“Yes, we were,” Masterson said. “And thanks more to the charm of the salesman than any wise planning on my part, there were diesel emergency generators in place to kick in as they were supposed to when the electricity went off. When my cousin Philip flew in with emergency rations—that’s his Bonanza in the hangar—he found us with Betsy and the Lorimers watching the aftermath of the disaster on television.”
Wilson shook his head.
“You were very lucky,” he said.
“You’re an admirer of Jefferson Davis, General?” Masterson asked, changing the subject.
“We went to the same school,” Wilson said. “At different times, of course.” Then he added, very seriously, “Yes, I am.”
“That’s the right thing to say in this house,” Masterson said. “From which my ancestors marched forth to do battle for Southern rights.”
“And just as soon as the history lesson is over,” Ambassador Lorimer said, “I’m sure Colonel Castillo would like to have our little chat.”
“Why don’t you take the colonel into the library, Philippe?” Masterson said, smiling tolerantly. “I’ll send Sophie in with coffee and croissants.”
“This way, Colonel, if you please,” Lorimer said.
The library, too, would have been at home in Tara, except that an enormous flat-screen television had been mounted against one of the book-lined walls and half a dozen red leather armchairs had been arranged to face it.
And there was an array of bottles and glasses above a wet bar set in another wall of books.
Ambassador Lorimer headed right for it.
“May I offer you a little morning pick-me-up from Winslow’s ample stock?” he asked.
“No, thank you, sir. I’m flying.”
“One of the few advantages of having a heart condition like mine is that spirits, in moderation of course, are medically indicated,” Lorimer said as he poured cognac into a snifter.
“Churchill did that,” Castillo said. “He began the day with a little cognac.”
“From what I hear, it was a healthy belt. And he was a great man, wasn’t he? Who saved England from the Boche?”
“Yes, sir, he was.”
“In large part, in my judgment, because he put Franklin Roosevelt in his pocket.”
“Yes, sir, I suppose that’s true.”
Lorimer waved Castillo into one of the armchairs and sat in the adjacent one.
A middle-aged maid wearing a crisp white apron and cap came in a moment later with a coffee service and a plate of croissants. Lorimer waited for her to leave before speaking.
“I was trained to be a soldier, Colonel,” he said. “Are you familiar with Norwich University?”
“Yes, sir, I am.”
“It was one of the few places in the old days where a black man had a reasonable chance to get a regular Army commission. So I went there with that intention. Just before graduation, however, I was offered a chance to join the foreign service, and took it primarily, I think, because I thought someone of my stature looked absurd in a uniform.”
“I have a number of friends who are Norwich, sir.”
“I remember a pithy saying I learned as a Rook at Norwich: ‘Never try to bullshit a bullshitter.’ Keeping that and the fact that I spent thirty-six years as a diplomat in mind, why don’t you tell me why Secretary Cohen is trying to put me in her pocket?”
“I’m not sure I know what you mean, Mr. Ambassador.”
“I think you do, Colonel. Let’s start with why she doesn’t want me to go to my late son’s … estancia … in Uruguay.”
“The secretary believes that would be ill-advised, sir,” Castillo said. “She asked me to tell you that.”
He nodded. “She sent the same message to me through others. What I want to know is: why? I’m old, but not brain-dead. I don’t think it has a thing to do with my physical condition, or for that matter do I swallow whole the idea that the secretary, as gracious a lady as I know she is, is deeply concerned for Poor Old Lorimer. Why doesn’t she want me to go down there?”
Castillo didn’t reply immediately as he tried to gather his thoughts.
Lorimer went on:
“I have my own sources of information, Colonel. Let me tell you what I’ve learned. It is the belief of our ambassador there, a man named McGrory, who is not known for his dazzling ambassadorial ability, and that of the Uruguayan government, that my son died as the result of a drug deal gone wrong. I’m having trouble accepting that.”
“I don’t know what to say, Mr. Ambassador,” Castillo said.
