“You have humiliated me for the last time, Roscoe, by showing up at church functions late—if you show up at all—and reeking of alcohol. Make up your mind, Roscoe, it’s either your drinking and carousing or your family.”
After giving the ultimatum some thought, Roscoe had moved into the Watergate Apartments. He concluded, perhaps selfishly, that there wasn’t much of a choice between the interesting people with whom he associated professionally in various watering holes and the middle-level bureaucrats with whom Elizabeth expected him to associate socially at Saint Andrews Presbyterian Church in Chevy Chase.
Alimony and child support posed a hell of a financial problem, of course, but he had a generous and usually unchecked expense account, and legions of lobbyists were more than pleased to pick up his tabs at the better restaurants around town.
And, with the lone exception of what divorce does to kids, he’d many times decided he’d made the right decision. And rising to being a syndicated columnist for the Washington Times-Post Writers Syndicate was just one example.
Now Roscoe understood that if he was going to write a think piece on the clusterfuck, he was going to have to find out how it had happened, and the way to do that was get to presidential spokesman John David Parker before ol’ Porky returned from seeing the President off to reestablish some order and decorum.
Roscoe quickly got out of his seat and left Auditorium Three.
He found Parker almost immediately. Porky was leaning against the corridor wall just outside Auditorium Three, looking, Roscoe thought, more than a little dazed.
He’s probably thinking he’ll soon have to face the famed wrath of Joshua Ezekiel Clendennen.
“Dare I hope to have a moment of time with my favorite presidential spokesman?”
“Make that ex–presidential spokesman,” Parker replied.
“You got canned over that royal screwup? So soon?”
Parker nodded.
“They wouldn’t even let me back in there,” Parker said, nodding toward the uniformed CIA security people standing outside the door to Auditorium Three.
“And now you need a ride back to our nation’s capital, right?”
Parker considered that a moment and then said, “Yeah, I guess I do. You have a car?”
“Indeed I do. Come on. Let’s get out of here.”
Roscoe just then changed his mind about covering this story as a think piece.
The head wrote itself—“Presidential Spokesman Fired”—and he had already composed the obvious lead: “In an exclusive interview with this reporter, former presidential spokesman John David Parker told . . .”
It was almost sure to make Page One above the fold.
The thing I have to do now is keep the rest of the media boys and girls away from him.
The Lincoln Town Car, with Edgar Delchamps at the wheel, was parked very close to the entrance of the garage in a slot that a neatly lettered sign announced was RESERVED FOR ASSISTANT DEPUTY DIRECTOR NUSSBAUM.
I wonder if Delchamps told the guard his name was Nussbaum, or whether the guard recognized Delchamps and, having heard the ice-pick-in-the-ear story, decided that the agency dinosaur could park anywhere he chose to.
Roscoe ushered Parker into the backseat of the car and slid in beside him.
“Get us out of here,” Roscoe ordered.
“What the hell happened in there?” Delchamps asked. “We watched it on the Brick.”
“My pal is about to tell us. John, say hello to Edgar and Two-Gun.”
“I thought you looked familiar, Mr. Parker,” Two-Gun said, turning in the seat to offer his hand.
“So the President said, ‘When I get back to the White House, I will announce that I have accepted your resignation. Now get off my goddamn helicopter,’ and I did,” Parker finished.
“And when you went back in the building, they wouldn’t let you in the auditorium?” David Yung asked.
“They even took my ID badge,” Parker said.
“I don’t suppose anyone cares what I think,” Delchamps said, “but just off the top of my head, Roscoe, I think your pal was set up.”
“Otherwise, the security guys wouldn’t have been waiting for you to take your ID badge.”
“So what do I do now?” Parker asked, and then answered his own question. “Go back to my apartment and lick my wounds, I guess.”
“If you go back to your apartment, the press will be there for your version of what happened,” Roscoe said. “And until we figure this out, no matter what you tell them, you’re going to look like an incompetent who got fired for cause, or a disgruntled former employee saying unkind—and frankly hard to believe—things about our beloved President. Or both. Probably both.”
