The shooters pa-4

by W. E. B Griffin

  When Castillo looked out the back, he saw that the Peugeot behind them had come to a stop in the middle of the exit road, effectively blocking anyone who might be following.

  They drove three blocks into what looked like a working-class neighborhood-rows of small, wall-sharing, single-family homes built of masonry, broken only by buildings that could have been small factories, or garages, or warehouses-then made another screeching turn, and abruptly slowed before making a left turn off the street and rolling through an opened overhead door into a three-story building.

  A stocky man wearing a pistol shoulder holster was standing just inside the door, and as soon as the bus was inside, he pulled on a chain mechanism that quickly lowered a corrugated steel door.

  The room had been dimly lit. Now fluorescent lights flickered on, filling the area with a bright, harsh light.

  They could see they were in some kind of garage. Vehicles of all descriptions-twenty-five or thirty, perhaps more, including several taxis and a nearly new Mercedes-Benz 220-were parked closely together, noses out, against the walls. There was a ramp at the end of the room leading upward.

  "Is this where we go fishing, Colonel?" Chief Warrant Officer Five Colin Leverette asked.

  The bus driver opened the door.

  Munz stuck his head into the bus.

  "We change vehicles here," he announced.

  "What's going on, Alfredo?" Castillo asked in German.

  "In a moment, please, Karl," Munz replied in German, then said in English, "Would everybody please get off the bus?"

  Max needed no further encouragement. Munz ducked out of his way at the last possible second.

  Max ran around the area-In a strange gait, Castillo noticed, almost as if he's running on his toes. He's hunting, that's what he's doing. I'll be damned if he didn't sense that just about all us warriors of legendary icy courage on the bus were scared shitless by this mysterious little joyride-found nothing that worried him and returned to Munz, where he sat down and offered him his paw.

  "Max says it's safe to get off the bus, fellas," Davidson said.

  "Don't laugh at him," Castillo said. "Remember the last time he went looking for something in a garage?"

  "Who's laughing?" Davidson said agreeably.

  Everybody piled off the bus.

  The driver went to the rear and started unloading the luggage. Two more large men who looked like cops-the ones who had been in the backseat of Munz's BMW, Castillo decided-moved quickly to help him.

  Castillo caught Munz's eye and wordlessly asked who they were and what was going on.

  "I'll explain this all in a minute," Munz said. "We're pressed for time. Lester, could you find Acceso Norte from here?"

  "Yes, sir," Corporal Bradley replied. "I am fairly familiar with the area."

  "Yung?" Munz asked.

  "Yeah. I know my way around B.A."

  "Karl, would it be all right with you if Lester and Yung drove everybody not needed here out to Nuestra Pequena Casa?"

  "Who's 'needed here,' Alfredo?" Castillo asked.

  "Edgar and Jake should be in on this, Charley," Alex Darby said.

  "Okay," Castillo said. "Are we going to need a radio right now?"

  Darby shook his head.

  "Okay, load the cars that Mr. Darby's going to give you," Castillo ordered. "Neidermeyer, if you ride with Two-Gun, we won't have both radios in one car. Otherwise, suit yourselves. Take all the luggage. Edgar and Jake, you'll stay."

  They nodded.

  Two minutes later, the corrugated steel door clanked noisily up. Yung drove a Volkswagen Golf out of the building. The door came clanking quickly down again, to rise two minutes later to permit the exit of a Jeep Grand Cherokee with Bradley driving.

  When the corrugated steel door had crashed noisily down again, one of the cops who had helped with the luggage raised his hand toward the ramp.

  "Please," he said in English.

  They started to follow him up the ramp. Max ran past him without difficulty. The others had a little trouble. The ramp was quite steep, not very wide, and had six-inch-wide anti-wheel-slip bumps running across it.

  At the next level, they found themselves in an area much like the level they had just left. Vehicles of all descriptions were parked tightly together against the walls.

  Max was standing in the middle, looking at a brown uniformed gendarmeria sergeant sitting on a folding chair with an Uzi in his lap. The gendarme sat in front of a steel door in an interior concrete-block wall.

