W. E. B. Griffin - Presidential Agent 07 (3 page)

General McNab finished reading Ambassador McCann’s message that had been sent to the secretary of State.

“Shit!” he exclaimed, immediately adding, “Sorry.”

“That was my reaction, Bruce,” the secretary of State said.

McNab pushed one of the buttons in the attaché case. A printer on the sideboard behind his desk began to whir. McNab pointed to it, and Captain Walsh quickly went to the printer.

“Something about this smells,” McNab said. “Danny Salazar is no novice. For that matter, neither is Ferris.”

“You know everything I do,” she said.

“Has the press got this yet?”

“They will half an hour after it gets to the White House.”

“Can I call Roscoe Danton before that happens, give him a heads-up?”

Roscoe J. Danton was a member of the
Washington Times-Post
Writers Syndicate.

“Why?”

“Gut feeling we should. He’s almost one of us. We owe him. And we may need him.”

“Does Danton have a Brick?”

“No Brick,” McNab replied. “A CaseyBerry. Aloysius likes him. Number fourteen.”

“I’ll call him and tell him to call Porky. But all he’ll have, Bruce, is ten or fifteen minutes.”

John David “Porky” Parker was President Joshua Ezekiel Clendennen’s spokesman.

“That’s a long time, sometimes.”

“Bruce, I’m really sorry about this.”

“I know,” McNab said.

The LEDs went out.

McNab put down the CaseyBerry, picked up the black telephone, and pushed one of the buttons on its base.

“Terry,” he announced a moment later, “I need you.”

“On my way, sir,” Major General Terry O’Toole, deputy commander of SPECOPSCOM, replied.

He was in McNab’s office forty-five seconds later. He was trim and ruddy-faced.

McNab pointed to the printout. O’Toole picked it up and read it.

“Shit,” he said. “And I gave Jim Ferris to you.”

“What
you
did, General,” McNab said, “was comply with my request for the name of your best field-grade trainer. What
I
did was send him to DEA so they could send him to Mexico. And
I
sent Danny Salazar with him to cover his back.”

O’Toole looked at him.

McNab went on: “And what you’re going to say now is, ‘Yes, sir, General, that’s the way it went down.’ ”

O’Toole met McNab’s eyes, nodded, and repeated, “Yes, sir, General, that’s the way it went down.”

McNab nodded.

O’Toole said: “What happens now?”

“Do you know Colonel Ferris’s religious persuasion?”

“Episcopalian.”

“Al,” General McNab ordered, “get on the horn to the Eighteenth Airborne Corps chaplain. Tell him I want the senior Episcopalian chaplain and the senior Roman Catholic chaplain here in fifteen minutes.”

“Yes, sir,” Captain Walsh said, and went to a telephone on a side table.

“And call my wife,” McNab said. “Same message; here in fifteen.”

“Yes, sir.”

“What about your wife, Terry? Does she know Mrs. Ferris?”

“May I use your telephone, General?” O’Toole replied.

“Don’t tell her who,” McNab said.

“I understand, sir.”

Neither Mrs. McNab nor Mrs. O’Toole would be surprised by the summons. Both had gone more times than they liked to remember to accompany their husbands when they went to inform wives that their husbands were either dead or missing.

McNab picked up the CaseyBerry and punched in a number.

It was answered ten seconds later in what was known as “the Stockade.” Delta Force and Gray Fox were quartered in what had once been the Fort Bragg Stockade. The joke was that all the money spent to make sure no one got out of the Stockade had not been wasted. All of the fences and razor wire and motion sensors were perfectly suited to keep people
out
of the Stockade.

The CaseyBerry was answered by a civilian employee of the Department of the Army, who were known by the acronym DAC. His name was Victor D’Alessandro, a very short, totally bald man in his late forties who held Civil Service pay grade GS-15. Army regulations provided that a GS-15 held the assimilated rank of colonel. Before Mr. D’Alessandro had retired, he had been a chief warrant officer (5) drawing pay and allowances very close to those of a lieutenant colonel. And before he put on the bars of a warrant officer, junior grade, D’Alessandro had been a sergeant major.

“Go,” Mr. D’Alessandro said by way of answering his CaseyBerry.

