The Outlaws

by W. E. B. Griffin

  “I have to think that’s possible. Can you devise a spurious position indicator for him?”

  “Where do you want him to start moving to in twenty seconds, Jack?”

  “Doesn’t he have family in Germany? Do you know where?”

  “Yeah. Outside Frankfurt. But what about Budapest?”

  “What’s in Budapest?”

  “A guy on Charley’s net. He’s sort of like an uncle to him. Billy Kocian?”

  “I don’t know the name.”

  “Good guy. Trust me.”

  “Budapest sounds fine.”

  “I can call Billy and tell him what’s happening. And ... what I could do, Jack, is put Charley’s position indicator on one of those boats that sails up and down the Danube between Vienna and Budapest. That would drive those people bonkers wondering what the hell he’s up to.”

  “A splendid idea!”

  “Anything else I can do for you?”

  “Aloysius, do you—or your people—ever work with extremely low temperatures, using gases in the minus two-hundred-degrees Celsius area?”

  “All the time. The colder you get something, the faster everything electrical moves. Twice a week, I say, ‘Eureka! This will work!’ and then everything that cold turns brittle and shatters when somebody in Los Angeles or Chicago burps, and we’re back to Step Fucking One.”

  “Helium?”

  “Of course. It’s a little pricey, but you can go down to about minus two-seventy Celsius with helium.”

  “You’ve got a pretty good source of supply for helium?”

  “Yeah. Several of them. Where are you going with this, Jack?”

  “You could order, say, a thousand liters, two thousand, even more, of helium without attracting much attention?”

  “Why would I want to do that?”

  “Because we may need at least that much to kill Congo-X.”

  “Helium kills Congo-X?”

  “Fifteen minutes in a helium bath at minus two-seventy Celsius kills it.”

  “So it can be killed! I was really getting worried about that.”

  “You were not alone,” Hamilton said. “We don’t know how much the Russians have. I suspect that if the President doesn’t give them Castillo and the Russians very soon, they will deliver more of it to encourage him to do so. My concern is that there will be an accident when they do so. I—”

  “I get the picture,” Casey interrupted. “I’ll load what helium I have here . . . maybe three hundred liters, maybe a little more ... on my Gulfstream. As soon as we know where the Russians have sent the new Congo-X, the helium will be there in no more than three hours. And I’ll lay my hands on as much more as I can get as soon as I can.”

  “Aloysius, we can’t let those people learn any of this.”

  “I’m not as dumb as I look and sometimes act, Jack. I already figured that out.”

  “Good man!”

  “As soon as we hang up here, I’ll get through to Charley, and tell him both what’s going on and to get the hell off Grandma’s place as soon as he can.”

  “Splendid!”

  [FIVE]

  Apartment 606

  The Watergate Apartments

  2639 I Street, N.W.

  Washington, D.C.

  0755 10 February 2007

  When Roscoe J. Danton finally found the ringing house telephone in the living room and picked it up, he was not in a very gracious mood.

  Mr. Danton had returned to Washington four hours before after a fifteen-hour flight from Ushuaia, Patagonia, Argentina, whence he had traveled—on what, he had concluded, was a wild-goose chase that belonged in The Guinness Book of World Records—with Ambassador Charles M. Montvale and Montvale’s executive assistant—The Honorable Truman Ellsworth—and four CIA spooks to locate Alexander Darby, who allegedly could point him to Lieutenant Colonel C. G. Castillo.

  The Gulfstream III twin-engine jet aircraft had been noisy and crowded. What food there had been was damned near inedible. The toilet had stopped up. And because there had been no functioning socket into which to plug his laptop, once its battery had gone dead, he couldn’t do any work.

  Mentally, he had composed a blistering piece that would subject Montvale and Ellsworth to the scorn of the world. But even as he’d done that, he knew he would never write it. He not only felt sorry for them, but had come to like them.

  He also had spent a good deal of time trying to come up with a version of what had happened to tell Christopher J. Waldron, the managing editor of the Times-Post, something that would not result in Waldron concluding that Roscoe J. Danton had either been drunk or was a moron or both.

  He had gotten to bed a few minutes before four.

  And now the fucking house phone goes off!

  In the five years I’ve lived in the Watergate, I haven’t talked on the goddamn thing five times!

  “What?” he snarled into the instrument.

  “Mr. Danton, this is Gerry in the garage.”

  “And how may I be of assistance, Gerry?”

  “There’s something wrong with your car, Mr. Danton. The alarm keeps going off.”

  “That happens, Gerry”—As you should know, you fucking cretin. You work in the garage—“when someone bumps into it. It’ll stop blowing the horn and flashing the headlights in three minutes.”

  “Yeah, I know, but yours keeps going off. This is the fifth time it’s gone off. You’re going to have to do something.”

  “What would you suggest?”

  “Well, you could disconnect the battery. That’d shut the alarm system off.”

