By Order of the President

by W. E. B Griffin

  “Not an airline,” he said. “They sent a plane for me.”

  “Who ‘they’?”

  “The Department of Homeland Security,” Charley said. “It’s a Secret Service airplane.”

  “No shit?”

  “Is there a general aviation terminal?” Charley asked. “Or something like that?”

  “Beats the shit out of me,” the Highway sergeant confessed. “Let me see if I can find one of the airport guys. They got sort of a district out here.”

  Halfway down the line of departing passenger gates of the various airlines, the Highway officer driving the car spotted a policeman wearing a white-brimmed cap, and blew his horn to attract his attention. When that didn’t work, he made the siren growl for a moment, which produced the desired effect. The airport detail officer trotted over to the car, to the fascination of thirty or more departing passengers.

  “Your name Castingo?” the officer inquired after having been asked where a Secret Service airplane would be parked.

  “Castillo,” Charley said.

  “Whatever. Close enough. The arm is out for a guy who would probably ask about a Secret Service airplane,” the of ficer said. Then he looked at the sergeant. “They want him over at the unit.”

  The unit turned out to be a small building at the end of one of the parking lots. The sergeant opened the rear door of the patrol car for Charley, and, after Charley grabbed his gear from the trunk, led him into the building.

  It was, Charley saw, a small police station. There was a “desk”—an elevated platform—manned by a sergeant and a corporal, and, on one side of the room, there were two holding cells. The “bars” were made of chain-link fence, but since the cells were in sight of the desk sergeant it was unlikely that a prisoner could get through them unnoticed.

  Joel Isaacson, the supervisory Secret Service agent in charge of Secretary Hall’s security detail, was leaning against the makeshift desk.

  Charley walked toward him with the Highway sergeant on his heels. When Isaacson saw Charley, he smiled, then bent his head slightly toward the voice-activated microphone under his lapel.

  “Tom,” he said. “Don Juan just walked in here.”

  Castillo wondered how unlikely it was that the Highway sergeant, when reporting the successful delivery of the passenger to the airport, would fail to mention that he had been met by some kind of a federal agent, probably Secret Service, who referred to him as “Don Juan.”

  “Hey, Charley,” Isaacson said. “Good timing. I don’t think I’ve been here five minutes. Your flying chariot awaits.”

  “I didn’t expect to see you, Joel,” Castillo said as they shook hands.

  “The FBI came through with that dossier the boss asked for,” Isaacson said. “On your new friend?”

  Castillo nodded.

  “The boss wants you to read it on our way to where we’re going. I’m to bring it back.”

  “Okay.”

  “And you’re in luck. The suitcase you left on the airplane the last time you were on it?”

  Charley searched his memory.

  Christ! I left my go-right-now bag on the secretary’s airplane the day I met the president and he gave me this job. The day Fernando picked me up in his new Lear and flew me to Texas to see Abuela.

  Jesus, I’d forgotten all about it. How long ago was that? It seems like last year, but it was really only a couple of weeks ago. Less than two weeks: thirteen days.

  “It’s still on the plane,” Joel said. “I tagged it inspected.”

  “Thanks.”

  “It could have been a bomb, Charley,” Isaacson said. “You’re lucky somebody didn’t take it to the end of the runway at Andrews and blow it up.”

  “I forgot to tell anyone I left it on board,” Charley said.

  “I’m not sore at you, Don Juan . . .”

  Thanks a lot, Joel. The sergeant here might have missed “Don Juan” the first time.

  “. . . egg is on my face. Don’t tell the boss.”

  “Of course not.”

  “You about ready to go?”

  “Anytime,” Charley said. He turned to the Highway Patrol sergeant. “Thanks for the ride. I appreciate it.”

  “No problem,” the sergeant said and then looked at Isaacson. “Why do you call him that? ‘Don Juan’? Can I ask?”

  Isaacson smiled, then made an exaggerated search of the room with his eyes.

