Hazardous Duty - PA 8

by W. E. B Griffin

  “Thank you for seeing me on such short notice, Mr. President,” Secretary Cohen said. “But you said you wanted to see Colonel Naylor’s reports as soon as they arrived.”

  “Actually, Madam Secretary,” Robin Hoboken said, “what the President said was that he wanted to see Colonel Castillo’s reports as soon as they arrived.”

  “I stand corrected,” Cohen said.

  “How’d you know I’d be here?” President Clendennen asked. “I just got back three minutes ago.”

  “When I called earlier, when I first received these messages, Mr. President, I was told you were unavailable, not that you had gone somewhere.”

  “Belinda-Sue’s mother, that saintly old woman,” the President said, “is very ill. She wanted to see me. I could not, of course, turn her down. God alone knows how long she’ll be with us. But I could not in good conscience ask the American taxpayer to pay the enormous expense of my going down to Biloxi in the 747 on a personal matter. So I went, very quietly, in a Gulfstream, taking only Robin and Mulligan with me.”

  “How is the First Mother-in-Law?” Natalie asked.

  “Not well, but with prayer there’s always hope,” the President said. “Now let me see Colonel Castillo’s report.”

  “She doesn’t have Colonel Castillo’s report, Mr. President,” Robin Hoboken said. “She said she had Colonel Naylor’s report.”

  “And Mr. Whelan’s redacted news story,” Cohen said.

  The President read both.

  “Well,” he said, “to judge from this, and other information I have, I think it would be fair to assume my Out of the Box Operation is starting to take shape. Wouldn’t you agree, Madam Secretary?”

  “‘Other information,’ Mr. President?”

  “Natalie,” he said condescendingly, “I learned a long time ago that the more people who know a secret, the less chance there is that it will remain a secret. Right now, you don’t have the Need to Know about my other information.”

  “May I ask, sir, if your other information might result in something that would require my services in the next twenty-four hours?”

  “The President just told you, Madam Secretary, that you don’t have the Need to Know,” Robin Hoboken said.

  “Why do you ask, Madam Secretary?” the President asked.

  “I’d like to run down to the Greenbrier and play a little golf, Mr. President.”

  “For how long?”

  “I would be back tomorrow afternoon no later than five, sir.”

  “Sure, go ahead. All work and no play makes Jack… in this case, Natalie, of course… the dull girl, as I always say.”

  “Thank you, Mr. President.”

  “Did you know, Natalie, that during the Cold War, they had a great big underground place at the Greenbrier where Congress could meet in case the Russians nuked Washington?”

  “I’ve heard that, Mr. President.”

  “Robin here told me that only last week. Which made me wonder what else is going on around here that I don’t know about.”

  “Mr. President,” Natalie said, “I would suggest that with Hoboken and Mulligan looking after you, there’s very little of that sort of thing.”

  “You’re right,” the President said. “I only wish I was as sure of the loyalty of other people around here as I am of theirs.”

  Then he added: “Have a good time playing golf at the Greenbrier, Natalie.”

  [FIVE]

  In the Secretary of State’s Yukon

  Approaching Joint Base Andrews, Maryland

  1835 15 June 2007

  One of the three cellular telephones Charlene Stevens always carried with her rang—giving off a sound like that of a feline in heat—and she quickly put it to her ear.

  She listened and then said, “Thanks. You are now forgiven for not putting out the garbage.”

  She turned from the front passenger seat to address Secretary Cohen.

  “That was my Lord and Master, boss.”

  Secretary Cohen understood Charlene was referring to her husband, Arthur, who was known as “King Kong” to his fellow Secret Service agents, possibly because he stood five feet five inches tall and weighed 135 pounds.

  “Arthur said,” Charlene reported, “that Mulligan just called the Presidential Flight Detachment and told them to get a chopper ready for a flight to carry two agents to the Greenbrier Valley Airport.”

  “Damn!” Natalie Cohen said.

