“They’re all right,” she reported a moment later. “For God’s sake, slow down!”
He didn’t slow down, but did stop weaving through traffic.
Five kilometers down the toll road, he saw a Policia Federal police car parked in a Shell gasoline station.
He pulled off the highway and skidded to a stop by the car. The policemen inside looked at him more in annoyance than curiosity.
Duffy pushed the button on his door panel that rolled down his window.
“Comandante Duffy, Gendarmeria Nacional!” he shouted at the Policia Federal policemen. “We have just been ambushed. Shot at. Look for a battered white Ford 150.”
They took him at his word.
The driver, a young officer, jumped out of the car, drew his pistol, and looked up the highway. The passenger, a sergeant, walked to the SUV.
By then Duffy had the microphone of his radio in his hand.
“All gendarmeria hearing this. Comandante Duffy has just been ambushed at kilometer forty-six on the Panamericana. I want the nearest cars at the Shell station, kilometer thirty-eight, southbound. En route, stop all old white Ford 150 pickups and inspect right rear of vehicle for collision damage.”
Duffy got out of the car, put the pistol back in the holster in the small of his back under his shirt, then opened the rear door of the Mercedes.
He picked up the seven-year-old Jose and said, “Why don’t we go in there and get a Coke, and then we’ll go see Abuela?”
His wife, holding the baby, looked at him.
“Well, we’ll have something to talk about when we get to your mother’s, won’t we?” Liam asked.
“Goddamn you, Liam!” Monica said.
II
[ONE]
7200 West Boulevard Drive
Alexandria, Virginia
1145 25 December 2005
A yellow Chrysler minivan with the legend
The sole passenger—a trim woman who appeared to be in her sixties but was in fact a decade older, her jet-black hair, drawn tight in a bun, showing traces of gray—slid the door open before the driver could get out of the van to do it for her.
There was a path up a slope from the driveway to the front of the house, but there were no footprints in the snow to suggest that anyone had used it recently.
The driver took a small leather suitcase from the rear of the van, thought about it a moment—
“That’s very kind of you.”
She followed him up the path. When he had put the suitcase at the foot of the door, she handed him a folded bill.
“Thank you,” she said. “And Merry Christmas.”
He looked at the money. It was a hundred-dollar note.
The fare was thirty-three fifty.
“Ma’am, I can’t change this.”
“Merry Christmas,” she said again, and pushed the doorbell button.
“Thank you very much, and a Merry Christmas to you, too.”
He got back in the van, waited to make sure that someone would answer her ring, and then drove away.
The door was opened by a large, muscular young man in a single-breasted suit.
“Yes, ma’am?”
“Merry Christmas. Colonel Castillo, please.”
“There’s no one here by that name, ma’am.”
“Yes, there is,” she said politely but firmly. “Tell him his grandmother is here.”
The muscular young man considered that for a moment, then appeared to be talking to his suit lapel. It wasn’t the first time she had seen someone do that.
“Roger that,” he said again. “She says she’s Don Juan’s grandmother.”
Not ninety seconds later, a large, fair-skinned, blue-eyed man of thirty-six suddenly appeared at the front door. Lieutenant Colonel Carlos G. Castillo, Special Forces, U.S. Army, was wearing brown corduroy slacks and a battered sweatshirt with USMA printed on it. He held what could have been a glass of tomato juice in one hand, and a large, nearly black, eight-inch-long cigar in the other.
At his side was a very large silver-and-black shaggy dog about one and a half times the size of a very large boxer. At first sight, the dog—a one-hundred-forty-pound Bouvier des Flandres named Max—often frightened people, even dog lovers such as the muscular young man in the business suit who had answered the door, and who took some pride in thinking he was unflappable.
He flapped now in shock as the old lady, who, instead of recoiling in horror as Max rushed at her, dropped to her knees, cooed, “Hello, baby! Are you happy to see your old Abuela?” and wrapped her arms around Max’s massive neck.
Max whined happily as his shaggy stub of a tail spun like a helicopter rotor.
The old lady looked up at the man in the West Point sweatshirt.
“And what about you, Carlos? Are you happy to see your old Abuela?”
“Happy yes,” he said. “Shock will come later. What the he—What are you doing here?”
“Well, Fernando, Maria, and the children spent Christmas Eve with me at the house. Today I was faced with the choice of spending Christmas with Maria’s family or getting on the plane and spending it with you.”
“How’d you find the house, Abuela?”
“I told Fernando I was going to send you a turkey, and he gave me the address.”
“In other words, he doesn’t know you’re here?”
“Probably not,” Dona Alicia Castillo confessed as she stood up. “But the way that works, darling, is that I’m the Abuela and you and Fernando are the grandchildren. I don’t need anybody’s permission.”
“Welcome, welcome, Abuela,” Castillo said, smiling, and wrapped his arms around her, lifting her off the floor.
“I echo the sentiment,” a deep voice with a slight Eastern European accent said. “Until you arrived, Dona Alicia, I was sick with the thought of having to spend the day alone with these barbarians.”
Eric Kocian, a tall, erect man with a full head of silver hair, who also appeared to be in his sixties but was in fact eighty-two years of age, was in a starched white dress shirt, pressed woolen trousers, and a blue-striped chef’s apron. He walked to her and with great formality kissed her hand.
“Count your fingers, Abuela,” Castillo said. “And make sure you still have on your wedding ring.”
“Merry Christmas, Billy,” Dona Alicia said, using his nickname, and rising on her toes to kiss his cheek. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you in an apron.”
“When one is being fed by vulgarians, one is wise to keep one’s eye on the cooks.”
