Covert Warriors

by W. E. B. Griffin

Svetlana shook her head in resignation.

  “How so?” Torine asked, smiling.

  “Don’t shake your head at me, Podpolkovnik Alekseeva,” Castillo said. “Did I, or didn’t I, convince Ivan the Terrible Junior that his plans for this problem wouldn’t solve it?”

  “What were his plans?” Torine asked.

  “They did have, I’ll admit, the advantage of simplicity,” Castillo said. “What he wanted to do was whack anyone who he suspected was SVR. I finally managed to convince him that Vladimir Vladimirovich has more SVR operators than we have bullets, and that a wiser, less violent, solution was called for.”

  “Which is?” Torine asked, smiling as he beckoned to a waiter.

  “I’m still working on that,” Castillo said. “Little problems keep popping up.”

  “You managed to talk Pevsner out of whacking everybody in sight and letting God sort it out,” Leverette asked, incredulously, “without having a Plan B?”

  “I was impressed,” Tom Barlow said. “That’s just what he did. I didn’t think he was going to get away with it.”

  Castillo smiled at Svetlana, and said, “Pay attention to your big brother, Sweaty.”

  “What makes either of you think you really got away with it?” Sweaty replied.

  “No plans at all, Charley?” Leverette asked.

  “More questions than plans,” Castillo said.

  He pointed at the laptop in front of Bradley.

  “Lester, show Uncle Remus, Uncle Jake, and Gimpy the letter that the President wants President Martinez to send to him.”

  The three bent over the laptop and read the letter.

  “Where’d you get this?” Torine asked.

  “What is it?” Miller asked.

  “That’s the letter the President ordered Natalie Cohen to give to Ambassador McCann, so that McCann can go to President Martinez with it, and have Martinez send it back. She sent it to Lammelle, and he sent it to me.”

  “So?” Torine said. “He wants to swap the guy doing time in Florence for Ferris. We knew that.”

  “Uncle Remus has that pained look on his face that shows he’s thinking,” Castillo said. “That, or he smells a rat.”

  “Both,” Leverette said.

  “Go on.”

  “The President wrote this himself?” Leverette asked.

  “The President told Natalie that Clemens McCarthy wrote it,” Castillo said. “He told Natalie he thought it was brilliant.”

  “‘. . . your Marshals would transport him to the Oaxaca State Prison, where they would turn him over to prison authorities,’” Leverette quoted.

  “I, too, found that interesting.”

  “I don’t understand,” Torine said.

  Castillo nodded, then said: “Question one: Why would the President be specific about where Abrego was to go to be exchanged? Question two: Why the Oaxaca State Prison? It’s way south, not near the U.S. border. There must be a state prison near our border.”

  “Oaxaca is closer to Venezuela?” Uncle Remus asked.

  “That may—probably does—have something to do with it. I have no idea what, but there is a reason.”

  “You just said McCarthy wrote the letter,” Miller said.

  “Same questions,” Castillo said.

  “Where are you going with this?”

  “I don’t know; I just started thinking about it,” Castillo said. “Okay, here goes. A lot of people are beginning to realize that Clendennen is losing, or has lost, his marbles. That’s what everybody—including me—thought when we heard his paranoid suspicions that we were staging a coup d’état to get him out of the Oval Office, and Montvale in.

  “There’s considerable proof that he’s not playing with a full deck. For example, he staged that business at Langley and fired Porky Parker for disloyalty. Then he went bananas because we walked out on his speech. And then he started this swap-Abrego-for-Ferris business.”

  “But?” Leverette asked.

  “The possibility exists that he’s not being paranoid about a coup d’état.”

  “Jesus Christ!” Miller said.

  “Who would be behind that, Charley?” Torine asked dubiously, and then had an additional thought and incredulously asked, “Montvale?”

  Castillo nodded.

  Miller said, “Jesus Christ! Are you serious, Charley?”

  “I may be wrong. I hope I am wrong. But, yeah, the more I think about it, the more serious I become.”

