Black Ops

by W. E. B Griffin

  “What this is, old boy,” Lee-Watson said, laughing, “is what I think you Americans call a model house. Designed, don’t you know, to show potential customers how nice-looking these very expensive houses can be when furnished.”

  “No wonder the toilet wouldn’t flush,” Castillo said.

  Lee-Watson looked horrified.

  “Gotcha!” Castillo said.

  Lee-Watson sighed. “Quite.”

  Liam Duffy walked confidently into the study a minute later. He was in civilian clothing. His unbuttoned double-breasted suit jacket revealed a large semiautomatic pistol carried in a high-rise cross-draw holster.

  He looked quickly around the room until his eyes fell on Berezovsky.

  “Well, I see that everybody’s here,” he said, mockingly jovial. He looked at Tom Barlow. “Including Colonel Dmitri Berezovsky.”

  Castillo said: “This is Señor Barlow, Liam. Señor Thomas Barlow, may I introduce Comandante Liam Duffy?”

  “Mucho gusto, Señor Barlow,” Duffy said. “But I have to tell you that you look just like the man in the photograph on an Interpol warrant that just crossed my desk—for one Colonel Dmitri Berezovsky.”

  “You’re mistaken, Comandante,” Lee-Watson said.

  “Like hell I am!” Duffy snapped, then looked at Lee-Watson.

  “Do you have the pleasure of Señor Cedric Lee-Watson’s acquaintance, Liam?” Munz asked.

  The question got to Duffy.

  “I know who you are, señor,” he said. “I must say I’m surprised to see you in this company.”

  “How are you, Comandante?” Lee-Watson said.

  “Liam, listen to me carefully,” Munz said. “Are you going to take his word that this is Señor Barlow, or will it be necessary for Señor Lee-Watson to call the foreign minister and have him tell you that you’re wrong?”

  Duffy didn’t immediately reply. After a moment, he said, “Alfredo, we seem to have a problem here.”

  “One that can be worked around, I’m sure,” Munz said.

  “One way to do that, Alfredo, is for you to give me the name of the bastard who tried to kill my wife and children. If I had that, I would just leave and forget I had even seen . . . Señor Barlow.”

  “Unfortunately, it’s not quite that simple.”

  “I will have that name, Alfredo. That’s not negotiable.”

  “Liam, I know a good deal about you. You’re not only a good policeman but an honest one, and we both know that’s not always the case in Argentina. I sincerely admire you.”

  Duffy looked at him a long moment. “But?”

  “But there are forces in play here that you don’t understand.”

  “Such as?”

  “I had two reactions when I heard of the attack on you and your family,” Munz explained. “The first was personal—that it was a despicable act, beneath contempt.”

  “And the second?” Duffy asked softly.

  “That your quite natural reaction to it was going to cause Carlos and me trouble.”

  “I don’t need any help from you or Carlos to kill the bastards—”

  “We know that, Liam,” Castillo interrupted. “But why don’t you let us tell you why we don’t want you to go out and eliminate the bastards right now?”

  Duffy looked at him angrily.

  “Pay close attention to me, Liam,” Castillo said, his tone of voice now suddenly the opposite of mockingly amused. “We can do this nice, between friends, or we can do it the other way.”

  “You’re not actually threatening me, Carlos?”

  “That was a statement of fact, not a threat,” Castillo said. “You ready to listen?”

  They locked eyes for twenty seconds, then Duffy nodded.

  “The same day that you and your family were attacked, Liam,” Castillo then said, “a German journalist was assassinated in Germany, an Austrian couple was murdered—garroted—in Vienna, and an attempt was made to murder an American policeman and his wife in Philadelphia.”

  Duffy considered that for a moment, then asked softly, “There was a connection?”

  “And General Sirinov also ordered the elimination,” Berezovsky added, “when they were to attend the journalist’s funeral several days later, of two other journalists, and, if possible, of Colonel Castillo.”

  “How could you know this?” Duffy said, and without waiting for an answer went on: “General who? They tried to kill you, too, Carlos?”