“Bad news, Vic,” General McNab said. “Danny Salazar and two DEA guys with him were whacked about noon fifty miles from Acapulco. They were in an embassy SUV with Colonel Ferris. The SUV and Ferris are missing.”

“Shit! What happened?”

“I want you to go down there—black—and find out,” McNab said. “You and no more than two of your people. By the time you get to Pope, the C-38 will be waiting to fly you to Atlanta. By the time you get there, you should have reservations on Aeromexico to either Acapulco or Mexico City. I’ll try to confirm while you’re en route.”

In a closely guarded hangar at Pope Air Force Base, which abutted Fort Bragg, were several aircraft, including a highly modified Boeing 727 and a C-38, the latter the military nomenclature of the Israel Aircraft Industries Ltd./Galaxy Aerospace Corporation Astra SPX business jet. The C-38 had civilian markings.

“I’ll take Nunez and Vargas.”

“Your call.”

“Who’s paying for this?”

McNab, who hadn’t considered that detail, gave it some quick thought.

There were two options, neither of which would cost the U.S. taxpayer a dime. In D’Alessandro’s safe, together with an assortment of passports in different names, were two manila envelopes, one marked “TP” and one “Charley.” Each envelope held two inch-thick stacks of credit cards, American Express Platinum and Citibank Gold Visa cards, the names embossed on them matching the names on the passports, and two business-size envelopes, each holding $10,000 in used hundred-, fifty-, and twenty-dollar bills.

There had been a “TP” envelope in the safe for several years. TP stood for Those People. Those People were an anonymous group of very wealthy businessmen who saw it as their patriotic duty to fund black Special Operations missions when getting official funds to do so would be difficult or impossible.

The “Charley” envelope was a recent addition to D’Alessandro’s safe. Charley stood for Lieutenant Colonel Carlos G. Castillo, Special Forces, U.S. Army, Retired. The Amex Platinum and Citibank Gold Visa cards in the Charley envelope identified their holders as officers of the LCBF Corporation.

During a recent covert operation—which went so far beyond black that McNab had dubbed it Operation March Hare, as in “mad as a March hare”—Castillo and McNab had learned that Those People had concluded that since they were making a financial contribution to an operation, they had the right to throw the special operators under the bus when it seemed to be the logical thing to do, considering the big picture.

One of the results of that was the LCBF Corporation’s decision to provide General McNab with the same sort of stand-by funding as Those People provided. It had not posed any financial problems for the LCBF Corporation to do so. The LCBF Corporation already had negotiable assets of more than $50 million when the director of the Central Intelligence Agency handed Mr. David W. Yung—LCBF’s vice president, finance—a Treasury check for $125 million in settlement of the CIA’s promise to pay that sum, free of any tax liabilities, to whoever delivered to them an intact Russian Tupelov Tu-934A transport aircraft.

Mr. D’Alessandro had written “Charley” on the LCBF envelope without thinking about it. D’Alessandro had still been a sergeant major when Second Lieutenant Castillo had first been passed behind the fences of the Stockade. And as good sergeants major do, he had taken the young officer under his wing. Both D’Alessandro and General McNab devoutly believed they had raised Castillo from a pup.

General McNab would have dearly liked to stick Those People with the costs of D’Alessandro’s reconnaissance mission, but decided in the end it would not be the thing to do now. He would think of something else—a bayonet, maybe—to stick them with at a later time.

“Let Charley pay for it, Vic,” he said.

“I’ll be in touch,” D’Alessandro said, and broke the CaseyBerry connection.

 

 

Aloysius F. Casey, Ph.D., chairman of the board of the AFC Corporation, stepped off the elevator onto the upper-level reception foyer of the Machiavelli Suite, and then stepped to one side, graciously waving out the two females from the elevator.

The first woman was Mrs. Agnes Forbison, who was fifty-one, gray-haired, and getting just a little chubby. Mrs. Forbison was vice president, administration, of the LCBF Corporation. Previously she had been—as a GS-15—administrative assistant to the Honorable Thomas Hall, secretary of the then–newly formed Department of Homeland Security, and after that, deputy chief for administration of the now-defunct Office of Organizational Analysis.

