“Did he really?” Castillo said. “I wonder where he got that?”
“Probably from Sun-tzu,” Svetlana said seriously. “That’s where most people think Machiavelli got it.”
“Sun-tzu?” Castillo asked. “That’s the Chinaman who turned two hundred of the emperor’s concubines into soldiers and won the war with them? I’ve always been an admirer of his.”
“It was one hundred eighty concubines,” Svetlana said. “He got their attention by beheading the first of them who thought it was funny and giggled, and then he beheaded the second one who giggled, and then so on down the line until he came to one who understood that what was going on was no laughing matter.”
“Does anybody else think Sweaty’s trying to make a point?” Delchamps asked innocently.
“Let me make a point, several points,” Castillo said seriously. “One, as far as the intelligence community is concerned, I’m a pariah. So is everybody ever connected with the OOA. They hated us when we had the blessing of the President, and now hating us is politically correct. I’ll bet right now both the company and the FBI—hell, all the alphabet agencies—have a ‘locate but do not detain’ bulletin out on us. They’re not going to help us at all. Quite the opposite: If we start playing James Bond again, we’ll find ourselves counting paint flecks on the wall at the Florence maximum security prison in Colorado.
“And, if I have to say this, we’ll have less than zero help from anybody.”
“I think you’re wrong about that, Charley,” Barlow said. “We know that—”
“Let me finish, Tom,” Castillo said sharply. “Point two—probably the most important thing—is that any operation we might try to run would have to have a leader. And C. Castillo, Retired, cannot be that leader. What did President Johnson say? ‘I shall not seek, nor will I accept ...’”
“You’re wrong about that, too, Ace,” Delchamps said. “I for one won’t go—and I don’t think any of the others will—unless you’re running the show. And we have to go, since the option to that is sitting around waiting for some SVR hit squad to whack us. And, Romeo, what about the fair Juliet? You’re going to just sit around holding Sweaty’s hand waiting for the hit squad to whack her? Worse, drag her back to Mother Russia?”
“You don’t know how the others will feel,” Castillo said, more than a little lamely.
“Hypothesis: They’ll all go. Any questions?” Delchamps said.
“Count me in, Charley,” Alex Darby said.
“I wouldn’t know where to start,” Castillo said.
“I’m not sure if you’ve ever heard this before,” Barlow said. “But some people in our line of work think collecting as much intelligence as possible as quickly as possible is a good way to start.”
“And how would I go about doing that?”
“That’s what I started to say a moment ago,” Barlow said. “You were there, Charley, in that suite in the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas when those people as much as told us that the director of Central Intelligence is either one of them, or damn close to them.”
“I don’t remember that,” Castillo said.
“The man who was a Naval Academy graduate quoted verbatim to you the unkind things you said to the DCI, something about the agency being ‘a few very good people trying to stay afloat in a sea of left-wing bureaucrats.’ Who do you think told him about that?”
“I remember now,” Castillo said. “But I really had forgotten. That’s not much of a recommendation, is it?”
“Charley, I said I’d take your orders,” Delchamps said. “But ... You saw The Godfather?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Both Brando and the son—Pacino? De Niro? I never can keep them straight—had a consigliere. Think of me as Robert Duvall.”
“Think of us both as Robert Duvall,” Barlow said. “It was Al Pacino.”
“I don’t think so,” Delchamps said.
“Can either of my consiglieri suggest how I can get in touch with those people?”
“Well, if you hadn’t been gulping down all that Wild Turkey, I’d suggest you fly everybody to Carinhall in Alek’s chopper. But since you have been soaking up the booze, I guess we’ll have to drive over there and get on Casey’s radio.”
“No,” Castillo said. “There’s a Casey radio in the Aero Commander.”
“It fits?” Delchamps asked, surprised.
“Aloysius’s stuff is so miniaturized it’s unbelievable,” Castillo said. “But call your house, Alek, and tell your man to stand by. There’s no printer in the airplane. And you’d better call down to the airstrip and have them push the plane from the hangar.”
“Yes, sir, Podpolkovnik Castillo, sir,” Svetlana said, and saluted him. Then she saw the look on his face. “My darling, I love it when you’re in charge of things; it makes me feel comfortable and protected.”
“It makes me think Ace’s had too much to drink,” Delchamps said.
“Aloysius, you think the offer from those people is still open?” Castillo asked.
Castillo was sitting in the pilot’s seat of the Aero Commander. Delchamps was in the co-pilot’s seat. Svetlana was kneeling in the aisle and her brother was leaning over her. Pevsner, Duffy, and Darby were sitting in the cabin. Max and János were standing watchfully outside by the nose of the airplane.
“I told them you’d change your mind,” Casey said. “This thing sort of scares me, Charley. There was another beer keg of that stuff sitting on a road near the Mexican border in Texas this morning.”
“Another one?” Castillo asked.
“Another one. They left it where the Border Patrol couldn’t miss it. It’s been taken to Colonel Hamilton at Fort Detrick. We’re waiting to hear from him to tell us if it’s exactly the same thing.”