  “And when the Air Force guy said you were getting ready to go there and were usually willing to carry people with you, Mulligan not only cut him off but said he didn’t even want you to know he was sending agents there.”

  “Pull off somewhere, please, Tom,” Secretary Cohen ordered the Yukon’s driver as she searched in her purse for her CaseyBerry.

  She pushed one autodial button and five seconds later A. Franklin Lammelle came over the phone’s loudspeaker.

  “And how may the CIA be of service to the secretary of State?”

  “Get on the phone and tell everybody the Greenbrier’s off,” she said.

  “What happened?”

  She told him.

  “Do you think he figured this out himself, or was Mulligan involved?”

  “I think he was suspicious—he’s paranoid about a coup—and Mulligan poured gasoline on those embers.”

  “So no meeting?”

  “Unless we can find someplace else to hold it, I really don’t know what to do.”

  “Someplace else isn’t that much of a problem. I’ve got a safe house outside Harrisburg that isn’t in use at the moment.”

  “Harrisburg, Pennsylvania?” she asked incredulously.

  “Harrisburg, Pennsylvania,” Lammelle confirmed. “And everybody but McNab and Naylor could drive there. And you could tell Naylor to visit the Indiantown Gap Military Reservation, using his airplane and taking McNab with him.”

  She considered that a moment. “This safe house of yours is really safe?”

  “Who’s going to think there’d be a CIA safe house in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania?”

  “Make the calls, please, Frank, and get everybody there after eight o’clock tomorrow night.”

  “And what about you, Madam Secretary, as the senior government official?”

  “I’ll get back to Washington at five or a little after, let the President know I’m back—”

  “Back from where?”

  “Playing golf at the Greenbrier,” she replied, “and then I’ll drive up there. How do I find it?”

  “I suppose Brünnhilde the Bodyguard is with you?”

  “Up yours, Frank,” Charlene said.

  “I’ll see that Art has a map by the time you need it,” Lammelle said.

  “Fine,” Charlene said.

  “You’re really going down there and play golf?”

  “That’s what I told the President I was going to do. How could I not go? Call me and let me know what’s going on.”

  “Yes, ma’am, Madam Secretary,” Lammelle said.

  Cohen broke the connection.

  “Agent Stevens, I wasn’t aware that you and Director Lammelle were so intimately acquainted,” she said.

  “He and Art went through the FBI Academy together,” Charlene said. “They decided that they didn’t want to spend their lives investigating white-collar crimes, so Art went into the Secret Service, and Frank into the Agency. Frank was Art’s best man when we got married, and I held Frank’s hand through both of his divorces.”

  “You never said anything.”

  “Yeah, well,” Charlene said. “That doesn’t mean we don’t talk about you.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that Frank thinks you’re the cat’s pajamas, boss.”
<
br />   Natalie shook her head, then pressed another autodial button and then shut off the loudspeaker function. Charlene heard only one side of the conversation:

  “I hope you didn’t have big plans for tomorrow, sweetheart…

  “Put enough clothes in your bag for a fancy dinner tonight, and then take your golf clubs and get in a cab and go out to Teterboro. I’m about ten minutes from taking off from Andrews for Teterboro…

  “Because we’re going to the Greenbrier to play golf…

  “Of course you can make time for something like that. Your call, sweetheart. Would you rather have a romantic dinner with me tonight, and eighteen holes tomorrow, or the next time your Aunt Rebecca wants me to talk to the girls at the Beth Sinai Home have me tell her to go suck on a lemon… ?

  “That’s what my mother said about you, too, darling. That I would regret marrying you. See you at Teterboro…”

  [SIX]

  Aboard Der Stadt Köln

  The River Rhine

  Koblenz, Germany

  1125 16 June 2007

  Charley Castillo’s CaseyBerry sounded “Charge!” and he picked it up, saw who was calling, and put it to his ear.

  “Hey, Paul.”

  “Charley, are you really in the middle of the Rhine River, or did you tell Aloysius to send out spurious GPS data again?” Paul Sieno asked.

