[ONE]

La Casa en el Bosque
San Carlos de Bariloche
Patagonia
Río Negro Province, Argentina
1300 3 February 2007

“I believe in a democratic approach when having a meeting like this,” Lieutenant Colonel Carlos G. Castillo, USA (Retired), announced. “And the way that will work is that I will tell you what’s going to happen, and then everybody says ‘Yes, sir.’”

It was summer in Argentina, and Castillo, a well-muscled, six-foot-two, one-hundred-ninety-pound, blue-eyed thirty-six-year-old with a full head of thick light brown hair, was wearing tennis whites.

There were groans from some of those gathered around an enormous circular table in the center of a huge hall. It could have been a movie set for a motion picture about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. When this thought had occurred to Sandra Britton, Ph.D., Dr. Britton had thought Castillo could play Sir Lancelot.

Two people, one of each gender, gave Castillo the finger.

“We told quote unquote those people in Las Vegas that we would give them an answer in three weeks,” Castillo said. “Three weeks is tomorrow.”

“Go ahead, Ace. Let’s get it over with,” Edgar Delchamps said. He was a nondescript man in his late fifties. The oldest man in the room, he was wearing slacks with the cuffs rolled up and a dress shirt with the collar open.

“I would like to suggest that we appoint a chairman for this, and a secretary, and I recommend Mr. Yung for that,” Castillo said.

“Cut the crap, Ace,” Delchamps said. “Everyone knows you’re calling the shots, but if you’re going to make Two-Gun something, I more or less respectfully suggest you make him secretary-treasurer.”

Men who have spent more than three decades in the Clandestine Service of the Central Intelligence Agency tend not to be impressed with Army officers who had yet to make it even to West Point while they themselves were matching wits with the KGB in Berlin and Vienna.

“Two-Gun, you’re the secretary-treasurer,” Castillo said to David William Yung, Jr.

Yung was a round-faced, five-foot-eight, thirty-six-year-old, hundred-fifty-pound Chinese-American whose family had immigrated to the United States in the 1840s. In addition to a law degree, he held a master’s degree in business administration from the University of Pennsylvania, and was fluent in four languages, none of them Asian.

Before he had become a member of the OOA, he had been an FBI agent with a nearly legendary reputation for being able to trace the path of money around the world no matter how often it had been laundered.

Before his association with OOA, Yung had never—except at the Quantico FBI base pistol range—taken his service pistol from its holster. Within days of being drafted into the OOA, he had been in a gun battle and killed his first man.

But the “Two-Gun” appellation had nothing to do with that. That had come after Delchamps, who was not authorized at the time to be in possession of a firearm in Argentina, had Yung, whose diplomatic status at the time made him immune to Argentine law, smuggle his pistol across the border. Yung thus had two guns and was thereafter Two-Gun.

Two-Gun Yung signified his acceptance of his appointment by raising his balled fist thumbs up, and then opening up his laptop computer.

“First things first, Mr. Secretary-Treasurer,” Castillo said. “Give us a thumb-nail picture of the assets of the Lorimer Charitable and Benevolent Fund.”

Two-Gun looked at his computer screen.

“This is all ballpark, you understand,” he said. “You want the history?”

“Please,” Castillo said.

“We started out with those sixteen million in bearer bonds from Shangri-La,” Yung said.

Shangri-La was not the mythical kingdom but rather Estancia Shangri-La, in Tacuarembó Province, República Oriental del Uruguay. When Castillo had led an ad hoc team of special operators there to entice Dr. Jean-Paul Lorimer to allow himself to be repatriated, Lorimer was shot to death by mercenaries seeking to recover from him money he had stolen from the Iraqi oil-for-food scam, for which he had been the “bagman” in charge of paying off whomever had to be paid off.

His safe had contained sixteen million dollars’ worth of what were in effect bearer bonds, which Castillo had taken with him to the U.S. When this was reported to the then-President of the United States, the chief executive managed to convey the impression—without coming right out in so many words—that justice would be well served if the bearer bonds were used to fund the OOA.

The following day, the Lorimer Charitable & Benevolent Fund came into being.

“Into which Charley dipped to the tune of seven and a half million to buy the Gulfstream,” Yung went on. “Call that eight million by the time we fixed everything, and rented the hangar at Baltimore/Washington. Et cetera.

“That left eight, into which Charley dipped for another two point five million to buy the safe house in Alexandria. That left five point five million.”

The house in Alexandria was used to house members of the Office of Organizational Analysis while they were in the Washington area, and also to conduct business of a nature that might have raised eyebrows had it been conducted in the OOA’s official offices in the Department of Homeland Security compound in the Nebraska Avenue complex in the District of Columbia.

