Black Ops (Presidential Agent 5)

". . . has elected to make you privy to this, I can tell you--is that Lieutenant Colonel Castillo, without any authority whatsoever, took it upon himself to completely ignore the carefully laid plans of the CIA station chief in Vienna to cause these Russians--important Russians; Berezovsky was the rezident in Berlin and the woman the rezident in Copenhagen--to defect and flew them here."

"Speaking hypothetically, of course," Castill

o put in, "what makes you so sure that the station agent in Vienna shared anything with me? I never laid eyes on her. How could I ignore something I didn't know?"

"Then what were you doing in Vienna, for Christ's sake?"

"Carrying out my orders to locate and render harmless those responsible for the assassination of Mr. Masterson."

"And Berezovsky and Alekseeva just popped into your life?"

"Actually, that's just about what happened. Hypothetically speaking, of course."

"You're going to explain that, of course?"

"If you think you can get your temper and indignation under control--and keep them that way--I'll give it a shot."

Montvale made a grand Go to it gesture.

"In a twenty-four-hour period starting the day before Christmas Eve, there were three assassinations. Two of them you called to ask me about: the garroting of the Kuhls in the Stadtpark in Vienna and--"

"You told me you had never heard of the Kuhls," Montvale interrupted.

"And I hadn't."

"Am I permitted to ask questions?" Ambassador Silvio said, then went on without waiting for a reply. "Who are the Kuhls?"

"Were," Montvale corrected him. "For a very long time, they were deep-cover CIA assets in Vienna. Primarily, they were involved in identifying Russians--and others--who could be influenced by others to defect. They had a number of successes over the years."

"And they were identified and killed?"

"That's what it looks like," Montvale said.

Montvale and Silvio watched while Castillo relit his cigar.

Then, after exhaling a blue cloud of smoke, Castillo went on: "At just about the time the Kuhls were assassinated, a correspondent of the Tages Zeitung, Gunther Friedler, was murdered in Marburg an der Lahn. That's a small city sixty miles or so north of Frankfurt am Main, best known for Philipp's University. The body was mutilated in an attempt to paint the murder as the result of a homosexual lover's quarrel. Friedler was investigating the Marburg Group, a collection of German businessmen known to have profited from the Iraqi oil-for-food scam. Specifically, Friedler was looking into the connection between these people and a chemical factory operating on what had been the West German nuclear facility in the former Belgian Congo."

"May I ask how you know this?" Silvio asked.

"I have an interest in the Tages Zeitung publishing firm," Castillo said.

Montvale smiled, then while looking at Castillo said: "Actually, Mr. Ambassador, in his alter ego role as Karl Wilhelm von und zu Gossinger, Castillo owns the Tages Zeitung publishing empire."

Silvio's eyebrows rose in surprise.

Castillo calmly went on: "I was, when we heard about this, in Washington with a man named Eric Kocian, who is publisher of the Budapest Tages Zeitung. An attempt to murder him in Budapest was made some time ago. Kocian was our man who reopened the Vienna Tages Zeitung after World War Two. And he was an old friend of the Kuhls. And he considered Friedler a close friend. He announced he was going to (a) go to their funerals and (b) find out who had murdered them. There was no way I could stop him, so we got on the Gulfstream and flew to Germany.

"Going off at a tangent, there were, within the twenty-four-hour period I mentioned, two more assassination attempts, both of which failed. One was here--actually in Pilar; that's about forty-five klicks from here, Mr. Montvale--when Comandante Liam Duffy of the Gendarmeria Nacional and his family were leaving a restaurant. . . ."

"I heard about that," Ambassador Silvio said softly.

"Duffy was in on the operation when we got the DEA agent back from the drug people in Paraguay. The second attempt, in Philadelphia, was on Special Agent Jack Britton of the Secret Service and his wife. They took fire from fully-auto AKs as they drove up to their home. For years, Britton had been a deep-cover Philly cop keeping an eye on an aptly named bunch of African-American Lunatics involved in, among other things, the lunatic idea of crashing that stolen 727 into the Liberty Bell and making mysterious trips to Africa--including the Congo--financed, we found out, with oil-for-food money.

"Britton was on the Vice President's security detail. When he was informed 'of course, you're off that assignment' and otherwise made to feel he was being punished for having been the target of an assassination attempt, he said some very rude things to various senior Secret Service people, then told them what they could do with the Secret Service and came to see me before we flew to Germany. I sent him and his wife down here--"

"And why did you think you had the authority to do that?" Montvale demanded.

Castillo ignored the interruption and, looking at Silvio, continued: "I was initially thinking Jack would be just the guy to help protect Ambassador Masterson in Uruguay. And since Jack had, so to speak, burned his Secret Service bridge, I didn't think--and still don't think--that I had to ask anyone's permission."