W. Griffin - The Hostage

"They'll be on the first Busquebus from BA. It gets here at about ten-thirty."

"And you found accommodations for them?"

"Yes, sir."

"You have those maps I asked you for?"

"Yes, sir."

"Are you going to have any trouble waking up in time to pick up Munz and me here at the hotel at, say, seven o'clock in the morning?"

"I'll be here, sir."

"Where are we going?" Munz said. "Can I ask?"

"Generally speaking, we are going to reconnoiter the target. I'll be more specific in the morning." He paused. "I wonder where the restaurant is?"

"Right next to us," Munz said. "But it doesn't open until eight. In half an hour."

"Well, that'll give me time to finish this drink and have another," Castillo said.

He saw how they were both looking at him.

"What I'm doing now is running on my reserves. When I'm doing that, I can't get to sleep unless I dilute the adrenaline, or whatever the hell it is, with substantial quantities of alcohol."

"I understand," Munz said.

"Mr. Castillo, can I speak to you privately for a moment?" Yung asked.

"It won't wait until the morning? I wasn't kidding. I'm in no shape to make decisions."

"It won't take a moment, sir."

"Alfredo, order me another one, please. I will be back directly," Castillo said and stood up.

He followed Yung out of the bar and through the lobby to the street.

"Okay, what?" Castillo asked.

"I know we got off on the wrong foot, Mr. Castillo- my fault…"

"Water over the dam," Castillo said.

"And I just wanted to say I'm grateful you're not cutting me out of this. I thought, when you went back to Buenos Aires this morning, that's what was going to happen. So thank you. I'll do my damnedest."

Castillo thought, unkindly:

Jesus H. Christ! He's acting like a high school kid, blubberinghis gratitude to the coach for letting him back on the team after he got caught smoking in the boys' room. He thinks what's going to happen is some kind of a game.

So how do I handle this?

Castillo smiled at Special Agent Yung, then punched him on the shoulder.

"I'm glad you're going to be on the team, Yung," he said, hoping he sounded far more sincere than was the case.

[ONE] Estancia Shangri-La Tacuarembo Province Republica Oriental del Uruguay 0855 30 July 2005 Jean-Paul Bertrand, patron of Estancia Shangri-La, naked under his silk Sulka dressing gown, his bare feet in soft brown unborn calfskin loafers, carefully pushed open the French door from his bedroom to the interior courtyard of his home.

He was carrying a cup of tea in his left hand, and when it was raining-as it was now-the damned door stuck and the tea would spill. It didn't matter if he slopped tea on the tile floors, of course, but getting tea on the light blue dressing gown was really distressful.

He had managed-not without a good deal of effort-to teach the laundress how he liked his shirts- lightly starched-and his linen, and how she should carefully wash his silk socks in cold water. But dry cleaning was an entirely different matter. There was no dry-cleaning establishment worthy of the name in Tacuarembo, which meant that all his dry cleaning had to be taken to Punta del Este. The place there charged an arm and a leg to dry-clean something, but at least it was returned clean, in one piece, and usually of the same color.

There were several problems with that, too, however. For one thing, he did not think it wise to go to his condominium in Punta del Este. People might be looking for him to show up there. And even if he could go-in, say, six months-the stains he got on anything here would by then be permanent.

Therefore, he opened the door very carefully, and was pleased with his foresight and care. The damn door did stick, but he didn't spill any tea on his dressing gown.

He sighed. It was drizzling. And from the appearance of the sky, it was going to drizzle all day. That happened often in winter.

What it meant was that he would be a prisoner in the house at least for today and tomorrow, and probably longer than that. The paths in the interior courtyard garden were paved with tile, and if he wanted to, he could pace back and forth-like a prisoner being allowed to exercise-for as long as he wanted. But leaving the house was out of the question. Walking on the grass was like walking on a wet sponge. Jean-Paul had ruined more than one pair of shoes like that.

And where the grass ended, there was mud. The only way to move through the mud was to wear calf-high rubber boots. The rubber hurt his feet, ruined his silk socks, and made his feet smell. And too frequently the boots became stuck in the mud, which meant that when he tried to take a step, his foot came out of the boot and wound up in the mud past the ankle-if he didn't fall down on his face in the mud. Or worse, on his back.

Jean-Paul heard the helicopter a long time before he finally saw it. While helicopters were certainly not common, he seemed to see more and more of them, even way out here in the country. He had learned that some of them were owned by people who used them to commute between Montevideo-or even Buenos Aires-and their estancias. That was especially true in the winter, when the goddamn persistent drizzle turned the roads into impassable quagmires. And some were used to take hunters from Montevideo or Buenos Aires to the duck-shooting areas.

There was a lot of that, too. Well-to-do American and European hunters had discovered the wild fowl of Uruguay. He had even heard that the Vice President of the United States had shot Perdiz over dogs-whatever that meant-on an estancia owned by a Uruguayan lawyer not far from Shangri-La.

In the summer, there were frequent overflights of Shangri-La by helicopters taking people from Argentina and Brazil to Punta del Este. Jean-Paul had toyed with the idea of getting one for himself. Having one would solve the problem of getting back and forth to Punta del Este. It was a dreadfully long drive on narrow highways. And he now could easily afford one.

But a helicopter would draw attention to him, and it was a little too soon to be attracting attention. The helicopter, like a good many other things, would just have to wait until everyone forgot Jean-Paul Lorimer.

The sound of the helicopter grew louder and then- startling him-it suddenly appeared out of the drizzle, no more than several hundred feet in the air, and flashed overhead.

It was quickly gone, and then the sound of its engines and thrashing rotor blades grew dimmer and finally disappeared.

Jean-Paul Bertrand decided the pilot had somehow become lost and had flown close to the ground to find a road and reorient himself.

He tossed what was left of his tea onto a flower bed and went back into the house for a fresh cup. [TWO] Suite 735 Victoria Plaza Hotel 759 Plaza Independencia Montevideo, Uruguay 1125 30 July 2005 Suite 735 was classified by the Radisson Victoria Plaza as a "hospitality" suite, intended for the use of businessmen who wished to entertain potential clients in privacy. There was a bedroom with two king-sized beds, plus a large sitting room with a wet bar, a refrigerator, and a large table seating eight that was suitable for use as either a dining table or a conference table. An enormous Sony flat-screen television was mounted on one wall of the sitting room so that those sitting at the table could view sales presentations, HBO, or, for that matter, the XXX-RATED video dramas that were available for a nominal fee.

When Castillo walked into the hospitality suite with Munz and Yung, there were ten people in the room: Colonel Jacob Torine; Special Agents Jack Britton and Tony Santini of the Secret Service; Special Agent Ricardo Solez of the Drug Enforcement Administration; Mr. Alex Darby, the commercial attache of the U.S. embassy in Buenos Aires; Mr. Fernando Lopez; Sergeants First Class Robert Kensington and Seymour Kranz of Delta Force; Corporal Lester Bradley of the United States Marine Corps; and someone-a mild-looking man in his early thirties-Castillo had never seen before.