  Castillo nodded.

  Berezovsky went on: “Lieutenant General Yakov Sirinov runs Directorate S of the Sluzhba Vnezhney Razvedki, SVR. He ordered the appropriate SVR rezidents—those in Berlin, Vienna, New York, and Buenos Aires—to carry out the eliminations.”

  “How is it that you know this?” Duffy demanded.

  “Because, Comandante, I was at the time the Berlin rezident. Something that I doubt one might find noted on anything from Interpol.”

  Duffy took a moment to consider that.

  “You’re telling me this man,” he then said, “this General Sirinov . . . is that right?”

  “Lieutenant General Yakov Sirinov,” he furnished.

  “. . . ordered the murder of my wife and children?”

  “Of you, certainly,” Berezovsky said. “I don’t think your family was on the order. But, on the other hand, I don’t think his order said, ‘Make sure this man’s family is not hurt while you are eliminating the comandante.’ ” He paused while that sank in, then went on: “On the other hand, considering what we believe to be his second purpose, he very well may have ordered the elimination of your family.”

  “What do you mean, ‘second purpose’?” Duffy asked.

  Castillo answered: “The primary connection between all these assassinations, Liam, both successful and failed, with the possible exception of yours, is that everybody either knew or soon would uncover more details about an Islamic terrorist operation than the SVR wanted them to know.”

  “What kind of a terrorist operation?” Duffy asked.

  Castillo ignored the question, and instead replied: “The assassination of the German journalist—his name was Friedler—was because he was getting too close to the Germans who were involved in the oil-for-food cesspool.”

  “Did you ever hear, Comandante,” Berezovsky said, “that ‘it is impossible to cheat an honest man’?”

  “What?” Duffy asked.

  “The corollary of that is that you can cheat—or otherwise steal from—a dishonest man.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Duffy said, as much indignantly as in confusion.

  “When the Iraq oil-for-food program was in operation,” Berezovsky went on, “there were many people who grew rich from it. One of the ways to turn a nice profit was to raise the price of the food and medicine and medical supplies being sold to Iraq. Hands were washed . . .”

  “Greased, Tom,” Castillo corrected him.

  “. . . greased,” Berezovsky went on, his face and tone making it clear he was unaccustomed to being corrected and certainly not grateful for the clarification now, “and the appropriate authorities found nothing wrong with, for example, a microscope of the type used in elementary schools to examine the wings of a fly and available in a store for, say, fifty dollars being shipped to Iraq as the latest item in medical microscopy and valued at a thousand times the fifty dollars it had actually cost.

  “The man—the example here is a member of what we’re calling the Marburg Group—took the fifty-thousand-dollar check, cashed it, made a small gift—say, five thousand dollars—to the invoice examiner, and pocketed the difference, not mentioning it to the tax people, of course, and went away patting himself on the back for being a very clever businessman.

  “It wasn’t all medical equipment, of course. A great deal of food was in fact shipped to Iraq and fed to the hungry. Possibly as much as ten percent of that was purchased at shamelessly inflated prices. One hundred cases of canned chicken became a thousand cases by the ‘mistaken’ adding of a zero to
the invoice. The invoice examiner, of course, missed the mistake. You getting the picture, Comandante?”

  Duffy nodded.

  Castillo said: “All of this stopped, Liam, when we deposed Saddam Hussein. What these thieves then found to be necessary was to clean things up to make sure none of the very important people who profited—the name of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan’s son has been mentioned—would be caught. One man who we know not only profited—to the extent of sixteen million dollars—but also knew who had been paid off and for what was a UN official. His name was Dr. Jean-Paul Lorimer and he had then been living in Paris. But Lorimer saw what was coming and fled to Uruguay, where he had bought an estancia, changed his name, and set himself up in business as an antiquities dealer.

  “Lorimer’s sister was married to the number-two man at the American embassy in Buenos Aires, J. Winslow Masterson. When what we have come to call ‘the cleaners’ couldn’t find Lorimer, they decided his sister probably knew where he was. So they kidnapped her from the parking lot of the Kansas Restaurant in San Isidro. That’s when I became involved, Liam.”