  “How long have you had this dangerous idea?” Miller asked.

  “When I smelled something wrong in that letter—where the President wanted Martinez to tell him where he wanted Abrego to be sent. What the hell is that all about?”

  “He didn’t,” Torine argued. “McCarthy wrote that letter.”

  “Even worse,” Castillo said. “How could McCarthy know about the Oaxaca State Prison? He’s been on the job only a couple of days.”

  “So where did he get it?”

  “Supervisory Secret Service Agent Mulligan probably knew about it.”

  “You’re suggesting Mulligan had a hand in writing that letter,” Leverette said.

  “Yeah, I am. When Montvale was director of National Intelligence, he had the secretary of Homeland Security in his pocket. And the Secret Service is part of Homeland Security. I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to wonder if he had this Mulligan character keeping an eye on Clendennen for him. And if Mulligan did slip Oaxaca State Prison into that letter—why would he do that unless Montvale told him to?”

  “Why, Charley?” Torine asked.

  “Try this scenario on for size,” Castillo said. “Abrego is taken to this prison in the middle of nowhere in Mexico by U.S. Marshals. I don’t know whether they’re planning to exchange him for Ferris or ‘allow him to escape.’ It doesn’t matter, the plan blows up. Abrego gets away and Ferris is whacked.

  “They find him with his head cut off, or hanging from a bridge overpass in Acapulco, or both. The press starts to run down the story. The letter from Martinez is leaked—” He paused in thought, then went on, “Going off on a tangent, Clendennen is pushed over the edge at this point. He publicly accuses Crenshaw and Cohen of betraying him. Since they haven’t betrayed him, they deny it. Clendennen starts looking like a lunatic.

  “By this point, the press is hot on the story. They learn from the Bureau of Prisons that they were ordered by the attorney general to take Abrego from Florence to the Oaxaca State Prison—something that is against long-standing U.S. policy and has never been done. The attorney general says Clendennen ordered it over his objections and that Natalie Cohen not only was there when he did it, but was also given a letter by him—this letter—which set up the whole thing.

  “At this point, either Clendennen resigns or impeachment proceedings start in the Congress, or—and I think this is what Montvale is shooting for—Clendennen really starts frothing at the mouth, which will cause whatever authorities make decisions like this—the Cabinet?—to conclude that his mental condition is such that he cannot discharge his duties as POTUS, whereupon . . .”

  Jake Torine finished: “Whereupon the Vice President steps forward and says he is forced to assume the President’s responsibilities until such time as the poor man recovers his faculties.”

  “And what happens then?” Leverette asked.

  “Uncle Remus, we can’t let it get that far,” Castillo said.

  “So how do we stop it?” Leverette asked.

  “We follow that military adage of ‘When you don’t know what to do, doing anything is better than doing nothing.’”

  “Are you going to translate that, Charley?” Leverette asked.

  “All I can think of is snatching Ferris or Abrego or both of them, before, during, or after the exchange, escape, or whatever at Oaxaca State Prison and then wait to see who—beside the Mexicans—comes out of the woodwork looking for them.”

  “And how are you going to do that?” Torine asked.

  “And how does all this tie
in with your scenario that the whole Ferris business is an SVR plot to get you and the other Russians?” Leverette added.

  “‘The other Russians’?” Castillo parroted sarcastically.

  “You know what I mean,” Leverette said.

  “Uncle Remus, I don’t know how it fits in. I don’t even know if the SVR is really after me and the other Russians. And I can’t explain the business about the Oaxaca State Prison. Truth to tell, I’m flying blind.”

  “Okay,” Leverette said. “So now that we know that, what’s the plan?”

  Torine laughed.

  Castillo then said, “I recently ran into an old acquaintance, Juan Carlos Pena, el jefe of the Policía Federal for the province of Oaxaca. He came to Hacienda Santa Maria—the grapefruit farm—and out of the goodness of his heart told me to get the hell out of Dodge before I got hurt. These drug people, Juan Carlos told me, are very dangerous.”