  “Gerry, if you could do that for me, I’d be happy to make it worth your while. How does ten dollars sound?”

  “Sounds fine to me, Mr. Danton, but your car is locked and I have to get under the hood to disconnect the battery. You can’t open the hood from outside.”

  In the background Danton could then hear the sound of a horn going bleep-bleep-bleep.

  “There it goes again,” Gerry said unnecessarily.

  Roscoe Danton sighed audibly.

  “I’ll be right down,” he said.

  Which means I’ll have to get dressed. I can’t go down there in my underwear.

  There were three men watching the blinking headlights on Roscoe’s car. One of them had sort of a uniform on, and was presumably Gerry. The other two were wearing suits.

  Which means they probably live here, which means I will shortly get one of those fucking letters from the tenants’ association demanding to know how I dare disturb the peace and tranquillity of the Watergate Apartments, blowing my horn in this outrageous way.

  As he approached his car, the lights stopped blinking and the horn stopped bleating.

  “Why hello, Roscoe,” one of the men in suits said. “Nice to see you again. But we are going to have to stop meeting this way. People will talk.”

  I am actually losing my mind. I’m hallucinating.

  How could Alexander Darby possibly be standing next to my car in the Watergate garage?

  “My name is Yung, Mr. Danton,” the other man in a suit said, putting out his hand. “I’m glad to meet you. Alex has told me a good deal about you.”

  Alex Darby said, “Gerry, we can take it from here. Thanks very much for your help.”

  “Anytime,” Gerry said, and took the extended twenty-dollar bill and walked toward his booth near the entrance.

  “Got your passport with you, Roscoe?” Darby asked.

  In a Pavlovian reflex, Danton patted his suit jacket pocket, and immediately regretted it.

  “Good,” Yung said. “If you want to talk to Colonel Castillo, you’re going to need it.”

  “Who are you?”

  “My name is David W. Yung. I’m Colonel Castillo’s attorney.”

  “Did you find Ushuaia interesting, Roscoe?” Darby asked.

  “How do you know about that?”

  “Well, as the saying goes, ‘You can take the man out of the agency, but you can’t take the agency out
of the man.’”

  Yung put in: “What we’re going to do, Roscoe—you don’t mind if I call you Roscoe, do you?”

  “Yeah, I think I do.”

  “If you’re going to be difficult, Roscoe, not a problem,” Yung said. “We’ll just leave and go find C. Harry Whelan, Jr. We know he also wants to meet Colonel Castillo. We’d rather have you, but only if you want to go along. We’re not going to drug you, or anything like that, and take you against your will.”

  “Take me where?”

  “I’ll tell you what we have in mind if you let me call you Roscoe. If you do, in turn you may call me Two-Gun.”

  I’m smiling. I have every right to be royally pissed.

  And maybe I should even be frightened—was there an implied threat in that “We’re not going to drug you”?

  But what I’m doing is smiling.

  “Two-Gun”? They call him “Two-Gun”?

  “You may call me Roscoe, Two-Gun.”

  “Thank you. Now, Roscoe, presuming you are willing, you are going to drive you and me to BWI. You have a first-class ticket on the Aero-Mexico ten-forty-five flight to Mexico City. Once I see your plane take off, I will drive your car back here and turn it over to Gerry’s capable hands. You will be met at the airport in Mexico City and taken to meet Colonel Castillo.”

  “And the Russians?”

  “Actually, one of the Russians has expressed an interest in meeting you, Roscoe.”

  “Where is Castillo, Two-Gun?”

  “You will learn that later.”

  “And if I say no?”

  “Then we shall regretfully have to stuff you in the trunk of your car. And by the time Gerry hears your piteous cries for help—and finally figures out where they’re coming from—Alex and I will have folded our tent and disappeared.”

  Goddamn it! I’m smiling again.

  “Okay. Give me ten minutes to throw some things in a bag and grab my laptop.”

  “No. If we’re going, it has to be right now.”

  “Why?”

  “There’s about one chance in ten that Alex and I were not as successful as we believe we were in eluding the Secret Service guys surveilling our house, which raises the possibility that there may be some of them outside.”

  “What makes you think they won’t see, follow, stop, whatever, us when you and I leave?”

  “Because just before we leave, Alex is going to leave the garage as if Satan himself is in hot pursuit. If there are no Secret Service agents waiting for him outside, fine. If there are, Alex will lead them on a tour of the scenic spots of our nation’s capital while you and I make our leisurely way to BaltimoreWashington International.”

  “And Harry Whelan won’t be involved, right?”

  “I was afraid you would ask that.”

  “Meaning he will be?”

  “Meaning he will be offered the same opportunity.”

  “Can I cut his throat?”

  “When you come back, you can do anything you want to.”

  “I haven’t a clue why I’m going along with this,” Roscoe J. Danton said as he put the key in the car door.

