The shooters pa-4 Read online

  "Please take me to your officer," he said politely.

  The muzzle of the submachine gun now directed him to the open door of the panel van.

  He went to it. He ducked his head to get inside, and as he entered the van he suddenly had the sensation of what felt like a bee sting in his buttocks.

  Then everything went black.

  One of the Highway Policemen pushed his body all the way into the van and the door closed. The other Highway Policeman ordered Timmons's driver out from behind the wheel, handcuffed him, then forced him into the backseat.

  Then he got behind the wheel and drove off toward the airport.

  The Peugeot panel van followed.

  [TWO]

  Nuestra Pequena Casa

  Mayerling Country Club

  Pilar, Buenos Aires Province, Argentina 1645 31 August 2005 "Sergeant Kensington," Lieutenant Colonel C. G. Castillo said, "if you say 'un-fucking-believable' one more time, I'm going to have the sergeant major wash your mouth out with soap."

  Sergeant Robert Kensington-a smallish, trim twenty-one-year-old-turned from a huge flat-screen television screen mounted on the wall of the sitting room and looked uneasily at Lieutenant Colonel Castillo, who was thirty-six, blue-eyed, had a nice thick head of hair, and stood a shade over six feet tall and one hundred ninety pounds.

  Sergeant Major John K. Davidson, who was thirty-two and a little larger than Lieutenant Colonel Castillo, looked at him, smiled, and said, "With all possible respect, Colonel, sir, the sergeant is right. It is un-fucking-believable."

  "He's got you there, Ace," a nondescript man in his late fifties wearing a blue denim shirt and brown corduroy trousers said, chuckling. "'Un-fucking-believable' fits like a glove."

  His name was Edgar Delchamps, and though technically subordinate to the lieutenant colonel, he was not particularly awed by Castillo. Men who have spent more than thirty years in the clandestine service of the Central Intelligence Agency tend not to be awed by thirty-six-year-old recently promoted light birds.

  "Lester's around here someplace," Castillo said. "I don't want Kensington corrupting him any more than he already has."

  Delchamps, Davidson, Colonel Alfredo Munz, and Sandor Tor chuckled.

  Munz, a blond-headed stocky man in his forties, until recently had been the head of SIDE, which combines the functions of the Argentine versions of the FBI and the CIA. He was of German heritage and fluent in that language and several others.

  Tor, a Hungarian, was director of security for the newspaper Budapester Tages Zeitung. Before that, he had been an Inspector of Police in Budapest, and in his youth had done a hitch in the French Foreign Legion.

  "I cannot hear what that woman is saying over all this brilliant repartee," Eric Billy Kocian announced indignantly, in faintly accented English. The managing director and editor-in-chief of the Budapester Tages Zeitung was a tall man with a full head of silver hair who looked to be in his sixties. He was in fact eighty-two years of age.

  Delchamps made a megaphone with his hands and called loudly, clearly implying that Kocian was deaf or senile, or both: "Billy, it looks like they've got a little storm in New Orleans."

  Everybody laughed.

  Kocian threw his hands up in disgust and said something obscene and unflattering in Hungarian.

  But then the chuckles subsided and they all returned their attention to the television.

  In deference to Kocian, Munz, and Tor, they were watching Deutsche Welle, the German version, more or less, of Fox News. It was covering Hurricane Katrina in the Gulf Coast of the United States and had just reported, with some stunning accompanying video, that eighty percent of New Orleans was flooded, some parts of the port city under twenty feet of water, its entire population forced to flee.

  Castillo stared at the images of one of America's major cities in complete chaos, and at the collection onscreen of talking heads representing local, state, and federal government officials-all unequivocally with their thumbs up their collective asses while blaming one another for failure after failure-and heard himself mutter, "Un-fucking-believable…"

  Not much in Nuestra Pequena Casa was what it appeared to be. Starting with the fact that Our Little House was in fact a very large house, bordering on a mansion. It was in the upscale Mayerling Country Club in the Buenos Aires suburb of Pilar.

  It had been rented, furnished except for lightbulbs and linen, just over three weeks before to a Senor Paul Sieno and his wife, Susanna. The owner believed them to be a nice and affluent young couple from Mendoza. They had signed a year's lease for four thousand U.S. dollars a month, with the first and last month due on signing, plus another two months' up front for a security deposit.

  The Sienos had paid the sixteen thousand in cash.

  Cash payments of that size are not at all uncommon in Argentina, where the government taxes every transaction paid by check and where almost no one trusts the banks.

