Black Ops (Presidential Agent)

by W. E. B Griffin

  "If I heard all that from anybody but you two . . ."

  "That wasn't the question."

  She nodded. "I got it, Edgar."

  "Now tell our leader you're sorry, baby," Paul Sieno said.

  Susanna looked at Castillo.

  "Is the wedding going to be simple, Don Juan, or are you both going to wear your uniforms?"

  "Uniforms, I think. But only if you're going to precede us down the aisle scattering rose petals while singing 'I Love You Truly.' "

  [TWO]

  Pilar Golf & Polo Country Club

  Pilar, Buenos Aires Province, Argentina

  1740 2 January 2006

  After thinking about it, Castillo decided there was more to be lost than gained by eluding the gendarmeria SUV that was waiting for them outside the gate of the Mayerling Country Club.

  Comandante Liam Duffy would be annoyed, Castillo understood, and now was not the time to annoy the Latin-tempered (his mother was Argentine) gendarmeria officer. That was, annoy him any more than he already was annoyed.

  Castillo knew that Duffy remained furious about the assassination attempt on Christmas Eve on Duffy and his family, and while Castillo had almost identified the SVR officer who had organized and probably participated in that, he would have to check with Berezovsky before he was sure. And as soon as Duffy learned that name, he was going to do his very best to find him and then kill him and his close associates in the most imaginatively painful ways he could think of.

  While Castillo fully sympathized with Duffy, he didn't want that to happen until the Congo operation was over. Taking out the SVR officer who had replaced Lieutenant Colonel Viktor Zhdankov in South America would tell the SVR more than Castillo wanted them to know about the extent of his knowledge of SVR operations.

  Replacing Zhdankov had become necessary after Corporal Lester Bradley, USMC, using his Colt Model 1911 .45-caliber semiautomatic, had taken Zhdankov out with a well-placed head shot in the basement garage of the Pilar Sheraton Hotel and Convention Center when Zhdankov had been engaged in trying to take out Aleksandr Pevsner.

  The initial order, according to both Aleksandr Pevsner and Svetlana, had come from Lieutenant General Yakov Sirinov, who was the man in charge of that sort of thing for the Sluzhba Vnezhney Razvedki. He ran either Directorate S, the oddly brazenly named Illegal Intelligence arm of the SVR, or Service A, which was the arm of the SVR charged with planning and implementing "active measures," which meant such things as assassinations.

  Or General Sirinov ran both Directorate S and Service A.

  Or Directorate S and Service A were really one and the same entity.

  Svetlana and Pevsner had told Castillo the order from General Sirinov had probably been rather vague in nature, stating only that the individuals on a list had been determined to be posing a threat to the Russian Federation and were to be eliminated as soon as the local rezidents could arrange to have it done, preferably within the same twenty-four-hour period.

  That, Svetlana had matter-of-factly told Castillo, would serve both to keep the others on the list from suspecting they were in danger because one of their number had been eliminated, and would also make a statement, when the assassinations had been successfully carried out, that the SVR was back and dealing with its enemies as the KGB, the NKVD, and the Cheka had done in the past.

  The names certainly listed were Frau und Herr Kuhl in Vienna, Herr Friedler in Marburg, Mr. Britton in Philadelphia, and Comandante Duffy in Buenos Aires. Both Svetlana and Pevsner felt that some people on General Sirinov's list who would be eliminated, if possible, as a second priority included Otto Gorner, Eric Kocian, and Karl Wilhelm von und zu Gossinger, aka C. G. Castillo.

  Neither Svetlana nor Pevsner had mentioned that the Berlin rezident ordered to implement the successful termination of Herr Friedler and, if possible, as a second priority, Otto Gorner, Eric Kocian, and Karl Wilhelm von und zu Gossinger aka C. G. Castillo, was one Dmitri Berezovsky--and, although this thought had run through Castillo's mind more than once, neither had he.

  When Jack Davidson had driven the BMW out of the Mayerling gate, Castillo had signaled cheerfully for the gendarmes in their Mercedes SUV to follow them.

