The Hostage

by Griffin, W. E. B.

  He was sitting in the leather-upholstered, high-back desk chair. His arms were tied to the arms with leather belts. He was naked. His throat had been cut—cut through almost to the point of decapitation.

  His hairy, somewhat flabby chest was blood-soaked, and blood had run down from his mouth over his chin.

  There was a bloody kitchen knife on the desk, and a bloody pair of pliers. Jean-Paul was made uncomfortable by the sight, of course, but he was never anywhere close to panic or nausea or anything like that.

  He had spent a good deal of time, as he worked his way up in the United Nations, in places like the Congo, and had grown accustomed to the sight and smell of mutilated bodies.

  He looked again at the body and at the desk and concluded that before they’d cut his throat, they had torn out two fingernails and then—probably later—half a dozen of his teeth. The torso and upper thighs had also been slashed in many places, probably with the knife.

  I knew something like this would probably happen, but not this soon. I thought at the minimum we would have another two weeks or so.

  Did anyone see me come in?

  No.

  I gave the cabdriver the address of a house six up Cobenzlgasse from this one, and made sure that he saw me walking up the walk to it before he drove off.

  Is there anything incriminating in the apartment?

  Probably after what they did to him, there is nothing of interest or value left.

  And it doesn’t matter, anyway. It’s time for me to go.

  The only question seems to be whether they will be waiting for me in Paris.

  It is possible this is only a warning to me.

  But certainly, I can’t operate on that assumption.

  Dr. Jean-Paul Lorimer walked calmly out of the study, reclaimed his carry-on suitcase where he’d left it when coming in, paused thoughtfully a moment, then took the key to the apartment from his pocket and laid it on the table by the door.

  Then he walked out of the apartment and onto Cobenzlgasse, dragging his suitcase behind him. He walked down the hill to the streetcar loop, and when one came, got on it.

  When the streetcar reached the Vienna Opera on Karnter Ring, he got off and then boarded a streetcar that carried him to the Vienna West railroad station on Mariahilferstrasse.

  He bought a ticket for a private single room on train EN 262, charging it to his United Nations Platinum American Express card.

  Then, seeing that he had enough time before the train would leave for Paris’s Gare de l’Est at eight thirty-four, he walked out of the station, found a coffeehouse and ordered a double coffee mit Schlagobers and took a copy of the Wiener Kurier from the rack to read while he drank his coffee.

  [TWO]

  7, Rue Monsieur Paris VII, France 1205 13 July 2005

  Dr. Jean-Paul Lorimer took a last sad look around his apartment. He knew he was going to miss so many of his things—and not only the exquisite antiques he had been able to afford in recent years—but there was simply nothing that could be done about it.

  He also had second thoughts about leaving nearly seven thousand euros in the safe. Seven thousand euros was right at eight thousand U.S. dollars. But leaving just about everything—including money in the safe—would almost certainly confuse, at least for a while, anyone looking for him.

  And it wasn’t as if he would be going to Shangri-La without adequate financial resources. Spread more or less equally between the Banco Central, the Banco CO-FAC, the Banco de Crédito, and the Banco Hipotecario were sixteen million dollars, more money than Jean-Paul could have imagined having ten years before.

  And in Shangri-La, there was both a luxury apartment overlooking a white sand beach of the Atlantic Ocean and, a hundred or so miles farther north, in San José, an isolated two-thousand-hectare estancia on which cattle were being profitably raised.

  All of the property and bank accounts were in the name of Jean-Paul Bertrand, whose Lebanese passport, issued by the Lebanese foreign ministry, carried Jean-Paul Lorimer’s photograph and thumbprint. Getting the passport had cost a fortune, but it was now obvious that it was money well spent.

  Jean-Paul was taking with him only two medium-sized suitcases, plus the take-aboard suitcase he’d had with him in Vienna. Spread between the three was one hundred thousand U.S. dollars in neat little packs of five thousand dollars each. It was more or less concealed in shoes, socks, inner suit jacket pockets, and so on. He had already steeled himself to throwing away the cash if it developed he could not travel to Shangri-La without passing through a luggage inspection.

