The Outlaws (Presidential Agent 6)

!”

“You are really trying my patience, friend Charley, but since you are being so intentionally dense, let me spell it out for you—”

“I don’t speak Russian,” García-Romero interrupted.

Pevsner ignored him, and continued in Russian: “What I do, as you well know, is move things around.”

“Like drugs?” Castillo asked sarcastically.

“Not knowingly,” Pevsner said. “Not that I think drugs are any more reprehensible a cargo than, say, the shipments of arms I have moved on many occasions and for years for your Central Intelligence Agency, but rather because when, inevitably, one of my shipments of arms, for example, is intercepted by the authorities, all that happens is that I lose the shipment and pay a fine. If the authorities intercept a cargo of drugs, my airplanes are confiscated and the authorities try very hard to make sure everyone goes to jail.

“That said, and again as you very well know, in recent years I have severed my connection with the CIA and, for that matter, with the SVR, when that involves the shipment of arms.

“Just about everything that Nicolai and I now transport around the world is perfectly legal. Moving currency, and the bearers of that currency, from one place to another may not be perfectly legal, but if there is a violation, it is of customs and immigration laws. People caught by the authorities attempting to illegally enter a country are simply returned to where they came from. If customs officers discover they have in their luggage undeclared large amounts of currency, the usual punishment is the seizure of half of it.

“In that connection, an amateur attempt by Hugo Chávez several months ago to send about a million dollars to the president of Argentina—”

“‘An amateur attempt’?” Castillo interrupted sarcastically.

“—without it coming to the attention of the authorities failed because the courier used a chartered private jet—a Gulfstream like yours, if memory serves. People using chartered jets attract the attention of the authorities. The Argentine customs people carefully searched the courier’s bags as he passed through customs, found the money, refused his offer of a little gift, and confiscated half of the money. The courier had dinner that night with the president. You getting the picture?”

“I really would like to know what you two are saying,” García-Romero said.

“If moving money around is so easy, why do they need you to do it?” Castillo asked.

“Discretion, Carlos,” Nicolai Tarasov said. “The people we move money for are as much—perhaps more—concerned that no one finds out they are moving money as they are for the money itself. They don’t want to be embarrassed as the president of Argentina and Hugo Chávez were when their courier was caught.

“If one of their couriers is caught aboard one of our aircraft—which very rarely happens—we say we didn’t know he had the money with him, and the courier tells them he was carrying the money for someone not remotely connected with the people he’s actually carrying it for. Half of the money—presuming the customs officials cannot be bribed, and they usually can—is confiscated. The owners of the currency write the loss off as the cost of doing business, and that’s the end of it.”

“You’re telling me the only thing Drug Cartel International is used for is moving money?” Castillo said.

“That’s exactly what I’m trying to tell you,” Pevsner said. “And that’s why I was so surprised when Nicolai said he thought it likely the Tu-934A had come here. I had trouble believing your Uncle Héctor could be that stupid.”

Pevsner turned to García-Romero, who of course had recognized his name being said, and switched to Spanish.

“I just told Carlos that I had trouble believing you could be so stupid,” he said. “Now, let’s turn to that. Start at the beginning, Héctor, and tell us how this fiasco came to happen.”

García-Romero looked very uncomfortable.

“Let’s hear it, Héctor,” Pevsner said coldly.

“Valentin Borzakovsky came to me and said the Russian embassy had a problem,” García-Romero began. “He said they had reason to believe the CIA had infiltrated Aeromexpress Cargo ...”

“What won’t those evil Yankees be up to next?” Pevsner asked.

“... which the Russians use as their air-freight forwarder. Borzakovsky said the Russian embassy really needed to get something from Moscow the Americans couldn’t know about,” García-Romero finished.

“Do you think those blue beer kegs they unloaded from the Tu-934A might have contained nuclear weapons?” Castillo said jokingly.

But what the hell am I joking about?

They contained Congo-X, which is just about as bad.

“I’m not as naïve as you seem to think, Carlos,” García-Romero said. “There were radiation detectors waiting for that shipment.”

And if the needles on your radiometers had gone off the scale, and you had said anything, you and everybody who works for you in the cave would be dead and the nukes would be in Mexico.

“Go on, Héctor,” Pevsner said.