And I won’t have a story.
“So what do I do?” Parker asked again.
“When in doubt, find a hole and hunker down until things calm down,” Delchamps said.
“Go to a hotel or something?” Parker asked.
“Or something. Roscoe, is Brother Parker really a pal of yours?”
“He’s a pal of mine,” Roscoe declared.
Did I say that because Porky is a good guy who’s always been straight with me? Or because I can see my story getting lost?
“Problem solved,” Delchamps announced.
“Meaning what?” Roscoe asked.
“You’ll see.”
[TWO]
7200 West Boulevard Drive
Alexandria, Virginia
1255 12 April 2007
The house, which was large and could be described as a “Colonial mansion,” sat on an acre of manicured lawn well off West Boulevard Drive. The landscaping on a grass-covered rise—a berm—in the lawn prevented anyone driving by from getting a good look at the front door of the house.
There was a neat cast-bronze sign just inside the first of two fences:Lorimer Manor
Assisted Living
No Soliciting
The first fence was made of five-foot-high white pickets. Hidden on the pickets were small cameras, and both audio and motion sensors.
The second fence, closer to the house, was of cast iron, eight feet tall, and also held surveillance cameras and motion sensors. Every twenty feet there were floodlights.
As Edgar Delchamps steered the Town Car up the drive, a herd of canines—if “herd” is the proper term to describe a collection of six enormous, jet-black Bouviers des Flandres—came charging around the side of the house.
They waited patiently for the substantial gate to open, then when the Lincoln rolled past, they followed it, gamboling happily like so many outsize black lambs.
“What’s with the dogs?” Porky Parker asked.
“Clinical studies have shown that having access to dogs provides a number of benefits to elderly people, so we use them in our geriatric services program,” Two-Gun Yung replied. “That makes them deductible. You have no idea how much it costs to feed those big bastards.”
“They also serve to deter the curious,” Edgar Delchamps added.
He stopped the Lincoln before a four-door garage, pulling it alongside one of the two black GMC Yukons parked there.
Everyone got out of the Town Car as one of the garage doors rolled upward.
A grandmotherly type in her early fifties appeared at a door in the rear of the garage. Her name was Dianne Sanders, and she was listed on the payroll of Lorimer Manor, Inc., as resident housekeeper.
The herd of Bouviers des Flandres gamboled on toward her. She put her fingers to her lips and whistled shrilly. The dogs stopped as if they had encountered a glass wall.
“Go chase a cat,” Mrs. Sanders ordered sternly, pointing out the garage door.
Reluctantly but obediently the herd slowly walked out of the garage.
She looked at Delchamps and said: “Am I supposed to pretend I don’t know who your friends are? In addition to inside plumbing, Lorimer Manor offers television.”
“Think of that one,” Delchamps said, pointing at Parker, “as a lonely stranger desperatel
y needing the hospitality of friends. And also some lunch, if that’s possible. I thought you knew Roscoe.”
“Only by reputation,” she said.
“You know he’s one of us,” Yung said.
“I heard.”
“And now that you know that, Mr. Parker,” Yung said, “we’ll have to kill you.”
Oh, Jesus, here we go again!
Porky will go bananas.
“May I ask what’s going on here?” Parker asked. “What is this place?”
“Of course you can ask, but as Two-Gun just said, what you know can get you killed,” Delchamps said. He smiled, then added: “Well, let’s go get some lunch.”
In the house, Parker looked around. Plate-glass windows across the back wall offered a view of an enormous grassy area. There was a croquet field and a cabana with a grill beside an enormous in-ground swimming pool. Two of the Bouviers, their red tongues hanging and their stub tails wagging, were looking in through one of the plate-glass windows; the rest of the herd was chasing birds on the grass.
