Hazardous Duty

[ONE]

Supervisory Secret Service Agent Robert J. Mulligan held open the door to the Oval Office and Truman C. Ellsworth, the director of National Intelligence, and CIA Director A. Franklin Lammelle came through it.

“Good morning, Mr. President,” Ellsworth said. He took from his briefcase a brown manila envelope and handed it to him.

“We have heard from Colonel Castillo, Mr. President,” Ellsworth said.

President Joshua Ezekiel Clendennen quickly glanced at what it contained:

The President handed the report to presidential spokesperson Robin Hoboken and then demanded, “Where’s Cohen? Isn’t she supposed to deliver this?”

“I have no idea where the secretary of State is, Mr. President,” Hoboken said. “But I’m sure the Secret Service could find her for you.”

The President looked as if he was going to reply to Hoboken, but didn’t, instead shaking his head.

“The protocol, Mr. President,” DCI Lammelle said, “provides that when the secretary is not available, the message goes to the next person on the list, in this case the DCI, me. When I got it, I immediately went to see Mr. Ellsworth and we came here together.”

“That answers the second part of my question,” the President said. “But not the first.”

“To the best of my knowledge, sir, Secretary Cohen is in New York at the UN,” Ellsworth said.

“Doing what?”

“As I understand the matter, sir, the French are experiencing beach erosion problems in Normandy.”

“What the hell can that possibly have to do with us?”

“The French position, Mr. President,” Lammelle said, “as I understand it, is the problem began in the spring of 1944, when we landed our invasion force there and tore them up — the beaches, I mean — in so doing. And that therefore we should pay for restoring their beaches to their pre — June sixth, 1944, condition.”

“Well, I can understand that,” Hoboken said.

“And how much is that going to cost the American taxpayer?” Truman Ellsworth asked innocently.

“I don’t know,” Lammelle said. “I understand the secretary is trying to get the French to charge the cost of restoring their beaches in Normandy against their debt to us. So far, they have been unwilling to do so.”

“That’s going to have to go on the back burner,” the President said. “Tell Secretary Cohen not to give the Frogs a dime until she clears it with me.”

“Yes, sir.”

“First things first, I always say.”

“Yes, sir.”

“So explain this to me,” the President said, waving Castillo’s report.

“What is it you don’t understand, Mr. President?”

“Practically none of it,” the President admitted. “But let’s start with all these Rent-a-Spooks he’s hired from Sparkling Water Due Diligence, Inc. What the hell? Who exactly are these people and what are they going to do for me?”

“Several years ago, Mr. President, several companies were formed to furnish certain services to the intelligence community on a contract basis,” Ellsworth answered. “What happened, Mr. President, is that the FBI, the DIA, and others realized that some of the best people, particularly those in the Clandestine Service—”

“Spooks.”

“Yes, sir. Many of them had reached retirement age, or length of service — one can retire from the Clandestine Service after twenty years — and were not interested in continuing to serve beyond their twenty years because they could make a great deal more money working for industry and Wall Street.

“Eventually sort of an employment agency, which called itself ‘Blackwater,’ came into being to match the needs of Wall Street and industry with available personnel. That quickly evolved into Blackwater providing Wall Street and industry — who didn’t want it to get out that they had spies on their payrolls — with the appropriate personnel on a contract basis.

“When the Agency began to miss the Clandestine Service personnel who had retired — they really needed them — it occurred to the Agency that if Wall Street could hire these ex-spies, so could they. And that’s how it began, Mr. President. And I must say it’s worked out well.”

“You are using ex-spies from this Blackwater thing to do the CIA’s spying — is that what you’re telling me?”

“Since I took over as DCI, Mr. President, I have been moving more toward Sparkling Water and away from Blackwater.”

“Why is that?”

“Blackwater kept raising its prices, Mr. President. Not only did Sparkling Water come to me and offer the same quality ex-spies for less money, but also the services of ex — Delta Force Special Operators and retired Secret Service personnel. The Delta Force people were unhappy performing services for Wall Street. So the Agency has just about moved to placing all its contract business with Sparkling Water.”

“So you know who the people on here are?” the President asked, waving Castillo’s report.

“Yes, sir, I do.”

“And you’re going to tell me about them, right?”

“Yes, sir. May I have a look at Colonel Castillo’s report, sir?”

“Why don’t you have your own copy?”

“Because it says ‘Duplication Forbidden,’ sir. Right at the top.”

“Okay. Who are they?”

“Leverette and Gregory, Mr. President, are both Afro-Americans and retired from Delta Force,” Lammelle began.

“What’s Afro-American got to do with anything? Why did you have to bring that up? You know full well my administration is color blind.”

“I think it probably has something to do with their being able to move inconspicuously around Somalia, Mr. President,” Ellsworth said. “Most of the people in Somalia are Afro-Amer… African… of the Negro race.”

“I don’t think you’re supposed to say that either,” the President said.

“Mr. and Dr. Britton are also African-Americans,” Lammelle said.

“Why does Castillo think he needs a doctor in Somalia?”

“She’s a Ph.D., Mr. President, a philologist, not a physician.”

“She’s a stamp collector?” the President asked incredulously.

“Stamp collectors are philatelists, Mr. President. Philologists are language experts.”

“Okay, so she speaks whatever gibberish they speak in Somalia. Why not say that, that she’s an interpreter? I’m beginning to wonder if Castillo is purposely trying to confuse me.”

“I don’t know if Dr. Britton speaks Af-Soomaali or not, Mr. President,” Ellsworth said.

“Speaks what?”

“Af-Soomaali, Mr. President, the language spoken in Somalia.”

“Of course she does,” the President said impatiently. “If she doesn’t speak Af-soo… whatever you said… why would Castillo be taking her there? But find out for sure. If she doesn’t, that would really sound fishy to me.”

“Yes, sir, Mr. President.” Ellsworth paused, then went on: “Mr. Britton is a former Secret Service agent, Mr. President. And before that he was an undercover detective in Philadelphia.”

