"I went right from Saint Johan's in Fulda to Georgetown, in Washington," Castillo said. "My grandfather was a believer in the total immersion system of learning a foreign language."

"And did it work?"

"I speak fluent American," Castillo said. "And passable English."

Hausner laughed.

"And you're now based in Washington?"

"It was either that or Fulda," Castillo said.

"I understand. Fulda offers about as much of the good life as Wetzlar."

"When I was a kid, I went to the school at the Leitz plant," Castillo said. Leica cameras came from the Leitz factory in Wetzlar. "I used to drink in a gasthaus by the bridge."

"Zum Adler," Hausner furnished. "So did I. So what brings you to Luanda?"

"The missing airplane:"

"Uh-huh," Hausner said.

"And the man who would ordinarily cover the story was unable to come. And I speak a little Spanish, which is a little like Portuguese."

"I understand."

"What do you think happened to that airplane?"

"How much do you know about it?"

"Only what I read in the newspapers. An airplane, a Boeing 727, which had been here for a year, suddenly took off without permission and hasn't been seen since."

"That's about all I know," Hausner said.

"Why was it here for a year? How do you hide an airplane that size? Was it stolen? What do you do with a stolen airplane?"

"You could fly it into a skyscraper in New York," Hausner said. "But I don't think that's what the thief-thieves-had in mind."

"Really?"

"It would be so much easier to steal-what's the term?- skyjack an airplane in the United States-or, for that matter, in London, if they wanted to fly into Buckingham Palace-than it would be to fly an airplane from here to wherever they wanted to cause mischief."

"That's true," Castillo agreed.

It probably is true, but for some reason I remain unconvinced.

"I have a theory-but, please, Herr von und zu Gossinger, I really don't want to be quoted."

"Not even as a 'high-ranking officer, speaking on condition of anonymity'?"

"Not at all."

He liked "high-ranking officer. "

"All right, you have my word."

"Let me put it this way," Hausner said. "I wouldn't be at all surprised if in two or three weeks-or this afternoon-the airplane will be found not more than a couple of hundred miles from here, perhaps even closer, on a deserted field. The empty hulk of the airplane; everything that can be taken off of it-engines, instruments, even the wheels and tires-will have been taken off."

"For resale on the black market?"

"Uh-huh. There's a market all over Africa for aircraft parts."

"That would open the possibility that the owners of the aircraft-you don't know why it sat here for a year?"

"It may have needed parts. Do you know who owned it?"

"A small airplane dealer in Philadelphia," Castillo said, "that probably had it insured and will now place a claim. That may be enough in itself, but if they were involved in having the plane stolen and can sell the parts:"

"Precisely," Hausner said.

"I'd like to see where the airplane was parked all that time," Castillo said after a moment. "Is that going to be difficult?"

"There's not much to see," Hausner said. "A concrete pad in a far corner of the airfield. I've been there. But, no, it won't be a problem. I know the security man at the airfield. I'll give him a call and tell him you're coming."

Hausner opened his desk drawer and took two business cards from a box. He wrote a name on one of them and then handed both to Castillo.

"A small gift for his favorite charity might be a good idea," Hausner said, smiling.

"I think I'll go out there now," Castillo said. "Before it gets hot."

"I'll send you out there in one of our cars," Hausner said. "And then you can take a taxi to your hotel when you've finished."

"That's very kind of you," Castillo said.

"Not at all," Hausner said. He stood up and offered his hand.

[EIGHT]

Hausner was right. There was nothing much to see at the airport, although the "little gift" Castillo gave to the airport security manager for his favorite charity resulted in having that dignitary drive him to the remote parking area in his Citroen pickup truck.

There were four parking pads near the north threshold of the main runway. None were in use. The one the security manager pointed out as where the 727 had been parked was identical to the others-an oil-stained square concrete pad with grass growing through its cracks.

Controllers in the tower across the field would have seen the 727 every time they looked in the direction of the runway's northern threshold.

Taking off without permission would have been simple. All the pilot would have had to do-and almost certainly did do-was call ground control for permission to taxi to the hangar/terminal area. When that permission was granted, all the pilot had had to do was make a right turn off the taxiway onto the threshold, and then another right onto the runway and go. He would have been airborne before any but the most alert controller would have noticed he wasn't on the taxiway.

Castillo ran the numbers in his mind:

If the pilot kept the 727 close to the ground, he would have been out of sight in no more than a minute or two and disappeared from radar in not much more time. If he was making three hundred knots-and he almost certainly would have been going at least that fast-that was five miles a minute. In twenty minutes, he would have been a hundred miles from the airport. In half an hour, he would have been 150 miles from the airfield, and even if he had climbed out by then in the interest of fuel economy he would have just been an unidentifiable blip on the airfield's radar screen. He certainly would not have activated his transponder.

In the taxi-this one a Peugeot-to El Presidente Hotel, Castillo decided that he was not going to learn much more in Luanda than he already knew. The CIA and DIA and State Department intel filings would have the details of who was suspected of flying the plane off, who serviced the plane so that it would be flyable after sitting there for so long, and so on. There was no sense wasting time duplicating their efforts himself now. When he'd assembled and collated everybody's filings, he would know which of the agencies had made the same sort of decision to let another agency develop something they should have developed themselves. This is one of the things the president had said he wanted to know.

The airplane was bound to show up. When that happened, he would probably be able to determine who had done the best job of finding out what had happened, and, more important, who had not learned something that should have been learned. Plus, of course, who had made the best guess about what was going to happen.

The president had made it clear he wanted to know who had known what and when. And who had done or not done something others had done.

Castillo decided that what he would do was go to his room and write a story for the Tages Zeitung. He would e-mail it both to Germany and to Hall. The secretary would understand from the Tages Zeitung filing that he hadn't learned anything that hadn't already been reported.

Afterward, he would spend the afternoon hanging around the hotel bar. Striking up conversations with strangers often produced an amazing amount of information. If something new-or even the suggestion of something new-came up, he would run it down. If not, he'd go back to Germany, and from Germany home. Until the plane showed up, there was really nothing else he could do, and the plane might not show up for weeks. Unless, of course, he thought wryly, he went back to Washington, where the 727 would show up when he was halfway across the Atlantic.