The Hunters

by W. E. B Griffin

  “Good morning, Susanna,” Castillo said. “I’m in my office and so is an old friend of yours. He’d like to say hello.”

  He extended the handset to Delchamps.

  Delchamps, shaking his head, took it. “Hey, sweetie, how are you?”

  “Oh, Ed, it’s good to hear your voice…”

  Castillo pushed the button that turned off the speakerphone function.

  “Pretty impressive,” Delchamps said, ninety seconds later, after the connection was taken down. “What about the garbling?”

  “We twenty-first-century spooks call that ‘encryption,’” Castillo said. “This system uses a logarithm—ours alone—we think even NSA can’t crack.”

  “Okay,” Delchamps said. “I’ll hang around long enough to see if I can do you any good. If I can’t, I’m off to my vine-covered cottage by the side of the road. Deal?”

  “Agnes, get Mr. Delchamps an American Express card,” Castillo said. “And see that Gossinger Consultants, Inc., provides him with accommodations suitable for someone we really need.”

  “Why do I suspect that Gossinger Consultants, Inc., has some sort of connection with the Lorimer Benevolent and Charitable Trust you told me about?” When there was no immediate reply, Delchamps smiled, then asked, “What happens now?”

  Castillo said, “The President, at the same meeting, called the director of the FBI and ordered him to send over a senior guy first thing this morning skilled in putting jigsaw puzzles like this one together. I think you’d better stick around and meet him, then get yourself settled in.”

  “Inspector Doherty is already here,” Agnes said. “Shall I bring him in?”

  “What was that name again?” Miller asked.

  “Doherty,” Agnes replied. “Inspector John J. Doherty.”

  “Oh, this should be interesting,” Miller said.

  “Meaning what?” Castillo asked.

  “You don’t remember him, Ace?” Miller asked.

  Castillo shook his head.

  Miller went on, “He’s the guy they sent to you about the turned FBI agent—Whatshisname—Howard Kennedy, your Russian mafioso’s pal. When he told you—some what peremptorily, I’ll admit—that the FBI expected you to notify them immediately the moment you heard anything about either Pevsner or Kennedy or they contacted you in any way, you told him not to hold his breath.”

  “Christ, that’s him? I forgotten his name, if I ever knew it.”

  “Well, there’s a lot of Irishmen in the FBI,” Miller said. “Maybe there’s two or more inspectors named John J. Doherty, but I really don’t think so.”

  “Show Inspector Doherty in please, Mr. Forbison,” Castillo said. “And Dick, you can stop calling me Ace.”

  “You want me to get out of the way?” Delchamps asked.

  “No. Stick around, please,” Castillo said.

  Inspector Doherty, unsmiling, came through the door sixty seconds later. He was a nondescript man in his late forties, wearing a single-breasted dark gray suit. He wore frameless glasses and his graying hair was cropped short.

  Castillo thought, I didn’t like this guy the first time I saw him and I don’t like him now.

  “Good morning, Inspector Doherty,” Castillo said. “Thank you for being so prompt, and I’m sorry to have kept you waiting.”

  Doherty nodded but didn’t speak.

  “This is Mr. Forbison,” Castillo said, “and Major Miller and Mr. Delchamps. These are the people you’ll be primarily working with.”

  “Ambassador Montvale wasn’t very clear about what I’m supposed to do,” Doherty said.

  “That’s because you don’t have the proper clearance,” Castillo said. “I’m about to grant you that clearance. The classification is Top Secret Presidential. It deals with a Presidential Finding that charges me with locating and rendering harmless the people who murdered Mr. J. Winslow Masterson, of the State Department, and Sergeant Roger Markham, of the Marine Corps, and who kidnapped Mr. Masterson and wounded a Secret Service agent.”

  “What does ‘rendering harmless’ mean?” Doherty asked.

  “Since there is little chance you will be involved in that, I don’t think that you need to know how I interpret that,” Castillo said. “What you do need to know is that from this moment, you will communicate to no one not cleared for this information—and that, of course, includes anyone in the FBI who is not specifically cleared for it—anything you hear, learn, conclude, or intuit about this operation.”

