The Hostage pa-2

by W. E. B Griffin

  She nodded, and he picked up the tab and her credit card and went back to the cash register. Betsy went in her purse and took out a wad of pesos and pulled a five-peso note from it. For some reason, you couldn't put the tip on a credit card. Five pesos was about twenty percent, and Jack was always telling her that the Argentines were grateful for ten percent. But the bartender was a nice young man who always took good care of her, and he probably didn't make much money. Five pesos was a buck sixty.

  When the bartender came back with the American Express form, she signed it, took the carbon, laid the five-peso note on the original, and pushed it across the bar to him.

  "Muchas gracias, senora."

  "You're welcome," Betsy said in Spanish.

  She put the credit card in her wallet, and then the wallet in her purse, and closed it. She slipped off the bar stool and walked toward the entrance. This gave her a view of the kitchen, intentionally on display behind a plate-glass wall. She was always fascinated at what, in a sense, was really a feeding frenzy. She thought there must be twenty men in chef's whites tending a half-dozen stainless steel stoves, a huge, wood-fired parrilla grill, and other kitchen equipment. All busy as hell. The no-smoking dining room of the Kansas was enormous and usually full.

  The entrance foyer was crowded with people giving their names to the greeter-girls to get on the get-seated roster. One of the greeters saw Betsy coming and walked quickly to hold open the door for her.

  Betsy went out onto Avenida Libertador, and looked up and down the street; no husband. She turned right on the sidewalk toward what she thought of as the Park-Yourself entrance to the Kansas parking lot. There were two entrances to the large parking area behind the restaurant. The other provided valet parking.

  Betsy never used it. She had decided long ago, when they had first started coming to the Kansas, that it was really a pain in the you-know-where. The valet parkers were young kids who opened the door for you, handed you a claim check, and then hopped behind the wheel and took off with a squeal of tires into the parking lot, where they proved their manhood by coming as close to other cars as they could without taking off a fender.

  And then when you left, you had to find the claim check, and stand outside waiting for a parker to show up so you could give it to him. He then took off at a run into the parking lot. A couple of minutes later, the Bus would arrive with a squeal of tires, and the parker would jump out with a big smile and a hand out for his tip.

  It was easier and quicker to park the Bus yourself. And when you were finished with dinner-or waiting for a husband who didn't show the simple courtesy of calling and saying he was delayed, and who didn't answer his cellular-all you had to do was walk into the parking lot, get in the Bus, and drive off.

  When she'd come in today, the parking lot had been nearly full, and she'd had to drive almost to the rear of it to find a home for the Bus. But no problem. It wasn't that far, and the lot was well lit, with bright lights on tall poles on the little grassy-garden islands between the rows of parked cars.

  She was a little surprised and annoyed when she saw that the light shining down on the Bus had burned out. Things like that happened, of course, but she thought she was going to have a hell of a hard time finding the keyhole in the door.

  When she actually got to the Bus, it was worse. Some sonofabitch-one of the valet parkers, probably-had parked a Peugeot sedan so close to the left side of the van that there was no way she could get to the door without scraping her rear and/or her boobs on either the dirty Peugeot or the Bus, which also needed a bath.

  She walked around to the right side of the Bus and with some difficulty-for a while she thought she was going to have to light her lighter-managed to get the key in the lock and open the door.

  She was wearing a tight skirt, and the only way she was going to be able to crawl over the passenger seat and the whatever-it-was-called thing between the seats to get behind the wheel was to hike the skirt up to her crotch.

  First things first. Get rid of the purse, then hike skirt.

  She opened the sliding door and tossed her purse on the seat.

  The front door suddenly slammed shut.

  What the hell?

  She looked to see what had happened.

  There was a man coming toward her between the cars. He had something in his hand.

  What the hell is that, a hypodermic needle?

  She first felt arms wrap around her from behind, then a hand over her mouth.

  She started to struggle. She tried to bite at the hand over her mouth as the man coming toward her sort of embraced her. She felt a sting on her buttocks.

