The Hunters (Presidential Agent 3)

Alvarez smiled as if highly amused. McGrory looked at him curiously.

“Forgive me,” Alvarez said. “My wife is always accusing me of smiling at the wrong time. In this case, I was smiling at your—innocent, I’m sure—choice of words.”

“What words?” McGrory said.

“‘The poor fellow,’” Alvarez said.

“I’m not sure I follow you, Señor Alvarez,” McGrory said.

“What is that delightful American phrase? ‘Out of school’?”

“That is indeed one of our phrases, Señor Alvarez. It means, essentially, that something said was never said.”

“Yes. All right. Out of school, then. Actually, two things out of school, one leading to the other.”

“There’s another American phrase,” McGrory put in. “‘Cross my heart and hope to die.’ Boys—and maybe girls, too—say that to each other as they vow not to reveal something they are told in confidence. Cross my heart and hope to die, Señor Alvarez.”

Howell thought: My God, I can’t believe you actually said that!

“How charming!” Alvarez said. “Well, Señor Ordóñez, who is really with the Policía Nacional—he’s actually the chief inspector of the Interior Police Division—was telling me on the way over that Mr. Lorimer—or should I say Señor Bertrand?—was a very wealthy man until just a few days ago. He died virtually penniless.”

“Oh, really?” McGrory said. “That’s why you smiled when I called him a ‘poor fellow’?”

Alvarez nodded. “And I apologize again for doing so,” he said, and went on: “Señor Ordóñez found out late yesterday afternoon that Señor Bertrand’s bank accounts were emptied the day after his body was found.”

“How could that happen?” McGrory asked. “How does a dead man empty his bank account?”

“By signing the necessary withdrawal documents over to someone several days before his death and then having that someone negotiate the documents. It’s very much as if you paid your Visa bill with a check and then, God forbid, were run over by a truck. The check would still be paid.”

“Out of school, was there much money involved?” McGrory asked.

“Almost sixteen million U.S. dollars,” Ordóñez said. “In three different banks.”

This was the first Howell had heard anything about money.

When Alex Darby, the Buenos Aires CIA station chief who had driven Howell’s “black” Peugeot to Tacuarembó so that it could be used to drive Castillo and Munz to the estancia, returned the car to Howell in Montevideo, he had reported the operation had gone bad.

Really bad, but not as bad as it could have been.

Darby’s report of what had happened at Hacienda Shangri-La had been concise but complete—not surprisingly, he had been a CIA agent, a good one, for a longtime.

But no mention at all of any money.

Hadn’t Darby known?

Hadn’t he been told?

Or had he been told, and decided I didn’t have the Need to Know?

Jesus Christ, sixteen million dollars!

Did Castillo get it?

Or the parties unknown—parties, hell, with that kind of money involved, it was probably a government—who had sent the Ninjas after Lorimer?

“My God!” McGrory said. “Out of school, who was the someone to whom Mr. Lorimer wrote the checks?”

“We don’t know,” Alvarez said. “They were presented to the Riggs National Bank in Washington. All three of the banks here use Riggs as what they call a ‘correspondent bank.’”