“To which,” Two-Gun went on, “Mr. Philip J. Kenyon the Third of Midland, Texas, contributed forty-six point two million in exchange for his Stay Out of Jail card.”

Mr. Kenyon had mistakenly believed his $46,255,000 in illicit profits from his participation in the Iraqi oil-for-food scam were safe from prying eyes in a bank in the Cayman Islands. He erred.

The deal he struck to keep himself out of federal prison for the rest of his natural life was to cooperate fully with the investigation, and to transfer the money from his bank account in the Cayman Islands to the account of the Lorimer Charitable & Benevolent Fund in the Riggs National Bank in Washington, D.C.

“There have been some other expenses, roughly totaling two million,” Yung continued. “What we have left is about fifty point five million, give or take a couple of hundred thousand.”

“That don’t add up, Two-Gun,” Edgar Delchamps challenged. “There shouldn’t be that much; according to your figures, we’ve got two point something million more than we should have.”

“There has been some income from our investments,” Two-Gun said. “You didn’t think I was going to leave all that money in our bank—our banks plural; there are seven—just drawing interest, did you?”

“Do we want to start counting nickels and dimes?” Colonel Castillo asked. “Or can we get to that later?”

“‘Nickels and dimes’?” Sandra Britton, a slim, tall, sharp-featured black-skinned woman, parroted incredulously. “We really are the other side of Alice’s Looking Glass, aren’t we?”

Possibly proving that opposites attract, Dr. Britton, who had been a philologist on the faculty of Philadelphia’s Temple University, was married to John M. Britton, formerly of the United States Secret Service and before that a detective working undercover in the Counterterrorism Bureau of the Philadelphia Police Department.

“I was going to suggest, Sandra,” Charley Castillo said, “that we now turn to the question before us. Questions before us. One, do we just split all that money between us and go home—”

“How the hell can Jack and I go home?” Sandra interrupted. “Not only can I not face my peers at Temple after they learned that I was hauled off by the Secret Service—with sirens screaming—but the AALs turned our little house by the side of the road into the O.K. Corral.”

Dr. Britton was making reference to an assassination attempt made on her and her husband during which their home and nearly new Mazda convertible were riddled by fire from Kalashnikov automatic assault weapons in the hands of native-born African-Americans who considered themselves converts to Islam and to whom Dr. Britton referred, perhaps politically incorrectly, as AALs, which stood for African-American Lunatics.

“If I may continue, Doctor?” Colonel Castillo asked.

Dr. Britton made a gesture with her left hand, raising it balled with the center finger extended vertically.

“I rephrase,” Castillo said. “Do we just split that money between us and go our separate ways? Or do we stay together within what used to be the OOA and would now need a new name?”

“Call the question,” Anthony “Tony” J. Santini said formally.

Santini, a somewhat swarthy, balding, short, heavyset man in his forties, until recently had been listed in the telephone book of the U.S. embassy in Buenos Aires as an assistant financial attaché. He had been, in fact, a Secret Service agent dispatched to Buenos Aires to, as he put it, “look for funny money.” Before that, he had been a member of the vice presidential protection detail. He had been relieved of that assignment when he fell off the ice-covered running board of the vice-presidential limousine. He had been recruited for the OOA shortly after it had been established, to “locate and eliminate” the parties responsible for the murder of J. Winslow Masterson.

“Second the motion,” Susanna Sieno said.

She was a trim, pale-freckled-skin redhead in a white blouse and blue jeans. She looked like she and the man sitting beside her—her husband, Paul—should be in a television commercial, where the handsome young husband comes home from the office and chastely kisses his charming young bride after she shows how easy it had been for her to polish their kitchen floor with Miracle Glow.

Actually, between the Sienos, they had more than four decades in the Clandestine Service of the CIA—Paul having served twenty-two years and Susanna just over twenty—which had been more than enough for the both of them to have elected to retire, which they had done ten days before.

“The motion having been made and seconded,” Castillo said mock-formally, “the chair calls the question: ‘Do we disband and split the money?’ All in favor raise your hand and hold it up until Two-Gun counts.”

“Okay,” Castillo said a moment later, “now those opposed, raise your hands.”

Yung again looked around the table.

“I make it unanimously opposed,” Yung said. “OOA lives!”

“OOA’s dead,” Castillo said. “The question now is, what do we do with the corpse?”

Delchamps said, “Sweaty, Dmitri—excuse me, Tom—and Alfredo didn’t vote.”

“I didn’t think I had the right,” Alfredo Munz, a stocky blond man in his forties, said.

