Hazardous Duty (Presidential Agent 8)

To a soldier’s eye, and Charley was a soldier, the patios appeared to have been designed and installed by someone familiar with the finer points of observation posts and machine-gun emplacements. While he had never seen a machine gun or a mortar tube in any of them, he would not have been surprised if such could be installed in minutes.

He didn’t know if the patios and the neat little buildings that might be holding machine guns and mortars had been there when Aleksandr Pevsner had bought the place—that it was a clone of Hermann Göring’s Karin Hall was very interesting—or whether Aleksandr Pevsner had put them in.

Just that they were there, and manned around the clock.

And being a soldier, Charley knew that when he and Max got to the patio now, they had arrived as the corporal of the guard, so to speak, was about to post the new guard.

There were five men on the patio, four sturdy, good-looking men with Uzi submachine guns hanging from their shoulders and a huge man, a Hungarian by the name of Janos Kodály, who had been in the Államvédelmi Hatóság before becoming Aleksandr Pevsner’s bodyguard, and was now in charge of his security.

They all came to attention—Castillo was not surprised, as he knew the four men were all ex-Spetsnaz, the Russian equivalent of Special Forces, and what to do when an officer appeared was a Pavlovian reaction for them—when Charley and Max walked onto the patio.

“C????? ??????,” Charley ordered in Russian, and the men stood “at ease” in response to Charley’s Pavlovian reaction. Then he switched to Hungarian and said, “Janos, aren’t you a little long in the tooth to be playing Corporal of the Guard at this hour?”

Two of the ex-Spetsnaz apparently spoke—or at least understood—Hungarian, because they smiled.

Janos didn’t reply directly, instead saying, “My Colonel, there is a thermos of tea.”

“Great,” Charley said.

—

When he was five, Charley’s great-aunt Erzsebet Cséfalzvik, his grandfather’s sister, had decided to teach him how to speak Hungarian. His response had been amazing. Within a week, he was chattering away fluently with the old woman, which greatly annoyed his mother, who did not speak Hungarian.

By the time he left for the United States, Aunt Erzsebet had died, but he had heard some of her story, and later learned the rest.

She was considerably older than her brother. As a very young woman she had married a Hungarian nobleman whom she had met while he was a student at Philipps University in Marburg an der Lahn. That explained why Karlchen’s mother had sometimes derisively referred to her as “the Countess.”

There was some kind of bad blood between her and the Gossingers—Charley later learned his great-grandfather had been violently opposed to her marriage—and she never returned to Germany until after World War II. Then she showed up at her brother’s house in Fulda, destitute and starving. She had been evicted from “the estates” by the Communists, and had nowhere else, no one else, to turn to.

She earned her keep when Charley’s grandmother died soon after his mother was born. Aunt Erzsebet had raised his mother.

As long as she lived, the old woman regaled Karlchen with tales of life in Hungary during “the Good Times.” He regarded them as being something like the story of King Arthur in Camelot, nice, but unbelievable.

When he was six, Karlchen was enrolled in Saint Johan’s School, which was experimenting with the notion that a good way to teach a foreign language to the young was to start when they were young. Karlchen was enrolled in the English program, and was old enough to understand this had caused problems between his mother and his grandfather. Something to do with his mysteriously missing father.

Two weeks into that program, Charley’s teacher asked him, “I didn’t think you spoke any English at all.”

“I didn’t.”

“And all of a sudden you do?”

“I guess I got that from Allan,” he had truthfully replied, in English, making reference to his new buddy, an American boy by the name of Allan Naylor. “I started to talk to him, and pretty soon it got easy.”

By the time Karlchen went to the United States as Carlos Guillermo Castillo, he spoke Hungarian, Russian, French, Slovak, and Ita

lian, in addition, of course, to German and English.

And he was also smart enough to know that his unusual facility with languages caused people to look upon him as some sort of freak, so he kept his mouth shut about it.

When two weeks of conversation with his newfound cousin Fernando Lopez had him speaking Spanish as well as Fernando, whose mother tongue it was, he kept that under his hat until his newfound abuela commented on it.

He started to lie to her, to tell her he had studied Spanish in Saint Johan’s School, but when he saw his grandmother’s eyes on him, he realized he couldn’t lie to her, and told her the truth.

His abuela told him that she thought it would be a good idea if he didn’t tell people about that gift from God; they probably wouldn’t understand.

Later, when the Army sent him as a young lieutenant to the Language School at Monterey for the basic course in Cantonese Chinese, he was rated as having “native fluency” in Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese, when given those tests.

At this point another mentor, this one Brigadier General Bruce J. McNab, offered advice much like that offered by his grandmother.