“Does he speak Af-soo whatever?”

“I just don’t know, Mr. President,” Ellsworth confessed.

“Mr. and Mrs. Sieno, Mr. President,” Lammelle said quickly, “are both retired from the Clandestine Service of the Agency.”

“Both of them are retired CIA spies?”

“We like to think of people like that as ‘field officers,’ Mr. President,” Ellsworth said.

“Why can’t you people call a spade a spade?” the President said.

“Many African-Americans find the term ‘spade’ offensive, Mr. President,” Robin Hoboken said. “I for one would never think of calling CIA field officers ‘spades.’”

The President glared at his spokesman.

“Actually, Mr. President, I’m not sure whether the Sienos are Italian-Americans or Latinos,” Lammelle said.

“If you two are the best intelligence people we have,” the President said, “the country’s in deep trouble. Get the hell out of here!”

[TWO]

General Sergei Murov and his security detail had not gone to Havana openly. That would not be in the tradition of the Cheka and its successor organizations. Instead, their documents identified them all as members of the Greater Sverdlovsk Table Tennis Association and Mr. Murov as Grigori Slobozhanin, the chief coach thereof.

His true identity was known of course to General Jesus Manuel Cosada, who had replaced Raúl Castro as head of the Dirección General de Inteligencia, or DGI, when Señor Castro had replaced his brother, Fidel, as president of the Republic of Cuba.

General Cosada therefore ordered that the visiting Ping-Pongers be housed in the five-star high-rise Meliá Cohiba Hotel on Avenida de Maceo, more commonly known as the Malecón, the broad esplanade that stretches for four miles along the coast of Havana.

He did so for several reasons. He knew that General Murov and President Castro were close personal friends, for one thing, and for another that the Presidential Suite was equipped with state-of-the-art cameras and microphones — some of them literally as small as the head of a pin — with which the visit of General Murov could be recorded for posterity and other purposes.

General Cosada’s expert in this type of equipment, Señor Kurt Hassburger, who had immigrated to Cuba from the former East Germany and really hated Russians, had also installed a microphone and transmitter in the lid of the cigar humidor Señor Castro would give — filled with Cohiba cigars — to General Murov as a little “Welcome Back to Cuba” memento.

When General Cosada and President Castro entered the Presidential Suite carrying the humidor of cigars, they were wearing the customary attire of senior officials of the Cuban government.

In the early days of the Cuban revolution, the Castro forces had raided a government warehouse and helped themselves to U.S. Army equipment the Yankee Imperialists had given to the Batista regime. This included U.S. Army “fatigue” uniforms and combat boots, which Fidel promptly adopted as the revolutionary uniform, primarily because they were far more suitable for waging revolution than the blue jeans, polo shirts, and tennis shoes he had been wearing.

When the revolution had been won, Fidel and Raúl and their subordinates had continued to wear the fatigues because — depending on who you were listening to — they represented solidarity with the peasants and workers or because they were much more comfortable in the muggy heat of Cuba than a suit and shirt and necktie would have been.

The fatigues President Castro and General Cosada were wearing today were of course not the ones liberated from Batista’s warehouse — there was a tailor on the presidential staff who made theirs to order — but they looked like U.S. Army fatigues.

General Murov thought their uniforms made them look like aging San Francisco hippies. Or Wanna-Be-Warriors at a Soldiers of Fortune convention.

Murov was far more elegantly attired. When he had been the cultural attaché of the Russian embassy in Washington he had regularly watched J. Pastor Jones and C. Harry Whelan, Junior, on Wolf News to keep abreast of what the American reactionaries were up to.

Their programs were in part sponsored by Jos. A. Bank Clothiers and the Men’s Wearhouse. Eventually, their advertisements got through to him and he investigated what he thought were their preposterous claims by visiting an emporium of each.

There he found that not only was the reasonably priced clothing they offered superior to that offered for sale in Moscow, but that they really would give you two suits — or an overcoat and a suit, or two overcoats, or a half dozen shirts and neckties and a sports coat and slacks — absolutely free if you bought one suit at the regular price.

He found this fascinating because recently, having nothing better to do, he had been flipping through the SVR manual on rezident operations and had come across an interesting item buried in the manual as a small-font footnote. It stated that anything purchased, including items of clothing, deemed by the rezident as necessary to carry out intelligence missions could be billed to the SVR’s Bureau for the Provision of Non-Standard Equipment.

Murov had turned almost overnight into a fashion plate. And he was not only happy with the way he looked — as the spokesman for Men’s Wearhouse said he would be — but convinced that the SVR man who had written the footnote was right on the money. How could one be a really good spy wearing clothing that made one look as if one was drawing unemployment?

This of course applied to the staff of the rezident, the junior spies, so to speak. They shouldn’t look like they were drawing unemployment, either. He went to the management of both Men’s Wearhouse and Jos. A. Bank and asked them if he could throw a little business their way, what could they do for him? Not in terms of free sports coats, but in cash?

A mutually agreed upon figure—5.5 percent of the total — was reached, and Murov sent his staff to both establishments with orders to acquire a wardrobe in keeping with the high standards expected of SVR spies, and not to worry about what it cost, as the bill would be paid by the SVR’s Bureau for the Provision of Non-Standard Equipment.

President Castro handed General Murov the humidor of Cohibas, and Murov handed General Cosada the case of Kubanskaya.

“Fidel sent these for you,” Raúl said.

“How kind of him.”

“I really appreciate the Kubanskaya, Sergei,” Raúl said. “You can’t get it in Cuba.”

“I understand we’re selling a lot of it to Venezuela,” Sergei replied.