  “I don’t see any members of the gentle sex who might take offense, so why not? Take a look at him, Sergeant. Nice-looking guy. Young. Not married. Lives very well. Meets a lot of interesting women. Would you suspect that he gets laid a lot?”

  The Highway Patrol sergeant chuckled.

  “I thought it was probably something like that,” he said.

  [SEVEN]

  On board Cessna Citation X NC 601 Flight level 31,000 feet Near Raleigh, North Carolina 2135 9 June 2005

  “Did you read this?” Charley Castillo asked, raising his eyes from the personnel file of Kennedy, Howard C., each page of which was stamped SECRET in red.

  Joel Isaacson and Tom McGuire were in the rear of the cabin, both lying nearly horizontally in fully reclined seats and both holding a bottle of beer. And both nodded.

  “I decided I had the need to know,” McGuire said, mock serious.

  Isaacson smiled.

  “Something’s missing,” Castillo said. “Or I’m missing something.”

  Isaacson raised his right eyebrow but again said nothing. “The FBI’s been leaning on me—or the boss—to tell them where he is. And he’s really worried that I will.”

  “Uh-huh,” Isaacson agreed.

  “There’s nothing in here that explains that,” Charley said.

  “And there’s nothing in here about a warrant or an indictment, anything like that. What’s going on? Why’s it classi fied secret? It’s just a personnel record. Confidential, maybe, but secret?”

  “There’s a story going around that the FBI internal phone book is classified secret,” Tom McGuire said. “They’re big on keeping things to themselves.”

  “What does it say he did for the FBI?” Isaacson asked.

  Castillo dropped his eyes to the file again.

  “He was ‘assistant special agent in charge of the professional standards unit,’ ” Castillo read. “What the hell is that?”

  “It’s what the cops call ‘internal affairs,’ ” McGuire said. “Think about it, Charley.”

  “You mean he was involved with dirty FBI agents?”

  “There is no such thing as a dirty FBI agent,” Isaacson said. “I’m surprised you, a supervisory special agent of the Secret Service, don’t know that.”

  McGuire laughed. Castillo didn’t think they resented his having Secret Service identification, but sometimes they needled him. Castillo gave Isaacson the finger.

  “What about their counterintelligence guy who was on the Russian’s payroll?”

  “They couldn’t deny that one,” McGuire said. “The CIA bagged him. Think of him as the exception that proves the rule.”

  “I never said, with Tom as my witness, what I’m about to say,” Isaacson said. “Okay?”

  “Okay,” Castillo said.

  “I, of course, don’t know what I’m talking about. But let me throw this scenario at you,” Isaacson said. “It probably goes all the way back to J. Edgar Hoover, but the basic philosophy of the FBI is protect the FBI, closely followed by make the FBI look good and never do or admit anything that could in any way make the FBI look bad. ¿Está claro, mi amigo?”

  Castillo nodded, smiling.

  “With that in mind, they don’t call their internal affairs unit ‘Internal Affairs.’ To have an internal affairs unit would be an admission that there was a possibility, however remote, that there might be, from time to time, one or two— maybe even three—FBI agents who are not absolutely one hundred percent squeaky clean and perfect in every way. On the other hand, it has to be faced that there are, from time to time, some agen
ts whose behavior might not meet in every detail the professional standards expected of everyone in the FBI. Hence, the ‘Professional Standards Unit,’ to root these miscreants out, and do so very quietly.”

  “You don’t like the FBI much, do you, Joel?”

  “Like every other right-thinking, patriotic American, I hold the FBI in the highest possible regard. I am simply unable to accept any suggestion that any FBI agent would ever do anything wrong.”

  Tom McGuire chuckled.

  “Okay, so what are you thinking, Joel?”

  “Read the file, Charley. The FBI put your pal Kennedy on the fast track from the time he left Quantico. He was always assigned some place important—he was never in someplace like the Cornhole, Kansas, field office; he was in New York, LA, Dallas, with frequent tours in Washington. He was good. I could tell that on the phone.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “In your apartment, when he called. I answered the telephone, ‘Hello?’ he asked, ‘Charley?’ I said, ‘Who’s calling, please?,’ and he hung up. He smelled a cop—maybe an FBI agent—answering your phone. He called back five minutes later—time enough to leave wherever he was calling from and to get on a cellular that would be hard to trace.”

