one’s dead,” Sandra replied, straight-faced, and then went on: “Charley, I don’t want to put my nose in where it doesn’t belong, but this schoolteacher volunteers for anything you think I can do.”

Jack Britton said: “Little Red Riding Hood—”

“ ‘Under Britches,’” Castillo automatically corrected him. “Little Red Under Britches.”

“I’d love to know the etymological root of that,” Sandra Britton said.

“—doesn’t know that Sandra’s a professor,” Jack Britton finished.

Sandra added: “And while I don’t think I could render the lady colonel hors de combat with a karate chop, I am famous for my icy stare’s ability to silence a roomful of obstreperous students.”

“Jack, did the State Department issue you a diplomatic passport?”

“The embassy gave us both one the minute we walked in the door. I don’t even know what it’s good for.”

“It identifies you as a diplomat,” Castillo explained. “Which means you can’t be searched and then arrested for carrying a concealed weapon.”

“Really?” Sandra said. “When do I get my gun?”

“Do you know how to use one?”

“Sherlock here took me shooting on our honeymoon.”

“You sure you want to get involved?”

“You said there may be a connection between all the things that have happened. And in the course of one of those things, my new car and house got shot up. Hell yes I want to get involved.”

“Congratulations, Mrs. Britton,” Castillo said formally. “You are now a member of the Office of Organizational Analysis. Just as soon as we have a moment, I’ll get you on the horn with Agnes Forbison and we’ll get you on the payroll.”

“You’re serious,” Jack Britton, surprised, declared out loud.

“In the words of your bride, ‘Hell yes.’ ”

Castillo had just decided that Sandra Britton being here was a fortunate happenstance.

He had also just realized that neither Darby nor Santini had opened their mouths, not even to ask questions.

That could be because my briefing was brilliant, covering absolutely everything that needed to be said.

No questions necessary.

More likely, however, it’s because they don’t like what they heard and are deciding how and when they can tactfully suggest to the boss that he’s about to fuck up by the numbers.

When Castillo walked over to the quincho with the Brittons, Alex Darby, and Tony Santini, sitting on its verandah were Alfredo Munz, Edgar Delchamps, and Jack Davidson. Munz was holding a bottle of Coca-Cola; Delchamps and Davidson, liter bottles of Quilmes beer.

“Kensington?” Castillo asked.

“With our guests,” Delchamps said, jerking his thumb toward the interior of the quincho.

“Everybody up to speed?” Castillo asked.

“Ace, is this where you ask, ‘Any questions or comments?’ ” Delchamps said.

Castillo shrugged. “Okay. Any questions or comments?”

“Charley,” Darby said, “you’re aware that there is a U.S. government agency that’s charged not only with trying to get the bad guys—and girls, come to think of it—to change sides but has all the facilities in place to deal effectively with them. Yes? They call it the CIA.”

“I’ve heard that.”

“With that in mind,” Darby went on, “now that you’ve gotten Berezovsky and family safely out of Europe—where, I suspect, they were about to be grabbed by the Sluzhba Vnezhney Razvedki and/or the Federal’naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, which, I also presume you know is charged with keeping defectors from defecting—”

“Why don’t I just get on the horn,” Castillo interrupted reasonably, “and call Langley and have them send a plane down here to take our guests off our hands?”

“Yeah,” Darby said. “Why don’t you?”

“I’m glad you brought that up, Alex. It reminds me of something else I’ve forgotten to do. Alex, if you happen to have a friendly conversation with your pal Miss Eleanor Dillworth in Vienna, you have no idea where I am, and you never heard of Berezovsky and company.”

“What?” Darby said.

“I didn’t get into that,” Delchamps said.

“Into what?” Darby asked.

“Miss Dillworth is not a big fan of our leader,” Delchamps offered.

“Your leader. I work for Langley.”

“No, Alex,” Castillo said, “you don’t. Ambassador Montvale has informed the DCI that—at the direction of the President—the CIA is to furnish the OOA—me—with whatever assets I think I need. You are such an asset. I don’t mean to get starchy, but it’s necessary. You will not tell the CIA or anyone else that you have been requisitioned. That’s an order, Top Secret Presidential, as was what I said before about the woman in Vienna. Clear, Alex?”

Darby’s face whitened.

“He does have the authority, Alex,” Delchamps said. “You’d better say, ‘Yes, sir.’ ”

“Jesus Christ!” Darby blurted.

“That’s close enough,” Castillo said.

“Are you now going to tell us what’s going on, Ace?”

“Two things,” Castillo said. “One is that I’m following my original orders, which remain in force until the man who issued them—and no one else—changes them. Those orders are to ‘find and render harmless’ whoever is responsible for the murder of Jack The Stack Masterson. I think that may be a General Sirinov; Berezovsky mentioned his name. He said Sirinov ordered the elimination of the Kuhls, Friedler, and Billy, Otto, and me. I think he probably had something to do with what happened to Jack and Sandra and to Liam Duffy.

“Second, Berezovsky said—for the two million bucks I promised him—that he would give me the details about a chemical factory in Congo-Kinshasa making some kind of weapon of mass destruction. I thought he was telling the truth, and so did Davidson.”

Davidson nodded.

“So,” Castillo finished, “I’m going to deal with these people myself until I am convinced that they are fucking with me or that I can’t—we can’t—handle them ourselves.”

“Ace, you realize you just bit off a hunk that’s going to be hard to chew, never mind swallow?”

Castillo took a long, thoughtful look at Delchamps, then said, “Meaning you think I’m wrong? On some kind of ego trip?”

