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  "A hypodermic needle?" Tor parroted.

  "It's in my jacket pocket," the old man said. "When we get to the hospital, take it and find out what it is."

  "They were going to drug you?"

  "They only started shooting after Max and I grabbed the bastard on the bridge. Jesus Christ, Sandor, do you need a map? They were going to take me someplace to see what I know and where my evidence is. When they had that, then they were going to put me in the Danube."

  "Where is your evidence?"

  "In my apartment."

  "Where in your apartment?"

  "If I told you, then you'd know," the old man said. "Someplace safe."

  "You don't want to tell me?"

  "No. Can't you drive any faster? I'm getting a little woozy."

  A moment later, Sandor looked in the backseat.

  The old man was unconscious. Max was standing over him, gently licking his face as if trying to wake him.

  Sandor turned and looked forward again, and thought, Please, God, don't let him die!

  He pushed another autodial button on the cellular, praying it was the right one.

  "Telki Private Hospital."

  "I'm bringing an injured man to the emergency room. Be waiting for me," Tor ordered.

  Five minutes later, he pulled the Mercedes up at the emergency entrance of the Telki Private Hospital. A gurney, a doctor, and a nurse were outside the door.

  Tor helped the doctor get the old man on the gurney.

  "He's been shot," the doctor announced.

  "I know," Tor said.

  The doctor gave him a strange look, then started to push the gurney into the hospital.

  Tor put his arm around the dog.

  "You can't go, Max," he said.

  Max strained to follow the gurney but allowed Tor to restrain him.

  Tor looked at his watch. It was two twenty-five. [TWO] Estancia Shangri-La Tacuarembo Province Republica Oriental del Uruguay 2225 31 July 2005 At almost precisely that moment in real time-by the clock, it is four hours later in Budapest than it is in Uruguay-a U.S. Army Special Forces medic, Sergeant Robert Kensington, who had been kneeling over a stocky blond man in his forties and examining his wound, stood up and announced: "You're going to be all right, Colonel. There's some muscle damage that's going to take some time to heal, and you're going to hurt like hell for a long time every time you move-for that matter, breathe. I can take the bullet out now, if you'd like."

  "I think I'll wait until I get to a hospital," Colonel Alfredo Munz said.

  Until very recently, Munz had been the director of SIDE, the Argentine organization that combines the functions of the American FBI and CIA.

  There were three other men in the room, the study of the sprawling "big house" of Estancia Shangri-La. One of them-a some what squat, completely bald very black man of forty-six-was lying in a pool of his own blood near Colonel Munz, dead of 9mm bullet wounds to the mouth and forehead. He had been Dr. Jean-Paul Lorimer, an American who had been a United Nations diplomat stationed in Paris and who had taken some pains to establish a second identity for himself in Uruguay as Jean-Paul Bertrand, a Lebanese national and dealer in antiquities. Eighteen days earlier, on July thirteenth, Dr. Jean-Paul Lorimer had gone missing in Paris. A week later, his sister, who was married to J. Winslow Masterson, the chief of mission of the U.S. embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina, had been kidnapped from the parking lot of a restaurant in San Isidro, an upscale Buenos Aires suburb.

  The President of the United States, suspecting the kidnapping had something to do with international terrorism and wanting to know what was going on without that information having to be slowly filtered through State Department and intelligence channels, had sent to Buenos Aires a personal agent-an Army officer serving as executive assistant to the secretary of Homeland Security.

  Major C. G. Castillo had arrived in Buenos Aires on July twenty-second. The next morning, El Coronel Alfredo Munz of SIDE informed the American ambassador that Mr. Masterson had been found in a taxi on the riverfront, drugged and sitting beside the body of her husband, who had been shot before her eyes.

  The President had been enraged. He telephoned Ambassador Juan Manuel Silvio to personally tell him that he was placing Major Castillo in charge of both the investigation of the kidnapping and murder and of the protection of Mr. Masterson and her children until they were safely returned to the United States.

  When the Air Force Globemaster III carrying Masterson's family and remains-and the remains of a Marine Guard sergeant, who had been murdered when driving a female Secret Service agent away from the Masterson residence-touched down at Keesler Air Force Base in Mississippi on July twenty-fifth, Air Force One and the President of the United States were waiting for it.

  The President sent for Major Castillo. Just before he got off the Globemaster to go aboard Air Force One, Mr. Masterson told Major Castillo that her kidnappers wanted to know where her brother was hiding and that they would kill her children if she didn't tell them. They had murdered her husband to make the point the threat was serious. Mr. Masterson told Castillo that she had absolutely no idea where Jean-Paul Lorimer was or why the kidnappers were after him.