“Yeah, but between us, it’s hard to get from there, too. Fidel is a little overenthusiastic about that ‘Drink Cuban’ program of his. It means we’re supposed to drink rum and it’s treasonous to the revolution to import spirits made anywhere else. So I have to remember to hide my Kubanskaya when he comes by the house. And whenever I take a chance and get the Bulgarians to slip me a case on the quiet through their embassy here, the sonofabitches are on the phone next day asking, ‘So, what are you going to do for Bulgaria now?’”

“Bulgarians do tend to be a bit greedy, don’t they?” Sergei asked rhetorically. “Did you ever see them eat?”

“I’d hate to tell you what Fidel calls them,” Raúl said.

“How is Fidel?”

“He sends his regards along with the cigars.”

“Well, thank him for the Cohibas when you see him.”

“I will. You’ve heard he’s stopped smoking himself?”

No, Murov thought, but if I had to smoke these, I’d stop smoking myself.

Among other intelligence Murov had acquired while he was the rezident in Washington was that all the good cigar makers had fled from Cuba immediately after the revolution. The really good ones had gone to the Canary Islands, where they continued to turn out Cohibas and other top-of-the-line cigars.

The Cuban Cohibas were not really Cuban Cohibas, in other words. When Murov saw the humidor of Cuban Cohibas, he had immediately decided to take it to Moscow, where he would give them to people he didn’t like, and he hoped ol’ Raúl wouldn’t expect him to light up one of the ones he had given him.

“No, I hadn’t,” Murov said.

“He said he feels better now that he’s stopped smoking.”

“Well, I can understand that,” Murov replied, and mentally added, If he was smoking these steadily, I’m surprised they didn’t kill him.

“So tell me, Sergei,” Raúl said, “what brings you to Havana?”

“I need about a dozen of your best DGI men,” Murov replied. “For a month, maybe a little longer.”

“To do what?” General Cosada asked.

“Vladimir Vladimirovich wants to entertain three people now in Argentina, and I need your people to assist them in getting on the plane to Moscow.”

“What three people?” Raúl asked.

“Former SVR Polkovnik Dmitri Berezovsky, former SVR Podpolkovnik Svetlana Alekseeva, and Lieutenant Colonel C. G. Castillo, U.S. Army, Retired.”

“Why don’t you go to the Venezuelans?” General Cosada asked. “I know they don’t like the American. For that matter any Americans.”

“Have you already forgotten Major Alejandro Vincenzo, Raúl? Sic transit gloria, Major Alejandro Vincenzo?”

“I don’t like to think about Alejandro,” Castro said. “But no, I haven’t forgotten the loss of my sister Gloria’s second-oldest son. But it momentarily slipped my mind that that bastard Castillo was responsible for what happened to him.”

“Raúl,” Murov asked, “does the fact that that bastard Castillo killed your nephew in Uruguay change our conversation from ‘What can the SVR do for the DGI?’ to ‘What can the DGI do for the SVR?’”

President Castro considered that a moment.

“No,” he said finally. “It doesn’t. Where we are now is ‘What can the SVR do for the DGI, in exchange for what the SVR wants the DGI to do for the SVR?’”

When Murov didn’t immediately reply, Castro went on, “I wouldn’t want this to get around, Sergei, but neither Fidel nor I ever really liked Vincenzo. But he was our sister’s kid, and you know how that goes: We were stuck with him.”

“And between you and me, Sergei,” General Jesus Manuel Cosada said, “the sonofabitch was always sucking up to Fidel. He wanted my job.”

“But then why did you send him to Uruguay?” Murov asked.

“Sending him there,” Cosada said, “is not exactly the same thing as sending him there and hoping he got to come back.”

“Jesus Christ, Jesus!” Raúl said. “If Gloria ever heard you say that, you’d be a dead man!”

“I asked why you sent him, feeling the way you apparently felt, to Uruguay,” Murov said.

“Well, when the Iraqi Oil-for-Food people told us what they wanted…”

“Which was?” Murov asked.

“They wanted the UN guy, Lorimer, dead.”

“Because he ripped them off for sixteen million dollars?”

“Well, once he’d done that, they knew he couldn’t be trusted. And he knew too much, too many names. He had to be dead. They didn’t seem to care too much about the money,” Raúl said.

“Which got Raúl and me to thinking…” Cosada said.

“What would happen if we sent Alejandro down there with the Hungarians…” Raúl said.

“For which they were offering us a lot of money,” Cosada picked up. “And they took out Dr. Lorimer…”

“But then we told them there was no sixteen million dollars in bearer bonds in his safe.”

“And somebody tipped the Uruguayan cops to what the Hungarians had done, and where to find them.”

“And Alejandro brought us the bearer bonds,” Raúl said. “Getting the picture?”

“Brilliant!” General Murov said.

“The Oil-for-Food people were not about to make a stink. They would have gotten the important part of what they wanted — Lorimer dead — and the money wasn’t that important to them. The money those rag-headed Iraqi bastards made from Oil-for-Food is unbelievable, except it’s true.”

“So that’s what happened,” Murov said.

“No, that’s not what happened,” Raúl said. “What happened was this goddamn Yankee Castillo killed Alejandro and killed the Hungarians and made off with our sixteen million dollars. The notion of that thieving Yankee sonofabitch sitting naked in a cell in Lubyanka getting sprayed with ice water — I presume that’s what you have in mind for him — has a certain appeal. I don’t like it when people steal sixteen million dollars from me. Tell me what you have in mind, Sergei.”

“Well, so long as they were in Argentina—”

“‘Were in Argentina’?” Cosada interrupted.

“Jesus Christ, Jesus, for Christ’s sake stop interrupting my friend Sergei,” Raúl snapped.

“As I was saying,” Murov went on, “so long as the three of them, ‘the Unholy Trio,’ so to speak, are in Argentina, we can’t get at them. Not only are they protected by Aleksandr Pevsner’s private army, but that goddamn Irish cop Liam Duffy has my photograph on the wall of every immigration booth in the country.”

“So what are you proposing?” Raúl asked.

“Just as I got on the plane to fly here—”

“Speaking of flying, Sergei,” Raúl said, “we have to talk about the Tupolev Tu-934A.”

