The Hostage has author W.E.B. Griffin (“The Corps” series, “The Brotherhood Of War” series, Final Justice) going back into the “Presidential Agent” series. Introduced in his previous novel, 2004’s By Order Of The President, Charley Castillo (the protagonist of this timely international espionage thriller) works directly for the President in the Department Of Homeland Security. Castillo’s skills get called upon when the President asks him to go to Buenos Aries. There an American diplomat’s wife, Betsy Masterson, is kidnapped from a restaurant in a Buenos Aries Province and made to watch as her husband is murdered. When he learns about the kidnapping and murder, Castillo puts in a call from the U.S embassy in Buenos Aries to Washington:

“My name is Castillo Will you put me through to Secretary Hall, please?”

“The Secretary is asleep, sir.”

He called me “sir,” which means he doesn’t know Castillo from Adam’s off ox.

“Wake him, please.”

“May I ask what this concerns, sir?”

“Get him on the goddamn phone, now!”

There was no reply, but fifteen seconds later Secretary of Homeland Security Matthew Hall came on the line.

“All you had to do was tell Dinsler who you are, Charley. You didn’t have to swear at him,” Hall said, his voice annoyed.

“Yes, sir. Sir, Mr. Masterson, Mr. Masterson, the chief of mission, has been murdered.”

“Jesus Christ,” Hall said. “And his wife?”

“She’s in the German Hospital, surrounded by eight SIDE agents, and four of ours. The bastards drugged her. She woke up – more accurately, came half out of it – in the backseat of a taxicab and found her husband slumped beside her with two bullets in his brain.”