  When finally he had to deal with Liam Duffy's impatience--angry impatience--to learn the name of the man who had tried to kill Duffy and his family, at least the Argentine cop wouldn't have his Irish temper already inflamed by Castillo having eluded his protectors. Read: tail.

  Several miles past the end of the Autopista del Sol, where the six-lane toll road had turned into a two-lane macadam highway, Castillo saw a sign reading PILAR GOLF & POLO COUNTRY CLUB, and moments later saw the gatehouse of the place itself.

  Unlike either the Mayerling or Buena Vista country clubs, where a combination of high fences, closely packed trees, and thick shrubbery hid everything inside from anyone on the roadway, the Pilar Golf & Polo Country Club presented an unobstructed view of immaculate fairways and greens as far as the eye could see. A dozen electric golf carts were on narrow, concrete paths that picturesquely wound near the fairways and the greens.

  At least a mile from the gatehouse, sitting on a gentle hill, were a dozen houses--maybe more--all of which seemed to Castillo to be larger than Nuestra Pequena Casa.

  There might have been a fence around them, but Castillo didn't get a good enough look at them before Davidson had to stop at the gatehouse, which itself was a substantial two-story building. Castillo saw that there were two barrier gates in series, each a substantial affair that opened by rolling to the side; the interior gate was two car lengths distant from the exterior one.

  From behind thick glass windows in the gatehouse, three uniformed, armed guards examined the BMW and its occupants. Castillo could see on an interior wall a row of video monitors mounted over a rack of shotguns. The monitors gave the guards a clear view of what the surveillance cameras were recording--at the moment, six views of the BMW, including its undercarriage.

  At this point, Castillo had a somewhat unnerving and embarrassing thought: He knew Svetlana, Munz, and Lester were inside the Pilar Golf & Polo Country Club, but not exactly where.

  Nothing beyond "in another of Pevsner's safe houses."

  You should have asked how to get in here, stupid!

  It didn't turn out to be a problem.

  First, a black KIA sport utility vehicle with darkened windows appeared from the side of the gatehouse in the area between the barriers and stopped its nose against the interior barrier. A large and sturdy man in a business suit got out of the KIA, in the process unintentionally revealing that he carried a large semiautomatic pistol in a shoulder holster.

  Next, the red light in a traffic signal mounted on the side of the gatehouse went off and the signal's green light came on. The exterior barrier then rolled slowly to one side. When there was room, Davidson drove up to the KIA as the barrier now behind him closed.

  The man who had gotten out of the KIA walked to the BMW, smiled, and bent down beside it.

  When Davidson rolled down his window, Max erupted from the backseat, where he had been sitting beside Edgar Delchamps, put his head between Davidson and the lowered window, then growled deep in his chest and showed the man his teeth.

  The man jumped three feet backward--moving so quickly that Castillo thought he was going to lose his balance.

  The man quickly regained his composure.

  "El Coronel Munz has been expecting you, gentlemen," he announced. "If you'll be so kind as to follow me?"

  The interior barrier rolled away, and they followed the KIA down a serpentine macadam road that skirted the golf course--as they did, Castillo concluded that the club had two eighteen-hole courses--then past four polo fields, two of which were in use, and then an enormous building with half a dozen tennis courts that suggested it was the Club House.

  Finally, they approached the sort of compound of houses he had seen from the road.

  There was no road in front of the houses, just a line of six-foot-high
fencing, nearly invisible from even a short distance away. A second look showed that inside the fencing there was an even less visible line of wire suspended between insulators two or three feet above the grass.

  That's motion sensing, Castillo decided. The outer fence is designed to keep the golfers, and their golf balls, off that last expanse of grass. The motion-sensing wire inside goes off if something larger than a golf ball gets close to the houses.

  Whoever designed this knew what he was doing, and was not constrained by financial considerations.

  Proof came as they approached the houses from the rear. He now saw that the houses were lined up in a gentle curve, their front doors facing away from the road and toward yet another guard shack and barrier. Two other KIAs, identical to the one they were following, sat facing out just inside the barrier.

  The barrier here was different. It consisted of four five-foot-tall painted steel cylinders about eighteen inches in diameter in the center of the road. They could be raised and lowered hydraulically. They sank into the road as the lead KIA approached.