“Meaning, Ace, I think you’re doing the right thing—I can think of fifty ways that Langley could, would, fuck this up—and that means what I said, I just hope you realized what size chaw you just bit off.”

Castillo nodded.

“Any other questions or comments?” he asked.

When there were none, he gestured toward the sliding door of the quincho. “Let’s see to our guests.”

Bob Kensington, in a chair against one wall of the quincho, was still in his bathing trunks. He had the Uzi on his lap, the weapon’s sling, with a two-magazine pouch hanging from it, slung around his neck.

Sof’ya was sitting on the floor with the pups and Max. The puppies were trying to climb high enough on Max, who was sitting beside the girl, to gnaw on his ears. He didn’t seem to mind.

The adult Russians were sitting in a row on wicker chairs. Berezovsky had removed his jacket, revealing a sweat-soaked shirt and what Castillo decided was a really cheap pair of suspenders. His wife and Svetlana had removed their jackets. Their blouses were the opposite of crisp and fresh.

“Did you all get something to drink?” Castillo asked.

Berezovsky and his wife nodded.

Sof’ya said, “Thank you.”

Svetlana didn’t respond at all.

“The first thing we’re going to do is get you some summer clothing,” Castillo said. “And the way we’re going to do that is that Mrs. Berezovsky will go with Agent Britton”—he pointed to Sandra, not Jack, surprising more than a few—“to the local shopping center. Make sure you know the sizes of everyone, Mrs. Berezovsky.

“While they are gone, I will show the others your accommodations, and you can move your luggage into them. Mr. Darby and Mr. Delchamps will have to take a look through the luggage—”

“Is that necessary?” Svetlana interrupted.

Does that mean you have something you don’t want me to find?

Or that you have nothing I might consider contraband, and are going to be amused at our fruitless search?

“Obviously, Colonel, I have decided that it is,” Castillo said. “And right now I would like your purses, wallets, money, passports, and all identification. Put them on the Ping-Pong table, please, now. The purses will be returned after Agent Davidson has had a chance to examine them.”

“Less the contents, of course?” Svetlana asked sarcastically.

“Colonel, why don’t we try to start our relationship as amicably as possible? We are going to be spending a good deal of time together, and I don’t see much point in making it any more unpleasant than necessary.”

Colonel Alekseeva responded to the proffered olive branch by standing, then walking over to the Ping-Pong table and dumping the contents of her purse on it.

“Okay?” She held up the purse—he thought it looked like something that could be used to hold horse feed—so that he could see it was empty.

“Fine. But leave the purse, will you, please?”

She glowered at him.

What’s this, a new tactic?

Now she’s going to be a martyr, and I’m going to have to be nice to her, so she’ll look deeply into my eyes again?

“One never knows, does one, Colonel, what might be hidden in the lining of a purse? For all I know you might have another .32 in there.”

She tried to stare him down and failed.

“Are you about ready to go shopping, Mrs. Berezovsky?” Castillo said.

“May I take my daughter with me?”

“You may. But don’t you think she’d rather play with the dogs?”

She looked at her daughter and then smiled.

“Yes, I do,” she said.

“Just get enough clothing for three days,” Castillo said. “Plus a bathing suit or two.”

“Bathing suits?” Svetlana asked incredulously.

“This is a five-star prison, Colonel. With a swimming pool. I also think you will like the food, which will be ready by the time Mrs. Berezovsky and Agent Britton have returned.”

She didn’t say anything.

“Your choice, Colonel,” Castillo said. “Use the pool or don’t use it. For that matter, wear a bathing suit or don’t wear one. That’s up to you.”

“There are three bedrooms—actually suites—on the second floor, Tom,” Castillo said to Berezovsky, then pointed at a closed door. “The center one here is mine; it has an office in which I will conduct my part of the interrogations. The other two suites don’t have the office. Arrange yourselves in them any way you want.

“At night, the doors will be locked and there will be someone in the corridor to make sure we have no ‘sleepwalkers.’ And there will be someone in the drive to make sure no one opens—or goes through—the windows. That should prove no problem, as only a fool sleeps with an open window in an Argentine summer.

“The point I’m trying to make, Colonel,” Castillo went on, making it clear that he was talking to Berezovsky, not to Svetlana, “is that I will make every reasonable effort to make our relationship as business-like as possible, as comfortable as possible, so long as you’re here.”

“And how long will that be?” Svetlana asked.

Castillo ignored her.

“Every reasonable effort for comfort is dependent, of course, on good behavior. The alternatives range from moving you onto cots in the garage, which is not air-conditioned, to leaving one or both of you trussed up like Christmas turkeys on the driveway of the Russian embassy on Rodríguez Pena.”

“I asked, ‘How long are we going to be here?’ ” Svetlana said.

Castillo turned to her after a moment. “Until you earn back the cost of what it cost me to get you here, plus of course the two million dollars we’ve talked about.”

“And how long do you think that will take?” she pursued.

“And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to leave you with Mr. Darby and Mr. Delchamps. While they are having a look at your luggage, Mr. Davidson, Max, and I are going to take a dip until supper.”

On his way to the quincho five minutes later, Castillo—now wearing bathing trunks—was intercepted by the housekeeper. She was holding up a bathing suit.

“For the poor little chica, if that’s all right. It belongs to Juanita. I already gave one to the other lady.”

Castillo presumed that “Juanita” was either a diminutive maid or one of the housekeeper’s children. Or grandchildren.

“That’s very kind,” Castillo said. “How about going out there with me and helping her get into it?”

