The Hunters (Presidential Agent 3)

A waiter appeared.

Julio ordered a blue cheese empanada, bife chorizo medium rare, papas frit as, and an onion-and-tomato salad.

José held up two fingers, signaling the waiter he’d have the same.

“And where are these deceased Ninja warriors?” Julio asked.

José chuckled.

“On an estancia—called Shangri-La—near Tacuarembó.”

Julio signaled with a quick shake of his head that he had no idea where Tacuarembó was.

“It’s about three hundred sixty kilometers due north,” José said. “On Highway 5.” He paused. “I was hoping you might go up there with me.”

“That’s a long ride.”

“Less long in a helicopter.”

Julio knew the use of rotary-wing ai

rcraft by Uruguayan police was not common, even for the movement of very senior officers.

“Am I being invited as a friend or officially?” Julio said.

“Why don’t we decide that after we have a look around Estancia Shangri-La?” José replied.

“Okay.” Julio paused. “Tell me, Cousin, would I happen to know—or even have met—the owner of Estancia Shangri-La?”

“You tell me. He is—was—a Lebanese dealer in antiquities by the name of Jean-Paul Bertrand.”

Julio shook his head and asked, “And had you a professional interest in Señor…what was his name?”

“Jean-Paul Bertrand,” José furnished.

“…Bertrand before he was killed?”

José shook his head. “He was as clean as a whistle, so far as I have been able to determine.”

The waiter returned with their empanadas, and they cut off their conversation. They might have returned to it had not two strikingly beautiful young women come in the restaurant.

They didn’t hurry their lunch, but they didn’t dawdle over it, either. Twenty-five minutes after Julio had taken his first sip of the Merlot, the bottle was empty and José was settling the bill with the waiter.

When they left the former cattle shed, they walked across the street to the Navy base. Julio saw—with some surprise—that the helicopter waiting for them was not one of the some what battered Policía Nacional’s Bell Hueys he expected but a glistening Aerospatiale Dauphin. The pilot was a Navy officer. Julio suspected it was the Uruguayan president’s personal helicopter.

That meant, obviously, that someone high in the Uruguayan government—perhaps even the president himself—considered what had happened at Estancia Shangri-La very important.

[TWO]

Estancia Shangri-La

Tacuarembó Province

República Orientale del Uruguay

1405 2 August 2005

As the Dauphin fluttered down onto a field, Julio saw that there were a dozen police vehicles and two ambulances parked unevenly around the main building of the estancia and that there were twenty-five or thirty people—many in police uniform—milling about.