By Order of the President

by W. E. B Griffin

  “Can I ask what this is all about?”

  “Mr. Castillo will tell you what you have to know, Sergeant,” Kramer said, then asked, “This okay with you, Charley?”

  “It’s fine, Dutch. Thank you very much.”

  “And while you’re out at the airport, I’ll put the arm out for those other people we were talking about.”

  “The sooner, the better,” Castillo said.

  “I know,” Kramer said.

  “Anytime, gentlemen,” Sergeant Schneider said.

  Castillo and Miller followed her out of the office.

  “Let me see about the car,” she said and walked across the room.

  When she was out of earshot, Miller said, “Put a fing padlock on your dick, Charley, please.”

  Captain O’Brien looked at Castillo intently but did not comment directly.

  “If you can think of anything I could be doing?”

  "All scraps of information gratefully received,” Miller said.

  XI

  [ONE]

  On Interstate 95 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 0915 9 June 2005

  The unmarked car Commissioner Kellogg had ordered delivered to the Counterterrorism Bureau—so far as Castillo could tell, it was identical to the commissioner’s car—was moving at ten miles per hour over the speed limit as they drove I-95 along the Delaware River.

  Castillo was in the backseat. Miller had elbowed him out of the way to claim the front seat.

  “I really hope you can keep your mouth shut, Sergeant Schneider,” Castillo said.

  “You can call me Betty, if you like,” she said. “And, yes, I know how to keep my mouth shut.”

  “I’d like that,” Castillo said. “How about the boyfriend last night?”

  “Jesus Christ, Charley!” Miller said.

  “I want to make the point that I don’t want you confiding in your boyfriend, either,” Castillo said.

  “I’ll tell him I can’t talk about this,” she said. “He’ll be pi . . . He won’t like it but he’ll understand. He’s a cop.”

  “Good.”

  “He’s a lieutenant in Highway Patrol. And he’s not my boyfriend, he’s my brother,” Betty said.

  “He was a very convincing jealous boyfriend last night,” Castillo said.

  “I hope the international Mafia thought so,” Betty said, and then asked, “Are you now going to tell me what this is all about?”

  “You’ll pick up more than you have to know from listening to me on the phone,” Castillo said.

  “You’re going to call him on your cell?” Miller asked.

  “Unless you happen to know where we can find a convenient secure phone,” Castillo said as he put his phone to his ear.

  A moment later, he said, “I need to talk to him right now, Mrs. Kellenhamp—

  “Where is he?—

  “What’s he doing at Camp David?—

  “How do I call Camp David? Maybe it would be better if you called him there and asked him to call me on my cellular —

  “You’re right. It’d be better to go through the White House—

  “If he calls, please ask him if he’s talked to me, and, if he hasn’t, to please call me right away. This is important.”

  He took the cellular phone from his ear and punched another autodial number.

  “My name is Castillo. I’m Secretary Hall’s executive assistant. You can verify my identity by calling Mrs. Kellenhamp at Secretary Hall’s office. You have the number. He’s at Camp David. Patch me through to him, please.”

  He took the cellular from his ear.

  “They’ll check,” he announced. “I wonder what’s going on at Camp David?”

  He put the phone back to his ear and mumbled, “Guess they didn’t check,” then said louder, “Yes, sir. Sir, I wouldn’t normally call you there but another problem has come up—

  “Sir, the commissioner is being more than helpful, but at four-fifteen tomorrow afternoon he’s going to tell the mayor what we think may happen to the Liberty Bell—

  “Sir, he doesn’t want to cause panic and he doesn’t want to cry wolf. He’s afraid if the mayor—the mayor’s staff— hears anything at all about this, it will get leaked to the press. But he can’t stall indefinitely—

  “Yes, sir. I should have thought about this. I don’t know why the hell I didn’t—

  “Yes, sir. Four-fifteen tomorrow afternoon—

  “We’re on our way to talk to the people who own Lease-Aire, sir. They gave us a sergeant and a car. And Chief Inspector Kramer, who runs their Counterterrorism Bureau, is trying to make contact with somebody—maybe more than one person—he has inside the black groups who may have heard something relative to what Pevsner was talking about—

  “I don’t know how long that will take, sir—

  “Yes, sir, the minute I hear anything—

  “Yes, sir. Sir, I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news—

  “Thank you, sir. When are we going to have word about Abéché?—

  “I understand, sir.”

