Hazardous Duty (Presidential Agent 8)

“And my abuela,” Castillo said softly, visibly fighting his emotions, “took one look at the picture, said I had my father’s eyes, and two hours after that, she and General Naylor—he was then a major—were in my grandfather’s Learjet en route to New York, where they caught the five-fifteen Pan American flight to Frankfurt.

“When they showed up at the house, I didn’t want to let them in. My mother was in great pain, looked like a skeleton, and I didn’t want anyone to see her looking like that, and in a cloud of cognac fumes.

“Abuela pushed past me, found my mother’s bedroom, and said…”

He lost his voice, and it took a very long moment before he was able to continue: “. . . and said, ‘I’m Jorge’s mother, my dear. I’m here to take care of you and the boy.’

“And my mother looked up at the ceiling and said, ‘Thank you, God.’”

“Two weeks after that, I got on another Pan American flight with my grandfather, carrying my new American passport as Carlos Guillermo Castillo, and flew to the States. My abuela stayed with my mother, who didn’t want me to see her in her last days. Two weeks after I got to San Antonio, she died. And I began my new life as a Texican, which is how Americans of Mexican background are described.”

“Your ancestors emigrated from Mexico to the United States, my son?” the archbishop asked.

“Your Eminence is familiar with the Alamo?” Castillo asked.

“Of course.”

“The Alamo today is owned by the Alamo Foundation, membership in which is limited to direct descendants of those men—some of Spanish blood—who died at the Alamo at the side of Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie, and Daniel Boone trying to keep the Mexicans out of what later became Texas. My grandmother served for many years as president of the Alamo Foundation. No, sir, I do not consider myself to be descended from Mexicans who immigrated to the United States. I am a Texican.”

“And a Hessian, apparently,” the archbishop said. “Fascinating!”

“If I may?” Pevsner asked.

The archbishop nodded his permission.

“Vladimir Vladimirovich sent another team of ex–Államvédelmi Hatóság to Germany with a dual mission. First, they were to eliminate Günther Friedler in a particularly nasty way—”

“Why?” the archbishop asked.

“‘Particularly nasty way’?” Archimandrite Boris repeated.

“Why?” Pevsner said. “Because he had been asking too many questions about the SVR ‘fish farm’ in the Congo where the former East German people were developing, even starting to produce, that very nasty biological warfare substance the Americans called ‘Congo-X.’”

“An abomination before God!” the archbishop said.

“You know about that?” Castillo asked.

“The church, my son, has its sources of information.”

“Oddly enough, Your Eminence,” Castillo said, “that’s exactly how Colonel Hamilton, who heads our biological warfare laboratory, described that stuff, as ‘an abomination before God.’”

“And so it is,” the archbishop pronounced.

“Was,” Pevsner said. “Before Charley. Now there’s no more of it, whatever it’s called.”

“God will bless Colonel Castillo for his efforts in that regard,” the archbishop announced.

“As I was saying,” Pevsner said, “Vladimir Vladimirovich’s assassins eliminated Herr Friedler in a particularly nasty way—they tried to make it appear he had died as a result of a spat between homosexuals—for his journalistic enterprise. But Vladimir Vladimirovich didn’t stop there. He wanted to send another message to the journalistic community that writing about the fish farm was dangerous, and the way he decided to do it was to assassinate the senior staff of the Tages Zeitung organization during Friedler’s funeral.”

“The senior staff being?” the archbishop asked.

“Eric Kocian, Your Eminence, publisher of the Budapest edition; the senior editor; Otto Görner, the managing director of Gossinger Beteiligungsgesellschaft; and the owner thereof, Herr Gossinger. I don’t really think he knew our Charley had two personas.”

“You are underestimating Vladimir Vladimirovich, Aleksandr,” Nicolai Tarasov said. “That’s dangerous. I’m quite sure he knew all about our friend Charley.”

“Then we are agreed to disagree,” Pevsner said. “I think we can agree, however, that Vladimir Vladimirovich regarded the elimination of Kocian, Görner, and my brother Charley as too important to be left to the Államvédelmi Hatóság, despite their well-deserved reputation for efficiency in such tasks, and therefore ordered Dmitri to assume command—after Friedler was in his casket—of the operation, to make sure Kocian, Görner, and my brother Charley were eliminated.”

“Your Eminence,” Nicolai said, “while I regret having to differ with my cousin Aleksandr again, I must. My feeling has always been that Vladimir Vladimirovich had no intention of shipping Dmitri and Svetlana to Russia when they were arrested in Vienna—having them in Russia would have posed a number of problems for him. Having them eliminated in Vienna, perhaps while trying to escape from the Austrian authorities, on the other hand, would have permitted Vladimir Vladimirovich to place the public blame for all the assassinations on Dmitri and Svetlana, and thus off himself, so far as the Germans were concerned. The SVR would know what had happened, that Vladimir Vladimirovich had eliminated his potentially most dangerous opponent—opponents, Dmitri and Svetlana. He would be ahead on both accounts.”