“Let me clarify that somewhat,” Lorimer said. “Sadly, I did not have the same relationship with my son that Winslow Masterson enjoyed with his son Jack. I didn’t particularly like Jean-Paul and he didn’t like me. I doubt that Jean-Paul was involved in the illicit drug trade, not because he was my son and thus incapable of something like that, but because it’s out of character for him.”
He paused, then finished: “So, if he wasn’t in the drug trade, Colonel, what was he doing that caused his murder?”
Castillo didn’t reply.
“Please do me the courtesy, Colonel, of telling me ‘I can’t tell you’ rather than ‘I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.’”
“I can’t tell you, Mr. Ambassador.”
“We are now at what is colloquially known as ‘the deal breaker,’” Lorimer said. “You have your choice of telling me, which means I will listen to whatever else you have to say, or not telling me, which means our little chat is over, and Mrs. Lorimer and I will be on the first airplane we can catch to Uruguay. We’ve been imposing on the Mastersons’ hospitality too long as it is.”
“Mr. Ambassador, this information is classified Top Secret Presidential.”
Lorimer didn’t seem surprised.
“To me,” Lorimer said simply, “that strongly suggests there has been a Presidential Finding.”
Castillo didn’t reply.
“I will take your silence to mean that there is a Presidential Finding and you don’t have the authority to confirm that. Your choice, Colonel. Get on that satellite telephone and tell the secretary—or whoever has put you in your present predicament—that unless you are authorized to tell me about the Finding, the Lorimers are off to Estancia Shangri-La.”
Well, what the hell!
If he goes down there—and there’s no way I can stop him—the chances are that he’ll do something—not on purpose—to compromise that operation, and thus the Presidential Finding.
And for some reason—which is probably foolish—I trust him.
He’s a tough old bastard.
“I have that authority, Mr. Ambassador.”
“And you’re not going to tell me?”
“The President was at the air base in Biloxi when we returned from Argentina with Mr. Masterson’s remains and his family. He informed me there that he had made a Finding. A covert and clandestine organization had been formed and charged with finding and rendering harmless those responsible for…”
Tapping the balls of his fingers together, Ambassador Lorimer considered for a good sixty seconds what Castillo had told him before raising his eyes to Castillo.
“So the ever-present silver lining is that Jean-Paul was not a drug dealer,” he said. “Hell of a note when you’re happy to hear your only son was just a thief from other thieves, not a drug dealer.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Ambassador.”
“Why should you be sorry? From what I hear, you’ve been the knight in shining armor on a white horse in the whole sordid affair.”
“That’s not an accurate description, Mr. Ambassador.”
“It’s my judgment to make, Colonel,” Lorimer said. “How much of what you have just told me does my daughter know?”
“Very little of it, sir. She doesn’t have the need to know. I did tell her—and Mr. Masterson—that I was almost certain that the people who had murdered Mr. Masterson—”
“Were ‘rendered harmless�
�?”
“Yes, sir.”
“How can you be ‘almost certain’ of that?”
“You don’t have the need to know that, sir.”
“You wouldn’t have told them that unless you were ‘almost certain,’ which means you weren’t repeating what someone else had told you, but rather that you were personally involved.”
Castillo didn’t reply.
“All of this except for your possible concern that I would go down and somehow compromise the Presidential Finding—which is absurd—doesn’t explain why you—and I mean you, not the secretary—don’t want me to go to Uruguay.”
“May I go off at a tangent for a moment, Mr. Ambassador?”
Lorimer nodded.
“I understand, sir, why you’re anxious to…get out from under Mr. Masterson’s hospitality—”
“Guests, as with fish, you know, begin to smell after three days.”
“My grandfather was known to say that, often in more colorful terms,” Castillo said. “Mr. Ambassador, what would it take to get you to go someplace—Paris, for example; Mr. Lorimer’s apartment is there and available to you—for sixty days before you go to Uruguay?”
