“To attract less attention?” Naylor asked.
McNab nodded.
“I’ve been wondering if another. .”
“Was sent to me?” Naylor finished for him.
McNab nodded again.
“Captain,” Naylor said politely, “would you ask Colonel Brewer to come up here, please?”
Colonel J. D. Brewer was Naylor’s senior aide-de-camp.
“We have been cleared for takeoff,” the public-address system announced. “Please fasten your seat belts.”
“No FedEx Overnight envelope or other communication relative to this at MacDill, General,” Colonel Brewer reported five minutes later, as the Gulfstream reached cruising altitude.
Naylor looked at McNab.
“What’s the plan at Andrews?” McNab asked.
“A Black Hawk will take us to Langley; we meet the others there.”
“Including Natalie?”
“I have been led to believe the secretary of State will be there.”
His tone made it clear that he thought General McNab should not refer to the secretary of State by her first name.
“I call her Natalie because I like her, General,” McNab said. “She’s my kind of gal.” And then he quoted the secretary of State: “ ‘You miserable goddamn shameless hypocritical sonofabitch!’ ”
It was what Secretary of State Natalie Cohen had said to President Clendennen in the Situation Room of the White House on February 12, immediately after the President had announced that “for the good of the country, for the good of the office of the President, I am inclined to accept Ambassador Montvale’s offer to become my Vice President.”
It was the first time anyone in the room had ever heard her say anything stronger than “darn.”
“My God!” Naylor said.
“She calls a spade a spade,” McNab said. “There aren’t many other people in Foggy Bottom-offhand, I can’t think of one-who do that.”
Naylor looked at McNab as if he were forming his words. When finally he said nothing, McNab went on:
“We can ask her at the agency if she’s been contacted, and I’m sure that among Lammelle’s gnomes is someone who can lift any fingerprints there might be on the envelope.”
Franklin Lammelle was DCI, director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
“All right,” Naylor said. “And the CIA would be the most logical choice to deal with this situation, right?”
McNab didn’t reply.
“McNab, you’re not thinking of going down there to rescue Colonel Ferris, are you?”
“General, I would say that none of us has enough information to make any decisions on how to deal with this,” McNab said. “But we can think about it while we’re at Langley doing our bit to help the President get reelected.”
“Is that how you think of it?”
McNab didn’t reply directly, instead saying, “Having complied with Action One of the SOP by notifying my superior headquarters of the situation, with your permission, General, I will now take Action Two.”
General Naylor nodded his permission.
“Al,” McNab said to Captain Walsh, “would you please bring the Brick up here?”
Sixty seconds later, Walsh laid the Brick on the table. It had been provided to General McNab by the AFC Corporation free of charge. The chairman of the board of the AFC Corporation, Dr. Aloysius Francis Casey, had, during the Vietnam war, been the communications sergeant on a Special Forces A Team.
He credited that service for giving him the confidence to do such things as apply for admission to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology without having a high school diploma, and then shortly after being awarded his Ph.D. by that institution, starting the AFC Corporation, which quickly became the world leader in data processing and encryption.
“Like the jarheads say, General,” he had told then-newly promoted Brigadier General McNab when he flew, uninvited, in one of AFC’s Learjets to Fort Bragg, “once a Green Beanie, always a Green Beanie. And now it’s payback time.”
The translation was that he was willing to provide the Special Operations community with the very latest in communication and encryption equipment free of charge. When he left Fort Bragg that day, he had taken with him Brigadier General McNab’s aide-de-camp-“You can call me Aloysius, hotshot,” Casey had told then-Second Lieutenant C. G. Castillo-so that Castillo could not only select from AFC’s existing stocks of electronic equipment but could also tell what communications abilities Delta Force and Gray Fox wished it had.
General McNab now opened the attache case. A green LED told him the system was in STANDBY mode. He flipped a few switches and other green LEDs illuminated. One was ENCRYPTED VOICE COMMUNICATION, one ENCRYPTED DATA COMMUNICATION, and one ENCRYPTED SCAN.
General McNab removed a device about the size of a cigarette lighter from the attache case, put it to his eye, aimed it at the FedEx Overnight envelope, and then at the photograph and message it contained.
A red LED illuminated briefly over the legend ENCRYPTED DATA TRANSMISSION IN PROGRESS, and then went out.
General McNab then picked up a telephone handset and pushed a button.
“Yes, sir?” the voice of Major General Terry O’Toole, deputy commander of SPECOPSCOM, came over the Brick’s speakers after bouncing off a satellite 27,000 miles over the earth.
“Terry, I just sent you what was handed to me as I walked out of my quarters this morning,” McNab said.
“I’m looking at it, General,” O’Toole said.
“Load up your wife and get over to Colonel Ferris’s quarters. Show her this, tell her we’re working on it, and to keep her mouth shut about it.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Tell her as soon as I learn anything, I’ll let her know.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’ll be in touch.”
“Yes, sir.”
McNab replaced the handset and closed the attache case.
TWO
Apartment 606 The Watergate Apartments 2639 I Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 0935 12 April 2007
“I would much rather drip ice water in his ear,” Edgar Delchamps said as he stood beside the bed of Roscoe J. Danton. “But we’re a little pressed for time.”
