The Hostage (Presidential Agent 2)

"Right. His van is there, and his wife's purse, but no wife. Jack sounds very concerned."

"I'll call the San Isidro cops," Lowery said. "I'm in Belgrano; ten, twelve minutes out. On my way."

"Thanks, Ken."

"Let's hope she's in the can, powdering her nose," Lowery said. "See you there. Lowery out." Jack Masterson, scanning the parking lot and making mental notes of what and who were in the immediate area, pushed another autodial button on his cellular phone.

"Post One, Staff Sergeant Taylor," the Marine guard on duty at the embassy said, as he answered the unlisted telephone.

"This is Masterson. I need to speak to Ken Lowery now."

"Sir, Mr. Lowery has left the embassy. May I suggest you try to get him on the radio?"

"I don't have a goddamn radio. You contact him, and tell him to call me on my cellular. Tell him it's an emergency."

"Yes, sir." [FIVE] The Residence Avenida Libertador y Calle John F. Kennedy Palermo, Buenos Aires, Argentina 2110 20 July 2005 "?Hola?" Ambassador Juan Manuel Silvio said, picking up the telephone beside his armchair in the sitting room of the ambassadorial apartment on the third floor of the residence.

"Alex, Mr. Ambassador. We have a problem."

"Tell me."

"Everything points to Betsy Masterson having been kidnapped from the parking lot of the Kansas in San Isidro about an hour ago."

For a long moment, the ambassador didn't reply. He was always careful with his words.

"Ken Lowery is aware of this?" he asked, finally.

"Yes, sir. I'm in Ken's car, headed downtown from the Kansas."

"Jack?"

"I talked him into going home, sir. My wife is on her way over there."

"Why don't you and Ken come here, Alex?" Silvio asked. "And I think it might be useful if Tony Santini came, too. I could call him."

Anthony J. Santini, listed in the embassy telephone directory as the assistant financial attache, was in fact a Secret Service agent dispatched to Buenos Aires to, as he put it, "look for funny money." That meant both counterfeit currency and illegally acquired money being laundered.

"I'll call him, sir."

"Then I'll see you here in a few minutes, Alex. Thank you," the ambassador said, and hung up. "You'll call who?" Ken Lowery inquired.

"Tony Santini," Alex Darby replied. "The ambassador wants him there, too."

"The residence or the embassy?"

"Residence," Darby replied, then added, "I guess he figures Tony is the closest thing we have to the FBI."

There were no "legal attaches"-FBI agents-at the embassy at the moment. There were a half dozen "across the river" looking for money-laundering operations. Money laundering in Argentina had just about dried up after the Argentine government had, without warning several years before, forcibly converted dollar deposits to pesos at an unfavorable rate and then sequestered the pesos. International drug dealers didn't trust Argentine banks any more than industry did and moved their laundering to Uruguay and elsewhere.

Darby punched an autodial button on his cellular to call Santini. Ambassador Juan Manuel Silvio was a tall, lithe, fair-skinned, well-tailored man, with an erect carriage and an aristocratic manner, and when he opened the door to the ambassadorial apartment Alex Darby thought again that Silvio looked like the models in advertisements for twelve-year-old scotch or ten-thousand-dollar wristwatches.

He was a Cuban-American, brought from Castro's Cuba as a child. His family had arrived in Miami, he said, on their forty-six-foot Chris-Craft sportfisherman with nothing but the clothing on their backs and a large cigar humidor stuffed with his mother's jewelry and hundred-dollar bills.

"My father was one of the few who recognized Castro as more than a joke," he had once told Darby. "What he didn't get quite right was how quickly Castro would march into Havana."

Darby knew he wasn't boasting, but the opposite. Silvio was proud of-and greatly admired-his fellow Cubans who had arrived in Miami "with nothing but the clothes on their backs" and subsequently prospered. He simply wanted to make it plain that it had been much easier for his family than it had been for other refugees.

Silvio graduated from his father's alma mater, Spring Hill College, a Jesuit institution in Mobile, Alabama, with a long history of educating the children of upper-class Latin Americans, took a law degree at Harvard, and then a doctorate in political science at the University of Alabama.