“What do you mean, ‘talk about it’?”

“Fidel wants one. He told me to tell you his feelings were hurt when you gave one to the late Fat Hugo…”

“I did not give one to Fat Hugo.”

“… and didn’t give one to him,” Raúl said. “And I can see his point.”

“Read my lips, Raúl. I did not give a Tupolev Tu-934A to Fat Hugo.”

“That’s not what we heard,” Cosada said.

“If you didn’t give one to Fat Hugo, what was that airplane our friend Castillo stole from him? A Piper Cub?” Raúl challenged.

“What Castillo stole from Fat Hugo’s island was General Vladimir Sirinov’s Tupolev Tu-934A,” Murov said.

“I don’t think Fidel’s going to believe that,” Raúl said.

“Raúl, listen to me. I don’t want this to get around, but we don’t have that many Tupolev Tu-934As. We don’t have enough for us. Do you think I would have come here on that Aeroflot Sukhoi Superjet 100-95 if I could have talked Vladimir Vladimirovich into letting me use a Tu-934A? That so-called Superjet is a disaster. I didn’t uncross my fingers until we landed here, and I’m going home on Air Bulgaria. They’re flying DC-9s that are as old as I am, but their engines don’t fall off.”

“Well, I’ll tell Fidel what you said, but if I were you, I’d try real hard to get him a Tupolev.”

“Can we get on with this?”

“You’d be in a better bargaining position, Sergei, if you got Fidel one of those Tupolevs, but go ahead.”

“I thought you were the president now.”

“I am, but Fidel is still Fidel. He just doesn’t come to the office as often as he used to.”

“I found out just before I got on the plane to come here that Castillo and his fiancée, the former Podpolkovnik Svetlana Alekseeva, and a couple of Castillo’s people, the Merry Outlaws, just left Bariloche for Cozumel.”

“Couple of questions, Sergei. Castillo’s fiancée?”

“He’s going to marry her. That’s what ‘fiancée’ means.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“No, I’m not.”

“Unbelievable! He’s not a bad-looking guy. And no offense, Sergei, but every female SVR podpolkovnik I’ve ever seen looks like a Green Bay Packers tackle in drag.”

“This one doesn’t. Believe it.”

“Merry Outlaws?”

“That’s what President Clendennen calls Castillo’s people. If that’s good enough for him…”

“What are they going to do in Cozumel?”

“I gave that a good deal of thought before I understood.”

“Understood what?”

“What they’re going to do in Cozumel. It’s going to be a great big wedding. All the OOOR — and there’s a hell of a lot of them.”

“All the what?”

“Like ROCOR, which, as I’m sure you know, stands for Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia.”

“No, I didn’t,” Raúl confessed.

“Me, either,” Cosada said. “What the hell is it?”

“We don’t have time for that right now, maybe later. OOOR stands for Oprichnina Outside of Russia.”

“And what the hell does Oprichnina mean?” Castro asked.

“I really don’t have the time to get into that with you either, Raúl. But trust me, there’s more of them than anybody suspects and they’ll all want to come to the wedding. The Berezovsky family — and Svetlana was Svetlana Berezovsky before she married Evgeny Alekseev and became Svetlana Alekseeva — is one of the oldest, most prestigious families in the Oprichnina.

“If anybody in the OOOR gets invited to the wedding, and they all will, they’ll go. Just the Oprichniks in Coney Island would fill a 747. And they’ll all bring their security people, now that I think of it. So two 747s from Coney Island alone.”

“Where the hell is Coney Island?” Cosada asked.

“In New York City. You know the place where they have — or had — the parachute tower? For ten dollars, you got to make sort of a parachute jump?”

“Oh, yeah,” Cosada said. “I think the parachute tower is gone, but I know where you mean.”

“Don’t take offense, Sergei,” Raúl said, “but I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”

“Aleksandr Pevsner’s La Casa en Bosque in Bariloche is big, but not big enough for all those Oprichnik wedding guests. And there’s only a few hotels there. And Aeropuerto Internacional Teniente Luis Candelaria couldn’t handle one 747, much less a bunch of them. So what are they going to do? A cruise ship — maybe two cruise ships — is what they’re going to do. A cruise ship is sort of a floating hotel.”

“Where are they going to get a cruise ship?”

“The last I heard, Pevsner owned twelve of them,” Murov said. “Most of them are like floating prisons, but a couple of them, I understand, are very nice.”

“I’m an old man, Sergei,” Raúl said. “Not as swift as I used to be. You want to explain this to me in simple terms?”

“Aleksandr Pevsner owns the Grand Cozumel Beach and Golf Resort. Which — Cozumel — is also a stop for cruise ships. So they hold the wedding in the resort and put up the guests who won’t fit in the resort in one of his cruise ships. Or two of them. That’s what Castillo and Svetlana are going there for, to set this up.

“Dmitri Berezovsky didn’t go along with them to Cozumel now, but he’ll be there for the wedding. He’ll probably give the bride away; he’s her brother. So we go there now, and get set up ourselves. And when everybody is jamming the place, there’s all the wedding excitement, we snatch the three of them, load them onto an Aeroflot airplane conveniently parked at Cozumel International—”

“For a nonstop flight to Moscow,” Raúl finished.

“Where your boss will tie the Yankee sonofabitch who stole our sixteen million in bearer bonds to a chair in Lubyanka,” Cosada furnished.

“And spray him with ice water,” Raúl picked up.

“Until he is an ice sculpture,” Cosada said.

“How many men are you asking for, Sergei?” Raúl asked.

“Ten or twelve should do it.”

“General Cosada,” Raúl said, “make twenty-four of your best men available to General Murov immediately.”

“Yes, sir, Mr. President.”

“As a matter of fact, Jesus, I think you better go with him,” Raúl added.

[THREE]

Castillo’s CaseyBerry vibrated and rang — the ringtone actually a recording of a bugler playing “Charge!”