Munz, at the time of Masterson’s kidnapping, had been an Argentine Army colonel in command of SIDE, an organization combining the Argentine versions of the FBI and CIA. Embarrassed by the incident and needing a scapegoat, the interior ministry had, as a disgusted Charley Castillo had put it, “thrown Munz under the bus.” Munz had been relieved of his command of SIDE and forced to retire. Castillo had immediately put him on the OOA payroll.

“Don’t be silly,” Castillo said. “You took a bullet for us. You’re as much a part of us as anyone else.”

Munz had been wounded during the Estancia Shangri-La operation.

“Hear, hear,” Yung said.

“I didn’t say the Argentine Kraut didn’t have every right to vote,” Delchamps said. “I simply stated that he, Sweaty, and Tom didn’t vote.”

“If I have a vote,” Sweaty said, “I will vote however my Carlos votes.”

“Sweaty,” also in tennis whites, sat next to Castillo. She was a tall, dark-red-haired, stunningly beautiful woman, who had been christened Svetlana. Once associated with this group of Americans, “Svetlana” had quickly morphed to “Svet” then to “Sweaty.”

Susanna’s eyebrows rose in contempt, or perhaps contemptuous disbelief. In her long professional career, she had known many intelligence officers, and just about the best one she had ever encountered was Castillo.

The most incredibly stupid thing any spook had ever done was become genuinely emotionally involved with an enemy intelligence officer. Within twenty-four hours of Lieutenant Colonel C. G. Castillo having laid eyes on Lieutenant Colonel Svetlana Alekseeva of the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki—the SVR, the Russian Service for the Protection of the Constitutional System, renamed from “KGB”—on a Vienna-bound railroad train in Germany, she had walked out of his bedroom in a safe house outside Buenos Aires wearing his bathrobe and a smug smile, and calling him “my Carlos.”

Dr. Britton smiled fondly at Sweaty when she referred to Castillo now as “my Carlos.” She thought it was sweet. Sandra Britton knew there really was such a thing as Love at First Sight. She had married her husband two weeks after she had met him and now could not imagine life without him.

Their meeting had occurred shortly after midnight eight years before on North Broad Street in Philly when Jack had appeared out of nowhere to foil a miscreant bent on relieving her of her purse, watch, jewelry—and very possibly her virtue. In the process, the miscreant had suffered a broken arm, a dislocated shoulder, testicular trauma, and three lost teeth.

Britton had then firmly attached the miscreant to a fire hydrant with plastic handcuffs, loaded the nearly hysterical Dr. Britton in her car, and set off to find a pay telephone.

There were not many working pay telephones in that section of Philadelphia at that hour, and to call the police it had been necessary to go to Dr. Britton’s apartment.

After Britton had called Police Emergency to report that the victim of an assault by unknown parties could be found at North Broad and Cecil B. Moore Avenue hugging a fire hydrant, one thing had led to another. Sandra made Jack breakfast the next morning, and they were married two weeks later.

“I don’t think I have a vote,” Tom Barlow said. “But if I do, I’ll go along with however Sweaty’s Carlos votes.”

Barlow, a trim man of about Castillo’s age and build, whose hair was nearly blond, and who bore a familial resemblance to Sweaty—he was in fact her brother—until very recently had been Colonel Dmitri Berezovsky, the SVR rezident in Berlin.

Castillo and Sweaty gave Barlow the finger.

“I would say the motion has been defeated,” Yung said. “I didn’t see any hands. And I have the proxies of Jake, Peg-Leg, the Gunnery Sergeant, Sparky, and Miller. They all like the idea of keeping OOA going.”

Jake and Sparky were, respectively, Colonel Jacob S. Torine, USAF (Retired), and former Captain Richard Sparkman, USAF. Torine had been in on OOA since the beginning, when he had flown a Globemaster to Argentina to bring home the body of Jack the Stack Masterson, and his family. Torine had been quietly retired with all the other military members of OOA who had more than twenty years’ service when OOA had shut down.

Sparkman, who on active duty had served under Torine on a number of black missions of the Air Force Special Operations Command, had been flying Washington political VIPs around in a Gulfstream and hating it when he heard (a) of OOA and (b) that Colonel Torine was involved. He made his way through the maze designed to keep OOA hidden in the bushes, found Torine, and volunteered to do whatever was asked, in whatever Torine was involved.

He had been accepted as much for having gotten through the maze as for being able to fill the near-desperate need OOA had for another pilot who (a) knew how to keep his mouth shut and (b) had a lot of Gulfstream time as pilot in command.