He picked up the foot of Danton’s bed, raised it three feet, and dropped it.
“You sonsofbitches!” Mr. Danton said upon being roused from his slumber.
He sat up suddenly, and then pushed himself back against the headboard.
“Rise and shine, Roscoe,” David W. Yung, Jr., said.
“How the hell did you two get in here?” Danton demanded.
“And good morning to you, too, Roscoe,” Delchamps said.
“The door was open,” Yung said.
Mr. Danton’s door came equipped-in addition to the locking mechanism that came with the knob-with two dead bolts, both of which Danton was sure he had set.
“How did you get through the lobby?” Danton challenged. “Or into the garage?”
“There didn’t seem to be anyone on duty,” Delchamps said. “Up and at ’em, Roscoe. Before we go out to Langley I want to pick up a little liquid courage at the Old Ebbitt Grill. They serve a magnificent Bloody Mary.”
“I’m not going out to Langley,” Roscoe said.
“And we have to talk about your million dollars,” Yung said.
Danton eyed Yung. What did he say?
Roscoe J. Danton was a little embarrassed to privately admit that he was more than a little afraid of both men. While he didn’t think David W. Yung, Jr., was capable of the sort of violence attributed to Edgar Delchamps, on the other hand, Yung’s peers-that was to say, others in Castillo’s Merry Band of Outlaws-called him Two-Gun, and Roscoe didn’t think they’d just plucked that out of thin air.
“Time, Roscoe, is of the essence,” Delchamps said. “Remember to wash behind your ears.”
Roscoe had some time-not much-to once again think his situation over during his ablutions.
He had come
close to what President Clendennen derisively called “Castillo’s Merry Band of Outlaws” in the practice of his profession, which was to say running down a story. That was a bona fide journalistic accomplishment; he was the only journalist ever to do so, and Roscoe took some justifiable pride in his having done so.
Among other things, it had resulted in a page-one, above-the-fold story in The Washington Times-Post:
BRILLIANT INTELLIGENCE COUP SEES MAJOR CHANGES IN WHITE HOUSE
By Roscoe J. Danton
Washington Times-Post Writers Syndicate
President Joshua Ezekiel Clendennen today chose Ambassador Charles W. Montvale, the director of National Intelligence, to be Vice President less than twenty-four hours after Secretary of State Natalie Cohen revealed that Montvale had been the brains behind the brilliant intelligence coup that saw Russia’s super-secret Tupelov Tu-934A touch down at Andrews Air Force Base in Washington with American intelligence operatives at the controls.
How the aircraft-described, off the record, by senior Air Force officials as “years ahead of anything in the American arsenal”-came into U.S. possession remains a closely guarded secret, but it is known that the Central Intelligence Agency had a standing offer of $125 million for the delivery of one into its hands.
Montvale announced at Andrews that the money would be paid to the two pilots who flew it into Andrews. They were identified only as “retired officers with an intelligence background.”
Secretary of State Natalie Cohen, pointing to Montvale’s long and distinguished career in public service-he has been a deputy secretary of State, secretary of the Treasury, and ambassador to the European Union-said she could think of no one better qualified to be Vice President, and hoped his selection to that office would “put to rest once and for all the scurrilous rumors of bad blood between Montvale and the President.”
President Clendennen immediately nominated Truman C. Ellsworth, who had been Montvale’s deputy, to be director of National Intelligence. That appointment, according to White House insiders, almost certainly was behind the resignation of CIA Director John Powell, although the official version is that Powell “decided it was time for him to return to private life.”
The President announced that he was sending the name of CIA Deputy Director for Operations A. Franklin Lammelle to the Senate for confirmation as CIA Director. Lammelle, who has worked closely with both Montvale and Secretary of State Cohen, is widely believed to have been deeply involved with Montvale in the operation that saw the super-secret Russian Tupelov Tu-934A come into American hands.
Presidential spokesman John David Parker said the President would have nothing further to say about the intelligence coup, stating that it “was, after all, a clandestine operation, and the less said about it, the better.”
The problem was that Roscoe not only knew the backstory, which he had not written about, but had been part of it. He knew, for example, that the President had been known to refer to Montvale as “Ambassador Stupid, director of National Ignorance.” He also knew that President Clendennen, shortly after taking office, had ordered Montvale’s “Red Phone”-which provided instant access to the President and cabinet heads-shut off, and canceled Montvale’s access to the White House fleet of limousines and GMC Yukons, in the hope that this would encourage Montvale to resign, so that he could appoint CIA Director John Powell-who could, in the President’s judgment, find his ass with both hands-to replace him.
He also knew, for example, that President Clendennen had named Ambassador Montvale to be his Vice President not as a reward for the intelligence coup, or because of his admiration for him, but because the alternative had been the virtually certain indictment of the President by the House of Representatives quickly followed by an impeachment trial in the Senate.
Danton knew that the delivery of the Tupelov Tu-934A into the hands of the CIA had almost been a sideshow to what had really happened: Shortly before Clendennen had become President on the sudden death of his predecessor-an aortal aneurysm had ruptured- the United States had launched a preemptive strike on a biological warfare manufactory in the Congo.