  Both el Senor y la Senora Sieno were in fact agents of the Central Intelligence Agency, and what they had really been after was a "safe house," which is usually defined within the intelligence community as a place nobody else knows about where one may hide things and people.

  Nuestra Pequena Casa-the owner had named it-was ideal for this purpose.

  The Mayerling Country Club, which is several kilometers off the Panamericana Highway, about fifty kilometers north of the center of Buenos Aires, held about one hundred houses very similar to Nuestra Pequena Casa. Each sat upon about a hectare (or about two and a half acres). It also held a Jack Nicklaus golf course, five polo fields, stables, tennis courts, and a clubhouse with a dining room that featured a thirty-foot-high ceiling and half a dozen Czechoslovakian crystal chandeliers suspended over a highly polished marble floor.

  The entire country club was surrounded by a nine-foot-tall fence, topped with razor wire, and equipped with motion-sensing devices. When triggered, an alarm went off in the Edificio de Seguridad and floodlights came on where the intrusion had been detected. Then members of the Mayerling Security Force, armed with everything from semiautomatic pistols and shotguns to fully automatic Uzis, rushed to the scene on foot, by auto, and in golf carts.

  None of this had anything to do with intelligence, espionage, or even the trade in illegal drugs, but rather with kidnapping. The kidnapping of well-to-do men, their wives, offspring, parents-sometimes even their horses and dogs-was Argentina's second-largest cottage industry, so the wags said, larger than all others except the teaching of the English language.

  Just about all of the houses within the Mayerling Country Club were individually fenced on three sides, most often by fences concealed in closely packed pine trees. They, too, had motion-sensing devices.

  Motion-sensing devices also prevented anyone from approaching the unfenced front of the houses without being detected.

  Nuestra Pequena Casa was for Mayerling not an unusually large house. It had six bedrooms, all with bath; three other toilets with bidets; a library, a sitting room, a dining room, a kitchen, servants' quarters (for the housing of four), a swimming pool, and, in the backyard near the pool, a quincho.

  A quincho, Paul Sieno explained, was much like an American pool house, except that it was equipped with a parrilla-a wood-fired grill-and was primarily intended as a place to eat, more or less outdoors. It was an extremely sturdy structure, built solidly of masonry, and had a rugged roof of mottled red Spanish tiles. The front of the quincho had a deep verandah, which also was covered by the tile roof, and a wall of sliding glass doors that overlooked the pool and backyard and which served as the entrance from the verandah into the main room of the building.

  The group had moved from the big house out to the quincho.

  Paul Sieno was kneeled down before the parrilla, which was built into one wall of the cocina, or kitchen. He worked with great effort-and as yet not much success-to get the wood that he had carefully arranged under the heavy black iron grill to catch fire.

  Susanna Sieno stood behind him, lea
ning against the polished marble countertop to the left of the parrilla, handing her husband sheets of newspaper for use as tinder.

  On the countertop, beside the stainless steel sink, was an impressively large wooden platter piled high with an even more impressively large stack of a dozen lomos, each filet mignon hand cut from tenderloins of beef to a thickness of two inches. Nearby were the makings for side dishes of seasoned potatoes and tossed salad.

  In the adjoining main room of the quincho there was a brand-new flat-screen television mounted on a wall that was identical to the one in Nuestra Pequena Casa.

  The DirecTV dish antenna on the quincho's red tile roof was identical to the one mounted on the big house. The television set in the quincho, however, was hooked to a repeater connected to the DirecTV antenna on the big house. This allowed for the antenna on the quincho roof to be aimed at an IntelSat satellite in permanent orbit some 27,000 miles above the earth's surface-and thus to be part of a system that provided the safe house with instant encrypted voice, visual, and data communication. It communicated with similar proprietary devices at the Office of Homeland Security in the Nebraska Avenue Complex in Washington, D.C., and ones in what had at one time been the Post Stockade at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and was now the headquarters of Delta Force and even more clandestine special operations forces.

  Most of the group was sitting in teak deck chairs that they had pulled inside from the verandah.

  The TV was now tuned to the English-language CNN, not because its nonstop coverage of the disaster that was Hurricane Katrina was any better than that of Deutsche Welle-it arguably was worse-but because DW was repeating ad nauseam the same footage and interviews. The on-air "talent"-both on location and in the various news bureaus-had long ago stopped offering any real reporting and had instead resorted to the basic equivalent of a live camera simply airing the obvious. And, while it was only a matter of time before CNN's so-called in-depth coverage would begin to loop, at least for now the group was seeing and hearing something somewhat different.