When OOA was shut down, Sparky didn’t have the option of retiring, because he didn’t have enough time in the service. He also realized that he really couldn’t go back to the Air Force after having been tainted by his association with OOA. He knew the rest of his career in the Air Force would have been something along the lines of Assistant Procurement Officer, Hand-Held Fire-Extinguishing Devices.

He had resigned. There was an unspoken agreement that Sparky would go on the payroll as a Gulfstream pilot, details to be worked out later, presuming everybody was still out of jail.

Gunnery Sergeant Lester Bradley was in a similar situation. Another gunny, one in charge of the Marine guard detachment at the American embassy in Buenos Aires, had sent then-corporal Lester Bradley—a slight, five-foot-three, twenty-year-old Marine who could be spared most easily from more important duties—to drive an embassy GMC Yukon XL carrying two barrels of aviation fuel across the border to Uruguay.

Thirty-six hours later, the Yukon had been torched with a thermite grenade. Bradley, who had been left to “watch” the Yukon, had taken out—with head-shots firing offhand from a hundred meters—two mercenaries who had just killed Jean-Paul Lorimer, Ph.D., and then started shooting their Kalashnikovs at Castillo.

Inasmuch as Castillo thought it would be unwise to return Corporal Bradley to his embassy duties—where his gunnery sergeant would naturally be curious to learn under what circumstances the Yukon had been torched—he was impressed into the OOA on the spot.

The day that OOA ceased to exist, the President of the United States had asked Castillo, “Is there anything else I can do for you before you and your people start vanishing from the face of the earth?”

Castillo told him there were three things. First was that Corporal Bradley be promoted to gunnery sergeant before being honorably discharged “for the good of the service.”

The second thing Castillo had asked of the President was that Colonel Berezovsky and Lieutenant Colonel Alekseeva be taken off the Interpol warrants outstanding for them. When they had disappeared from their posts in Berlin and Copenhagen with the obvious intention of defecting, the Russian government had said their motive had been to escape arrest and punishment for embezzlement.

The third thing Castillo asked was that he and everybody connected with him and OOA be taken off the FBI’s “locate but do not detain” list.

The President had granted all three requests: “You have my word.”

The first thing Castillo thought when he heard that the President had dropped dead was that his word had died with him. The chances that President Clendennen—especially with Director of National Intelligence Montvale whispering in his ear—would honor his predecessor’s promises ranged from zero to zilch.

The retirements of Major H. Richard Miller, Jr., Avn, USA, who had been the OOA’s chief of staff, and First Lieutenant Edmund “Peg-Leg” Lorimer, MI, USA, had posed no problem, although neither had twenty years of service.

Miller, a United States Military Academy classmate of Castillo’s, had suffered grievous damage to his leg when his helicopter had been shot down in Afghanistan. Lorimer had lost a leg to an improvised explosive device in the same country. They would receive pensions for the rest of their lives.

As Castillo & Co. had begun to fulfill their part of the agreement with POTUS—disappearing from the face of the earth—they had made their way to Las Vegas, where they were the guests of Aloysius Francis Casey—president, chief executive officer, and chairman of the board of the AFC Corporation.

Castillo had first met Casey when Castillo had been a second lieutenant, freshly returned from the First Desert War working as aide-de-camp to just-promoted Brigadier General Bruce J. McNab at Fort Bragg when Casey showed up there. Casey announced that he had been the communications sergeant on a Special Forces A-Team in the Vietnam War and, further, told McNab and his aide-de-camp that he had done well after being discharged. Not only had Casey earned a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but he had started up—and still owned more than ninety percent of—the AFC Corporation, which had become the world’s leading developer and manufacturer of data transmission and encryption systems.

Aloysius Casey, Second Lieutenant Castillo had immediately seen, was not troubled with excessive modesty.

Casey said that he attributed his great success to Special Forces—specifically what he had learned about self-reliance and that there was no such thing as impossible.

And he said he had decided it was payback time. He was prepared to furnish Delta Force, free of charge, with his state-of-the-art communications and encryption equipment.

“It’s three, four years ahead of anything anybody else has,” Casey had announced. McNab had sent Castillo with Casey to Las Vegas—on AFC’s Learjet—that same day to select what AFC equipment Delta Force could use immediately, and to brainstorm with Casey and his senior engineers on what advanced commo equipment Delta could use if somebody waved a magic wand and created it for them.

The latter devices had begun to arrive at Delta Force’s stockade at Fort Bragg about two months later.

When OOA had been set up, Castillo had naturally turned to Casey—who now called him “Charley” rather than, as he had at first, “The Boy Wonder”—for communications and cryptographic equipment, and Casey had happily produced it.