  As the man led them across the open area toward the door, the gendarme, eyeing Max warily, got quickly out of his chair and had the door open by the time the man got to it.

  The man went inside, and there was again the flicker of fluorescent lights coming on.

  "Please," he said once more, as he waved them inside.

  Max trotted in first.

  The room was dominated by an old desk-once grand and elegant-before which sat a simple, sturdy, rather battered oak conference table. There were eight chairs at the table. The wall behind the desk was covered with maps of Argentina in various scales, including an enormous one of Buenos Aires Province. Along both walls were tables holding computers, facsimile machines, telephones, a coffee maker, and some sort of communications radios. All of it looked old.

  "Please," the man said again, this time an invitation for everyone to sit down.

  "That will be all, thank you," Munz said to the man.

  "Si, mi coronel," the man said, and left the room, closing the door behind him.

  Max lay down with his head between his paws and looked at the closed door.

  "Okay, Alfredo," Castillo said. "What's going on, starting with where are we?"

  "We have a law of confiscation in Argentina, Karl," Munz said. "This building was being used as a warehouse for cocaine and marijuana; it was seized. And so were the vehicles you saw. Comandante Liam Duffy of the Gendarmeria Nacional now uses it, unofficially, as an office and base of operations."

  "He's the guy who the DEA guy was on his way to see when he was snatched?" Delchamps asked.

  Munz nodded.

  "So what are we doing here?" Delchamps went on. "And who are all the guys with guns?"

  "Comandante Duffy thought there was a good chance that you would be at some risk at the airport…"

  "How did he know we would be at the airport?" Torine asked.

  "He was with us at the house when you radioed saying you were going to Ezeiza instead of Jorge Newbery," Darby offered.

  "You had this guy in Nuestra Pequena Casa?" Castillo snapped at Alex Darby. "That's supposed to be our safe house!"

  "A lot of things have happened, Charley," Darby replied.

  "Obviously," Castillo said, thickly sarcastic.

  "Easy, Ace," Delchamps said, then looked at Darby. "Like what, Alex? What has happened?"

  "The bottom line is that Chief Inspector Jose Ordonez, of the Interior Police Division of the Uruguayan Policia Nacional, is back in the game…"

  "Jesus Christ!" Castillo exploded. "How the hell-?"

  "Let him finish, Ace," Delchamps said reasonably.

  Castillo glowered at him but said nothing.

  "If I may…," Alfredo Munz began, and when Castillo motioned impatiently for him to go on, Munz picked up the explanation: "The day I came back here, I called Jose Ordonez. For several reasons. One, to thank him for what he had done for us. And to tell him that I was back. And, frankly, the primary reason I called was to ask him how well he knew Duffy. I knew we had to deal with Duffy, and I knew Duffy only casually. And I knew Duffy would know that I had been 'retired' from SIDE, and was afraid that he wouldn't want to have anything to do with me."

  "And?" Castillo said.

  "Jose told me that Duffy had come to Uruguay to see him, and that as a result of the interesting conversation he'd had with him, he had called Bob Howell and asked him how Duffy could get in touch with me. And, more important, with you."

  Robert Howell, the "cultural att
ache" of the U.S. embassy in Montevideo, was in fact the CIA station chief.

  "And what did Howell tell him?" Castillo asked carefully.

  "The truth-or what he thought was the truth. That both you and I were in the United States, but that he would relay the message."

  "And what did Howell do?"

  "He got on the next plane to Buenos Aires and came to see me," Darby said. "So I took him out to Nuestra Pequena Casa to see Alfredo to see if he had any idea what this was all about."

  "Did you?" Castillo asked.

  Munz shook his head.

  "I don't think we were in the house thirty minutes," Darby said, "when Duffy showed up at the front door."

  "The front door, or at the gate?" Castillo asked.

  "The front door," Darby said. "Obviously, he had people on me or Howell-more likely both-and they followed us from the embassy. And no country club security guard is going to tell a comandante of the gendarmeria he can't come in."

  "What did he want?" Castillo asked.

  "To talk to me," Munz said. "But especially to you."

  "What about?"