  He also had five thousand dollars—in five packets of a thousand each—in various pockets of his suit and four passports, all bearing his likeness, but none of them issued by any government.

  Jean-Paul had some trouble with the two suitcases and the carry-aboard until he managed to flag down a taxi, but after that things went smoothly.

  From Charles de Gaulle International, he flew on Royal Air Maroc as Omar del Danti, a Moroccan national, to Mohamed V International in Casablanca. Two hours later, he boarded, as Maurice LeLand, a French national, an Air France flight to Dakar’s Yoff International Airport in Senegal. Still as LeLand, at nine-thirty that night he boarded the Al Italia flight to São Paolo, Brazil. There he boarded a twin-turboprop aircraft belonging to Nordeste Linhas Aéreas, a Brazilian regional airline, and flew to Santa Maria.

  In Santa Maria, after calling his estancia manager, he got on an enormous intercity bus—nicer, he thought, than any Greyhound he’d ever been on. There was a television screen for each seat; a cold buffet; and even some rather nice, if generic, red wine—and rode it for about two hundred miles to Jaguarao, a farming town straddling the Brazil-Uruguay border.

  Ricardo, his estancia manager, was waiting for him there with a Toyota Land Cruiser. They had a glass of a much better red, a local merlot, in a decent if somewhat primitive restaurant, and then drove out of town. Which also meant into Uruguay. If there was some sort of passport control on either side of the border, Dr. Lorimer didn’t see it. Two hours later, the Land Cruiser turned off a well-maintained gravel road and passed under a wrought-iron sign reading SHANGRI-LA.

  “Welcome home, Doctor,” Ricardo said.

  “Thank you, Ricardo,” Jean-Paul said, and then, “I’m going to be here for a while. The fewer people who know that, the better.”

  “I understand, Doctor.”

  “And I think, man-to-man, Ricardo, that you will understand I’ll more than likely be in need of a little company.”

  “Tonight, Doctor? You must be tired from your travel.”

  “Well, let’s see if you can come up with something that will rekindle my energy.”

  “There are one or two maids, young girls,” Ricardo said, “that you may find interesting.”

  “Good,” Dr. Lorimer said.

  Ten minutes later the Land Cruiser pulled up before a rambling one-story white-painted masonry house.

  Half a dozen servants came quickly out of the house to welcome El Patrón home. One of them, a light-skinned girl who appeared to be about sixteen, did indeed look interesting.

  Dr. Lorimer smiled at her as he walked into the house.

  [THREE]

  The United States Embassy Avenida Colombia 4300 Palermo, Buenos Aires, Argentina 1825 20 July 2005

  J. Winslow Masterson, a very tall, well-dressed, very black African American of forty-two, who was almost belligerently American and loathed most things French, stood leaning on the frame of his office window looking at the demonstration outside.

  Masterson’s office was on the second floor of the embassy building, just down the hall from that of the ambassador. Masterson was deputy chief of mission— read number two, or executive officer, or deputy ambassador—and at the moment was the acting minister extraordinary and plenipotentiary of the President of the United States to the Republic of Argentina.

  The ambassador, Juan Manuel Silvio, was “across the river”—in Montevideo, Uruguay—having take
n a more or less working lunch with Michael A. McGrory, the minister extraordinary and plenipotentiary of the President of the United States to the Republic of Uruguay. The two ambassadors or their chiefs of mission got together regularly, every two weeks, either in Buenos Aires or Montevideo.

  Silvio had taken the red-eye, the first flight from Jorge Newbery airport in downtown Buenos Aires, which departed on the twenty-six-minute flight to Montevideo at 7:05 A.M., and he would return on the 3:10 P.M. Busquebus. The high-speed catamaran ferry made the trip in just over three hours. The ambassador said that much time allowed him to deal uninterrupted in the comfortable first-class cabin with at least some of the bureaucratic papers that accumulated on his desk.

