It was also possible that Svetlana or her brother had been involved in the death of her husband. They both knew that the only way Evgeny could have redeemed his own SVR career after her defection was to find and terminate her. The unwritten rule was that if an SVR officer could not control his own wife, how could he control others? So when he had appeared in Argentina, her brother had decided—or she had, or they had—that Evgeny had to go.
That was credible, but Murov thought the most likely scenario was that Colonel Castillo had taken out Evgeny. Doing so would not only have protected Svetlana from Evgeny but make her eligible as a widow to marry him in the church.
Whatever the actuality, Murov’s whispered word in the ear of His Beatitude had resulted in a report from Murov’s people at the wonderfully named Aeropuerto Internacional Teniente Luis Candelaria in Bariloche that His Eminence Archbishop Valentin, the head of ROCOR, and his deputy, the Archimandrite Boris, had flown in there, nonstop from Chicago, in a Gulfstream V aircraft belonging to Chilean Sea Foods, which Murov knew was yet another business formed by Aleksandr Pevsner from the profits of hiding the SVR’s money.
Murov believed that His Eminence would decide there was nothing to the rumors that Svetlana had been involved in the termination of her husband, and the marriage could take place. For one thing, Aleksandr Pevsner’s generosity to ROCOR was well known. For another, Colonel Castillo could credibly say that he had never had the privilege of the acquaintance of his fiancée’s late husband. And if nothing else worked, Dmitri Berezovsky would confess that he had taken out Evgeny to protect his little sister.
All of these factors came together to convince General Murov that his best opportunity to deal with the problem was during the wedding.
It would not be easy, of course. He could not personally go to Bariloche, running the risk of being seen by any of the players, all of whom knew him.
And the team would have to be able to blend, so to speak, into the woodwork, which meant Spanish-speaking terminators would be needed. There were people available in Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay, but Liam Duffy would know who they were and have an eye on them.
That left Cuba and Venezuela. The successor to Hugo Chávez, whom Murov thought of privately as something of a joke, would be more than willing to do what he could for the SVR, but his people were, compared to the Cuban Dirección General de Inteligencia, bumbling amateurs.
Furthermore, earlier on Colonel Castillo had taken out Major Alejandro Vincenzo of the DGI in Uruguay. That was something the Cubans, in particular Fidel’s little brother, Raúl—who before he took over from Fidel had run the DGI—had never forgotten and would love to avenge.
General Murov picked up his telephone and ordered that five seats on the next Aeroflot flight to Havana be reserved for him and his security detail.
He hung up and then picked up the telephone again.
“When you pack me for the Havana trip,” he ordered, “put a case of Kubanskaya with my luggage.”
Not only was Kubanskaya one of the better Russian vodkas—and ol’ Raúl really liked a taste a couple times a day—but he liked to let visiting American progressives read the label and get the idea it was made right there in Cuba.
[FIVE]
The Oval Office
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.
Washington, D.C.
2135 8 June 2007
“Mr. President,” Supervisory Secret Service Agent Robert J. Mulligan announced, “the secretary of State and the DCI are here.”
“Let them wait five minutes and then escort them in,” President Clendennen ordered.
After consulting his watch, presidential spokesperson Robin Hoboken announced, “That will be at nine-forty, plus a few seconds, Agent Mulligan.”
“Good evening, Mr. President,” Secretary Cohen said, five minutes and seven seconds later.
“What’s he doing here?” the President asked, indicating DCI Lammelle.
“The DCI was with me, Mr. President, when Lieutenant Colonel Naylor’s message was delivered to me. I suggested he come with me in case he might be helpful.”
“Let’s see the message,” the President said.
She handed it to him and he read it, and then passed it to Robin Hoboken.
TOP SECRET
URGENT
DUPLICATION FORBIDDEN
TO: POTUS
SUBJECT: CGC
VIA SECRETARY OF STATE
MAKE AVAILABLE (EYES ONLY) TO:
DIRECTOR, CIA
SECRETARY OF DEFENSE
DIRECTOR OF NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE
C IN C CENTRAL COMMAND
SITREP #2
US EMBASSY MONTEVIDEO 2230 ZULU 8 JUNE 2007
1-FACE-TO-FACE CONTACT ESTABLISHED WITH CGC 2010 ZULU 8 JUNE
2-CGC AMENABLE TO CALL TO EXTENDED HAZARDOUS DUTY UNDER FOLLOWING CONDITIONS:
A-PERIOD OF DUTY SHALL NOT EXCEED NINETY (90) DAYS.
