Black Ops

at the Christmas dinner table working on this.”

“Glad to hear it,” Santini said.

“Why do you need Britton, Tony?” Castillo said.

“I keep hearing things like there’s a raghead connection with our friends in Asuncion that we didn’t pick up on. He can pass himself off as a raghead, I seem to recall.”

“I don’t want him going undercover.”

“Why not?”

“Say, ‘Yes, sir, Charley. I understand he’s not to go undercover.’ ”

“Yes, sir, Charley.”

Castillo thought he heard a mix of annoyance and sarcasm in the reply. He knew he saw gratitude in Sandra Britton’s eyes.

“Okay,” he went on, “as soon as we have the schedule, we’ll give you a heads-up. Put them in Nuestra Pequena Casa. If Munz wants to tell Duffy, fine. Otherwise, not. I have a gut feeling.”

“Yes, sir, Charley, sir.”

Castillo ignored that. He said, “Alex Darby presumably knows about Duffy?”

“Yeah, sure. And anticipating your next question, Alex called Bob Howell in Montevideo so that he could give a heads-up to the China Post people sitting on the ambassador at Shangri-La. He told me that Munz had already called Ordonez to give him a heads-up. I’d say all the bases are pretty well covered. But what the hell’s going on, Charley?”

“I wish I knew. You’ll be among the first to know if I ever find out. I’ll be in touch, Tony. Take good care of the Brittons.”

“Anybody who says rude things to a SAC is my kind of guy, Charley. Try to stay out of trouble.”

Castillo broke the connection.

He looked at Britton.

“Masterson’s mother and father—ambassador, retired—lost their home in New Orleans to Hurricane Katrina. They’re now living on the estancia in Uruguay—Shangri-La—which he inherited from his late son, who was the bagman for the oil-for-food cesspool. I couldn’t talk the ambassador out of it. And I really had a hard time getting him to agree to having four guys from China Post—even on our payroll, not that he couldn’t have easily afforded paying them himself—to go down there to sit on him.”

“ ‘China Post’?” Mr. and Mrs. Britton asked in unison.

“Some people think that Shanghai Post Number One (In Exile) of the American Legion,” Davidson explained, “is sort of an employment agency for retired special operators seeking more or less honest employment.”

“What Santini just told me,” Castillo said, “was that Alex Darby, the CIA station chief in Buenos Aires, has given Bob Howell, the station chief in Montevideo, a heads-up, and that Alfredo Munz, who works for us . . .”

“Sort of the OOA station chief,” Davidson injected drily.

“. . . down there has given a heads-up to Chief Inspector Jose Ordonez of the Interior Police Division of the Policia Nacional del Uruguay,” Castillo went on. “A really smart cop, even if he doesn’t like me very much. One of the first things I want you to do down there is get with him. Bottom line, I think, as Santini said, we have all the bases covered down there.”

“Carlos,” Dona Alicia said. “Did I understand correctly that another friend of yours has been attacked? He and his family?”

He looked at her for a long moment before replying.

“It looks that way, Abuela. But Liam Duffy is more a friend of Alfredo Munz than mine.”

“Just a coincidence, would you say, Karlchen?” Kocian asked. “Two such incidents on the same day?”

Plus your friend, Billy. That makes three.

And the deep-cover asset in Vienna makes four.

Shit . . . five if you count his wife.

Castillo said: “What Montvale described as a deep-cover asset in Vienna, a man named Kuhl and his wife —”

“Kurt Kuhl?” Delchamps interrupted, and when Castillo nodded, he asked, “What the hell happened to him?”

“Merry Christmas,” Castillo said. “The Kuhls were found garroted to death behind the statue of Johann Strauss on the Ring in Vienna yesterday. You knew him?”

“Yeah, I knew both of them well,” Delchamps said.

“You’re talking about Kurt Kuhl who ran the chain of pastry shops?” Kocian asked, and looked at Delchamps.

“I think it has to be him,” Delchamps said. “Them.”

“Then so did I know them,” Kocian said. “They were friends for many years.” He paused, then asked incredulously, “ ‘Deep-cover asset’? You’re not suggesting he had a connection with the CIA?”

“For longer than our leader here is old,” Delchamps said. “If there’s going to be a star on the wall—and there should be two stars; Gertrud was as good as Kurt was—it should be studded with diamonds.”

“I don’t understand,” Dona Alicia said.

“There’s a wall in Langley, Dona Alicia, at the CIA headquarters, with stars to memorialize spooks who got unlucky.”

“I didn’t know,” she said softly.

“Am I permitted to ask what Kurt and Gertrud did for the CIA?” Kocian asked.

After a moment, Delchamps said, somewhat sadly: “Well, why not? They turned people, Billy. Or they set them up to be turned. . . .”

“Turned?” Dona Alicia asked softly, as if she hated to interrupt but really wanted to know.

“They made good guys out of bad guys, Abuela,” Castillo said. “They got Russian intelligence people to come to our side.”

“And East Germans and Poles and Czechs and Hungarians,” Delchamps said. “What I can’t understand is why they were just killed. Excuse me, garroted.”

“Instead of ‘interviewing them’ at length?” Davidson asked. “Getting a list of names? Some of them, I’ll bet, are still being worked.”

“A lot of them are still being worked,” Delchamps said matter-of-factly. “I had three in Paris. One in the Bulgarian embassy and two in the Russian.”

“At the risk of sounding paranoid, I think there’s a pattern to this,” Castillo said.

“Just because you’re paranoid, Ace, doesn’t mean that ugly little men from Mars—or from Pushkinskaya Square—aren’t chasing you with evil intentions.”

That got some chuckles.

“Pushkinskaya Square?” Dona Alicia asked.

My God, Castillo thought. She’s not just being polite; she’s fascinated with this business.

What kind of a man discusses multiple murders—or attempted murders—with his grandmother at the Christmas dinner table?

“It’s in Moscow, Dona Alicia,” Delchamps explained. “It’s famous for two things: a statue of Pushkin, the Russian poet, and an ugly building that’s the headquarters of the SVR, which used to be the KGB.”

“Oh, yes,” Dona Alicia said politely, then asked, “Does ‘garroted’ mean what I think it does?”

“Why don’t we change the subject?” Castillo said. “It’s Christmas!”

“Yes, dear,” Dona Alicia said. “I agree. But I’m interested.”

“They put a thing around your neck, Dona Alicia,” Delchamps said. “Sometimes plastic, sometimes metal. It causes strangulation. It was sort of the signature of the AVH, the Allamvedelmi Hatosag, Hungary’s secret police. When they wanted it known they had taken somebody out, they used a metal garrote.”

“The sort of thing the Indian assassins, the thugs, used?”

“So far as I know, they used a rope, a cord, with a ball on each end so that they could get a good grip. What the Hungarians used was sort of a metal version of the plastic handcuffs you see the cops use. Once it’s in place, it’s hard, impossible, to remove.”

Davidson saw Castillo glaring at Delchamps.