"Good idea," Castillo said.

[SIX]

Le Presidente Hotel

Largo 4 de Fevereiro

Luanda, Angola

0605 4 June 2005

There were a dozen or more black men in business suits and chauffeur's caps holding cards with names lettered on them waiting for the passengers as they came out of customs at the airport. One of the cards read: PATRICIA WILSON.

"I guess the hotel sent a car for me, too," she said. "What do we do?"

"I suspect you'll have to pay for it anyway," Castillo said, "and I suspect both cars will be small."

"And probably French?" she asked.

"If yours breaks down-and it probably will-I'll rescue you," Castillo said. "And you can do the same for me."

"Call me later? I need the attentions of a beautician."

"Absolutely," he said.

He had put her into her car, a Citroen, and then followed his driver to a Mercedes. He wondered if that was random or whether the Meridien hotel chain had a policy: Germans get Mercedes, Americans get Citroens.

When he didn't see her in the hotel lobby he was disappointed. He thought her driver had probably made much better time through the very early morning traffic in the small Citroen than he had in the larger Mercedes and that she was probably already in her shower. That triggered an immediate mental image.

There's no question about it. At this almost obscene hour of the morning my hormones are raging.

And you know in your bones that this one is dangerous and that you should back off.

He tried out his Portuguese on the assistant manager behind the registration desk, but the French hotelier insisted on responding in barely understandable German.

In which he said welcome to Le Presidente and that he would have to keep Castillo's passport.

Hotels did that either to make sure they got paid-not a valid excuse here because his bills were to be paid directly by the Tages Zeitung -or so the police could have a look at it.

The "small suite" was a sitting room, a bedroom, and an alcove with a desk and chair that wasn't large enough to be called a room. A high-speed Internet cable was neatly coiled on the desk.

The windows of both the sitting room and the bedroom looked out and fifteen stories down onto the bay. There was a basket of fruit and a bottle of wine on the coffee table and a terry cloth robe had been laid across the double bed.

Castillo wondered if the room was bugged, but that was an automatic thought. As he always assumed any gun he picked up was loaded, he always assumed hotel rooms were bugged. He knew a lot of people who really should have known better who had fired "unloaded" guns and others who had wrongly presumed "There's no way this place could be bugged."

He took his laptop from its briefcase and plugged the charger and the ethernet cable into it. The high-speed access to the Internet was up and running. There were three e-mail messages for him on tageszeitung. wash@aol. com. One was from a company promising to return the full purchase price (less shipping) if their product failed to increase the size of his male member. After a moment's thought, and pleased with himself, he forwarded that one to fernandolopez@castillo. com.

The second offered Viagra online without a prescription and the third told him now was the time to refinance his mortgage. He deleted both.

There was only one message on his MSN account, from shake.n. bake@yahoo. com:

Major Castillo took a moment to consider his reply to the secretary of homeland security and then quickly typed it.

He read the screen to make sure there were no typos and then pushed ENTER.

Going to the American embassy here would be a waste of time, and it would almost certainly draw attention to him.

Furthermore, he had already read, in Washington, the intel summaries. What the military attache had sent to the Defense Intelligence Agency, what the CIA station chief had sent to Langley, and what the ambassador had sent to the State Department. If there had been significant developments on what happened to the missing 727 while he was on his way to Angola, the secretary would either have indicated that in the e-mail, or, at the least, ordered him to call home.

His job here wasn't to find the airplane but rather, as the president had put it, to find out who knew what and when they knew it.

The German embassy was another matter. Not only would a German journalist be expected to check in with the embassy but Otto had sent them a message saying he was coming. More important, they might know something, or have an opinion, that they almost certainly would not have shared with the Americans.

Castillo unpacked, then had a shower and a shave. He drew the blinds against the early morning sun, lay down on the bed, and went to sleep.

He intended to sleep until nine or thereabouts. When he woke, it was 9:05. He dressed, brushed his teeth, and then went down to the lobby, had a cup of coffee and a croissant in the lobby lounge, and then went out and got in a taxi.

The doorman who put him into the cab asked in Portuguese where he wanted to go and Castillo told him, in what he hoped sounded like Portuguese. The doorman seemed to understand him.

[SEVEN]

The Chief of Mission at the German embassy, whose name was Dieter Hausner, was about Castillo's age. He was thin, nearly bald, and well dressed. His office overlooked an interior garden. It was impersonal. The only picture on the walls was of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, and the furniture was modern, crisp, and efficient. Castillo was not surprised that the chrome-and-leather chair into which Hausner waved him was awkward to get into and would be worse getting out of.

Hausner told him the ambassador was sorry he couldn't receive Herr von und zu Gossinger personally-the press of duty-but he hoped that while Herr von und zu Gossinger was in Angola he would have the chance to offer him dinner.

"That would be very nice," Castillo said.

"You know, although I now consider myself a Berliner, I'm from Hesse myself," Hausner said. "Wetzlar."

"Oh, yes."

"And I'm an Alte Marburger."

The reference was to Phillip's University in Marburg an der Lahn, not far from either Fulda or Wetzlar. Castillo had told people he was a Marburger. He knew enough about the school to get away with it, including the fact that the university usually turned a deaf ear to inquiries about its alumni unless they came from another university. Obviously, he couldn't do that here, and get in a game of "did you know" with Hausner.

"My uncle Wilhelm-Willi-was a Marburger," Castillo said.

"But not you? Where did you go to university?"

I am being interrogated. Why? Because the ambassador wanted to check me out before he fed me dinner? Or is Dieter here really the agency spook? Or the spook or counterspook in addition to his other duties?

So far as I know, I have never done anything to arouse the curiosity of German intelligence, but that doesn't mean they don't have a dossier on Karl Wilhelm von und zu Gossinger.

Would Hausner routinely have run a security check on me when he got Otto's heads-up that I was coming? Or would he presume that if the Tages Zeitung sent me, I was who they said I was? Or will he – if I arouse his curiosity – ask for a security check the minute I walk out of here?