B-POTUS WILL PROVIDE THE FOLLOWING SUPPORT
-1- A SUPPORT TEAM OF EIGHT TO TEN TECHNICIANS ON A CONTRACT BASIS FROM SPARKLING WATER DUE DILIGENCE, INC.
-2- A GULFSTREAM V AIRCRAFT WITH CREW FROM PANAMANIAN EXECUTIVE AIRCRAFT, INC., PANAMA CITY, PANAMA
-3- IN LIEU OF MILITARY PER DIEM, ALL ACTUAL LIVING COSTS WILL BE ON A REIMBURSABLE BASIS, TO BE PAID IN CASH, IT BEING UNDERSTOOD THAT ALL ACCOMMODATIONS FOR ALL CONCERNED WILL BE IN FIVE-STAR HOTELS, WHEN AVAILABLE.
-4- REPORTING TO POTUS WILL BE ON AN IRREGULAR BASIS AS INTELLIGENCE IS DEVELOPED, BUT NOT LESS THAN ONCE EVERY TWO WEEKS.
3-CGC REQUESTS ACCEPTANCE VIA UNDERSIGNED AT US EMBASSY, MONTEVIDEO, WITHIN TWENTY-FOUR (24) HOURS AS CGC MUST CANCEL GSTAAD, SWITZERLAND, SKI RESERVATIONS WITHIN FORTY-EIGHT (48) HOURS OR LOSE HIS DEPOSIT THEREON.
NAYLOR, LTC
TOP SECRET
“Who the hell does he think he is?” the President snapped. “Telling me his conditions?”
He looked at Robin Hoboken in expectation of an answer to his rhetorical question.
When none was forthcoming, the President asked, “What the hell is Sparkling Water?”
“It’s what some people call soda water, Mr. President,” Supervisory Secret Service Agent Mulligan replied. “You know, sir, like scotch and soda.”
In the split second before he was to say something both unkind and rude, the President realized Mulligan had not seen the message.
He turned to DCI Lammelle and said, “You’re the DCI, Lammelle. You’re supposed to know everything. What the hell is Sparkling Water?”
“It’s a contracting firm, sir, one of the better ones.”
“It sounds as if Colonel Castillo wants to build a garage, or put in a swimming pool,” Robin said thoughtfully, “and wants the U.S. government to pay for it. That’s outrageous!”
“Mr. President,” the secretary of State said, “as I’m sure you know, from time to time it is in the best interests of the government, for any number of reasons, not to use a governmental agency, or government employees, to accomplish a specific mission, but rather to turn to the private sector and contract for their services—”
“In other words,” the President interrupted, “Sparkling Water is one of those Rent-a-Spook outfits, right?”
“Yes, sir. You could put it that way,” the secretary said.
“Renting a spook, a good one, that’s pretty expensive, right?” the President asked.
“You get what you pay for, sir,” Lammelle said.
“And this airplane he wants us to rent for him in Panama, that’s going to cost a bundle, too, am I right?”
“I’m afraid so, Mr. President,” Lammelle said.
“And those five-star hotels he wants everybody to stay in,” Robin Hoboken chimed in. “That’s reall
y going to cost a fortune, isn’t it?”
“I wouldn’t say a fortune,” the secretary of State said. “But it will be very expensive.”
“Not a problem,” the President said. “Since this is an intelligence-gathering project, I’ll send the bills to ol’ Truman C. Ellsworth. The director of National Intelligence can figure out who’s going to pay for it—the CIA, the DIA, the FBI, anybody just so it doesn’t come out of the White House budget.”
“Good thinking, Mr. President,” Robin Hoboken said.
“But there are a couple of tiny tweaks to the deal I want to make. First, Colonel Castillo will send me a report not less than once every two days, not less than once every two weeks. And second, tell him he’s going to have to find a seat on that expensive airplane ol’ Truman’s going to rent for him for ol’ Roscoe J. Danton.”
“Excuse me?” the secretary of State asked.
“Wither Castillo goeth, so goeth Roscoe,” the President said. “I made a deal—the nature of which is none of your business—with Danton.” He paused. “You can show these nice people out now, Mulligan.”
[SIX]
Estancia Shangri-La
Tacuarembó Provincia
Republic Orientale de Uruguay
1015 9 June 2007
A Chrysler van, bearing diplomatic license plates, pulled up before the veranda of the big house, and C. Gregory Damon, who was the chief security officer of the United States embassy in Montevideo, got out. Mr. Damon, who was forty-four years old and a very black-skinned man of African heritage, stood six feet three inches tall and weighed 225 pounds.