  “How? Why?”

  Well, if nothing else, I have his attention.

  Let’s see how he reacts to this:

  “I work for the President of the United States, Liam, dealing with matters like these. Surely, you must have suspected?”

  “When you had those helicopters flown off your aircraft carrier . . .”

  “The USS Ronald Reagan,” Castillo furnished.

  “. . . I suspected you were more than a simple lieutenant colonel.”

  “Well, until now, Liam, I was not in a position to explain more.”

  “I understand, Carlos,” Duffy said.

  “Just about as soon as I got down here,” Castillo went on, “ ‘the cleaners’ tricked Jack Masterson into going to the riverside in downtown Buenos Aires, where they killed him in cold blood before his wife to make the point that unless she told them where her brother was they were perfectly capable of killing her children, too.

  “The problem was that Mrs. Masterson had no idea where her brother was. Fortunately, I had a pretty good suspicion. My people and I got to the estancia in Uruguay—”

  “How did you find him, Carlos?”

  Castillo looked at Duffy without speaking.

  The cold truth is, Liam, it was dumb luck.

  God takes care of fools and drunks—and I qualify on both counts.

  But I can’t tell you that, because we are trying to dazzle you into believing I am a combination of 007 and Bruce Willis with a shave.

  “If I could tell you, Liam, I would,” he said finally. “You understand?”

  Duffy held up both hands.

  “Carlos!” he said emotionally. “I understand your position. Forgive me for asking.”

  Castillo went on: “We got to Lorimer’s estancia about ten minutes before ‘the cleaners’ did. There were six of them, probably ex-Stasi—East German Secret Police—commanded by Major Alejandro Vincenzo of the Cuban Dirección General de Inteligencia.”

  “I know that name,” Duffy said, and then really remembered, adding excitedly: “He was Fidel Castro’s chief of security when Castro was here. You remember, Alfredo?”

  Munz nodded.

  “We of course were prepared for them,” Castillo continued, “and it was unfortunately necessary to terminate Major Vincenzo and his people. In the fire-fight, Dr. Lorimer lost his life.”

  What actually happened, Liam, is that we didn’t have a clue that anyone else was around, much less pros working for the fucking Russians.

  The first we knew anything was when the bastards put their first round into Lorimer’s head. Their second round would have gone into my head if not for Lester taking the bastard out with a head shot.

  And because of my incompetence and stupidity, Seymour Krantz is now pushing up daisies in Arlington National Cemetery.

  We didn’t have a clue as to who the guys who had damned near killed us were. Or even, then, why they had whacked Lorimer.

  But that’s not the picture of Charley Castillo that Munz said we have to paint for you.

  And you seem to be swallowing everything whole.

  So let’s see how this goes down:

  “The trail has led us many places since then, Liam,” Castillo said. “And frankly, it took us a long time to put it all together. We couldn’t have done that without Colonel Ber—Mr. Barlow and his sister. They confirmed what we had only suspected.”

  “What?”

  “That there’s a monstrous plan to bring down—if not outright kill, then to terrorize—millions of Americans by poisoning the water supplies of major U.S. cities.”

  Now, why did that sound phony?

  It’s the only thing I’ve told him that’s the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

  Because it’s so monstrous—and that’s the only word that fits—that the mind simply does not accept it.

  Cannot accept it any more than we can accept a bearded character in a bathrobe telling us he wants to kill every last infidel—Christian, Jew, Buddhist, whatever—and is perfectly willing to blow himself up if that’s what it takes to do it.

  “In a remote area of the Democratic Republic of the Congo . . .” Berezovsky began, then stopped when he saw by Duffy’s expression that he had little or no knowledge of what that was.

  “They keeping changing the name,” Berezovsky explained. “It was once the Belgian Congo, and then Zaire—”

  “I understand,” Duffy interrupted.