“And how may I help the comandante on this beautiful spring morning?” he answered it.

There was a reply from Comandante Juan Carlos Pena, el Jefe of the Policía Federal for the Province of Oaxaca, to which Castillo answered, “Your wish is my command, my Comandante,” and then broke the connection.

Castillo then turned to the women taking the sun in lounge chairs beside the swimming pool. There were three of them: Svetlana Alekseeva; Susanna Sieno, a trim, pale-freckled-skin redhead; and Sandra Britton, a slim, tall, sharp-featured black-skinned woman.

“I’m afraid it’s back to the village for you, ladies,” Castillo said.

“What did you say?” Sweaty asked.

“El Comandante just told me to put my pants on and send the girls back to the village.”

Sweaty threw a large, economy-size bottle of suntan lotion at him and said some very rude and obscene things in Russian.

Max leapt to his feet and caught the suntan lotion bottle in midair. But to do so he had to go airborne himself, which resulted in him dropping from about eight feet in the air into the pool. This caused the ladies to be twice drenched, first when he entered the water — a 120-pound Bouvier des Flandres makes quite a splash — and again when Max, triumphantly clutching the bottle in his teeth, climbed out of the pool and shook himself dry.

With a massive and barely successful effort, the men attached to the ladies — Castillo; Paul Sieno, an olive-skinned, dark-haired man in his early forties; and John M. “Jack” Britton, a trim thirty-eight-year-old black-skinned man — managed to control what would have been hysterical laughter.

“Over here, girls,” Castillo said, as he went to the side of the penthouse and pointed downward, “you really should see this.”

Curiosity overwhelmed feminine indignation and they went and looked twenty-four floors down. So did Jack Britton, Roscoe J. Danton, and Paul Sieno.

They saw four identical brown Suburbans, each roof festooned with a rack of what is known in the law enforcement community as “Bubble Gum Machines,” approaching and then disappearing beneath the canopied entrance to the Grand Cozumel Beach & Golf Resort.

“American Express is here,” Castillo said.

“What the hell does that mean?” Roscoe asked.

“Juan Carlos calls them that because he never leaves home without them,” Castillo explained.

“Your friend has a CaseyBerry?” Britton asked.

“I could do no less for the only honest police officer in Mexico,” Castillo said. He turned to former Marine Gunnery Sergeant Lester Bradley.

“Lester, stand by the door. Our guests are about to arrive. The rest of you are cautioned not to make any sudden moves when they arrive.”

Three minutes later the doorbell chimes bonged pleasantly. Lester pulled the door open. Three burly police officers came through the door, each armed with an Uzi submachine gun. They quickly surveilled the room, and then one of them gestured for whoever was still outside that it was safe to enter.

Jack Britton was impressed. During his career with the Philadelphia Police Department, he had once served on the SWAT team. His professional assessment of these people was that they really knew “how to take a door.”

A short, stocky, unkempt olive-skinned man in a baggy suit and two more uniformed officers carrying Uzis came through the door.

Max dropped the suntan lotion bottle, rushed toward the man, put his paws on his shoulders — which pinned him to the wall — and then enthusiastically lapped at his face.

“Carlitos, you sonofabitch, you taught him to do that to me!” Juan Carlos Pena said.

“No, it’s the remnants of your breakfast on your unshaven face,” Castillo said.

Pena pushed Max off him, and then he and Castillo approached each other and embraced.

When they broke apart, Pena asked, pointing to the Sienos, the Brittons, and Roscoe J. Danton, “Who are these people? Excuse me for asking, but I have learned to be very careful when I’m around you.”

“Dr. Britton, Sandra, is a philologist,” Castillo said. “Her husband, Jack, is not nearly so respectable. He used to be a cop. The Sienos, Susanna and Paul, have an even less respectable history, and Mr. Danton is a practitioner of a profession held in even lower prestige than being a congressman. He’s a journalist.”

Pena smiled.

“Well, he must like you. Carlito only insults his friends,” he said. “Which means I can move on to Question Two: What brings you to beautiful Cozumel? White-sand beaches and the sun setting over the sparkling Caribbean will not be a satisfactory answer.”

“We come to offer you a unique opportunity,” Castillo said.

“I’m afraid to ask what that might be, but I suppose I don’t have a choice, do I? Tell me about my unique opportunity.”

“Very few men are ever offered, as you are about to be, the opportunity of advising the President of the United States, Joshua Ezekiel Clendennen, vis-à-vis how he should handle the Mexican drug cartels.”

“You didn’t have to come all the way down here — or up here; my guy at the airport said you came from Argentina — to ask me that. You already know the answer.”

“And what would that be, Señor Pena?” Susanna Sieno asked, in Spanish.

“Get people in the U.S. to stop buying illegal drugs,” Pena said.

“Ouch!” Castillo said.

“Carlitos, you know I’m right. If you Americans were not buying drugs, we Mexicans wouldn’t be slaughtering each other for the profitable privilege of moving them through Mexico and then across the border.”

“You’re right, Juan Carlos, but that’s not an answer the President will like.”

“Why not?”

“Let me tell you what we’re really doing here, Juan Carlos,” Castillo said, and did so.

“You’re telling me,” Juan Carlos asked when Castillo had finished, “that the President of the United States is not playing with a full deck?”

“I wouldn’t want this to get around,” Castillo replied, “but I estimate there are no more than forty-two of the normal complement of fifty-two cards in his deck. He doesn’t think he’s Napoleon, and he doesn’t, so far as we know, howl at the moon. But…”

“So why hasn’t he been moved out of the Oval Office and into a padded cell?”

“We’ve already forced one President — Nixon — to resign or face impeachment, and actually tried to impeach one — Clinton — in the Senate. Both times, it nearly tore the country apart; we don’t want to do that again.”

“‘We’?” Pena asked softly.

