The Hunters (Presidential Agent 3)

“Yeah, but who?”

The implication was clear. Ordóñez would not have been surprised if one of the local cops had taken it, for any number of reasons having nothing to do with the investigation of a multiple homicide.

I’m not going to comment on that, Ordóñez thought.

“Both head shots,” Artigas said.

Ordóñez nodded and then, raising his voice, asked, “Where’s the other five?”

The second police supervisor made a vague gesture away from the house.

“Four out there, Chief Inspector,” he said. “Señor Bertrand’s body is in the house, in his office.”

Ordóñez gestured for him to lead the way into the house.

The body lying on its back behind a large, ornate desk and next to the open door of a safe was that of a some what squat, very black man in his late forties. There were two entrance wounds in the face, one on the right side of the forehead, the second on the upper lip.

A section of the skull had been blown outward. There was brain tissue on the safe and on the wall beside it.

Artigas sensed Ordóñez’s eyes on him.

“Two entrance wounds that close,” Artigas said, “maybe a submachine gun?”

Ordóñez nodded.

“But from a distance,” he said, pointing to the window. One of the panes was broken. “If he had been shot in here, for example, the moment he obligingly opened the safe, I think there would have been powder burns on the face.”

“Yeah,” Artigas said.

“The photo album?” Ordóñez asked.

“On the desk, Chief Inspector,” the police supervisor said.

“While Captain Cavallero was leaving everything exactly as it was when he first came here,” Ordóñez said, drily, “he happened to notice and then scan through a photo album. I think you may find it interesting.”

The Moroccan leather-bound photo album on the desk was open to an eight-by-ten-inch color photograph of a wedding party standing on the steps of a church large enough to be a cathedral. Everyone was in formal morning clothing. Señor Bertrand was standing at the extreme right. The bride, a tall, slim woman, was standing beside an extraordinarily tall, broadly smiling young man.

“Julio,” Ordóñez asked, softly, “do you think the bridegroom is who Captain Cavallero thought it might be?”

Well, Artigas thought, now I know why I’m here.

“That’s Jack the Stack, all right. No question about it,” he said.

“‘Jack the Stack’?”

“Before he was J. Winslow Masterson of the United States State Department, he was Jack the Stack of the Boston Celtics,” Artigas said.

“Really? A professional basketball player? I didn’t know that. From the Celtics to the State Department?”

“He got himself run over by a beer truck as he was leaving a stadium,” Artigas said. “No more pro ball. And the settlement—the truck driver had been sampling his wares—made Jack the Stack a very wealthy man. I heard sixty million dollars.”

“Now that I think about it, I remember hearing that story. But I didn’t connect it with an American diplomat in Buenos Aires,” Ordóñez said and then asked, “I wonder what Señor Bertrand’s relationship to Señor Masterson was?”

“That’s not all I’m wondering about Señor Bertrand,” Artigas replied.

[THREE]

Office of the Ambassador