  Inside the compound, the KIA stopped before the third house, and the man got out and nodded toward the house.

  The house, of timbered brick, looked as if it belonged in the Scottish Highlands as the ancestral hunting lodge of at least a duke.

  Offering his unsolicited observation that "these fucking Krautmobiles weren't designed for full-size people," Edgar Delchamps opened the rear door of the BMW and started to haul himself out.

  He had one leg out the car's door when Max saw not only that the door of the house had opened but who had come through it.

  He exited the car in a leap, using Delchamps's crotch as the springing point for both rear legs, which served to push Delchamps back in his seat. Delchamps said unkind things about Max and his mother.

  Max bounded to Svetlana, yapping happily and dancing around her. She bent and scratched his ears.

  Then she saw Castillo and waved to him.

  Max lapped her face and then ran to Castillo, who was by then out of the front seat. Max yapped at him as if saying, "Hey, boss! Guess who I found here?" before returning to Svetlana, where he stood on his rear legs and draped his paws over her shoulders.

  A very large man rushed out the front door, looking as if he was in the act of drawing a lethal weapon from a shoulder holster.

  "Nyet!" Svetlana ordered in a voice befitting a podpolkovnik of the Sluzhba Vnezhney Razvedki on a Moscow parade ground. The man stopped as if frozen.

  Svetlana's voice softened as she pushed Max off her shoulders, then dropped to wrap her arms around his neck. "It's okay, Stepan. Max is our dog, isn't he, my Charley?"

  Castillo nodded.

  He walked up to her. She kissed him chastely and not very possessively on the cheek.

  "You remember Edgar, of course, honey?"

  "Certainly," she said. "He's the one who took the stitches out of my good purse."

  She looked at Delchamps and then at Castillo. Then she pulled Castillo's face to hers and kissed him on the mouth--passionately, possessively, and at length.

  "Please come in the house, Mr. Delchamps," she said a moment later. "We'll have a cocktail, and then I will show you and Mr. Davidson around our house."

  She tucked her hand under Castillo's arm, leaned her head against his shoulder, and led him into the house.

  "What's this 'our house' business?" Castillo asked.

  "I love it," she said. "And so will you when you see it. I'm going to buy it. And this is Mr. Lee-Watson, who's going to sell it to me."

  Three people were standing in the high-ceilinged foyer: El Coronel Alfredo Munz, Corporal Lester Bradley, USMC, and a very tall, elegantly tailored man in his forties.

  "Delighted to make your acquaintance, sir. Cedric Lee-Watson."

  His accent suggested he was the duke who owned this Scottish Highlands castle.

  Castillo took the proffered hand and looked at Munz, asking with his eyes, Who the hell is this guy, and what's he doing in Pevsner's safe house?

  "Mr. Lee-Watson handles real estate for our mutual friend in Bariloche," Munz explained.

  "Indeed, for he whose name is only rarely, and then very carefully, spoken," Lee-Watson said.

  "Cedric built this place--the club--for our friend," Munz said.

  Lester Bradley caught Castillo's attention. "Colonel, can I see you for a minute, please?"

  "What's up, Lester?"

  "Privately, sir?"

  "Won't that wait until after I show him the house?" Svetlana protested.

  Castillo took Bradley's arm and led him farther into the house, to one side of a wide stairway at the end of a foyer.

  "Okay, what, Lester?"

  "As soon as I got the AFC set up, there was a call for you from Mr. D'Allessando."

  "What did he want?" Castillo asked, surprised.

  On his retirement from twenty-four years of service--twenty-two of it in Special Forces--Chief Warrant Officer Five Victor D'Allessando had gone to work for the Special Operations Command as a Department of the Army civilian. Theoretically, he was a technical advisor to the commanding general of the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg. What he actually did for the Special Operations Command was not talked about.

  "He said a friend wants to talk to you, sir."

  "Well, get on the horn and get him back, Les."

  "Yes, sir."

  Bradley walked to the foot of the stairs, then ran up them, taking them two at a time.

