"Always a pleasure to see you, Mike," Silvio said.
"Thank you," McGrory replied. "Likewise."
Silvio took a large swallow of his wine and smiled happily.
"The wines here are marvelous," Silvio said.
"Yes, they are," McGrory agreed.
"Don't quote me, Mike, but I like them a lot better than I like ours, and not only because ours are outrageously overpriced."
"I'm not much of a wine drinker," McGrory confessed.
"'Use a little wine for thy stomach's sake,'" Silvio quoted, "'and thine other infirmities.' That's from the Bible. Saint Timothy, I think, quoting Christ."
"How interesting," McGrory said.
The waiter handed them menus.
McGrory ordered a lomo con papas frit as-you rarely got in trouble ordering a filet mignon and French fries-and Silvio ordered something McGrory had never heard of.
When the food was served, McGrory saw that Silvio got a filet mignon, too.
But his came with a wine-and-mushroom sauce that probably tastes as good as it smells, and those little potato balls look tastier-and probably are-than my French fries will be.
"You said you wanted to have a little chat out of school, Mike," Silvio said after he had masticated a nice chunk of his steak. "What's on your mind?"
"Two things, actually," McGrory said, speaking so softly that Silvio leaned across the table so that he would be able to hear.
McGrory took the message about FBI Special Agent Yung and handed it to Silvio, who read it.
"Isn't this the chap you sent here when Mr. Masterson was kidnapped?" Silvio asked.
"One and the same."
"You never said anything to me, Mike, about him being on Secretary Cohen's personal staff."
"I didn't know about that," McGrory confessed.
Silvio pursed his lips thoughtfully but didn't say anything.
"Something else happened vis-a-vis Special Agent Yung," McGrory went on. "The same day-the night of the same day-that the bodies were found at what turned out to be Lorimer's estancia, I received a telephone call from the assistant director of the FBI telling me that it had been necessary to recall Yung to Washington, and that he had, in fact, already left Uruguay."
"He say why?"
"We were on a nonsecure line and he said he didn't want to get into details. He gave me the impression Yung was required as a witness in a trial of some kind. He said he would call me back on a secure line but never did."
Silvio cut another slice of his steak, rubbed it around in the sauce, and then forked it into his mouth. When he had finished chewing and swallowing, he asked, "Did you try to call him?"
"I was going to do that this morning when that message came and then I found out the deputy foreign minister, Alvarez, had called my chief of mission and asked if he could come by the embassy for a cup of coffee."
"Sounds like he wanted to have an unofficial chat," Silvio said.
"That's what I thought. So when he showed up, I told him that my man had the flu and I would give him his coffee."
"What did he want?"
"He had Chief Inspector Ordonez of the Interior Police with him," McGrory said. "The man in charge of the investigation of what happened at that estancia. After they beat around the bush for a while, he as much as accused me of not only knowing that there were Green Berets involved in the shooting but of not telling them."
"Were there?" Silvio asked.
"If there were, I have no knowledge of it."
"And as the ambassador, you would, right?"
"That's the way it's supposed to be, Silvio. We're the senior American officers in the country to which we are assigned and no government action is supposed to take place that we don't know about and have approved of."
"That's my understanding," Silvio agreed. "So where did he get the idea that Green Berets were involved?"
"He had two things," McGrory said. "One was a-I don't know what you call it-what's left, what comes out of a gun after you shoot it?"
"A bullet?" Silvio asked.
"No, the other part. Brass. About this big."
He held his fingers apart to indicate the size of a cartridge case.
"I think they call that the 'cartridge case,'" Silvio said.
"That's it."
"What was special about the cartridge case?"
"It was a special kind, issued only to U.S. Army snipers. And the reason he knew that was because he called the Uruguayan ambassador in Washington, who called the Pentagon, who obligingly told them. They didn't go through me. And when a foreign government wants something from the U.S. government, they're supposed to go through the ambassador."
"On the basis of this one cartridge case, they have concluded that our Green Berets were involved? That doesn't make much sense, does it?"
"They also found out that a helicopter was involved. People heard one flying around and there were tracks from the skids-those pipes on the bottom?-in a nearby field, where it had apparently been refueled. You don't have a helicopter, do you?"
"I have an airplane-the Army attache does, an Army King Air-out at Campo Mayo, but no helicopter. The King Air is so expensive to fly that most of the time it just sits out there."
How come Silvio's Army attache gets an airplane, McGrory thought, and mine doesn't? he said, "Well, according to them, whoever left all the bodies had a helicopter. And they think it was a Green Beret helicopter."
"Maybe they're just shooting in the dark," Silvio said. "They must be getting pretty impatient. Seven people killed and they apparently don't know why or by whom."
"Do you have any idea what that massacre was all about?"
Silvio shook his head, took a sip of wine, then said, "What I'd like to know is what this Lorimer fellow was doing with a false identity in Uruguay. Do you have any idea?"
McGrory shook his head. "No, I-oh, I forgot to mention that. Lorimer had a fortune-sixteen million dollars-in Uruguayan banks. It was withdrawn-actually, transferred to some bank in the Cayman Islands-the day after he was killed. By someone using the Riggs National Bank in Washington."
"Really? Where did Lorimer get that kind of money?"
"Most of the time, when large sums of money like that are involved, it's drug money," McGrory confided.
"Do they know who withdrew it?"
"Transferred it. No, they don't."
"Well, if you're right, Mike, and I suspect you are, that would explain a good deal, wouldn't it? Murder is a way of life with the drug cartels. What very easily could have happened at that estancia is that a drug deal went wrong. The more I think about it…"
"A fortune in drug money, a false identity…" McGrory thought aloud. "Bertrand, the phony name he was using, was an antiques dealer. God knows, being an established antiques dealer would be an easy way to move a lot of cocaine. Who would look in some really valuable old vase, or something, for drugs?"
"I suppose that's true," Silvio agreed.
"I'm thinking it's entirely possible Lorimer had a room full of old vases stuffed with cocaine," McGrory went on, warming to his new theory. "He had already been paid for it. That would explain all the money. When his customers came to get it, some other drug people-keeping a secret like that is hard-went out there to steal it. And got themselves killed. Or maybe they did steal it themselves. May be there were more than six guys in black overalls. The ones that weren't killed loaded the drugs on their helicopter and left, leaving their dead behind. They don't care much about human life, you know. They're savages. Animals."
"So I've heard."
Ambassador McGrory sat thoughtfully for a long moment before going on: "If you were me, Juan, would you take the insult to the department?"
Silvio paused thoughtfully for a moment before answering.
"That's a tough call, Mike," he said. "If I may speak freely?"
"Absolutely," McGrory said.
"Alvarez's behavior was inexcusable," Silvio said. "Both in not going through you to get to the Pentagon and then by coming to your office to as much as accuse you of lying."
"Yes, It was."
"Incidents like that in the past have been considered more than cause enough to recall an ambassador for consultation, leaving an embassy without an ambassador for an extended period."