“Well, send me whatever intel you have, everything you can get your hands on. Everything, Aloysius.”
“Done.”
“What shape is the Gulfstream in?”
“Ready to go.”
“Tell Jake to take it to Cancún. They’ll expect him.”
“You don’t want him to pick you up down there?”
“No. I’ll come commercial.”
Svetlana was tugging at his sleeve.
She rubbed her thumb and forefinger together, mouthed Money, and then held up two fingers.
“Aloysius, I’m going to need some cash,” Castillo said.
“No problem. How much?”
“Will those people stand still for two hundred thousand?”
“Where do you want it?”
Castillo was now aware Svetlana was shaking her head in what looked like incredulity but could have been disgust.
“Send it to Otto Görner and tell him to put it in my personal account.”
“Otto will have it within the hour. Anything else?”
“That’s all I can think of.”
“Let me know,” Aloysius Casey said. “And thanks, Charley. Break it down.”
Castillo looked over his shoulder at Svetlana.
“You’re going to tell me what I did wrong, aren’t you, my love?”
“I meant two million dollars. Now those people are going to think they can hire you for an unimportant sum. The more people pay you, the more important they think you are.”
“Well, my love, you’ll have to excuse my naïveté. This is the first time I’ve signed on as a mercenary.”
“Well, my darling, you’d better get used to it.”
“What you’d better get used to, Ace,” Delchamps said, “is thinking of Sweaty as Robert Duvall.”
[THREE]
The Oval Office
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.
Washington, D.C.
1715 5 February 2007
It had proven impossible to gather together all the people the President had wanted for the meeting. The secretary of Defense was in Europe at a NATO meeting, and the commanding general of the Defense Intelligence Agency had gone with him. The secr
etary of Homeland Security was in Chicago.
When Charles M. Montvale, the director of National Intelligence, and Colonel J. Porter Hamilton, MC, USA, walked into the Oval Office, the secretary of State, Natalie Cohen; John Powell, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency; and Mark Schmidt, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, were sitting in chairs forming a rough semicircle facing the President’s desk.
So were Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security Mason Andrews, standing in for the secretary, and General Allan B. Naylor, USA, commanding general of United States Central Command, who was representing both the secretary of Defense and the commanding general of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Presidential spokesman Jack “Porky” Parker sat at a small table—just large enough to hold his laptop computer—to one side of the President.
“I’m sorry to be late, Mr. President,” Montvale said.
“It’s my fault, Mr. President,” Hamilton said. “I was engaged in some laboratory processes I couldn’t interrupt.”
“Not even for the commander in chief?” Clendennen asked unpleasantly.
“If I had stopped doing what I was doing when Mr. Montvale asked me to, it would have caused a two- or three-hour loss of time,” Hamilton said. “I considered a fifteen- or twenty-minute delay in coming here the lesser of two evils.”
“Until just now, Colonel, I wasn’t aware that colonels were permitted to make decisions like that,” Clendennen said sarcastically.
Hamilton didn’t reply.
“What were you doing that you considered important enough to keep us all waiting for you to finish?” Clendennen asked.
“Actually, I had several processes working, Mr. President,” Hamilton, un-cowed, said. “The most important of them being the determination that Congo-X and Congo-Y were chemically—perhaps I should say ‘biologically’—identical—”
“What’s Congo-Y?” the President interrupted.
“I have so labeled the material from the Mexican border.”
“And are they? Identical?”
“That is my preliminary determination, Mr. President.”
“Colonel, two questions,” General Naylor announced.
“Sir?”
Clendennen didn’t like having his questioning of Hamilton interrupted by anyone, and had his mouth open to announce Excuse me, General, but I’m asking the questions when he changed his mind.
Clendennen liked General Naylor, and had been pleased when he had shown up to stand in for the secretary of the Defense and Defense Intelligence Agency general. He knew he could always believe what Naylor told him. This was not true of the people he was standing in for: The secretary of Defense had assured President Clendennen that the infernal laboratory in the Congo had first been completely reduced to pebbles and then incinerated. Clendennen had never heard the DIA general mouth an unqualified statement.
“They’re related, obviously,” Naylor began. “First, do you know with reasonable certainty who developed this terrible substance? And, second, how would you say they intend to use it against us?”
“Sir, I have nothing to support this legally or scientifically, but something tells me the origins of this substance go back at least to World War Two and perhaps earlier than that.”
“Go down that road,” Clendennen ordered.
“During the Second World War, sir, both the Germans and the Japanese experimented with materials somewhat similar to Congo-X. That is to say, biological material that could be used as a weapon. The Japanese tested it in China on the civilian population and the Germans on concentration camp inmates.”
“And did it work?” the President asked.
“All we have is anecdotal, Mr. President,” Hamilton said. “There is a great deal of that, and all of it suggests that it was effective. There is strong reason to believe material similar to this was tested on American prisoners of war by the Japanese ...”
“Do we know that, or don’t we?” the President asked impatiently.
“A number of POWs were executed by the Japanese immediately after Hiroshima. Their bodies were cremated and the ashes disposed of at sea,” Naylor said.
“Nice people,” the President said.
