Covert Warriors (Presidential Agent 7)

“Oh, he protested bitterly,” Castillo said. “It was as hard for me to talk him into it as it would have been for me to talk someone who’s been wandering around the Sahara Desert for a month into having a glass of ice water.”

She smiled.

“And how do you justify your two-point-seven-million-dollar toy?”

“I’d rather not tell you. You might decide that Sweaty’s profligate.”

“My Uncle Nicolai has one, Abuela,” Sweaty explained. “He uses it to fly—‘high rollers,’ right, Carlito?—back and forth to the Grand Cozumel from Mexico City and Miami . . .”

Castillo thought: And for other purposes, such as hauling suitcases full of hundred-dollar bills out of Drug Cartel International to someplace where they can be laundered.

“. . . and when I saw the way Carlito looked at it, like a little boy watching an electric train in a store window . . .”

She mimed this by opening her eyes very wide and letting her tongue hang out the side of her mouth.

Doña Alicia laughed.

“I know the look,” Doña Alicia said. “When he and Fernando were about twelve, their grandfather showed them a pair of Winchester .30-30 Model 1894 lever-actions that he said he was sending down to Hacienda Santa Maria . . .”

Doña Alicia paused when Sweaty’s face showed a lack of understanding.

“The grapefruit farm,” Castillo explained.

Doña Alicia went on: “The rifles were for keeping the deer from eating our grapefruit. They were to be a Christmas present for them, but they didn’t know that. And both of them . . .”

She opened her eyes wide and let her tongue hang out of the side of her mouth.

Sweaty laughed, then finished: “So I bought him a Mustang.”

“Grandpa told me that it was just as easy to fall in love with a rich girl as it was a poor one,” Castillo said. “And I took his advice.”

“I don’t know how you put up with him, Svetlana dear. But, on the other hand, his grandfather was just about as bad, and I put up with him for forty-eight years before the Lord took him.”

And then her face grew serious.

“Do you think the people at Hacienda Santa Maria are safe?” she asked.

Well, that’s a natural transition, I suppose, from a couple of Model 94s as Christmas presents for a couple of twelve-year-olds to asking by implication if weapons are needed to protect our people at Hacienda Santa Maria.

“Fernando’s down there right now, Abuela, making sure they are.”

“And how is he going to do that?”

“He took some security people with him,” Castillo said.

“From Gladiator Security? Was that necessary? The police chief in Oaxaca is an old, old friend of ours. And, for that matter, so is the chief of police in Acapulco. Between them, I’m sure . . .”

“Abuela, Colonel Ferris was kidnapped fifty miles from Acapulco,” Castillo said.

“So you decided that people from Gladiator Security were needed?”

“Not Gladiator Security. The people Fernando took to the hacienda are Spetsnaz. Ex-Spetsnaz.”

“Russian Green Berets?”

“More or less. They’ve been protecting Sweaty’s cousin Aleksandr and his family in Argentina.”

“And Fernando took them there?”