When Castillo, trailed by the maid, walked into the quincho, Bob Kensington was standing by the AFC communications device and a stand-alone all-in-one device that could print, scan, and send and receive facsimile transmissions. Kensington was feeding the machine from the stack of passports, identification cards, driver’s licenses, and the like that they had taken from the Russians.

Kensington stated the obvious. “This goddamn thing is the slow-link—takes forever to scan this stuff.”

“Miller can’t run that stuff through NSA at Fort Meade until he has it. Nose to the grindstone, Sergeant Kensington!”

“Yes, sir,” Kensington said, then loudly shouted, “Hoooo-rah!”

Castillo laughed. The shouting of “Hoooo-rah!” to indicate their enthusiasm to carry out a difficult task was getting to be almost a hallmark of U.S. Army Rangers, and even some lesser ordinary soldiers.

Most Special Forces people—and almost everybody in Delta Force—thought doing so was ludicrous.

Castillo said: “Your oh-so-commendable enthusiasm, Sergeant, has earned you a promotion. You are now the detachment’s classified documents officer.”

“I guess I should have seen that coming. Where’s the Pride of the Marine Corps when I need him?”

“Lester will be here tomorrow morning. But you will not delegate that responsibility to him. A lot of that stuff’s likely to be very important later on, not just now. I don’t want any of it lost.”

Kensington nodded his understanding. He scanned two pages of Svetlana’s passport, then using a flash memory thumb-sized chip, put the chip into a slot and transferred the file to the AFC device. It beeped. Before he could open the scanner to rearrange the passport and repeat the process, the AFC beeped again—and a sultry female voice announced, “All done, baby. Slip it to me again! I never get enough!”

Castillo raised an eyebrow. “I presume that means the file has been received and verified, and the AFC is ready to accept another file?”

“That’s about it, sir,” Kensington said, a little—but only a little—embarrassed.

“Where’d you get the voice?”

“I played around with the voice-recognition circuits.” Kensington now smiled. “I can make anybody say almost anything.”

Castillo turned to see what, if anything, Sof’ya thought of the sultry female voice. He saw that she was shyly and politely trying to tell the maid, in English, that she would please like to wait until Mama came back before accepting the bathing suit.

The maid spoke very little English.

Castillo wondered what the child had been told about what was happening, and what rules Mama had told her that now governed her behavior.

He came to her rescue.

“Sof’ya, you can wait for your mother, but why don’t you come out and watch Max and the pups?”

“He goes in the pool?” she asked.

“Watch.”

Castillo retrieved a soccer ball from the top of a refrigerator. It was the only place where the ball could be kept out of the dog’s reach.

Max jumped to his feet, having instantly decided that playing with the ball would be more fun than having his offspring gnaw on his ears.

Castillo went to the quincho door and drop-kicked the ball into the pool. Max raced after it, not even pausing before jumping into the water. He swam to the ball and took it in his mouth.

Then Max saw that the pups had not only followed him to the pool but jumped in it after him.

Sof’ya screamed. “They’ll drown!”

Castillo didn’t think so, but Max was suddenly overcome by paternal emotions. He dropped the soccer ball, swam to one of the pups, and picked it up gently in his mouth.

The pup howled.

Sof’ya screamed again as she ran to the side of the pool.

Max looked confused. There were two pups, but he could get only one in his mouth at a time. He began to paddle in a circle. The pup that had not been rescued paddled desperately after him.

Castillo slipped out of his sandals and ran, laughing, to the pool and dove in.

He swam to the circling dogs and caught in his hand the one that was free. The pup struggled to regain its freedom, but Castillo managed to get it to the decking of the pool, where he set it at Sof’ya’s feet.

“The other one, the other one!” she screamed. “He’s going to eat it!”

“Max!” Castillo called. “Come!”

But Max kept circling.

With some difficulty—he was now almost helpless with laughter—Castillo went after Max. Max saw him coming and swam away from him to the wrong—the deep—end of the pool.

There he tried to climb out and failed. All he could do was get his paws on the edge of the pool—and slide back in.

Before Castillo could reach him, Sof’ya ran to the pool’s edge there and tried to convince Max to give up the puppy. When that failed, she reached over and grabbed a handful of Max’s fur, trying to pull him out.

Max’s paws again slipped on the poolside tiles. This time he slid backward into the water with two results: He took Sof’ya with him and, when his head went underwater, he let go of the puppy.

Castillo was by then at the scene. He grabbed the now-yapping puppy and put it on the pool deck. Max reached the surface, saw the puppy, and tried again to climb out of the pool.

The puppy ran to pool edge and started yapping indignantly at its father.

Castillo knew Max would not hurt the pup. Sof’ya did not know Max as well as Castillo did.

“He’s going to eat him! Oh, God! He’s going to eat him!”

Castillo grabbed Sof’ya so that he could hoist her out of the pool. He didn’t know how well she could swim—if at all—and she was still wearing her heavy European winter clothing.

She struggled.

At that point, reinforcements arrived. Or, more accurately, erupted from the water next to Castillo.

“What are you doing to her, you sonofabitch?” Lieutenant Colonel Svetlana Alekseeva of the Sluzhba Vnezhney Razvedki demanded, furiously indignant.

Lieutenant Colonel C. G. Castillo of the Office of Organizational Analysis instantly took his hands off Miss Sof’ya Berezovsky, which caused her to go under the water again, which frightened her, and caused her to struggle rather violently when she felt her aunt’s hands on her.

Castillo climbed agilely out of the pool, then got to his feet and surveyed the pool.