  "I wanted to show you some photographs, Colonel," a voice behind Castillo said. It sounded not only American, but as if the speaker were a native of Brooklyn.

  Castillo turned to see a tall, muscular, very fair-skinned man with a full head of curly red hair. He was in the process of taking off his suit jacket, under which he carried in a shoulder holster what looked like a full-frame Model 1911A1 Colt.45 semiautomatic pistol.

  Max was now on his feet, his head cocked to one side, looking at the newcomer.

  So you're Liam Duffy, Castillo thought.

  And how long have you been outside listening to this conversation, Senor Duffy?

  Duffy walked around to behind the ornate desk. He hung his jacket on the back of his chair, sat down, and then announced, "I am Comandante Duffy, of the Gendarmeria Nacional."

  He really does sound like he's from Brooklyn.

  Where the hell did that come from?

  "How do you do, Comandante?" Castillo said. "Am I to thank you for the protection we've had since we walked into the terminal at Ezeiza?"

  "Alfredo, who I recently learned is a very dear friend of a very dear friend of mine in Uruguay-Jose Ordonez-which makes him a very dear friend of mine, thinks we might work together, Colonel. With that in mind, it was in the interest of the gendarmeria to guard you and your men against a threat I don't think you knew existed."

  "What kind of a threat?"

  "Possibly being shot, or perhaps being strangled."

  "Now, who would want to do something like that to innocent tourists who came to your beautiful country to fly-fish its rivers of trophy trout?"

  "The same people who did this, Colonel," Duffy said.

  He tossed a large manila envelope-very skillfully, it landed right where Castillo was sitting-across his desk.

  Castillo took from the envelope a thick sheath of color prints. They had been printed on ordinary paper, but the quality told him they had been taken with a high-quality digital camera.

  He took a quick look at the first one, then passed it to Delchamps, and signaled that he was to pass it to Torine and the others when he had seen it.

  It showed a bullet-riddled body of a man in a brown, military-type uniform. He was lying on his back, eyes open, in a dark pool of blood, on what was probably the gravel shoulder of a macadam country road.

  There were, in all, eight photographs of the body. Several fairly close photographs of the head and torso showed the head was distorted. It had been shot several times at close range, including, Castillo judged, once in the mouth. There were more signs of entrance wounds in the body than Castillo could conveniently count, which strongly suggested the use of a submachine gun, with what looked like an entirely unnecessary coup de grace shot in the mouth.

  Next came as many photographs of a second gendarme. He had died of strangulation. A blue metal garrote had been so tightly drawn against his throat that it had cut into the flesh; he had lost a substantial quantity of blood before he had died.

  Then there were glossy photographs of two gendarmes sitting in a chair. Both had their wrists handcuffed and showed signs of having been beaten.

  Castillo passed along the last of the pictures and the envelope to Delchamps, then looked at Duffy. Duffy locked eyes with him, and Castillo sensed it would not be in his best interests to break the eye contact first.

  Castillo didn't look away until Munz touched his arm with the envelope, now again thick with pictures. He took it from Munz, stood up, and walked to Duffy's desk. He put the envelope on the desk, then walked back to his chair, sat down, and looked at Duffy again.

  "My gendarmes were manning road checks when the hijos de puta did this to them," Duffy then said. "The gendarmeria sometimes sets up road checks at random sites and sometimes at sites where we have information about where drugs will be coming down the highway. In both cases here, we had had information that drugs would be coming down two particular highways, which happen to be some seventy kilometers apart."

  Duffy paused a moment, then continued: "Killing and kidnapping gendarmes is very unusual. Criminals almost never kill members of the gendarmeria, and never before have kidnapped any of them."

  "Why is that, Comandante?" Delchamps asked softly.

  "Because they know it is unacceptable," Munz said.

  "What does that mean, 'unacceptable'?" Castillo demanded.

  "It means the gendarmes will take revenge," Munz said. "Killing anyone they suspect may have been involved."

  He let that sink in for a moment, then went on: "The gendarmeria operates all over Argentina, very often in remote areas and with very few men. They usually operate in two-man teams, and sometimes alone. They are not attacked, because the price for doing so is too high. When this happened-"

  "When did this happen?" Castillo interrupted. "Before or after Timmons was snatched?"

