The Outlaws: a Presidential Agent novel
Page 17
“I don’t know what’s going on here, Mr. Danton,” Darby said. “But apparently someone has given you incorrect information. I’m sorry you’ve been inconvenienced. How did you get here?”
“In a taxi.”
“Where are you staying?”
“The Plaza Hotel.”
“Well, the least we can for you is give you a ride back there,” Darby said. “We can do that, can’t we, Liam?”
“Absolutely,” Liam said.
“Nice to have met you, Mr. Danton,” Darby said, and gestured toward the door.
“Likewise,” Roscoe Danton snapped sarcastically. “And I’ll pass on the free ride, thank you just the same.”
Comandante General Liam Duffy locked eyes with Danton, and evenly said, “Let me explain something to you, Señor. There are some irregularities with your documents—”
“What kind of irregularities?” Danton interrupted angrily.
Duffy ignored him. He went on: “I’m sure they can be quickly cleared up. Possibly even today and certainly by the morning. Our usual procedure is taking people with irregular documents to our headquarters. Then we would notify the U.S. embassy and ask them to verify your documents. Sometimes, they can do that immediately. In the case of someone like yourself, a distinguished journalist, I’m sure they would go out of their way to hasten this procedure—”
“Call the public affairs officer,” Danton interrupted again. “Sylvia Grunblatt. She knows who I am.”
Duffy ignored him again. “—and by late today, or certainly by tomorrow morning, a consular officer would come by our headquarters, verify the legitimacy of your documents, which would then be returned to you and you could go about your business.
“But, in the meantime, you would be held. We can’t, as I’m sure you understand, have people running around Buenos Aires with questionable documents. Now, partly because I am anxious to do everything I can for a prominent North American journalist such as you purport to be, and partly because Señor Darby feels sorry for you, what I’m willing to do is take you to your hotel and let you wait there. With the understanding, of course, that you would not leave the Plaza until your documents are checked and we return them to you. Believe me, Señor, the Plaza is far more comfortable a place to wait than the detention facilities at our headquarters.”
Danton held up both hands at shoulder height.
“I surrender,” he said. “The Plaza it is.”
“Comandante, will you take this gentleman to the Plaza?”
“Sí, mí comandante.”
“What the hell was that all about?” Julia Darby asked.
“If I were still an officer of the Clandestine Service,” Alex Darby replied, “I would hazard a guess that it has something to do with this.”
He held up a copy of the letter Colonel Vladlen Solomatin had given to Eric Kocian in Budapest.
“If I were still an officer of the Clandestine Service,” Edgar Delchamps said, “I would know not only what Roscoe Danton is up to, but also what Comrade Colonel Solomatin is up to.”
“You think I’m wrong?” Liam Duffy asked.
“No. Vladimir Putin may very well have dispatched one of the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki hit squads—or several of them—to whack us all,” Delchamps said. “But I don’t think Roscoe Danton is a deep-cover SVR asset who came out of his closet to do the deed. He’s a pretty good journalist, actually.”
“What was that about Eleanor pointing him at Alex? At Charley?” Julia asked. “Did he make that up?”
“I don’t think so. Eleanor got fired when Charley stole her defectors. She’s pissed. Understandably,” Alex Darby said. “I think she’d like to watch as Charley was castrated with a dull knife.”
“I don’t think she likes me much either,” Delchamps said.
“And you know why,” Alex said.
“I don’t,” Julia said.
“Quickly changing the subject,” Delchamps said, “I suggest we get the hell out of Dodge as quickly as possible. Just as soon as the movers come.”
“I can leave somebody here to deal with the movers,” Liam said.
“And Sylvia has the car keys—and the power of attorney—to sell the car,” Darby said. “Moving Julia and the boys to the safe house in Pilar until it’s time to go to Ezeiza seems to be the thing to do. Honey, will you go get the boys?”
“No,” Julia said. “I’m a mommy. Mommies don’t like it much when their sons look at them with loathing, disgust, and ice-cold hate. You go get them.”
“It’s not that bad, honey,” Alex argued. “People who—hell, people who sell air conditioners get transferred, with little or no notice, all the time. Their children get jerked out of school. It’s not the end of the world.”
“You tell them that,” she said.
“They’ll like Saint Albans, once they get used to it,” Alex said somewhat lamely.
“Why? Because you went there?” Julia challenged.
“No. Because Al Gore and Jesse Jackson, Jr., did,” Alex said, and after a moment added, “I’ll be right back. With my pitiful abused namesake and his pathetic little brother.”
When the door to the elevator foyer had closed behind her husband, Julia asked, “What are you going to do, Edgar? Eventually, I mean.”
Delchamps considered the question a long moment before replying.
“I don’t know, Julia,” he said. “Like Alex, this business of ... of selling air conditioners ... is all I know. What I won’t be doing is hanging around the gate at Langley with the other dinosaurs telling spy stories.”
“I didn’t know what Alex did for a living until the night he proposed,” Julia said. “And then he told me he was in research for the agency.”
“They call that obfuscation,” Delchamps said.