  Berezovsky nodded. “Between Stanleyville—now called Kisangani—and the borders of Sudan and Uganda, there is a chemical laboratory—a very good one—dedicated to developing water-poisoning materials that will either get through any known filtering systems or overwhelm them, then remain chemically active for a very long time and, to the extent possible, resist any chemical attempt to neutralize them. Once this has been accomplished, the factory will produce these materials in whatever quantities are required to attack the water systems of all major American cities.”

  Duffy considered that, then said: “Colonel, forgive me, but that”—the door opened and Svetlana walked in—“is incredible.”

  As she walked toward Castillo, all eyes on her, he thought: I should have known that she was not going to be a good little girl and stay in the bar.

  “Don’t let me interrupt,” she said, sitting on the arm of Castillo’s chair. “What’s incredible?”

  Duffy was visibly surprised but quickly recovered.

  “You must be Lieutenant Colonel Alekseeva,” he said, then asked in heavy macho-laden sarcasm, “Are there many female officers of your rank in the Russian secret police?”

  “My name is Susan Barlow, Comandante. I’m Tom’s sister. I really don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Screw it, Castillo thought. I can play, too.

  “Now I’m curious, Liam,” Castillo said. “How many senior female officers are there in the gendarmería? I didn’t know you had any.”

  “Carlos,” Duffy said. “You’re not going to deny that this woman is the Russian defector?”

  “Carlos?” Svetlana asked. “Why did you call Colonel Castillo ‘Carlos,’ Comandante?”

  He looked at her incredulously, then sarcastically snapped: “Because that’s his name, Colonel.”

  “I didn’t know that,” she said in what was almost a purr. “Carlos is much nicer than Charley. Hello, there, Carlos!”

  Castillo could not resist smiling at Svet. This visibly confused Duffy and visibly annoyed Munz.

  “Please go on, Alfredo,” Svetlana said. “I didn’t mean to interrupt. You were saying something was incredible. No. The comandante was saying that.”

  Yes, you did mean to interrupt, baby.

  You decided to confuse Duffy.

  Knock him off balance, knock some of that self-righteous confidence out of him, make the point that he’s not as important as he would like to think he is.

&nb
sp; “If everyone is through being clever,” Munz said, quietly furious, “may I get on with this?”

  “Susan,” Castillo said, “Comandante Duffy finds incredible the notion of a chemical laboratory in the Congo and the whole idea of poisoning the water supplies of major American cities.”

  “Yes, I do,” Duffy said firmly.

  Svetlana smiled. “So did I, Comandante, when I first heard about it. You do have to expand your mind even to begin accepting it.”

  “ ‘Expand your mind’?” Duffy parroted.

  “Consider this, Comandante,” Svetlana said. “The day before Hiroshima, how many people could have accepted that the Americans had developed an incredible bomb with the explosive power of thousands of tons of dynamite? Or, on the tenth of September, how incredible would it have been to hear that the next day two one-hundred-story buildings would be taken down by religious zealots flying passenger airliners into them?”

  Duffy thought about that a moment. “I take your point, Colonel. Which is not to say that I suddenly believe this Congo thing.”

  Castillo met Munz’s eyes, then Berezovsky’s.

  They heard it, too.

  Duffy called her “Colonel”—and without a hint of sarcasm or condescension.

  What comes next is the truth. . . .

  “Then,” Svetlana went on, “you have to ask yourself why we would make up something such as this.”

  Duffy began to argue: “If there was anything to this at all, certainly the CIA must have some idea—”

  “As of a few hours ago, Liam,” Castillo interrupted, “the CIA sees no threat in the Congo operation. Specifically, the CIA believes that what’s there is nothing more than a fish farm.”

  “How do we know they’re wrong?” Duffy asked reasonably.

  Operative words, “How do we know?”

  We’ve got him.

  Except, of course, when he asks, “What has this to do with Argentina? It’s none of Argentina’s business.”

  “We know, Comandante,” Berezovsky offered, “because of the Marburg Group. Those businessmen—ones who can be cheated and manipulated because of their dishonesty—were my responsibility when I was the Berlin rezident.”