Black Ops Page 4

  “Well, we’ll have something to talk about when we get to your mother’s, won’t we?” Liam asked.

  “Goddamn you, Liam!” Mónica said.

  II

  [ONE]

  7200 West Boulevard Drive

  Alexandria, Virginia

  1145 25 December 2005

  A yellow Chrysler minivan with the legend Captain Al’s Taxi Service To All D.C. Airports painted on its back windows drove through the snow of the long, curving driveway up to the big house and stopped before the closed four doors of the basement garage.

  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—What the hell, it’s Christmas Day—and then said, “I’ll walk you to the door, ma’am.”

  “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,” Doña 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, Doña 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,” Doña 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.”

  “Well, I’m glad to see you. I somehow had the idea you’d gone back to Budapest.”

  Kocian sighed dramatically. “I pray daily that I will soon be released from durance vile. So far the Good Lord has ignored my devout pleas.”

  “I had no idea you were living here with Carlos.”

  “I’m not,” he said a little too quickly. “Mädchen and I—with those few pups Karlchen has not torn cruelly from their mother—are staying in the Mayflower.”

  “Four of those adorable pups, as I suspect you well know, Billy, are making this Christmas even more joyous for some very nice people.”

  Kocian ignored that. He said, “May I offer you a glass of champagne, Doña Alicia? I took the precaution of bringing some, knowing that if the inhabitants of this monastery had any at all, it would be vinegar.”

  “ ‘Monastery’?”

  “That’s what they call it,” Kocian said with a nod at Castillo. “Their sense of humor is as perverse as their taste in food and wine.”

  “I would love a glass of champagne,” Doña Alicia said, smiling.

  “If you would be so kind as to follow me?”

  Doña Alicia saw that the kitchen was large—even huge—and that the sliding doors open to the adjacent living room showed that it was sizable, too, causing her to idly wonder what exact purpose this great big house—and all these people—served for her grandson. There were seven people in the kitchen, six men and a woman, not counting Eric Kocian or Charley Castillo. Most were sprawled in chairs holding what could have been glasses of iced tomato juice, but what Doña Alicia knew had to be Bloody Marys. The woman and two of the men were standing at the stove, which was in an island in the center of the room.

  There was also another Bouvier des Flandres, this one a third smaller than Max and lying on the floor beside an infant’s crib that held four sleeping puppies. She clearly was the mother—Mädchen—and sat up attentively when the others came into the room.

  Castillo gestured toward the woman and one of the men at the stove. Dressed casually in nice blue jeans and sweaters, both were in their forties, a pleasant-looking pair yet average to the point that they would not stand out in a crowd on Main Street, U.S.A.

  “Abuela,” Castillo said, “this is Dianne and Harold Sanders. They take care of us. This is my grandmother, Mrs. Alicia Castillo. Have we got enough to feed her?”

  “No problem, Colonel,” Harold Sanders said as he stirred some dark sauce in a large pot. He looked at Abuela and nodded once. “It’s our honor to meet you, ma’am.”

  “You know everybody else, right, Abuela?” Castillo went on.

  “Enough,” she said, and went to Dianne Sanders. “My grandson should have given you Christm
as off.”

  “Unless we cooked dinner, ma’am,” Harold Sanders put in, “they’d poison themselves and we’d be out of a job.”

  “If you say so,” she said with a smile.

  She went in turn to the others, kissing the cheeks of the men she knew, shaking the hands of those she didn’t and saying she was happy to get to know them.

  These included a young Chinese American whose name was David Yung; a nondescript man in his late fifties, wearing somewhat rumpled trousers and an unbuttoned vest, who introduced himself as Edgar Delchamps; a well-set-up man about Castillo’s age by the name of John Davidson; a ruddy-cheeked, middle-aged man who said he was Tom McGuire; and another middle-aged man whose name was Sándor Tor. Most were wearing suits, but not the jackets thereto.

  And there were two others in the house: the muscular young man in the suit who had opened the front door to Doña Alicia, and another muscular young man in a suit who could have been his brother were he not a very dark-skinned African-American.

  These two muscular young men were special agents of the United States Secret Service. Their mission was to provide security to the personnel of the Office of Organizational Analysis. While both the Secret Service and the OOA were in the Department of Homeland Security, almost no one knew of the OOA’s existence and even fewer were in fact members, including these special agents.

  Of course, there were very good reasons for this—indeed, top secret ones—chief among them that the OOA had come into being only five months earlier at the direction—if not the fury—of the President of the United States:

  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, MRS. 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

  There at first had been only one member of the Office of Organizational Analysis—Castillo, who had recently returned from Afghanistan and was then assigned as an aide to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Matthew Hall—but the staff had quickly grown.