And Parker noted the residents: First he saw four elderly men, two in wheelchairs, three of whom looking roughly as old as Edgar Delchamps. There also was a very large—six-foot-two, 220-pound— and very black man wearing aviator sunglasses who appeared to be in his late thirties, and a woman who looked about sixty. She had a chrome walker next to her chair at a large dining table that was covered with food.
In the center of the table was a centerpiece: Two dinosaurs, each about two feet long, faced each other. There was a pink bow around the neck of one of them.
“I think everybody knows who Mr. Parker is,” Delchamps announced to the residents.
Everybody nodded.
“He wants to know what’s going on here,” Delchamps said, “what this place is. Can I tell him?”
“Is he a friend?” one of the men in a wheelchair asked.
“Roscoe vouches for him,” Delchamps said, “and Roscoe—in case you didn’t know—is one of us.”
“In that case, tell him.”
“Sure. Tell him.”
“Why not?”
The elderly lady added: “As long as he understands that if he runs at the mouth . . .”
Oh, no! Danton thought. Not the old woman, too!
“. . . we’ll have to kill him.”
Another of the men, about Delchamps’s age, pointed at the centerpiece of dinosaurs, and said: “That should make it quite obvious, Mr. Parker. This is where us old dinosaurs come to die.”
There were grunts, and then came what appeared to Parker and Danton to be a regular war of words among the residents.
“Oh, shit, there he goes again with that crap!”
“Jesus Christ, Mac, will you knock off with that come-to-die nonsense?”
“Speak for yourself, John Alden! You’ve always—”
“Let me have a shot at this!” Dianne Sanders interrupted. “Mr. Parker, everybody in this room—except those two and me—is retired from the Company.”
She pointed to the enormous black man and to a man who looked to be in his late forties.
“That’s Dick Miller and Tom, my husband. They used to run around the block with Charley Castillo and General McNab until the Army decided they were no longer able to play Rambo, and medically retired them. I was a cryptographer, and took my retirement, too. Then came the glory days of the Office of Organizational Analysis . . . you both know what that was?”
Parker and Danton nodded.
“Charley needed a safe house here, and OOA bought this. Then Uncle Remus—you know who he is?”
Roscoe Danton knew that Uncle Remus was the politically incorrect—and some suggested racist—name that only his close friends could call Chief Warrant Officer (5) Colin Leverette, U.S. Army, Retired.
Danton nodded.
Porky shook his head.
“He’s the guy who took Colonel Hamilton to the Fish Farm in the Congo,” Delchamps clarified.
“One of the better snake eaters,” Tom Sanders further clarified. “Dianne and I were in our happy, exciting retirement in Fayetteville, watching the mildew grow in the bathtub when Uncle Remus showed up and asked if we’d be interested in running this place. We were on the next plane up here.”
“Then we thought we’d be out of a job when OOA was broken up,” Dianne picked up. “But when Edgar said he needed a place to live now that he was retired, he moved in ‘as a temporary measure.’ ”
“And then the other dinosaurs started moving in, one by one,” the elderly lady offered. “We were scattered all around D.C. I was in the Silver Oaks Methodist Episcopal Ladies Retirement Community in Silver Spring. You can imagine how much I had in common with the ladies there.”
“So you’re also retired from the CIA?” Danton asked.
“Thirty-four years in the Clandestine Service,” she said with quiet pride.
“Dinosaurs?” Porky Parker asked.
“That’s what they call us at Langley,” the elderly lady said. “We still believe that the only good Communist is a dead Communist, so we’re dinosaurs to them.”
“And, so,” one of the men in a wheelchair said, “with the not inconsiderable help of Two-Gun, we formed Lorimer Manor, Inc., and bought this place from the Lorimer Charitable and Benevolent Trust. When one of Castillo’s Merry Outlaws needs to use a safe house—Edgar, Two-Gun, and Gimpy stayed here last night, for example—we send a bill to the LCBF Corporation.”
Gimpy, Danton thought, must be the big black guy in the aviator sunglasses.
