"You're suggesting that Lorimer has been killed?" Castillo asked.
"He was lucky if he was killed quick-in other words, just to shut him up. If somebody wanted to know what he knew… They did a real job on his pal, a Lebanese named Henri Douchon, in Vienna. To encourage him to answer questions, they pulled two of his fingernails, and half a dozen of his teeth. Then they cut his throat."
"When was this?" Castillo asked.
"A couple of weeks ago."
"When was the last time anybody saw Lorimer?" Castillo asked.
"Going by his American Express charges, he flew to Vienna on the twelfth of this month. The same day, he bought-or somebody bought using his AmEx card-a train ticket from Vienna here. I don't know if he ever used it; it might be something to throw off anybody looking for him. But he might have come back here. Just don't know. A scenario that occurs to me is that he was grabbed when he went to see his pal Douchon. Then they took him somewhere to ask him questions, or didn't. Following either possibility, they cut him up in little pieces and dropped him into the beautiful Blue Danube. Or he came back here, where they grabbed him, and after he answered their questions, what was left of him was dropped into the Seine."
"Have you considered he might be in hiding?" Castillo asked.
"Sure. Don't think so. My guess is that he's dead. These are very nasty people who wouldn't think twice before they took him out."
"I heard he might have been skimming from the payoff money," Castillo said.
"Could be. I doubt it. He was paid well, of course, but I can't find any trace of big money."
"And you think you would have been able to?"
Delchamps nodded confidently.
"I even got into his apartment," he said. "He had some really nice stuff, antiques, paintings, etcetera. More than he could afford on what the UN paid him, but a lot less, I think, than he would have had had he been stupid enough to try to steal from these guys."
"Okay," Castillo said. "Thanks. But one more question: If, for the sake of argument, he were hiding, where would you guess that would be?"
"In a closet somewhere," Delchamps said. "Or under a bed. Jean-Paul Lorimer was a wimp. He didn't have the balls to be a criminal."
"You knew him?"
"I saw him around. I'm the cultural attache at the embassy. I can put the opera, et cetera, on the expense account.And I get invited to all the parties. The Corps Diplomatique loves to have Americans around so they can tell us how we're fucking up the world." He paused. "Okay, that's what I know. Anything you think I missed?"
"I'd like to see all your files on Lorimer," Castillo said.
"So they can disappear into the black hole?"
"Photocopies would do. That way you'd still have the originals."
"You're not asking for the originals?"
Castillo shook his head. "Photocopies would be fine. How long would it take you to make copies?"
"Which you would then turn over to Montvale-or somebody in the agency, maybe-so they could message me to 'immediately transfer by courier the originals of the documents listed below and certify destruction of any copies thereof'?"
"I don't have to give Montvale anything," Castillo said, "and right now I can't think of anything I want to give him. And as far as the agency is concerned, I am on Langley's Fuck the Bastard If Possible list. I want the copies for me."
Delchamps inclined his head, obviously in thought. Then he took another sip of his coffee. Finally, he leaned back in his chair and lit a small cigar.
"Odd that you should ask about photocopies of my files on Lorimer, Mr. Castillo. By a strange coincidence, I spent most of the afternoon and early evening yesterday, starting right after Ambassador Montvale called me, making photocopies of them. At the time, I was thinking of retiring and writing a book, What the CIA Didn't Want to Get Out About Oil for Food."
"What about the 'my lips are sealed forever plus three weeks' statement you signed? You could get your tail in a crack doing something like that."
"You ever run into a guy named Billy Waugh?"
Castillo nodded.
"I thought you might have," Delchamps said. "Billy wrote a book called I Had Osama bin Laden in My Sights and the Wimps at Langley Wouldn't Let Me Terminate Him-or something like that-and nothing ever happened to Billy."
"They were probably afraid that Billy would write another one, CIA Assholes I Have Known," Castillo said.
Delchamps chuckled. "I thought about that," he said. "And I figured they'd probably come to the same conclusion about me."
He pushed himself out of the chair and held his hand out with his thumb and index finger held wide apart. "It makes a stack about this big," he said. "I'll go next door and get them."
"Thanks," Castillo said. "One more question. Why did you change your mind? About telling me anything?"
"Straight answer?"
"Please."
"Like I said, I'm a dinosaur. I've been doing this a long time. When I was a kid, starting out in Berlin, we had guys there who had been in the second war, Jedburghs, people like that. I even knew Bill Colby. One of them told me if you couldn't look into a man's eyes and size him up you'd better find something else to do. He was right. You-the three of you-have all got the right look."
Delchamps nodded at Fernando and Torine and walked out of the room.
When the door had closed, Fernando said, "So Lorimer's dead. So now what, Gringo?"
"We don't know that he's dead," Castillo said. "From what Delchamps said, if Lorimer was grabbed, it was around the twelfth of this month. They didn't even abduct Mrs. Masterson until the twentieth, or blow Masterson away until the morning of the twenty-third. That's several days. I think they would have heard, in that time, if somebody had blown Lorimer away."
"Okay," Fernando said. "Same question. What now?"
"Go get Sergeant Kranz out of bed," Castillo said. "Tell him to get packed."
Sergeant First Class Seymour Kranz, a Delta/Gray Fox communicator, had been one of the two communicators they'd picked up-together with their satellite communications equipment-at Fort Bragg. Colonel Torine had told Kranz he had been chosen to go with them to Europe, rather than the other communicator, who had set up at the Nebraska Avenue Complex, because Torine devoutly believed that when flying across an ocean every pound counted. Kranz was barely over the Army's height and weight minimums. The real reason was that Kranz had been with Torine and Castillo when they were searching for the stolen 727 and proved that you don't have to be six feet tall and weigh two hundred pounds to be a first-rate special operator.
"Where are we going?" Torine asked.
"We're going to see my uncle Otto," Castillo said, and walked to the couch and sat down and picked up the telephone on the coffee table in front of it. [TWO] Executive Offices Die Fulda Tages Zeitung Fulda, Hesse, Germany 0805 27 July 2005 Frau Gertrud Schroeder was a stocky-but by no means fat, or even chubby-sixty-year-old Hessian who wore her gray hair done up in a bun. She had been employed by the Tages Zeitung since she was twenty, and had always worked for the same man, Otto Goerner.
Otto Goerner had joined the firm shortly after he graduated from Philipps University in Marburg an der Lahn, in part because he was Wilhelm von und zu Gossinger's best friend. Wilhelm was the son and heir apparent to Herman Wilhelm von und zu Gossinger, the managing director and just about sole stockholder in Gossinger Beteiligungsgesellschaft, G.m.b.H.
When Gertrud joined the Gossinger firm, it had been a medium-sized corporation, not nearly as large as it had been before World War II, or was now. The firm's prewar holdings in Hungary and what had become East Germany-timber, farms, newspapers, breweries, and other businesses-had been confiscated by the communist East German and Hungarian governments.
By 1981, Otto Goerner had risen in the corporate hierarchy to become Herman Wilhelm von und zu Gossinger's-the Old Man's-assistant. The title did not reflect his true importance. He was the de facto number two man. But clearly stating this would have been awkward. Wilhelm von und zu Gossinger was supposed to be number two in the family firm.