By Order of the President (Presidential Agent 1)

The second offered Viagra online without a prescription and the third told him now was the time to refinance his mortgage. He deleted both.

There was only one message on his MSN account, from :

UNCLE ALLAN IS WORRIED THAT YOUR CAR BROKE DOWN. SHALL WE TELL UNCLE BILL YOU’RE COMING? LOVE MOTHER

Major Castillo took a moment to consider his reply to the secretary of Homeland Security and then quickly typed it.

UNCLE ALLAN IS A WORRIER. CAR RUNNING FINE.

I’LL CALL UNCLE BILL IF I HAVE TIME TO GO THERE.

LOVE CHARLEY

He read the screen to make sure there were no typos and then pushed ENTER.

Going to the American embassy here would be a waste of time, and it would almost certainly draw attention to him.

Furthermore, he had already read, in Washington, the intel summaries. What the military attaché had sent to the Defense Intelligence Agency, what the CIA station chief had sent to Langley, and what the ambassador had sent to the State Department. If there had been significant developments on what happened to the missing 727 while he was on his way to Angola, the secretary would either have indicated that in the e-mail, or, at the least, ordered him to call home.

His job here wasn’t to find the airplane but rather, as the president had put it, to find out who knew what and when they knew it.

The German embassy was another matter. Not only would a German journalist be expected to check in with the embassy but Otto had sent them a message saying he was coming. More important, they might know something, or have an opinion, that they almost certainly would not have shared with the Americans.

Castillo unpacked, then had a shower and a shave. He drew the blinds against the early morning sun, lay down on the bed, and went to sleep.

He intended to sleep until nine or thereabouts. When he woke, it was 9:05. He dressed, brushed his teeth, and then went down to the lobby, had a cup of coffee and a croissant in the lobby lounge, and then went out and got in a taxi.

The doorman who put him into the cab asked in Portuguese where he wanted to go and Castillo told him, in what he hoped sounded like Portuguese. The doorman seemed to understand him.

[SEVEN]

The Chief of Mission at the German embassy, whose name was Dieter Hausner, was about Castillo’s age. He was thin, nearly bald, and well dressed. His office overlooked an interior garden. It was impersonal. The only picture on the walls was of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, and the furniture was modern, crisp, and efficient. Castillo was not surprised that the chrome-and-leather chair into which Hausner waved him was awkward to get into and would be worse getting out of.

Hausner told him the ambassador was sorry he couldn’t receive Herr von und zu Gossinger personally—the press of duty—but he hoped that while Herr von und zu Gossinger was in Angola he would have the chance to offer him dinner.

“That would be very nice,” Castillo said.

“You know, although I now consider myself a Berliner, I’m from Hesse myself,” Hausner said. “Wetzlar.”

“Oh, yes.”

“And I’m an Alte Marburger.”

The reference was to Phillip’s University in Marburg an der Lahn, not far from either Fulda or Wetzlar. Castillo had told people he was a Marburger. He knew enough about the school to get away with it, including the fact that the university usually turned a deaf ear to inquiries about its alumni unless they came from another university. Obviously, he couldn’t do that here, and get in a game of “did you know” with Hausner.

“My uncle Wilhelm—Willi—was a Marburger,” Castillo said.

“But not you? Where did you go to university?”

I am being interrogated. Why? Because the ambassador wanted to check me out before he fed me dinner? Or is Dieter here really the agency spook? Or the spook or counter-spook in addition to his other duties?

So far as I know, I have never done anything to arouse the curiosity of German intelligence, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have a dossier on Karl Wilhelm von und zu Gossinger.

Would Hausner routinely have run a security check on me when he got Otto’s heads-up that I was coming? Or would he presume that if the Tages Zeitung sent me, I was who they said I was? Or will he—if I arouse his curiosity—ask for a security check the minute I walk out of here?

“I went right from Saint Johan’s in Fulda to Georgetown, in Washington,” Castillo said. “My grandfather was a believer in the total immersion system of learning a foreign language.”

“And did it work?”