"For your consideration, sir, Special Agent Timmons is not all that fond of the asshole."
"Nevertheless, I think that we should take the chance."
"Yes, sir," Lieutenant Lorimer said, his voice showing his deep disappointment.
"Let him up, Lieutenant," Castillo ordered. "Get him on his feet."
"You heard the colonel, Asshole. Stand up."
"Sergeant," Castillo then said, "I want you to understand that I am authorizing your immediate termination should you ever get close to a telephone without Lieutenant Lorimer or myself being present. Understood?"
"Yeah."
Lorimer barked, "Say 'yes, sir' when you're talking to the colonel!"
"Yes, sir."
"You are dismissed, Sergeant. Please stay in your room until you are called for breakfast."
"Yes, sir."
Castillo made a motion as if brushing away a fly, and Sergeant Mullroney started quickly walking up the path to the house.
Fifteen seconds later, Colonel Castillo whispered, "If you are about to have the giggles, Lorimer, and Asshole hears you, I'll throw you down the mountain."
Lieutenant Lorimer acknowledged the order by bobbing his head.
He didn't trust himself to open his mouth, the bottom lip of which he was biting as hard as he could.
[TWO] Lieutenant Colonel Castillo leaned over Lieutenant Lorimer, who was sprawled on a chaise lounge by the side of the swimming pool, and very carefully topped off Lorimer's glass of Famous Grouse with more of the same.
"Lieutenant Lorimer," Castillo said, "I am a lieutenant colonel."
"Yes, sir."
"And, you may have noticed, I wear a green beret."
"Yes, sir, I did notice that."
"And, as I am sure you know, while some lieutenant colonels sometimes make mistakes, and some Special Forces officers sometimes make mistakes, when a Special Forces lieutenant colonel makes a mistake, it is truly a cold day in hell."
"So I have been led to believe, sir."
"That being understood between us, there is sometimes an exception to the rule just cited."
"I find that difficult to accept, sir."
"Nevertheless, I think perhaps-as difficult as this may be for you to accept-I made a mistake about you."
"Yes, sir?"
"Frankly, Lieutenant, when you approached Mullroney and me with stealth worthy of the finest Comanche, I really had no idea how to deal with the sonofabitch."
"With respect, Colonel, sir, I believe his name is Asshole. And I think the asshole is now under control, sir."
"The knife at his throat when you rolled him over, Lieutenant-don't let this go to your head-was masterful. I would not be surprised to learn that Sergeant Mullroney soiled his undies."
"I would be disappointed to learn that he didn't, Colonel."
"The problem of a police officer being embedded with us having been solved-I devoutly hope-let us now turn our attention to the big picture. How do we get your friend back?"
"Yeah," Lorimer said, and exhaled audibly. "How the hell do we do that?"
"To get him back, we have to know a lot of things, starting with who has him. And where. Your thoughts, please?"
"May I infer from the colonel's question that I am now regarded as part of the team, so to speak?"
"From this moment on, you may regard yourself as the psychological warfare officer of the team. You seem to have some skill in that area."
"I am humbled by that responsibility, sir, and will try very hard to justify your confidence in me."
"Where do these bastards have him, Eddie?"
"Well, he could be in Asuncion, but I don't think so. If I had to bet, they've got him in the boonies somewhere. Either in Paraguay or across the river in Argentina."
"Bearing in mind that you're betting with a man's life, why?"
"That's boonieland up there, Argentina and Paraguay. You can raid a house in a city a lot easier than you can in the boonies."
"Meaning that if you're holding somebody in a remote farmhouse, you can see the good guys coming?"
"If there's only one road going someplace, they know you're coming long before you get there. You've got somebody in the bag, you just march him off into the woods, and look innocent when somebody shows up at the door."
"So what we have to do is not only find where he is-I'll get back to that in a minute-but come up with some way to get enough people in there with the element of surprise."
"Yeah," Lorimer said. "And that won't be easy."
"I'm going off at a tangent here, Eddie."
"Yes, sir?"
"Something was said about Timmons's driver being taken out by these people. I want to make sure I heard it right. Tell me about that."
"They found the embassy car parked against the fence of the airport. It's called the Silvio Pettirossi International Airport-you want all the details like that?"
Castillo nodded.
"Anything that comes into your mind, Eddie. My data bank is pretty empty."
"Typical Third World airport," Lorimer went on. "It used to be called the Presidente General Stroessner Airport, and you can still see signs with his name on them. He was the president, read dictator, for thirty-five years. Apparently a world-class sonofabitch-"
"Presidente General Alfredo Stroessner," Castillo interrupted, "was exiled to Brazil in 1989 after a coup by General Andres Rodriguez. I don't know where the hell I got that, but the data bank apparently isn't completely empty. And, I just remembered, he was cozy with the Nazis, the ones who fled to South America after World War Two. Interesting."
"Why? Is that important?"
"I'll tell you in a minute. And the next time we have a little chat like this, I'll have to remember to bring the laptop so I can write all this down. I tend to forget things I hear when I'm drinking. Go on, please, Eddie."
"The embassy car was parked against the fence across the field from the terminal. The driver was on the floor of the backseat choked to death."
"Strangled, you mean?"
"I don't know if that's the word. He had a gizmo around his neck, like those plastic handcuffs the cops use, but metal."
"With a handle?" Castillo asked, quietly, and mimed how the handle would be used.
Lorimer nodded.
"It's called a garrote," Castillo said. "One of them was used to take out a friend of mine, Sergeant First Class Sy Kranz, who was a damned good special operator, when the Ninjas jumped us at Estancia Shangri-La."
"I never heard that you lost anybody."
"We lost Sy Kranz," Castillo said. "And taking him out wasn't easy, which told us right off that the Ninjas we took out were pros."
"How much about that operation are you going to tell me, Colonel?"
"We later found out that one of the people we took out was Major Alejandro Vincenzo of the Cuban Direccion General de Inteligencia. We think the others were probably either ex-Stasi or ex-AVO or ex-AVH, probably being run by the FSB."
"Colonel, except for the FSB, I don't know what you're talking about. Who was the FSB running? Jesus, what was going on at that farm?"
"Estancia," Castillo corrected him without thinking. "Estancia Shangri-La. This much we know: Jean-Paul Lorimer, an American who worked for the UN, was a-probably the-bagman in that Iraqi Oil for Food cesspool. We know he set himself up with a phony identification and name on the estancia. We know he had sixteen million dollars. Whether he earned that as the bagman or stole it, we don't know. We know that a team of pros was sent to the estancia. We think their basic mission was to whack him to shut his mouth. They may have been after the money, too. And we're pretty sure the others were ex-Stasi…"
He stopped when he remembered Lorimer didn't know what he was talking about.
"Stasi, Eddie, was the East German Ministerium fur Staatssicherheit-Ministry for State Security. AVO-Allamvedelmi Osztaly-and later AVH-Allamvedelmi Hatosag-did about the same thing when Hungary was still under the communists."
"And they were involved in that oil-for-food business?"
"They were hired guns, we think, for people who were involved in it," Castillo said.