  He took the telephone from his ear and exhaled audibly.

  “He says he’s going to have to tell the president about the commissioner’s 1615 deadline,” Castillo said.

  “Jesus!” Miller said.

  “What is the commissioner going to tell the mayor at four-fifteen tomorrow?” Sergeant Schneider asked.

  Castillo looked toward the front of the car and saw that Sergeant Schneider had adjusted the rearview mirror so that she could look at him.

  He met her eyes in the mirror and thought she had eyes that were at once attractive and intelligent.

  “That we think there is a possibility—operative word possibility—that a group of Somalian terrorists who call themselves the Holy Legion of Muhammad, and who may— operative word may—have stolen a Boeing 727 in Luanda may—repeat, may—try to crash it into the Liberty Bell.”

  “My God! You’re serious!”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “I knew this was important when the commissioner gave you a new unmarked car,” she said. “But nothing like that. The Liberty Bell? Why would they want to do that?”

  “Two theories,” Miller said. “One is that they think it’s an important symbol to America, much more so than most of us think it is. And the second—sort of tied in with the first—is that somebody in Philadelphia told these people they should hit the Liberty Bell.”

  “What we’re trying to find out is if there is some link between Lease-Aire and the terrorists or between anybody else in Philadelphia and the terrorists,” Castillo continued. “If we can do that, then maybe we can find out exactly what they’re planning and when. That’s why we’re going to the airport, to talk to the Lease-Aire people.”

  The Ford suddenly accelerated.

  Miller glanced over at the speedometer.

  “We don’t want to get pinched for speeding, Sergeant,” he said.

  “There’s blue flashers under the grille,” she said. “If there’s a Highway Patrol car out here, he’ll see them.”

  “Or die young in a fiery crash,” Miller said. “You’re going almost ninety.”

  She laughed.

  “Relax,” she said. “And you can call me Betty, too. I thought I told you.”

  Castillo saw her eyes on him in the rearview mirror.

  “Chief Kramer said you were a Secret Service supervisory agent,” she said.

  “I am.”

  “You told the White House operator—I assume that was the White House operator . . . ?”

  “It was.”

  “. . . that you were Secretary Hall’s executive assistant.”

  “I am.”

  “Curiouser and curiouser,” she said and returned her attention to the road.

  The corporate headquarters of Lease-Aire, Inc., was on the second floor of an unimpressive two-story, concrete-block building attached to the end of an old and somewhat run-down hangar on a remote corner of Philadelphia International Airport.

>   There was a sign—it looked as if it had been printed on a computer’s ink-jet printer—on the steel door announcing, CLOSED DUE TO ILLNESS IN THE FAMILY.

  “Now what?” Miller asked.

  Sergeant Schneider took a cellular phone from her purse and pushed an autodial button.

  “Jack, Betty,” she said a moment later. “I need a favor. Look in the lower drawer of my filing cabinet. There’s a folder called ‘Lease-Aire.’ I need the home address of a guy named Terry Halloran. And a phone number, if there is one.”

  “Who’s he?” Castillo asked.

  “President of Lease-Aire, right?” Miller asked.

  Betty nodded.

  “How’d you happen to have that information?” Castillo asked Sergeant Schneider.

  “The FBI came to us asking what we had on them,” she said. "We’d never heard of them. But Captain O’Brien told me to have a look at them in case there was something we should know.”

  “And what did you find out?” Castillo asked.

  She held up her hand in a signal for him to wait and then repeated the address and telephone number that Jack Whoever on the other end of the line gave her.

