Hazardous Duty (Presidential Agent 8)

“I’m an old man, Sergei,” Raúl said. “Not as swift as I used to be. You want to explain this to me in simple terms?”

“Aleksandr Pevsner owns the Grand Cozumel Beach and Golf Resort. Which—Cozumel—is also a stop for cruise ships. So they hold the wedding in the resort and put up the guests who won’t fit in the resort in one of his cruise ships. Or two of them. That’s what Castillo and Svetlana are going there for, to set this up.

“Dmitri Berezovsky didn’t go along with them to Cozumel now, but he’ll be there for the wedding. He’ll probably give the bride away; he’s her brother. So we go there now, and get set up ourselves. And when everybody is jamming the place, there’s all the wedding excitement, we snatch the three of them, load them onto an Aeroflot airplane conveniently parked at Cozumel International—”

“For a nonstop flight to Moscow,” Raúl finished.

“Where your boss will tie the Yankee sonofabitch who stole our sixteen million in bearer bonds to a chair in Lubyanka,” Co

sada furnished.

“And spray him with ice water,” Raúl picked up.

“Until he is an ice sculpture,” Cosada said.

“How many men are you asking for, Sergei?” Raúl asked.

“Ten or twelve should do it.”

“General Cosada,” Raúl said, “make twenty-four of your best men available to General Murov immediately.”

“Yes, sir, Mr. President.”

“As a matter of fact, Jesus, I think you better go with him,” Raúl added.

[THREE]

The Imperial Penthouse Suite

The Grand Cozumel Beach & Golf Resort

Cozumel, Mexico

0945 11 June 2007

Castillo’s CaseyBerry vibrated and rang—the ringtone actually a recording of a bugler playing “Charge!”

“And how may I help the comandante on this beautiful spring morning?” he answered it.

There was a reply from Comandante Juan Carlos Pena, el Jefe of the Policía Federal for the Province of Oaxaca, to which Castillo answered, “Your wish is my command, my Comandante,” and then broke the connection.

Castillo then turned to the women taking the sun in lounge chairs beside the swimming pool. There were three of them: Svetlana Alekseeva; Susanna Sieno, a trim, pale-freckled-skin redhead; and Sandra Britton, a slim, tall, sharp-featured black-skinned woman.

“I’m afraid it’s back to the village for you, ladies,” Castillo said.

“What did you say?” Sweaty asked.

“El Comandante just told me to put my pants on and send the girls back to the village.”

Sweaty threw a large, economy-size bottle of suntan lotion at him and said some very rude and obscene things in Russian.

Max leapt to his feet and caught the suntan lotion bottle in midair. But to do so he had to go airborne himself, which resulted in him dropping from about eight feet in the air into the pool. This caused the ladies to be twice drenched, first when he entered the water—a 120-pound Bouvier des Flandres makes quite a splash—and again when Max, triumphantly clutching the bottle in his teeth, climbed out of the pool and shook himself dry.

With a massive and barely successful effort, the men attached to the ladies—Castillo; Paul Sieno, an olive-skinned, dark-haired man in his early forties; and John M. “Jack” Britton, a trim thirty-eight-year-old black-skinned man—managed to control what would have been hysterical laughter.

“Over here, girls,” Castillo said, as he went to the side of the penthouse and pointed downward, “you really should see this.”

Curiosity overwhelmed feminine indignation and they went and looked twenty-four floors down. So did Jack Britton, Roscoe J. Danton, and Paul Sieno.