When Charley had bought the Gulfstream, Casey had seemed a little annoyed that Charley had asked if Casey would equip it with the same equipment. Charley at the time had thought that maybe he had squeezed the golden goose a little too hard and vowed he would not be so greedy the next time.

When they got the Gulfstream back from the AFC hangar at Las Vegas’s McCarran International Airport, it had not only the latest communications and encryption equipment installed, but an entirely new avionics configuration.

“I figured you needed it more than Boeing,” Casey said.

His annoyance with Charley was because Castillo had been reluctant to ask for his support.

“For Christ’s sake, Charley, you should have known better,” Casey said.

The Gulfstream was again in Las Vegas, not for the installation of equipment, but to get it out of sight until a decision could be made about what to do with it.

Charley had flown the Gulfstream to Las Vegas the same day he had received his last order from the President: “You will go someplace where no one can find you, and you will not surface until your retirement parade. And after your retirement, I hope that you will fall off the face of the earth and no one will ever see you or hear from you again. Understood?”

Charley had said, “Yes, sir,” and walked out of the room. After a quick stop at Baltimore/Washington International to pick up Major Dick Miller, he had flown to Las Vegas with newly promoted (verbal order, POTUS) and about to be discharged Gunnery Sergeant Lester Bradley and Mr. and Mrs. Jack Britton.

Immediately on arrival, Castillo had learned that providing equipment to Special Operations people free of charge had not been Aloysius Casey’s only contribution to the national security of the nation.

Limousines met them at McCarran, and drove them to the Venetian Hotel and Casino, where they were shown to a private elevator which carried them to a duplex penthouse.

At the foot of a curving glass-stepped staircase which led to the lower floor, Castillo saw Dmitri Berezovsky—now equipped with a bona fide Uruguayan passport in the name of Tom Barlow—Sergeant Major Jack Davidson, Aloysius Francis Casey, and about a half-dozen men Castillo could not remember having seen before sitting on a circular couch that appeared to be upholstered with gold lamé.

Casey waved him down. Max, Castillo’s hundred-plus-pound Bouvier des Flandres, immediately accepted the invitation, flew down the stairs four at a time, barked hello at the people he knew, and then began to help himself from one of the trays of hors d’oeuvres.

Not understanding what was going on, Castillo had gone down the stairs slowly. As he did, he realized that he did in fact recognize a few of the men. One of them was a legendary character who owned four—Maybe five?—of the more glitzy Las Vegas hotels.

But not this one, came a flash from Castillo’s memory bank.

Another was a well-known, perhaps even famous, investment banker. And another had made an enormous fortune in data processing. Castillo had remembered him because he was a Naval Academy graduate.

“Everybody pay attention,” Casey had said, laughing. “You don’t often get a chance to see Charley with a baffled look on his face.”

“Okay, Aloysius, you have pulled my chain. What the hell is going on around here?”

“Colonel,” the Naval Academy graduate said with a distinctive Southern accent, “what we are is a group of people who realize there are a number of things that the intelligence community doesn’t do well, doesn’t want to do, or for one reason or another can’t do. We try to help, and we’ve got the assets—not only cash—to do so. We’ve been doing this for some time. And we’re all agreed that now that you and your OOA associates are—how do I put this?—no longer gainfully employed—”

“How did you hear about that?” Castillo interrupted.

The Naval Academy graduate ignored the question.

“—you might want to come work for us.”

“You’ve got the wrong guy,” Castillo said simply. “The intel community hates me, and that’s a nice way of describing it.”

“Well, telling the DCI that his agency ‘is a few very good people trying to stay afloat in a sea of left-wing bureaucrats’ may not have been the best way to charm the director, even if I happen to know he agrees with you.”

“Colonel,” the man who owned the glitzy hotels said, “this is our proposal, in a few words: You keep your people together, keep them doing what they do so well, and on our side we’ll decide how to get the information to where it will do the most good, and in a manner that will not rub the nose of the intelligence community in their own incompetence.” He paused. “And the pay’s pretty good.”

“Right off the top of my head, no,” Castillo said. “My orders from the President are—”

“To go someplace where no one can find you,” the investment banker interrupted him, “until your retirement parade. And after that fall off the face of the earth. Something like that?”

How could he—they—possibly know about that?

Nobody had been in that room except the secretaries of State and Defense and the director of the CIA—the President had told Montvale to take a walk until he got his temper under control.

Does that mean these people have an in with any of them?

Or with all of them?

Of course it does.

Jesus H. Christ!