  Oh, Jesus Chri… Four minutes later, a dark blue BMW 545i with heavily darkened windows and a Corps Diplomatique license plate pulled out of the flow of traffic on Avenida Libertador and stopped at the curb. It was a clearly marked NO PARKING NO STOPPING zone, but usually, as now, there were two or three cars with CD tags parked there.

  In the rear seat of the BMW, Jack Masterson turned to Alex Darby.

  "Now that your car has joined mine in the shop, how are you going to get to work in the morning?"

  "I can have one of my guys pick me up," Alex replied.

  "Wouldn't you rather I did?"

  "I was hoping you'd ask."

  "Eight-fifteen?"

  "Fine. You want me to send this one back here after he drops me off?"

  "No. Betsy has the Bus. Send this one back to the embassy." He raised his voice and switched to Spanish. "Make sure the dispatcher knows I need a car at my house at eight tomorrow morning."

  "Si, senor," the driver replied.

  "That presumes," Masterson said to Darby, "that I'm still alive in the morning. She who hates to wait is going to be highly pissed."

  Darby chuckled.

  Masterson got out of the car and half-trotted across the sidewalk to the Kansas entrance. He pushed his way through the crowd of people waiting to be seated and went up the shallow three-step stairs to the bar.

  Betsy was nowhere in sight, either at the bar or in one of the half dozen booths.

  Shit!

  One of the bartenders caught his eye and held up his hands in a helpless gesture. Jack walked to him.

  "You just missed her, senor," the bartender said. "Not two minutes ago, she left."

  Shit!

  Maybe I can catch her in the parking lot!

  "Muchas gracias," he said, and then hurriedly went back through the entrance foyer and left through the door leading to the valet parking entrance.

  If she used valet parking, she might still be waiting. Betsy was nowhere in sight.

  Shit!

  Jack trotted into the parking lot and looked around.

  He didn't see the Bus anywhere at first, and then he did, in the back of the lot. The interior lights were on, which meant she'd just gotten to the car.

  He took off at a dead run for the Bus.

  I don't have any idea what she's doing with the door open, but it means I probably can get there before she drives off.

  "Sweetheart, I'm sorry!" he called when he got to the Bus.

  Where the hell is she?

  There was no room to get to the driver's door, and when he got to the passenger side, he saw that it wasn't open, just not fully closed. That explained the interior lights being on.

  Where the hell is she?

  He slid the sliding door open enough so that he could slam it shut. He saw the purse on the seat.

  "Oh, Jesus H. Christ!" he said softly.

  He took his cellular from his shirt pocket and pushed an autodial button.

  Answer the fucking phone, Alex!

  "Alex Darby."

  "Alex, I think you'd better come back here. Come to the rear of the parking lot."

  Darby heard the tone of Masterson's voice.

  "Jesus, what's up?"

  "The Bus is here. The door was half open. Betsy's purse is on the backseat. No Betsy. I don't like the looks of this."

  "On my way, Jack." "Hand
me the microphone and turn the speaker up," Alex Darby said to his driver. "And then head back to the Kansas. Fast."

  "Si, senor," the driver said, and took the shortwave radio microphone from where it lay on the passenger seat and handed it to Darby. The shortwave net provided encrypted voice communication.

  Allegedly, the encryption was unbreakable. Very few people believed this.

  Alex keyed the mic. "Darby to Lowery."

  Almost instantly, the speaker came to life. "Yeah, Alex. What's up?"

  "I just had a call from Jack Masterson. Something very unusual is going on at the Kansas on Aven-"

  "In San Isidro?" Lowery cut him off. "That Kansas?"

  "Right. His van is there, and his wife's purse, but no wife. Jack sounds very concerned."

  "I'll call the San Isidro cops," Lowery said. "I'm in Belgrano; ten, twelve minutes out. On my way."

  "Thanks, Ken."

  "Let's hope she's in the can, powdering her nose," Lowery said. "See you there. Lowery out." Jack Masterson, scanning the parking lot and making mental notes of what and who were in the immediate area, pushed another autodial button on his cellular phone.

