“Thank you, Mr. President,” Robin interrupted.
“For what?”
“Getting my name right.”
“Right. You’re welcome. What I want you to do, Hackensack, is get DCI Lammelle on the phone.”
“Yes, sir, Mr. President. May I ask why?”
“Because I told you to, you moron. By now you should understand that I’m the President and you’re the flunky, and that means I give the orders and you obey them. Got it?”
“Yes, Mr. President.”
“When you finally get around to obeying your orders and get Lammelle on the phone, I’m going to order him… which I can do because I’m the President and he’s another flunky… to immediately get on his airplane and fly to Cozumel, where he will order Colonel Castillo to immediately cease and desist any outrageous plans he may have in mind to slaughter innocent and illiterate Somalian teenagers.”
[THREE]
Penthouse A
r /> The Royal Aztec Table Tennis and Golf Resort and Casino
Cozumel, Mexico
1830 21 June 2007
“Well, we seem to have been swept away on Cupid’s wings, don’t we, my dear Agrafina?” General Sergei Murov said as he reached for the bottle of Stolichnaya on the bedside table.
“Either on Cupid’s wings, or on a wave of lust,” she replied. “Stolichnaya tends to arouse that in me.”
“In that regard, my darling, vis-à-vis lust, I have a confession to make.”
“If you’re about to confess it was the smell of the borscht, I would advise you not to.”
“I won’t deny the smell of the borscht had something to do with what happened just now…”
“Careful, my love!”
“What the smell of the borscht did was first make me think of my mother, may she rest in peace, and then of my first love. Her name was Svetlana.”
“And this Svetlana smelled of borscht?”
“Sometimes. But what I was trying to say was that the smell of the borscht reminded me of my lost love, Svetlana. At that point, I lost control, moved the mirrored vanity onto my patio, climbed up on it, and looked over the glass barrier.”
“Now that this has happened to us, I’m glad I missed with the bottle of Dos Equis I threw at you.”
“And what I saw made my heart beat even faster. For a moment, I thought I was going to faint.”
“When you peeped over the glass barrier, I was modestly clothed in my itsy-bitsy tiny polka-dot bikini. If seeing me in that almost made you faint, how come you didn’t faint later after you ripped it off me?”
“What made me nearly faint was seeing you, seeing the remarkable resemblance you bear, my darling, to my lost love Svetlana.”
“Really? I gather you saw this Svetlana dame when she was not wearing her whatever they call itsy-bitsy tiny polka-dot bikinis in Russia?”
“No. Our love was not only one-sided—she never really liked me—but pure. I never saw her less than fully clothed.”
“And that’s why you didn’t marry this broad? She didn’t like you and wouldn’t take her clothes off?”
“I am sure that my beloved Svetlana never took her clothing off in the presence of any man—with the possible exception, of course, of her gynecologist—until she went to her marriage bed.”