"Where'd you get them?"
"We borrowed them from Sweaty's and Dmitri's cousin. He flew a dozen up yesterday from Argentina after Sweaty had another good idea."
"Which was?"
"I'll tell you when we're upstairs," Castillo said, and gestured toward the elevator. Then he added, "Thank God you can't trust lawyers-maybe especially Mexican lawyers. Isn't there a politically incorrect joke about that?"
"Meaning what?"
"Cutting a long story short, this place was supposed to have been burned to the ground after they exploded all the butane. But the Mexican lawyer who was supposed to do that-was trusted to do that-didn't."
"Aleksandr will kill him," Sweaty said.
"Pay attention, Allan," Castillo said. "That was not a figure of speech."
General Naylor thought: And that comment was not Charley being cute. [SEVEN] Castillo led the group into a dining room and waved them into chairs around an enormous table. Naylor saw there was already one man sitting at the table-I wonder who that guy is?-and two burly, fair-skinned men armed with Uzi submachine guns, one sitting by each of the room's two doors.
And I don't think Charley's pulling our leg about the Spetsnaz, either.
They look like Russians and they look like special operators.
Proof of that came immediately when Sweaty said something to them in Russian, to which one of them responded as an enlisted man does to an officer.
Castillo added something-gave an order-in Russian and the other Russian popped to attention and said something that was obviously, "Yes, sir."
Both of them left the dining room.
"Sweaty ordered one of them to get us some coffee," Castillo explained, "and I told the other one to fetch Mr. Danton."
"May I ask questions?" General Naylor said.
"Yes, sir. Of course," Castillo replied.
"Danton is the reporter?"
"Yes, sir. That was Sweaty's idea. I'll get into that in a minute."
"And General McNab? Has he also given you his parole?"
"Charley never asked me for it, General," McNab answered for him.
Thirty seconds later, one of the Russians led Roscoe J. Danton into the room.
"Please have a seat, Mr. Danton," Castillo said. "I presume you know everybody?"
"I don't know who these gentlemen are," Danton said, indicating Colonel Brewer, Allan Junior, Vic D'Allessando, and Aloysius Francis Casey.
"My name is Casey," Aloysius said.
"Colonel Brewer is my senior aide-de-camp," General Naylor said. "And that's my son, Lieutenant Colonel (Designate) Allan Naylor, Junior."
"I try very hard to keep my name out of the newspapers, Mr. Danton," D'Allessando said. "Think of me as a friend of Charley's. You can call me Vic."
"And was that Frank Lammelle they just carried into my cell?"
"Yes, it was," Castillo said. "And I'm crushed that you think of that lovely room with an en suite bath and such a lovely view as a cell."
"If there's a guy with a submachine gun at the door keeping you inside," Danton said, "that's a cell."
"Point taken," Castillo said. "I think I should begin this by telling you, Mr. Danton, that General Naylor, Colonel Brewer, and Lieutenant Colonel (Designate) Naylor are not here voluntarily. They have given me their parole."
"What the hell does that mean?"
"It means that under the Code of Honor, they will-"
"What 'Code of Honor'?" Danton interrupted.
"I don't really know. I think of it as the Code of Honor," Castillo said, and looked at General Naylor. "Is there a more formal name, sir?"
"I don't really know," Naylor said. "What it means, Mr. Danton, is that I-personally and on behalf of my staff-have given Colonel Castillo our parole, which means that we will neither attempt escape nor undertake any hostile action without first notifying him that we have withdrawn our parole."
"You're serious, aren't you?" Danton asked, and when Naylor nodded, said, "You take that Code of Honor business seriously? Incredible!"
"I don't think that's the only thing you're going to hear, or see, in the next couple of days that you may find incredible," Castillo said.
Two Russians appeared with a huge thermos of coffee and a tray with cups, cream, and sugar.
Castillo waited until the fuss caused by that dissipated and then rapped his spoon against the thermos. Everybody looked at him.
"Here we go," he said. "While I am a graduate of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff School-where one learns how to write a staff study-I have to confess that when it was time for me to actually go to Fort Leavenworth, either they really couldn't find room for me, or an unnamed senior officer decided I could make a greater contribution to the Army by running his errands. So he pulled some strings, the result of which was that I took the course by correspondence-in addition to my other duties-rather than in the academic setting of Leavenworth."
General Naylor realized he was smiling, and when he looked, he saw General McNab-the unnamed senior officer-was, too.
"The result of that was I cannot come up with as good a staff study as most people can. But as General McNab has told me so many times over the years, you gotta go with what you got.
"Statement of the Problem: The Russians and the Iranians, probably with a lot of help from former East Germans and maybe the Czechs and even the Japanese, none of whom find anything wrong with using biological weapons on soldiers and civilians, came up with a substance we now call Congo-X, because it was manufactured in a laboratory in the Congo.
"Our own expert in this area, Colonel J. Porter Hamilton, cutting to the chase, describes Congo-X as 'an abomination before God.'
"Surprising me not a hell of a lot, Congo-X slipped through the cracks at Langley. It was the stated opinion of the CIA that what was going on in the Congo was a fish farm.
"We learned what was really going on there through dumb luck-"
"Colonel," Roscoe J. Danton interrupted, "if I take notes, will I be wasting my time?"
"I think taking notes is a good idea."
"I'll need my laptop."
Castillo said something in Russian, and then, "Your laptop's on the way. Now, where was I?"
"Something about dumb luck," Danton said.
"Oh, yeah. What I should have said was 'stupidity and incompetence.' I've got to go off at a tangent here. I'm sure that everybody here will be surprised when I tell you that there are some Russians who have moral qualms about biological warfare because of their deep religious convictions. And even more surprised that some of these good Russians get to rise high in the ranks of the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki, which in English is the Service for the Protection of the Constitutional System.
"And I'm sure that you will be shocked to hear that the SVR is just as bad as our beloved CIA when it comes to bureaucratic infighting and empire-building. The head villain here is Vladimir Putin, who-despite what title he's running under-actually runs the SVR, which among other things ran the 'Fish Farm' in the Congo.
"In an attempt to restore the SVR to the sort of glory their predecessor secret police organization had before the Soviet Union imploded, Putin decided that a number of people-Russians, Germans, Austrians, Argentines, and Americans, the latter including your lecturer here today-had to be whacked or eliminated.
"He succeeded in whacking the German, a journalist who was asking too many questions about German involvement in supplying the Fish Farm, and the Austrians, who had been deep-cover CIA assets successfully engaged over the years in getting Russians and other Eastern Bloc people to switch sides.
"The attempted assassination of the Argentine failed, but Putin still had high hopes of taking me out when I went to the German's funeral. The murdered German worked for the Tages Zeitung newspaper chain, which, as most of you know, I own-"
"You own the Tages Zeitung chain?" Danton asked incredulously.
Castillo nodded. "Incredible, right? Stick around. It gets better. Anyway, they knew I would go to the funeral. So Putin sent a team of assassins-former members of the Hungarian Allamvedelmi Hatosag-to Germany, with orders to report to Colonel Berezovsky, the SVR rezident in Berlin. Berezovsky would tell them when and where to whack me when I showed up at the funeral."