Black Ops (Presidential Agent 5)

"Clear?" Castillo pursued.

"I hope you're not going to be in Africa long, Carlos."

"Not ten seconds longer than absolutely necessary."

"I can wait that long," Duffy said.

[THREE]

Pilar Golf & Polo Country Club

Pilar, Buenos Aires Province, Argentina

0725 3 January 2006

Very carefully--so as not to wake Svetlana--Castillo got out of bed, walked across the tile floor to the bathroom, and closed its door behind him. The door was substantial; he didn't think Svetlana would hear the sound of the shower through it.

He had seen the bathroom during Svetlana's quick tour of the house, and again just before they had gone to bed, but he hadn't paid much attention to it. Now, taking a good look, he decided that this bathroom made the all-marble bath in the Presidente de la Rua Suite of the Four Seasons Hotel, which at the time he had thought was pushing opulence to new heights, look like the plywood-holed-planking honey bucket sanitary facilities he had known so well in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other exotic locales.

The Club House--where everyone, including Max and Marina, had gone for dinner in a convoy of electric golf carts--had been similarly mind-boggling. It looked more like one of Saddam Hussein's palaces in Baghdad than, for example, the Southern Hills Country Club in Tulsa. And the furnishings and service made the Petroleum Club in Dallas look like a Motel 6.

He remembered Abuela telling him that before World War II, when people wanted to describe someone as stinking rich and needed a more elegant phrase, they said, "Rich as an Argentine." Abuela had also told him that Juan Domingo Peron had managed to squander, during his tenure as dictator, what in 1938 had been the largest gold reserves in the world.

But some of that enormous wealth, to judge by the miles of high-rise luxury apartments in Buenos Aires and those lining the beaches of Punta del Este, had somehow managed to elude Peron's grasp.

Then another part of his brain kicked in. He remembered documents he'd read--ones still classified sixty years after the war's end--about the movement to Argentina of vast sums of money by senior members of the about-to-crumple Nazi structure. That, in turn, triggered memories of Aleksandr Pevsner's Bariloche copy of Goring's hunting estate mansion, Karinhall. The odds that that had been built by a successful cattle breeder were pretty damn slim.

That was his final profound philosophical thought before he stepped away from a sanitary facility mounted on the marble wall of its own softly lit cubicle. A red light flickered in a gold-plated box and the urinal flushed.

"Oh, God, how did I ever get through life having to flush my own pissoir?" he asked aloud, then left the cubicle and headed for the shower.

He looked at his new wristwatch. He would have just about an hour until Delchamps and Davidson--who had gone to Nuestra Pequena Casa after dinner--would bring just about everybody--which, it was to be hoped, would include Uncle Remus and Dick Miller, who should have arrived sometime during the night and been taken to the safe house--for the first meeting on what would happen in Africa and--more important--how in hell they would make it happen.

"Oh, God," he again asked aloud, "how did I tell time all those years without a Rolex?"

He pulled open one of the two doors to the shower, stripped, and stepped inside. He picked up a bar of soap and started to bathe. Then he smelled himself, decided the bar of soap was the causative factor, and sniffed it.

"Oh, God," he once more asked aloud, "how did I ever get through life without soap like this?"

He soaped his body and then closed his eyes and soaped his hair and face.

"Jesus Christ!" he exclaimed as he suddenly felt hands on his body that weren't his.

"If you let me wash yours, I'll let you wash mine," Svetlana said, and stuck her tongue in his ear.

[FOUR]

0840 3 January 2006

The bar had been turned into a meeting room.

Everyone--including Dick Miller and Uncle Remus--was there when Castillo and Svetlana walked in.

"Overslept, did you, Ace?" Delchamps greeted them.

"Sorry," Castillo said. "Everybody met?"

There were nods and a chorus of "Uh-huhs."