  "A week after Timmons was taken," Munz said. "The day-or the day after-Max found Lorimer in the bushes at Nuestra Pequena Casa."

  "The gendarmeria, Colonel," Duffy said, "prides itself on always getting its man. It was not wise to do what these hijos de puta did, and I asked myself why these narcos had.

  "The first conclusion obviously to be drawn was that they decided to send the gendarmeria the same kind of message they have been sending your DEA people in Asuncion-that they will not tolerate interference with their business.

  "Then I asked myself why they had suddenly decided to do this. What came to mind there was that they were about to start significantly increasing the flow of product to the point where so much money would be involved that they would think that protecting the shipments was worth the risk of behaving toward the gendarmeria in a manner heretofore considered unacceptable.

  "If this were true, I reasoned, it was possible-even likely-that my men were targeted by the narcos, rather than it being that they simply had stopped a narco truck and that the narcos had resisted. If the latter were the case, then both men would have been killed-no witnesses-not one of them taken away.

  "That posed a number of questions, including how they had learned-that is, who had told them-where the road checks would be. I had some ideas about that, but nothing that I could prove. The most kind was that the hijos de puta offered the farmhands, the peones, in the area a little gift if they would telephone a number to report where we had set up a road check. Less kind was the possibility that the narcos offered a little gift to the officers of the Policia Federal in the area to do the same thing.

  "But the major question in my mind was what had happened to cause the sudden increase in actions by the hijos de puta that they had to know were not only unacceptable to the gendarmeria but would also call attention to them, which was also not in their best interests.

  "At that point, I remembered hearing some gossip about something interesting that had happened in Uruguay. It sounded incredible, but I decided it was worth looking into. What
I had heard was that a drug deal had gone wrong on an estancia in Tacuarembo Province in central Uruguay. According to this story, six men, all dressed in black, like characters in a children's movie, had been found shot to death.

  "I thought that checking out the story would be a simple matter. Jose Ordonez is more than a professional associate with whom I have worked closely over the years. As I said, we are dear friends. I thought all I would have to do would be to telephone Jose-unofficially, of course; I have Jose's private number and he has mine-and ask him what there was to this incredible story. And also to ask him if he had noticed any sudden increase in the drug shipments into and out of his country.

  "So I called him. When I asked him what had happened in Tacuarembo Province, he didn't answer directly. He said that it had been too long since we had seen one another, and that we should really try to have lunch very soon.

  "Well, the very next morning, I was on the Buquebus to Montevideo," Duffy went on. "Tourist class, as I was paying for it myself. Getting an official authorization to travel to Uruguay is difficult, takes time, and then only results in a voucher for a tourist-class seat. Is it that way in the U.S. Army, Colonel?"

  "Very much so, Comandante. Getting the U.S. Army to pay for travel is like pulling teeth."

  "That, then, raises the question of who is paying for the helicopter in which you have been flying all over down here."

  Castillo looked Duffy square in the eyes and said evenly, "I have no idea what you're talking about, Comandante."

  "If we are going to work together, Colonel, we are going to have to tell each other the truth."

  The last three words of the sentence came out: udder da trute.

  Castillo couldn't restrain a smile.

  "You find that amusing?" Duffy asked.

  "Colonel Munz didn't tell me you were from Brooklyn, Comandante."

  "I don't understand."

  "You have a Brooklyn accent, Comandante."

  Duffy, visibly annoyed, looked at Munz.

  Munz gestured that he didn't understand, and then turned to Castillo and said, "I don't understand either, Karl."

  "Okay," Delchamps said, "Cultural History 101. Pay attention, there will be a pop quiz. Sometime around the time of the potato famine in Ireland, the Catholic Church sent a large number of priests-from Kilkenny, I think, but don't hold me to that-to minister to Irish Catholic immigrants in the New World. Many of them went to Brooklyn, and many to New Orleans. Their flocks picked up their accent. Now that I've heard Comandante Duffy speak, I wouldn't be a bit surprised if some of them were sent down here, too."