Max, apparently having finally realized that he was not going to be able to get out of the pool at the deep end, now was swimming furiously to the shallow end of the pool, where he could walk out using the wide steps there.

Svetlana, without much success, was trying to calm Sof’ya, who was still concerned about Max eating one or both of the pups, which now yapped a chorus. Finally, Svetlana succeeded to the point where she could move Sof’ya close enough to poolside so that Castillo could bend over, or kneel, and give Sof’ya his hand and haul her out and safely onto the deck.

But when Castillo bent over to offer his hand, he became distracted—and nearly fell back into the pool.

There was, of course, a very good reason for his losing his balance. And it was a sight he would not soon forget:

Although Colonel Alekseeva at the moment was wholly unaware of her problem, the fact was that when she had been struggling with Sof’ya, the strap of the top to her two-piece swimsuit had snapped, and said strap had slipped from her neck, and the top itself had fallen from her breasts.

This caused the exposure to Castillo’s instantly bedazzled eyes of the most perfect naked bosom—in every respect, including erect nipples—he had ever seen, and the number of those he had seen at one time or another over the course of his life was legion.

He was frozen for a moment, but somehow—miraculously—then reached down and coolly hauled Sof’ya from the pool. He turned her over to the housekeeper, who was hovering with concern nearby.

Then he returned his attention to the pool.

With a little bit of luck, she’ll want me to give her a hand out of the pool.

Luck, alas, was no longer to be with him.

Colonel Alekseeva saw Colonel Castillo standing above her, saw where he was looking, looked herself, and in one swift motion, modestly clapped her hands over her bosom and slipped under the water, there to attempt reaffixing her garment.

Castillo heard footsteps approaching.

“You’re going to have to teach me how to do that, Ace,” Edgar Delchamps said behind him, a laugh in his tone. “Talk about absolutely destroying the self-confidence of the prisoner about to be interrogated!”

Castillo turned to glare at him but found Delchamps walking quickly to Sof’ya, who was sitting on the grass crying and clutching both of the soaking-wet pups to her.

“You know what that means, don’t you, Sof’ya?” Delchamps asked her in a kind and gentle voice that Castillo had never heard from him.

She shook her head, not understanding the question.

“In the United States, we have a rule. When a puppy is in danger and someone rescues him, that person then owns him.”

“Really?”

“Which of the pups did you rescue?” Delchamps asked.

With no hesitation at all, Sof’ya hoisted one.

“This little girl,” she said. “I call her ‘Marina.’”

“Well, Marina now belongs to you,” Delchamps said. “That means, you understand, that you now will be responsible for seeing that she has enough to eat, things like that. You think you can do that?”

Sof’ya happily nodded.

On one hand, Castillo thought, Delchamps may have finally found the out he was looking for after running off at the mouth and announcing he wanted one of Mädchen’s pups. How the hell was he going to care for a puppy?

On the other hand, truth being stranger than fiction, a human heart may actually be beating under the old dinosaur’s hide.

Delchamps gently took the other pup, the last one, from Sof’ya and walked to Castillo.

As if he had been reading Castillo’s mind, he said, “In the trade, that’s known as establishing the good-guy/bad-guy relationship. Guess who’s the good guy, Ace? The guy who gave the kid a puppy, or the bastard who tore Auntie’s bathing suit from her shoulders and then stared shamelessly at her boobs?”

He handed the pup to Castillo. Castillo took it, shook his head but didn’t reply, and returned his attention to the pool.

Lieutenant Colonel Alekseeva had reached the shallow end and was now wading through the last several feet, trying without success to repair the broken strap with one hand as she held the suit top with the other.

Max, who had been lying on the tiles recuperating from his ordeal, stood up and eyed her curiously.

As Svetlana marched past him, he shook to free himself of the water in his fur. The fur of a Bouvier des Flandres holds an astonishing amount of water.

As Svetlana jumped out of the way, the right side of her bathing suit bottom slipped off her right buttock and bunched up in the valley between the opposing buttocks, exposing to view a pink, fleshy orb that put into the shadows all other orbs Castillo had seen here and there in his lifetime.

She pushed and pulled the cloth back into place while marching with what dignity she could muster toward the house.

Castillo felt a stirring in his groin.

Down, boy, down!

If there was ever a really off-limits female, there it is, walking on those lovely long legs into the house!

VII

[ONE]

Nuestra Pequeña Casa

Mayerling Country Club

Pilar, Buenos Aires Province, Argentina

1905 29 December 2005

Colonel Dmitri Berezovsky was the first of the Russians to appear. He was wearing baggy swimming trunks, a knit shirt embroidered with a Ralph Lauren polo player insignia, and rubber sandals, and he had a towel draped around his neck.

Castillo, who was standing at the parrilla turning bifes de chorizo, saw Sof’ya holding the puppy and running happily toward her father, obviously intending to tell him that the dog was now hers.

Berezovsky, without breaking stride, held out his hand to her in a stop signal. Shedding the shirt and the towel en route, he took the steps into the shallow end of the pool, waded toward the deep end until he judged it deep enough for swimming, then flopped onto his belly and swam using a breaststroke with his head out of the water to the far end of the pool. There, he stopped, hung on to the side of the pool for several seconds, then flopped back into the water and breaststroked—with his head held high again—back to the shallow end. And, there, he stood, waded until he reached the end of the pool, and got out.

Castillo saw that Berezovsky had managed his swim without getting his hair wet.

The Russian walked to where he had dropped the towel and Sof’ya was now standing. He picked up the towel and dried himself methodically as Sof’ya explained what had happened and tried to hand him the dog.