  This same dynamic happened during the Desert Wars, Lieutenant C. G. Castillo thought with more than a little disgust. Sticking a camera crew out in the middle of a hot zone-with a clueless commentator, someone with no real understanding of what's going on around them-is worse than there being no, quote, reporting, unquote, at all.

  Watching RPG rounds and tracers in a firefight-or people looting a flooded food store-without an educated source on screen to put what you're seeing in context of the big picture only serves to drive the hysteria.

  It damn sure doesn't help someone sitting in the comfort of their living room better understand what the hell is really going on.

  Castillo turned from the TV and glanced around the quincho.

  Of the people watching CNN, three could-and in fact often did-pass as Argentines. They were the Sienos (who now had the parrilla wood burning) and a twenty-three-year-old from San Antonio, Texas, named Ricardo Solez, who had come to Argentina as an agent of the Drug Enforcement Administration. All had mastered the Porteno accent of a Buenos Aires native.

  Anthony J. "Tony" Santini, a special agent of the U.S. Secret Service, a stocky and somewhat swarthy forty-two-year-old, could pass for a Porteno until he had to say something, whereupon his accent usually gave him away.

  None of the others watching the TV in the quincho even tried to pass themselves off as Argentines.

  Special Agent David W. Yung of the FBI, a thirty-two-year-old of Chinese ancestry-who spoke Spanish and three other languages, none of them Oriental-felt that his race made trying to fob himself off as an Argentine almost a silly exercise.

  The language skills of various others were rudimentary.

  As Colonel Jacob D. "Jake" Torine, United States Air Force, put it, "It's as if the moment I get out of the States, a neon sign starts flashing over my head-American! Throw rocks!"

  Inspector John J. Doherty of the FBI understood what Torine meant. Lieutenant Colonel Castillo had once remarked, "Torine and Doherty look like somebody called Central Casting and said, 'Send us an airline pilot and an Irish cop.'" Neither had taken offense.

  One viewer of what Katrina was doing to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast was in a category of his own.

  Corporal Lester Bradley, United States Marine Corps, was not quite twenty. He appeared to be about seventeen. He stood five feet five inches tall and weighed a little under one hundred forty pounds. Looking at him now-attired in a knit polo shirt, khaki trousers, and red and gold striped Nike sport shoes-very few people would think of associating him with the military at all, much less with the elite special operations.

  The truth here was that Bradley, fresh from Parris Island boot camp, had earned his corporal's stripes as a "designated marksman" with the Marines on the march to Baghdad. On his return to the United States, he had been assigned to the USMC guard detachment at the American embassy in Buenos Aires, where he mostly functioned as a clerk typist until the day he had been detailed-as the man the gunny felt he could most easily spare-to drive a GMC Yukon XL to Uruguay.

  Three days after that, Bradley found himself part of a hastily organized special operations mission during which he saved the life of then-Major C. G. Castillo by using a borrowed sniper's rifle to take out two of the bad guys with head shots.

  Bradley thus had learned too much about a very secret operation-and the reasons for said operation-for him to be returned to the care of the gunny, who could be counted on to demand a full account of where his young corporal had been and what he had done. So Bradley next had been aboard the aircraft on which Castillo and the body of Sergeant First Class Seymour Kranz-who had been killed during the operation-returned to the United States.

  Not knowing what to do with Bradley back in the States, Castillo had "put him on ice" at Camp Mackall, North Carolina, the Special Forces training base, until he could find a solution. Camp Mackall's sergeant major, Jack Davidson, had taken one look at the boyish Marine, concluded that his assignment to Mackall was a practical joke being played on Davidson by a Marine master gunnery sergeant acquaintance, and put him to work pushing the keys on a computer.

  The first that Davidson learned of who Bradley really was-and that he had saved the life of Castillo, with whom Davidson had been around the block many times, most recently in Afghanistan-came when Lieutenant General Bruce J. McNab showed up at Mackall to arrange for Bradley to attend Sergeant Kranz's funeral at Arlington National Cemetery.

