W. Griffin - The Hostage

"Thanks," she said.

It was a ten-minute drive from the airport to the Four Seasons. Halfway there the rain seemed to slacken. By the time they rolled up to the Four Seasons it had stopped completely.

Bellmen appeared and took care of the luggage. "Roger, are you hungry?" Castillo asked.

"No, s- No. I'm not."

"Go home, get a hot shower, and be here at half past seven."

Sergeant Markham nodded and got back in the car.

"Very nice," Jack Britton said about the hotel.

"I didn't want him to catch pneumonia," Castillo said, gesturing at the departing BMW.

"Who's he?" Special Agent Schneider asked.

"One of the Marine guards."

"I noticed the haircut," she said.

"So we don't have wheels to go out to a restaurant-"

"Can we go inside, please?" Special Agent Schneider said. "It's cold out here."

"Sorry," he said, and motioned her ahead of him through the door. He saw that water was dripping from the hem of her skirt onto the polished marble floor.

She found her way to the reception desk by herself, and they handed her her key.

"So, about dinner," Castillo said.

"It's midnight. Is anything open?" Jack Britton interrupted.

"This is Argentina. They go to dinner starting at ten," Castillo said. "There's the hotel restaurant."

"I don't want to get dressed up enough to go to a restaurant," Britton said. "You, Betty?"

"I want to get out of these clothes," Special Agent Schneider said, triggering mental images in Major Castillo's mind, "and into a hot shower," she concluded, triggering additional mental images. "But I'm starved."

"What about room service?" Britton asked.

"Sure. Is that what you want to do?"

"Are the rooms big enough for all three of us to have dinner?" Special Agent Schneider asked. "I don't like to eat sitting on a bed."

"Mine is," Castillo said.

"Why don't we do that?" Britton asked. "Could you order dinner for us while we shower? Neither of us speaks Spanish that well."

"What do you want?"

"Anything, as long as it's warm and comes with a double Jack Daniel's," he said.

Special Agent Schneider laughed and got onto the elevator.

"Make that two," she said, and handed Castillo his jacket.

Major Castillo happened to notice that with the jacket no longer covering her, Special Agent Schneider's rain-soaked dress now clung to her body like a coat of varnish. He averted his eyes.

"I'm in fifteen-hundred," he announced as they got off the elevator. "At the far end of the corridor. I'll order us something to eat."

The elevator triggered a memory of Howard Kennedy.

Shit, I didn't call him with the names.

He felt in his jacket for the sheet of lined paper Yung had given him. It was soaked, but it was legible.

He carefully laid the soggy sheet of paper on the glass-topped coffee table in the sitting room, then went into his bedroom and stripped off his clothing.

Four years of practicing West Point Class 202- Personal Hygiene, or How to Take a Shower in No Time at All-paid off. Five minutes after entering his bedroom he came out of it, showered and dressed in slacks and a shirt.

First he called room service and ordered dinner, plus a bottle of Jack Daniel's and, after a moment's thought, a bottle of Famous Grouse and two bottles of Senetin cabernet sauvignon. He had shared a bottle of that with Ambassador Silvio at lunch, and, as the ambassador had said, it was really first class.

Then he called the valet and told him he had a soaking wet suit that he absolutely had to have dried and pressed and back by six-thirty in the morning. That posed no problem for the valet, which made Castillo suspect the drying and pressing service of the Four Seasons was probably going to cost as much as the suit had when he'd bought it at the annual Brooks Brothers sale at thirty-five percent off the tag price.

Finally, he sat down on the couch and punched Kennedy's autodial button on his cellular.

They could barely hear each other, which was explained when Kennedy said he'd never seen so much goddamn rain in his life. The rainstorm had apparently moved the fifteen miles or so between Jorge Newbery and Aeropuerto Internacional Ministro Pistarini de Ezeiza and was interfering with the cellular signals.

He was down to the last name on the list of FBI agents-he'd had to spell each one phonetically, sometimes twice-when the doorbell chimes bonged.

When he opened it, Special Agent Schneider, a lady who was probably from the valet service, and a man in a bartender's white jacket pushing a rolling table with the whiskey, wine, and the accoutrements were standing there.

Special Agent Schneider was wearing blue jeans and a sweater. Her hair looked damp.

He motioned them all into the room.

"Fix yourself a drink," he said. "Food's on the way."

He signed the bill for the drinks, then motioned the lady from the valet service into the bedroom and pointed out the waterlogged suit to her.

All of this while simultaneously spelling Daniel T. Westerly's name phonetically to Howard Kennedy for the third or fourth time, and being very much aware that Special Agent Schneider filled out both her sweater and her blue jeans in an incredibly delightful way. She wasn't wearing makeup, not even lipstick, and Castillo thought she looked fine without it.

Kennedy finally could hear Westerly's name spelled out phonetically.

"Westerly. Okay. He's a fingerprint guy. Damned good at it, too. He once lifted two eight-point digits from a used condom."

"That's it, Howard, that's the last of the names."

"All of them are on the major crimes team."

"Should any of them be of special interest to me?"

"No. Yung's the one who interests me. Watch yourself with him, Charley."

"I will. And you will inquire about Mr. Lorimer for me, right? Just as soon as you get where you're going?"

"The way it's raining, Charley, I may never get out of here."

That's two-no, four-sentences that came through intact.

"Howard, I like you. I'm going to make the rain stop."

"What?"

"Trust me, Howard, in ten minutes, fifteen tops, it will stop raining. I have issued the order. Have a nice flight, and remember to call."

He pushed the END button and laid down the cellular. "What was that all about?" Special Agent Schneider asked.

"Not that I'm not delighted to see you, but I thought women took longer to shower and dress than men."

"That means you're not going to tell me, right?" Betty replied. "To answer the second question, Jack's calling his wife."

"You really don't want to know," Castillo said.

She raised her glass of bourbon.

"You're not drinking?"

"I'm going to have the wine."

"On your good behavior, are you?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"This quote room unquote looks like a set for a movie," she said. "And mine's not exactly a slum, either. The whole bathroom is marble. Which raises the question, how do we pay for all this?"

"Wait until you see the view," he said and went to the windows and found the switch for the opening mechanism.

"That's beautiful!" she said and walked and stood beside him. "But it doesn't answer the question about the bill."

"When we get back to Washington, Agnes-Mrs. Forbison, who runs things in the Nebraska complex- will show you how to fill out the forms for travel expenses outside the country. When you get the check, sign it over to me."

"What I think that means is that you intend to pick up the difference between what the Secret Service will pay and what you will."

"I wanted to keep you and Jack separate from the FBI," Castillo said. "This is the only answer I could come up with on short notice."

The chimes bonged again.

This time it was Jack Britton and two waiters pushing two room-service carts loaded with food covered by stainless-steel domes. Britton was wearing a sports jacket, slacks, and a shirt and tie.