“I meant ‘we Americans,’” Castillo replied. “The decision to — how do I say this? — live with Clendennen and try to keep him from doing real harm was made primarily by the secretary of State, Natalie Cohen, Generals Naylor and McNab, and a few others in pay grades much higher than my own. I’m just a simple old soldier obeying orders.”

“You didn’t make that up,” Pena said. “You stole it.”

“What?”

“I saw that movie, Carlitos. George C. Scott, playing General Patton, was trying to lay some crap on Karl Malden, who was playing General Omar Bradley, and when Bradley called him on it, Patton said, smiling, what you just said, ‘I’m just a simple old soldier obeying orders,’ and Malden/Bradley said, ‘Bullshit.’”

“I can’t imagine General Bradley saying ‘bullshit’ under any circumstances,” Castillo said prissily. “General Bradley marched in the Long Gray Line and was an officer and a gentleman.”

“Oh, God,” Pena said, laughing. “What you are, Carlitos, is an idiot with a death wish. Only an idiot with, say, twenty-two cards in his deck would come back here the way you have.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? There’s a big sign in the airport that says ‘Welcome to Cozumel!’ That didn’t mean me?”

“Juan Carlos,” Svetlana asked, “what do you mean ‘death wish’?”

It took Pena a moment to frame his reply, and when he gave it, his tone was dead serious.

“About six weeks ago, Svetlana,” he said, “specifically on April twenty-second, eleven men were shot to death at KM 125.5 on National Road 200. That’s near Huixtla, in the state of Chiapas.

“One of the bodies remains unidentified, but there is reason to believe that it is that of a Russian, an agent of the SVR. Two bodies were identified as those of Enrico Saldivia and Juan Sánchez, both known to be members of the Venezuelan Dirección de los Servicios de Inteligencia y Prevención, commonly referred to by its acronym, DISIP. The remaining bodies were all Mexican nationals. Two of them belonged to the Zambada Cartel, which is run by Joaquín Archivaldo. These bodies were further identified to be former Special Forces soldiers—Mexican Special Forces, trained and equipped by American Special Forces — who changed sides.

“The other six men are known to have been members of the Sinaloa Cartel, which is run by Joaquín Guzmán Loera and Ismael Zambada García.

“Those two cartels are normally at each other’s throats, but in this case were working together. What they had done was kidnap an American Special Forces officer, Lieutenant Colonel James D. Ferris, with the idea of exchanging him for a man named Félix Abrego, who had been convicted in the U.S. of the murder of several American DEA agents. He had been sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole and was then confined at the Florence Maximum Security Prison in Colorado.

“The American President, Clendennen, elected to abrogate the long-standing U.S. policy of not negotiating in situations like this, and their plan had proceeded to the point where, on April twenty-second, they were transporting Colonel Ferris to the Oaxaca State Prison, where his exchange for Señor Abrego was to take place.

“En route, their convoy of vehicles was intercepted by parties unknown. Colonel Ferris was liberated and shortly thereafter was welcomed home by President Clendennen in Washington.

“Everyone in the convoy — Russian, Venezuelan, and Mexican — died. As each was shot at least two times in the head, it had the appearance of what is known in law enforcement circles as a ‘professional hit.’

“The Zambada and Sinaloa cartels, the Venezuelan DISIP, and, I would suppose, the SVR, believe our Carlito was the parties unknown — the shooter, so to speak — and are very anxious to get suitable revenge for his assault on their prestige. I have heard that after he’s tortured to death, they plan to decapitate his corpse and hang his head from a bridge over the highway in Acapulco, with his genitalia in his mouth.”

Castillo opened his mouth to protest, but in the split second before the words “Hey, I didn’t shoot any of those bastards and you know it!” were to come out of his mouth, Castillo closed it.

That’s moot. While I didn’t actually shoot anybody, rescuing Jim Ferris was my operation. I planned it and I ordered its execution. I had no idea Juan Carlos planned not only to have his men kill them all, but also to personally fire two coup de grâce rounds into their ears, and would have told him not to had I known. But that’s also moot.

And it wouldn’t have mattered if I had left all of them neatly trussed up, but alive, at the side of the road. They would still know I was responsible for grabbing Ferris and would still be planning to hang my head from an Acapulco bridge with my severed dick in my mouth.

“And that, Sweaty,” Juan Carlos said, “is why our Carlito’s presence here suggests he has a death wish.”

“You’re underestimating him again, Juan Carlos,” Sweaty said calmly. “My Carlos is not a fool, and he certainly doesn’t have a death wish.”

I think that’s what they call blind loyalty.

“You’re underestimating these people, Sweaty,” Pena said.

“I never underestimate my enemies,” she replied.

“I gather these people aren’t planning to hang your head from an Acapulco bridge?” Castillo said.

“Why should they?” Pena said.

“Do you really want me to answer that?”

Castillo looked at Roscoe J. Danton, who looked sick.

“You have a question, Roscoe?” Castillo asked.

“He’s serious, isn’t he?” Danton asked. “If they catch you, these cartel people are going to… do what he said?”

“That would seem to be Comandante Pena’s professional opinion,” Castillo said.

“I investigated the incident—” Pena began.

“Incident?” Danton blurted. “A massacre is what you just described.”

“… at KM 125.5,” Pena went on ignoring him. “And I turned in my report to the procurador general de la república, who is something like the attorney general in the United States. My report stated that the murders had been committed by parties unknown, most probably in connection with the drug trade. I further stated that since my investigation had turned up no suspects, the crime would most probably go unsolved.

“Shortly afterward, Señor Pedro Dagada, an attorney who has several times represented members of both the Zambada and Sinaloa cartels in their brushes with the law, happened upon me while I was having lunch in the Diamond.”

He paused and then went on, “For your general edification, Señor Danton, ‘the Diamond’ is what we call the five-star Camino Real Acapulco Diamante hotel in Acapulco. In English, that’s the Royal Road Acapulco Diamond. Got it?”