The manufactory and everything within at least two square miles around it had been bombed and incinerated with every aerial weapon in the American arsenal except nuclear. It was believed this action had removed all of an incredibly lethal substance known as Congo-X from the planet.
This assessment was proven false when FedEx delivered several liters of Congo-X to the Army’s Medical Research Institute of Infectious Disease-the euphemism for Biological Warfare Laboratories-at Fort Detrick, Maryland. This was shortly followed by the discovery of another several liters of the substance by Border Patrol agents just inside the U.S.-Mexico border.
And this was shortly followed by the SVR rezident in Washington, Sergei Murov, inviting A. Franklin Lammelle, then the CIA’s deputy director of operations, for drinks at the Russian embassy’s dacha on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.
There he proposed a deal: The Russians would turn over all the Congo-X in their possession in exchange for the former SVR rezident in Berlin, Colonel Dmitri Berezovsky, and his sister, Lieutenant Colonel Svetlana Alekseeva, the former SVR rezident in Copenhagen, who had not only defected with the assistance of Lieutenant Colonel C. G. Castillo but had also spilled the beans to Colonel Castillo about the “Fish Farm” in the Congo. The Russians also wanted Colonel Castillo.
When this proposal was brought to the attention of President Clendennen, he thought the deal made a great deal of sense, and ordered that it be concluded. When informed that Colonel Berezovsky and Lieutenant Colonel Alekseeva were not in the hands of the CIA, but in Argentina, with Colonel Castillo, who flatly refused to turn them over to the CIA, President Clendennen ordered Director of National Intelligence Montvale to send all the alphabet agencies of the intelligence community to find them and see that they were all loaded aboard the next available Aeroflot flight to Moscow.
Frederick P. Palmer, the United States attorney general, later described this action as being of “mind-boggling illegality,” and suggested that if anything beyond President Clendennen’s caving in to the Russians was needed to convince the House of Representatives that articles of impeachment were in order, this would do it.
And the story would have come out. The simultaneous offered resignations of Secretary of State Cohen, Director of National Intelligence Montvale, General Naylor, and even presidential spokesman Porky Parker could not be swept under the rug, even if a sense of duty might keep those resigning from making public why they could no longer serve President Clendennen.
Attorney General Palmer, however, argued that the country could not take another impeachment scandal, and that it was their duty to stay in office, with the caveats that the President appoint Montvale as Vice President, that the President ask for DCI Powell’s resignation, and that he make other changes in the senior leadership that they considered necessary.
The President, having no alternative but impeachment, quickly agreed.
Roscoe Danton, running down the rumor that Lieutenant Colonel Castillo had snatched two Russian defectors from the CIA station chief in Vienna, had first encountered members of the Merry Band of Outlaws in Argentina during the time the alphabet agencies were looking for him.
Without quite knowing how it had happened, he had wound up in Mexico embroiled in Colonel Castillo’s Merry Outlaws’ current operation.
Castillo had learned that the Congo-X the Border Patrol had found just inside the Texas-Mexico border had been flown to Mexico in a Tupelov Tu-934A, and that the aircraft, presumably carrying more Congo-X, was on an air base on Venezuela’s La Orchila Island. He launched an operation to grab both the aircraft and the Congo-X.
Roscoe J. Danton had been aboard one of the Black Hawk helicopters that landed on La Orchila Island. He had not been sure then, and was not sure now, whether he was there as a courageous journalist following a story no matter where it led, or whether he was a craven coward who believed the Merry Out
laws when they made their little joke, “Now that you know that, Roscoe, we’ll have to kill you”-and actually might have done so had he not climbed aboard the Black Hawk.
Danton had managed to convince himself, before he had been so rudely awakened, that he had been more the professional journalist than professional coward. He had come to this conclusion after deciding that President Clendennen was a miserable sonofabitch for trying to swap Dmitri and Sweaty-who had also been on the Black Hawk-and Charley Castillo to the Russians.
“After the island,” when he saw Castillo and Colonel Jake Torine preparing to fly the Tupelov Tu-934A to Andrews Air Force Base, he realized that he had been accepted by the Merry Outlaws as one of their own.
There were advantages to this-for example, he had been given a CaseyBerry, over which the secretary of State had given him the scoop about the murders and kidnapping in Mexico-and he could see a cornucopia of other news that would come his way in the future.
But there were manifold disadvantages to his being a professional journalist that he could see as well.
As Roscoe pulled on his shorts in his bedroom, he said: “Guys, I really don’t want to go out there. Why? Wolf News will carry the President’s press conference from the first line of bullshit to the last.”
“You’re going, Roscoe,” Yung said. “Charley wants you to go.”
“When you get down to it, guys, I’m really not one of you.”
“Charley thinks you are,” Yung said. “That’s good enough for the executive combat pay committee.”
“For the what?”
“The executive combat pay committee,” Delchamps replied. “Two-Gun, Alex Darby, and me. We’re the ones who pass out the combat pay.”
Yung added, “The committee asked Charley, ‘What about Roscoe?’ And Charley replied, ‘He was on the island, wasn’t he?’ ”
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