The Hunters (Presidential Agent 3)

“You never said who these people are.”

“I don’t have a fucking clue, Vic,” Castillo said. “Anyway, once we found Lorimer I staged an operation to repatriate him.”

“McNab sent people down there? I didn’t hear anything about that. Who’d he send?”

“He didn’t send anybody. I didn’t have time to wait for anybody from the stockade. I went with what I had.”

“Which was?”

“Kranz and Kensington were already down there, as communicators. So I used them. Plus two Secret Service guys, a DEA agent, an FBI agent, and Bradley.”

D’Allessando pointed at Bradley, who was now sucking at the neck of a Coors beer bottle, and raised his eyebrows.

“Yeah. That Bradley,” Castillo said and then went on: “The CIA station chiefs in Buenos Aires helped and I had an Argentine—ex-SIDE—with me. I thought it was, do it right then or don’t do it all. If I could find Lorimer, so could the bad guys.”

“Yeah. So what were you going to do with Lorimer when you found him?”

“Get him to the States.”

“How?”

“I had the Lear—you saw it here?”

“You took that to South America?”

“By way of Europe,” Castillo said.

“Across the Atlantic twice?” D’Allessando asked, incredulously.

“That was interesting,” Castillo said. “But Jake Torine said we could do it and we did. I borrowed a JetRanger in Uruguay…”

“The last time you ‘borrowed’ a helicopter, you nearly went to Leavenworth,” D’Allessando said. “Is Interpol looking for you, Charley?”

“No. I really borrowed this one from a friend.”

“And he will keep his mouth shut when people start asking him questions?”

“It’s in his interest to keep his mouth shut.”

D’Allessando shrugged, suggesting he hoped this would be the case but didn’t think so.

“The plan was to snatch Lorimer at his estancia, chopper him, nap of the earth, to Buenos Aires, put him on the Lear, and bring him to the States. The ex-SIDE guy had arranged for us get the Lear out of Argentina without questions being asked.”

“But something went wrong, right

? The best-laid plans of mice and special operators, etcetera?”

“We had just gotten him to open his safe when somebody stuck a Madsen through the window and let loose. Lorimer took two hits to the head and the SIDE guy took one in the arm. And then Bradley took the shooter out with a head shot from Kranz’s Remington and then took out the shooter’s pal. Both head shots. He saved my ass, Vic.”

D’Allessando looked at Bradley.

“Consider all my kind thoughts about your touching innocence withdrawn,” he said.

“Just doing my job, sir,” Corporal Bradley said.

D’Allessando’s eyebrow rose but he didn’t say anything.

“And when Bradley was popping these people with Seymour’s rifle, where was Seymour?”