“What the hell is that all about?” Miller asked.
“Even a heathen like you should know that the Holy Scripture—specifically First Corinthians chapter seven, verse nine—clearly says that it’s better to marry than to burn.”
“What the hell are you talking about, Liam?”
“I’d love to clear things up, but they’re holding dinner for us.”
“‘Us’ including Charley, Liam?” Torine asked.
“Of course. He’s the one burning to get married. I wouldn’t do what I’m doing for anyone else. Get in the helicopter. We’ll take care of the luggage.”
“Who’s driving?” Miller asked.
“I am,” a pleasant-appearing man about Miller’s age said. “Colonel Castillo said that you would probably ask. Former Major Kiril Koshkov, onetime chief instructor pilot, Spetsnaz Aviation School, at your service, Colonel Junior Miller.”
Torine laughed and put out his hand.
“Jake Torine, Major. Pleased to meet you.”
“An honor, Colonel,” Koshkov said. “Would you like to ride in the left seat?”
“Thank you,” Torine said. “Junior, why don’t you get in the back with Vic and the other Junior?”
Two minutes later, they were airborne, and flying up the east shore of Lake Nahuel Huapi.
As a young officer, Torine had read a book—Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler, by two Englishmen, Simon Dunstan and Gerrard Williams—that posited that Adolf and Eva Braun had not committed suicide in the Führerbunker but rather had made it to Argentina, where they had lived on Estancia San Ramon, east of Bariloche, until the early 1960s.
That was right about where they were now.
He had dismissed the book as bullshit then and continued to do so until his first visit to Aleksandr Pevsner’s La Casa en Bosque—where they were headed now—several years before. The house was well named. It had been built on 1,500 hectares of heavily wooded land on the western shore of Lake Nahuel Huapi.
The moment he walked into the mansion, Torine had had the feeling he’d either been there before, or seen photographs of the foyer. This was damned unlikely, as Aleksandr Pevsner’s desire for privacy was legendary, and there was no chance he would have allowed a photographer from Better Homes and Gardens or Country Living or Architectural Digest anywhere near the place.
But the “I know this place” feeling didn’t go away, and the next day Torine mentioned it to Charley Castillo.
“Really?” Castillo had asked, smiling, and then he went into the false top of his laptop where he kept various things he didn’t want people to see and came out with a somewhat battered photograph.
It showed two men, Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring and a Wehrmacht colonel, standing with their hands folded in front of them in the foyer of La Casa en Bosque.
“The man with Göring is Oberst Hermann Wilhelm von und zu Gossinger,” Castillo said. “My grandfather.”
Confused, Torine had blurted, “But how could that have been taken here?”
“That was taken at Göring’s Karin Hall estate in Prussia,” Castillo said. “Shortly after Grandpa managed to get on the last plane out of Stalingrad.”
“What is this place, Charley? A clone of Karin Hall?”
“It certainly looks like it. All I know is that Pevsner bought this place from an American woman when he got out of Russia. After I showed him this photo, he told Howard Kennedy—”
“The ex–FBI agent who worked for Pevsner?” Torine interrupted. “The one someone slowly beat to death with an angle iron in the Conrad Hotel and gambling joint in Punta del Este? That Howard Kennedy?”
Castillo had nodded.
“Aleksandr explained to me that both Mr. Kennedy’s death and the painful manner thereof was necessary pour l’encouragement des autres not to think they could get away with setting the boss up to be whacked.
“Anyway, Kennedy couldn’t find the American woman who sold him this place and he looked very hard. As you well know, when Aleksandr tells somebody to do something and they don’t do it, or screw it up, his tantrums make the famous tantrums of General McNab in such circumstances look like a small, disappointed frown.
“But Aleksandr did manage to get the plans for Karin Hall from a dishonest German civil servant, and they looked like a Xerox copy of the plans from which this place was built. Or vice versa.”