Hazardous Duty (Presidential Agent 8)

“I thought you were the president now.”

“I am, but Fidel is still Fidel. He just doesn’t come to the office as often as he used to.”

“I found out just before I got on the plane to come here that Castillo and his fiancée, the former Podpolkovnik Svetlana Alekseeva, and a couple of Castillo’s people, the Merry Outlaws, just left Bariloche for Cozumel.”

“Couple of questions, Sergei. Castillo’s fiancée?”

“He’s going to marry her. That’s what ‘fiancée’ means.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“No, I’m not.”

“Unbelievable! He’s not a bad-looking guy. And no offense, Sergei, but every female SVR podpolkovnik I’ve ever seen looks like a Green Bay Packers tackle in drag.”

“This one doesn’t. Believe it.”

“Merry Outlaws?”

“That’s what President Clendennen calls Castillo’s people. If that’s good enough for him…”

“What are they going to do in Cozumel?”

“I gave that a good deal of thought before I understood.”

“Understood what?”

“What they’re going to do in Cozumel. It’s going to be a great big wedding. All the OOOR—and there’s a hell of a lot of them.”

“All the what?”

“Like ROCOR, which, as I’m sure you know, stands for Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia.”

“No, I didn’t,” Raúl confessed.

“Me, either,” Cosada said. “What the hell is it?”

“We don’t have time for that right now, maybe later. OOOR stands for Oprichnina Outside of Russia.”

“And what the hell does Oprichnina mean?” Castro asked.

“I really don’t have the time to get into that with you either, Raúl. But trust me, there’s more of them than anybody suspects and they’ll all want to come to the wedding. The Berezovsky family—and Svetlana was Svetlana Berezovsky before she married Evgeny Alekseev and became Svetlana Alekseeva—is one of the oldest, most prestigious families in the Oprichnina.

“If anybody in the OOOR gets invited to the wedding, and they all will, they’ll go. Just the Oprichniks in Coney Island would fill a 747. And they’ll all bring their security people, now that I think of it. So two 747s from Coney Island alone.”

“Where the hell is Coney Island?” Cosada asked.

“In New York City. You know the place where they have—or had—the parachute tower? For ten dollars, you got to make sort of a parachute jump?”

“Oh, yeah,” Cosada said. “I think the parachute tower is gone, but I know where you mean.”

“Don’t take offense, Sergei,” Raúl said, “but I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”

“Aleksandr Pevsner’s La Casa en Bosque in Bariloche is big, but not big enough for all those Oprichnik wedding guests. And there’s only a few hotels there. And Aeropuerto Internacional Teniente Luis Candelaria couldn’t handle one 747, much less a bunch of them. So what are they going to do? A cruise ship—maybe two cruise ships—is what they’re going to do. A cruise ship is sort of a floating hotel.”

“Where are they going to get a cruise ship?”

“The last I heard, Pevsner owned twelve of them,” Murov said. “Most of them are like floating prisons, but a couple of them, I understand, are very nice.”