The Outlaws (Presidential Agent 6)

“My husband is shopping. He shops. I cook. Should be back anytime now.”

Dianne Sanders had spent most of her working career as a cryptographer and later as a highly respected cryptographic analyst. Harold, her husband, had been a Delta Force special operator until he developed heart disease and had been medically retired.

For a while he had been what he described as a “camp follower,” taking care of their house while Dianne stayed on active duty. That hadn’t worked, and eventually—Hell, with both our retirements we can live pretty damned well—Dianne had retired, too.

That hadn’t worked either.

They both had been climbing the walls of their garden apartment in Fayetteville, North Carolina, when CWO5 Colin Leverette, aka Uncle Remus, who had been around the block many times with Harold, asked them if they would be interested in running a safe house for Charley Castillo outside Washington. Harold had been around just as many blocks with Castillo as he had with Uncle Remus, and the Sanderses had jumped at the chance to get out of the garden apartment.

Julia Darby made Bloody Marys and handed them to Tom and Dianne.

“Take a sip of that, and then go back on duty,” she said.

He did so, and said, “Okay.”

“Ask me how Alex is,” Julia said.

“Okay. How’s Alex?”

“I hope that miserable sonofabitch and his hot-pants, large-breasted, twenty-year-old Argentine girlfriend freeze together in Ushuaia,” she said.

“Where or what is Ushuaia?”

“It’s the southernmost city in Argentina, way at the end. Coldest place I’ve ever been, including the personnel office at Langley.”

“You don’t expect me to believe that about Alex, do you?”

“I don’t care if you believe it or not, but I hope Charles M. Montvale does. I’d love to hear that he’s running around down there freezing his ass looking for Alex.”

Tom McGuire grinned.

“You have always been an evil woman, Julia,” he said admiringly, and tapped his Bloody Mary against hers. “How do you spell ‘Ushuaia’?”

[FIVE]

Penthouse B

The Grand Cozumel Beach & Golf Resort

Cozumel

Quintana Roo, Mexico

1805 6 February 2007

En route to Cozumel—somewhere over Peru—a dozing Castillo woke to find Sweaty’s head resting on his neck. Upon smelling her perfume, he realized with more than a little pleasure that there was going to be enough time between their arrival in Cozumel and dinner for what the French—who sometimes do things with a certain style—called a cinq à sept.

He dozed off again considering this pleasant possibility, to be wakened perhaps an hour after that by one of the pilots of the Boeing 777 offering him a very nice luncheon plate fresh from the microwave.

Sweaty already had hers.

Castillo waited until the pilot had moved away, then asked her in French: “Ma chère, what does ‘a five-to-seven’ mean to you?”

“Five to seven means what it sounds like,” she replied in Russian. “I have no idea what a five-to-seven means.”

“Just as soon as we get to our room in the hotel, I’ll show you a”—he pronounced the term phonetically—“sank-ah-set.”

She kissed his cheek. “But I have other plans for you just as soon as we get to our room in the hotel, my darling.”