  “Not exactly in the middle; we’re about to tie up in Koblenz. How are things in sunny Cozumel?”

  “Getting interesting, which is why I called.”

  “How so?”

  “You’ll never guess who’s here.”

  “But you are going to tell me, right? I’m so exhausted from my labors that I’m not up to playing guessing games.”

  “Grigori Slobozhanin.”

  “Who the hell is he?”

  “He’s the chief coach of the Greater Sverdlovsk Table Tennis Association, and he brought a half-dozen of his better Ping-Pong players here with him. Plus a couple of dozen Cuban Ping-Pongers.”

  “Okay, Paul, I give up.”

  “Before he took up table tennis, he was known as General Sergei Murov.”

  Castillo was suddenly very serious.

  “Paul, get with Juan Carlos Pena as soon as you can—”

  “Way ahead of you, Charley,” Sieno interrupted.

  “I know Juan Carlos doesn’t exactly look like that suave Mexican actor,” Castillo went on, stopping when he couldn’t recall the actor’s name, and then, when he had partial recall, continuing, “Antonio Bandana, or whatever the hell his name is, but he’s not only one damned smart cop but one of my oldest friends.”

  “Gringo, if I can have ‘one damned smart cop’ in writing, I’ll pretend I didn’t hear your unflattering comparison of me to Antonio Whatsisname,” Juan Carlos Pena said.

  “How are you, Juan Carlos?” Castillo asked.

  “I hope we interrupted something important,” Pena said.

  “You did. I was sitting here in a deck chair drinking wine and watching Sweaty sunbathe in a bikini.”

  “You both better stay there,” Pena said. “Why don’t you go to Las Vegas and get married in the Elvis Presley Wedding Chapel, like normal people?”

  “Instead of Cozumel, you mean?”

  “I have enough trouble in Cozumel already. I don’t need another river of blood scaring the tourists away because the Cuban DGI doesn’t like you.”

  “What makes you think the Cuban DGI doesn’t like me?”

  “When Paul told me that General Sergei Murov was here with his Ping-Pong players, and General Jesus Manuel Cosada was here with a dozen of his Ping-Pong players—”

  “Who?”

  “I can hear your abuela saying, ‘Carlos, you have to learn not to interrupt your betters when they’re talking, otherwise people won’t like you.’”

  “My abuela was talking about adults, Juan Carlos, and if you recall, I’m three weeks older than you are.”

  “As I was saying, when I heard General Jesus Manuel Cosada, who became DGI after Raúl moved up to be president when ol’ Fidel retired from public life, was here, the really wild thought that it might be connected with you just sort of popped into my mind.

  “Then, when Paul told me he’d seen several DGI heavyweights in addition to the general, and happened to mention you were planning to tie the knot here, things that were happening began to make sense.”

  “What sort of things were happening?”

  “Well, the DGI guys immediately began finding employment at the Cruise Ship Terminal and several of the hotels, including the Grand Cozumel Beach and Golf Resort, which seemed a little odd.”

  “The Grand Cozumel hired some of them?”

  “The Grand Cozumel hired seven Cubans and the Terminal six.”

  “That’s surprising.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know who runs the Terminal for Aleksandr Pevsner, but Sweaty told me that the guy who runs the Grand Cozumel learned the hotel trade running the SVR dachas in Sochi.”

  “The what, where?”

  “Sochi, on the Black Sea, is sort of the Mexican Cozumel. I don’t know about the czars, but important Russians from Stalin down—”

  “It goes back to the later czars,” Sweaty said. Charley looked at her and saw she had her CaseyBerry to her ear.

  Where the hell did she have that phone? There’s not enough material in her bikini to safely blow her nose!

  “Starting in the 1860s,” Sweaty went on, “they started developing it as a place for sanatoriums; tuberculosis was a big problem then.”

  “Hey, Red, how are you?” Juan Carlos inquired.

  “I’m well and my Carlito’s right, Juan Carlos,” Sweaty said. “Pietr Urbanovsky, the general manager of the Grand Cozumel, is ex-SVR. He’s going to be—or should be—very careful about who he hires.”