When he had finally dried himself to his satisfaction, he rolled up the towel, held it between his knees, put the polo shirt back on, draped the towel around his neck, and took the dog.

Berezovsky looked thoughtfully across the pool at Castillo.

He’s wondering what we’re up to, Castillo thought.

In his circumstances, I’d do the same damn thing.

And by now, of course, in addition to wondering what’s going to happen to him and his family, he’s almost certainly wondering if defecting was really such a good idea in the first place.

Castillo turned to the parrilla, stuck an enormous fork into a two-pound bife de chorizo—New York strip steak—then held it over his head, signaling Berezovsky to come over.

Still carrying the pup, Berezovsky did so, with Sof’ya at his side.

“My Sof’ya tells me she has been given this animal,” he said, making it a question.

“And now she wants me to cook it for her on here?” Castillo asked.

“No!” Sof’ya said, but laughed.

Berezovsky handed her the puppy.

“Why?” he asked simply.

“I guess Mr. Delchamps thought she should have it,” Castillo said. “This has to be tough on her, Colonel.”

Berezovsky nodded. Castillo couldn’t read it.

“Are the women about ready?” Castillo said. “The food is.”

He picked up another bife de chorizo to illustrate his point.

“Sof’ya, go tell your mother that supper is ready. And Auntie Svetlana, too.”

The girl ran off with her puppy.

“The beef here is the best in the world,” Castillo said.

“So I have been told,” Berezovsky said.

“It goes down very well with wine,” Castillo said, pointing to an uncorked bottle of Saint Felicien Cabernet Sauvignon and some long-stemmed wineglasses sitting beside an open cardboard case of the wine. “You’re welcome to help yourself, but you might want to keep in mind that right after we have our supper, we’re going to have the first of our conversations.”

Berezovsky met his eyes, considered what he had said, then said, “Thank you,” and headed for the wine.

I wonder if the “thank you” was for the warning or the wine?

Berezovsky poured wine—a lot of it—into two of the large wineglasses, half filling them and half emptying the bottle, then walked to Castillo at the parrilla and offered him one.

“I started early,” Castillo said. He pointed to his now nearly empty glass at the end of the grill.

Berezovsky thrust the glass he held at Castillo again and smiled.

Okay. I get it. You think I have grape juice in my glass.

Then you will drink the real stuff, get plastered and loose-lipped, and I will be absolutely sober and able to take advantage of your naïve trust.

Castillo took the glass Berezovsky held out to him.

“Chug-a-lug?” Castillo asked.

“‘Chug-a-lug’?” Berezovsky parroted.

I don’t think, Tom Barlow, ol’ buddy, that you have a clue what that means.

Castillo raised the glass to his lips and drained it.

Berezovsky’s eyes showed his surprise, but he rose to the challenge and also drained his glass.

Castillo immediately refilled the glasses, but set his down and began to flip the steaks on the grill.

If I chug-a-lug again, I’ll probably fall down and begin to sing bawdy songs, or in some other manner manifest behavior unbecoming an officer and a gentleman, such as myself.

Why the hell did I do that?

One of the maids appeared with several large serving platters.

“The bife de chorizo is done,” Castillo announced. “Please put it on the table.” He turned to Berezovsky. “It’s hot, grilling the steaks. I’m going to cool off until the women get here.”

He walked to the deep end of the pool, dove in, swam underwater to the shallow end, turned, and swam back. Then he turned to repeat the process. When he came up for air at the shallow end of the pool, he saw the women—Sandra Britton, Lora and Sof’ya Berezovsky, and Svetlana Alekseeva—walking together from the house toward the quincho.

They were all dressed very much alike, in brightly colored cotton skirts and white blouses, and chatting and laughing among themselves.

If it wasn’t for Jack Britton walking behind them with that Uzi held at his side, they’d look like members of the Midland Junior League headed for lunch at the Petroleum Club pool.

Jesus, she’s really good-looking!

He turned and swam to the deep end of the pool, considered his situation for a moment, and turned again.

By the time Castillo climbed out of the pool, he had completed three more laps, and by the time he took his seat at the big table in the quincho, everybody had already been served and had started to eat.

[TWO]

The housekeeper, Svetlana Alekseeva, and Jack Davidson all came into Castillo’s office together. The housekeeper carried a tray with three mugs and a large thermos of coffee. There was no cream or sugar, and Castillo idly wondered whether that was an oversight or because the housekeeper had heard Svetlana refuse both after supper.

Probably the latter, Castillo decided. The housekeeper was more than she seemed to be. She had worked—at exactly what, Castillo didn’t know—for Alfredo Munz when El Coronel Munz had been head of SIDE, Argentina’s version of the CIA and FBI rolled into one. Munz had vouched for them when Darby and the Sienos had been staffing Nuestra Pequeña Casa, and that was good enough for Castillo.

Davidson carried two small recording devices; a large ashtray; a box of wooden matches; a portable leather cigar humidor (he was as addicted to the filthy weed as was Castillo); what looked like a laptop computer but was actually much more, as was its twin—Castillo’s—already on the table; a legal pad; a box of fine-point felt-tip pens; and a small notebook.

Lieutenant Colonel Alekseeva brought only her purse with her. When Castillo had waved her into one of the upholstered captain’s chairs at the table, she instead went to his desk and began to unload the purse. Out came a package of Marlboro cigarettes, a disposable lighter, two ballpoint pens, a notebook, a small package of Kleenex, a small bottle of perfume, and a plastic bottle filled with blue gunk. The last item so interested Castillo that he picked it up and read the label. It was Argentine sunscreen lotion with aloe.