“What’s the LCBF Corporation?” he asked.
“That’s who’s going to pay you your combat pay, Roscoe,” Delchamps said.
Porky Parker’s eyebrows rose at that.
“Think of it as our basic corporate structure,” Two-Gun amplified. “Providing complete financial services to our little community.”
“All right, David,” the elderly lady said, a little impatiently. “Now it’s your turn. What the hell happened at Langley this morning?”
“. . . And so the President told me he was accepting my resignation and to get off his goddamn helicopter, and then I ran into Roscoe, and he brought me here,” Porky Parker concluded.
“I said, and you all heard me,” one of the middle-aged men said, “that there was something phony about that failed microphone.”
“What is that sonofabitch up to?” the elderly lady asked softly.
“I have no idea,” Parker said. “My question is, what do I do now?”
“You stay out of sight,” Delchamps said. “I already told you that. Maybe go to Mexico with us. You’ve got your passport?”
“My official passport is in my briefcase with my laptop,” Parker said. “The last time I saw it was when I asked one of the Secret Service guys to watch it for me backstage in Auditorium Three.”
“I hoped you kissed it—them . . . the passport and laptop—good-bye,” Delchamps said.
“My regular passport is in my apartment,” Parker said.
“Outside of which members of the media can be counted on, sitting,” Roscoe said, “burning with desire to hear your version of your surprising and sudden departure from distinguished government service.”
Which will also screw up my exclusive interview with Porky.
There was a buzzing sound.
“Our master’s voice,” Dick Miller said as he took a CaseyBerry from his pocket and put it to his ear.
“How nice of you to call,” he went on. “I just put you on conference, Charley.”
Roscoe saw Delchamps and Yung quickly put their CaseyBerrys to their ears. He took out his own, found the CONF button, and pushed it.
“I didn’t call to chat, Gimpy,” Castillo’s voice announced. “I called hoping to hear that Edgar has Roscoe in the bag and that you’re about to go wheels-up. Better yet, that you’re already in the air.”
Danton made a face.
“Roscoe in the bag”?
What the hell does that mean?
“Ace, Roscoe is in the bag,” Delchamps said.
What the hell are they talking about?
“And he brought Mr. John David Parker with him,” Delchamps continued.
“What the hell is that all about?” Castillo said.
“Roscoe, would you be so kind as to tell our leader what the hell that’s all about?”
“The press is looking for him,” Danton said.
“Why?”
“Right about now, the President is going to announce he’s accepted his resignation,” Danton replied.
“Because of that fucked-up press conference?”
“Yes, but Porky didn’t fuck it up,” Danton said.
After a moment, Castillo replied, “Got it. And you are—what is it you say?—‘chasing the story.’ ”
“That’s right.”
“So what are you planning to do with Mr. Parker?”
“We’re trying to figure that out, Charley.”
“Is Mr. Parker also trying to evade the press, Roscoe, or do you have him in handcuffs?”
“He doesn’t want to see them, either.”
“Okay, so bring him down here,” Castillo said.
“What?”
“Bring him down here; we’ll work it out later,” Castillo said. “Got it, Edgar?”
“Jawohl, mein Führer!” Delchamps barked.
“Spare me the sarcasm,” Castillo said. “Just call me when you’re wheels-up. I need Roscoe and the Mustang down here yesterday.”
He needs me? What the hell for?
And where’s “down here”?
“Jawohl, mein Führer,” Delchamps repeated.
A moment later, Roscoe, seeing that everyone had taken their CaseyBerrys from their ears, turned his off.
“Where is ‘down here’?” Danton asked.
“Cozumel,” Yung replied.
Danton looked at him, and thought: If he says “And now that you know that I’ll have to kill you,” I’ll throw this goddamn phone at him.
“And he wants me to go down there?” Danton asked incredulously.
Yung looked at Delchamps, and said: “Small problem. Mr. Parker doesn’t have his passport.”
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