W. E. B. Griffin - Presidential Agent 07 (12 page)

“Fortunately for Stefan, Svetlana always liked him,” Tom Barlow said. “She was never at all fond of the general.”

“So where is Charley’s redhead?” D’Alessandro asked.

“She’s having a bikini wax. She should be up in a minute in her bikini,” Castillo said. “Lester, why don’t you get Vic a Dos Equis? After which he can tell us all about Acapulco.”

“Lester,” D’Alessandro said, “why don’t you get your old Uncle Vic a double of that Jack Daniel’s?”

“Yes, sir.”

D’Alessandro slid onto a chaise longue in the shade of the striped awning, and sat on it.

“Is everybody familiar with the official version, the message Ambassador McCann sent to Secretary of State Cohen?” he began.

“Which she passed to Roscoe Danton, giving him his scoop,” Castillo said. “Yeah, Vic, we’re all familiar with that.”

“Our guys in Acapulco—there’s three—and the DEA guys there think that what happened is Ferris’s Suburban was stopped by a roadblock manned by either Federales or people wearing Federales uniforms. They got talked out of the Suburban and the bad guys whacked everybody but Ferris. Then they loaded Ferris back into the Suburban and took off for God knows where. Or God knows why.

“Supporting this theory is that Ferris and Danny Salazar—especially Danny—had been around the block more than once, had either M-16s or CAR-15s with them, and would have offered some pretty skilled resistance to an ambush.

“Why wouldn’t Ferris—and again, especially Danny—be suspicious of a Federales roadblock? Because they had good relations with the Federales, good relations being defined as sharing intelligence with them, which is further defined as they tell us only what they want us to know, and we tell them everything we know, which they promptly pass to the drug cartels.”

“That bad, huh?” Castillo asked. “And Ferris went along with this?”

“How well do you know Jim Ferris, Charley?”

Castillo shrugged. “Not well. I’ve seen him around. People who know him well seem to respect him.”

“Including me,” D’Alessandro said. “He’s a hell of a teacher, probably the best we have.”

“But?”

“You and Ferris are different in several ways, Charley. First, you’d be a lousy teacher. You’d also be a lousy instructor, and there’s a difference.”

“Probably,” Castillo admitted.

“Which, McNab being aware of this, is why you never found yourself at McCall teaching Snake Eating 101 to a class of would-be Green Beanies.”

“I always thought it was the press of my other duties,” Castillo said sarcastically.

“No. It was because McNab knew—and I knew and Uncle Remus knew—that you would set a lousy example for the new guys. You ever actually eat a snake, Charley?”

“No, and I never bit the head off a live chicken running around in the Hurlburt Field swamps, either,” Castillo said.

“But—the proof being you’re still alive—you performed satisfactorily in the real world, huh? And have all those medals to prove it?”

“Where the hell are you going with this, Vic?” Castillo asked more than a little testily.

“You wanted to know who Jim Ferris is. I’m telling you. He’s almost exactly your opposite. He caught, killed, and ate snakes because that’s what he was ordered to do. And he taught a whole bunch of people to obey orders and eat snakes, too. You went into the swamps at Hurlburt with two pounds of high-protein bars taped to your legs because you heard snake would be on the menu.

“The point being that when Jim Ferris came down here, he obeyed his orders from the ambassador to cooperate with the Mexicans. He argued with both Ambassador McCann, and the ambassador before McCann, but he obeyed his orders.

“What you would have said, Charley, is: ‘Screw this. I was sent down here to get the drug guys and that’s what I’m going to do.’ ”

Castillo, who did not look as if he took offense to that, then said: “So you’re suggesting the drug cartel had no reason to whack anybody because Ferris’s people weren’t causing them any trouble?”

“Yeah. And they must have known that killing three Americans and kidnapping a fourth would bring a lot of attention.”

“Tell me about the drug guys,” Castillo said.

“Pacific Coast operations are run by the Sinaloa cartel, which is headed by two guys, Joaquín Guzmán Loera and Ismael Zambada García. You ever hear of Los Zetas?”

Castillo shook his head.

“Loera and García needed a private army, so they bought one. They went to the Mexican army and said, ‘If you come work for me, bringing along the weapons the Americans gave you, I will pay you five times what the Army has been paying you. If you don’t come, we will kill you and rape your wives, mothers, and other female relatives.’ ”

“Shit!” Castillo said.

“These are really charming people, Charley, and they have very deep pockets. They have about a battalion’s worth of Mexican soldiers—officers, noncoms, and privates. And all the equipment we gave them. Los Zetas are really bad guys, Charley.”

“And they could have been manning the roadblock?”

“Either in Mexican army uniforms or Federales uniforms,” D’Alessandro answered. “Which brings us back to why?”

“Edgar thinks it had nothing to do with the drug cartels,” Castillo said, “and Alek agrees with him.”

“Then what?”

“It has been suggested that Mr. Putin, on reflection, has decided that an armistice is not the way for him to go,” Tom Barlow offered. “And that he’s coming after Svetlana and me again.”

“And after Charley,” D’Alessandro added.

“And me,” Pevsner said. “Not necessarily in that order.”

“Jesus, I guess I should have thought of that,” D’Alessandro said. “I will think about it now. Lester, I’d think better after I’ve had a second taste of the Jack Daniel’s.”

 

 

Two glistening white Yukons with the legend GRAND COZUMEL BEACH AND GOLF RESORT painted on their doors and a much less elegant brown Suburban with the insignia of Mexican Customs and Immigration were waiting for the Cessna Mustang when the small twin-engine jet was wanded to a parking spot.