  “Thanks, Jack,” she concluded and turned the phone off.

  “Aren’t you going to write that down?” Miller asked.

  She returned her cellular to her purse and came out with a voice recorder.

  “It’s a bugger,” she said. “It bugs my cellular. I turn it on whenever I make a call like that.”

  She pushed buttons on the digital recorder and from its memory chip it played back her voice reciting the address and phone number.

  “I’m impressed,” Castillo said.

  “Me, too,” Miller said.

  “Well, we’re not the Secret Service, but we’re getting fairly civilized. There’s even a rumor that we’re going to get inside plumbing in Building 110 next year.”

  Castillo and Schneider smiled at each other. Miller’s smile was strained.

  “Hey, no offense,” she said. “The problems I have with Feds are with the FBI.”

  “He’s worried that I’m going to make a pass at you,” Castillo said.

  “Jesus, Charley!” Miller said.

  Betty asked Castillo, evenly, “Are you?”

  “From what I’ve seen so far, I would be afraid to,” Castillo said.

  “Good. Let’s keep it that way.”

  “You were telling me what you found out when you had a look at Lease-Aire?” Castillo said.

  “Shoestring operation, family owned. The president’s— Terry Halloran’s—wife is secretary-treasurer. Her brother, name of Alex MacIlhenny, is vice president and chief and only pilot. Also chief mechanic. He learned how to fly in the Air Force, got out, went to work for the airlines—several of them—kept getting placed on unpaid furlough when business wasn’t good, got sick of that and went in business with his brother-in-law buying and reselling worn-out airliners. Nothing on any of them except the pilot’s wife had him arrested one time on a domestic violence rap that didn’t hold up. They’re divorced. Until you told me about this terrorist business, I was almost willing to go along with the FBI theory that they were trying to collect the insurance. ”

  “You did your homework,” Castillo said, admiringly.

  “The sister and husband seem okay. They checked out; no prior record, etcetera. He’s a muckety-muck in the Knights of Columbus. I never met the pilot, but I can’t imagine the sister or her husband getting involved with terrorists no matter how much they needed money.”

  “I think that ‘illness in the family’ business is not the reason they’re closed,” Castillo said, nodding at the sign. “I want to talk to them.”

  She took her cellular from her purse again.

  “I’ll give them a call and see if they’re home,” she said and punched in the number from memory, which also impressed Castillo.

  “If there’s an answer, hang up,” he ordered.

  She raised her eyebrows momentarily and then nodded.

  “There’s no answer,” she said, finally.

  “I still think we should go to their home,” Castillo said.

  “It’s off Roosevelt Boulevard,” Betty said. “The other side of town.”

  “Which means another blood-chilling ride down the interstate? ” Miller asked.

  “Only if you’re a coward,” Castillo said.

  “Or you can ride in the backseat,” Betty said. “Statistics say it’s safer there.”

  Castillo thought: I don’t think there is anything more in that comment than what she said.

  When they got to the unmarked car, he got in the backseat.

  But when she turned on the seat to back the car away from the building, their eyes met again.

  [TWO]

  2205 Tyson Avenue Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 1040 9 June 2005

  Two-two-zero-five Tyson Avenue was a neat brick three-story house just about in the middle of the block. The other houses, built wall to wall, were apparently identical, differing only in the color of the paint trim and the style of awnings and screen doors.

  There was no answer to the doorbell, which played chimes. The third time Sergeant Schneider pressed the button, Castillo noticed that one of the chime notes was missing.

  “No answer,” Miller said, quite unnecessarily. “What do we do now?”

  “I don’t know how the Secret Service does it,” Betty Schneider said, “but we simple cops listen for sounds of life. I heard either a radio or a television.”

  I didn’t, Castillo thought, because I wasn’t listening. She’s good!

  “Well, they don’t want to answer the doorbell,” Miller pursued. “What do we do? Keep punching the bell until they do?”

