The Hunters (Presidential Agent 3)

“Get one of the security guys in here. You tell him what store and I’ll tell him to get a receipt,” Castillo said and took a wad of currency from his pocket.

“You going to tell me what that fund—‘the Lorimer Charitable and Whatever Fund’—is all about?”

“On the way to Buenos Aires. There’s no time now.”

Castillo carefully pried the portable hard drive from the pages of Ot Pervovo Litsa, then connected it to his laptop computer.

“Okay, Eric, it’s hooked up. Let me have the password.”

“You trust that machine?”

“I won’t erase your data until I’m sure it’s in here,” Castillo said. “But, yeah, I trust it.”

“I put a lot of time and effort into what’s in there,” Ko

cian said. “I’d hate to lose it.”

“Not as much as I would,” Castillo said, “and therefore I am going to be very careful. Let’s have the password.”

Kocian gave it to him, then added: “Never in my worst nightmares did I see myself as a lackey of the CIA.”

Castillo entered the password, decrypted the data on Kocian’s hard drive, then transfered it to his.

When he saw that was working, he said, “I don’t work for the CIA, Eric.”

“So you say. But if you did, you wouldn’t say you did, would you?”

“Probably not,” Castillo said.

Kocian elected to change the subject.

“I really hate to destroy any book,” he said. “But I had seen all the spy movies on the TV and hiding the hard drive in a book seemed like a good idea. And Ot Pervovo Litsa was a garbage book.” He paused, then added, “Full of bullshit, like the dispatches from Washington you send all the time.”

Is he trying to piss me off?

Or do my paraphrases from The American Conservative really offend his sense of journalistic integrity?

Castillo said, “You don’t think Mr. Putin told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth to those reporters?”

“You read it?”

Castillo nodded.

“In Russian or the translation?”

“In Russian.”

“Then you will recall he told one journalist that practically right out of university, he went in the KGB and learned his craft by suppressing ‘dissident activities’ in Leningrad. That, I believe. I also believe that his father was a cook, first to the czars—where he cooked for Rasputin—and then to the Bolsheviks, most significantly Lenin himself, and then in one of Stalin’s dachas outside Moscow, as he told other Russian journalists. He also said that his father served with the Red Army during the Great Patriotic War. He was a little vague about what his poppa did in uniform.”

Castillo nodded.

He dropped his eyes to his laptop and saw that the transfer of files procedure was just about finished.

He held up his hand to signal Kocian that he needed a moment and then typed in the encryption code.

Kocian waited until Castillo raised his eyes to him and then went on: “Do you think that Putin’s father spent that time boiling beets for the Red Army in some field mess? Or is it more likely that Putin’s father—whom the regime trusted enough to let him cook for Stalin—served as a political officer, making sure no officer strayed from the path of righteousness?”

“Good point.”