Black Ops

not going to happen.

A moment later, Gorner thought aloud: “Let me know what flight he’ll be on and I’ll have some of our security people waiting at the gate. Better yet—I have some friends—send me the flight number and I will get agents of the Bundeskriminalamt to take him off the airplane before it gets to the gate.”

“I’ll bring him in the Gulfstream,” Castillo said. “For one thing, he won’t leave the dogs, and I don’t want —”

“I thought you went out of your way not to attract attention,” Gorner interrupted.

“Here’s a headline for you, Otto: ‘Tages Zeitung Publisher Returns from America for Friedler Last Rites.’ ”

“Okay,” Gorner said after a moment. “But don’t bring anybody from the CIA to mourn with you.”

Castillo looked at Delchamps and smiled.

He would no more have gone to Germany without Delchamps than he would have gone without shoes, but this was not the time to argue with Gorner about that, or even tell him.

As a practical matter, before this came up, they had been planning to go to Europe, taking Billy Kocian with them, and not only because they knew Kocian was out of patience with living in the Mayflower Hotel and spending his days searching his copious memory to fill in the blanks of the investigation.

Delchamps and FBI Inspector John J. Doherty—another at-first-very-reluctant recruit to OOA—were agreed that the time had come to move the investigation out of the bubble at Langley and onto the ground.

They would start in Budapest, Doherty had suggested—and Delchamps had agreed—then move almost certainly to Vienna, then to Berlin and Paris and wherever else the trail led, preceded by a message from either—or both—Secretary of State Natalie Cohen and Director of National Intelligence Charles M. Montvale ordering the ambassadors and CIA station chiefs to provide the people from OOA whatever support they requested, specifically including access to all their intelligence.

All that this latest development had changed was that they first would go to Hesse in Germany—seeing Otto Gorner in Fulda had been on the original agenda—rather than to Budapest, and that they would go as soon as possible, rather than “right after the first of the year.”

“If you think you have your emotions under control, Otto,” Castillo said, “I’ll go get Billy.”

Gorner got his emotions under control to the point where he was able to say, in a reasonably civil voice, “Thank you.”

Delchamps followed Castillo through the office door, touched his arm, and softly said, “I presume you know, Ace, that cutting out someone’s eye is Middle East speak—and, come to think of it, Sicilian—for This is what happens to people who get caught looking at things they shouldn’t.”

Castillo nodded, then said, “But setting up something like this to look as if it’s a homosexual love affair gone wrong isn’t Middle East speak, is it?”

“That may have been a message to your Onkel Otto,” Delchamps said. “You keep sending people to look at things they shouldn’t be looking at, and the way we take them out will humiliate their families and the Tages Zeitung.”

Castillo considered that a moment, then nodded.

“Billy, can I see you a moment?” he said, and mimed holding a telephone to his ear.

Kocian came back into the kitchen ten minutes later, which told Castillo that he had subjected Otto Gorner to a thorough interrogation, which in turn meant Kocian knew all the sordid details of his friend’s death. But there was nothing on his face to suggest anything unpleasant.

He’s one tough old bastard, Castillo thought admiringly.

Dona Alicia was more perceptive.

“Not bad news, I hope, Billy?” she asked.

“I’m afraid so. A dear friend has passed on unexpectedly.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Dona Alicia said. “And at Christmastime!”

“I’ll have to go to the funeral, of course,” Kocian said, and looked at Castillo. “How much of an inconvenience for you would it be, Karlchen, if we went to Germany very soon—say, tomorrow—rather than after New Year’s?”

“That can be arranged, I’m sure,” Castillo said, adding mentally, because I know, and you know I know, just how quickly the Hungarian charm would vanish if I even looked like I was going to suggest it would be “inconvenient.”

“You’re very kind, Karlchen. You get that from your mother.” Kocian paused. “I refuse to let my personal loss cast a pall on everybody else’s Christmas. So while you’re making the necessary arrangements, I will open an absolutely superb bottle of wine from a vineyard that was once the property of the Esterhazys.”

[THREE]

Colonel Jacob D. Torine, United States Air Force, answered his cellular telephone on the third buzz.

“Torine.”

“Merry Christmas, Jake. How would you like to go to Germany?”

“That would depend on when,” Torine replied, and belatedly added, “And Merry Christmas to you, too, Charley.”

“Early tomorrow morning. Something’s come up.”

“You want me to get on a secure line?”

“I’ll explain when I see you.”

“This is going to cost me two hundred dollars,” Torine said.

“Excuse me?”

“At dinner, I said something to the effect that it was nice, for a change, to be home for the holidays, to which my bride replied, ‘I’ve got a hundred dollars that says you won’t be here through New Year’s Day,’ to which I replied, ‘Oh, I think I will be,’ to which she replied, ‘Double down if the phone rings before we’re finished with dinner.’”

“I’m sorry, Jake. If it’s a real problem, I can get Miller to come down from Philly.”

“Thank you just the same, but I don’t want to have to explain to your boss why I wasn’t driving—and you and Gimpy were—when you got lost, ran out of gas, and put the bird down in the North Atlantic, never to be seen again. I’ll be at Signature at half past seven. That will mean I will have to tear Sparkman, weeping piteously, from the bosom of his beloved, but that can’t be helped.”

“I thought you said he wasn’t married?”

“He’s not. What’s that got to do with anything, Don Juan?”

Castillo caught the crack, smiled, but ignored it. He instead replied, “Do it, Jake. It’s important we get to Rhine-Main.”

“I have told you and told you, Colonel, that Rhine-Main is only a memory of our youth. I’ll have Sparkman file a flight plan to Flughafen Frankfurt am Main.”

“I’m really sorry to have to do this to you, Jake.”

“Yeah,” Torine said, and broke the connection.

Captain Richard M. Sparkman, USAF, was the most recent addition to OOA. After five years flying an AC- 130H Spectre gunship in the Air Force Special Operations Command, he had been reassigned to the Presidential Airlift Group, 89th Airlift Wing, based at Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland.

His superiors—the ones in the Pentagon, not those at Hurlburt Field, home of the AF Special Operations Command—had decided that it was time to rescue him from those regulation-busting special operations savages and bring him back to the real Air Force. He was, after all, an Air Force Academy graduate, and stars were in his future.

It was solemnly decided that flying very important people—very senior military officers and high-ranking government officials—around in a C-20, the Air Force’s designation for the Gulfstream III, would broaden his experience and hopefully cause him to forget the outrageously unconventional things he had learned and practiced