  “Okay,” Charley said.

  “So, again, I don’t know what I’m talking about, but here’s a possibility. Your pal Kennedy was assigned—as a very bright, absolutely trustworthy member of the FBI Palace Guard—to Professional Standards, where he got to know where all the bodies are buried. Not all of the miscreants Professional Standards catches with their hands in the petty cash drawer—or in the drawers of somebody else’s wife—get prosecuted, or even canned.”

  “Why not?”

  “The higher they are on the FBI pyramid, the more embarrassing it is for the FBI to haul them before the bar of justice. May I go on?”

  “Certainly. I’m not sure how much of this I believe, but it’s interesting.”

  “Well, then, fuck you, Charley. My lips are now sealed.”

  “You can’t leave me hanging like this, Joel.”

  Isaacson made him wait long enough for Charley to think, I’ll be damned, he is going to stop, before he went on.

  “With whatever they did hanging over their heads, the powers that be can trust them to behave. That works fine as long as the guy—guys—who know what they did are in the FBI. But your pal is no longer with the bureau, is he? He now works for a Russian bad guy. But he can still use the same lever to . . . how do I put this? . . . gain the cooperation of a lot of people in the bureau for his ends, which are not necessarily in the best interests of the FBI.”

  “Okay, so what?” Charley asked. “Why is Kennedy so worried that they’ll be able to locate him?”

  McGuire made a pistol with his hand and said, “Bang!”

  “Oh, come on, Tom!” Charley said.

  “Accidents happen,” Isaacson said. “People get run over by hit-and-run drivers, fall off balconies, etcetera.”

  Jesus Christ, they mean it!

  “Watch your ears back there,” the pilot’s voice came over the cabin speaker. “I finally got cleared to make an approach to Pope. It’s going to be steep.”

  The nose of the airplane immediately dipped.

  In his mind, Charley saw the altimeter unwinding and the digital airspeed indicator on the glass panel beginning to flash red as they approached maximum safe speed.

  [EIGHT]

  Pope Air Force Base, North Carolina 2155 9 June 2005

  The copilot of the Citation came out of the cockpit as soon as the aircraft was safely on the ground and stood by the door prepared to open it the moment the aircraft stopped. The pilot obviously wanted to get airborne again as quickly as possible. So long as the Citation was transporting Charley, it wasn’t available to Secretary Hall.

  When the Citation stopped on the tarmac in front of base operations, the copilot immediately opened the door.

  Charley went down the steps carrying his laptop computer briefcase and the suitcase he’d brought from Philadelphia, and Joel Isaacson followed him off the airplane with the go-right-now bag, handed it to Charley, affectionately punched him on the shoulder, and got back on the airplane.

  Charley hung the laptop’s strap around his neck, picked up the two suitcases, and with the laptop bumping him uncomfortably with each step walked toward the double glass doors of base operations. Before he got there, the Citation was just visible as it approached the threshold of the active runway, and, as Charley pushed through the doors with his back, he saw the Citation turn onto the runway without stopping and begin its takeoff roll.

  Charley wondered again why it was so important that he come to Fort Bragg right now that Hall had sent the plane for him. The only thing he could think of was that otherwise it would have taken him forever to get here on an airline.

  There was an Air Force sergeant on duty behind the base operations counter.

  “I’m going to need a ride over to the Special Warfare Center,” Charley announced.

  “You just get off that Citation?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “You military?”

  Good question. Who am I? The special assistant to the secretary of Homeland Security? A supervisory special agent of the Secret Service? Major C. G. Castillo of the U.S. Army? Or maybe a Drug Enforcement Agency agent? Which is what I told Betty’s brother just before he offered to break both my legs.

  “Yes, I am,” Charley told the sergeant.

