Hazardous Duty (Presidential Agent 8)

Koblenz, Germany

1125 16 June 2007

Charley Castillo’s CaseyBerry sounded “Charge!” and he picked it up, saw who was calling, and put it to his ear.

“Hey, Paul.”

“Charley, are you really in the middle of the Rhine River, or did you tell Aloysius to send out spurious GPS data again?” Paul Sieno asked.

“Not exactly in the middle; we’re about to tie up in Koblenz. How are things in sunny Cozumel?”

“Getting interesting, which is why I called.”

“How so?”

“You’ll never guess who’s here.”

“But you are going to tell me, right? I’m so exhausted from my labors that I’m not up to playing guessing games.”

“Grigori Slobozhanin.”

“Who the hell is he?”

“He’s the chief coach of the Greater Sverdlovsk Table Tennis Association, and he brought a half-dozen of his better Ping-Pong players here with him. Plus a couple of dozen Cuban Ping-Pongers.”

“Okay, Paul, I give up.”

“Before he took up table tennis, he was known as General Sergei Murov.”

Castillo was suddenly very serious.

“Paul, get with Juan Carlos Pena as soon as you can—”

“Way ahead of you, Charley,” Sieno interrupted.

“I know Juan Carlos doesn’t exactly look like that suave Mexican actor,” Castillo went on, stopping when he couldn’t recall the actor’s name, and then, when he had partial recall, continuing, “Antonio Bandana, or whatever the hell his name is, but he’s not only one damned smart cop but one of my oldest friends.”

“Gringo, if I can have ‘one damned smart cop’ in writing, I’ll pretend I didn’t hear your unflattering comparison of me to Antonio Whatsisname,” Juan Carlos Pena said.

“How are you, Juan Carlos?” Castillo asked.

“I hope we interrupted something important,” Pena said.

“You did. I was sitting here in a deck chair drinking wine and watching Sweaty sunbathe in a bikini.”

“You both better stay there,” Pena said. “Why don’t you go to Las Vegas and get married in the Elvis Presley Wedding Chapel, like normal people?”

“Instead of Cozumel, you mean?”

“I have enough trouble in Cozumel already. I don’t need another river of blood scaring the tourists away because the Cuban DGI doesn’t like you.”

“What makes you think the Cuban DGI doesn’t like me?”

“When Paul told me that General Sergei Murov was here with his Ping-Pong players, and General Jesus Manuel Cosada was here with a dozen of his Ping-Pong players—”

“Who?”

“I can hear your abuela saying, ‘Carlos, you have to learn not to interrupt your betters when they’re talking, otherwise people won’t like you.’”