“The last time we did this, Charley,” Davidson said in Pashtu as he arranged his toys on the table, “neither the prisoner nor the surroundings were nearly as nice, were they?”

Castillo chuckled, as the image of that last time—a really bad guy in a crude stone building that was more of a hut than a building—popped into his mind.

“What was that, Pashtu?” Svetlana asked, but it was more of a statement.

If you know what it was, Castillo thought, you probably understand it, so there goes our private code.

And we won’t be able to fall back on alternatives A and B, either. We know you speak Russian and Hungarian.

But why did you ask? Why give that up?

Castillo ignored her question. Instead, he said: “Before we get into the fingernail-pulling and waterboarding aspects of this, Svetlana, let me tell you what’s going to happen tonight.”

She nodded, just once, and did not smile.

“As we speak, your identification and other information we took are being processed in Washington. When we get that back, we can clear up any inconsistencies there may be.”

She nodded again.

“For now, to get started, let’s clear up a few minor things. First, why don’t you identify these account numbers for us?”

He gestured with his index finger, took a sheet of paper that had been stuck into the legal pad, and slid it across the table to Svetlana.

She glanced at it quickly, then looked into Castillo’s eyes, not quite able to conceal her surprise and discomfort.

Gotcha, sweetheart!

“That’s a printout from the chip Mr. Darby found in the lining of your purse,” Castillo said. “Probably the guts of one of those things . . .”

He looked at Davidson, who furnished, “Flash drives, Charley.”

“. . . those flash drives you stick in a computer’s USB slot,” Castillo finished.

There was no expression on her face, but her eyes showed that she had just been kicked in the stomach.

“Sergeant Kensington,” Castillo continued, “who’s really good at that sort of thing, had a hell of a time reading it, but finally managed it. Darby thinks they’re bank account numbers. Maybe encoded somehow. Anyway, we sent them to Two-Gun Yung in Vienna. . . . Oh, that’s right. You never met Two-Gun, did you? Two-Gun is our money guy. He’s just about as good at finding hidden money as Kensington is at fooling around with computers.”

Svetlana continued to meet his eyes, as if hoping to read something in them, but didn’t say anything.

Castillo went on: “In the belief that (a) the list may be encrypted and (b) if encrypted then done so more or less simply, I’ve sent it to our in-house cryptography lady. If I’m right about (a) and (b), she should be able to quickly crack it. If she can’t—and/or if Two-Gun can’t immediately determine what they are, I’ve told our cryptologist to take the numbers to Fort Meade—the National Security Agency’s at Fort Meade, Maryland; she worked there for years—where they have, honest to God, acres and acres of computers that can eventually crack anything.

“I’d really rather not have to do that. So if you will identify those numbers for us, it will save us some time and might do a lot to convince me you meant it when you said you’d tell me anything I want to know. Right now, your hiding that chip from me brings that promise into question.”

She reached for the pack of Marlboros and put a cigarette in her mouth. Davidson struck a wooden match and held it out to her.

She lit the cigarette. She took a deep puff, held it, looked at the burning tip of the cigarette, and exhaled through both nostrils as she sighed and shrugged her shoulders.

Castillo found this to be erotic.

She turned and met his eyes, which had the same effect.

“The money is, so to speak, our retirement money,” she said.

“Is that list encrypted?”

She nodded.

“And are you going to decrypt it for me?”

“It’s simple substitution,” she said.

She picked up one of the ballpoint pens and demonstrated with underlines on the numbers as she spoke.

“The first block on the second line, the second block on the fourth, the third block on the sixth . . .”

She raised her eyes to Castillo. “You understand?”

He nodded.

“Is the key,” she said. “The alphabet is reversed.”

“Cyrillic?” Castillo asked.

She nodded again and pushed the sheet away from her.

Davidson took it, lifted the lid of his laptop computer, pushed several keys, waited a moment while watching the screen, then began typing.

“You have the Cyrillic alphabet in there?” Svetlana asked, surprised.

“No, but we’re trying to fool you into thinking we do,” Castillo said. “And while Jack’s doing that, we will turn to Subjects Two and Three on our agenda for this evening.”

She took another drag on her cigarette, then crushed it out as she simultaneously exhaled through her nostrils and looked into Castillo’s eyes.

He felt it in the pit of his stomach.

“Something else you promised and didn’t deliver,” Castillo said, “is the reason why you have defected. You said I wouldn’t believe you when you told me. Has it got something to do with these bank accounts? Or is there something else?”

“The money is not the reason we defected,” she said calmly. “The money permitted us to defect. Is it your intention to take the money?”

“Would you believe me if I said no?”

“I don’t know,” she said matter-of-factly.

“Before you start telling me the things I’m not going to believe, let’s talk about Alekseeva. Starting with his full name.”

“Evgeny Alekseeva, Colonel, SVR. I think that would be ‘Eugene’ in English. It’s from the old Greek word for ‘noble.’ Evgeny’s parents were always proud of their bloodline.”

What the hell does that mean?

“And he is—or was—your husband?”

“Is.”

No shit!

Well, that may—or may not—affect my interest.

“Any children?”

“If I had children, I would be with them here or back there.”

“Why didn’t Evgeny come with you?”

“He is perfectly happy where he is.”

What the hell does that mean?

“And, apparently, you were not?”

“I was not.”

“You had trouble with your husband? Is that what you’re suggesting?”

“I was not happy. He was. That often causes problems. Are you always happy with your wife?”

She looked deeply into his eyes.

She’s probing. . . . How am I supposed to respond?

