By Order of the President (Presidential Agent 1)

“It may have needed parts. Do you know who owned it?”

“A small airplane dealer in Philadelphia,” Castillo said, “that probably had it insured and will now place a claim. That may be enough in itself, but if they were involved in having the plane stolen and can sell the parts . . .”

“Precisely,” Hausner said.

“I’d like to see where the airplane was parked all that time,” Castillo said after a moment. “Is that going to be dif ficult?”

“There’s not much to see,” Hausner said. “A concrete pad in a far corner of the airfield. I’ve been there. But, no, it won’t be a problem. I know the security man at the airfield. I’ll give him a call and tell him you’re coming.”

Hausner opened his desk drawer and took two business cards from a box. He wrote a name on one of them and then handed both to Castillo.

“A small gift for his favorite charity might be a good idea,” Hausner said, smiling.

“I think I’ll go out there now,” Castillo said. “Before it gets hot.”

“I’ll send you out there in one of our cars,” Hausner said. “And then you can take a taxi to your hotel when you’ve finished. ”

“That’s very kind of you,” Castillo said.

“Not at all,” Hausner said. He stood up and offered his hand.

[EIGHT]

Hausner was right. There was nothing much to see at the airport, although the “little gift” Castillo gave to the airport security manager for his favorite charity resulted in having that dignitary drive him to the remote parking area in his Citroën pickup truck.

There were four parking pads near the north threshold of the main runway. None were in use. The one the security manager pointed out as where the 727 had been parked was identical to the others—an oil-stained square concrete pad with grass growing through its cracks.

Controllers in the tower across the field would have seen the 727 every time they looked in the direction of the runway ’s northern threshold.

Taking off without permission would have been simple. All the pilot would have had to do—and almost certainly did do—was call ground control for permission to taxi to the hangar/terminal area. When that permission was granted, all the pilot had had to do was make a right turn off the taxiway onto the threshold, and then another right onto the runway and go. He would have been airborne before any but the most alert controller would have noticed he wasn’t on the taxiway.

Castillo ran the numbers in his mind:

If the pilot kept the 727 close to the ground, he would have been out of sight in no more than a minute or two and disappeared from radar in not much more time. If he was making three hundred knots—and he almost certainly would have been going at least that fast—that was five miles a minute. In twenty minutes, he would have been a hundred miles from the airport. In half an hour, he would have been 150 miles from the airfield, and even if he had climbed out by then in the interest of fuel economy he would have just been an unidentifiable blip on the airfield’s radar screen. He certainly would not have activated his transponder.

In the taxi—this one a Peugeot—to El Presidente Hotel, Castillo decided that he was not going to learn much more in Luanda than he already knew. The CIA and DIA and State Department intel filings would have the details of who was suspected of flying the plane off, who serviced the plane so that it would be flyable after sitting there for so long, and so on. There was no sense wasting time duplicating their efforts himself now. When he’d assembled and collated everybody ’s filings, he would know which of the agencies had made the same sort of decision to let another agency develop something they should have developed themselves. This is one of the things the president had said he wanted to know.

The airplane was bound to show up. When that happened, he would probably be able to determine who had done the best job of finding out what had happened, and, more important, who had not learned something that should have been learned. Plus, of course, who had made the best guess about what was going to happen.

The president had made it clear he wanted to know who had known what and when. And who had done or not done something others had done.

Castillo decided that what he would do was go to his room and write a story for the Tages Zeitung. He would e-mail it both to Germany and to Hall. The secretary would understand from the Tages Zeitung filing that he hadn’t learned anything that hadn’t already been reported.

Afterward, he would spend the afternoon hanging around the hotel bar. Striking up conversations with strangers often produced an amazing amount of information. If something new—or even the suggestion of something new—came up, he would run it down. If not, he’d go back to Germany, and from Germany home. Until the plane showed up, there was really nothing else he could do, and the plane might not show up for weeks. Unless, of course, he thought wryly, he went back to Washington, where the 727 would show up when he was halfway across the Atlantic.

And, as a corollary of this reasoning, Castillo decided he would stay away from Miss Patricia Wilson. For one thing, she wasn’t what she announced herself to be and that made a dalliance with her, if not actually dangerous, then an awkward situation very likely to explode in his face. For another, he had the feeling she was not the sort of female who could be lured into his bed in the little time he planned to be in Luanda.

[NINE]

There was no blinking green light in the locking mechanism of Castillo’s hotel room door when he slid the plastic “key” into it.

He tried reinserting it in all possible ways, simultaneously working the lever-type doorknob. He had just inserted it, as he thought of it, wrong side out and upside down, when the door was opened from the inside.

As a reflex action, he jumped away and flattened his back against the corridor wall.

There was no explosion, either per se, or of persons bursting into the corridor with weapons ready.

Instead, a chubby, smiling, very black face looked around the doorjamb into the corridor. He recognized it immediately. It belonged to Major H. Richard Miller, Jr., Aviation, U.S. Army, a USMA classmate of Castillo’s. The major was wearing a not-very-well-fitting, single-breasted black suit, a frayed-collar white shirt, and a somewhat ragged black tie.