The Hunters

by W. E. B Griffin

  “There’s a rumor that there has even been a Presidential Finding,” the DCI said.

  “One wonders how such rumors get started,” Ellsworth said. “And, consequently, the ambassador has taken a very personal interest in that unfortunate business.”

  “You don’t want to tell me about the Finding?” the DCI asked.

  “If there is a Finding, John, I really don’t think you would want to know the details.”

  The DCI pursed his lips thoughtfully but didn’t respond.

  “And as the ball bounces down from the pinnacle, I now have a personal interest in the Masterson affair,” Ellsworth said.

  “Well, that’s certainly understandable,” the DCI said.

  “I don’t suppose there have been any developments in the last couple of hours?”

  “No. And since I have made it known that I also have a personal interest in this matter, I’m sure I would have heard,” the DCI said.

  “Yes, I’m sure you would have,” Ellsworth said. “That’s one of the reasons I’m here. Should there be any developments—and I’m sure there will be—the ambassador would like to hear of them immediately after you do. I mean immediately, not through the normal channels.”

  “Consider it done, Truman.”

  “If the ambassador is not available, have the information passed to me.”

  The DCI nodded.

  “Does the name Castillo ring a bell, John?”

  “Major C. G. Castillo?”

  Ellsworth nodded.

  “Oh yes indeed,” the DCI said. “The chap who stumbled upon the missing 727. Odd that you should mention his name. That rumor I heard about a Finding said that he was somehow involved in the Masterson business.”

  “Well, if there were a Finding, I wouldn’t be surprised. The ambassador was at the White House last night where Castillo was promoted to lieutenant colonel by the President himself. Not to be repeated, entre nous, the ambassador told me that if the President were the pope he would have beatified Colonel Castillo at the ceremony.”

  “How interesting!” the DCI said. “I wonder why that brings to mind Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North?”

  “Possibly because they are both good-looking, dashing young officers who somehow came to bask in the approval of their commander in chief,” Ellsworth said.

  “That’s probably it.”

  “The ambassador is personally interested in Colonel Castillo,” Ellsworth said. “I have the feeling he likes him and would like to help him in any way he can.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Now, to help him—which would also mean keeping him from getting into the same kind of awkward situation in which North found himself—the more the ambassador knows about where the colonel is and what he’s up to, the better. Even rumors would be helpful.”

  “I understand.”

  “The problem, John, is that both Colonel Castillo and the President might misinterpret the ambassador’s interest. It would be best if neither knew of the ambassador’s—oh, what should I say?—paternal interest in Colonel Castillo and his activities.”

  “Well, I certainly understand it. And I hear things from time to time. If I hear anything, I’ll certainly pass it on to you. And I’ll spread the word, discreetly of course, of my interest.”

  “Not in writing, John. Either up or down.”

  “Of course not. Have you any idea where Colonel Castillo might be?”

  “The last I heard, he was on his way to Paris. And he’s liable to go anywhere from there. Germany. Hungary. The Southern Cone of South America.”

  “He does get around, doesn’t he?”

  “Yes, he does.”

  “Well, as I said, I’ll keep my ear to the rumor mill and keep you posted.”

  “Thank you. I know the ambassador will be grateful.”

  “Happy to be of whatever assistance I can. Is that about it?”

  “There’s one more thing, John. For some reason, the ambassador thinks your senior analyst in the South American Division’s Southern Cone Section may not be quite the right person for the job.”

  “Oh really? Well, I’m sorry to hear that. And you can tell the ambassador I’ll have a personal look at the situation immediately.”

  “Her name is Wilson. Mr. Patricia Davies Wilson,” Ellsworth said.

  “You know, now that I hear that name, I seem to recall that it came up not so long ago in connection with Castillo’s.”

  “Really?”

  “I seem to recall something like that.”

