The Outlaws: a Presidential Agent novel Read online

  In the late Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Pevsner had been simultaneously a colonel in the Soviet Air Force and a colonel in the KGB, responsible for the security of Aeroflot worldwide.

  When the KGB was faced with the problem of concealing its wealth— hundreds of billions of dollars—from the people now running Russia, who were likely to put it in the state treasury, they decided that the wealth—much of it in gold and platinum—had to be hidden outside Russia.

  And who better to do this than Colonel Aleksandr Pevsner? He knew people—many of them bankers—all over the world.

  Pevsner resigned from the Air Force, bought several ex-Soviet Air Force cargo aircraft at distress prices, and soon began a profitable business flying Mercedes automobiles and other luxury goods into Moscow. The KGB’s gold, platinum, precious stones, and sometimes cash—often contained in fuel barrels—left Moscow on the flights out.

  For the latter service, Pevsner had been paid a commission of usually ten percent of the value. His relationship with the KGB—its First Chief Directorate now the SVR—had soured over time as the SVR had regained power under Vladimir Putin. The new SVR had decided that if Pevsner were eliminated, he could not tell anyone where their money had gone, and they might even get back some of the commissions they had paid him.

  There had been a number of deaths, almost entirely of SVR agents, and Pevsner was now living with his wife and daughter in an enormous mansion on a several-thousand-hectare estate in the foothills of the Andes Mountains, protected by a security force Castillo called Pevsner’s Private Army.

  The mansion—which had been built during World War II—bore a remarkable similarity to Carinhall, Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring’s estate in Germany. Not really joking, Pevsner and Castillo said it had probably been built by either admirers of the Number Two Nazi—or even for Göring—when the Nazi leadership was planning to keep Nazism alive under the Operation Phoenix program by fleeing to Argentina.

  Castillo had met Pevsner—more accurately, Pevsner had arranged to meet Castillo—when Castillo thought Pevsner was a likely suspect in the disappearance of the 727 from Aeroporto Internacional Quatro de Fevereiro in Luanda, Angola.

  Pevsner had learned of Castillo’s suspicions from his chief of security, a former FBI agent. Castillo had been snatched from the men’s room of the Hotel Sacher in Vienna and taken to the Vienna Woods at gunpoint.

  On meeting Castillo, Pevsner decided the wisest path for him to follow was to help Castillo find the missing aircraft. He really didn’t like to kill people unless it was absolutely necessary—incredibly, he was a devout Christian—and killing Castillo would certainly draw more American attention to him and his business enterprises.

  The missing airplane was found with his help, and there was no sudden burst of activity by the Americans looking into Pevsner and his affairs.

  But the real reason Pevsner was able to feel he had really made the right decision not to kill Castillo came when Pevsner was betrayed by the former FBI agent, who set up an assassination ambush in the basement garage of the Sheraton Pilar Hotel outside Buenos Aires.

  The team of SVR assassins found themselves facing not only János, Pevsner’s massive Hungarian bodyguard, but a number of members of the OOA, who had learned what was about to happen.

  In the brief, if ferocious, firefight which ensued, János was seriously wounded and all four of the SVR would-be assassins had been killed. One of the Russians had been put down by Corporal Lester Bradley, USMC, with a headshot at thirty meters’ distance from Lester’s Model 1911A1 .45 ACP pistol.

  That had, of course, made Aleksandr Pevsner think of Charley Castillo as a friend, but there had been another unexpected development. Shortly after they had been struck with Cupid’s arrow, Sweaty had told her Carlos that the reason they had wanted to come to Argentina was because she and her brother had a relative living there. They were cousins. His mother and the mother of Sweaty and Tom were sisters. They didn’t know where he was, and she hoped her Carlos would help her find him.

  His name, Sweaty had said, was Aleksandr Pevsner.

  Behind the flight deck of the PeruaireCargo 767 there was a small passenger area equipped with a table, a galley, and six seats which could be converted to beds at the press of a switch.