Second to get off the elevator was a stunningly beautiful woman with luxuriant dark red hair. Her passport identified her as a Uruguayan citizen by the name of Susanna Barlow.

Following Señorita Barlow off the elevator was Lieutenant Colonel Carlos G. Castillo, Ret.—a good-looking, six-foot, 190-pound thirty-seven-year-old—who was the president of the LCBF Corporation. Castillo was followed by an enormous black dog, a Bouvier des Flandres, who answered to Max.

As Castillo stood beside Miss Barlow, she said—hissed perhaps would be more accurate—“You remember I told you this was a mistake.”

On Castillo’s heels came Mr. Edgar Delchamps, a nondescript man in his early sixties, who was vice president, planning and operations, of the LCBF Corporation. He was retired from the Central Intelligence Agency, where he had served for more than thirty years as an officer of the Clandestine Service.

Delchamps was followed by thirty-three-year-old David W. Yung, Jr., who stood five feet eight and weighed 150 pounds. Despite his obvious Oriental heritage, Mr. Yung could not speak any of the languages of the Orient. He was fluent, however, in four other languages. The vice president, financial, of the LCBF Corporation was an attorney and previously had been a special agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The final passenger stepped off the elevator. His Argentine passport identified him as Tomás Barlow. He was about the same age as Castillo and was built like him. He was Señorita Barlow’s brother. In a previous life, they had been Colonel Dmitri Berezovsky, the SVR
rezident
in Berlin, and Lieutenant Colonel Svetlana Alekseeva, the SVR
rezident
in Copenhagen.

Castillo walked to the edge of the upper-level entrance foyer, rested his hands on the bronze rail atop the glass wall, and looked down to the lower level. Max went with him, put his front paws on the rail, and barked.

Four men—three of them well, even elegantly, dressed—were standing there, looking up at the upper level. One of them was a legendary hotelier who owned four of the more glitzy Las Vegas hotels, and three more in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and Biloxi, Mississippi.

Another was a well-known, perhaps even famous, investment banker. Another had made an enormous fortune in data processing. Castillo knew him to be a U.S. Naval Academy graduate. The fourth man was a sort of mousy-looking character in a suit that looked as if it had come off the final-clearance rack at Goodwill. All that Castillo knew about him was that no one knew exactly how many radio and television stations he owned.

Those People and the executive board of the LCBF were about to meet.

Castillo turned and walked back to the people by the elevator door.

“This is your show, Aloysius,” he said, loudly enough for Those People to hear. “You get to choose who gets thrown off the balcony first.”

Delchamps and Tom Barlow chuckled. Yung smiled.

Casey shook his head and walked toward the head of the curving staircase leading to the lower level. Max trotted after him, then turned to look at Castillo as if expecting an order to “stay.” When that did not come, he went down the stairs ahead of Casey, headed directly for a coffee table laden with hors d’oeuvres, and with great delicacy helped himself to a caviar-topped cracker.

“Careful, Max,” Castillo called. “They’re probably poisoned.”

“Enough, Carlito!” Señorita Barlow ordered.

She then started down the stairs. Everyone followed, Casey last, after Castillo, as if to ensure that Castillo didn’t get away.

“Annapolis,” as Castillo thought of him, waited at the foot of the stairs and put out his right hand.

“Thank you for coming,” he said. “We have to get this straightened out between us.”

Castillo took the hand with visible reluctance.

“For the good of the country,” Annapolis added.

“We don’t seem to agree on what’s good for the country, do we?” Castillo replied.

“I thought champagne would be in order,” “Hotelier” said, “to toast the success of the latest operation. What was it called?”

He snapped his fingers, and two waiters moved to coolers and began to open bottles of champagne.

“I understand some people called it March Hare,” Edgar Delchamps offered.

“Well, whatever it was called, it was one hell of a success,” “Radio and TV Stations” said.

The waiters quickly poured the champagne, and then walked around, offering it on trays to everyone.

“I give you . . .” Hotelier said, raising his glass.

“Whoa!” Castillo said. “Two things before we do that, if you please. One, why are we talking about such things with these fellows in here passing the champagne?”