“You never got married, did you?”
He shook his head.
The telephone rang.
This time it was the embassy movers.
[FIVE]
The President’s Study
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.
Washington, D.C.
0935 5 February 2007
“What am I looking at, Charles?” President Joshua Ezekiel Clendennen inquired of Ambassador Charles M. Montvale, the director of National Intelligence.
Before Montvale could reply, the President thought he knew the answer to his question, and went on: “This is the—what should I call it?—the package that caused all the uproar at Fort Detrick yesterday, right? And why am I looking at this now, instead of yesterday?”
“These photographs were taken less than an hour ago, Mr. President,” Montvale said. “On a dirt road one hundred fifty yards inside our border near McAllen, Texas.”
The President looked at him, waiting for him to continue.
“A routine patrol by the Border Patrol found that sitting on the road at about half past seven, Texas time. The intel took some time to work its way up the chain of command. The Border Patrol agents who found it reported it to their superiors, who reported it—”
“I know how a chain of command works, Charles,” the President interrupted.
“Homeland Security finally got it to me just minutes ago,” Montvale said.
“Cut to the chase, for Christ’s sake,” the President snapped. “Is that another load of Congo-X or not?”
“We are proceeding on the assumption that it is, Mr. President, and working to confirm that, one way or the other—”
“What the hell does that mean?” the President interrupted again.
“As soon as this was brought to my attention, Mr. President, I contacted Colonel Hamilton at Fort Detrick. I was prepared to fly him out there.”
“And is that what’s happening?”
“No, sir. Colonel Hamilton felt that opening the beer cooler on-site would be ill-advised.”
“‘Beer cooler’?”
“Yes, sir. The outer container is an insulated box commonly used to keep beer or, for that m
atter, anything else cold. They’re commonly available all over. The FBI has determined the one sent to Colonel Hamilton was purchased at a Sam’s Club in Miami.”
“I don’t know why I’m allowing myself to go off on a tangent like this, but why don’t you just call it an ‘insulated box’?”
“Perhaps we should, sir. But the Congo-X at Fort Detrick was in a blue rubber barrel, resembling a beer barrel, in the insulated—”
“Okay, okay. I get it. So what’s with Colonel Hamilton?”
“Colonel Hamilton said further that in addition to the risk posed by opening the insulated box on-site, to determine whether whatever it holds was Congo-X or not, he would have to take all sorts of various laboratory equipment—”
“So you’re moving it to Detrick, right? Is that safe?”
“We believe it is the safest step we can take, sir.”
“And that’s under way?”
“Yes, sir. The insulated box will be—by now has been—taken to the Corpus Christi Naval Air Station in a Border Patrol helicopter. From there it will be—by now, is being—transported to Andrews Air Force Base here in a Navy C-20H. That’s a Gulfstream Four, Mr. President.”
“Thank you for the clarification, Charles,” the President said sarcastically. “One can never know too many details like that. And when the beer cooler-slash-insulated box gets to Andrews? Is everything set up there to cause another public relations disaster, like the one we had yesterday?”
“An Army helicopter will be standing by at Andrews, sir, to fly the insulated container to Fort Detrick. It should not attract undue attention, sir.”
“It better not.”
“Mr. President, what caused the, the—”
“‘Disaster’ is probably the word you’re looking for, Charles,” the President said.
“—excitement at Fort Detrick yesterday was Colonel Hamilton declaring a Potential Level Four Biological Hazard Disaster. That probably won’t happen today.”
The President snorted, and then asked, “So what’s going to happen when the insulated container from Texas is delivered to Hamilton?”
“He will determine whether the container contains more Congo-X.”
“And if it does?”
“Excuse me?”
“If it does contain more of this noxious substance—now, that’s an understatement, isn’t it? ‘Noxious substance’?—what is he going to do about that?”
“The colonel has been experimenting with high-temperature incineration as a means of destroying Congo-X. He has had some success, but he is not prepared to declare that the solution.”
“So we then have several questions that need answering, don’t we? One, what is this stuff? Two, how do we deal with it? More important, three, who’s sending it to us? And, four, why are they sending it to us?”
“Yes, sir, that’s true.”
“And you have no answers?”
“I think we can safely presume, sir, that it was sent to us by the same people who were operating the ‘fish farm’ that we destroyed in the Congo.”
“I think we can ‘safely presume’ that we didn’t destroy everything that needed destroying in the Congo, can’t we?”
“I’m afraid we have to proceed on that assumption, Mr. President.”
“And you have no recommendations?”
“Sir?”
“It seems to me our options range from sending Natalie Cohen to Moscow and Teheran to get on her knees and beg for mercy all the way up to nuking both the Kremlin and wherever that unshaven little Iranian bastard hangs his hat in Teheran.”
“There are more options than those extremes, Mr. President.”
“Such as?”
“Sir, it seems to me that if whoever sent these two packages of Congo-X wanted to cause us harm, they would have already done so.”
“That thought has also run through my mind,” Clendennen said sarcastically.