  There were, Masterson guessed, maybe three hundred demonstrators today, banging pots and pans, held back by fences and maybe fifty cops of the Mounted Police, half of them actually on horseback.

  The demonstrators waved—at least when they thought the TV cameras were rolling—banners protesting the International Money Fund, the United States’ role therein, American fiscal policy, and America generally. There were at least a half dozen banners displaying the likeness of Ernesto “Che” Guevara.

  The Argentine adulation of Guevara both surprised and annoyed Masterson. He admitted a grudging admiration for Fidel Castro, who had taken a handful of men into the mountains of Cuba for training, then overthrown the Cuban government, and had been giving the finger to the world’s most powerful nation ever since.

  But Guevara was another story. Guevara, an Argentine who was a doctor, had been Castro’s medic. But as far as Masterson knew that was all he had ever done to successfully further the cause of communism. As a revolutionary, he had been a spectacular failure. His attempt to communize Africa had been a disaster. All it had taken to see him flee the African continent with his tail between his legs was a hundred-odd-man covert detachmentof African American Special Forces soldiers. And when he’d moved to Bolivia, an even smaller covert group of Green Berets, this one mostly made up of Cuban-Americans, had been waiting for him, not so much to frustrate his revolutionary ambitions as to make him a laughingstock all over Latin America.

  The Green Berets had almost succeeded. For example, they had almost gleefully reported that Guevara had taken a detachment of his grandly named Revolutionary Army on an overnight training exercise, promptly gotten lost in the boonies, drowned four of his men trying to cross a river, and taken two weeks to get back to his base, barely surviving on a diet of monkeys and other small but edible jungle animals. And when he got back to his base, Guevara found that it was under surveillance by the Bolivian Army. A farmer had reported the Revolutionary Army to the Bolivian government, in the belief they were drug smugglers.

  The President of Bolivia, however, was not amused, nor receptive to the idea that the best way to deal with Dr. Guevara was to publicly humiliate him. He ordered a quick summary court-martial—the bearing of arms with the intent of overthrowing a government by force and violence being punishable by death under international law—followed by a quick execution, and Guevara became a legend instead of a joke.

  “Lost in thought, Jack?” a familiar voice, that of Alexander B. Darby, asked behind him. Darby’s official title was embassy commercial attaché, but among the senior officersit wasn’t exactly a closely guarded secret that he actually was the CIA’s station chief.

  Masterson turned and smiled at the small, plump man with a pencil-line mustache.

  “My usual unkind thoughts about Che Guevara.”

  “They’re still out there?”

  Masterson nodded.

  “It looked like rain. I hoped it would, and they would go away.”

  “No such luck.”

  “You about ready?”

  “At your disposal, sir,” Masterson said, and started for the door.

  Masterson was bumming a ride home with Darby, who lived near him in the suburb of San Isidro. His own embassy car had been in a fender bender—the second this month—and was in the shop.

  “The boss back?” Darby asked, as they got on the elevator that would take them to the basement.

  “He should be shortly; he took the Busquebus,” Masterson replied.

  “Maybe he was hoping it would rain, too,” Darby said.

  Masterson chuckled.

  If the demonstrations outside the embassy did nothing else, they made getting into and out of the embassy grounds a royal pain in the ass. The demonstrators, sure that the TV cameras would follow them, rushed to surround embassy cars. Beyond thumping on the roofs and shaking their fists at those inside the car—they could see only the drivers clearly; the windows in the rear were heavily darkened—they didn’t do much damage. But it took the Mounted Police some time to break their ranks so that the cars could pass, and there was always the risk of running over one of them. Or, more likely, that a demonstrator—who hadn’t been touched—would suddenly start howling for the cameras, loudly complaining the gringo imperialists had run over his foot with malicious intent. That was an almost sure way to get on the evening news and in Clarín, Buenos Aires’s tabloid newspaper.

  The elevator took them to the basement, a dimly lit area against one wall of which was a line of cars. Most of them were the privately owned vehicles of secondary embassy personnel, not senior enough to have an official embassy car and driver, but ranking high enough to qualify for a parking slot in the basement. There was a reserved area on the curb outside the embassy grounds for the overflow.