  “I don’t like this at all, I guess you understand,” Doherty said.

  “You have two options, Mr. Doherty,” Castillo said. “You can go back to the J. Edgar Hoover Building and tell them you’re unwilling to take this assignment. You may not tell anyone there why you don’t want to do it, what I have just told you, identify me or anyone else you have met here, or of course repeat that there is a Presidential Finding.”

  “There’s been talk of a Finding, as you probably know.”

  “There’s a lot of talk in Washington,” Castillo said, evenly.

  “What’s my second option?”

  “You can bring to this operation all the skills Director Schmidt told the President you have. I was there when he made that call. I want you to understand clearly, however, that once you become aware of the details we think you need to help sort everything out, you can’t change your mind. If that happens, I’m going to give you an office where you can sit all day, read The Washington Post, and drink coffee, then send people home with you at night to make sure you don’t see anybody you should not or make any unmonitored telephone calls, etcetera. That will last until we’re finished, however long it takes.”

  Doherty looked at him coldly.

  “You realize, Colonel, that I was an FBI agent when you were a cadet at West Point and I don’t like being threatened like that.”

  “Mr. Delchamps here was a clandestine agent of the CIA when you were a bushy-tailed cadet at the FBI Academy. He’s operating under the same rules. What’s important, Mr. Doherty, is not how old I am but to whom the President has given the authority to execute the Finding. That’s me, and if you can’t live with that feel free to walk out right now.”

  They locked eyes for a moment.

  “What’s it going to be, Inspector?” Castillo asked. “In or out?”

  After a long moment, Doherty said, “In with a caveat.”

  “Which is?”

  “I will do nothing that violates the law.”

  “Well, I guess that means you’re out,” Castillo said. “I’ll do whatever I have to do to carry out my orders and I can’t promise that no laws will be broken.”

  Doherty exhaled audibly.

  “You want to know what I’m thinking, Colonel?”

  “Only if you want to tell me,” Castillo said.

  “That if I turn you down, they’ll send you somebody else, and if he turns you down, somebody else. Until the bureau finally sends you someone who’ll play by your rules.”

  “That sounds like a reasonable scenario,” Castillo agreed.

  “When I joined the bureau, I did so thinking that sooner or later I would have to put my life on the line. I was ‘bushy-tailed’ then, to use your expression, and had in mind bank robbers with tommy guns or Russian spies with poison and knives. It never entered my mind that I would be putting my life—my career—on the line for the bureau doing something like this.”

  He sighed.

  “But if the President thinks this is so important, who am I to argue with that? And, being important to me, who’s better qualified to keep the bureau from being mud-splattered with this operation than I am?”

  He met Castillo’s eyes for a long moment.

  “Okay, I’m in. No caveats. Your rules.”

  “And no mental reservations?” Castillo asked, softly.

  “I said I’m in, Colonel. That means I’m in.”

  “Welcome aboard,” Castillo said.

  There were no smiles between them.

  “
Okay, Agnes, where are we going to set up?” Castillo asked.

  “I figured the conference room,” she said. “It’s about as big as a basketball court, and there’s already phones, etcetera. And, of course, a coffeemaker.”

  “Why don’t you take Mr. Delchamps and Inspector Doherty in there and let them see it? I need a word with Major Miller and then we’ll both have a look.”

  “Well?” Castillo asked the moment the door had closed after Mr. Forbison and the others.

  “I don’t think Inspector Doherty likes you very much,” Miller said.

  “I don’t give a damn whether he does or not. The question is, is he going to get on the phone the first time he has a chance? ‘Hey, guys, you won’t believe what this loose cannon Castillo is up to.’”

  “I think I would trust him as far as you trust Yung.”

  “Going off at a tangent, Yung has now seen the light and is really on board.”

  “Did he see the light before or after these bastards tried to kill him?”

  “Britton asked almost exactly the same question,” Castillo said, chuckling.