He bounded agilely up the steps to the veranda and said, “Good morning, Mr. Ambassador.”
“Damon,” Ambassador Philippe Lorimer, Retired—a seventy-four-year-old very black-skinned man of African heritage who stood five feet four inches tall and weighed 135 pounds—replied. “It’s always a pleasure to welcome you to Shangri-La.”
Mr. Damon walked to Lieutenant Colonel Allan B. Naylor, Junior, said, “You must be Naylor. I know these other three clowns,” and handed him a manila envelope.
The three clowns to whom he referred were Chief Warrant Officer Five Colin Leverette, USA, Retired, a forty-five-year-old, very black-skinned man of African heritage who stood six feet two inches tall and weighed 210 pounds; Major H. Richard Miller, Junior, USA, Retired, a thirty-six-year-old, six-foot-two, 220-pound, very dark-skinned man of African heritage; and Lieutenant Colonel Carlos G. Castillo, USA, Retired, who was not only not of African heritage but whose fair skin didn’t even suggest he might be of Spanish heritage.
Colonel Naylor took the envelope, extracted a single sheet of paper from it, read it, and handed it to Colonel Castillo.
TOP SECRET
WASH DC 0010 9 JUN 2007
FROM SEC STATE
LT COL A.B. NAYLOR, JR
US EMBASSY MONTEVIDEO
REFERENCE YOUR SITREP #2
INFORM CGC POTUS AGREEABLE TO TERMS WITH FOLLOWING CAVEATS:
-1- REPORTS TO POTUS WILL BE ON A TWO-DAY REPEAT TWO-DAY BASIS NOT REPEAT NOT TWO-WEEK SCHEDULE
-2- DO NOT BEGIN ANY TRAVEL UNTIL MR. ROSCOE J. DANTON JOINS YOUR PARTY; HE WILL GO WHEREVER YOU GO
COHEN, SEC STATE
TOP SECRET
Castillo read the message and handed it to Mr. Leverette.
“Well, Uncle Remus, now we know what she told us on the CaseyBerry last night,” he said. “But not what this business about Roscoe is all about.”
“I’m sure he will tell us when he gets here,” Leverette said.
“And I’m sure someone is going to tell me what this Southern Cone meeting of the NAACP is all about,” C. Gregory Damon said.
“We really don’t want that word to get out in the State Department, Greg,” Castillo said. “And since you’ve put on those striped pants and thus abandoned your friends in the special ops community…”
“With all possible respect, Colonel, sir,” Mr. Damon said, and gave Castillo the finger.
“We have returned to where it all began to start again,” Castillo said, “for a period not to exceed ninety days. I’m on a recruiting mission. Are you interested?”
“Hell no, I’m not interested. You’ve recruited me before, and every time I went along, people tried to kill me. And what do you mean, ‘where it all began’?”
“If I told you, Greg, I’d have to kill you,” Castillo said. “You know about the rule.”
Leverette shook his head.
“Remember,” he said, “when Jack the Stack Masterson got kidnapped and then whacked?”
Damon nodded. “You and I were in Afghanistan.”
“And Charley and Dick here had just left Afghanistan, Dick on a medical evacuation flight—he’d dumped his bird—and Charley under something of a cloud for stealing a bird and going to pick him up where he’d dumped the bird and after he’d been given a direct order not to try it.”
“I heard about that,” Damon said.
“McNab saved his ass by getting him assigned to the head of Homeland Security in Washington as an interpreter and canapé passer.”
“I hadn’t heard that.”
“Did you know that Jack the Stack was Ambassador Lorimer’s son-in-law?” Leverette asked.
“Secretary Cohen told me,” Damon said. “Just before I came down here, when she called me in and told me that anything the ambassador wanted—”
“When the President—the last President, not the current loony-tune—heard that Masterson had been snatched,” Leverette went on, “and didn’t like what he heard the embassy in Buenos Aires was doing about it, he had an idea. Send somebody down here to find out what was going on, somebody who would…”
“Charley, you mean?” Damon asked, but it was a statement, not a question.
“. . . know what to look for, and report to him.”
“So this current idea of our Commander in Chief is not only nutty, but not original,” Castillo said. “He stole it from his predecessor.”
“You want to tell this story, or should I?” Leverette asked.
Castillo answered by continuing.
“So I was taken off the canapé circuit and sent down here. The day after they arrived, they found Mrs. Masterson…”
“My daughter,” the ambassador said softly.