  “I’ll need to see some identification, sir,” the sergeant said. “And your orders.”

  Where the hell is my Army identification?

  In the lid of the laptop briefcase, where I put it when I went to Germany. And I am not going to take it out now and give the sergeant something interesting to tell the boys.

  “Not possible, Sergeant, sorry,” Charley said. “Would you call the duty officer at SWC and tell him that Major Castillo needs a ride over there? They expect me.”

  “I really have to see some identification, sir.”

  “That wasn’t a suggestion, Sergeant. Call the SWC.”

  “Sir, this is Sergeant Lefler at Pope base ops. I have a gentleman here who doesn’t have any identification but says he’s a Major Castillo and that you expect him.”

  Fifteen seconds later, after repeating Castillo’s name, the sergeant almost triumphantly turned to Castillo and said, “They never heard of you, sir.”

  “Let me talk to him, please,” Charley said.

  The sergeant didn’t reply, instead dialing a number from memory.

  “Sir, I hate to bother you,” he said a moment later, “but I think you better come down here. We may have an attempted breach of security.”

  A moment later, he added, “No, sir. Not to worry,” and then hung up.

  “Sir, would you please have a seat over there?” he said to Charley, pointing to a row of chrome-and-plastic chairs.

  “What’s going on, Sergeant?”

  “Sir, the Airdrome Officer of the Day is on his way here. He will answer any questions you might have. Please take a seat, sir.”

  The sergeant rested his hand on the holster hanging from his pistol belt.

  What the hell is going on here?

  They don’t expect me?

  Charley walked to the row of chairs and sat down.

  Fuck it, I’ll give him something to talk about.

  “Sergeant, could I walk over there and get into my briefcase, please?”

  “You just sit right there, please, sir,” the sergeant replied. “You can talk about your briefcase to the major when he gets here, sir.”

  The telephone on the desk rang. Without taking his eyes from Castillo, the sergeant answered it.

  “Pope base operations, Sergeant Lefler speaking, sir—

  “Sir, the AOD is not here at the moment—

  “He should be here in a couple of minutes, sir. Would you like to call back?—

  “Sir, there already has been a civilian Citatio
n in here. It just left—

  “Yes, sir. A man did get off. He doesn’t have any identification, sir, but he says he’s a major—

  “I don’t think I’d better do that, sir, until the AOD gets here. He may let you talk to him—

  “No, sir, I don’t know who I’m talking to. You didn’t give me your name.”

  The sergeant looked stricken at the response he was given.

  An Air Force major, a pilot, wearing the brassard of an Airdrome Officer of the Day, came into the area.

  Charley suspected the Airdrome Officer of the Day had been catching a few winks on a cot somewhere near.

  “What’s going on, Sergeant?” he asked.

  “Sir, I think you better take this,” the sergeant said, extending the telephone to him. “It’s the deputy commander of Eighteenth Airborne Corps.”

  The major took the telephone.

  “This is Major Treward, sir. The AOD. How may I help you, sir?”

  The major looked at Castillo.

  “Excuse me, sir, are you the special assistant to the secretary of homeland security?”

  Castillo nodded.

  “Yes, sir, he’s right here,” the major said and extended the telephone to Castillo.

  “Sir,” Sergeant Lefler said, “he told me he was an Army major.”

  “This is Major Castillo, sir,” Charley said into the telephone.

  “See, he just did it again, sir,” Sergeant Lefler told the AOD.

  “That’s me, too, sir,” Charley said into the phone. “I’m assigned to Homeland Security—

  “Yes, sir. I just arrived here on the secretary’s plane. My orders are to report to General McNab.”

  “He wouldn’t show me any orders, either, Major,” Sergeant Lefler said. “I asked.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll be here,” Charley said into the telephone. “Thank you, sir.”

  He handed the telephone to the Air Force major. “The general is coming to pick me up.”

  “Sir, the Security SOP says nobody leaves the building without proper identification,” Sergeant Lefler announced.