“It would therefore follow they want something. What we have to do is learn what they want.”
“Would you be surprised, Charles, if I told you that thought has also run through my mind?”
Montvale didn’t reply.
“I want you to set up a meeting here at, say, five,” the President said. “We’ll brainstorm it. You, Natalie, the DCI, the FBI director, the secretary of Defense, the heads of Homeland Security and the DIA. And Colonel Hamilton, too. By then he’ll probably know if this new stuff is more Congo-X or not. In any event, he can bring everybody up to speed on what he does know.”
“Yes, sir. That’s probably a good idea.”
“I thought you might think so,” President Clendennen said.
[SIX]
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence
Eisenhower Executive Office Building
17th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.
Washington, D.C.
1010 5 February 2007
Truman C. Ellsworth, whose title was “executive assistant to the director of National Intelligence,” learned only after having served in that position for three months that the title was most commonly used by members of the secretarial sorority to denote those women who were more than just secretaries. Those females who had, in other words, their own secretaries to do the typing, filing, and fetching of coffee.
By the time he found out, it was too late to do anything about it.
Ellsworth, a tall, silver-haired, rather elegant man in his fifties, had chosen the title himself when Charles M. Montvale had asked him to again leave his successful, even distinguished law practice in New York to work for him, as his deputy, in the newly created Directorate of National Intelligence.
He wouldn’t have the title of deputy, Montvale explained, because there was already a deputy director of National Intelligence, whom Montvale privately described as “a connected cretin” who had been appointed by the President in the discharge of some political debt.
Montvale said he would make—and he quickly had made—it clear that Truman C. Ellsworth was number two in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and that any title would do. Ellsworth chose “executive assistant” because an executive is someone who executes and he was inarguably going to be Montvale’s assistant.
In this role, while Charles M. Montvale sat on his office couch, Truman C. Ellsworth sat behind Montvale’s desk and called first the secretary of State, Natalie Cohen, whom he knew socially well enough to address by her first name, and told her that the President had asked “the boss” to set up a five o’clock meeting at the White House to discuss “a new development in the Congo business.”
She said she would of course be there.
Then Truman called, in turn, Wyatt Vanderpool, the secretary of Defense; John “Jack” Powell, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency; Mark Schmidt, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation; and Lieutenant General William W. Withers, U.S. Army, the commanding general of the Defense Intelligence Agency. He told them, somewhat more curtly, that “the ambassador” had told him to call them to summon them to a five P.M. brainstorming session at the White House vis-à-vis the new development in the Congo affair. He wasn’t able to reach the secretary of Homeland Security, but he did get through to Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security Mason Andrews.
Ellsworth returned the telephone receiver to its cradle and reported as much to Ambassador Montvale: “I got through to everybody but DHS, Charles. I had to settle for Mason Andrews.”
“I wish I had thought of this when you had Jack Powell on the line,” Montvale said.
“Thought of what, Charles?”
“Castillo may be involved in this—probably is, in some way—and I have no idea where he is.”
Ellsworth’s eyebrows rose.
“I daresay that the colonel, retired, in compliance with his orders, has dropped off the face of the earth.”
“I want to know where he is,” Montvale said. “I forgot that the President told me the next time he asked, he expected me t
o be able to tell him where Castillo is.”
“Well, you can tell Jack Powell to start looking for him when you see him at the White House.”
“That’s seven hours from now,” Montvale said. “Get him on a secure line, please, Truman. I will speak with him.”
Ellsworth reached for a red telephone on the desk, and said into it, “White House, will you please get DCI Powell on a secure line for Ambassador Montvale?”
[ONE]
Estancia San Joaquín
Near San Martín de los Andes
Patagonia
Neuquén Province, Argentina
1645 5 February 2007
From the air, the landing strip at Estancia San Joaquín looked like a dirt road running along the Chimehuín River, which arguably was the best trout-fishing river in the world.
It was only when the manager of the estancia heard the Aero Commander—which he expected—overhead and threw a switch that the aeronautical function of the dirt road became obvious. The switch (a) caused lights marking both ends of the runway to rise from the ground and begin to flash, and (b) another hydraulic piston to rise, this one with a flashing arrow indicating the direction of the wind.
The sleek, twin-engined, high-wing airplane touched down and taxied to a large, thatched-roof farm building near the road. There, part of what looked like the wall of the farm building swung open and, as soon as the pilot shut down the engines, a half-dozen men pushed the aircraft into what was actually a hangar. There was a Bell Ranger helicopter parked inside.
The door/wall closed, the marking lights sank back into the ground, and the airfield again became a dirt road running along the tranquil Chimehuín River.
Edgar Delchamps was the first to emerge from the airplane.
Max ran to greet him, which he did by resting his paws on Delchamps’s shoulder as he kissed him.
It was a long moment before the dog had enough and Delchamps could straighten up.
“Funny, I would never have taken you for a trout fisherman,” Charley Castillo greeted him.
Castillo was wearing a yellow polo shirt, khaki trousers, a battered Stetson hat, and even more battered Western boots.