When in doubt, try the truth. . . .

“I’m supposed to be asking the questions, Colonel,” Castillo said. “But since you’re curious, no wife. Not ever.”

She shrugged.

“Where is your husband now?”

“He may be dead, or under interrogation, or perhaps he’s packing his bag to come looking for me.”

“He didn’t know what you were planning?”

“If he suspected what Dmitri and I were planning, he would have denounced us.”

“Nice guy.”

“He would be doing what he thought he had to do.”

“And if he comes looking for you and finds you, what do you think he would think he had to do?”

“The SVR would, of course, prefer to have us back home, but getting us there might be—probably would be—dangerous. So he would kill me. And, of course, Dmitri and his family.”

“As I said, a nice guy.”

“So obviously, the thing Dmitri and I have to do is not get found.”

Castillo picked up the phone and punched one button.

“Bob, get on the horn to Major Miller, tell him I need yesterday (1) the agency’s file on Evgeny Alekseeva, Colonel, SVR. I spell.” He did so, and looked at Svetlana to see if he had it right, which of course caused him to look into her eyes.

She nodded.

“And (2) tell him to get quietly onto NSA and get me all Russian traffic on the same guy. All of his aliases, too. If he’s moving, I want to know all about it.

“And I just thought of (3): Call Two-Gun and our cryptologist and tell them to hold off sending the data on that chip to NSA; I think we can decrypt it here. Got it?”

There was a pause as he heard it read back.

“If you got it, how come I didn’t get no ‘Hooooo-rah!’ ?” Castillo asked, and hung up the phone.

Davidson raised his eyes from his laptop and, shaking his head, smiled at him.

Svetlana looked at Castillo as if wondering why he wasn’t in a straitjacket.

“Which brings us back to Question One, Colonel: the reasons I won’t believe why you’ve defected. If it wasn’t to make off with the money, then what?”

“Dmitri and I realized that things weren’t really changed, that they were going back to the way they were, and that we didn’t want to be part of it anymore.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Castillo confessed.

“How much do you know about the SVR, about Russia?”

“Not much.”

That’s not true.

I know a good deal about both Russia and the SVR. And she knows I do.

Which means she knows I’m lying to her.

Which she expected me to do.

So why does that bother me?

“I think you think you know a good deal about Russia and the SVR,” Svetlana said.

She’s reading my mind again!

“Is your ego such, Colonel,” she went on, “that you could accept that there’s a good deal you think you see that isn’t at all what you think it is, and that there is a good deal you don’t see at all?”

That’s a paraphrase of what General McNab has been cramming down my throat since the First Desert War: “Any intelligence officer who thinks he’s looking at the real skinny is a damn fool, and any intelligence officer who thinks he has all the facts is a goddamned fool.”

Castillo glanced at Davidson, who apparently not only could walk and chew gum at the same time but also had been often exposed to the wisdom of General Bruce J. McNab and just now had heard the same thoughts paraphrased by a good-looking Russian spook.

They smiled at each other.

“Did I say something amusing?” Svetlana snapped.

“Not at all,” Castillo said. “We just found it interesting that you are familiar with the theories of B. J. McNab, the great Scottish philosopher.”

“I never heard of him,” Svetlana said.

“I’m surprised,” Castillo said. “You’ll have to expand on what you said.”

“It’ll sound like a history lesson,” she said. “And I don’t like the idea of playing the fool for you.”

“I’m always willing to listen. Believing what I hear is something else.”

She looked at him intently, rather obviously trying to decide if he was indeed trying to make a fool of her.

“Do you have any idea, Colonel,” she asked, more than a little sarcastically, “how long what you would call the secret police have been around Russia?”

“No, but I think you’re going to tell me,” Castillo said, matching her sarcasm.

“What do you know of the boyars?” she asked.

“Not much.”

“Ivan the Terrible?”

“Him, I’ve heard of. He’s the guy who used to throw dogs off the Kremlin’s walls, right? Because he liked to watch them crawl around on broken legs?”

“That was one of the ways he took his pleasure. He threw people off, too, for the same reason.”

“Nice guy.”

She shook her head in tolerant disgust.

“Ivan the Terrible—Ivan the Fourth—was born in 1530,” she went on. She switched to English. “In other words, thirty-eight years after Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492.”

He smiled, and she smiled back.

Castillo heard Davidson, who was bent over his laptop, chuckle.

Svetlana went back to Russian: “Ivan’s father, Vasily the Third, Grand Duke of Muscovy, died three years later, which made Ivan the Grand Duke.

“There was then no Tsar. The country was run by the boyars, who were the nobility, and each of whom had a private army, which they placed at the service of the Grand Duke of Muscovy. Everybody wanted to be the Tsar, but none was able to get everybody else to step aside to give him the job.

“The Grand Duchy of Muscovy—the most important one—was thus governed by ad hoc committees, so to speak, of boyars, who ‘advised’ the Grand Duke what to do, whereupon he issued the Grand Ducal Order.

“This was fine, so long as he was a little boy. But he was growing up, and he might be difficult to deal with as an adult. So they began to impress upon him how powerful they were. One of the ways they did this would now be called ‘child molestation.’ They wanted to terrorize him, and when they thought they had succeeded, the boyars let him assume power in his own right in 1544, when he was age fourteen.

“They had frightened Ivan but not cowed him. He came to the conclusion that unless he wanted other people to run his life, he was going to have to become more ruthless than the boyars who were running his life and abusing him in many ways, including sexual.

“There is a lovely American expression which fits,” Svetlana said. “Ivan had gone through”—she switched to English—“ ‘the College of Hard Knocks’”—then back to Russian—“and had learned from his teachers.”

