The man jumped three feet backward—moving so quickly that Castillo thought he was going to lose his balance.
The man quickly regained his composure.
“El Coronel Munz has been expecting you, gentlemen,” he announced. “If you’ll be so kind as to follow me?”
The interior barrier rolled away, and they followed the KIA down a serpentine macadam road that skirted the golf course—as they did, Castillo concluded that the club had two eighteen-hole courses—then past four polo fields, two of which were in use, and then an enormous building with half a dozen tennis courts that suggested it was the Club House.
Finally, they approached the sort of compound of houses he had seen from the road.
There was no road in front of the houses, just a line of six-foot-high fencing, nearly invisible from even a short distance away. A second look showed that inside the fencing there was an even less visible line of wire suspended between insulators two or three feet above the grass.
Proof came as they approached the houses from the rear. He now saw that the houses were lined up in a gentle curve, their front doors facing away from the road and toward yet another guard shack and barrier. Two other KIAs, identical to the one they were following, sat facing out just inside the barrier.
The barrier here was different. It consisted of four five-foot-tall painted steel cylinders about eighteen inches in diameter in the center of the road. They could be raised and lowered hydraulically. They sank into the road as the lead KIA approached.
Inside the compound, the KIA stopped before the third house, and the man got out and nodded toward the house.
The house, of timbered brick, looked as if it belonged in the Scottish Highlands as the ancestral hunting lodge of at least a duke.
Offering his unsolicited observation that “these fucking Krautmobiles weren’t designed for full-size people,” Edgar Delchamps opened the rear door of the BMW and started to haul himself out.
He had one leg out the car’s door when Max saw not only that the door of the house had opened but who had come through it.
He exited the car in a leap, using Delchamps’s crotch as the springing point for both rear legs, which served to push Delchamps back in his seat. Delchamps said unkind things about Max and his mother.
Max bounded to Svetlana, yapping happily and dancing around her. She bent and scratched his ears.
Then she saw Castillo and waved to him.
Max lapped her face and then ran to Castillo, who was by then out of the front seat. Max yapped at him as if saying, “Hey, boss! Guess who I found here?” before returning to Svetlana, where he stood on his rear legs and draped his paws over her shoulders.
A very large man rushed out the front door, looking as if he was in the act of drawing a lethal weapon from a shoulder holster.
“Nyet!” Svetlana ordered in a voice befitting a podpolkovnik of the Sluzhba Vnezhney Razvedki on a Moscow parade ground. The man stopped as if frozen.
Svetlana’s voice softened as she pushed Max off her shoulders, then dropped to wrap her arms around his neck. “It’s okay, Stepan. Max is our dog, isn’t he, my Charley?”
Castillo nodded.
He walked up to her. She kissed him chastely and not very possessively on the cheek.
“You remember Edgar, of course, honey?”
“Certainly,” she said. “He’s the one who took the stitches out of my good purse.”
She looked at Delchamps and then at Castillo. Then she pulled Castillo’s face to hers and kissed him on the mouth—passionately, possessively, and at length.
“Please come in the house, Mr. Delchamps,” she said a moment later. “We’ll have a cocktail, and then I will show you and Mr. Davidson around our house.”
She tucked her hand under Castillo’s arm, leaned her head against his shoulder, and led him into the house.
“What’s this ‘our house’ business?” Castillo asked.
“I love it,” she said. “And so will you when you see it. I’m going to buy it. And this is Mr. Lee-Watson, who’s going to sell it to me.”
Three people were standing in the high-ceilinged foyer: El Coronel Alfredo Munz, Corporal Lester Bradley, USMC, and a very tall, elegantly tailored man in his forties.
“Delighted to make your acquaintance, sir. Cedric Lee-Watson.”
His accent suggested he was the duke who owned this Scottish Highlands castle.
Castillo took the proffered hand and looked at Munz, asking with his eyes,
“Mr. Lee-Watson handles real estate for our mutual friend in Bariloche,” Munz explained.
“Indeed, for he whose name is only rarely, and then very carefully, spoken,” Lee-Watson said.
“Cedric built this place—the club—for our friend,” Munz said.
Lester Bradley caught Castillo’s attention. “Colonel, can I see you for a minute, please?”
“What’s up, Lester?”
“Privately, sir?”
“Won’t that wait until after I show him the house?” Svetlana protested.
Castillo took Bradley’s arm and led him farther into the house, to one side of a wide stairway at the end of a foyer.
“Okay, what, Lester?”
“As soon as I got the AFC set up, there was a call for you from Mr. D’Allessando.”
“What did he want?” Castillo asked, surprised.
On his retirement from twenty-four years of service—twenty-two of it in Special Forces—Chief Warrant Officer Five Victor D’Allessando had gone to work for the Special Operations Command as a Department of the Army civilian. Theoretically, he was a technical advisor to the commanding general of the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg. What he actually did for the Special Operations Command was not talked about.
“He said a friend wants to talk to you, sir.”
“Well, get on the horn and get him back, Les.”
“Yes, sir.”
Bradley walked to the foot of the stairs, then ran up them, taking them two at a time.
Svetlana, trailed by Delchamps, Davidson, and Lee-Watson, crossed the foyer to Castillo.
“Vic D’Allessando was on the horn,” Castillo reported. “He said a friend wants to talk to me.”
Delchamps and Davidson both shrugged, indicating they had no idea what D’Allessando might have on his mind.
Everybody started up the stairs to the second floor.
[THREE]
Ten minutes later, as Svetlana and Lee-Watson had just about finished showing all the comforts the master suite offered, Bradley walked in and announced, “I’ve got Mr. D’Allessando for you, sir. The AFC is just down the hall.”
Delchamps read Castillo’s mind.
“You want us to wait here, Ace?”
Castillo exhaled audibly.
“The wheezing, I suspect, reveals a certain indecision,” Delchamps said.
“I was thinking that Svetlana probably should hear this,” Castillo said.
