Black Ops

“It doesn’t always work, sir. Watch your back, Colin.”

Of course the voice can be shut off.

Uncle Remus is telling me (a) he doesn’t want to have one of the shooters wasting time sitting around the bush with an earpiece waiting for a call, and (b) more important, that he doesn’t want soon-to-be- retired Lieutenant Colonel Castillo looking over his shoulder and offering unsolicited advice.

What Uncle Remus is saying loud and clear: “Butt out, Charley, and let us do our thing.”

“See you when I see you, Charley. Leverette out.”

Castillo turned to Davidson. “Jack, is there a countdown function?”

“Seventy-two hours?”

Castillo nodded. “Put it on all of them.”

Davidson tapped keys.

In the upper left-hand corner of all the monitors, a line of numbers appeared: 72:00:00. Which a second later turned to: 71:59:59.

[SIX]

0615 12 January 2006

When Castillo, in his bathrobe, walked into the library and sat down at the table, the countdown on the monitors read 68:20:25 and continued declining.

“Les, if you can find my—and Jack’s—laptops in all this crap, how about putting the countdown on them?”

“Yes, sir.”

Bradley had come to his room and said Susanna Sieno wanted to talk to him.

“C. G. Castillo.”

“Mrs. Sieno,” Sexy Susan said, “I have Colonel Castillo for you. Encryption Level One.”

“Hey, Susanna. How’s the temperature down there? It’s ten above zero here.”

“Is Svetlana with you?”

“No. You want her?”

“No, I don’t,” Susanna said.

While Castillo was trying to interpret the meaning of that, three seconds later Sexy Susan said, “Not Encrypted Data Transmission complete.”

Castillo went to the printer as it spit out a sheet of paper.

“The morning newspaper was just delivered,” Susanna Sieno said. “Read that. There’s more. Alfredo heard about this around midnight, and has been working on it since. He just came here.”

Castillo glanced at one of the monitors and saw that “here,” according to a flashing lightning bolt and a three-dimensional image, was Nuestra Pequena Casa in the Mayerling Country Club in Pilar.

The printout he held in his hand was a scan of part of the front page of The Buenos Aires Herald:

RUSSIAN DIPLOMATS MURDERED NEAR EZEIZA AIR TERMINAL

From Staff Reports

Officers of the Gendarmeria Nacional discovered shortly before midnight the bodies of two Russian diplomats, later identified as Lavrenti Tarasov and Evgeny Alekseeva, in an automobile of the Russian embassy parked just off the Autopista Ricchieri approximately two kilometers from the airport entrance.

According to a spokesman for the Russian embassy, Tarasov—the commercial attache in the Russian embassy in Asuncion, Paraguay—was apparently taking Alekseeva to the airport, where Alekseeva had reservations on the 10:35 p.m. Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt, Germany. Both had been in Argentina participating in a diplomatic conference.

Comandante Liam Duffy of the gendarmeria, the first senior police official on the scene, told The Herald that “at first glance, pending full investigation” it appeared to be a case of mistaken identity, that the diplomats were mistaken for drug dealers.

“From the condition of the cadavers,” Duffy said, “it would appear that they were fatally shot with shotguns, this after both had been wounded several times with a small-caliber weapon, probably a .22, in the knees and groin areas. Inflicting this type of excruciatingly painful, but not immediately lethal, wound is almost a trademark of the [drug criminals] to get their fellow scum to talk.”

The murders recalled the still-unsolved murder of the U.S. diplomat J. Winslow Masterson, who was found shot to death on Avenida Tomas Edison in late July of last year.

Comandante Duffy said that while the most thorough investigation would be conducted, he had “to say in candor” that he doubted very much that it would be any more successful than the investigation into the Masterson murder had been.

“When these faceless, cowardly rats of drug dealers go back into the sewers, only good luck ever sees them get what they so richly deserve,” Duffy said.

Alfredo Munz, despite what Susanna had said, didn’t have much to add to what was in the Herald story, except to put in words what had been pretty obvious as soon as Castillo had read the story: that Duffy had learned that Alekseeva was going back to Europe, which meant that Tarasov was going back to Paraguay, and Duffy just wasn’t going to let that happen.

Castillo told him thanks and broke the connection.

How the hell am I going to handle this?

“Les, print some copies of that story and pass them around, please,” he said, then he pushed himself out of his chair and headed for his bedroom.

“Svetlana, sweetheart.”

She opened her eyes and stretched.

“I’ve got some bad news, baby.”

She sat up.

“Duffy went off the deep—”

“Is that it?” She snatched the story out of his hand before he had a chance to reply.

After a moment, she said softly but matter-of-factly: “And so I am now the Widow Alekseeva.”

Castillo didn’t say anything.

She swung her legs out of bed.

“Pray with me, my darling,” she said as she knelt next to the bed. She saw the look on his face. “Please, my Carlos.”

She bent her head and put her hands together.

Shit!

Castillo, more than a little awkwardly, knelt beside her and put his palms together.

He glanced at Svetlana. Her lips were moving, but no sound was coming out of her mouth. Twice she crossed herself.

So what am I supposed to pray for?

“Thank you, God, for letting Duffy take out my lover’s husband”?

Or, “God, I hope you didn’t make him suffer too long between Duffy shooting .22-rounds in his balls and finishing him off with the shotgun”?

Damn, I am indeed a prick.

Oh, Jesus, why didn’t I think of this before? “Dear God, please make this as easy as possible on Svetlana. She’s really a good woman, a good Christian, and she’s going to blame herself for this. If you want to punish anybody, punish me for not being able to get that cold-blooded Irish bastard to back off.

“Let her really be pissed at me, just so long as she doesn’t blame herself. She’s sure as hell going to get into the sin thing, because we’ve been sharing a bed while she was still married, and will decide that this is her punishment.

“Well, lay that on me, too. She didn’t rape me. It just happened. I take full responsibility. Let her