“And there is further evidence, Mr. President, that the Chinese sent several hundred American POWs captured in the early days of the Korean war to Czechoslovakia, where they were subjected to biological material apparently similar to something like this. Again, no proof. We know the prisoners were sent to Czechoslovakia. But no bodies, not one, were ever recovered. We still have Graves Registration people looking.”
“Why don’t we know more about the chemicals, about whatever was used on the prisoners?”
“At the time, Mr. President,” Naylor said, “the greatest threat was perceived to be the possibility the Russians would get their hands on German science vis-à-vis a nuclear weapon and rocketry. We were quite successful in doing so, but the effort necessary was at the expense of looking more deeply into what the Germans had been doing with biological weapons.
“In the Pacific, actually, we acquired what anecdotal information we have about the executed and cremated POWs primarily because MacArthur was passionately determined to locate, try, and hang as quickly as possible those Japanese officers responsible for the atrocities committed against our prisoners. They were, so to speak, just one more atrocity.”
The President considered that for a moment.
“So, then what is your theory about this, Colonel Hamilton?” he asked.
Hamilton began: “It’s pure conjecture, Mr. President—”
“I thought it might be,” the President interrupted sarcastically, and gestured for Hamilton to continue.
Hamilton ignored the interruption and went on: “It is possible that, at the end of World War Two, the Russians came into possession of a substance much like Congo-X. They might even have acquired it from the Japanese; there was an interchange of technical information.
“They very likely acquired at the same time the German scientists working with this material, much as we took over Wernher von Braun, his rocket scientists, and the rockets themselves.
“If this is true—and even if it is not, and Russian scientists alone worked with it—it had to have become immediately apparent to them how incredibly dangerous it is.”
“Why is it so ‘incredibly dangerous’?” the President interrupted yet again.
Hamilton looked at Clendennen a long moment, then carefully said: “With respect, Mr. President, I believe I’m repeating myself, but: The Congo-X in my laboratory, when placed under certain conditions of temperature and humidity, gives off microscopic particles—airborne—which when inhaled into the lung of a warm-blooded mammal will, in a matter of days, begin to consume the flesh of the lung. Meanwhile, the infected body will also be giving off—breathing back into the air—these contaminated, infectious particles before the host has any indication that he’s been infected.
“When I was in the Congo and saw the cadavers of animals and humans who had died of this infestation, I told the President—our late President—that the Fish Farm, should there be an accident, had the potential of becoming a greater risk to mankind than the nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl had posed.”
“That’s pretty strong, isn’t it, Colonel?” the President asked.
“Now that I have some idea of the danger, Mr. President,” Hamilton said, “that was a massive understatement.”
“Is there a way to kill this material?” Naylor asked.
“I’ve had some success with incineration at temperatures over one thousand degrees centigrade,” Hamilton said, looked at the President, and added: “That’s about two thousand degrees Fahrenheit, Mr. President.”
“I seem to recall the secretary of Defense telling me that the attack produced that kind of heat,” the President said.
“Then where did the two separate packages of Congo-X come from?” Secretary of State Natalie Cohen asked.
“There’re only two possibilities,�
� Ambassador Montvale said. “The attack was not successful; everything was not incinerated and someone—I suspect the Russians—went in there and picked up what was missed. Or, the Russians all along had a stock of this stuff in Russia and that’s what they’re sending us.”
“Why? What do they want?” Cohen asked.
“We’re not even sure it’s the Russians, are we?” Mark Schmidt, the director of the FBI, asked.
“Are we, Mr. Director of National Intelligence?” the President asked. “Are we sure who’s been sending us the Congo-X?”
“Not at this time, Mr. President,” Montvale replied.
“Have we the capability of sending someone into the Congo?” Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security Mason Andrew asked. “To do, in the greatest secrecy—what do they call it?—‘damage assessment’?”
“Not anymore,” Natalie Cohen said.
There was a long silence.
“Madam Secretary,” the President asked finally, icily, “would I be wrong to think that you had a certain Colonel Costello in mind when you said that?”
She met his eyes.
“I had Lieutenant Colonel Carlos Castillo in mind, yes, sir,” she said. “I was thinking that since he managed to successfully infiltrate Colonel Hamilton into the Congo and, more importantly, exfiltrate him—”
“Weren’t you listening, Madam Secretary, when I said that in this administration there will be no private bands of special operators? I thought I had made that perfectly clear. Castillo and his men have been dispersed. He was ordered by my predecessor to—the phrase he used was ‘fall off the face of the earth, never to be seen again.’ I never want to hear his name mentioned again, much less to see him. Is everybody clear on that, absolutely clear?”
“Yes, Mr. President,” Secretary Cohen said.
There was a murmur as everyone responded at once: “Yes, sir.” “Yes, Mr. President.” “Absolutely clear, Mr. President.”
“Mr. President, there may be a problem in that area,” Porky Parker said.
The President looked at him in surprise, perhaps even shock. The President thought he had made it absolutely clear to Parker that the spokesman’s role in meetings like this was to listen, period.
The Outlaws: a Presidential Agent novel Page 20