  “And you suspect he might be pals with them?” Leverette asked.

  “That thought has run through my mind,” Castillo said. “I think I’d better have another talk with him.”

  “A nice talk? Or the other kind?” Leverette asked.

  Castillo didn’t reply directly. He instead said, “What I hope I can do is get Juan Carlos, for auld lang syne, to (a) tell me all he knows about the involvement of the Venezuelans—which means the SVR—in this, and (b) keep me up to date on the plans for Señor Abrego at the Oaxaca State Prison.”

  “That’s a tall order, Charley,” Torine said.

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “Okay,” Leverette said. “Let’s say that works. You know that Abrego is going to be at the prison at a certain time. Then what?”

  “Then I offer whoever was going to let Abrego go more money than the Venezuelans are offering, and grab him. And/or grab Ferris, when they take him to Oaxaca State Prison.”

  “And there you are, near this prison in the middle of nowhere, with either or both of them,” Leverette said. “What are you going to do with them?”

  “Load them on my Black Hawk,” Castillo said.

  Leverette looked askance at Castillo. “Before I ask you where you’re going to take them in your Black Hawk, where in hell are you going to get a Black Hawk?”

  “I already have a Black Hawk,” Castillo said. “By now . . . or certainly by tomorrow . . . it will be at Martindale Army Airfield at Fort Sam.”

  “The one you stole from the Mexican cops?” Leverette asked.

  “The one I bought from the Mexican cops,” Castillo said. “Natalie Cohen didn’t want to embarrass the Mexican ambassador by asking him to explain its miraculous resurrection from the total destruction he said it suffered in the war against the drug cartels—complete with its weaponry and Policía Federal markings intact—so she gave it to Lammelle and asked him to get rid of it. While making up his mind about the best way to go about it, he had it trucked from Norfolk to Fort Sam for storage.”

  “Did he just do that, or did you ask him to?” Torine asked.

  “I asked him.”

  “Then his neck is on the line,” Torine said.

  “All of our necks are going to be on the line with this, Jake,” Castillo said. “I’m not going to line everybody up and ask for volunteers to take one step forward, but I’ll understand if—”

  “Come on, Charley,” Dick Miller interjected. “You damn well know better than that.”

  Castillo met his eyes, then started to say something but apparently couldn’t find his voice. He offered his hand to Miller, who shook it.

  Then Castillo stood up and wrapped his arms around Miller. “I’ll let you hug me, too, Charley,” Leverette said. “But if you think I’m going to kiss you, don’t hold your breath.”

  [TWO]

  Office of the Warden

  United States Penitentiary Administrative Maximum

  Facility (ADX)

  Florence, Colorado

  1605 18 April 2007

  J. William Leon, warden of the Florence ADMAX facility, was a large (six-three, 225 pounds) red-haired man known behind his back to his staff as “Willy the Lion” or sometimes simply as “the Lion.”

  He was generally recognized within the federal prison community as the most senior of all prison wardens. In the United States there were 114 federal incarceration facilities, which the Federal Bureau of Prisons, part of the Department of Justice, called “institutions.”

  Leon’s status as the most senior warden was de facto, if not de jure. He ran Florence ADMAX. That said it all.

  He was de jure subordinate to a number of people in the Bureau of Prisons bureaucratic hierarchy but de facto answered only to Harold M. Waters, the director of the Bureau of Prisons. Howard Kennedy had begun his executive career working under Leon when Leon had been the assistant warden of Federal Correctional Institution, Allenwood, in Montgomery, Pennsylvania. He often said that everything valuable that he had learned about the incarceration business he had learned from Willy the Lion, and that Willy the Lion was the best warden in the bureau. Period.

  Leon had joined the federal prison system as a trainee shortly after graduating from college, and the first time he had ever been inside a prison was the day he reported for work. He had needed a job, and his decision to join the incarceration profession had almost been as a lark—“What have I got to lose? It might be interesting.”