  “You know, great minds tread similar paths,” Miller replied. “Well?”

  “I heard about it after they tried to kidnap him,” Castillo said. “But I have the feeling he’d made up his mind before.”

  “Your charismatic leadership?”

  “I think it’s more likely that he thought about what I said about spending the rest of his FBI career investigating parking meter fraud in South Dakota and realized that would happen anyway if he ever did get to go back the FBI. With going back then not an attractive option, working for us didn’t seem so bad. I don’t know. I’m not looking the gift horse in the mouth. Yung is smart and we need him.”

  “Before you sent him down south, you said you trusted him because he was moral,” Miller said.

  Castillo nodded. “And I think Doherty is moral. The difference between them is that Doherty’s a heavy hitter in the bureau.”

  “But he knows (a) he’s here because the President set it up and (b) that if anything leaks to the FBI and we hear about it, we’ll know he’s the leaker because he’s the only FBI guy who’s being clued in.”

  “Except Yung, of course,” Castillo said. “What did you think of Edgar Delchamps?”

  “I think he likes you,” Miller said. “I think the reason he was really pissed—and really pissed he was—was because he thought his friend Castillo had stabbed him in the back.”

  “You think he still thinks that?”

  “I think he’s giving you a second chance,” Miller said.

  Castillo nodded. “I really like him. And a dinosaur like him is just what we need.”

  “I wonder how he and the inspector are going to get along?”

  “Jesus, I didn’t even think about that,” Castillo said. “And there’s one more guy coming. A heavy hitter from NSA. He won’t work for us, but he will get us whatever we want from NSA.”

  “When’s he coming?”

  “He should be here now,” Castillo said. “Let’s go look at what Agnes has set up.”

  The conference room wasn’t nearly as large as a basketball court, as Agnes had described it, but it was enormous. There was an oval table with more than a dozen spaces around it, each furnished with a desk pad, a telephone, a small monitor, and a leather-upholstered armchair. And there was room for more. One narrow end of the room had a roll-down projection screen and flat-screen television monitors were mounted in a grid on the walls. Two wheel-mounted “blackboards”—the writing surfaces were actually blue and they came with yellow felt-tip markers instead of chalk—were against one wall, and there was room for a half dozen more.

  “This place looks as if we’re going to try to land someone on the moon,” Miller quipped.

  Castillo and Agnes chuckled.

  Delchamps and Doherty didn’t even smile.

  “Colonel,” Doherty asked, “are you open for suggestions on how to do this?”

  “Your call, Inspector.”

  “Okay, first the basics. If this room hasn’t been swept sweep it, and sweep it daily.”

  “NSA is supposed to send a man here to get us what we need from NSA,” Castillo replied. “I presume that means technicians. That sound okay?”

  Doherty nodded, then went on, “And seal this room. Never leave it empty, and make sure nobody gets in here who shouldn’t be. If it gets so we can’t walk through the clutter on the floor, we’ll shut down for an hour or so, turn the blackboards around, and have it cleaned.”

  “Not a problem, Inspector,” Agnes Forbison said.

  “And speaking of blackboards,” Doherty said, “two’s not half enough. Get another four—better, six—in here.”

  “When do you want them?” Agnes said.

  “Now.”

  “The first will be here in five minutes,” Agnes said. “It’ll probably take a couple of hours to get another five.”

  “The sooner, the better,” Doherty said.

  “What’s with all the blackboards?” Castillo asked.

  “Inspector Doherty shares with me,” Delchamps said, “the philosophy that if you’re going to use a computer, use the best one.”

  “What about computers, Agnes?” Castillo asked.

  “I can set up pretty quickly whatever you and the inspector tell me you need.”

  “We are referring, Colonel,” Delchamps said, “to the computers between our ears.”

  “Then you’ve lost everybody except you and the inspector,” Castillo said.

  “Computers, Colonel, are only as good as the data they contain,” Doherty said. “You know what GIGO means?”

  Castillo nodded. “Garbage in, garbage out.”