  “I think the ambassador would be pleased to have your assurance that you’re going to put someone quite top-notch in that job and do so in such `a manner that, when she is replaced, Mr. Wilson will have no reason to suspect the ambassador—or even the DCI—was in any way involved with her reassignment.”

  “Of course.”

  “And I think he would be even more pleased if I could tell him you said that that would be taken care of very soon.”

  “How soon is ‘very soon,’ Truman?”

  “Yesterday would be even better than today.”

  The DCI nodded but didn’t say anything.

  [FIVE]

  Restaurante Villa Hipica

  The Jockey Club of San Isidro

  Buenos Aires Province, Argentina

  1340 5 August 2005

  Ambassador Michael A. McGrory was not at all pleased with where Ambassador Juan Manuel Silvio had taken him for lunch.

  McGrory had suggested they go somewhere they could have a quiet, out-of-school conversation. If Silvio had made a similar suggestion to him in Montevideo, he would have taken Silvio either to his residence or to a restaurant where they could have a private room.

  Instead, he had brought them all the way out here—a thirty-minute drive—to a wide-open restaurant crowded with horse fanciers.

  Well, perhaps not wide open to every Tom, Dick, and José, McGrory thought, surveying the clientele. I suspect membership in the Jockey Club is tied in somehow with the restaurant.

  Their table by a window provided a view of the grandstands and there was a steady parade of grooms leading horses—sometimes four or five at a time—right outside the window.

  Certainly, a fine place to have lunch if you’re a tourist—if they let tourists in—but not the sort of place to have a serious conversation about the business of the United States government!

  A tall, well-dressed man with a full mustache approached the table with a smile and a bottle of wine.

  “Your Excellency, I was just now informed you are honoring us with your presence,” he said, in Spanish.

  “I’ve told you, Jorge,” Silvio replied, “that if I want you to call me that, I will wear my ermine robes and carry my scepter.” He shook the man’s hand and then said, “Jorge, may I present Ambassador Michael McGrory, who came here from Uruguay to get a good meal? Mike, this is Señor Jorge Basto, our host.”

  “My little restaurant is then doubly honored,” Basto said. “It is an honor to meet you, Your Excellency.”

  “I’m happy to be here and to make your acquaintance,” McGrory replied with a smile.

  “And look what just came in this morning,” Basto said, holding out the bottle.

  “You’re in luck, Mike,” Silvio said. “This is Tempus Cabernet Sauvignon. Hard to come by.”

  “From a small bodega in Mendoza,” Basto said. “May I open it, Mr. Ambassador?”

  “Oh, please,” Silvio said.

  Goddamn it, McGrory thought, wine! Not that I should be drinking at all. I am—we both are—on duty. But these Latins—and that certainly includes Silvio—don’t consider drinking wine at lunch drinking, even though they know full well that there is as much alcohol in a glass of wine as there is in a bottle of beer or a shot of whiskey.

  I would really like a John Jamison with a little water, but if I ordered one I would be insulting the restaurant guy and Silvio would think I was some kind of alcoholic, drinking whiskey at lunch.

  A waiter appeared
with glasses and a bottle opener. The cork was pulled and the waiter poured a little in one of the glasses and set it before Silvio, who picked it up and set it before McGrory.

  “Tell me what you think, Mike,” he said with a smile.

  McGrory knew the routine, and went through it. He swirled the wine around the glass, stuck his nose in the wide brim and sniffed, then took a sip, which he swirled around his mouth.

  “Very nice indeed,” he decreed.

  McGrory had no idea what he was supposed to be sniffing for when he sniffed or what he was supposed to be tasting when he tasted. So far as he was concerned, there were two kinds of wine, red and white, further divided into sweet and sour, and once he had determined this was a sour red wine he had exhausted his expertise.

  The waiter then filled Silvio’s glass half full and then poured more into McGrory’s glass. Silvio picked up his glass and held it out expectantly until McGrory realized what he was up to and raised his own glass and touched it to Silvio’s.

  “Always a pleasure to see you, Mike,” Silvio said.

