“What kind of a garrote was used in Vienna, Charley?” Davidson asked innocently.
Castillo moved his glare to Davidson.
“How long does it take for someone to die when this happens to them?” Dona Alicia asked.
McGuire saw the look on Castillo’s face and took pity on him.
“You think there’s a pattern, Charley?” McGuire asked, moving the subject from people being garroted. “What kind?”
Castillo shrugged. “All these hits were on the same day.”
“First,” Delchamps went on, “the victim loses consciousness as oxygen to the brain is shut off. After that, it doesn’t take long.”
“Is it very painful?” Dona Alicia said.
“I would suppose it’s damned uncomfortable,” Delchamps answered. “But I would say it’s more terrifying; you can’t breathe.”
“How awful!” Dona Alicia said.
Castillo’s cellular rattled on the table as the vibration function announced an incoming call. He looked at the caller identity illuminated on its screen.
“Quiet, please,” he ordered, and pushed the SPEAKERPHONE button. “Homicide. Strangulation Division.”
“I don’t suppose you know, Gringo, you wiseass, where Abuela might be?”
“Abuela,” Castillo said. “It’s your other grandson. The fat one.”
“That’s not kind, Carlos. Shame on you!” Dona Alicia said. “And Fernando, you know how I feel about you calling Carlos ‘Gringo.’ ”
“Abuela, you could have told me you were going there.”
“I didn’t want to bother you, my darling. Merry Christmas!”
“I was worried sick. There was no answer at the house. I was just about to get in the car and go over there.”
“Nobody answered the phone because I gave everybody the day off. Did you have a nice Christmas dinner?”
“Very nice, thank you.”
“We had a wonderful dinner,” she went on as others around the table exchanged grins. “Billy Kocian is here and he made some sort of Hungarian dessert with cherries, brandy, and brown sugar with whipped cream. It was marvelous! And now we’re sitting around chatting. And having a little champagne, if it is the truth you really want. There’s no cause for concern.”
“When do you want to come home?”
“If it wasn’t for Carlos going out of town tomorrow, I’d stay awhile. But sometime tomorrow, probably.”
“I’ll come pick you up.”
“You’re not thinking of coming here in the plane, Fernando?”
“The plane” was the Bombardier/Learjet 45XR owned by the family company and piloted more often than not by one Fernando Lopez, the company’s president and Castillo’s cousin and Abuela’s grandson.
“Yes, I am, Abuela.”
“That’s very kind, darling, but I know what it costs by the hour to fly the plane; and that there’s no way that we can claim it as a business deduction and get away with it. I’m perfectly capable of getting on an airliner by myself. Now, get off the phone and enjoy your family at Christmas!”
“Fernando?” Castillo called.
“What?”
“A penny saved is a penny earned. Try to keep that in mind while you’re running our family business.”
“Gringo! You son—”
“ ’Bye, now, Fernando!” Castillo called cheerfully, and quickly broke the connection.
“You were saying, Edgar,” Dona Alicia said, “that being garroted is more frightening than painful?”
[TWO]
Signature Flight Support, Inc.
Baltimore-Washington International Airport
Baltimore, Maryland
0725 26 December 2005
Major (Retired) H. Richard Miller, Jr., chief of staff of the Office of Organizational Analysis, and Mrs. Agnes Forbison, the OOA’s deputy chief for administration, were in the hangar when the convoy of four identical black GMC Yukon XLs drove in through a rear door and began to unload passengers and cargo.
The first passenger to leap nimbly from a Yukon was Dona Alicia Castillo, who had been riding in the front passenger seat of what the Secret Service had been describing on their radio network as “Don Juan Two Four.” That translated to mean the second of four vehicles in the Don Juan convoy. Don Juan was the code name of the senior person in the convoy.
When the director of the Washington-area Secret Service communications network had been directed to add then-Major Castillo to his net, a code name had been required. For example, the secretary of Homeland Security, who was well over six feet and two hundred pounds, was code-named Big Boy, and the director of National Intelligence was Double Oh Seven. Having seen the dashing young Army officer around town—and taking note of the string of attractive females on his arm—the communications director had to think neither long nor hard before coming up with Don Juan.
Dona Alicia walked quickly to Miller and kissed his cheek. She had known him since he and Castillo had been plebes at West Point.
The second exitee—from Don Juan Four Four—was Max, closely followed by the Secret Service agent attached to him by a strong leash. Max towed the agent to the nose gear of a glistening white Gulfstream III, where he raised his right rear leg and left a large, liquid message for any other canines in the area that the Gulfstream was his.
Gulfstream Three Seven Nine actually belonged to 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 honorary chairman of the board was Dona Alicia Castillo, whose president and chief executive officer was Fernando Lopez, and whose officers included Carlos Castillo.
The Office of Organizational Analysis “dry leased” on an “as needed” basis the Gulfstream from Gossinger Consultants on an agreed price of so much per day, plus an additional amount per flight hour.
OOA provided the crew and paid fuel, maintenance, insurance, and other costs, such as the hangar rent at Signature Flight Support. The Lorimer Charitable & Benevolent Fund reimbursed the OOA on a monthly basis for all of its aviation expenses involved with providing members of the LC&BF staff with the necessary transportation to carry out their charitable and benevolent duties.
It was the perhaps immodest opinion of David W. Yung, Jr.—BA, Stanford University, and MBA, Harvard Business School, who enjoyed a splendid reputation within the FBI and the IRS of being an extraordinarily talented rooter-out of money laundering and other chicanery—that if anyone could work their way through this obfuscatory arrangement he had set up, they would have to be a hell of a lot smarter than he was.
And there was little question in the minds of the cognoscenti that Two-Gun Yung was one smart character. It was he who had first found and then invisibly moved into the LC&BF account in the Riggs Bank in Washington a shade under forty-six million dollars of illicit oil-for-food profits that Philip J. Kenyon III—chairman of the board, Kenyon Oil Refining and Brokerage Company, Midland, Texas—thought he secretly had squirreled away in the Caledonian Bank & Trust Limited in the Cayman Islands.
That transaction was described, perhaps irreverently, by Edgar Delchamps as selling a slimeball a $46,000,000 Stay Out of Jail Card.
Castillo, who had been riding in the front passenger seat of Don Juan Four Four, walked to Max at the nose of