Again Castillo smiled at Svetlana, and she smiled back and Davidson chuckled over his laptop.

“Ivan selected from among the boyars,” Svetlana went on, “a small number he felt were hard enough to deal with the others, and at the same time he could control, both by passing out the largesse at his control and by terrorizing them.

“He also knew that if he had the church on his side, he would also have the support of the peasants and serfs, who were very religious—”

“Wasn’t it some other Russian,” Davidson asked innocently, “who said, ‘Religion is the opiate of the masses’?”

“No, Mr. Davidson,” Svetlana corrected him. “It was Karl Marx who said that. He was a German, a Jew with a strong rabbinical background, and what he actually wrote was ‘Opium des Volkes,’ which usually is mistranslated.”

“I stand corrected,” Davidson said, and then wonderingly asked, “I wonder if my Uncle Louie knows that?”

The question so surprised her that she blurted: “Your Uncle Louie?”

“He’s a rabbi,” Davidson explained.

Castillo chuckled.

Svetlana shook her head again in disbelief.

She went on: “So Ivan made a deal with the church. If they would”—she switched to English—“ ‘scratch his back, he would scratch theirs.’ ”

When she got the now-expected chuckle from Davidson and exchanged the expected smile with Castillo, she went back to Russian: “The Metropolitan of Moscow found scripture which said that Ivan had a divine right to rule. Ivan developed an overnight religious fervor, and in January 1547, the Metropolitan presided over the coronation of Tsar Ivan the Fourth. He was then seventeen years old.

“As soon as he was Tsar, his boyars began throwing into pits the boyars who he suspected weren’t so sure he had a divine right to rule. There, they were eaten by starving dogs.”

“A really nice guy,” Castillo said.

“The property—lands and serfs who belonged to the land—were split between the Tsar and the boyars who believed that it pleased God to have Ivan the Fourth as Tsar.

“Over the next eighteen years, while Ivan did a really remarkable job of turning Russia into a superpower, he consolidated his power. He took care of the church, and the church responded by telling the faithful that Ivan was standing at the right hand of God, making the point that challenging Ivan was tantamount to challenging God.

“Then he started separating the best of the good boyars from the bad ones. A good boyar was defined, primarily, as one who didn’t harbor any ideas about assassinating him and then taking over. Those he suspected had such ideas were removed from the scene in various imaginative ways—for example, by being skinned alive—which served, of course, to remind those that remained that even thinking of displeasing the Tsar was not smart.

“The more clever boyars came to understand that the key to success was in getting close to the Tsar, most often by denouncing those who could be safely accused of having possibly treasonous thoughts. The most clever of the clever boyars further understood that getting too close to the Tsar tended to increase their risk of being tossed to the starving dogs or thrown from the Kremlin walls. The Tsar was naturally suspicious of anyone whose power seemed possible of threatening his own.

“The point here is that as he passed out the serfs taken from the bad boyars to the good boyars, this increased the size of the good boyars’ armies. Soldiers, so to speak, were serfs equipped with a sword or a pike, who went into battle because they might live through the battle, and refusing to go into battle would certainly see them killed.

“So he began to recruit a corps of officers from the merchant class, and even from the peasant class. They were treated almost as well as the good boyars, and realized that their good fortune depended on ensuring that the Tsar, who had appointed them to command the serfs he had taken away from the bad boyars, remained in power.”

She paused to take another cigarette out of the pack, light it with what Castillo thought was great style, then exhaled.

“By 1565,” Svetlana continued, “he thought he had arranged things as well as he could. First, he moved his family out of Moscow to one of his country estates. When he was sure that he and they were safe in the hands of his officer corps, he wrote an open letter—copies of it were posted on walls and, importantly, in every church—to Philip, the Metropolitan of the church in Moscow. The Tsar said he was going to abdicate and, to that end, had already moved out of Moscow.

“The people, the letter suggested, could now run Russia to suit themselves, starting by picking a new Tsar, to whom they could look for protection. This caused chaos at all levels. The people didn’t want a new Tsar who was not chosen by God. The boyars knew that picking one of their own to be the new Tsar was going to result in a bloodbath. The officer corps knew that the privileges they had been granted would almost certainly not be continued under a new Tsar, and that the boyars would want their serfs back.

“The Tsar was begged not to abdicate, to come home to Moscow. After letting them worry for a while, during which time they had a preview of what life without Tsar Ivan would be like, he announced his terms for not abdicating.

“There would be something new in Russian, the Oprichina—‘Separate Estate’—which would consist of one thousand households, some of the highest nobility of the boyars, some of lower-ranking boyars, some of senior military officers, a few members of the merchant class, and even a few families of extraordinarily successful peasants.

“They all had demonstrated a commendable degree of loyalty to the Tsar. The Oprichina would physically include certain districts of Russia and certain cities, and the revenue from these places would be used to support the oprichniki and of course the Tsar, who would live among them.

“The old establishment would remain in place. The boyars not included in the Oprichina would retain their titles and privileges; the council—the Duma— would continue to operate, its decisions subject of course to the Tsar’s approval. But the communication would be one way. Except in extraordinary circumstances, no one not an oprichniki would be permitted to communicate with the Oprichina.

“The Tsar’s offer was accepted. God’s man was back in charge. The boyars had their titles. The church was now supported by the state, so most of the priests and bishops were happy. Just about everybody was happy but Philip, the Metropolitan of Moscow, who let it be known that he thought the idea of the Oprichina was un-Christian.