  “Thank you,” McGrory replied. “Likewise.”

  Silvio took a large swallow of his wine and smiled happily.

  “The wines here are marvelous,” Silvio said.

  “Yes, they are,” McGrory agreed.

  “Don’t quote me, Mike, but I like them a lot better than I like ours, and not only because ours are outrageously overpriced.”

  “I’m not much of a wine drinker,” McGrory confessed.

  “‘Use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake,’” Silvio quoted, “‘and thine other infirmities.’ That’s from the Bible. Saint Timothy, I think, quoting Christ.”

  “How interesting,” McGrory said.

  The waiter handed them menus.

  McGrory ordered a lomo con papas frit as—you rarely got in trouble ordering a filet mignon and French fries—and Silvio ordered something McGrory had never heard of.

  When the food was served, McGrory saw that Silvio got a filet mignon, too.

  But his came with a wine-and-mushroom sauce that probably tastes as good as it smells, and those little potato balls look tastier—and probably are—than my French fries will be.

  “You said you wanted to have a little chat out of school, Mike,” Silvio said after he had masticated a nice chunk of his steak. “What’s on your mind?”

  “Two things, actually,” McGrory said, speaking so softly that Silvio leaned across the table so that he would be able to hear.

  McGrory took the message about FBI Special Agent Yung and handed it to Silvio, who read it.

  “Isn’t this the chap you sent here when Mr. Masterson was kidnapped?” Silvio asked.

  “One and the same.”

  “You never said anything to me, Mike, about him being on Secretary Cohen’s personal staff.”

  “I didn’t know about that,” McGrory confessed.

  Silvio pursed his lips thoughtfully but didn’t say anything.

  “Something else happened vis-à-vis Special Agent Yung,” McGrory went on. “The same day—the night of the same day—that the bodies were found at what turned out to be Lorimer’s estancia, I received a telephone call from the assistant director of the FBI telling me that it had been necessary to recall Yung to Washington, and that he had, in fact, already left Uruguay.”

  “He say why?”

  “We were on a nonsecure line and he said he didn’t want to get into details. He gave me the impression Yung was required as a witness in a trial of some kind. He said he would call me back on a secure line but never did.”

  Silvio cut another slice of his steak, rubbed it around in the sauce, and then forked it into his mouth. When he had finished chewing and swallowing, he asked, “Did you try to call him?”

  “I was going to do that this morning when that message came and then I found out the deputy foreign minister, Alvarez, had called my chief of mission and asked if he could come by the embassy for a cup of coffee.”

  “Sounds like he wanted to have an unofficial chat,” Silvio said.

  “That’s what I thought. So when he showed up, I told him that my man had the flu and I would give him his coffee.”

  “What did he want?”

  “He had Chief Inspector Ordóñez of the Interior Police with him,” McGrory said. “The man in charge of the investigation of what happened at that estancia. After they beat around the bush for a while, he as much as accused me of not only knowing that there were Green Berets involved in the shooting but of not telling them.”

  “Were there?” Silvio asked.

  “If there were, I have no knowledge of it.”

  “And as the ambassador, you would, right?”

  “That’s the way it’s supposed to be, Silvio. We’re the senior American officers in the country to which we are assigned and no government action is supposed to take place that we don’t know about and have approved of.”

  “That’s my understanding,” Silvio agreed. “So where did he get the idea that Green Berets were involved?”

  “He had two things,” McGrory said. “One was a—I don’t know what you call it—what’s left, what comes out of a gun after you shoot it?”

  “A bullet?” Silvio asked.

  “No, the other part. Brass. About this big.”

  He held his fingers apart to indicate the size of a cartridge case.

  “I think they call that the ‘cartridge case,’” Silvio said.

  “That’s it.”

  “What was special about the cartridge case?”

