The Hunters (Presidential Agent 3)

“Of what?”

“Who are you protecting the Munz family from? And why? And what are they doing here? And what’s your connection with El Coronel Munz, whom you say you don’t know.”

“I didn’t say I didn’t know him; I said that was a question I didn’t choose to answer.”

“Are you going to tell me now?”

“Are you going to tell me about the interesting developments about the Shangri-La massacre?”

Ordóñez took a long moment before he replied.

“Do the names Vasily Respin and Aleksandr Pevsner ring a bell with you, David?”

“It’s one man,” Yung said. “I’m not sure which is his real name, and there are other aliases. There’s a dozen, maybe more, Interpol warrants out for him. For all sorts of things.”

“He’s in Argentina, using the name Pevsner,” Ordóñez said.

“How do you know that?”

“Alfredo Munz told me.”

“Why hasn’t he been arrested?”

Ordóñez shrugged. “Obviously, it is not in the best interests of the Argentine government to arrest him.”

“He’s paid somebody off?”

Ordóñez shrugged. “That could be. He has all kinds of money. Enough, for example, to own a Bell Ranger helicopter.”

Jesus Christ! Is that where Castillo got the Ranger? From an international mafioso?

“It’s not like fingerprints, of course, but the skids of helicopters make skid-marks in mud—like the mud near Estancia Shangri-La—that are identifiable. I mean, it’s not too hard to determine what type of helicopter made the marks in the mud. The helicopter at Estancia Shangri-La was a Bell Ranger.”

“You think it was Pevsner’s?”

“I don’t know. I do know there aren’t very many of them around Buenos Aires. I do know that after being at Jorge Newbery airport, early on the night of the Shangri-La massacre, Pevsner’s Bell Ranger took off, visual flight rules, for Pilar. It closed out its flight plan over Pilar. Since there is no airport in Pilar, there is no record of it landing there. Very early in the morning on the day of the massacre, Pevsner’s helicopter returned to Jorge Newbery, again flying under visual flight rules from Pilar. And again, since it had not landed at an airport, there is no record of it having taken off from one. It stayed there until late in the day, when it again returned to Pilar under visual flight rules.

“There is enough time between Pevsner’s Bell Ranger closing out its flight plan over Pilar the night of the massacre and its return to Jorge Newbery early the next morning for it to have been flown to Tacuarembó Province and back. By flying very low, it would not have appeared on radar either here or in Argentina.”

“You think Pevsner was involved in the business at the estancia?”

“I don’t know, David. But Pevsner is not one of those people I dismiss from suspicion because of his lily-white reputation. Now I will tell you what else I have learned, with the caveat that when I finish you will tell me what you know about any of this.”

“If that was the offer of a deal, it wasn’t accepted.”

“That’s an admission, you realize, that you know something.”

“No, it isn’t. I had no idea, for example, until just now that this Russian mafioso was in South America or that he owns a helicopter. I said ‘No deal’ because, after you tell me what else you know and ask me what I know and I tell you nothing, you can’t say I’m breaking our deal.”

Ordóñez looked at Yung intensely for a moment but did not respond directly. Instead, he said, “You remember me telling you that, among other things we did together, we worked on the protection of foreign dignitaries, such as Fidel Castro?”

Yung nodded.

“And that one of the things that really puzzled me about the massacre was that two of the Ninjas were shot with a special rifle bullet issued only to your competitive marksmen and Special Forces soldiers?”

“I remember.”

“An additional puzzling factor here was the reaction of Ambassador McGrory when Deputy Foreign Minister Alvarez very circuitously asked him if there was any possibility that your Special Forces were in any way involved. I was watching his face. His surprise was genuine, as was his anger at the question. If your Special Forces were involved, Ambassador McGrory didn’t know about it. That leaves two possibilities—that they were not involved or that they were on a mission of such secrecy that the American ambassador was not told.”