The Hunters (Presidential Agent 3)

Lauro Miller 1776

Montevideo, República Oriental del Uruguay

1150 2 August 2005

The telephone on the desk of Assistant Legal Attaché Julio Artigas buzzed and one of the six buttons on it began to flash.

Artigas, a slim, olive-skinned Cuban American of thirty, who had been a Special Agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation for eight years and assigned to the Montevideo embassy for three, picked up the handset.

“Artigas.”

“Julio, this is your cousin José,” his caller said in Spanish.

Thirty-seven-year-old Chief Inspector José Ordóñez, of the Interior Police Division of the Uruguayan Policía Nacional, was not related to Julio Artigas, but they looked very much alike. They had several times been mistaken for brothers. That wasn’t possible without the same surname, but it could have been possible for cousins, and cousins they had become. They also shared a sense of humor.

“And how goes your unrelenting campaign against evil, Cousin José?” Julio replied. He had arrived in Ur

uguay speaking Cuban-inflected Spanish fluently, and with only a little effort he had acquired a Uruguayan inflection. Many Uruguayans were surprised to learn he was not a native son.

“I would hope a little better than yours,” José said. “How about lunch?”

“Is that an invitation? Or have you been giving your salary away at the blackjack tables again?”

“I will pay,” José said. “I will put you on my expense sheet.”

“Oh?”

“I hope you have, or can make, your afternoon free.”

“If you are paying, my entire week is free.”

“You are so kind.”

“Where shall we meet? Someplace expensive, of course.”

“I’m at the port. How about something from a parrilla?”

“Great minds travel similar paths. When?”

“Now?”

“Get out your wallet.”

Artigas hung up. He opened a drawer in his desk, took from it a .38 caliber Smith & Wesson “Detective Special” revolver, then slipped the gun into a skeleton holster on his hip.

The pistol was his. It was smaller and lighter than the semiautomatic pistol prescribed for—and issued to—FBI agents, and, technically, he was violating at least four FBI regulations by carrying it.

But this was Montevideo, where his chances of ever needing a pistol ranged from very slight to none. Many of Artigas’s peers simply went un-armed. The primary mission of the FBI in Uruguay was the investigation of money laundering.

It was a different story for the DEA guys, who often found themselves in hairy situations. While not necessarily successful in stopping the drug flow, they were very successful in costing the drug merchants lots of money and consequently were unpopular with the drug establishment. They went around heavily armed.

Artigas had chosen the middle ground. While it is true that you never need a pistol until you really need one, it was equally true there is no sense carrying a large and hard-to-conceal cannon when a less conspicuous means of self-defense is available.

Artigas walked across the large, open room to the open door of a glass-walled cubicle that was the office of Special Agent James D. Monahan, who was because of his seniority the de facto, if not the de jure, SAC, or Special Agent in Charge, and waited for him to get off the phone.

“Something, Artigas?” Monahan asked, finally.

“I have just been invited to lunch by Chief Inspector Ordóñez.”