  Castillo sat down beside Sweaty, and a stewardess showed him a bottle of Argentine champagne, her eyes asking if it met his pleasure. He nodded and she poured champagne for him and Sweaty and for Tom Barlow and Two-Gun.

  “Randy came to my retirement parade,” Castillo told Sweaty. “He asked if he was ever going to see me again.”

  “Oh, my poor Carlos,” Sweaty said, and took his hand and kissed it.

  Max, who seemed to understand his master was unhappy, put his paws on Castillo’s shoulders and licked his face.

  The PeruaireCargo 767 flew nonstop from Cancún to Santiago, Chile.

  For some reason, the Chilean immigration and customs officials, who had a reputation for meeting all incoming aircraft before the doors were open, were not on the tarmac.

  Castillo, Sweaty, Tom, Two-Gun, and Max were thus able to walk directly, and without attracting any attention, from the 767 to a Learjet 45 which was conveniently parked next to where the 767 had stopped. The Learjet began to taxi the instant the door had closed.

  A short time later, it landed at the San Carlos de Bariloche airport in Argentina, just the other side of the Andes Mountains. Coincidentally, the Argentine immigration and customs authorities, like their brothers in Santiago, seemed not to have noticed the arrival of the Learjet. No one saw its passengers load into a Mercedes sedan and, led and trailed by Mercedes SUVs, drive off.

  Forty-five minutes later, Charley was standing on the dock on the edge of the Casa en el Bosque property and looking out across Lake Nahuel Huapi.

  “What are you thinking, my darling?” Sweaty asked, touching his cheek.

  “That I just have, in compliance with orders, dropped off the face of the earth.”

  “Okay,” Castillo said, “the motion to split the money and run having failed, we’re still in business. But as what?”

  “We’re going to have to form a corporation,” Two-Gun said.

  “What are we going to call the corporation?” Castillo pursued.

  “Do what Aloysius did. Use the initials,” Sergeant Major (Retired) Davidson suggested. “The Lorimer Charitable and Benevolent Fund becomes the LCBF Corporation.”

  “Second the motion,” CWO5 Colin Leverette (Retired) said. “And then when everybody agrees, I can go fishing.”

  He and Davidson had made their way to Bariloche the day before. Their passports had not attracted any unwelcome attention.

  “Any objections?” Castillo asked, and then a moment later said, “Hearing none, the motion carries. It’s now the LCBF Corporation. Or will be, when Two-Gun sets it up. Which brings us to Two-Gun.”

  “Uh-oh,” Two-Gun said.

  “I suggest we appoint Two-Gun, by any title he chooses to assume, and at a suitable wage, as our money and legal guy. I think we should hire Agnes to keep running administration and keep Dianne and Harold on at the house in Alexandria.”

  Mrs. Agnes Forbison, a very senior civil servant (GS-15, the highest pay grade) had been one of the first members of OOA, as its chief of administration.

  Dianne and Harold Sanders were both retired special operators. They had been thinking of opening a bed-and-breakfast when Uncle Remus Leverette told them Castillo needed someone to run a safe house just outside Washington. They had jumped at the opportunity, and Castillo had jumped at the opportunity to have them. He’d been around the block with Harold on several occasions, and Dianne, in addition to being an absolutely marvelous cook, was also an absolutely marvelous cryptographer.

  “Okay,” Leverette then said, “after we approve that, can I go fishing?”

  Castillo said, “Then there’s the final question: What do we do about the offer from those people in Las Vegas?”

  “I was af
raid you’d bring that up, Ace,” Delchamps said. “I have mixed feelings about that.”

  “We told them we’d let them know today,” Castillo said.

  “No, they told us to let them know by today,” Delchamps said. “I’m not happy with them telling us anything.”

  “Call them up, Charley,” Jack Britton said, “and tell them we’re still thinking about it.”

  “Second the motion,” Davidson said.

  “Why not?” Castillo said. “The one thing we all have now is time on our hands. All the time in the world. Any objections?”

  There were none and the motion carried.

  “I’m going fishing,” Leverette said, and grabbed his fly rod from where he’d left it on a table, then headed for the door.

  [TWO]

  Office of the Managing Editor

  The Washington Times-Post

  1365 15th Street, N.W.

  Washington, D.C.

  1605 3 February 2007

  The managing editor’s office was across the newsroom from Roscoe Danton’s office, substantially larger and even more crowded. The exterior windows opened on 15th Street, and the interior windows overlooked the newsroom. The latter were equipped with venetian blinds, which were never opened.

  Managing Editor Christopher J. Waldron had begun smoking cigars as a teenager and now, at age sixty-two, continued to smoke them in his office in defiance of the wishes of the management of The Washington Times-Post and the laws of the District of Columbia. His only capitulation to political correctness and the law had been the installation of an exhaust fan and a sign on his door in large red letters that said: KNOCK BEFORE ENTERING!!!!

  This served, usually, to give him time to exhale and to place his cigar in a desk drawer before any visitor could enter and catch him in flagrante delicto, which, as he often pointed out, meant “while the crime is blazing.”

  There had been complaints made about his filthy habit, most of them from the female staff but also from those of the opposite and indeterminate genders, but to no avail. Chris Waldron was about the best managing editor around, and management knew it.

  Roscoe Danton knocked on Waldron’s door, waited for permission to enter, and, when that came, went in, closing the door behind him.

  Chris Waldron reclaimed his cigar from the ashtray in his desk drawer and put it back in his mouth.

  He raised his eyebrows to ask the question, Well?

  Danton said, “I am fully aware that I am neither Woodward nor Bernstein, but—”

  “Thank you for sharing that with me,” Waldron interrupted.

  “—but I have a gut feeling I’m onto a big story, maybe as big as Watergate, and I want to follow it wherever it goes.”

  “And I had such high hopes that you’d really stopped drinking,” Waldron said, and then made two gestures which meant, Sit down and tell me about it.

  “So what do we know about these two disgruntled employee whistleblowers?” Waldron asked.

  “The younger one, Wilson, was an agricultural analyst at Langley before she got married to Wilson, who’s a career bureaucrat over there. The gossip, which I haven’t had time to check out, is that he’s light on his feet. He needed to be married, and she needed somebody to push her career. Anyway, she managed to get herself sent through The Farm and into the Clandestine Service. They sent her to Angola, and then she got herself sent back to Langley. A combination of her husband’s influence and her vast experience—eleven months in Angola—got her a job as regional director for Southwest Africa, everything from Nigeria to the South African border. She was where she wanted to be, back in Washington, with her foot on the ladder to greater things. She was not very popular with her peers.”

  “What got her fired?”

  “According to her, this Colonel Castillo said terrible things about her behind her back about her handling of that 727 that was stolen. Remember that?”

  Waldron nodded. “What sort of things?”

  “She didn’t tell me, not that she would have told me the truth. But anyway, that got her relieved from the Southwest Africa desk, and assigned to the Southern Cone desk—”

  “The what?”

  “Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile—otherwise known as the Southern Cone.”

  “From which she got fired?” Waldron asked, and when Danton nodded, asked, “Why?”

  “I got this from a friend of mine who’s close to the DCI and doesn’t like her. Somebody sent the DCI a tape on which our pal C. Harry Whelan, Jr., proudly referred to her as his ‘personal mole’ in Langley.”

  C. Harry Whelan, Jr., was a prominent and powerful Washington-based columnist.

  “That would do it, I guess. You check with Harry?”

  Danton nodded.

  “And did he admit knowing this lady?”

  “More or less. When I called him, I said, ‘Harry, I’ve been talking with Patricia Davies Wilson about you.’ To which he replied, ‘Don’t believe a thing that lying bitch says.’ Then I asked, ‘Is it true somebody told the DCI she was your personal mole over there?’ And Harry replied, ‘Go fuck yourself, Roscoe,’ and hung up.”

  “I can see where losing one’s personal mole in the CIA might be a trifle annoying,” Waldron said. “But—judging from what you’ve told me about this lady—might one suspect she is what our brothers in the legal profession call ‘an unreliable witness’?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Roscoe agreed. “But the other one, Dillworth, is different.”

  “How different?”

  “Well, for one thing, everybody I talked to liked her, said she was really good at what she did, and was sorry she got screwed.”

  “How did she, figuratively speaking of course, ‘get screwed’?”

  “She was the CIA station chief in Vienna. She had been working on getting a couple of heavy-hitter Russians to defect. Really heavy hitters, the SVR rezident in Berlin and the SVR rezident in Copenhagen, who happen to be brother and sister. Dillworth was so close to this coming off that she had had Langley send an airplane to Vienna, and had them prepare a safe house for them in Maryland.”

  “And it didn’t come off?”

  “Colonel Castillo showed up in Vienna, loaded them on his plane, and flew them to South America.”

  “She told you this?”

  “No. What actually happened was that Dillworth said she wasn’t going to tell me what had happened, because I wouldn’t believe it. She said she would point me in the right direction, and let me find out myself; that way I would believe it.”

  “Is this Russian defectors story true?”

  “There’s an Interpol warrant out for”—Roscoe stopped and consulted his organizer, and then went on—“Dmitri Berezovsky and Svetlana Alekseeva, who the Russians say stole several million euros from their embassies in Germany and Denmark.”

  “And you know that Castillo took these Russians to South America? How do you know?”

  “My friend who is close to the DCI and doesn’t like Ambassador Montvale told me that Montvale told the DCI that he was going to South America to get the Russians. And that when he got down there, Castillo told him the Russians had changed their minds about defecting.”

  “And you believe this?”

  “I believe my friend.”

  “So what happened is that when Castillo stole the Russians from Dillworth, blew her operation, the agency canned her?”

  “That got Dillworth in a little hot water, I mean when the Russians didn’t come in after she said they were, but what got her recalled was really interesting. Right after this, they found the SVR rezident in Vienna sitting in the backseat of a taxi outside our embassy. He had been strangled to death—they’d used a garrote—and on his chest was the calling card of Miss Eleanor Dillworth, counselor for consular affairs of the U.S. embassy.”

  “Curiouser and curiouser,” Waldron said. “The agency thought she did it?”

  “No. They don’t know who did it. But that was enough to get her recalled from Vienna. She thinks Castillo did
it. Or, really, had it done.”

  “Why? And for that matter, why did he take the Russians? To Argentina, you said? He was turned? We have another Aldrich Ames? This one a killer?”

  Aldrich Hazen Ames was the Central Intelligence Agency counterintelligence officer convicted of selling out to the Soviet Union and later Russia.

  “I just don’t know, Chris. From what I’ve been able to find out about him, Castillo doesn’t seem to be the traitor type, but I suppose the same thing was said about Ames until the FBI put him in handcuffs.”

  “And what have you been able to find out about him?”

  “That he was retired at Fort Rucker, Alabama—and given a Distinguished Service Medal, his second, for unspecified distinguished service of a classified nature—on January thirty-first. He was medically retired, with a twenty-five percent disability as the result of a medical board at Walter Reed Army Hospital. That’s what I got from the Pentagon. When I went to Walter Reed to get an address, phone number, and next of kin from the post locator, he wasn’t in it.

  “A diligent search by another friend of mine revealed that he had never been a patient at Walter Reed. Never ever. Not once. Not even for a physical examination or to have his teeth cleaned.”

  “And being the suspicious paranoid person you are, you have decided that something’s not kosher?”

  “I suppose you could say that, yes.”

  “What do these women want?”

  “Revenge.”

  “Is Dillworth willing to be quoted?”

  “She assures me that she will speak freely from the witness box, if and when Castillo is hauled before Congress or some other body to be grilled, and until that happens, speak to no other member of the press but me. Ditto for Mrs. Patricia Davies Wilson.”

  “She has visions, in other words, of Senator Johns in some committee hearing room, with the TV cameras rolling, glaring at this Castillo character, and demanding to know, ‘Colonel, did you strangle a Russian intelligence officer and leave him in a taxicab outside the U.S. embassy in Vienna in order to embarrass this fine civil servant, Miss Eleanor Dillworth? Answer yes or no.’”