  “Right. So anything we put into our computers, the kind you plug in the wall—and I’ll get with you shortly, Mr. Forbison, about what we’re going to need: nothing fancy—has to be a fact, not a supposition, not a possibility. The possibilities and the suppositions and the theories go on the blackboards. With me so far?”

  “I think I understand,” Castillo said.

  “We’ll probably save time if you watch to see how it’s done,” Doherty said.

  “Let’s try that, then,” Castillo said.

  “Okay. Off the top of your head, Colonel, tell me the one name you think is at the center of your problem.”

  Castillo thought a moment, then said, “Jean-Paul Lorimer, aka Jean-Paul Bertrand…”

  “Just one, just one,” Doherty said. “How do you spell that?”

  Doherty went to one of the blackboards and wrote JEAN-PAUL LORIMER in the center of it.

  “This is the player’s board,” he said. “This guy had an alias?”

  “Bertrand,” Castillo said and spelled it for him.

  On the board Doherty wrote AKA BERTRAND.

  he said, “We know that for sure? The names?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay, when we get a typist and a computer in here we can start a file called ‘Lorimer’ and put those facts in it in a folder called ‘Lorimer.’ When do we get the typist and the computer?”

  “Agnes?”

  “You want to clear Juliet Knowles for this, Charley?”

  “Okay, but her and a typist. You got somebody?”

  Agnes nodded.

  “Go get them, Agnes. Tell them what’s involved.”

  “And start on the other blackboards,” Doherty ordered. He turned to Castillo. “So what about this Lorimer? What do we know for sure?”

  “For sure, that he’s dead,” Castillo said. “We also believe that he was the head bagman for the maggots involved in the Iraq oil-for-food scandal.”

  “Facts first. He’s dead. When did he die? Where? What of?”

  “He died at approximately 2125 hours 31 July at Estancia Shangri-La, Tacuarembó Province, Uruguay, of two 9mm gunshot wounds from a Madsen to the head.”

  “Okay, those are all facts, right?”

  “Facts,” Castillo confirmed.

/>   “Okay,” Doherty replied, matter-of-factly, showing no reaction at all to the manner of Lorimer’s death, “that gives us the first facts in two new folders. One folder is the ‘Time Line,’ the other ‘Events.’ Spell all that for me, Colonel, please.”

  Ninety seconds later, after writing everything on the blackboard, Doherty said, “Okay. Who shot him and why?”

  “We have only theories about why he was shot,” Castillo said.

  “Then get to them later. Who shot him?”

  “There were six guys in their assault party…”

  “Whose assault party?”

  “We don’t know. We have identified one of them positively as Major Alejandro Vincenzo of the Cuban Dirección General de Inteligencia.”

  “Now, that’s interesting,” Doherty said. “Who’s your source for those facts. How reliable is he?”

  “I’m the source,” Castillo said. “I was there.”

  “Why?”

  “We were going to repatriate Lorimer.”

  “To where?”

  “Here. He was an American who worked for the UN in Paris.”

  “How were you going to do that? And why?”

  “We were going to snatch him, chopper him to Buenos Aires, load him on a Lear, and fly him here. To find out what we could from him about who might have murdered J. Winslow Masterson, who was his brother-in-law.”

  “Who’s we? Who was there with you?”

  Castillo hesitated for a moment, then shrugged and started to tell him. He stopped when a moment later Juliet Knowles and a pale-faced young woman who looked British came into the room, pushing a blackboard mounted on a wheeled frame. Mr. Forbison, carrying a laptop computer, was on their heels.

  “Colonel Gregory J. Kilgore of NSA is here, chief,” Agnes said as she put the computer on the conference table. “What do you want me to tell him?”

  “I better see him,” Castillo said. “This is going to take a little while to get organized anyhow.”

  Colonel Kilgore was a tall, slender Signal Corps officer in a crisp uniform.

  “Colonel Castillo?” he asked.

  “I’m a brand-new lieutenant colonel and I don’t wear my uniform around here, sir,” Castillo said.