“I think we would have all been disappointed, Colonel,” the Naval Academy graduate said, “if, right off the top of your head, you had jumped at the proposition. So how about this? Think it over. Talk to the others. In the meantime, stay here—no one can find you here, I can personally guarantee that—until your retirement parade. And then, after you fall off the face of the earth, call Aloysius from wherever that finds you, and tell him what you’ve all decided.”

In compliance with his orders, Castillo had stayed out of sight at the Venetian—it could not be called a hardship; Sweaty had been with him, and there is no finer room service in the world than that offered by the Venetian—until very early in the morning of his retirement parade.

Then he and Dick Miller had flown Sergeant Major Jack Davidson and CWO5 Colin Leverette in the Gulfstream to Fort Rucker. After some initial difficulty, they had been given permission to land. They had changed into Class A uniforms in the plane.

There was some discussion among them about the wisdom under the circumstances of removing from their uniforms those items of insignia and qualification which suggested they had some connection with Special Operations. But that had been resolved by Mr. Leverette.

“Fuck ’em,” Uncle Remus said. “This is the last time we’re going to wear the suit. Let’s wear it all!”

There was a sea of red general officers’ personal flags on the reviewing stand. The four-star flag of General Allan Naylor, the Central Command commander, stood in the center of them, beside the three-star flag of Lieutenant General Bruce J. McNab, who commanded the Special Operations Command. There were too many two- and one-star flags to be counted.

Among the two-star flags were those of Dick’s father, Major General Richard H. Miller, Sr. (Retired), and Major General Harold F. Wilson (Retired). General Wilson, as a young officer during the Vietnam War, had been the co-pilot of WOJG Jorge Alejandro Castillo—right up until Castillo, Charley’s father, had booted Wilson out of the Huey that would be shot down by enemy fire, ending Castillo’s life and finding him posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor.

The band played as it marched onto the parade ground before post headquarters, and those persons to be decorated marched front and center and were decorated and the retirement orders were read and the band played again and the troops passed in review.

And that was it.

They had been retired from the Army.

The four of them got into a waiting Dodge Caravan and were driven back to Cairns Field.

Then, as Castillo was doing the walk-around and as Miller was returning from filing their flight plan, two Army Chevrolet sedans and two Army Dodge Caravans drove onto the tarmac in front of Base Operations.

General Allan Naylor got out of one of the sedans and Lieutenant General McNab got out of the other. Major General (Retired) Miller got out of one of the Caravans, and Major General (Retired) Wilson, and his grandson, Randolph Richardson III, got out of the other.

It was an awkward moment all around.

“I wanted to say goodbye and good luck,” General Naylor said.

There was a chorus of “Thank you, sir.”

“Well, I suppose if you castrate too many bulls,” General McNab said, “you’re going to get gored, sooner or later. Don’t let the doorknob hit you in the ass on your way out.”

General Naylor looked askance at General McNab.

General Miller took his son to one side for a private word.

General Wilson took his grandson and Castillo to one side for a private word. General Wilson had known all along that Castillo was the natural father of his grandson. The boy and Castillo had learned of their real relationship only recently.

“Sir,” Randolph Richardson III asked, “where are you going?”

“Randy, I just don’t know.”

“Am I ever going to see you again?”

It took Castillo a moment to get rid of the lump in his throat.

“Absolutely, positively, and soon,” he managed to say.

Randy put out his hand.

Castillo shook it.

Fuck it!

He embraced his son, felt his son hug him back, and then let him go.

He wanted to say something else but this time the lump in his throat wouldn’t go away.

“Your mother’s waiting lunch for us, Randy,” General Wilson said, and led the boy back toward the Caravan.

Gulfstream 379 broke ground about four minutes later. It flew to Louis Armstrong International Airport in New Orleans, where it took on fuel and went through Customs and Immigration procedures, and then flew to the seaside resort city of Cancún on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula.

Colonel Jake Torine and Captain Dick Sparkman, who had been retired that day from the USAF with considerably less panoply—each had received a FedEx package containing their retirement orders and their Distinguished Service Medals—were already there. Gunnery Sergeant Lester Bradley, USMC, had received a similar package from the Department of the Navy.

The Gulfstream refueled, Torine and Sparkman took off for Las Vegas, where the plane came to be parked in one of the AFC hangars until a decision about its future could be reached.

At the moment, Gulfstream 379 was leased “dry” from Gossinger Consultants, a wholly owned subsidiary of Gossinger Beteiligungsgesellschaft, G.m.b.H., of Fulda, Germany, which had bought the aircraft from Lopez Fruit and Vegetables Mexico, a wholly owned subsidiary of Castillo Agriculture, Inc., of San Antonio, Texas, whose president and chief executive officer was Fernando Lopez, and whose corporate officers included one Carlos Castillo.