  Ten years into his career—then a captain at the United States Penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas—Leon had been offered a chance to move into the administrative side of the bureau—in other words, out of working with prisoners and into an office in Washington. A bright future was foreseen for him, and everybody thought he had made a mistake when he turned down the job offer.

  He had decided—this time not impulsively—that he liked working with prisoners a good deal more than he would have liked working at a desk in the Bureau of Prisons headquarters in Washington.

  What he meant by “working with prisoners” was the challenge he faced making them behave. The Lion had believed that the question of whether anyone belonged in prison or not had been decided in the courtroom and was none of a warden’s business. And he quickly decided that rehabilitation was mostly bullshit.

  Willy the Lion had concluded that a warden’s business was confining a prisoner in decent conditions in such circumstances that he (or she) did not pose problems for the guards, fellow prisoners, or him- or herself. And the way to accomplish this was simple: Establish rules that were fair and made sense, and then see that they were obeyed.

  His rise through the warden hierarchy was slow at first, but grew quickly as his superiors came to realize that he was not only good at running a prison, but even better at straightening out a prison in trouble. And trouble in prisons was not caused only by the inmates; the staff also contributed. Willy the Lion earned the reputation among them of being fair and reasonable, but not a man to cross.

  No one was surprised when the Lion was first named assistant warden at Florence ADMAX facility, or a year later when he was named warden, after it had proved too much to handle for its first warden.

  Once he took over, there had been no further problems. Period.

  And shortly after that happened, he demonstrated that he had another skill, one that no one suspected, and one that surprised even him.

  Willy the Lion could handle the press . . . from the handwringers convinced that the Bureau of Prisons spent most of its time figuring out ways to violate the civil rights of the prison population to the heavy hitters from the television news networks who had long known that covering bloody prison riots attracted as many millions of viewers as did the sexual escapades of movie stars and politicians.

  Once Willy the Lion’s skill at handling the press became known to the upper brass of the Bureau of Prisons, whenever there was trouble—a riot or allegations of guard brutality or corruption—that was likely to draw the national press to the gates of a prison, when the Fourth Estate showed up they very often found that Willy the Lion,
the warden of the toughest prison in the world, had “coincidentally” been there when the trouble started.

  Willy the Lion was a story by himself, so they dealt with him, and he was truthful with them, and they learned that he neither coddled the prison population nor made any effort at all to cover up malfeasance on the part of the warden or his guards.

  With rare exceptions, the press left the site of the story convinced that the Federal Bureau of Prisons had one hell of a tough job to do, and most of the time did it well, and in those few instances where somebody fucked up, there were a large number of people—like Willy the Lion—standing ready to make things right.

  Director of the Bureau of Prisons Harold M. Waters sometimes thought that Willy the Lion’s public relations role was almost as important as his proven skill at running Florence ADMAX.

  No one—not even Director Waters—knew that for the past nine months Willy had a personal problem with one of the prisoners in Florence ADMAX, one Félix Abrego, register number 97593-655.

  A federal court in Houston, Texas, had convicted Abrego on three counts of first-degree murder. The victims were all special agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration. And one of the three was Willy the Lion’s eldest sister’s youngest boy, Clarence, who had been twenty-two years old and on the job just over a year when Félix Abrego had stood over him and fired four shots into the groin area of his body, and then a fifth shot into his face.

  Abrego had been sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. The sentencing investigation had turned up his record as a hit man for the Mexican drug cartels and that he had been sent to Florence ADMAX from the Federal Detention Center, Houston, immediately after his trial.

  This caused Willy the Lion for the first time in his adult life to consciously violate the regulations—which of course have the force and effect of law—of the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

  For obvious reasons, a warden should not be in charge of the incarceration of a prisoner to whom he is related, or who has committed a crime against the warden, or a member of the warden’s family.

  Ordinarily this poses no problem. Such a prisoner is assigned to a prison where the warden has never heard of him.