Unlike either the Mayerling or Buena Vista country clubs, where a combination of high fences, closely packed trees, and thick shrubbery hid everything inside from anyone on the roadway, the Pilar Golf & Polo Country Club presented an unobstructed view of immaculate fairways and greens as far as the eye could see. A dozen electric golf carts were on narrow, concrete paths that picturesquely wound near the fairways and the greens.
At least a mile from the gatehouse, sitting on a gentle hill, were a dozen houses—maybe more—all of which seemed to Castillo to be larger than Nuestra Pequeña Casa.
There might have been a fence around them, but Castillo didn’t get a good enough look at them before Davidson had to stop at the gatehouse, which itself was a substantial two-story building. Castillo saw that there were two barrier gates in series, each a substantial affair that opened by rolling to the side; the interior gate was two car lengths distant from the exterior one.
From behind thick glass windows in the gatehouse, three uniformed, armed guards examined the BMW and its occupants. Castillo could see on an interior wall a row of video monitors mounted over a rack of shotguns. The monitors gave the guards a clear view of what the surveillance cameras were recording—at the moment, six views of the BMW, including its undercarriage.
At this point, Castillo had a somewhat unnerving and embarrassing thought: He knew Svetlana, Munz, and Lester were inside the Pilar Golf & Polo Country Club, but not exactly where.
Nothing beyond “in another of Pevsner’s safe houses.”
You should have asked how to get in here, stupid!
It didn’t turn out to be a problem.
First, a black KIA sport utility vehicle with darkened windows appeared from the side of the gatehouse in the area between the barriers and stopped its nose against the interior barrier. A large and sturdy man in a business suit got out of the KIA, in the process unintentionally revealing that he carried a large semiautomatic pistol in a shoulder holster.
Next, the red light in a traffic signal mounted on the side of the gatehouse went off and the signal’s green light came on. The exterior barrier then rolled slowly to one side. When there was room, Davidson drove up to the KIA as the barrier now behind him closed.
The man who had gotten out of the KIA walked to the BMW, smiled, and bent down beside it.
When Davidson rolled down his window, Max erupted from the backseat, where he had been sitting beside Edgar Delchamps, put his head between Davidson and the lowered window, then growled deep in his chest and showed the man his teeth.
The man jumped three feet backward—moving so quickly that Castillo thought he was going to lose his balance.
The man quickly regained his composure.
“El Coronel Munz has been expecting you, gentlemen,” he announced. “If you’ll be so kind as to follow me?”
The interior barrier rolled away, and they followed the KIA down a serpentine macadam road that skirted the golf course—as they did, Castillo concluded that the club had two eighteen-hole courses—then past four polo fields, two of which were in use, and then an enormous building with half a dozen tennis courts that suggested it was the Club House.
Finally, they approached the sort of compound of houses he had seen from the road.
There was no road in front of the houses, just a line of six-foot-high fencing, nearly invisible from even a short distance away. A second look showed that inside the fencing there was an even less visible line of wire suspended between insulators two or three feet above the grass.
That’s motion sensing, Castillo decided. The outer fence is designed to keep the golfers, and their golf balls, off that last expanse of grass. The motion-sensing wire inside goes off if something larger than a golf ball gets close to the houses.
Whoever designed this knew what he was doing, and was not constrained by financial considerations.
Proof came as they approached the houses from the rear. He now saw that the houses were lined up in a gentle curve, their front doors facing away from the road and toward yet another guard shack and barrier. Two other KIAs, identical to the one they were following, sat facing out just inside the barrier.
The barrier here was different. It consisted of four five-foot-tall painted steel cylinders about eighteen inches in diameter in the center of the road. They could be raised and lowered hydraulically. They sank into the road as the lead KIA approached.
Inside the compound, the KIA stopped before the third house, and the man got out and nodded toward the house.
The house, of timbered brick, looked as if it belonged in the Scottish Highlands as the ancestral hunting lodge of at least a duke.
Offering his unsolicited observation that “these fucking Krautmobiles weren’t designed for full-size people,” Edgar Delchamps opened the rear door of the BMW and started to haul himself out.
He had one leg out the car’s door when Max saw not only that the door of the house had opened but who had come through it.
He exited the car in a leap, using Delchamps’s crotch as the springing point for both rear legs, which served to push Delchamps back in his seat. Delchamps said unkind things about Max and his mother.
Max bounded to Svetlana, yapping happily and dancing around her. She bent and scratched his ears.
Then she saw Castillo and waved to him.
Max lapped her face and then ran to Castillo, who was by then out of the front seat. Max yapped at him as if saying, “Hey, boss! Guess who I found here?” before returning to Svetlana, where he stood on his rear legs and draped his paws over her shoulders.
A very large man rushed out the front door, looking as if he was in the act of drawing a lethal weapon from a shoulder holster.
“Nyet!” Svetlana ordered in a voice befitting a podpolkovnik of the Sluzhba Vnezhney Razvedki on a Moscow parade ground. The man stopped as if frozen.
Svetlana’s voice softened as she pushed Max off her shoulders, then dropped to wrap her arms around his neck. “It’s okay, Stepan. Max is our dog, isn’t he, my Charley?”
Castillo nodded.
He walked up to her. She kissed him chastely and not very possessively on the cheek.
“You remember Edgar, of course, honey?”
“Certainly,” she said. “He’s the one who took the stitches out of my good purse.”
She looked at Delchamps and then at Castillo. Then she pulled Castillo’s face to hers and kissed him on the mouth—passionately, possessively, and at length.
“Please come in the house, Mr. Delchamps,” she said a moment later. “We’ll have a cocktail, and then I will show you and Mr. Davidson around our house.”
She tucked her hand under Castillo’s arm, leaned her head against his shoulder, and led him into the house.
“What’s this ‘our house’ business?” Castillo asked.
“I love it,” she said. “And so will you when you see it. I’m going to buy it. And this is Mr. Lee-Watson, who’s going to sell it to me.”
Three people were standing in the high-ceilinged foyer: El Coronel Alfredo Munz, Corporal Lester Bradley, USMC, and a very tall, elegantly tailored man in his forties.
“Delighted to make your acquaintance, sir. Cedric Lee-Watson.”
His accent suggested he was the duke who owned this Scottish Highlands castle.
Castillo took the proffered hand and looked at Munz, asking with his eyes, Who the hell is this guy, and what’s he doing in Pevsner’s safe house?
“Mr. Lee-Watson handles real estate for our mutual friend in Bariloche,” Munz explained.