  “It was a special kind, issued only to U.S. Army snipers. And the reason he knew that was because he called the Uruguayan ambassador in Washington, who called the Pentagon, who obligingly told them. They didn’t go through me. And when a foreign government wants something from the U.S. government, they’re supposed to go through the ambassador.”

  “On the basis of this one cartridge case, they have concluded that our Green Berets were involved? That doesn’t make much sense, does it?”

  “They also found out that a helicopter was involved. People heard one flying around and there were tracks from the skids—those pipes on the bottom?—in a nearby field, where it had apparently been refueled. You don’t have a helicopter, do you?”

  “I have an airplane—the Army attaché does, an Army King Air—out at Campo Mayo, but no helicopter. The King Air is so expensive to fly that most of the time it just sits out there.”

  How come Silvio’s Army attaché gets an airplane, McGrory thought, and mine doesn’t?

  he said, “Well, according to them, whoever left all the bodies had a helicopter. And they think it was a Green Beret helicopter.”

  “Maybe they’re just shooting in the dark,” Silvio said. “They must be getting pretty impatient. Seven people killed and they apparently don’t know why or by whom.”

  “Do you have any idea what that massacre was all about?”

  Silvio shook his head, took a sip of wine, then said, “What I’d like to know is what this Lorimer fellow was doing with a false identity in Uruguay. Do you have any idea?”

  McGrory shook his head. “No, I—oh, I forgot to mention that. Lorimer had a fortune—sixteen million dollars—in Uruguayan banks. It was withdrawn—actually, transferred to some bank in the Cayman Islands—the day after he was killed. By someone using the Riggs National Bank in Washington.”

  “Really? Where did Lorimer get that kind of money?”

  “Most of the time, when large sums of money like that are involved, it’s drug money,” McGrory confided.

  “Do they know who withdrew it?”

  “Transferred it. No, they don’t.”

  “Well, if you’re right, Mike, and I suspect you are, that would explain a good deal, wouldn’t it? Murder is a way of life with the drug cartels. What very easily could have happened at that estancia is that a drug deal went wrong. The more I think about it…”

  “A fortune in drug money, a false identity…” McGrory thought a
loud. “Bertrand, the phony name he was using, was an antiques dealer. God knows, being an established antiques dealer would be an easy way to move a lot of cocaine. Who would look in some really valuable old vase, or something, for drugs?”

  “I suppose that’s true,” Silvio agreed.

  “I’m thinking it’s entirely possible Lorimer had a room full of old vases stuffed with cocaine,” McGrory went on, warming to his new theory. “He had already been paid for it. That would explain all the money. When his customers came to get it, some other drug people—keeping a secret like that is hard—went out there to steal it. And got themselves killed. Or maybe they did steal it themselves. May be there were more than six guys in black overalls. The ones that weren’t killed loaded the drugs on their helicopter and left, leaving their dead behind. They don’t care much about human life, you know. They’re savages. Animals.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  Ambassador McGrory sat thoughtfully for a long moment before going on: “If you were me, Juan, would you take the insult to the department?”

  Silvio paused thoughtfully for a moment before answering.

  “That’s a tough call, Mike,” he said. “If I may speak freely?”

  “Absolutely,” McGrory said.

  “Alvarez’s behavior was inexcusable,” Silvio said. “Both in not going through you to get to the Pentagon and then by coming to your office to as much as accuse you of lying.”

  “Yes, It was.”

  “Incidents like that in the past have been considered more than cause enough to recall an ambassador for consultation, leaving an embassy without an ambassador for an extended period.”

  “Yes, I know. Insult the ambassador of the United States of America at your peril!”

  McGrory heard himself raising his voice and immediately put his wineglass to his lips and discreetly scanned the restaurant to see if anyone had overhead his indiscretion.

  “The question is,” Silvio said, reasonably, “you have to make the decision whether what happened is worth, in the long haul, having you recalled for consultation. Or if there is some other way you can let them know you’re justifiably angry.”

  “They left my office, Juan, let me tell you, knowing that I was pretty damned angry.”