The Hostage (Presidential Agent 2)

"Howell will rent it for us this afternoon from Hertz at the airport. He will use his credit card, thus keeping your name off the books."

"I have a car that you can use, Mr. Castillo," Howell said. "A five-year-old, powder blue Peugeot."

"Better yet," Castillo said, "things are going so well, I'm waiting for that famous other shoe to drop. Would your car be the sort of car used by Uruguayan bureaucrats on official business, Mr. Howell?"

Howell nodded. "That's why I bought what I did, actually."

"Alex, you will drive Mr. Howell's five-year-old, powder blue Peugeot to Tacuarembo early tomorrow afternoon; there's no sense you being there any sooner than, say, half past five or six…"

"And when I get there, then what?"

"Go to the Hotel Carlos Gardel. If it doesn't have a bar, it has to have a place you can have a cup of coffee. Munz and I will meet you there, say, at eight or eight-thirty. We will be wearing suits and trying to look as much as possible like Uruguayan bureaucrats. Don't recognize us. Finish your coffee and leave. Go to the car. We'll find it. It's powder blue, right? That should make it easy to find."

"And then?"

"We drive out to Shangri-La, quickly flash our badges to whoever answers the door. Eventually, we will get to Mr. Bertrand, who will be informed that there seems to be some irregularity with his passport, and might we have a look at it?

"If this goes as I hope it will, Lorimer will open his safe-saving Yung the difficulty of blowing it open-to get either his Lebanese passport or money to bribe us with, probably both. Once the safe is open, Munz will put handcuffs on him, and I will begin to explain to him what happens next, and the wisdom of his cooperating. Once we get that far, you, who will have been waiting patiently outside, will drive the powder blue car ba

ck to Montevideo.

"Anybody around, seeing the car leaving, will presume we're in it," Castillo went on. "As soon as they see you leave, while Britton, Yung, and Solez are cutting the telephone line and/or any cables leading to any transmitter antennas, Kranz and Kensington will come into the house, put plastic cuffs on anybody in the house, and make sure there's nobody lurking around who can cause trouble. They will then go outside to make sure there are no visitors, or that we're warned if there are. Ricardo, Britton, and Yung, who should be in the house by then, will herd everyone we've cuffed into a bedroom, where they will be attached to the furniture with more plastic cuffs.

"When that's been done, leaving Ricardo to watch those cuffed, Britton and Yung will start to search the house for anything interesting that Lorimer didn't choose to put in the safe.

"That's in Munz's area of expertise, too, so he'll help with that. I'll sit on Lorimer.

"Just before dawn, we take Lorimer out of the house and head for the helicopter. By the time we get there, there will be enough light to take off. The way I figure it, we'll have anywhere from a half hour to an hour before those cuffed manage to get loose, or someone comes in to make breakfast, or whatever, and discover Jean-Paul has been kidnapped by-this is important- Spanish-speaking people, two of whom look like cops/businessmen/bureaucrats and the rest like those people one sees in thriller movies. Those balaclava masks really scare people."

Darby thought the scenario over carefully.

"You don't need permission to speak, you know, Alex," Castillo said after a very long thirty seconds.

"Jesus, Charley," Darby said, smiling, "this might just work."

"And nobody gets hurt," Castillo said. "I want everybody to keep that in mind. This is not an assault. The only man at Lorimer's estancia who deserves to die is Lorimer, and unfortunately I need the sonofabitch alive. The primary purpose of the black suits and the balaclava masks and all the weapons is to scare everybody into behaving while we're there. And the masks will make everybody hard to describe to the local gendarmes when they finally show up and start asking questions."

"At what time do you want me to chauffeur you and Munz out there?" Darby asked.

"Probably about nine o'clock. At that time, there probably won't be more than two or three servants in the house. Plus, maybe, his tootsie. Anyway, Kranz and Kensington will have kept an eye on the place for at least an hour before we get there, and if it doesn't look right, one or the other of them will wave us off at the driveway.

"If that happens, we may wait until later. Midnight, for example, and forget the bureaucratic business, just drive up in the Yukon, bust in, grab Lorimer, bust open the safe, and get the hell out of there. We can hide in the field where the chopper is. Or maybe just get in the chopper and go."

"I think the first scenario will work," Darby said.

"Jesus, I hope so," Castillo said. "Okay, we'll get to the rest of the tape. Make notes of what we're missing, and I'll try to get what I missed this afternoon."

He pushed a button on the control and the videotape began to play. "This is where we followed the road Bradley's going to use into Tacuarembo. I didn't see anything extraordinary about it, but take a real good look, Bradley." "Okay. Here we are over the field again. I didn't see one, but there has to be a road, a path, into it. Look for it, Bradley. Don't just drive over the field. We can't afford to have the Yukon stuck in the middle of the field when the sun comes up. I'm glad I thought of that. If Bradley gets the Yukon stuck, he will be shot, and his carcass left in the Yukon, which will be then torched by Ricardo. Ricardo, make sure that Kranz gives you a couple of thermite grenades and shows you how to use them before you drive up there. One for the engine compartment, the other on one of the barrels of fuel."

"I've seen a thermite grenade before," Solez said. "Okay, here we are. I'm about to make the low-level pass over the main house at Shangri-La." "Jesus, there's somebody in the interior courtyard."

He stopped the tape.

"Gentlemen, there is Mr. Jean-Paul Bertrand, aka Lorimer. Apparently having a wake-me-up cup of coffee in his garden." [THREE] Estancia Shangri-La Tacuarembo Province Republica Oriental del Uruguay 2110 31 July 2005 Jean-Paul Bertrand was not only dining alone, but he had prepared the meal himself.

There were several reasons. For one, he was bored. For another, his cook's idea of a gourmet meal was to throw something-usually beef, sometimes pork, and less often chicken-on the wood-fired parrilla grill, char it, and then serve it with either mashed potatoes or what they called here papas fritas, and a sliced tomato salad. Wrapping a potato in aluminum foil and baking it apparently overtaxed her culinary skills.

There were some marvelous chefs in Uruguay, but not in Tacuarembo. And, of course, he had to stay in Tacuarembo for the time being. Jean-Paul had come to believe that the northern Italian kitchen-which is what the good restaurants in Montevideo and Punta del Este served-was, in fact, as hard as this was to accept, actually a bit superior to that of the French.