  When Castillo reported to the President aboard Air Force One, the President showed him the document he and Secretary of State Natalie Cohen had just made law:

  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, CHIEF OF MISSION OF THE UNITED STATES EMBASSY IN BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA; THE ABDUCTION OF Mr. MASTERSON'S WIFE, Mr. ELIZABETH LORIMER MASTERSON; THE ASSASSINATION OF SERGEANT ROGER MARKHAM, USMC; AND THE ATTEMPTED ASSASSINATION OF SECRET SERVICE SPECIAL AGENT ELIZABETH T. SCHNEIDER INDICATES 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 DISCRETIONAL 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. MAJOR CARLOS G. CASTILLO, SPECIAL FORCES, U.S. ARMY, IS HEREWITH APPOINTED CHIEF, OFFICE OF ORGANIZATIONAL ANALYSIS, WITH IMMEDIATE EFFECT. SIGNED:

  PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  WITNESS: Natalie G. Cohen

  SECRETARY OF STATE

  TOP SECRET-PRESIDENTIAL

  No one anywhere had any idea why anyone was so determined to find Jean-Paul Lorimer and was perfectly willing to commit murder to do so. But it was obvious to Major Castillo that the best-indeed, the only-course of action was to find Jean-Paul Lorimer and the place to do that was in Paris.

  A CIA agent in Paris seemed to have some answers. He told Castillo he suspected that Lorimer was involved in the Iraqi oil-for-food sc
andal, which had just come to light. The CIA agent said he thought Lorimer had been the man who distributed the money involved. He also said he thought he knew where Jean-Paul Lorimer was: cut in small pieces in the river Seine.

  Castillo had gone next to Otto Gorner, the managing director of Gossinger Beteiligungsgesellschaft, G.m.b.H., in Fulda, Germany. He had a close relationship with both the holding company-which owned, among a good deal else, all the Tages Zeitung newspapers-and with Gorner himself.

  Gorner told him that he agreed with the CIA agent, that Lorimer had some connection with the oil-for-food scandal, which he had also been looking into. He also pointed him to Budapest, where the editor in chief of the Budapester Tages Zeitung, Eric Kocian, had a list of names of people he strongly suspected were involved.

  Kocian had never heard of Lorimer, but said there obviously had to be a "bag man," and it could easily be a UN diplomat who could travel around Europe and the Near East without drawing attention to himself. If Lorimer was that man, those deeply involved in the scandal would want him dead and would be willing to kill to see him eliminated.

  Kocian also said his information suggested that much of the oil-for-food money was going to South America. On condition that Castillo would not reveal either his name or the names on his list to any U.S. government agency, Kocian gave him a list of names of people who he thought-or knew-were involved and who were in South America, mainly in Argentina and Uruguay.

  Castillo had gone back to South America, where he found that Lorimer's name had not come up to any of the U.S. intelligence agencies operating there or to SIDE. But he had also learned that Uruguay was known as the "money-laundering capital of the Southern Cone." So he went there.

  The FBI agents in Montevideo, euphemistically called "legal attaches" of the embassy, had never heard of Lorimer either, but one of them, Special Agent David W. Yung, Jr., did say that he recognized a squat, bald, very black man in one of Castillo's photos as being the Lebanese antiquities dealer Jean-Paul Bertrand, who owned an estancia called Shangri-La and was known to be there.

  Yung was quickly informed that that in fact was a picture of Jean-Paul Lorimer.

  The thing to do with Lorimer, Castillo then had decided, was to repatriate the missing diplomat-by force, if necessary-and he set up an operation to do that. He had just identified himself to Lorimer in Lorimer's office at the estancia when the barrel of a Madsen submachine gun smashed the office window and sprayed the room, killing Lorimer and wounding El Coronel Munz. They had been attacked by six men, who were all killed in the next few minutes. None of them carried identification of any kind. The third man in Jean-Paul Lorimer's office was dressed-as Sergeant Kensington was-in the black coveralls and other accoutrements worn by Delta Force operators when engaged in clandestine and covert operations. He was cradling in his arms a black bolt-action 7.62?55 sniper's rifle, modified from a Remington Model 700. Had he not pushed his balaclava mask off his face, Corporal Lester Bradley, USMC, who was nineteen, would have looked far more like what comes to mind when the phrase Delta Force operator is heard.

  With the mask off, it had just occurred to the fourth man in the room, he looks like a kid who has borrowed his big brother's uniform to wear to the high school Halloween party.

  He was immediately sorry for the thought.

  The little sonofabitch can really shoot, as he just proved by saving my life.

  The fourth man was Major (Promotable) Carlos G. Castillo, Special Forces, U.S. Army. He was thirty-six, a shade over six feet tall, and weighed one hundred ninety pounds. He had blue eyes and light brown hair. He was in a well-tailored dark blue suit.

  He turned to Munz, who was looking a little pale from his wound.

  "Your call, Alfredo," Castillo said. "If Kensington says he can get the bullet out, he can. How are you going to explain the wound?"

  "No offense," Munz replied, "but that looks to me like a job for a surgeon."

  "Kensington has removed more bullets and other projectiles than most surgeons," Castillo said. "Before he decided he'd rather shoot people than treat them for social disease, he was an A-Team medic. Which meant…what's that line, Kensington?"

  "That I was 'Qualified to perform any medical procedure other than opening the cranial cavity, '" Kensington quoted. "I can numb that, give you a happy pill, clean it up, and get the bullet out. It would be better for you than waiting-the sooner you clean up a wound like that, the better-and that'd keep you from answering questions at a hospital. But what are you going to tell your wife?"