“The apartment is no longer available, Colonel. The man from the UN who brought me the check for Jean-Paul’s death benefit—one hundred thousand euros—also brought with him an offer for Jean-Paul’s apartment. Time and half what it was worth. They obviously wanted to make sure Jean-Paul was forgotten as soon as possible; now I know why.”
“Mr. Ambassador, I am prepared to offer you fifty thousand dollars a month for two months to lease Estancia Shangri-La.”
“Either that’s your remarkably clumsy way of offering me a bribe to keep me away from the estancia—which raises again the unanswered question of why you don’t want me down there—or you really want to lease the ranch, and that raises the really interesting question of why. What would you do with it?”
“I understand Phoenix, Arizona, is very nice this time of year, Mr. Ambassador.”
“So is Bali, but I’m getting a little old for bare-breasted maidens in grass skirts. What do you want with the estancia, Colonel?”
“I’m running another operation down there, sir.”
“You going to do it under the nose of this fellow McGrory again?”
Castillo nodded.
“I want to use it as a refueling point for several helicopters I want to get into Argentina.”
“You mean get into Argentina black,” Lorimer replied. He considered that a moment. “Okay. You’re going to fly them off some ship in the middle of the night and under the radar, right? Refuel them in the middle of nowhere in Uruguay, and then on to Argentina?”
Castillo nodded.
“What’s the operation?”
“We’re going to try to get a DEA agent back from the drug dealers who kidnapped him.”
“That sounds like a splendid idea,” Lorimer said. “It also sounds like the DEA agent is not an ordinary DEA agent. We lose a lot of DEA agents in Mexico and all we do is wring our hands. We certainly don’t send Special Forces teams in unmarked helicopters to get them back.”
“This one’s grandfather is a friend of the mayor of Chicago.”
“That would make him special, wouldn’t it? Okay, you can use the estancia, and I will forget that money you offered. If I remembered it, it would make me angry.”
Castillo looked him in the eyes a long moment and said, “Thank you, sir.”
“You’re welcome. And now you can tell me the best way to get from the airport in Montevideo to Shangri-La. Rent a car? Buy one? How’s the roads?”
Oh, shit!
I totally misread him…he’s still determined to go.
“I can’t talk you out of going down there, sir?”
“You didn’t really expect that you could, did you?”
“I really hoped that I could.”
Lorimer held up his hands in a gesture of mock sympathy.
“Look at it this way, Colonel,” he said. “If I’m there—Jean-Paul’s father, come to look after his inheritance—far fewer questions will be asked than if two or three men of military age showed up there by themselves and started hauling barrels of helicopter fuel onto the place.”
Castillo didn’t say anything.
“Don’t look so worried. I didn’t spend all my diplomatic career on the cocktail-party circuit.”
“I’m sure you didn’t, Mr. Ambassador.”
“You ever hear of Stanleyville, in the ex–Belgian Congo?”
“Yes, sir.”
“When the Belgians finally jumped their paratroops on it—out of USAF airplanes—to stop the cannibalism on the town square, we did things differently back then. We paid less attention to the sensitive nationalist feelings of the natives than to Americans in trouble. There I was on the airfield with two sergeants from the Army Security Agency who’d been running a radio station for me in the bush. We were waving American flags with one hand and .45s in the other.”
Castillo shook his head in disbelief.
“I don’t lie, Colonel,” Lorimer said. “At my age, I don’t have to.”
“I wasn’t doubting your word, Mr. Ambassador.”
“I hope not. Until just now I was starting to like you.”
“It was not, sir, what I expected to hear from an ambassador.”
“There are ambassadors and ambassadors, Colonel. For example, my daughter tells me we have a very good one in Buenos Aires.”
“Yes, sir, we do.”
“Are we through here? Can we go deal with her now? She’s going to have a fit when she hears you have failed in your noble mission to save the old man from himself.”
