The Hostage

by Griffin, W. E. B.

  “I really don’t know how this works in the Secret Service,” Castillo said. “But I don’t think the presidential protection detail people stay in the economy motel ten blocks from where the President is staying to save the government money. I intend to find out. I don’t want to spend my money to buy things I’ve bought to carry out what I’ve been ordered to do. The government is not on my list of favorite charities.”

  Britton nodded.

  “I wanted to keep you two away from the FBI,” Castillo said.

  “They don’t like you much, either,” Britton said. “I picked that up on the airplane.”

  Castillo found an excuse not to get into that when he saw one of the waiters opening a bottle of the cabernet.

  “I’ll do that, thank you,” he said in Spanish. “And we’ll serve ourselves.”

  By the time Castillo had finished relating what had happened, and why he had asked that they be sent to Argentina, and what he expected of them, they had finished what had turned out to be an enormous meal.

  And as they talked, Castillo had the feeling that his moral dilemma had solved itself. Special Agent Schneider was in fact a cop, and a smart one, and this was business, not romantic fantasy. And there was no question in his mind that if he made the first preliminary pass at Schneider, she would turn it down. Gently and kindly, probably, because Schneider was a good guy, but turn it down.

  And it was after two A.M.

  “Let’s knock it off,” he said. “I want to get started early in the morning. You want to eat here—we may think of something we missed—or do you want to meet in the restaurant downstairs at, say, quarter to seven?”

  “If you don’t mind, here,” Special Agent Schneider said. “For personal reasons: I want to look out your windows in the daylight.”

  “Okay, here at quarter to seven,” Britton said. “My ass is dragging.”

  He got up from the table and walked to the door. Special Agent Schneider followed. Both waved a good-night, but neither said anything.

  Three minutes after they had gone, Castillo was in bed. And then—he had no idea how much later—the door chimes bonged.

  Oh, shit! The floor waiter wants to get the goddamn dishes!

  Not quite knowing why he did so, he picked up the Beretta from the bedside table and held it behind his back as he stormed out of the bedroom and across the sitting room to the door and jerked it open.

  Special Agent Schneider was standing in the corridor.

  “I seem to have dropped my handkerchief,” she said.

  He didn’t reply.

  “May I come in?”

  He stepped out of the way.

  “I thought it was the floor waiter,” he said.

  “Were you going to shoot him?” Special Agent Schneider asked.

  He held up both hands—one of them holding the Beretta—helplessly.

  She walked to the table and poured wine into a glass.

  “I’m not sure this is a very good idea,” he said.

  She walked to him and handed him the glass and smiled.

  “There stands the legendary Charley Castillo, in his underwear with a gun in one hand and a glass of wine in the other,” she said, and shook her head, and then went back to the table and poured another glass of wine.

  With her back to him, she said, “I thought of you all the way down here on the airplane. I thought of you at other times, of course, but I thought of you all the goddamned time I was on the airplane.”

  Castillo saw her take a healthy swallow of the cabernet.

  “One of the things I thought about,” she went on, speaking softly, “was how I was going to handle the pass the man whose Secret Service code name is Don Juan was certainly going to make at me.”

  “I wouldn’t dare make a pass at you,” Castillo said, jocularly. “Not only would your brother break both my legs—”

  “Let me finish, please, Charley,” she interrupted firmly.

  “Sorry.”

  “I had to be very careful, so as not to hurt your feelings—which I didn’t want to do—or to piss you off, because you might get your masculine ego in an uproar and do something crappy and screw me up with the Secret Service. From what I’ve seen so far, I like the Secret Service, and when I took the appointment, I burned my bridges with the department in Philadelphia.”

  “Christ, I wouldn’t—”

  “Goddamn you, Charley, let me finish.”

  She turned to glare at him. He nodded, and she turned her back to him again.

