Black Ops (Presidential Agent 5)

"Is it available on short notice for a long flight?"

"Define 'long flight.' "

"Twelve thousand kilometers."

"Not without a fuel stop. The range is about thirty-seven hundred nautical miles. Where do you want to go?"

"Twelve thousand kilometers from Vienna," Berezovsky said.

"Buenos Aires," Svetlana added.

That shouldn't have surprised me--she mentioned Zhdankov--but it did.

"Why there?"

"That's none of your business," Berezovsky said.

"It is if I'm going to take you there. . . ."

"We have family there," Svetlana offered, "who can help us vanish."

"I'll need the details of that," Castillo said.

"When we're under way," she said. "At the fuel stop, I'll tell you."

Am I supposed to believe that?

/> "You are going to take us there, aren't you?" Svetlana asked.

She said, staring soulfully into my eyes.

Nice try, sweetheart.

Somebody must have told you of my reputation for being a sucker when beautiful women in distress stare soulfully into my eyes.

Who was it who said that the most important sex organ is between the ears?

But I'm not a sucker right now, thank you very much.

What I have to do right now is scare them a little.

"What I have to do right now is confer with Mr. Davidson to decide if what I might get out of helping you outweighs what you're trying to get out of me," Castillo said.

He saw disappointment in Svetlana's eyes.

And that makes me feel lousy, sweetheart.

But right now I'm doing what I know I have to.

Castillo went on: "So, what I think you should do now is go back to your compartment. On the way, see if anybody's tailing you. In twenty minutes, one of you--not both--come back, having decided between you what else you're going to tell me besides the name of a dead SVR officer's replacement to entice me to stick my neck out by not only trusting a couple of SVR agents I have never seen before and know nothing about in the first place, and then flying them halfway around the world with their former comrades in hot pursuit."

He stood, said in Hungarian, "Stay, Max," then stepped to the door, unlatched it, slid it open, and almost mockingly waved Berezovsky and Svetlana to pass through it.

"Twenty minutes should give you enough time to talk things over," he said.

Berezovsky gave him a dirty look as he left. Svetlana avoided looking at him.

Castillo slid the door closed after them, then looked at Jack Davidson.