Hazardous Duty (Presidential Agent 8)

“One of those he eliminated, for example, was Kurt Kuhl, who owned several pastry shops—called the Kuhlhaus—in Vienna, Prague, and Budapest. Vladimir Vladimirovich had good reason to believe that Herr Kuhl was a CIA asset who over the years had facilitated the defection of a number of SVR personnel, and agents controlled by the SVR.

“The bodies of Herr Kuhl and his wife were found behind the Johann Strauss statue in the Stadtpark in Vienna. They had been murdered with metal garrotes of the type the former Hungarian secret police, the Államvédelmi Hatóság, were fond of using. It isn’t much of a secret that those members of the Államvédelmi Hatóság who hadn’t been hung by their countrymen when Hungary severed its connection with the Soviet Union often found employment with the SVR, so Vladimir Vladimirovich could send that message, too, to other CIA assets. ‘We know about you, and are going to eliminate you.’

“Another problem for Vladimir Vladimirovich was right here,” Pevsner continued, gesturing toward Liam Duffy. “The SVR had a very profitable business going shipping cocaine and heroin from Paraguay and elsewhere through Argentina to Europe and the United States. The profits were used to fund SVR operations all over South America. When, rarely, the movements were detected, palms were greased, the drugs went back into the pipeline, and the shippers either never went to trial, or if they did were either freed or slapped on the wrist.

“Then my friend Liam was assigned the duty—the Gendarmería Nacional was—and things changed. Liam is a devout Roman Catholic who took his oath of office seriously. When his people intercepted a drug shipment, they burned the drugs and ran the shippers before courts which were not for sale.

“Worse than that, so far as Vladimir Vladimirovich was concerned, was that Liam began to hold—what’s that charming phrase?—drumhead courts-martial at the arrest scene, which saved the government the cost of trials and the expense of feeding the drug people during long periods of incarceration.”

“Holy Scripture teaches us,” the archbishop said disapprovingly, to ‘judge not, lest thee be judged.’”

“I considered that prayerfully, Your Eminence,” Duffy said, “and decided I could successfully argue my case before Saint Peter.”

“Vladimir Vladimirovich sent people to eliminate my friend Liam,” Pevsner continued, “and his family, and the attempt was made on Christmas Eve. All of the assassinations, or attempted assassinations, took place on Christmas Eve. In Liam’s case, the attempt failed.

“And finally, there was a reporter, Günther Freidler, who worked for Charley’s Tages Zeitung newspaper chain.”

“Excuse me?” the archbishop asked, and then parroted, “‘Charley’s newspaper chain’?”

“My brother Charley has two personas, Your Eminence,” Pevsner explained. “One of them is Lieutenant Colonel Castillo, U.S. Army, Retired, and the other is Herr Karl Wilhelm von und zu Gossinger, who is by far the principal stockholder of Gossinger Beteiligungsgesellschaft, which owns, among other things, the Tages Zeitung newspaper chain.” He paused, and then added, “If Your Eminence was concerned that my brother Charley’s interest in marrying my cousin Svetlana is based on her affluence, I respectfully suggest it is not a factor.”

“I don’t understand,” the archbishop said.

“I’m a bastard, Your Eminence,” Castillo said. “Born out of wedlock to an eighteen-year-old German girl, following her seventy-two-hour dalliance with an eighteen-year-old American chopper jockey.”

“‘Chopper jockey’?” the archbishop parr

oted.

“Helicopter pilot,” Castillo clarified. “Whom she never saw or heard from again.”

“There are men like that, unfortunately,” His Eminence said. “I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive him.”

“I have managed to convince myself, Your Eminence, that my father never knew he had… left my mother in the family way.”

“I can’t let that ride, Charley,” Naylor said.

Castillo shrugged.

The archbishop made a go on gesture to Naylor.

“Charley’s mother didn’t know what had happened to Charley’s father until she was literally on her deathbed,” Naylor said.

“How do you know that?” the archbishop said.

“I was there,” Naylor said. “My father was deeply involved. What happened was that Charley’s mother, knowing she was about to die and Charley would be an orphan—his grandfather and uncle had died in a car accident on the autobahn the year before; she thought he was really going to be alone—asked my father to find Charley’s father.”

“Asked your father?” the archbishop said.

“Yes, sir. My father was an officer in the 14th Armored Cavalry, then patrolling the border between East and West Germany. The border line had cut Charley’s family’s property just about in half. Charley’s mother and my mom were friends.

“So my father started looking for Charley’s father. He wasn’t hard to find. He was buried in the National Cemetery in San Antonio, Texas. A representation of the Medal of Honor was chiseled into his headstone.

“Once the Army learned that the twelve-year-old German boy about to be an orphan was the son of an American officer who had posthumously received our nation’s highest award for valor—at nineteen—the Army instantly shifted into high gear to take care of him. They knew that when his mother died, he would inherit just about all of Gossinger Beteiligungsgesellschaft, G.m.b.H., and were concerned that Charley’s inheritance would fall into the hands of Charley’s father’s family and be squandered.

“While a platoon of senior Army lawyers began looking into trust funds and anything else that would protect him, my father was sent to San Antonio to see if he could find Charley’s family, and to see what problems they were going to pose for Charley.

“He found Charley’s grandmother and showed her a picture of Charley.”