That status would have to be changed, Two-Gun Yung had announced, no matter what decision was reached about the offer of “those people” in Las Vegas.

At Cancún Airport International several hours later, CWO5 Leverette (Retired) and Sergeant Major Davidson (Retired) boarded a Mexicana flight to Mexico City. There, Leverette, now traveling on a Honduran passport under another name, would board a Varig flight to São Paulo, Brazil, and Davidson, traveling under his own name on an Israeli passport, would board a Mexicana flight bound for Lima, Peru.

Castillo had watched the takeoff of the Mexicana flight to Mexico City from the tarmac on the cargo side of the Cancún airfield. Then he had climbed into a Peruaire 767 cargo plane.

The 767 had flown up that morning from Santiago, Chile, with a mixed cargo of Chilean seafood and Argentine beef, citrus fruits and vegetables. The food was destined for Cancún Provisions, Ltda., and would ultimately end in the kitchen of The Grand Cozumel Beach and Golf Resort, and in the galleys of cruise ships which called at Cancún.

PeruaireCargo, Cancún Provisions, Ltda., The Grand Cozumel Beach and Golf Resort, and at least four of the cruise ships were owned—through a maze of dummy corporations, genuine corporations, and other entities at least twice as obfuscatory as the ownership of Gulfstream 379—by a man named Aleksandr Pevsner.

In the late Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Pevsner had been simultaneously a colonel in the Soviet Air Force and a colonel in the KGB, responsible for the security of Aeroflot worldwide.

When the KGB was faced with the problem of concealing its wealth— hundreds of billions of dollars—from the people now running Russia, who were likely to put it in the state treasury, they decided that the wealth—much of it in gold and platinum—had to be hidden outside Russia.

And who better to do this than Colonel Aleksandr Pevsner? He knew people—many of them bankers—all over the world.

Pevsner resigned from the Air Force, bought several ex-Soviet Air Force cargo aircraft at distress prices, and soon began a profitable business flying Mercedes automobiles and other luxury goods into Moscow. The KGB’s gold, platinum, precious stones, and sometimes cash—often contained in fuel barrels—left Moscow on the flights out.

For the latter service, Pevsner had been paid a commission of usually ten percent of the value. His relationship with the KGB—its First Chief Directorate now the SVR—had soured over time as the SVR had regained power under Vladimir Putin. The new SVR had decided that if Pevsner were eliminated, he could not tell anyone where their money had gone, and they might even get back some of the commissions they had paid him.

There had been a number of deaths, almost entirely of SVR agents, and Pevsner was now living with his wife and daughter in an enormous mansion on a several-thousand-hectare estate in the foothills of the Andes Mountains, protected by a security force Castillo called Pevsner’s Private Army.

The mansion—which had been built during World War II—bore a remarkable similarity to Carinhall, Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring’s estate in Germany. Not really joking, Pevsner and Castillo said it had probably been built by either admirers of the Number Two Nazi—or even for Göring—when the Nazi leadership was planning to keep Nazism alive under the Operation Phoenix program by fleeing to Argentina.

Castillo had met Pevsner—more accurately, Pevsner had arranged to meet Castillo—when Castillo thought Pevsner was a likely suspect in the disappearance of the 727 from Aeroporto Internacional Quatro de Fevereiro in Luanda, Angola.

Pevsner had learned of Castillo’s suspicions from his chief of security, a former FBI agent. Castillo had been snatched from the men’s room of the Hotel Sacher in Vienna and taken to the Vienna Woods at gunpoint.

On meeting Castillo, Pevsner decided the wisest path for him to follow was to help Castillo find the missing aircraft. He really didn’t like to kill people unless it was absolutely necessary—incredibly, he was a devout Christian—and killing Castillo would certainly draw more American attention to him and his business enterprises.

The missing airplane was found with his help, and there was no sudden burst of activity by the Americans looking into Pevsner and his affairs.

But the real reason Pevsner was able to feel he had really made the right decision not to kill Castillo came when Pevsner was betrayed by the former FBI agent, who set up an assassination ambush in the basement garage of the Sheraton Pilar Hotel outside Buenos Aires.

The team of SVR assassins found themselves facing not only János, Pevsner’s massive Hungarian bodyguard, but a number of members of the OOA, who had learned what was about to happen.

In the brief, if ferocious, firefight which ensued, János was seriously wounded and all four of the SVR would-be assassins had been killed. One of the Russians had been put down by Corporal Lester Bradley, USMC, with a headshot at thirty meters’ distance from Lester’s Model 1911A1 .45 ACP pistol.

