The Hunters (Presidential Agent 3)

He took a breath, then went on: “I wouldn’t have taken that from anybody but Alex Darby. But I’ve seen him operate. So I went along. And sure enough, he was right. You found that bastard Lorimer when nobody else could. You set up and pulled off that snatch operation in Uruguay in less time than I could believe, and—”

“That was not a complete success,” Castillo said. “Lorimer and one of my guys died. Alfredo took a bullet…”

“And you took out a Spetsnaz assault team to the last man. That doesn’t happen often. They’re good.”

“You’re sure they were Spetsnaz?” Castillo asked.

“Either Spetsnaz or Stasi or somebody else, maybe even Cubans, trained by—more important, controlled and financed by—the Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti. Who else but the FSB, Colonel? It’s time you started calling a spade a spade. You can’t talk about missing or stolen Russian nukes and leave them out of the discussion.”

“You said I shamed you. That Alfredo and I shamed you. What’s that all about?”

“Colonel, you did what you thought was the right thing to do—and so did you, Alfredo—without thinking of the consequences to yourself. I used to be that way before the bastards at Langley finally ground me down. That was shaming. So I decided to get off the sidelines.”

“Well,” Kocian said, “that makes it two of us in this room who know the KSB is behind all of this. It’s nice not to be alone anymore.”

“Three of us, Úr Kocian,” Sándor Tor said.

When Castillo looked at Tor, he went on: “I suspected after the incident on the Szabadság híd that your assailants were ex-Stasi—”

“What incident on the Szabadság híd?” Sieno asked.

“You’ve been to Budapest, too, Paul?” Castillo asked. “You do get around, don’t you? These bastards tried to snatch Billy on the Freedom Bridge—”

“Franz Joséf Byücke, Karlchen,” Kocian interrupted.

“…And when Sándor interrupted that, they shot Billy,” Castillo finished. He then said, “Please go on, Sándor.”

“I suspected ex-Stasi made the attack on Úr Kocian. The one Max bit and allowed us to catch said that he was from Dresden. That attack was professional. The proof came with the attack on you.”

“What proof?”

“We took fingerprints from the bodies of the men you shot,” Tor said. “They did not match the fingerprints of former members of the AVH or AVO. And both of the men you had to deal with had garrotes. Only three services used the garrote—the Hungarian Allamvedelmi Osztaly and Allamvedelmi Hatosag and the Ministry for State Security of the German Democratic Republic. Since they weren’t ex-AVO or ex-AVH, only ex-Stasi is left. And who is running all three? The KSB.”

Castillo started to say something but stopped when the door chimes went off.

Sieno got up and walked to a wall-mounted telephone by the door.

he said, “Sí, por favor,” hung the phone up, and turned to the others in the room.

“There’s another nice Italian boy in the lobby. He says he has our supper. I told the doorman to send him up.”

[THREE]

Everyone was seated around the table in the Sieno dining room, ready for their meal from Rio Alba. When Jack Davidson—who was slicing individual portions from the enormous bife lomo with what looked like a huge dagger—sensed Sieno’s eyes on him, he looked up and said, “Nice knife, Paul.”

“It’s a gaucho knife,” Sieno said. “I bought it to hang on the wall of my vine-covered retirement cottage by the side of the road. Then I started to use it.”

“You Jewish, Davidson?” Santini asked.

Davidson looked at him curiously. “Yeah. Why?”

“Then you will be fascinated to learn that there are forty thousand Jewish cowboys —gauchos— here.”

He stopped slicing. “You’re kidding!”

“Absolutely not. Mostly East Europeans. When they got off the boat in the 1890s, what Argentina needed was cowboys, so off to the pampas they got shipped. They wear the boots and the baggy pants, and stick knives like that under their belts in the back, but when they take off their cowboy hats there’s the yarmulke.”

“I have to see that.”