The Shooters (Presidential Agent 4)

He went to it. He ducked his head to get inside, and as he entered the van he suddenly had the sensation of what felt like a bee sting in his buttocks.

Then everything went black.

One of the Highway Policemen pushed his body all the way into the van and the door closed. The other Highway Policeman ordered Timmons's driver out from behind the wheel, handcuffed him, then forced him into the backseat.

Then he got behind the wheel and drove off toward the airport.

The Peugeot panel van followed.

[TWO]

Nuestra Pequena Casa

Mayerling Country Club

Pilar, Buenos Aires Province, Argentina 1645 31 August 2005 "Sergeant Kensington," Lieutenant Colonel C. G. Castillo said, "if you say 'un-fucking-believable' one more time, I'm going to have the sergeant major wash your mouth out with soap."

Sergeant Robert Kensington-a smallish, trim twenty-one-year-old-turned from a huge flat-screen television screen mounted on the wall of the sitting room and looked uneasily at Lieutenant Colonel Castillo, who was thirty-six, blue-eyed, had a nice thick head of hair, and stood a shade over six feet tall and one hundred ninety pounds.

Sergeant Major John K. Davidson, who was thirty-two and a little larger than Lieutenant Colonel Castillo, looked at him, smiled, and said, "With all possible respect, Colonel, sir, the sergeant is right. It is un-fucking-believable."

"He's got you there, Ace," a nondescript man in his late fifties wearing a blue denim shirt and brown corduroy trousers said, chuckling. "'Un-fucking-believable' fits like a glove."

His name was Edgar Delchamps, and though technically subordinate to the lieutenant colonel, he was not particularly awed by Castillo. Men who have spent more than thirty years in the clandestine service of the Central Intelligence Agency tend not to be awed by thirty-six-year-old recently promoted light birds.

"Lester's around here someplace," Castillo said. "I don't want Kensington corrupting him any more than he already has."

Delchamps, Davidson, Colonel Alfredo Munz, and Sandor Tor chuckled.

Munz, a blond-headed stocky man in his forties, until recently had been the head of SIDE, which combines the functions of the Argentine versions of the FBI and the CIA. He was of German heritage and fluent in that language and several others.

Tor, a Hungarian, was director of security for the newspaper Budapester Tages Zeitung. Before that, he had been an Inspector of Police in Budapest, and in his youth had done a hitch in the French Foreign Legion.

"I cannot hear what that woman is saying over all this brilliant repartee," Eric Billy Kocian announced indignantly, in faintly accented English. The managing director and editor-in-chief of the Budapester Tages Zeitung was a tall man with a full head of silver hair who looked to be in his sixties. He was in fact eighty-two years of age.

Delchamps made a megaphone with his hands and called loudly, clearly implying that Kocian was deaf or senile, or both: "Billy, it looks like they've got a little storm in New Orleans."

Everybody laughed.

Kocian threw his hands up in disgust and said something obscene and unflattering in Hungarian.

But then the chuckles subsided and they all returned their attention to the television.

In deference to Kocian, Munz, and Tor, they were watching Deutsche Welle, the German version, more or less, of Fox News. It was covering Hurricane Katrina in the Gulf Coast of the United States and had just reported, with some stunning accompanying video, that eighty percent of New Orleans was flooded, some parts of the port city under twenty feet of water, its entire population forced to flee.

Castillo stared at the images of one of America's major cities in complete chaos, and at the collection onscreen of talking heads representing local, state, and federal government officials-all unequivocally with their thumbs up their collective asses while blaming one another for failure after failure-and heard himself mutter, "Un-fucking-believable…"

Not much in Nuestra Pequena Casa was what it appeared to be. Starting with the fact that Our Little House was in fact a very large house, bordering on a mansion. It was in the upscale Mayerling Country Club in the Buenos Aires suburb of Pilar.

It had been rented, furnished except for lightbulbs and linen, just over three weeks before to a Senor Paul Sieno and his wife, Susanna. The owner believed them to be a nice and affluent young couple from Mendoza. They had signed a year's lease for four thousand U.S. dollars a month, with the first and last month due on signing, plus another two months' up front for a security deposit.

The Sienos had paid the sixteen thousand in cash.

Cash payments of that size are not at all uncommon in Argentina, where the government taxes every transaction paid by check and where almost no one trusts the banks.

Both el Senor y la Senora Sieno were in fact agents of the Central Intelligence Agency, and what they had really been after was a "safe house," which is usually defined within the intelligence community as a place nobody else knows about where one may hide things and people.

Nuestra Pequena Casa-the owner had named it-was ideal for this purpose.