The Outlaws (Presidential Agent 6)

“Only my friends can call me Sweaty,” she replied evenly.

“Right now, Colonel Sweaty, getting to be your friend is right at the top of my list of things to do. Let me begin by saying I love your sombrero and that adorable puppy.”

Berezovsky, having wordlessly shaken hands with General Naylor and Colonel Brewer, now offered his hand to Allan Junior.

“Be careful, Colonel,” Berezovsky said. “Her bite is twice as bad as her bark.”

“I’m not a lieutenant colonel yet. Just picked to be one. I’m glad to meet you.”

“If our official business is over for the moment, General Naylor?” Castillo said.

“I have nothing further to say to you officially, Colonel.”

“In that case, Uncle Allan, I’m damned glad to see you, even in these circumstances.”

“Me, too, Charley,” Naylor said, and after an awkward fifteen seconds, they embraced.

“Lunch is being prepared,” Sweaty said. “The beef, compared to Argentina, is unbelievably bad.”

“Do we have to do anything for Lammelle, Vic?” Castillo asked.

“Castration with a dull knife might be a good idea, but if you’re asking because of the dart, no.” He looked at his watch. “He should be coming out of it in the next ten minutes or so. I’d love to be there when he wakes up and finds those two Russians sitting on him. He’ll think he’s been shipped off to Moscow. What are they, Charley? Spetsnaz?”

“Ex.”

“Where’d you get them?”

“We borrowed them from Sweaty’s and Dmitri’s cousin. He flew a dozen up yesterday from Argentina after Sweaty had another good idea.”

“Which was?”

“I’ll tell you when we’re upstairs,” Castillo said, and gestured toward the elevator. Then he added, “Thank God you can’t trust lawyers—maybe especially Mexican lawyers. Isn’t there a politically incorrect joke about that?”

“Meaning what?”

“Cutting a long story short, this place was supposed to have been burned to the ground after they exploded all the butane. But the Mexican lawyer who was supposed to do that—was trusted to do that—didn’t.”

“Aleksandr will kill him,” Sweaty said.

“Pay attention, Allan,” Castillo said. “That was not a figure of speech.”

General Naylor thought: And that comment was not Charley being cute.

[SEVEN]

Castillo led the group into a dining room and waved them into chairs around an enormous table. Naylor saw there was already one man sitting at the table—I wonder who that guy is?—and two burly, fair-skinned men armed with Uzi submachine guns, one sitting by each of the room’s two doors.

And I don’t think Charley’s pulling our leg about the Spetsnaz, either.

They look like Russians and they look like special operators.

Proof of that came immediately when Sweaty said something to them in Russian, to which one of them responded as an enlisted man does to an officer.

Castillo added something—gave an order—in Russian and the other Russian popped to attention and said something that was obviously, “Yes, sir.”

Both of them left the dining room.

“Sweaty ordered one of them to get us some coffee,” Castillo explained, “and I told the other one to fetch Mr. Danton.”