Roscoe nodded uncomfortably.

“As I was saying, there I was in the Diamond, having lunch, when Señor Dagada appeared, greeted me warmly — which I found a little surprising, as I have sent a number of his clients to prison — and insisted on buying me a drink.

“Thirty minutes and three drinks later, Señor Dagada asked me, just between old pals, not to go any further, if I had any ideas about what had happened at KM 125.5 that I had not put in my report to the procurador general. He also confided in me that the procurador general, an old pal, had shown him my report.

“So I said, ‘Pedro, I wouldn’t tell even you this, old pal, if you hadn’t told me the procurador general had shown you my report. Just between us, the procurador general knows as well as I do what really happened out there at KM 125.5.’

“To which he replied, ‘Well, what was that?’

“To which I replied, ‘The Americans sent us a message. Don’t kidnap our diplomats who are also Special Forces. Special Forces doesn’t like that, and we can’t control our Special Forces any more than you can control your cartels. They got their guy back and left the bodies on the road at KM 125.5 as a polite suggestion not to kidnap anybody from Special Forces again.’

“And then Pedro asked, ‘You got a name?’

“And I said, ‘Well, there was a guy named Costello down here.’

“And then Pedro asked, ‘Costello or Castillo?’

“And I said I didn’t know for sure, but there was a guy down here named one or the other and I heard he was Special Forces looking for Ferris. He disappeared just about the time what happened at KM 125.5 happened — as did Ferris. ‘So draw your own conclusions, Pedro.’”

“You gave him Charley’s name?” Roscoe asked, horrified.

“You’re not listening. He already had Charley’s name. And I suspect he knew a good deal about Charley,” Pena said drily. He turned to Castillo. “So, what’s on your agenda now, John Wayne, in whatever little time you have left before they cut off — among other parts — your head?”

“I thought I’d take Roscoe here to Drug Cartel International Airport and let him take some pictures to show the President how hard we’re working.”

“I’ve already seen Drug Cartel International, thank you just the same,” Danton said.

“But the President, Roscoe, knows very little about it,” Castillo said. “And we want to keep him abreast of things, don’t we?” He turned to Juan Carlos Pena. “Keep in mind the idea is to stall the President until he tires of this nutty idea and moves on to another. So, what we’re going to do is take Roscoe with us to Drug Cartel International and then let him write his news story, together with pictures of the Outlaws suitably garbed and heavily armed, putting their lives on the line going about the President’s business by going, so to speak, literally into the mouth of the Drug Cartel dragon.

“We will send Roscoe’s story to the President with my report. My report won’t say much except that we are gathering intelligence, and are about to go to Budapest, from where I will report again.”

“What are you going to do in Budapest?” Juan Carlos asked.

“I haven’t figured that out yet, but whatever it is, it will be something that will keep the Commander in Chief thinking I’m really working hard for him. Getting the picture?”

“Yeah,” Pena said thoughtfully. “So, what do you want from me?”

“Can you cover my back when we go to Drug Cartel International?”

Pena visibly collected his thoughts before he replied.

“If you go there, the cartels will know about it within an hour.” He paused to let that sink in, then went on: “I can cover your back. But I won’t, Carlito, unless I have your word that you and Sweaty get on your airplane the minute we get back and get the hell out of here.”

As visibly as Pena had, Castillo visibly framed his answer. Pena saw this and took advantage of it.

“I don’t want to see your heads hanging side by side from that bridge I mentioned, Carlito.”

“It’s that bad, huh?” Castillo asked.

Pena nodded.

“My God!” Roscoe said.

“Your head hanging from the bridge, Roscoe, I could live with,” Pena said. “But I have a soft spot in my heart for Romeo and Juliet.”

“Okay,” Castillo said.

“That’s your word of honor, Carlito, right?”

Castillo nodded.

“Say it.”

“Word of honor,” Castillo said.

“Okay.”

“Is there time to drive there and back today? I don’t think flying in would be too smart.”

“That would depend on what you were flying,” Pena said. “If you had a Black Hawk helicopter, you could make it to Drug Cartel International and back before supper.”

“Sorry, Juan Carlos, I don’t even know where mine is. It’s not where I left it after we grabbed Ferris, and the CIA’s satellites can’t find it.”

“The CIA’s satellites?” Danton and Pena repeated just about simultaneously.

“Natalie Cohen was afraid it would wind up in the wrong hands and asked Frank Lammelle, the DCI, to find it for her.”

“It didn’t wind up in the wrong hands, Carlito,” Pena said. “You should listen to Sweaty and stop underestimating people.”

“You’ve got it?” Castillo asked.

Pena nodded.

“I can have it on the roof here in fifteen minutes,” Pena said. “Then we will go to Drug Cartel International, Roscoe can take your picture, and then we will come back here. Where, your luggage having been packed while you were gone, and loaded aboard your airplane, you can immediately take off for… Where did you say you were going? Budapest? Agreed?”

Castillo, after a moment, nodded.

“Only one thing I can think of,” he said. He turned to the Sienos.

“Where do you want us to drop you off?” he asked.

“What?” Paul Sieno asked.

“You know, Miami? Tampa? Palm Beach?”

“What are we going to do in Palm Beach?” Susanna Sieno asked.

“Susanna, you heard what the man said about these people. Stalling Clendennen in Mexico is not going to be a vacation on the CIA’s dime. They’d cut off your head, and Paul’s, as quickly as they’d cut off mine.”

“I was thinking about that,” she said.

“Good,” Juan Carlos said.

“Juan Carlos, could you pass off Paul and me as your cousins from, say, Colombia? Better yet, Havana?” she asked.

“What the hell, Charley,” Paul chimed in. “Maybe we could learn something about these people that somebody on top could use.”

“You understand,” Juan Carlos said, “that if these people find out who you are—”

“We spent five years in Cuba,” she said. “Brother Raúl is a lot smarter than these cartel people, and he and his DGI never got close to us.”

