The Hunters (Presidential Agent 3)

“Yes, sir. I understand, sir. Where do think Mr. Alvarez got an idea like that? About a Special Operations mission?”

McGrory did not reply directly.

Instead, he said, “The question is, why would he make such an absurd accusation? That was the question I asked myself, the question that kept me from immediately reporting the incident to the department. I did, however, just about throw him out of my office.”

“Did he offer anything to substantiate the accusation?” Yung asked.

“He showed me a…thingamabob…the shiny part of a cartridge, what comes out of a gun after it’s fired?”

“A cartridge case, sir?”

“Precisely. He told me it had been found at the estancia. And he told me he had gone directly to the Uruguayan embassy in Washington and they had gone to the Pentagon and the Pentagon had obligingly informed them that it was a special kind of bullet used only by U.S. Army competitive rifle shooters and Special Forces.”

“A National Match case, sir? Did the case have NM stamped on it?”

If it did, it almost certainly came from that Marine high school cheerleader’s rifle.

McGrory pointed his finger at Yung and nodded his head.

“That’s it,” he said.

“That’s not much proof that our Special Forces were involved,” Yung said.

“Of course not. Because they were not involved. If there were Special Forces involved, Mr. Howell and I would have known about it. That’s a given.”

“Yes, sir.”

“My temptation, of course, was to go right to the department and report the incident. You don’t just about call the American ambassador a liar in his office. But as I said before, Yung, I’ve been in the diplomatic game for some time. I’ve learned to ask myself why somebody says something, does something. I realized that if I went to the department, they’d more than likely register an official complaint, possibly even recall me for consultation. And I thought maybe that’s what the whole thing was all about. They wanted to cause a stink, in other words. Then I asked myself, why would they want to do that? And that answer is simple. They were creating a diversion.”

“To take attention from what, sir?”

“What really happened at that ranch, that estancia.”

“Which is, sir?”

“Think about this, Yung,” McGrory replied, indirectly. “Bertrand—Lorimer—had nearly sixteen million dollars in banks here. Did you know about that?”

Yung didn’t answer directly. He said, “Sixteen million dollars?”

McGrory nodded.

“That’s a lot of money.”

“Yes, it is,” McGrory agreed. “And the United Nations—although their pay scales are considerably more generous than ours—wasn’t paying him the kind of money—even if he lived entirely on his expense account, which I understand a lot of them do—for him to have socked away sixteen million for a rainy day. So where, I asked myself, did he get it?”

He looked expectantly at Yung, who looked thoughtful, then shrugged.

“You’ve been looking into money laundering,” McGrory said, some what impatiently. “Where does most of that dirty money come from?”

“Embezzlement or drugs, usually,” Yung said.

“And there you have it,” McGrory said, triumphantly. “Lorimer was a drug dealer.”

“You really think so, sir?”

“Think about it. Everything fits. With his alter ego as an antiques dealer, he was in a perfect position to ship drugs. Who’s going to closely inspect what’s stuffed into some old vase—some old, very valuable vase? You can get a lot of heroin into a vase. And where did Lorimer get his new identity and permission to live in Uruguay? The best face they could put on that was they were surprised that he was dealing drugs right under their noses. He had probably paid off a half dozen officials. That would come out, too.”

“It’s an interesting theory, Mr. Ambassador,” Yung said.