John David Parker was relieved to be on the ground. Not only had it been his first flight in a Mustang, until today he had thought that jet aircraft required the services of two pilots. Not only had there been but one pilot—Major Dick Miller, U.S. Army, Retired—but he had seen Miller climb aboard the airplane at Baltimore Washington International—and suddenly understood why they called him “Gimpy.” There clearly was something wrong with his left leg; it didn’t bend as knees are supposed to.

Surprising Parker not a little, moments after Miller had boarded the airplane, the gray-haired elderly lady and “the Reverend Father” Tom Sanders had shown up with his passport, as promised. They had even packed a small bag with a change of linen and his toilet kit.

Three minutes later, they were airborne. The trip was uneventful. They went through immigration at New Orleans’s Louis Armstrong International Airport and then flew across the Gulf of Mexico.

Two men got out of each Yukon. One of them—a burly, fair-skinned man wearing shorts, knee-high stockings and a white jacket with the logotype of the Grand Cozumel Beach and Golf Resort on the chest—came onto the airplane as soon as the stair door was opened.

The man shook Edgar Delchamps’s hand and said something in Russian.

“Hand him your passports as you get off,” Delchamps ordered. “He’ll take care of the formalities.”

It was a five-minute ride from the airport to the Grand Cozumel, which turned out to be an enormous luxury resort complex at the center of which was a twenty-odd-story building surrounded by smaller buildings. There were two golf courses, acres of tennis courts, and, fronting the wide, white sand beach, lines of individual cottages.

Parker was not surprised that the entire property was enclosed within a substantial fence, but when they reached the main building and went down a ramp to an underground garage, he was surprised at the steel barriers that were hydraulically lowered as they reached them. They looked exactly like the barriers at the White House, through which—he had been told and he believed—an M1 Abrams tank would have a hard time crashing.

There was a line of elevators. Delchamps led them all to one marked THE TAHITIAN SUITE
.
In lieu of an UP/DOWN button, it had a keyboard and what looked like a small television screen or computer monitor.

When Delchamps keyed in a series of numbers, the screen lit up, showing the outline of a hand. A moment after Delchamps placed his hand on the image, there came a
ping
sound—and the elevator door slid open.

He waved everybody onto the elevator.

There were no floor numbers on the elevator control panel, just up and down arrows.

When Delchamps pushed UP, the opening bars of
The Blue Danube
came over loudspeakers. After just a faint sensation of movement, the door slid open.

Parker thought:
That was quick. We’re probably only going to the second floor.

They were on a circular foyer, off of which were eight closed doors and one open double door. A burly man in a white jacket—a twin of the man at the airport—stood next to the open doors, holding an Uzi submachine gun along his leg.

He ran his eyes among the elevator passengers and then sat down.

Delchamps walked to and through the open doors with the others following him. Parker, confused for a moment, saw that rather than being on the second floor, they were on a very high floor.

They were in a large room. There were six men. Two were playing chess while a third—a very young man, almost a boy—watched. A fourth was reading a Spanish-language newspaper, and a fifth was reading the
Wall Street Journal
. The sixth was working at a laptop computer on a glass-topped coffee table.

Through wide plate-glass doors, Parker saw two more men—one of them a very large, obviously Latino man and the other a good-looking, six-foot, fair-skinned man in his late thirties who looked American—hoist themselves nimbly out of a swimming pool and start to towel themselves dry.

A huge black dog like the ones at Lorimer Manor came trotting around the side of the pool with a white soccer ball in his mouth. He dropped it at the feet of the swimmers and then shook himself dry. It produced an explosion of water.

A stunningly beautiful redheaded woman wearing a transparent flaming yellow jacket over a matching bikini—together, the garments left only negligible anatomical details to the imagination—rose gracefully from a chaise longue next to the pool and marched up to Roscoe Danton. She gave him a little hug and offered her cheek for him to kiss.

Then she put out her hand to Porky, and announced, “I’m Sweaty. Welcome to Cozumel. What can I get you to drink?”

That has to be a name,
Parker decided,
because she damn sure doesn’t smell sweaty.

“I’ll be almost pathetically grateful for anything with alcohol in it,” Porky said.

A white-jacketed waiter suddenly appeared.

“Scotch, double, rocks,” Porky ordered.

“Twice,” Roscoe said.

I don’t think ordering a double scotch was the smart thing for me to do,
Porky thought.
The last thing I need to do when I have to do some serious thinking is get bombed.

“Well, Gimpy, I see you managed to cheat death once again,” the swimmer Parker thought of as “the American” said. “Please tell me you didn’t bend my nice new bird.”

Gimpy gave the American the finger.

The American walked up to Parker.

“Welcome to Cozumel, Mr. Parker, you’re just in time for an Argentine
bife de chorizo
, which I believe loosely translates from Spanish as ‘food for the gods.�� I’m Charley Castillo.”

Parker knew a good deal about Charley Castillo, but this was the first time he’d ever seen him up close, and he was surprised at what he saw. It showed on his face.

Parker thought:
As a matter of fact, the only time I’ve ever seen him at all was on television, when he and the other guy who’d stolen that Tupelov airplane walked off it at Andrews Air Force Base.

The Russian defector, the former SVR
rezident
in Copenhagen, who President Clendennen had been willing—hell, been trying desperately—to swap to the Russians.

“Something wrong?” Castillo asked.

“No. I guess I’m a little shook up by everything that’s happened.”

The waiter put a glass in his hand, and Porky took a healthy swallow.

Castillo gave his hand to Danton.

“Thank you for coming, Roscoe,” he said. “I know it’s inconvenient, but it’s important.”

“Anytime, Charley,” Danton replied.

He added, mentally:
I always try to oblige people who are going to give me a million dollars. And it’s not as if I had much of a choice, is it?

“Mr. Parker . . . can I call you Porky?” Castillo said.

John David Parker—who loathed being called “Porky”—heard himself saying “Certainly.”