  “Let me tell you how I think that could have happened, Red,” Juan Carlos said. “The Cubans are tight with the drug cartels. So some cartel people went to the barrio where, for example, the people who pick up trash on the beach, polish the marble in the lobby, work in the laundry, people like that, live. They said, ‘Hey, Jose. You’ve been working too hard. Take a vacation. Go to your village. Stay there for a month. Here’s three months’ pay and a bus ticket.’ Then if Jose or Pedro says, ‘Thank you very much, but I like my job and don’t want to risk losing it by not showing up for work,’ Pasquale, the cartel guy, says, ‘Pedro, you either accept our generosity, or we’ll cut your head off and hang it from a bridge over the highway. And then we’ll go to your village and rape your wife, mother, and any daughters you happen to have.’ Then when Pedro and Jose and everybody else doesn’t show up for work, no problem for your pal… What did you say his name was?”

  “Pietr Urbanovsky,” Sweaty furnished.

  “Your pal Pietr had no trouble filling his vacancies because the Cubans—who probably said they were Mexican—were looking for employment. Getting the picture, Red?”

  “I don’t think you’re getting the picture, Pancho Villa,” Sweaty said sweetly. “My Carlito told you Pietr is not stupid.”

  “I didn’t say he was, Red. I didn’t mean to imply that he was taken in. What I think your pal Pietr will do is watch the Cubans closely as they pick trash off the beach, polish the marble, et cetera—which of course gets those necessary tasks accomplished—while he looks into his new employees and what happened to the ones who didn’t show up for work.

  “Sooner or later, most likely sooner, he will know all. And then he will get rid of his new employees the way he gets rid of employees foolish enough to think they can take home hams and roasts of beef and things they have stolen from the rooms of Grand Cozumel guests by dropping them into garbage cans.”

  “How does he do that, Juan Carlo
s?” Charley asked.

  “The rumor going around is that he retrieves the hams and roasts and whatever from the garbage cans and then puts the thieves in them. Then they are loaded aboard one of Señor Pevsner’s cruise ships for disposal with the other garbage on the high seas.”

  “Does the Service Employees International Union know about this?” Charley asked.

  “The rumor going around is that the union organizers they sent down here also went for a cruise in garbage cans,” Juan Carlos said.

  “The reason we called, Charley,” Paul Sieno said, “was to ask whether we should just let things take their natural course, or whether you want to tell Señor Urbanovsky not to put the Cubans in garbage cans right away, so we can keep an eye on them.”

  “Keep them alive,” Sweaty answered for him.

  “Yeah,” Castillo agreed thoughtfully, after a moment.

  “And I called, as I said before, to beg you to join yourselves in holy matrimony in the Elvis Presley Wedding Chapel in Vegas,” Juan Carlos said. “If you try to get married here, there will be bodies and rivers of blood all over the streets, which will greatly distress the Greater Cozumel Area Chamber of Tourism.”

  Again, Sweaty answered for Castillo: “We can’t get married until this nonsense with President Clendennen is over. But when it is, I intend to be married in the Grand Ballroom of the Grand Cozumel by His Eminence Archbishop Valentin, assisted by Archimandrite Boris. I don’t think His Eminence would be willing to conduct the service in the Elvis Presley Wedding Chapel.”

  “I don’t see it as a problem,” Charley said. “I don’t know how long it will take to dissuade President Clendennen of his notions I should get rid of the Somali pirates and seize Drug Cartel International, but it’s not going to be anytime soon. Another month or six weeks at a minimum, during which I have no intention of going anywhere near the North American continent.”

  “I hear and obey, Master,” Paul Sieno said.

  “Pancho,” Sweaty said, “as soon as we get off the line, I’ll call my brother and tell him to call Pietr and explain the situation to him.”

  “Take care, Red,” Juan Carlos said, and the green LEDs on their CaseyBerrys stopped glowing.