  She took another swallow of the cabernet, shook her head, and went on: “So then what happened was that you didn’t make a pass at me, and my initial reaction to that was, ‘Thank God!’ and then I realized that you were being responsible, you were being the upstanding guy who would never make a pass at somebody who worked for him.

  “And my reaction to that was, what the hell is the difference? He’s not going to make a pass at you, so that’s it. Relax.

  “And then when I left here and I saw you sitting at the table, I thought that’s the loneliest guy in the world. And then I got in bed and faced the facts. The truth.”

  “Which is?” he asked softly.

  “That what I really wanted to do was come back,” she said, and turned her head to look at him, and then quickly looked away.

  He didn’t move or say anything.

  “Which, obviously, was a pretty dumb thing,” she said. “Sorry.”

  She turned and walked quickly toward the door.

  He caught her arm and she tried to break loose, but he held on.

  “What?” she asked.

  “I don’t think you’ve been out of my mind for more than thirty consecutive minutes since the last time I saw you in Philadelphia.”

  She turned to face him and looked up into his eyes.

  “Oh, Jesus, Charley!”

  “Oh, Jesus!” Presidential Agent Castillo said to Special Agent Schneider.

  He had just rolled onto his back, breathing heavily, and put his arm over his eyes.

  “Yeah,” Betty said. After a moment, she shifted around on the bed so that she could rest her head on his chest.

  He put his arm around her and ran the balls of his fingers gently up and down her spine.

  “What happens now?” Charley asked. “Your brother comes in and breaks both my legs?”

  “Well, he’d have no trouble finding us,” Betty said. “We left a trail of my clothes from the living room into here.”

  He chuckled.

  “What are you thinking now, Charley? ‘I knew all along she’d be easy’?”

  “Worse than that. I think—ignore that—I know I’m in love with you.”

  “You’re under no obligation to say something like that.”

  “‘Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free,’” Castillo quoted. “I think John Lennon said that.”

  She tweaked his nipple.

  “That’s from the Bible,” she said, chuckling.

  “Well?”

  “Well what?”

  “No response? In other words, are my feelings for you reciprocated? Partially reciprocated? Or reciprocated not at all?”

  She raised her head and looked down at him.

  “My God, couldn’t you tell?” she asked, then: “You want me to say it, don’t you?”

  He nodded.

  “Okay. I love you. I guess I knew that when I walked into Counterterrorism and saw the guy who’d thought I was a hooker in the Warwick bar and my heart jumped.”

  “Oh, boy!”

  [FOUR]

  The Buenos Aires Herald Azopardo 455 Buenos Aires, Argentina 0327 24 July 2005

  At almost exactly this time—although neither of them cared a whit what hour it was, or even what day, as Charley reached down to pull Betty onto him—a small white Fiat van pulled away from the loading dock at the Buenos Aires Herald building in downtown Buenos Aires.

  It drove to the Austral Air Cargo building at Jorge Newbery airfield, where the dri
ver handed over approximately six hundred copies of the Herald, so fresh from the press that the ink had not had time to completely dry.

  The newspapers were tied together in sixteen packages, each with a simple address. Most were in fifty-copy packages, but some of the packages contained far fewer—in three instances, only five.

  The Austral people put all of them into three large blue plastic shipping containers, and then put the containers on a baggage cart. After all other cargo and passenger luggage had been loaded aboard Austral Flight 622, the containers would be loaded aboard—last on, first off.

  Flight 622 would depart Jorge Newbery at 0705 and land in Montevideo twenty-five minutes later. The blue plastic containers would be off-loaded first, and turned over to a representative of the Herald, who would arrange for their further distribution.

  He would load two hundred copies in his car. They were destined for downtown Montevideo (150) and for Carrasco, a suburb through which he would pass on his way downtown.