  Svetlana, trailed by Delchamps, Davidson, and Lee-Watson, crossed the foyer to Castillo.

  "Vic D'Allessando was on the horn," Castillo reported. "He said a friend wants to talk to me."

  Delchamps and Davidson both shrugged, indicating they had no idea what D'Allessando might have on his mind.

  Everybody started up the stairs to the second floor.

  [THREE]

  Ten minutes later, as Svetlana and Lee-Watson had just about finished showing all the comforts the master suite offered, Bradley walked in and announced, "I've got Mr. D'Allessando for you, sir. The AFC is just down the hall."

  Delchamps read Castillo's mind.

  "You want us to wait here, Ace?"

  Castillo exhaled audibly.

  "The wheezing, I suspect, reveals a certain indecision," Delchamps said.

  "I was thinking that Svetlana probably should hear this," Castillo said.

  "Or wondering how you could keep her from hearing it?" Delchamps said.

  Svetlana flashed him an icy look.

  "I was about to say, 'What the hell, the barn door's open; there's no way to get the cow back in,'" Delchamps went on, which earned him an ever more frigid glare, "but I was afraid she might take it the wrong way."

  Davidson chuckled.

  "Mr. Lee-Watson, will you excuse us for a few minutes? There's an important call I--we--have to take."

  "Of course."

  The AFC radio was set up on a small escritoire in a small room off the corridor. There was an interior door. Castillo opened it and saw that it opened on the bedroom of the master suite.

  He closed the door, and noticed that Bradley was about to leave the room. "Stay, Lester," Castillo said, and sat down carefully on an elegantly styled and obviously fragile chair.

  "Thank you so much, my ever thoughtful Charley," Svetlana said sarcastically.

  He started to get up to give her the chair, then changed his mind.

  "You're welcome," he said, and checked the LEDs on the AFC. They were all green. One of them indicated the conversation would be conducted with the protection of AFC Class One encryption, which Aloysius Francis Casey had personally informed him that even the master National Security Agency eaves-droppers at Fort Meade, Maryland, could not penetrate.

  Castillo pushed the SPEAKERPHONE button.

  "How they hanging, Vic? What's up?"

  There was no immediate reply, and when a reply did come, it was not in D'Allessando's familiar Brooklynese but rather in the cri
sp diction that immediately and unequivocally identified the other party to Castillo as Lieutenant General Bruce J. McNab, Commanding General of the United States Special Operations Command: "Colonel Castillo."

  "Good evening, sir."

  "I wasn't sure Vic could get through to you, Colonel. I didn't think they would permit you to take one of Aloysius's radios on your terminal leave."

  "General, I'm not on terminal leave."

  There was a pause.

  "But now that I have you, Colonel: Although you have caused me a lot of grief during our long relationship, on balance you were far more useful than I ever thought you would be. Given that, I wanted to tell you personally that I did my best to dissuade General Naylor from going along with Ambassador Montvale. I failed. I'm sorry, and I wanted to tell you that myself."

  "Sir, I am not on terminal leave."

  "Well, if you're not, you soon will be. Colonel Remley, my G-1, is on his way down there with the appropriate papers for you to sign." He paused. "That presumes, of course, that he can find you. He's not one of us, so that's quite possible. Where are you?"

  "Sir, I met briefly with Colonel Remley. And Ambassador Montvale. Several hours ago. They are both by now on their way back to the States. I declined to sign whatever it was he wanted me to sign."

  "Did Colonel Remley inform you that I had sent him down there at General Naylor's direction to have you sign your acceptance of the medical board's conclusions?"

  "No, sir. Neither your name nor General Naylor's was mentioned. Ambassador Montvale made it quite clear he wanted me to sign whatever Colonel Remley had for me to sign. I declined to do so."

  "Charley, if the President has decided it's time for you to go, it's your duty to go. You should know that."

  "Sir, the President is unaware of what Ambassador Montvale had planned for me."

  This time the pause was longer before McNab spoke again.

  "Forgive me, Charley. I am ashamed to say I was sitting here trying to decide who would be more likely to lie to me, you or that lying sonofabitch Montvale."