  Closest to the ramp leading up from the basement were parking spaces for the embassy’s vehicles, the Jeep Wagoneers and such used for taxi service, and for the half dozen nearly identical “embassy cars.” These were new, or nearly new, BMWs. They were either dark blue or black 5- and 7-series models, and they were all armored. They all carried diplomat license plates.

  There were five of these vehicles lined up as Masterson and Darby crossed the basement. The big black 760Li reserved for the ambassador was there, and its spare, and Darby’s car, and the consul general’s, and Ken Lowery’s. Lowery was the embassy’s security officer. The military attaché’s car was gone—he had a tendency to go home early—and Masterson’s was in the shop getting the right front fender replaced.

  Darby’s driver, who had been sitting on a folding chair at the foot of the ramp with the other drivers, got up when he saw them coming and had both rear doors open for them by the time they reached Darby’s car.

  One of the many reasons it wasn’t much of a secret that Alex Darby was the CIA station chief was that he had a personal embassy car. None of the other attachés did.

  All the drivers were employees of the private security service that guarded the embassy. They were all supposed to be retired policemen, which permitted them the right to carry a gun. It wasn’t much of a secret, either, that all of them were really in the employ of Argentina’s intelligence service, called SIDE, which was sort of an Argentine version of the CIA, the Secret Service, and the FBI combined.

  “We’ll be dropping Mr. Masterson at his house,” Darby announced when they were in the car. “Go there first.”

  “Actually, Betsy’s going to be waiting for me—is, in fact, probably already waiting for me—at the Kansas,” Masterson said. “Drop me there, please.”

  The Kansas was a widely popular restaurant on Avenida Libertador in a classy section of Buenos Aires called San Isidro. Getting out of the embassy grounds was not simple. First, the security people checked the identity of the driver, and then the passengers, and then logged their Time Out on the appropriate form. Then, for reasons Masterson didn’t pretend to understand, the car was searched, starting with the trunk and ending with the undercarriage being carefully examined using a large round mirror on a pole.

  Only then was the car permitted to approach the gate. When that happened, three three-foot-in-diameter barriers were lowered into the pavement. By the time that happened, the lookout stationed at the gate by the demonstrators had time to summon the protestors, and
one of the Mounted Police sergeants had time to summon reinforcements, two dozen of whom either ran up on foot or trotted up on horseback, to force the passage of the car through the demonstrators.

  Then the double gates were opened, the car left the embassy grounds, and the demonstrators began to do their thing.

  No real damage was done, but the thumping on the roof of the BMW was unnerving, and so were the hateful faces of some of the demonstrators. Only some. From what Masterson could see, most of the demonstrators just seemed to be having a good time.

  In a minute or so, they were through the demonstrators and, finding a hole in the fast-moving traffic, headed for Avenida Libertador.

  Alex Darby gestured in the general direction of the Residence—the ambassador’s home, a huge stone mansion—which faced on Avenida Libertador about five hundred yards from the embassy.

  Masterson looked and saw a pack of demonstrators running from the embassy to the residence.

  “No wonder he’s taking his time getting back on the Busquebus,” Darby said. “If he’d been at the embassy, he’d have had to run the gauntlet twice, once to get out of the embassy, and again to get in the residence.”

  A hundred yards past the residence, there was no sign whatever of the howling mob at the embassy. There was a large park on their right, with joggers and people walking dogs, and rows of elegant apartment buildings on their left until they came to the railroad bridge. On the far side of the bridge they had the Army’s polo fields to their left, and the racetrack, the Hipódromo, on their right. There was nothing going on at the polo fields, but the horse fanciers were already lining up for the evening’s races.

  Then there were more rows of tall apartment buildings on both sides of the street.

  They passed under an elevated highway, which meant they were passing from the City of Buenos Aires into the Province of Buenos Aires. The City of Buenos Aires, Masterson often thought, was like the District of Columbia, and the province a state, like Maryland or Virginia.