  Davidson had also been around the block several times with General McNab, and several times with McNab and Castillo together. He had not been at all bashful to tell the general (a) that Castillo's idea that Bradley could be hidden at Mackall made about as much sense as suggesting a giraffe could be hidden on the White House lawn, and (b) that if Charley was doing something interesting, it only made sense that Sergeant Major Davidson be assigned to do it with him, as the general well knew how prone Charley, absent the wise counsel of Sergeant Major Davidson, was to do things that made large waves, and got everybody in trouble, and that this was not very likely to be changed just because they'd just made Charley a light bird.

  Shortly after the final rites of Sergeant Kranz at Arlington National Cemetery, Sergeant Major Davidson and Corporal Bradley were en route to Buenos Aires.

  And shortly after going to Nuestra Pequena Casa, while serving as the driver of a Renault Trafic van, Corporal Bradley found himself participating in an unpleasant firefight in the basement garage of the Pilar Sheraton Hotel and Convention Center, during which he took down one of the bad guys with a Model 1911A1 Colt semiautomatic pistol and contributed to the demise of another with the same.45-caliber weapon.

  Following that, it was Castillo's judgment that Corporal Bradley really deserved to be formally assigned to the Office of Organizational Analysis.

  He called the director of National Intelligence, who called the secretary of defense, who called the secretary of the Navy, who directed the commandant of the Marine Corps-"Just do it, don't as
k questions"-to issue the appropriate orders:

  TOP SECRET-PRESIDENTIAL

  THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C.

  DUPLICATION FORBIDDEN

  COPY 2 OF 3 (SECRETARY COHEN)

  JULY 25, 2005.

  PRESIDENTIAL FINDING.

  IT HAS BEEN FOUND THAT THE ASSASSINATION OF J. WINSLOW MASTERSON, DEPUTY CHIEF OF MISSION OF THE UNITED STATES EMBASSY IN BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA; THE ABDUCTION OF MR. MASTERSON'S WIFE, MRS. ELIZABETH LORIMER MASTERSON; THE ASSASSINATION OF SERGEANT ROGER MARKHAM, USMC; AND THE ATTEMPTED ASSASSINATION OF SECRET SERVICE SPECIAL AGENT ELIZABETH T. SCHNEIDER INDICATE BEYOND ANY REASONABLE DOUBT THE EXISTENCE OF A CONTINUING PLOT OR PLOTS BY TERRORISTS, OR TERRORIST ORGANIZATIONS, TO CAUSE SERIOUS DAMAGE TO THE INTERESTS OF THE UNITED STATES, ITS DIPLOMATIC OFFICERS, AND ITS CITIZENS, AND THAT THIS SITUATION CANNOT BE TOLERATED.

  IT IS FURTHER FOUND THAT THE EFFORTS AND ACTIONS TAKEN AND TO BE TAKEN BY THE SEVERAL BRANCHES OF THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT TO DETECT AND APPREHEND THOSE INDIVIDUALS WHO COMMITTED THE TERRORIST ACTS PREVIOUSLY DESCRIBED, AND TO PREVENT SIMILAR SUCH ACTS IN THE FUTURE ARE BEING AND WILL BE HAMPERED AND RENDERED LESS EFFECTIVE BY STRICT ADHERENCE TO APPLICABLE LAWS AND REGULATIONS.

  IT IS THEREFORE FOUND THAT CLANDESTINE AND COVERT ACTION UNDER THE SOLE SUPERVISION OF THE PRESIDENT IS NECESSARY.

  IT IS DIRECTED AND ORDERED THAT THERE IMMEDIATELY BE ESTABLISHED A CLANDESTINE AND COVERT ORGANIZATION WITH THE MISSION OF DETERMINING THE IDENTITY OF THE TERRORISTS INVOLVED IN THE ASSASSINATIONS, ABDUCTION, AND ATTEMPTED ASSASSINATION PREVIOUSLY DESCRIBED AND TO RENDER THEM HARMLESS. AND TO PERFORM SUCH OTHER COVERT AND CLANDESTINE ACTIVITIES AS THE PRESIDENT MAY ELECT TO ASSIGN.

  FOR PURPOSES OF CONCEALMENT, THE AFOREMENTIONED CLANDESTINE AND COVERT ORGANIZATION WILL BE KNOWN AS THE OFFICE OF ORGANIZATIONAL ANALYSIS, WITHIN THE DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY. FUNDING WILL INITIALLY BE FROM DISCRETIONARY FUNDS OF THE OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT. THE MANNING OF THE ORGANIZATION WILL BE DECIDED BY THE PRESIDENT ACTING ON THE ADVICE OF THE CHIEF, OFFICE OF ORGANIZATIONAL ANALYSIS.