The Outlaws (Presidential Agent 6)

“But once I saw the picture in the Frankfurter Rundschau of Charley getting off his private jet,” Barlow went on, “I decided that Svetlana and I were going to leave Europe on that aircraft if I had to give him Sirinov and all the ex-Államvédelmi Hatóság people.”

“And from that moment, until we walked into Alek’s house here, everything went smoothly,” Svetlana said. “Does no one see the hand of God in that?”

“I do,” Castillo said.

When Sweaty looked at him, he sang, “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”

“Don’t mock God, Charley!” she snapped furiously and moved away from him on the couch.

“Well,” Pevsner said, “Dmitri and Svetlana were not intercepted in Vienna, and that was the end of that. Except of course that Liam applied the Old Testament eye-for-an-eye principle to Lavrenti Tarasov and Evgeny Alekseev, who had come to Argentina in search of Tom and Svetlana.”

“Not quite,” Delchamps said. “Alex’s good buddy, Miss Dillworth, sicced a reporter—a good one: Roscoe J. Danton of The Washington Times-Post—on Charley. He came to Alex’s apartment just before we got out of there.”

“A reporter? What did he want?” Castillo asked.

“He wanted you, Ace. He probably wants to know why you stole Sweaty and Tom out from under Miss Dillworth’s nose. And if Dillworth told him about that, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if she told him you left the Vienna rezident—what was his name? Demidov?—sitting in a taxi outside our embassy with an Államvédelmi Hatóság garrote around his neck, and her calling card on his chest.”

“I had nothing to do with that, as you goddamn well know. The story going around is that some old company dinosaur did that.”

“You sound like you think I had something to do with it,” Delchamps said.

“Do I?” Castillo said sarcastically.

“Funny thing about those old company dinosaurs, Charley. You’re too young of course to know much about them. But they really believe in what it says in the Old Testament about an eye for an eye, and if they do something like what happened to Demidov, they never, ever, ’fess up to it.”

“Changing the subject just a little,” Tom Barlow said. “I think we should throw this into the facts bearing on the problem: Just as soon as Sirinov and/ or Vladimir Vladimirovich heard that the Americans had taken out the Fish Farm, they realized that information had to have come from me.”

“You don’t know that,” Castillo argued.

“In our profession, Charley,” Tom said, “we never know anything. All we ever have is a hypothesis—or many hypotheses—based on what we think we know.”

“Touché,” Castillo said.

“We all forget that at one time or another,” Barlow said.

Castillo met his eyes, and thought, That was kind of you, Tom.

But all it did was remind everyone in this room that I am the least experienced spook in it.

Which, truth be told, I am.

“One of the things I was tasked to do in Berlin was make sure that the Fish Farm got whatever it needed,” Barlow went on. “It’s not hard to come up with a hypothesis that Sirinov and Vladimir Vladimirovich reasoned that since Polkovnik Berezovsky knew about the Fish Farm and it was destroyed shortly after Polkovnik Berezovsky defected to the Americans, whose CIA had looked into the matter and decided the factory was indeed a fish farm, Polkovnik Berezovsky told the Americans what it really was.”

“You knew what the CIA thought?” Charley asked.

“Of course,” Barlow said.

“You had ... have ... a mole?”

“Of course, but you don’t need a mole to learn things like that,” Barlow said. “Actually you can often learn more from a disgruntled worker who wouldn’t think of betraying her country than from an asset on the pay

roll.”

“Your pal Dillworth, for example, Alex,” Delchamps said. “What is it they say, ‘Hell hath no fury like a pissed-off female’?”

“Eleanor is a pro,” Darby said, again showing his loyalty.

“She pointed Roscoe Danton at Charley,” Delchamps argued. “What hypothesis does that suggest?”