  “No,” she said. “Yahoo.”

  “What?” Castillo asked.

  “You know,” she said. “Yahoo on the Internet? It stands for ‘You Always Have Other Options.’ ”

  She went down the steps, waving for Castillo and Miller to follow her, and got behind the wheel. This time Castillo got in the front seat. Her eyebrow rose when she saw him there and their eyes met momentarily but she didn’t say anything.

  Miller rested his elbows on the back of the front seat.

  “Where are we going?” Miller said. “Can I ask?”

  “Harrisburg,” she said.

  “Harrisburg?”

  “Harrisburg,” she repeated. “If I step on it, we can probably make it in a little under three hours.”

  Castillo, who sensed she was pulling Miller’s chain, said nothing. Miller shook his head, and then sat back on the seat and buckled his seat belt with a sure click.

  She drove to the end of the block, made a left turn, and then almost immediately made another into a narrow alley splitting the block.

  “It was the fifth house from the far end of the block,” she said, and Castillo saw her pointing and counting. She stopped the car.

  “And there they are, Mr. Terrence Halloran and his charming wife, Mary-Elizabeth,” she said, indicating the Hallorans’ backyard.

  Each of the row houses had a small backyard, with a fence separating it from its neighbors. The Halloran backyard had a small flower garden and a paved-with-gravel area with a gas charcoal grill, a round metal table, matching chairs, and a two-seater swing.

  A stocky man in his fifties with unruly white hair was sitting on the swing with his feet up on one of the chairs. He was holding a can of beer and there was a cooler beside him. A plump woman with startlingly red hair sat at the table with what looked like a glass of iced tea.

  Sergeant Schneider stopped the car and got out, and Castillo and Miller followed her.

  There was a waist-high, chain-link fence separating the yard from the alley.

  “Good afternoon,” Betty Schneider called from the gate in the fence. She took her identification folder from her purse and held it up. “I’m Sergeant Schneider.”

  “What the hell do the cops want now?” Mary-Elizabeth Halloran said, unplea
santly.

  “We’d like to talk to you, please,” Betty said.

  “Go the hell away,” Mrs. Halloran said.

  Well, Castillo thought, that explains that sarcastic “charming wife.” She’s dealt with this woman before.

  Terrence Halloran got off the swing and walked to the fence, carrying his beer. He pulled the gate inward and motioned for them to enter.

  “What now?” he asked.

  “These gentlemen would like to ask a few questions, Mr. Halloran,” Betty said.

  He took a closer look at them.

  “You’re not cops, are you?”

  “No, sir, we’re not,” Castillo said.

  “I already talked too much to the goddamned FBI,” he said.

  “We’re not the FBI,” Castillo said. “We’re from the Department of Homeland Security.”

  He gave Halloran a calling card, taking long enough to read it to confirm Castillo’s first impression that Halloran was well into a second six-pack of Budweiser. Then Halloran made a “follow me” gesture and walked to the table, where he handed the card to his wife.

  “Homeland Security, he says.”

  “Talk to them if you haven’t learned your lesson,” she said. “I won’t.”

  “Okay,” Halloran said. “Make it quick. I have a busy schedule.”

  He sat down on the swing.

  “Sir,” Miller said, “I don’t think Captain MacIlhenny voluntarily disappeared with the missing aircraft.”

  “The goddamned FBI thinks he put it on autopilot on a course that would take it out to sea and then jumped out the rear door,” Halloran said. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!”

  “I don’t think that’s the case, sir,” Miller said,

  “Well, that’s what they think, and that’s what they told the goddamned insurance company!”

  “Who told us they were not going to pay up until ‘the matter is settled,’ ” Mrs. Halloran said. “And then gave us thirty days to find—what was that line, Terry?”

  “ ‘Another carrier,’ ” Halloran said. “They canceled us, in other words.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Castillo said.

  “Why should you be sorry?” Mrs. Halloran asked, unpleasantly.