The Hunters (Presidential Agent 3)

“‘We’?” Montvale interrupted. “Who’s ‘we’? You and who else? ‘Accommodation’? What kind of ‘accommodation’?”

“‘We’ is Major Castillo and your President, Charles. Let Charley finish, please,” the President said.

“He was very helpful in locating the stolen 727, Mr. Ambassador,” Castillo said.

An American-owned Boeing 727 had disappeared from Luanda, Angola, on 23 May 2005, and when what the President described as “our enormous and enormously expensive intelligence community” was unable to determine who had stolen it, or why, or where It was, the president had come close to losing his temper.

He had dispatched Castillo, who was then an executive assistant to the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, to Angola, his orders being simply to find out what the CIA and the FBI and the DIA and the State Department—and all the other members of the intelligence community—had come to know about the stolen airplane, and when they had come to know it, and to report back personally to him.

Castillo had instead gone far beyond the scope of his orders. He not only learned who had stolen the aircraft—an obscure group of Somalian terrorists—and what they planned to do with it—crash it into the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia—but he also had located the 727 in Costa Rica, where it was about to take off for Philadelphia. Castillo had—with the aid of a Delta Force team from Fort Bragg—stolen the aircraft back from the terrorists and, with Colonel Jake Torine in the pilot’s seat, delivered it to MacDill Air Force Base.

This had endeared Castillo to the president but not to the CIA, the FBI, and the rest of the intelligence community, whose annoyance with him was directly proportional to the amount of egg the various directors felt they had on their faces.

“That’s the first time I heard that,” Montvale said.

“What part of ‘Let Charley finish’ didn’t you understand, Charles?”

“I beg your pardon, Mr. President,” Montvale said.

“Let me take it, Charley,” the President said. “Perhaps there will be fewer interruptions that way. In a nutshell, Charles, there is no legal action of any kind against this fellow underway in an American court. He made contact with Charley shortly after I gave Charley the job of finding out why no one else in our intelligence community could find it. He was very helpful. He wanted something in return.”

“I’ll bet,” Montvale said.

“Pevsner told Charley he thought the agency—which had quietly contracted for his services over the years—was trying to arrange his arrest by one of the countries that hold warrants for his arrest so that he could be locked up and his CIA contracts would not come to light. He went so far as to say he thought the agency would like to terminate him with extreme prejudice. Now, I know we don’t do that anymore, but the man was worried.

“As a small gesture of my appreciation, I authorized Charley to tell him that I had ordered the DCI and the director of the FBI—this is before you became director of National Intelligence—to cease all investigations they might have underway and to institute no new investigations without my specific permission. What Pevsner thought was happening was that the CIA was looking for him abroad and the FBI inside the United States. If they located him, they would either arrest him here on an Interpol warrant or furnish his location to one of the governments looking for him.

“Such stay-out-of-jail status to continue so long as Pevsner does not violate any law of the United States and with the unspoken understanding that he would continue to be helpful.”

“And has this chap continued to be helpful?” Montvale asked.

“He got me access to the helicopter I used to fly to Estancia Shangri-La,” Castillo said.

“He’s in Argentina?”

“I don’t know where Pevsner is at this moment,” Castillo said. “I ran into Howard Kennedy in Buenos Aires and he arranged for the helicopter.”

That’s not an outright lie. I just twisted the truth. For all I know, Alek might be in Puente del Este, Uruguay, not in Argentina.

“And Kennedy is?”

“A former FBI agent who now works for Pevsner,” the President said.

“And what was he doing in Argentina?”

“He accompanied a 767 loaded with objets d’art sent by the Saudi royal family from Riyadh for the King Fahd Islamic Cultural Center in Buenos Aires and took back to Riyadh a load of polo ponies and saddles and other polo accoutrements for the royal family,” Castillo said.

“The airplane no doubt owned by Pevsner?” Montvale asked.

“Probably, sir. I didn’t ask.”

“And this Kennedy fellow just turned over a helicopter to you because you asked him? Is that what you’re saying, Major Castillo?”

“I would bet that he did so with Mr. Pevsner’s permission, sir, but I didn’t ask about that, either.”

“I must say, Mr. President, that I find this whole situation amazing.”

“What is it they say, Charles, about politics making strange bedfellows?”