  "Lie, Alfredo," Castillo said. "Tell her you were shot by a jealous husband."

  "What she's going to think is, I was cleaning my pistol and it went off, and I'm embarrassed," Munz said. "But I'd rather deal with that than answer official questions. How long will I be out?"

  "You won't be out long, but you'll be in la-la land for a couple of hours."

  Munz considered that for a moment, then said: "Okay, do it."

  "Well, let's get you to your feet and onto something flat where there's some light," Kensington said. He looked at Castillo and the two of them got Munz to his feet.

  "There's a big table in the dining room that ought to work," Kensington said. "It looks like everybody got here just in time for dinner. There's a plate of good-looking roast beef on it. And a bottle of wine."

  "Okay on the beef," Castillo said. "Nix on the wine. We have to figure out what to do next and get out of here."

  "Major, who the fuck are these bad guys?" Kensington asked.

  "I really don't know. Yung is searching the bodies to see what he can find out. I don't even know what happened."

  "Well, they're pros, whoever they are. Maybe Russians? Kranz was no amateur and they got him. With a fucking garrote. That means they had to (a) spot him and (b) sneak up on him. A lot of people have tried that on Seymour and never got away with it."

  "Spetsnaz?" Castillo said. "If this was anywhere in Europe, I'd say maybe, even probably. But here? I just don't know. We'll take the garrote and whatever else Yung comes up with and see if we can learn something."

  When they got to the dining room, Kensington held up Munz while Castillo moved to a sideboard the Chateaubriand, a sauce pitcher, a bread tray, and a bottle of Uruguayan Merlot. Then he sat him down on the table.

  "You going to need me-or Bradley-here?" Castillo asked.

  "No, sir."

  "Come on, Bradley. We'll find something to wrap Sergeant Kranz in."

  "Yes, sir." Sergeant First Class Seymour Kranz, a Delta Force communicator, who at five feet four and one hundred thirty pounds hadn't been much over the height and weight minimums for the Army, was lying facedown where he had died.

  A light-skinned African American wearing black Delta Force coveralls sat beside him, holding a Car-4 version of the M-16 rifle between his knees. Despite the uniform, Jack Britton was not a soldier but a special agent of the United States Secret Service.

  "Anything, Jack?" Castillo asked.

  Britton shook his head.

  "It's like a tomb out there," he said. And then, "Is that what they call an unfortunate choice of words?"

  He scrambled to his feet.

  "Let's get Seymour on the chopper," Castillo said, as he squatted beside the corpse.

  The garrote which had taken Sergeant Kranz's life was still around his neck. Castillo tried to loosen it. It took some effort, but finally he got it off and then examined it carefully.

  It was very much like the nylon, self-locking wire-and-cable binding devices enthusiastically adopted by the police as "plastic handcuffs." But this device was blued stainless steel and it had handles. Once it was looped over a victim's head and then tightened around the neck, there was no way the victim could get it off.

  Castillo put the garrote in his suit jacket pocket.

  "Okay, spread the sheets on the ground," Castillo ordered. "You have the tape, right?"

  "Yes, sir," Corporal Bradley responded.

  He laid the sheets, stripped from Jean
-Paul Lorimer's bed, on the ground. Castillo and Britton rolled Sergeant Kranz onto them. One of his eyes was open. Castillo gently closed it.

  "Sorry, Seymour," he said.

  They rolled Kranz in the sheets and then trussed the package with black duct tape.

  Then he squatted beside the body.

  "Help me get him on my shoulder," Castillo ordered.

  "I'll help you carry him," Britton said.

  "You and Bradley get him on my shoulder," Castillo repeated. "I'll carry him. He was my friend."

  "Yes, sir."

  Castillo grunted with the exertion of rising to his feet with Kranz on his shoulder, and, for a moment, he was afraid he was losing his balance and bitterly said, "Oh, shit!"

  Bradley put his hands on Castillo's hips and steadied him.

  Castillo nodded his thanks and then started walking heavily toward where the helicopter was hidden, carrying the body of SFC Seymour Kranz over his shoulder. [THREE] Aeropuerto Internacional Jorge Newbery Buenos Aires, Argentina 2345 31 July 2005 When the Bell Ranger helicopter called Jorge Newbery Ground Control, announced that he was at twenty-five hundred feet over the Unicenter Shopping Mall on the Route Panamericana on a VFR local flight from Pilar and wanted permission to land as near as possible to the JetAire hangar, Ground Control immediately cleared the pilot to make a direct approach.

  "You're number one to land. There is no traffic in the area. Report when you are at five hundred feet over the threshold. Visibility unlimited. Winds are negligible."

  There is not much commercial late-night activity at Jorge Newbery, which is commonly thought of as Buenos Aires's downtown airport. The airport is separated by only a highway from the river Plate and is no more than-traffic permitting-a ten-minute drive from downtown Buenos Aires. Very late at night, the tarmac in front of the terminal is crowded with the Boeing 737s of Aerolineas Argentina, Austral, Pluna, and the other airlines which will, starting very early in the morning, take off for cities in Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil.