This accomplishment, however, did not mean that the Office of Organizational Analysis now could be shut down, or that the Finding could be filed in the Presidential Documents Not To Be Declassified For Fifty Years, or that the OOA personnel could be returned whence they had come.
Just about the opposite was true.
The investigation had been going on in Nuestra Pequena Casa for nearly three weeks. To say that no end was in sight was a gross understatement.
The turning over of the rocks had revealed an astonishing number of ugly worms of interest to the director of National Intelligence, the Department of Justice, the Internal Revenue Service, the Department of State, and other governmental agencies.
"What we have here isn't an investigation," Inspector Doherty, who was on the staff of the director of the FBI and who had given the subject a good deal of thought, said very seriously the night before at dinner, "it's an investigation to determine what has to be investigated."
Doherty had reluctantly-another gross understatement-become part of the investigation only after the President had personally ordered the FBI director to loan the best man he had to OOA, not the senior FBI man who could be most easily spared.
Edgar Delchamps, of the CIA, had replied, "You got it, Sherlock."
Delchamps, too, had come to the OOA reluctantly. So reluctantly that when transferred from his posting as the CIA station chief in Paris, he had reported to Castillo only after he had stopped by CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, to put in for retirement.
When Castillo found out about that, it had taken a personal call from the director of National Intelligence, Ambassador Charles W. Montvale, to the director of the Central Intelligence Agency to get Delchamps to put off his retirement "for the time being." Montvale told the DCI that the President had personally ordered that the OOA-meaning Delchamps-be given absolute access to any intelligence the agency had gathered on any subject.
Doherty and Delchamps had not at first gotten along. Both were middle-aged and set in their ways. Doherty's way-which had seen him rise high in the FBI hierarchy-was to scrupulously follow the book, never bending, much less breaking, the law. Delchamps had spent most of his career operating clandestinely, often using a fictitious name. There was no book for what he did, of course, because the clandestine service does not-cannot-operate that way. So far as Delchamps was concerned, the end really justified the means.
Yet surprisingly they had become close-even friends-in recent weeks, largely because, Castillo had decided, they were older than everybody but Eric Kocian. They regarded everyone else-including Castillo-as inexperienced youngsters and were agreed that the President had erred in giving Castillo the authority he had given him. (Castillo thought they were probably right.) What Doherty the night before had called the "investigation to determine what has to be investigated" now was just about over.
Castillo and Colonel Torine had flown the OOA's private jet-a Gulfstream III registered to the Lorimer Charitable amp; Benevolent Fund-down to Argentina to quietly ferry Delchamps, Doherty, and some of the others-not to mention the results of the investigation, which now filled one small filing cabinet and a dozen computer external hard drives-back to Washington.
Eric Kocian and his two dogs would go with them, too. His notes about the Iraqi Oil for Food scandal had provided keys to much of the information now on the hard drives.
So far as Castillo, Delchamps, and Doherty were concerned, Kocian was going to Washington to serve as a sort of living reference library as their investigation moved into the data banks of the FBI, the CIA, and other elements of the intelligence community.
So far as Kocian was concerned, however, he was going to Washington because there was a direct Delta Airlines flight from Washington Dulles International Airport to Budapest. It would allow him to take his dogs. There was no such flight from Buenos Aires.
Kocian owned two Bouvier des Flandres dogs, a male named Max and a bitch named Madchen. At one hundred-plus pounds, Max was time-and-a-half the size of a large boxer. Madchen was just a little smaller. There always had been a Max in Kocian's life since right after World War II, all of them named Max. Madchen was a recent addition, a gift from the Lorimer Charitable amp; Benevolent Fund, not necessarily as a pet for Kocian, but as a companion for Max.
Max's alertness in Budapest had warned Castillo in time for him to be able to use a suppressed Ruger MKII.22-caliber semiautomatic pistol to render harmless two men who had broken into his hotel room bent on his assassination.
As Castillo later had put it-perhaps indelicately-to Edgar Delchamps, "I don't know how things are done in the spook world, but in the Army when someone saves your ass, the least you can do for him is get him laid."
It had been love at first sight between Max and Madchen. But the playful frolicking of two canines weighing more than two hundred pounds between them had caused some serious damage to the furnishings of Nuestra Pequena Casa. Although they slept on the floor in Kocian's bedroom, they mostly had been banished to the backyard and to the quincho, where they had sort of adopted Corporal Lester Bradley, sensing that not only did he like to kick a soccer ball for them, but while manning the secure satellite communication device had the time to do so.
Everyone was so used to seeing Max, Madchen, and Lester together that hardly anyone noticed when Lester went to Ricardo Solez, touched his shoulder, and pointed to the secure radio. Solez nodded his understanding that if the radio went off, he was to answer the call.
Solez thought that Lester and Max and Madchen were leaving the quincho so that the dogs could meet the call of nature and Lester would then kick the soccer ball for them to retrieve. Both dogs could get a soccer ball in their mouths with no more effort than lesser breeds had with a tennis ball.
The first person to sense that that had not been Corporal Bradley's intention was Edgar Delchamps, who happened to glance out of the quincho into the backyard.
"Hey, Ace!" he called to Lieutenant Colonel Castillo. "As much as I would like to think the kid's playing cops and robbers, I don't think so."
Castillo looked at him in confusion, then followed Delchamps's nod toward the backyard.
Corporal Bradley, holding a Model 1911A1.45 ACP pistol in both hands, was marching across the grass by the swimming pool. Ahead of Bradley was a young man in a suit and tie who held his hands locked in the small of his neck. Max walked on one side of them, showing his teeth, and Madchen on the other showing hers.
"What the hell?" Castillo exclaimed.
Sandor Tor, with almost amazing grace for his bulk, got out of his chair and walked toward the door, brushing aside his suit jacket enough to uncover a black SIG-Sauer 9mm P228 semiautomatic pistol in a skeleton holster on his belt.
Castillo moved quickly to the drapes gathered at one side of the plateglass window and snatched a 9mm Micro Uzi submachine gun from behind them.
He opened the door as they approached the verandah of the quincho.
"What's up, Lester?" he asked.