The Hunters (Presidential Agent 3)

“Did you believe this story, Mr. Sieno?” Kocian asked.

“I had a lot of trouble with it,” Sieno said, carefully, after a moment.

“Why?” Kocian asked.

Sieno almost visibly formed his thoughts before he replied, “You know that George Tenet said that the purge of the KGB when the Soviet Union came apart was, quote, pure window dressing, unquote?”

“I didn’t know that,” Kocian said. “Well, I suppose the former head of your CIA had to be right about something.”

Castillo glared at him. Sieno ignored him.

“All they did was change the name from Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti to Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti,” Sieno said, bitterly.

Castillo thought, His Russian pronunciation of that was perfect.

“And put Mr. Putin in charge?” Kocian asked, innocently. “So things could go on as before?”

In Russian, Castillo asked, “How good is your Russian, Paul?”

“Not quite as good as yours, Colonel, but not bad,” Sieno replied, in Russian.

“And what is a nice Italian boy like you who speaks Russian like a Muscovite doing eavesdropping on the Cubans in Argentina?”

“Counting the days until I get my pension,” Sieno said.

“You were a bad boy in Moscow?” Castillo asked.

Sieno hesitated for a moment before he answered.

“Not exactly a bad boy,” he said. “But I was one of the major reasons Tenet said what he did. And there were a lot of people between me and the DCI who didn’t want him to hear any more of that from me. So they brought me back to Langley from Moscow and told me—I should say, implied with credible deniability—that I had two choices. Option one, I could go to Buenos Aires as deputy station chief and they would arrange for Susanna to be here and we could double-dip and, as long as I kept my mouth shut, I could look forward to saving a lot of money for my retirement. Or, option two, I could stay in Washington and leak what I knew and they would guarantee that I’d be fired for cause. And, of course, lose my pension and my reputation.”

“Jesus!” Torine said.

“And being the moral coward that I am, I took option one,” Sieno said.

“So why are you telling us this now?”

“You won’t like the answer,” Sieno said.

“Try me,” Castillo said.

“You shamed me, Colonel,” Sieno said. He pointed at Munz. “And so did you, mi Coronel.”

“What do you mean ‘shamed’?” Castillo asked.

“When this whole thing started—the night Masterson got away from Munz and me…”

“You’re losing me, Paul,” Torine said. “Masterson ‘got away from you’?”

“When these bastards snatched Mr. Masterson, Alex Darby assigned me to sit on him and the kids at their house. So Alfredo and I did just that. We sat in a car outside his house. And Masterson went over the fence in the backyard, walked to the train station, took a train downtown to meet the bad guys, and they blew him away. He’s dead because I fucked up, in other words…”

“I don’t believe that, Paul, and neither does the ambassador or Alex Darby,” Castillo said.

“Let me finish, please, Colonel,” Sieno said. “Bottom line is, if I’d done my job right Masterson would not have climbed the fence and gotten on that train. I took this personally. I was going to find out who did it and get back at them. Then you showed up, Colonel, and you were in charge and I didn’t like that at all. A

t one time, I’d been a pretty good clandestine service field officer and Alex Darby knew that, and here is some Army major with friends in high places about to call all the shots. It wouldn’t have been the first time I’d seen that happen.

“So I went to Darby—who is one of the really good guys—and asked him what the hell was going on. He told me that you were the best special operator he’d ever known, that he’d seen you operate in Iraq and Afghanistan and knew what you had done about getting that stolen 727 back. And that since my ego was involved, and this was very important, he was going to keep me out of whatever you were going to do. He didn’t want me getting in your way.”