Black Ops (Presidential Agent 5)

Castillo answered: "The primary connection between all these assassinations, Liam, both successful and failed, with the possible exception of yours, is that everybody either knew or soon would uncover more details about an Islamic terrorist operation than the SVR wanted them to know."

"What kind of a terrorist operation?" Duffy asked.

Castillo ignored the question, and instead replied: "The assassination of the German journalist--his name was Friedler--was because he was getting too close to the Germans who were involved in the oil-for-food cesspool."

"Did you ever hear, Comandante," Berezovsky said, "that 'it is impossible to cheat an honest man'?"

"What?" Duffy asked.

"The corollary of that is that you can cheat--or otherwise steal from--a dishonest man."

"I have no idea what you're talking about," Duffy said, as much indignantly as in confusion.

"When the Iraq oil-for-food program was in operation," Berezovsky went on, "there were many people who grew rich from it. One of the ways to turn a nice profit was to raise the price of the food and medicine and medical supplies being sold to Iraq. Hands were washed . . ."

"Greased, Tom," Castillo corrected him.

". . . greased," Berezovsky went on, his face and tone making it clear he was unaccustomed to being corrected and certainly not grateful for the clarification now, "and the appropriate authorities found nothing wrong with, for example, a microscope of the type used in elementary schools to examine the wings of a fly and available in a store for, say, fifty dollars being shipped to Iraq as the latest item in medical microscopy and valued at a thousand times the fifty dollars it had actually cost.

"The man--the example here is a member of what we're calling the Marburg Group--took the fifty-thousand-dollar check, cashed it, made a small gift--say, five thousand dollars--to the invoice examiner, and pocketed the difference, not mentioning it to the tax people, of course, and went away patting himself on the back for being a very clever businessman.

"It wasn't all medical equipment, of course. A great deal of food was in fact shipped to Iraq and fed to the hungry. Possibly as much as ten percent of that was purchased at shamelessly inflated prices. One hundred cases of canned chicken became a thousand cases by the 'mistaken' adding of a zero to the invoice. The invoice examiner, of course, missed the mistake. You getting the picture, Comandante?"

Duffy nodded.

Castillo said: "All of this stopped, Liam, when we deposed Saddam Hussein. What these thieves then found to be necessary was to clean things up to make sure none of the very important people who profited--the name of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan's son has been mentioned--would be caught. One man who we know not only profited--to the extent of sixteen million dollars--but also knew who had been paid off and for what was a UN official. His name was Dr. Jean-Paul Lorimer and he had then been living in Paris. But Lorimer saw what was coming and fled to Uruguay, where he had bought an estancia, changed his name, and set himself up in business as an antiquities dealer.

"Lorimer's sister was married to the number-two man at the American embassy in Buenos Aires, J. Winslow Masterson. When what we have come to call 'the cleaners' couldn't find Lorimer, they decided his sister probably knew where he was. So they kidnapped her from the parking lot of the Kansas Restaurant in San Isidro. That's when I became involved, Liam."

"How? Why?"

Well, if nothing else, I have his attention.

Let's see how he reacts to this:

"I work for the President of the United States, Liam, dealing with matters like these. Surely, you must have suspected?"

"When you had those helicopters flown off your aircraft carrier . . ."

"The USS Ronald Reagan," Castillo furnished.

". . . I suspected you were more than a simple lieutenant colonel."

"Well, until now, Liam, I was not in a position to explain more."

"I understand, Carlos," Duffy said.

"Just about as soon as I got down here," Castillo went on, " 'the cleaners' tricked Jack Masterson into going to the riverside in downtown Buenos Aires, where they killed him in cold blood before his wife to make the point that unless she told them where her brother was they were perfectly capable of killing her children, too.

"The problem was that Mrs. Masterson had no idea where her brother was. Fortunately, I had a pretty good suspicion. My people and I got to the estancia in Uruguay--"

"How did you find him, Carlos?"

Castillo looked at Duffy without speaking.

The cold truth is, Liam, it was dumb luck.

God takes care of fools and drunks--and I qualify on both counts.