The Hostage (Presidential Agent 2) - Page 104
"It's midnight. Is anything open?" Jack Britton interrupted.
"This is Argentina. They go to dinner starting at ten," Castillo said. "There's the hotel restaurant."
"I don't want to get dressed up enough to go to a restaurant," Britton said. "You, Betty?"
"I want to get out of these clothes," Special Agent Schneider said, triggering mental images in Major Castillo's mind, "and into a hot shower," she concluded, triggering additional mental images. "But I'm starved."
"What about room service?" Britton asked.
"Sure. Is that what you want to do?"
"Are the rooms big enough for all three of us to have dinner?" Special Agent Schneider asked. "I don't like to eat sitting on a bed."
"Mine is," Castillo said.
"Why don't we do that?" Britton asked. "Could you order dinner for us while we shower? Neither of us speaks Spanish that well."
"What do you want?"
"Anything, as long as it's warm and comes with a double Jack Daniel's," he said.
Special Agent Schneider laughed and got onto the elevator.
"Make that two," she said, and handed Castillo his jacket.
Major Castillo happened to notice that with the jacket no longer covering her, Special Agent Schneider's rain-soaked dress now clung to her body like a coat of varnish. He averted his eyes.
"I'm in fifteen-hundred," he announced as they got off the elevator. "At the far end of the corridor. I'll order us something to eat."
The elevator triggered a memory of Howard Kennedy.
Shit, I didn't call him with the names.
He felt in his jacket for the sheet of lined paper Yung had given him. It was soaked, but it was legible.
He carefully laid the soggy sheet of paper on the glass-topped coffee table in the sitting room, then went into his bedroom and stripped off his clothing.
Four years of practicing West Point Class 202- Personal Hygiene, or How to Take a Shower in No Time at All-paid off. Five minutes after entering his bedroom he came out of it, showered and dressed in slacks and a shirt.
First he called room service and ordered dinner, plus a bottle of Jack Daniel's and, after a moment's thought, a bottle of Famous Grouse and two bottles of Senetin cabernet sauvignon. He had shared a bottle of that with Ambassador Silvio at lunch, and, as the ambassador had said, it was really first class.
Then he called the valet and told him he had a soaking wet suit that he absolutely had to have dried and pressed and back by six-thirty in the morning. That posed no problem for the valet, which made Castillo suspect the drying and pressing service of the Four Seasons was probably going to cost as much as the suit had when he'd bought it at the annual Brooks Brothers sale at thirty-five percent off the tag price.
Finally, he sat down on the couch and punched Kennedy's autodial button on his cellular.
They could barely hear each other, which was explained when Kennedy said he'd never seen so much goddamn rain in his life. The rainstorm had apparently moved the fifteen miles or so between Jorge Newbery and Aeropuerto Internacional Ministro Pistarini de Ezeiza and was interfering with the cellular signals.
He was down to the last name on the list of FBI agents-he'd had to spell each one phonetically, sometimes twice-when the doorbell chimes bonged.
When he opened it, Special Agent Schneider, a lady who was probably from the valet service, and a man in a bartender's white jacket pushing a rolling table with the whiskey, wine, and the accoutrements were standing there.
Special Agent Schneider was wearing blue jeans and a sweater. Her hair looked damp.
He motioned them all into the room.
"Fix yourself a drink," he said. "Food's on the way."
He signed the bill for the drinks, then motioned the lady from the valet service into the bedroom and pointed out the waterlogged suit to her.
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