  "Post One, Staff Sergeant Taylor," the Marine guard on duty at the embassy said, as he answered the unlisted telephone.

  "This is Masterson. I need to speak to Ken Lowery now."

  "Sir, Mr. Lowery has left the embassy. May I suggest you try to get him on the radio?"

  "I don't have a goddamn radio. You contact him, and tell him to call me on my cellular. Tell him it's an emergency."

  "Yes, sir." [FIVE] The Residence Avenida Libertador y Calle John F. Kennedy Palermo, Buenos Aires, Argentina 2110 20 July 2005 "?Hola?" Ambassador Juan Manuel Silvio said, picking up the telephone beside his armchair in the sitting room of the ambassadorial apartment on the third floor of the residence.

  "Alex, Mr. Ambassador. We have a problem."

  "Tell me."

  "Everything points to Betsy Masterson having been kidnapped from the parking lot of the Kansas in San Isidro about an hour ago."

  For a long moment, the ambassador didn't reply. He was always careful with his words.

  "Ken Lowery is aware of this?" he asked, finally.

  "Yes, sir. I'm in Ken's car, headed downtown from the Kansas."

  "Jack?"

  "I talked him into going home, sir. My wife is on her way over there."

  "Why don't you and Ken come here, Alex?" Silvio asked. "And I think it might be useful if Tony Santini came, too. I could call him."

  Anthony J. Santini, listed in the embassy telephone directory as the assistant financial attache, was in fact a Secret Service agent dispatched to Buenos Aires to, as he put it, "look for funny money." That meant both counterfeit currency and illegally acquired money being laundered.

  "I'll call him, sir."

  "Then I'll see you here in a few minutes, Alex. Thank you," the ambassador said, and hung up. "You'll call who?" Ken Lowery inquired.

  "Tony Santini," Alex Darby replied. "The ambassador wants him there, too."

  "The residence or the embassy?"

  "Residence," Darby replied, then added, "I guess he figures Tony is the closest thing we have to the FBI."

  There were no "legal attaches"-FBI agents-at the embassy at the moment. There were a half dozen "across the river" looking for money-laundering operations. Money laundering in Argentina had just about dried up after the Argentine government had, without warning several years before, forcibly converted dollar deposits to pesos at an unfavorable rate and then sequestered the pesos. International drug dealers didn't trust Argentine banks any more than industry did and moved their laundering to Uruguay and elsewhere.

  Darby punched an autodial button on his cellular to call Santini. Ambassador Juan Manuel Silvio was a tall, lithe, fair-skinned, well-tailored man, with an erect carriage and an aristocratic manner, and when he opened the door to the ambassadorial apartment Alex Darby thought again that Silvio looked like the models in advertisements for twelve-year-old scotch or ten-thousand-dollar wristwatches.

  He was a Cuban-American, brought from Castro's Cuba as a child. His family had arrived in Miami, he said, on their forty-six-foot Chris-Craft sportfisherman with nothing but the clothing on their backs and a large cigar humidor stuffed with his mother's jewelry and hundred-dollar bills.

  "My father was one of the few who recognized Castro as more than a joke," he had once told Darby. "What he didn't get quite right was how quickly Castro would march into Havana."

  Darby knew he wasn't boasting, but the opposite. Silvio was proud of-and greatly admired-his fellow Cubans who had arrived in Miami "with nothing but the clothes on their backs" and subsequently prospered. He simply wanted to make it plain that it had been much easier for his family than it had been for other refugees.

  Silvio graduated from his father's alma mater, Spring Hill College, a Jesuit institution in Mobile, Alabama, with a long history of educating the children of upper-class Latin Americans, took a law degree at Harvard, and then a doctorate in political science at the University of Alabama.

  He joined the State Department on graduation.

  He joked, "My father decided that the family owed one son to the service of the United States. I am the youngest son, so, to my brothers' delight, here I am, while they bask in the Miami sun."