“My cousins from Havana are obviously as crazy as you are, Carlito,” Juan Carlos said. “But I like the idea of getting the straight story to people at the top. The reports of your DEA never seem to get there.”

“You realize, of course, that if you stay, it’s going to cost Those People in Las Vegas a lot of money.”

“Screw those people in Las Vegas,” Susanna said.

[FOUR]

The President of the United States was not in a good mood when Secretary of State Natalie Cohen, DCI A. Franklin Lammelle, General Allan B. Naylor, Senior, and Director of National Intelligence Truman C. Ellsworth filed into the Cabinet Room and stood waiting to be acknowledged.

The President had just been informed by Supervisory Special Agent Robert J. Mulligan that his mother-in-law, who had gone missing from Happy Haven, the Baptist assisted living facility in Pascagoula, Mississippi, several days before had been located.

The “First Mother-in-Law” was in the Biloxi, Mississippi, jail charged with public drunkenness and assault on a police officer. It appeared that she had overly availed herself of the free cocktails offered by the Biloxi Palace Casino to its gaming guests at the roulette tables.

Mulligan said he could probably spring her from durance vile by noon, but that wasn’t going to solve much. The Reverend J. Finley Cushman, DD, who had taken her in after she had been asked to leave the Ocean Springs branch of the Baptist assisted living facility, had made it quite clear if she ever got loose again and brought shame upon Happy Haven by getting into the Devil’s Brew, they would have to find some other haven for her.

Since she had been asked to leave just about every other facility in Mississippi, that posed problems. The prospect of having to face the First Mother-in-Law every morning at breakfast in the White House struck terror in the heart of Joshua Ezekiel Clendennen.

“Mr. President,” Secretary Cohen said, “we have another report from Colonel Castillo.”

The President was so upset that he momentarily couldn’t remember who Castillo was, and thought she was referring to the head of the Mississippi State Police, who was also a colonel.

“Mulligan just told me,” the President said, rather impatiently. And then he remembered.

“Give it to me,” he said, and then, “Sit.”

He read the report:

“What the hell does ‘suitably redacted’ mean?” the President asked.

“‘Redact,’ Mr. President,” Presidential Spokesperson Robin Hoboken said, “means to adapt by obscuring sensitive information. I would think then that ‘suitably redact’ means to do so suitably.”

“And how would you do that?” the President asked.

“Give me just a minute to look that up, Mr. President,” Hoboken said.

“How are we going to talk about this if you don’t have copies of it before you?” the President inquired of the three senior officials.

“Mr. President,” Truman Ellsworth said, “if you’ll look toward the head of Colonel Castillo’s report, it says ‘Duplication Forbidden.’”

“Let me tell you something, Mr. Ellsworth,” President Clendennen said. “I’m POTUS and Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces. No lousy little lieutenant colonel like this man Castillo is going to tell me I can’t make copies of any damned piece of paper I want.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Hoboken,” the President ordered, “make copies of this for everybody.”

“Yes, sir, Mr. President. Before or after I look up ‘suitably redacted’?”

“‘Suitably redacted’ can wait,” the President said, “since we don’t even know what that means.”

Three minutes later, Robin Hoboken passed out copies of Danton’s story.

He got through the first two paragraphs…

“What the hell are these black boxes all over this?” President Clendennen then demanded.

“Mr. President,” Secretary Cohen explained, “those are redacting marks showing what has been redacted.”

“I’ll be damned. And you didn’t know that, Hoboken?”

“I will from now on, Mr. President,” Hoboken said firmly.

The President resumed reading:

“Goddamn right he didn’t,” the President said.

“Sir?” Truman Ellsworth asked.

“If that black redact-whatyoucallit stands for Castillo, as I strongly suspect it does, goddamn right he had no choice but to obey his orders. That’s what I told you when you showed a certain lack of enthusiasm for Operation Out of the Box.”

“Yes, sir, Mr. President,” Ellsworth said.

The President resumed reading:

“What the hell is going on here?” the President said. “If that black box stands for Castillo, what the hell is this? ‘He had flown into Castillo Air Force Base at the controls of a Castillo aircraft he had stolen in Castillo’? Tell me that makes sense!”

“Those redacting remarks, Mr. President,” Secretary Cohen explained, “replace other words that have been obscured. A redacted block has no meaning in and of itself.”

“I think I’m getting it. Bear with me,” the President said, and resumed reading:

“I think I’m getting this,” the President announced. “He crossed out the name of his girlfriend, the Russian spy, right?”

“‘Redacted’ it, sir,” Robin Hoboken said.

“Why the hell can’t we just say ‘crossed out’?”

“If that is your pleasure, sir, we certainly will,” Robin Hoboken said.

The President resumed reading, this time finishing the report before saying anything else.

“Okay, I got it. Castillo redacted all those things so in case this fell into the wrong hands, nobody would know who Roscoe J. Danton was talking about. Am I right?”

“Yes, sir, Mr. President,” Truman Ellsworth said. “That is correct.”

“Couple of questions,” the President said. “General Naylor, Danton said you were the most important what in the Army?”

“I believe, Mr. President,” Secretary Cohen said, “that Mr. Danton believes General Naylor is the most important general in the Army.”

“Where did he get a nutty idea like that? Everybody knows the chief of staff is the most important general in the Army.”

“I don’t know where he got a nutty idea like that, Mr. President,” Robin Hoboken said, “but I’ll get on it right away and let you know as soon as I find out.”

“Lammelle, I want you to get together with Ellsworth and come up with a plan to shut down this drug dealers’ airfield. I don’t want to do anything until I hear more from Castillo, but I want to be ready.”

“Yes, sir,” Lammelle said.

“This out-of-the-box idea of mine is working out better than I thought. I wonder why I didn’t think of it earlier.”

“Well, you had a lot on your mind, Mr. President,” Robin Hoboken said. “That probably had something to do with it.”