“. . . drugged, sitting in a car down by the river, beside her husband, who had been assassinated in front of her. When the President heard this, he went ballistic. He got on the horn and told the ambassador he was putting me in charge of getting Mrs. Masterson and the kids safely out of Argentina and to the States, and that he was sending a Globemaster to do that.
“So, a couple of days later, I loaded everybody on the Globemaster and took off for Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi. En route, Mrs. Masterson told me that the people who had kidnapped her and killed her husband wanted her to tell them how to find her brother. They told her that unless she told them, they would kill her children, and proved their sincerity by killing her husband while she watched.”
“Who was her brother?”
“My son, Dr. Jean-Paul Lorimer, at the time was an official of the United Nations stationed in Paris,” Ambassador Lorimer said.
“Where he was the bagman for that Iraqi Oil-for-Food scandal,” Castillo amplified, “but I didn’t know that until later. Mrs. Masterson said so far as she knew he was in Paris.
“Air Force One, the President, and Natalie Cohen were waiting at Keesler Air Force Base in Mississippi.”
“As I was,” Ambassador Lorimer added.
“Natalie Cohen handed me this even before I had a chance to tell her what Mrs. Masterson had told me,” Castillo said.
Castillo appeared to be opening his laptop, from which he extracted and handed Damon two sheets of
paper.
TOP SECRET—PRESIDENTIAL
THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C.
DUPLICATION FORBIDDEN
COPY 2 OF 3 (SECRETARY COHEN)
JULY 25, 2005.
PRESIDENTIAL FINDING.
IT HAS BEEN FOUND THAT THE ASSASSINATION OF J. WINSLOW MASTERSON, DEPUTY CHIEF OF MISSION OF THE UNITED STATES EMBASSY IN BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA; THE ABDUCTION OF MR. MASTERSON’S WIFE, MRS. ELIZABETH LORIMER MASTERSON; THE ASSASSINATION OF SERGEANT ROGER MARKHAM, USMC; AND THE ATTEMPTED ASSASSINATION OF SECRET SERVICE SPECIAL AGENT ELIZABETH T. SCHNEIDER INDICATES BEYOND ANY REASONABLE DOUBT THE EXISTENCE OF A CONTINUING PLOT OR PLOTS BY TERRORISTS, OR TERRORIST ORGANIZATIONS, TO CAUSE SERIOUS DAMAGE TO THE INTERESTS OF THE UNITED STATES, ITS DIPLOMATIC OFFICERS, AND ITS CITIZENS, AND THAT THIS SITUATION CANNOT BE TOLERATED.
IT IS FURTHER FOUND THAT THE EFFORTS AND ACTIONS TAKEN AND TO BE TAKEN BY THE SEVERAL BRANCHES OF THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT TO DETECT AND APPREHEND THOSE INDIVIDUALS WHO COMMITTED THE TERRORIST ACTS PREVIOUSLY DESCRIBED, AND TO PREVENT SIMILAR SUCH ACTS IN THE FUTURE, ARE BEING AND WILL BE HAMPERED AND RENDERED LESS EFFECTIVE BY STRICT ADHERENCE TO APPLICABLE LAWS AND REGULATIONS.
IT IS THEREFORE FOUND THAT CLANDESTINE AND COVERT ACTION UNDER THE SOLE SUPERVISION OF THE PRESIDENT IS NECESSARY.
IT IS DIRECTED AND ORDERED THAT THERE IMMEDIATELY BE ESTABLISHED A CLANDESTINE AND COVERT ORGANIZATION WITH THE MISSION OF DETERMINING THE IDENTITY OF THE TERRORISTS INVOLVED IN THE ASSASSINATIONS, ABDUCTION, AND ATTEMPTED ASSASSINATION PREVIOUSLY DESCRIBED AND TO RENDER THEM HARMLESS. AND TO PERFORM SUCH OTHER COVERT AND CLANDESTINE ACTIVITIES AS THE PRESIDENT MAY ELECT TO ASSIGN.
FOR PURPOSES OF CONCEALMENT, THE AFOREMENTIONED CLANDESTINE AND COVERT ORGANIZATION WILL BE KNOWN AS THE OFFICE OF ORGANIZATIONAL ANALYSIS, WITHIN THE DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY. FUNDING WILL INITIALLY BE FROM DISCRETIONAL FUNDS OF THE OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT. THE MANNING OF THE ORGANIZATION WILL BE DECIDED BY THE PRESIDENT ACTING ON THE ADVICE OF THE CHIEF, OFFICE OF ORGANIZATIONAL ANALYSIS.
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