The Hostage (Presidential Agent 2)

"What happens now?" Charley asked. "Your brother comes in and breaks both my legs?"

"Well, he'd have no trouble finding us," Betty said. "We left a trail of my clothes from the living room into here."

He chuckled.

"What are you thinking now, Charley? 'I knew all along she'd be easy'?"

"Worse than that. I think-ignore that-I know I'm in love with you."

"You're under no obligation to say something like that."

"'Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free,'" Castillo quoted. "I think John Lennon said that."

She tweaked his nipple.

"That's from the Bible," she said, chuckling.

"Well?"

"Well what?"

"No response? In other words, are my feelings for you reciprocated? Partially reciprocated? Or reciprocated not at all?"

She raised her head and looked down at him.

"My God, couldn't you tell?" she asked, then: "You want me to say it, don't you?"

He nodded.

"Okay. I love you. I guess I knew that when I walked into Counterterrorism and saw the guy who'd thought I was a hooker in the Warwick bar and my heart jumped."

"Oh, boy!" [FOUR] The Buenos Aires Herald Azopardo 455 Buenos Aires, Argentina 0327 24 July 2005 At almost exactly this time-although neither of them cared a whit what hour it was, or even what day, as Charley reached down to pull Betty onto him-a small white Fiat van pulled away from the loading dock at the Buenos Aires Herald building in downtown Buenos Aires.

It drove to the Austral Air Cargo building at Jorge Newbery airfield, where the driver handed over approximately six hundred copies of the Herald, so fresh from the press that the ink had not had time to completely dry.

The newspapers were tied together in sixteen packages, each with a simple address. Most were in fifty-copy packages, but some of the packages contained far fewer-in three instances, only five.

The Austral people put all of them into three large blue plastic shipping containers, and then put the containers on a baggage cart. After all other cargo and passenger luggage had been loaded aboard Austral Flight 622, the containers would be loaded aboard-last on, first off.

Flight 622 would depart Jorge Newbery at 0705 and land in Montevideo twenty-five minutes later. The blue plastic containers would be off-loaded first, and turned over to a representative of the Herald, who would arrange for their further distribution.

He would load two hundred copies in his car. They were destined for downtown Montevideo (150) and for Carrasco, a suburb through which he would pass on his way downtown.

The others he took to the airport's bus terminal, where they were stacked according to their destination. The Route 9 stack would be placed aboard the first morning bus to San Carlos, Maldonado, and Punta del Este, the posh seaside resort on the Atlantic Ocean. The Route 8 stack would see stacks of the newspaper dropped off at Treinta y Tres, Melo, and Jaguarao. The Route 5 bus would drop off newspapers at Canelones, Florida, and then continue across the dam holding back the Lago Artificial de Rincon Del Bonete to Tacuar

embo, where it would drop off the last stack. There were just three copies of the Herald in the last stack.

The manager of the Tacuarembo Bus Terminal-he was paid to do so-would then telephone the manager of a remote estancia to tell him the Herald had arrived. Sometimes it didn't-things happened-and telephoning the estancia manager to tell him that the newspapers had, or had not, arrived saved the manager an hour-long ride down an unpaved highway.

All of this took time, of course, and it was almost three in the afternoon before the Herald was delivered to Estancia Shangri-La and another half hour before it was in the hands of El Patron, who was taking an afternoon siesta with Juanita, a sixteen-year-old maid.

Jean-Paul Lorimer, sitting up in bed, read the front-page banner headline with dismay, and muttered, "?Merde!"

The banner headline read: AMERICAN DIPLOMAT MURDERED IN PORT AREA and showed a photograph of the late J. Winslow Masterson.

Lorimer was of course disturbed and at first frightened. Jack was, after all, his brother-in-law, and this had to be very difficult on poor Betsy.

But there was no reason, to judge from the Herald's rather extensive coverage of the matter, for Jean-Paul Lorimer to think it had anything to do with him.