  To guide the young Army major through the swamp of Washington bureaucracy and to protect him as much as this could be done from the alligators dwelling therein, Secretary Hall had given up two members of his personal staff, Mrs. Agnes Forbison and Thomas McGuire.

  Mrs. Forbison, who was forty-nine, gray-haired, and getting just a little chubby, was a GS-15, the most senior grade in the Federal Civil Service. She had been one of Hall’s executive assistants before being named deputy chief for administration of the Office of Organizational Analysis.

  Tom McGuire, a supervisory special agent of the Secret Service, had been transferred to OOA because he knew the law-enforcement community and because—although he was not told this—Hall knew that whatever Castillo was going to do, it would take him far from Washington, and the secretary thought that getting away from Washington would take McGuire’s mind off the recent loss of his wife to cancer. He had been devastated.

  The search for the assassins of J. Winslow Masterson had taken Castillo from Buenos Aires to the U.S. embassy in Montevideo, Uruguay. There he had met David W. Yung, Jr., ostensibly one of more than a dozen embassy “legal attachés”—actually, FBI agents—investigating the money laundering that was taking place in that small republic and its surrounding countries in what the U.S. State Department types called the Southern Cone.

  About the time Yung had pointed Castillo toward a Uruguayan antiquities dealer—who was really one Dr. Jean-Paul Lorimer, an American employee of the United Nations and Elizabeth Masterson’s brother and deeply involved in the Iraqi-UN oil-for-food scandal—Castillo had learned that Yung—who spoke five languages, none of them Oriental—had been assigned duties in Uruguay that neither the ambassador nor the other “legal attachés” knew about.

  The secretary of State and the U.S. attorney general had him investigating money laundering by prominent Americans of profits from the oil-for-food cesspool.

  After Yung’s investigation helped unmask Lorimer, Castillo decided the best way to deal with the situation was to repatriate Lorimer to the United States—willingly or otherwise—where he could be interrogated by people like Tom McGuire.

  Castillo then launched an ad hoc helicopter assault on Lorimer’s estancia, Shangri-La, to accomplish this. He used a helicopter borrowed from Aleksandr Pevsner, a Russian arms dealer living in secret in Argentina, and the few personnel immediately available to him, including Yung and a young—very young—U.S. Marine Corps corporal, Lester Bradley.

  Castillo had sent Bradley—the clerk-typist of the Marine Guard at the American embassy in Buenos Aires, and thus best tasked to drive a truck on some unexplained mission—to Uruguay, at the wheel of a GMC Yukon XL, smuggling in two forty-two-gallon barrels for the refueling of the helicopter.

  The raid, even though conducted by what Castillo painfully acknowledged were mostly amateurs, initially went well. But just as Castillo was about to tell Lorimer that he was being returned to the States—and right after he’d had Lorimer open his safe—a burst of small-arms fire announced that others were interested in Dr. Jean-Paul Lorimer. He was killed instantly.

  In the next five minutes, the estancia became littered with bodies, including one of the two Special Forces soldiers on Castillo’s team. Sergeant Seymour Krantz had been garroted to death. The other six dead were all of the unknown men who had begun the attack. One had been shot by David W. Yung, Jr., who for the first time in his law-enforcement career had drawn his pistol, and two others by Corporal Lester Bradley, who took them out with head shots from a sniper’s rifle at more than one hundred yards away.

  Bradley later modestly confessed he had been a “designated marksman” when the Marines had marched on Baghdad, and there had been no question at all in his mind that he could make the shots at the estancia wh
en he laid the crosshairs of the telescopic sight on the heads of the bad guys about to fire on Yung and Castillo.

  The assault team immediately departed Estancia Shangri-La by helicopter, leaving behind Dr. Lorimer’s body but taking with them the body of Sergeant Krantz, the garroted Delta Force soldier; David W. Yung, Jr.; Corporal Lester W. Bradley, USMC—and some sixteen million dollars’ worth of what amounted to bearer bonds that Yung had found in Lorimer’s safe.

  Castillo had ordered Yung aboard the helicopter for two reasons:

  One, that Yung—even if he didn’t know it—had more information about the oil-for-food business behind the Masterson assassination than Castillo had been able to draw from him, and, Two, that Castillo didn’t think Yung would be able to keep his mouth shut during the interrogations that would begin the moment the black-clad bodies of whoever had attacked them were discovered at the estancia.

  And so far as Corporal Bradley was concerned, this was an even worse situation. If Bradley went back to his duties at the embassy without the GMC truck, his gunnery sergeant in Buenos Aires was naturally going to ask, “So where’s the Yukon?”

  Bradley obviously could not be allowed to reply that a Special Forces major had torched the vehicle with a thermite grenade during a clandestine helicopter assault on an estate in Uruguay—which was precisely what Bradley would understand that he would have to reply when so asked.

  Marines learn at Parris Island that when a gunny asks them a question, they will respond with the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.