The Hunters (Presidential Agent 3)

He had just finished tying his necktie when the doorman called to say his car was waiting for him.

[TWO]

Mayerling Country Club

Pilar, Buenos Aires Province, Argentina

1020 9 August 2005

The entrance to the Mayerling Country Club was very much like the entrance to the Buena Vista Country Club, four miles or so away on the other side of Route 8, where Aleksandr Pevsner lived. There was a guardhouse, with armed guards controlling a barrier pole. And, like Buena Vista, there was a shrubbery-shrouded, twelve-foot-high chain-link fence topped with razor wire, behind which the roofs of only a few houses were visible from the road.

There was immediate proof that the security was good when the guards refused to pass Alex Darby’s BMW until they called the house and got permission from someone—they later learned it was Mr. Sieno—to pass.

“Would they have passed us if you had CD plates on this?” Castillo asked as they drove slowly along the curving country club road at the prescribed thirty-kilometer-per-hour speed limit announced every one hundred meters by neatly lettered signs and reinforced by speed bumps every two hundred meters.

“No. And I didn’t put my name on the frequent visitor list, either,” Darby said. “The image I want to give is that the house is rented by the Sienos, a nice young Argentine couple of means from Mendoza.”

“Is her—their—Spanish good enough to make that credible?”

“Yeah. She did almost a year, clandestine, in Havana. She’s good, Charley. They’re both good. They had bright futures until he caught a bad case of career suicidus.”

“Of what?”

“An uncontrollable urge to tell Langley things Langley doesn’t want to hear. I had a pretty bad case of it myself.”

“You mean you’re here for the same reason?”

Darby nodded.

“You never said anything, Alex.”

“You didn’t ask, Colonel. It’s sort of a two-sided coin. Life is a lot nicer here than other places you and I have been to. And the people who work for me are really first-class. I wonder sometimes, however, how much useful information comes out of the good boys and girls in the unpleasant places who tell Langley what it wants to hear.

”

“Tell me about Edgar Delchamps,” Castillo said.

“How’d you get along with ol’ Ed, Charley?”

“Very well, I think.”

“He’s one of the good guys. I thought you two probably would get along.”

“How did he avoid getting a dose of career suicidus?”

“He had it. I would say he had a nearly fatal case of it.”

“Then what’s he doing in Paris? Don’t tell me that’s the agency’s version of Siberia.”

“Maybe not Siberia, but it’s one of those places where the good boys and girls don’t want to go because you can’t help but learn all sorts of things the Fran-cophiles in Virginia don’t want to read about while they’re humming ‘April in Paris.’ And Ed knows where a lot of the bodies are buried. When they yanked him out of Germany, he said that’s where he wanted to go and they backed down. They have sort of an understanding. He writes what he wants to and they don’t read it.”

Castillo grinned but shook his head in disgust.

he said, “How much do you think Delchamps would know about Colonel Pyotr Sunev of the KGB?”

“Probably a lot more than Langley wishes he does,” Darby said. “They got more than a little egg on their face when the defector they marched before Congress turned out to be quite the opposite. One of the reasons they’re annoyed with Ed is that he warned them the guy was bad news. Nobody likes ‘I told you so.’”

“That means he knows something about Russian suitcase nukes?”