Black Ops

Colonel Dmitri Berezovsky.”

“You’re mistaken, Comandante,” Lee-Watson said.

“Like hell I am!” Duffy snapped, then looked at Lee-Watson.

“Do you have the pleasure of Senor Cedric Lee-Watson’s acquaintance, Liam?” Munz asked.

The question got to Duffy.

“I know who you are, senor,” he said. “I must say I’m surprised to see you in this company.”

“How are you, Comandante?” Lee-Watson said.

“Liam, listen to me carefully,” Munz said. “Are you going to take his word that this is Senor Barlow, or will it be necessary for Senor Lee-Watson to call the foreign minister and have him tell you that you’re wrong?”

Duffy didn’t immediately reply. After a moment, he said, “Alfredo, we seem to have a problem here.”

“One that can be worked around, I’m sure,” Munz said.

“One way to do that, Alfredo, is for you to give me the name of the bastard who tried to kill my wife and children. If I had that, I would just leave and forget I had even seen . . . Senor Barlow.”

“Unfortunately, it’s not quite that simple.”

“I will have that name, Alfredo. That’s not negotiable.”

“Liam, I know a good deal about you. You’re not only a good policeman but an honest one, and we both know that’s not always the case in Argentina. I sincerely admire you.”

Duffy looked at him a long moment. “But?”

“But there are forces in play here that you don’t understand.”

“Such as?”

“I had two reactions when I heard of the attack on you and your family,” Munz explained. “The first was personal—that it was a despicable act, beneath contempt.”

“And the second?” Duffy asked softly.

“That your quite natural reaction to it was going to cause Carlos and me trouble.”

“I don’t need any help from you or Carlos to kill the bastards—”

“We know that, Liam,” Castillo interrupted. “But why don’t you let us tell you why we don’t want you to go out and eliminate the bastards right now?”

Duffy looked at him angrily.

“Pay close attention to me, Liam,” Castillo said, his tone of voice now suddenly the opposite of mockingly amused. “We can do this nice, between friends, or we can do it the other way.”

“You’re not actually threatening me, Carlos?”

“That was a statement of fact, not a threat,” Castillo said. “You ready to listen?”

They locked eyes for twenty seconds, then Duffy nodded.

“The same day that you and your family were attacked, Liam,” Castillo then said, “a German journalist was assassinated in Germany, an Austrian couple was murdered—garroted—in Vienna, and an attempt was made to murder an American policeman and his wife in Philadelphia.”

Duffy considered that for a moment, then asked softly, “There was a connection?”

“And General Sirinov also ordered the elimination,” Berezovsky added, “when they were to attend the journalist’s funeral several days later, of two other journalists, and, if possible, of Colonel Castillo.”

“How could you know this?” Duffy said, and without waiting for an answer went on: “General who? They tried to kill you, too, Carlos?”

Castillo nodded.

Berezovsky went on: “Lieutenant General Yakov Sirinov runs Directorate S of the Sluzhba Vnezhney Razvedki, SVR. He ordered the appropriate SVR rezidents—those in Berlin, Vienna, New York, and Buenos Aires—to carry out the eliminations.”

“How is it that you know this?” Duffy demanded.

“Because, Comandante, I was at the time the Berlin rezident. Something that I doubt one might find noted on anything from Interpol.”

Duffy took a moment to consider that.

“You’re telling me this man,” he then said, “this General Sirinov . . . is that right?”

“Lieutenant General Yakov Sirinov,” he furnished.

“. . . ordered the murder of my wife and children?”

“Of you, certainly,” Berezovsky said. “I don’t think your family was on the order. But, on the other hand, I don’t think his order said, ‘Make sure this man’s family is not hurt while you are eliminating the comandante.’ ” He paused while that sank in, then went on: “On the other hand, considering what we believe to be his second purpose, he very well may have ordered the elimination of your family.”

“What do you mean, ‘second purpose’?” Duffy asked.

Castillo answered: “The primary connection between all these assassinations, Liam, both successful and failed, with the possible exception of yours, is that everybody either knew or soon would uncover more details about an Islamic terrorist operation than the SVR wanted them to know.”

“What kind of a terrorist operation?” Duffy asked.

Castillo ignored the question, and instead replied: “The assassination of the German journalist—his name was Friedler—was because he was getting too close to the Germans who were involved in the oil-for-food cesspool.”

“Did you ever hear, Comandante,” Berezovsky said, “that ‘it is impossible to cheat an honest man’?”

“What?” Duffy asked.

“The corollary of that is that you can cheat—or otherwise steal from—a dishonest man.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Duffy said, as much indignantly as in confusion.

“When the Iraq oil-for-food program was in operation,” Berezovsky went on, “there were many people who grew rich from it. One of the ways to turn a nice profit was to raise the price of the food and medicine and medical supplies being sold to Iraq. Hands were washed . . .”

“Greased, Tom,” Castillo corrected him.

“. . . greased,” Berezovsky went on, his face and tone making it clear he was unaccustomed to being corrected and certainly not grateful for the clarification now, “and the appropriate authorities found nothing wrong with, for example, a microscope of the type used in elementary schools to examine the wings of a fly and available in a store for, say, fifty dollars being shipped to Iraq as the latest item in medical microscopy and valued at a thousand times the fifty dollars it had actually cost.

“The man—the example here is a member of what we’re calling the Marburg Group—took the fifty-thousand- dollar check, cashed it, made a small gift—say, five thousand dollars—to the invoice examiner, and pocketed the difference, not mentioning it to the tax people, of course, and went away patting himself on the back for being a very clever businessman.

“It wasn’t all medical equipment, of course. A great deal of food was in fact shipped to Iraq and fed to the hungry. Possibly as much as ten percent of that was purchased at shamelessly inflated prices. One hundred cases of canned chicken became a thousand cases by the ‘mistaken’ adding of a zero to the invoice. The invoice examiner, of course, missed the mistake. You getting the picture, Comandante?”

Duffy nodded.

Castillo said: “All of this stopped, Liam, when we deposed Saddam Hussein. What these thieves then found to be necessary was to clean things up to make sure none of the very important people who profited—the name of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan’s son has been mentioned—would be caught. One man who we know not only profited—to the extent of sixteen million dollars—but also knew who had been paid off and for what was a UN official. His name was Dr. Jean-Paul Lorimer and he had then been living in Paris. But Lorimer saw what was coming and fled to Uruguay, where he had bought an estancia, changed his name, and set himself up in business as an antiquities dealer.

“Lorimer’s sister was married to the number-two man at the American embassy in Buenos Aires, J. Winslow Masterson. When what we have come to call ‘the cleaners’ couldn’t find Lorimer, they decided his sister probably knew where he was. So they kidnapped her from the parking lot of the Kansas Restaurant in San Isidro. That’s when I became involved, Liam.”