By Order of the President (Presidential Agent 1)

“On the 727

story?” she asked.

He nodded.

“Me, too,” she said.

You told me, you beautiful creature, that you were going to Berlin. Therefore, you were lying. Or are lying. Or both.

What the fuck is going on here?

Besides, that missing airliner is a breaking story. Forbes comes out every other week. They don’t do breaking stories.

As if she had read his mind, Patricia Wilson said, “My editor wants an in-depth piece about sloppy air control in Africa, and I thought, Well, hell, why not start where they lost an airplane?”

Good try, Patricia, but that’s bullshit.

“Good idea,” Castillo said.

[SIX]

Le Presidente Hotel Largo 4 de Fevereiro Luanda, Angola 0605 4 June 2005

There were a dozen or more black men in business suits and chauffeur’s caps holding cards with names lettered on them waiting for the passengers as they came out of customs at the airport. One of the cards read: PATRICIA WILSON.

“I guess the hotel sent a car for me, too,” she said. “What do we do?”

“I suspect you’ll have to pay for it anyway,” Castillo said, “and I suspect both cars will be small.”

“And probably French?” she asked.

“If yours breaks down—and it probably will—I’ll rescue you,” Castillo said. “And you can do the same for me.”

“Call me later? I need the attentions of a beautician.”

“Absolutely,” he said.

He had put her into her car, a Citroën, and then followed his driver to a Mercedes. He wondered if that was random or whether the Meridien hotel chain had a policy: Germans get Mercedes, Americans get Citroëns.

When he didn’t see her in the hotel lobby he was disappointed. He thought her driver had probably made much better time through the very early morning traffic in the small Citroën than he had in the larger Mercedes and that she was probably already in her shower. That triggered an immediate mental image.

There’s no question about it. At this almost obscene hour of the morning my hormones are raging.

And you know in your bones that this one is dangerous and that you should back off.

He tried out his Portuguese on the assistant manager behind the registration desk, but the French hotelier insisted on responding in barely understandable German.

In which he said welcome to Le Presidente and that he would have to keep Castillo’s passport.

Hotels did that either to make sure they got paid—not a valid excuse here because his bills were to be paid directly by the Tages Zeitung—or so the police could have a look at it.

The “small suite” was a sitting room, a bedroom, and an alcove with a desk and chair that wasn’t large enough to be called a room. A high-speed Internet cable was neatly coiled on the desk.

The windows of both the sitting room and the bedroom looked out and fifteen stories down onto the bay. There was a basket of fruit and a bottle of wine on the coffee table and a terry cloth robe had been laid across the double bed.

Castillo wondered if the room was bugged, but that was an automatic thought. As he always assumed any gun he picked up was loaded, he always assumed hotel rooms were bugged. He knew a lot of people who really should have known better who had fired “unloaded” guns and others who had wrongly presumed “There’s no way this place could be bugged.”

He took his laptop from its briefcase and plugged the charger and the ethernet cable into it. The high-speed access to the Internet was up and running. There were three e-mail messages for him on One was from a company promising to return the full purchase price (less shipping) if their product failed to increase the size of his male member. After a moment’s thought, and pleased with himself, he forwarded that one to castillo.com.