That had, of course, made Aleksandr Pevsner think of Charley Castillo as a friend, but there had been another unexpected development. Shortly after they had been struck with Cupid’s arrow, Sweaty had told her Carlos that the reason they had wanted to come to Argentina was because she and her brother had a relative living there. They were cousins. His mother and the mother of Sweaty and Tom were sisters. They didn’t know where he was, and she hoped her Carlos would help her find him.

His name, Sweaty had said, was Aleksandr Pevsner.

Behind the flight deck of the PeruaireCargo 767 there was a small passenger area equipped with a table, a galley, and six seats which could be converted to beds at the press of a switch.

Castillo sat down beside Sweaty, and a stewardess showed him a bottle of Argentine champagne, her eyes asking if it met his pleasure. He nodded and she poured champagne for him and Sweaty and for Tom Barlow and Two-Gun.

“Randy came to my retirement parade,” Castillo told Sweaty. “He asked if he was ever going to see me again.”

“Oh, my poor Carlos,” Sweaty said, and took his hand and kissed it.

Max, who seemed to understand his master was unhappy, put his paws on Castillo’s shoulders and licked his face.

The PeruaireCargo 767 flew nonstop from Cancún to Santiago, Chile.

For some reason, the Chilean immigration and customs officials, who had a reputation for meeting all incoming aircraft before the doors were open, were not on the tarmac.

Castillo, Sweaty, Tom, Two-Gun, and Max were thus able to walk directly, and without attracting any attention, from the 767 to a Learjet 45 which was conveniently parked next to where the 767 had stopped. The Learjet began to taxi the instant the door had closed.

A short time later, it landed at the San Carlos de Bariloche airport in Argentina, just the other side of the Andes Mountains. Coincidentally, the Argentine immigration and customs authorities, like their brothers in Santiago, seemed not to have noticed the arrival of the Learjet. No one saw its passengers load into a Mercedes sedan and, led and trailed by Mercedes SUVs, drive off.

Forty-five minutes later, Charley was standing on the dock on the edge of the Casa en el Bosque property and looking out across Lake Nahuel Huapi.

“What are you thinking, my darling?” Sweaty asked, touching his cheek.

“That I just have, in compliance with orders, dropped off the face of the earth.”

“Okay,” Castillo said, “the motion to split the money and run having failed, we’re still in business. But as what?”

“We’re going to have to form a corporation,” Two-Gun said.

“What are we going to call the corporation?” Castillo pursued.

“Do what Aloysius did. Use the initials,” Sergeant Major (Retired) Davidson suggested. “The Lorimer Charitable and Benevolent Fund becomes the LCBF Corporation.”

“Second the motion,” CWO5 Colin Leverette (Retired) said. “And then when everybody agrees, I can go fishing.”

He and Davidson had made their way to Bariloche the day before. Their passports had not attracted any unwelcome attention.

“Any objections?” Castillo asked, and then a moment later said, “Hearing none, the motion carries. It’s now the LCBF Corporation. Or will be, when Two-Gun sets it up. Which brings us to Two-Gun.”

“Uh-oh,” Two-Gun said.

“I suggest we appoint Two-Gun, by any title he chooses to assume, and at a suitable wage, as our money and legal guy. I think we should hire Agnes to keep running administration and keep Dianne and Harold on at the house in Alexandria.”

Mrs. Agnes Forbison, a very senior civil servant (GS-15, the highest pay grade) had been one of the first members of OOA, as its chief of administration.

Dianne and Harold Sanders were both retired special operators. They had been thinking of opening a bed-and-breakfast when Uncle Remus Leverette told them Castillo needed someone to run a safe house just outside Washington. They had jumped at the opportunity, and Castillo had jumped at the opportunity to have them. He’d been around the block with Harold on several occasions, and Dianne, in addition to being an absolutely marvelous cook, was also an absolutely marvelous cryptographer.

“Okay,” Leverette then said, “after we approve that, can I go fishing?”

Castillo said, “Then there’s the final question: What do we do about the offer from those people in Las Vegas?”

“I was afraid you’d bring that up, Ace,” Delchamps said. “I have mixed feelings about that.”

“We told them we’d let them know today,” Castillo said.

“No, they told us to let them know by today,” Delchamps said. “I’m not happy with them telling us anything.”

“Call them up, Charley,” Jack Britton said, “and tell them we’re still thinking about it.”

“Second the motion,” Davidson said.

“Why not?” Castillo said. “The one thing we all have now is time on our hands. All the time in the world. Any objections?”

There were none and the motion carried.

“I’m going fishing,” Leverette said, and grabbed his fly rod from where he’d left it on a table, then headed for the door.

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