W. Griffin: The Hostage

Anthony J. Santini, listed in the embassy telephone directory as the assistant financial attache, was in fact a Secret Service agent dispatched to Buenos Aires to, as he put it, "look for funny money." That meant both counterfeit currency and illegally acquired money being laundered.

"I'll call him, sir."

"Then I'll see you here in a few minutes, Alex. Thank you," the ambassador said, and hung up. "You'll call who?" Ken Lowery inquired.

"Tony Santini," Alex Darby replied. "The ambassador wants him there, too."

"The residence or the embassy?"

"Residence," Darby replied, then added, "I guess he figures Tony is the closest thing we have to the FBI."

There were no "legal attaches"-FBI agents-at the embassy at the moment. There were a half dozen "across the river" looking for money-laundering operations. Money laundering in Argentina had just about dried up after the Argentine government had, without warning several years before, forcibly converted dollar deposits to pesos at an unfavorable rate and then sequestered the pesos. International drug dealers didn't trust Argentine banks any more than industry did and moved their laundering to Uruguay and elsewhere.

Darby punched an autodial button on his cellular to call Santini. Ambassador Juan Manuel Silvio was a tall, lithe, fair-skinned, well-tailored man, with an erect carriage and an aristocratic manner, and when he opened the door to the ambassadorial apartment Alex Darby thought again that Silvio looked like the models in advertisements for twelve-year-old scotch or ten-thousand-dollar wristwatches.

He was a Cuban-American, brought from Castro's Cuba as a child. His family had arrived in Miami, he said, on their forty-six-foot Chris-Craft sportfisherman with nothing but the clothing on their backs and a large cigar humidor stuffed with his mother's jewelry and hundred-dollar bills.

"My father was one of the few who recognized Castro as more than a joke," he had once told Darby. "What he didn't get quite right was how quickly Castro would march into Havana."

Darby knew he wasn't boasting, but the opposite. Silvio was proud of-and greatly admired-his fellow Cubans who had arrived in Miami "with nothing but the clothes on their backs" and subsequently prospered. He simply wanted to make it plain that it had been much easier for his family than it had been for other refugees.

Silvio graduated from his father's alma mater, Spring Hill College, a Jesuit institution in Mobile, Alabama, with a long history of educating the children of upper-class Latin Americans, took a law degree at Harvard, and then a doctorate in political science at the University of Alabama.

He joined the State Department on graduation.

He joked, "My father decided that the family owed one son to the service of the United States. I am the youngest son, so, to my brothers' delight, here I am, while they bask in the Miami sun."

Alex Darby liked the ambassador both personally and professionally. He had served in other American embassies where the ambassadors-career State Department and political appointees alike-had demonstrated an appalling lack of knowledge of geopolitics and history, and had regarded the CIA especially, and the other embassy "outsiders"-the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the Secret Service and even the military attaches who worked under the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)-as dangerous nuisances who had to be kept on a very tight leash lest they disrupt the amiable ambience of diplomatic cocktail parties.

It was a given to Ambassador Silvio that communism in Latin America was not dead; that it posed a genuine threat to the United States; that Islamic fascism was present in Latin America and growing stronger, and posed an even greater threat to the United States; and that the drug trade financed both.

His attitude toward and support of Darby and the other outsiders made their work easier, even if it did tend to annoy the "real" Foreign Service staff at the embassy. The ambassador heard out Darby's report of what had happened, considered what he had heard for a long moment, and then asked Lowery and Santini if either had anything to add.

Lowery said, "No, sir," and Santini shook his head.

"The priorities, as I see them," the ambassador said, "are to get Betsy back to her family, and then to help Jack through this. Any comments on that?"

All three men shook their heads. Lowery said, "No, sir," again.

"The Policia Federal are in on this, I presume?"

"Yes, sir," Lowery said.

"Were you considering involving SIDE, Alex?"

"I think SIDE already knows what's happened, sir," Darby replied. "But I can make a call or two if-"

"Let's hold off on that for a while. Do you think SIDE has informed the Foreign Ministry?"

"I think we have to assume they will, sir. The Policia Federal probably already have."

"Do you think this is politically motivated? Do we have any reason to suspect this is a terrorist act?"

"It may be, of course," Darby said. "But we've always thought that if the rag-heads were going to do anything, it would be a violent act, either a bomb at the embassy or here, or a drive-by assassination attempt on you-"

"You think it may be a run-of-the-mill kidnapping?" Silvio interrupted.

"Sir, I don't know what to think. But if I had to make a choice, that seems most likely."

"But kidnapping not only an American, but one with diplomatic status… that doesn't strike me as being smart."

"It will certainly get SIDE and the police off their a- Get them moving," Lowery said. "This is really going to embarrass the government."

"Mr. Santini? You have any thoughts?"

"Not many, sir. But my experience with what the sociologists call the 'criminal element' has been that they often do stupid things because they're usually stupid. I wouldn't be surprised if these guys missed the diplomat tag on the car."

"And when they learn who Mrs. Masterson is? You think they may let her go?"

"I hate to say this, sir," Santini replied, "but I think it's better than fifty-fifty that they won't. She can identify them."

"Jesus Christ!" Lowery said.

"Another scenario," Santini said, "is that they won't care about her diplomatic status, and may just demand a ransom, and if paid, let her go. We can assume only that they're willing to break the law, not that they are going to act rationally."

The ambassador asked, "Is this going to be on television tonight, and on the front page of Clarin in the morning?"

"Very possibly," Darby said. "Unless there is strong pressure from the government-the foreign minister or maybe the President or one of his cronies-to keep it quiet."

"That would be-pressure from on high-more effective in keeping this out of the press than anything we could do, wouldn't it?"

"Yes, it would," Darby said, simply.

"I'll call the foreign minister right now," the ambassador said. "Before I call Washington."

"I think that's a good idea, sir," Lowery said.

"Alex, why don't you stop by Jack's house? Tell him that everything that can be done is being done? And that he's in my prayers?"

"Yes, sir."

"I'll call him myself just as soon as I get off the phone-I may even go out there-but…"

"I understand, Mr. Ambassador," Darby said.

"I don't think it needs to be said, does it, that I want to know of any development right away? No matter what the hour?" [SIX] "Reynolds," the man answering the telephone announced.

"This is the Southern Cone desk?" Ambassador Silvio asked.

There was a more formal title, of course, for that section of the State Department charged with diplomatic affairs in the republics of Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina, but "Southern Cone" fit to describe the three nations at the southern tip of South America and was commonly used.