The Hunters (Presidential Agent 3)

But his came with a wine-and-mushroom sauce that probably tastes as good as it smells, and those little potato balls look tastier—and probably are—than my French fries will be.

“You said you wanted to have a little chat out of school, Mike,” Silvio said after he had masticated a nice chunk of his steak. “What’s on your mind?”

“Two things, actually,” McGrory said, speaking so softly that Silvio leaned across the table so that he would be able to hear.

McGrory took the message about FBI Special Agent Yung and handed it to Silvio, who read it.

“Isn’t this the chap you sent here when Mr. Masterson was kidnapped?” Silvio asked.

“One and the same.”

“You never said anything to me, Mike, about him being on Secretary Cohen’s personal staff.”

“I didn’t know about that,” McGrory confessed.

Silvio pursed his lips thoughtfully but didn’t say anything.

“Something else happened vis-à-vis Special Agent Yung,” McGrory went on. “The same day—the night of the same day—that the bodies were found at what turned out to be Lorimer’s estancia, I received a telephone call from the assistant director of the FBI telling me that it had been necessary to recall Yung to Washington, and that he had, in fact, already left Uruguay.”

“He say why?”

“We were on a nonsecure line and he said he didn’t want to get into details. He gave me the impression Yung was required as a witness in a trial of some kind. He said he would call me back on a secure line but never did.”

Silvio cut another slice of his steak, rubbed it around in the sauce, and then forked it into his mouth. When he had finished chewing and swallowing, he asked, “Did you try to call him?”

“I was going to do that this morning when that message came and then I found out the deputy foreign minister, Alvarez, had called my chief of mission and asked if he could come by the embassy for a cup of coffee.”

“Sounds like he wanted to have an unofficial chat,” Silvio said.

“That’s what I thought. So when he showed up, I told him that my man had the flu and I would give him his coffee.”

“What did he want?”

“He had Chief Inspector Ordóñez of the Interior Police with him,” McGrory said. “The man in charge of the investigation of what happened at that estancia. After they beat around the bush for a while, he as much as accused me of not only knowing that there were Green Berets involved in the shooting but of not telling them.”

“Were there?” Silvio asked.

“If there were, I have no knowledge of it.”

“And as the ambassador, you would, right?”

“That’s the way it’s supposed to be, Silvio. We’re the senior American officers in the country to which we are assigned and no government action is supposed to take place that we don’t know about and have approved of.”

“That’s my understanding,” Silvio agreed. “So where did he get the idea that Green Berets were involved?”

“He had two things,” McGrory said. “One was a—I don’t know what you call it—what’s left, what comes out of a gun after you shoot it?”

“A bullet?” Silvio asked.

“No, the other part. Brass. About this big.”

He held his fingers apart to indicate the size of a cartridge case.

“I think they call that the ‘cartridge case,’” Silvio said.

“That’s it.”

“What was special about the cartridge case?”