  The others he took to the airport’s bus terminal, where they were stacked according to their destination. The Route 9 stack would be placed aboard the first morning bus to San Carlos, Maldonado, and Punta del Este, the posh seaside resort on the Atlantic Ocean. The Route 8 stack would see stacks of the newspaper dropped off at Treinta y Tres, Melo, and Jaguarão. The Route 5 bus would drop off newspapers at Canelones, Florida, and then continue across the dam holding back the Lago Artificial de Rincon Del Bonete to Tacuarembó, where it would drop off the last stack. There were just three copies of the Herald in the last stack.

  The manager of the Tacuarembó Bus Terminal—he was paid to do so—would then telephone the manager of a remote estancia to tell him the Herald had arrived. Sometimes it didn’t—things happened—and telephoning the estancia manager to tell him that the newspapers had, or had not, arrived saved the manager an hour-long ride down an unpaved highway.

  All of this took time, of course, and it was almost three in the afternoon before the Herald was delivered to Estancia Shangri-La and another half hour before it was in the hands of El Patron, who was taking an afternoon siesta with Juanita, a sixteen-year-old maid.

  Jean-Paul Lorimer, sitting up in bed, read the front-page banner headline with dismay, and muttered, “¡Merde!”

  The banner headline read: AMERICAN DIPLOMAT MURDERED IN PORT AREA and showed a photograph of the late J. Winslow Masterson.

  Lorimer was of course disturbed and at first frightened. Jack was, after all, his brother-in-law, and this had to be very difficult on poor Betsy.

  But there was no reason, to judge from the Herald’s rather extensive coverage of the matter, for Jean-Paul Lorimer to think it had anything to do with him.

  Jack and his family had been ripe for something like this to happen for years, ever since he had been given that obscenely generous payment for being run over by the beer truck.

  And Argentina certainly was the place for it to have happened. Kidnapping there had replaced schools that taught English as the national cottage industry.

  He would not—could not—allow what had happened to Jack to force him to change his plans. All this really meant was that it would soon be discovered that Jean-Paul Lorimer was missing in Paris—and that might have already happened.

  If he called Betsy to express his condolences, even if he didn’t tell her where he was calling from, that would mean that although he had been missing since the thirteenth of July—in other words, for ten days—he’d been alive on the twenty-third.

  That didn’t even get into the matter of traceable telephone records, which would locate him.

  And his expression of condolences would, after all, be hypocritical.

  I never liked the arrogant sonofabitch, and am not at all sorry that he got knocked off his high horse with two bullets in the brain.

  There was even an upside to this.

  The attention by the press would be to the murder of Jack the Stack Masterson, who despite his Phi Beta Kappa key didn’t have enough brains to get out of the way of a beer truck, and no one would pay much, if any, attention to the disappearance of his brother-in-law in France.

  He dropped the Herald onto the floor beside the bed and turned to Maria del Juanita.

  “Darling, put some clothes on, and tell Señora Sanchez I will have my coffee in the library.”

  VIII

  [ONE]

  El Presidente de la Rua Suite The Four Seasons Hotel Cerrito 1433 Buenos Aires, Argentina 0647 24 July 2005

  A full minute after Special Agent Jack Britton lifted the brass knocker on the door of suite 1500—which was actually a switch triggering the door chimes—Major C. G. Castillo pulled the door open to him.

  Castillo was wearing a plush white ankle-length terry cloth robe adorned with the crest of the Four Seasons hotel. He needed a shave, his hair wasn’t combed, and it wasn’t wet, either.

  Britton thought, I got here even before he got into the shower, then said: “Schneider’s not up yet, either. Or she’s in the shower. She didn’t answer when I knocked. But your driver is. They put him through to me by mistake. I told him I’d tell you he was here.”

  “Come on in, Jack,” Castillo said. “We’re running a little late. They haven’t even taken the dishes away from last night.”

  Castillo walked to the telephone on the coffee table, punched a number, and in Spanish asked the concierge to send up his driver with copies of La Nación, Clarín, and the Herald; to check on his suit with the valet; and to immediately send up two large pots of coffee.

  Britton listened and watched intently, trying to understand what was being said.

  And then his interest really perked up.