“Sir, about getting to Shangri-La from the airport. I think I can arrange for several Spanish-speaking Americans to meet you and take you there. Maybe they could stay around and help you get organized.”
“These Good Samaritans just happen to be in Montevideo, right?”
Castillo laughed.
“No, sir. They’d actually be shooters from Fort Bragg….”
“That’s a very politically incorrect term, ‘shooters,’” the ambassador said. “I like it.”
“They would have a satellite radio with them. That would be useful. And they would provide you and Mrs. Lorimer with a little security.”
“I would be delighted to have your friends stay with us as long as necessary and be very grateful for their assistance.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Ambassador Lorimer stood up, picked up his now empty cognac snifter, returned to the bottles on the credenza, and poured a half inch of Rémy Martin into it. He raised the glass to Castillo.
“Since you’re on the wagon, Colonel: Mud in your eye.”
“I suspect there will be another time, sir.”
“I hope so.”
Lorimer looked at him intently for a moment, so intently that Castillo asked, “Sir, is there something else?”
“I always look into a man’s eyes when I’m negotiating with him,” Lorimer said. “I did so just now. And while I was doing that, I had the odd feeling I’d recently seen eyes very much like yours before.”
“Had you, sir?”
“Yes. I just remembered where. On that nice boy you brought with you. The general’s grandson. He has eyes just like yours.”
I’ve seen eyes very much like yours, too.
On Aleksandr Pevsner.
“I didn’t notice,” Castillo said.
The ambassador drained the snifter, then waved Castillo ahead of him out of the library.
J. Winslow Masterson III and Randolph Richardson IV were kicking a soccer ball on the lawn for Max. The adults and the younger Masterson children were sitting in white wicker rockers on the porch.
Just as Castillo was about to warn them that Max was likely to take a bite from the ball, Max did. There was a whistling hiss, which caused Max to drop the ball, push it tentatively with his paw, and then take it into his mouth and give it a go
od bite.
“Awesome!” Masterson III cried. “Did you see that?”
“I owe you a soccer ball,” Castillo said.
“Don’t be silly, Charley,” Betsy Masterson said, then turned to her father. “How’d your little chat go?”
“Splendidly,” the ambassador said. “Colonel Castillo and I are agreed there’s absolutely no reason your mother and I can’t go to Uruguay.”
“Dad, that’s absurd,” Betsy Masterson said. “Worse than absurd. Insane.”
“That’s not exactly what I said, Mr. Ambassador,” Charley protested.
“Be that as it may,” Ambassador Lorimer said, “for the next several months, Betsy, your mother and I will be using Jean-Paul’s home in Uruguay in lieu of our own, which is now, as you may have heard, the dikes having been overwhelmed, under twenty feet of water and Mississippi River mud.”
Betsy Masterson looked at him in exasperation, as if gathering her thoughts.
“I am reliably informed,” Lorimer went on reasonably, “that the house is quite comfortable, that there is a staff to take care of your mother and myself more than adequately—if not quite at the level of Winslow and Dianne’s hospitality, for which we will be forever grateful—”
“You know what happened there, Dad!” she interrupted.
“—and your mother and I both speak, as a result of our service in Madrid, quite passable Spanish.”
Betsy Masterson looked at Castillo. “Charley, you didn’t encourage him to go down there, did you?
“No, ma’am. More the opposite.”
“Can’t you stop him?”
“I don’t see how,” Castillo said.
“I’ll call the secretary of State myself!”
“Secretary Cohen has already taken her best shot, sweetheart. She sent Colonel Castillo to dissuade me. He failed.”
“You’re in no condition to fly all the way down there, Dad,” Betsy argued. “You’re in no condition to go through the security hassle at an airport, much less get on an airplane and fly that far.”
“I have survived going through the security hassles at a number of Third World airports,” he said. “The one in Addis Ababa comes to mind as the worst.”
Despite herself, she smiled.
The Shooters Page 30