  Alex Darby liked the ambassador both personally and professionally. He had served in other American embassies where the ambassadors-career State Department and political appointees alike-had demonstrated an appalling lack of knowledge of geopolitics and history, and had regarded the CIA especially, and the other embassy "outsiders"-the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the Secret Service and even the military attaches who worked under the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)-as dangerous nuisances who had to be kept on a very tight leash lest they disrupt the amiable ambience of diplomatic cocktail parties.

  It was a given to Ambassador Silvio that communism in Latin America was not dead; that it posed a genuine threat to the United States; that Islamic fascism was present in Latin America and growing stronger, and posed an even greater threat to the United States; and that the drug trade financed both.

  His attitude toward and support of Darby and the other outsiders made their work easier, even if it did tend to annoy the "real" Foreign Service staff at the embassy. The ambassador heard out Darby's report of what had happened, considered what he had heard for a long moment, and then asked Lowery and Santini if either had anything to add.

  Lowery said, "No, sir," and Santini shook his head.

  "The priorities, as I see them," the ambassador said, "are to get Betsy back to her family, and then to help Jack through this. Any comments on that?"

  All three men shook their heads. Lowery said, "No, sir," again.

  "The Policia Federal are in on this, I presume?"

  "Yes, sir," Lowery said.

  "Were you considering involving SIDE, Alex?"

  "I think SIDE already knows what's happened, sir," Darby replied. "But I can make a call or two if-"

  "Let's hold off on that for a while. Do you think SIDE has informed the Foreign Ministry?"

  "I think we have to assume they will, sir. The Policia Federal probably already have."

  "Do you think this is politically motivated? Do we have any reason to suspect this is a terrorist act?"

  "It may be, of course," Darby said. "But we've always thought that if the rag-heads were going to do anything, it would be a violent act, either a bomb at the embassy or here, or a drive-by assassination attempt on you-"

  "You think it may be a run-of-the-mill kidnapping?" Silvio interrupted.

  "Sir, I don't know what to think. But if I had to make a choice, that seems most likely."

  "But kidnapping not only an American, but one with diplomatic status… that doesn't strike me as being smart."

  "It will certainly get SIDE and the police off their a- Get them moving," Lowery said. "This is really going to embarrass th
e government."

  "Mr. Santini? You have any thoughts?"

  "Not many, sir. But my experience with what the sociologists call the 'criminal element' has been that they often do stupid things because they're usually stupid. I wouldn't be surprised if these guys missed the diplomat tag on the car."

  "And when they learn who Mrs. Masterson is? You think they may let her go?"

  "I hate to say this, sir," Santini replied, "but I think it's better than fifty-fifty that they won't. She can identify them."

  "Jesus Christ!" Lowery said.

  "Another scenario," Santini said, "is that they won't care about her diplomatic status, and may just demand a ransom, and if paid, let her go. We can assume only that they're willing to break the law, not that they are going to act rationally."

  The ambassador asked, "Is this going to be on television tonight, and on the front page of Clarin in the morning?"

  "Very possibly," Darby said. "Unless there is strong pressure from the government-the foreign minister or maybe the President or one of his cronies-to keep it quiet."

  "That would be-pressure from on high-more effective in keeping this out of the press than anything we could do, wouldn't it?"

  "Yes, it would," Darby said, simply.

  "I'll call the foreign minister right now," the ambassador said. "Before I call Washington."

  "I think that's a good idea, sir," Lowery said.

  "Alex, why don't you stop by Jack's house? Tell him that everything that can be done is being done? And that he's in my prayers?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "I'll call him myself just as soon as I get off the phone-I may even go out there-but…"

  "I understand, Mr. Ambassador," Darby said.

  "I don't think it needs to be said, does it, that I want to know of any development right away? No matter what the hour?" [SIX] "Reynolds," the man answering the telephone announced.

  "This is the Southern Cone desk?" Ambassador Silvio asked.

  There was a more formal title, of course, for that section of the State Department charged with diplomatic affairs in the republics of Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina, but "Southern Cone" fit to describe the three nations at the southern tip of South America and was commonly used.