  The bedroom door opened and Special Agent Schneider came out, dressed as she had been the night before in blue jeans and a sweater.

  “Good morning, Jack,” she said, matter-of-factly.

  She had her voice under control but not her blush mechanism.

  “If you’re going to order breakfast,” she said, “order a big one for me.”

  She then walked out of the El Presidente de la Rua Suite, calling over her shoulder, “I won’t be long.”

  The door closed, and Britton and Castillo looked at each other.

  “I think, Jack,” Castillo said finally, “that this is one of those times when silence would be golden.”

  Britton nodded, then said, “Sorry. I have to say this. From the way you looked at her just now, I could tell that you’re not fooling around with her, that it’s something more serious. So good for you. I know she’s nuts about you.”

  “How the hell could you know that?”

  “When we were in G-Man School, the subject of our conversations always seemed to wind up with you. And the proof came last night when we were eating. Both of you looked at everything but each other. And then, just now, the two of you looked like Adam and Eve in the garden before Eve started fooling around with the snake. She’s a good lady. You’re lucky.”

  Because he could think of nothing else to say, Castillo asked, “Is that what you call it, ‘G-Man School’?”

  “Yeah. Actually, it wasn’t too bad.” He grinned. “Betty was a laugh when they finally put us on the range. She had kept her mouth shut and her face straight when they were explaining how to squeeze the trigger and telling her not to let the recoil throw her, after a while she’d get used to it, but I could tell she didn’t like being patronized.

  “Anyway, there we are on the pistol range, two lowly candidates and the instructor. I’m standing behind her. So she gets the ‘open fire’ order, and her Glock sounds like an Uzi.

  “‘This was timed fire, Candidate Schneider. One aimed shot at a time.’

  “‘That’s what I did, sir,’ Schneider says, all sweet and feminine. ‘I aimed each time, sir.’

  “‘Well,’ the instructor adds, ‘as you will see, you’ll never hit anything firing that rapidly. Roll back number seven.’

  “So they rolled the target back to us and she’d put a
ll fourteen rounds into the bad guy’s face.

  “The instructor didn’t like being duped but couldn’t let it go. ‘It would seem, Candidate Schneider, that you have had some previous marksmanship experience. If you’re trying to make me look foolish or whatever, it won’t work.’”

  Castillo chuckled.

  The door chimes went off. It was the lady from the valet service with Castillo’s suit.

  “There’s a room-service menu in the drawer of that desk,” Castillo said, and pointed. “When Roger gets up here, find out what he wants, and then order for everybody. I’m going to get dressed.”

  [TWO]

  Special Agent Schneider sat across the breakfast table from Major Castillo, which position precluded Major Castillo from surreptitiously holding her hand—or perhaps touching her knee—beneath the table, but did not, he soon learned, prohibit Special Agent Schneider from rubbing the ball of her foot against his calf.

  They were almost finished eating when the chimes sounded again.

  Roger Markham rushed to the door, and Castillo was wondering what the hell it could be now when he heard a familiar voice: “You’re American, right? Maybe a Marine?”

  “Yes, sir,” Markham replied.

  “Go back in there, throw Major Castillo and whoever’s with him out of bed, and tell him Colonel Jake Torine, USAF, wishes a moment of his valuable time.”

  Castillo, laughing, started to get out of his chair. As he did, he saw from Special Agent Schneider’s face that she failed to see what was amusing.

  Colonel Torine, a tall, somewhat bony man in a sports jacket and slacks, marched into the sitting room and saw the people at the table in the dining alcove.

  “Oops!” he said. “Sorry, Charley. I didn’t know you had people in here.”

  “Good morning, sir,” Castillo said. “I should have contacted you last night.”

  “No. It’s the other way around. I should have reported to you when we got in last night. Those were my orders, from General Allan Naylor himself. But it was late, and raining like hell, and I figured I’d wait until morning. The defense attaché told me where I could find you.”