  [ONE]

  Office of the Director

  The Central Intelligence Agency

  Langley, Virginia

  0930 10 February 2007

  J. Stanley Waters, the CIA’s deputy director for operations, stood looking over the shoulder of DCI John Powell at the screen of a laptop computer. The screen showed an arrow positioned over a map of Budapest, Hungary. A box beside the arrow held the legend HOTEL GELLÉRT, SZENT GELLÉRT TÉR 1 and the local date and time.

  “There is our friend Castillo right now,” the DCI said.

  “What’s he doing in the Hotel Gellért in Budapest?” Waters asked.

  “Does it matter? Just as long as the case officers know where to find him when they get there.”

  “It would have been easier, and maybe quicker, to send the plane from Tampa. We know the guys on the plane are good, know the score, and if we had sent it over there the moment we saw he was headed for Europe, they would be there, or almost there, now.”

  “So you’ve been saying, five or six times,” the DCI said.

  “I stand chastised.”

  “And well you should,” the DCI said, only half-jokingly.

  When enough time for that to have sunk in had passed, the DCI went on: “And what you can do with this software, Stan—that Casey is really a fucking genius—is program a time lapse into it. Like this.”

  He tapped a few keys. The map changed and now showed a map covering the world from near Acapulco to Budapest.

  “This arrow is when Castillo started to move from Grandma’s house,” the DCI said. “That was at sixteen-thirty Acapulco time yesterday. I’ll set this thing to show us where he was by the hour.”

  He tapped keys.

  “There it is . . .”

  A series of arrows appeared on a line from Acapulco to Budapest.

  “Unfortunately, there was a cloud cover, so we couldn’t get a very good picture of what’s moving. But enough to categorize it as a small jet. One hour later . . .”

  He used his finger as a pointer.

  “. . . it was almost halfway to Cancún, and two hours later, it was almost in Cancún, telling us it was making about three hundred thirty knots, which suggests that he’s flying the family Lear, which makes sense, as we know the Gulfstream III is in Panama City, Panama.

  “An hour after that, having taken on fuel in Cancún, he was about two hundred miles on his way to Panama City.... Watch the arrow jump, Stan. Another hour, another three hundred forty nautical miles, and then another, et cetera, until he reaches Panama City, Panama.

  “And there Castillo sat for almost three hours until he boarded Varig Flight 2030 for Madrid.”

  “Jack, for Christ’s sake, you’re like a kid with your goddamn computer!”

  “Indulge me,” the DCI said. “And there he is in Madrid.”

  “Goddamn it, Jack!”

  “And finally, courtesy of Lufthansa, there he is in Budapest.”

  “What do you think he did with his airplane in Panama City?”

  “No telling. We should know by the morning when we get the satellite imagery. It could be sitting on the tarmac there, or that Air Force guy, Torine, could have flown it somewhere. I never understood how that worked. Torine was a pretty senior full colonel, and our boy a very junior lieutenant colonel. So how come Torine works for Castillo?”

  “I have no idea. What are you going to do with Lammelle?”

  “What do you mean, do with him?”

  “You are going to tell him that Castillo is in Budapest?”

  “I could tell Frank, but he would have to tell General Naylor, and General Naylor would naturally want to know how Lammelle, or the CIA, knows where Castillo is. The truthful answer to that would be that, courtesy of Aloysius Francis Casey, those people in Las Vegas are tracking Colonel Castillo through a GPS transmitter in his laptop. And we don’t want to reveal that, do we?”

  “So Frank just sits at MacDill?”

  “Unless McNab thinks he has found Castillo, and they all rush off to the wrong place to put them in the bag. You wouldn’t believe, Stan, how low our director of National Intelligence has sunk in the President’s esteem as a result of his wild-goose chase in Argentina. It would be unfortunate if Lammelle came to be known as a Wild-Goose Chaser in the mold of Ambassador Montvale, but that’s the way the ball just might bounce. If that should happen, of course, it would tend to eliminate Frank as a replacement for me when Clendennen gives Montvale the boot and I become the DNI. I would recommend you to replace me if it were not for your unfortunate tendency to mock my interest in Casey’s electronic toys.”

  “I can reform, Jack.”

  “You had fucking well better, Stan.”

  [TWO]

  Office of the Commanding General

  United States Army Central Command

  MacDill Air Force Base

&n
bsp; Tampa, Florida

  1605 10 February 2007

  “Vic needs a minute, General,” Command Sergeant Major Wes Suggins said from McNab’s door.

  Naylor did not like the rapport that had developed almost immediately between his sergeant major and D’Allessando, but he both understood it—Sergeants major are in fact the backbone of the Army and that’s especially true with men like these two, who function at the highest levels of the service—and he knew that he couldn’t warn Suggins against D’Allessando, who was in fact at this moment not a trusted member of the team but the enemy.

  He motioned for Suggins to admit D’Allessando, and called, “Come on in, Vic.”

  “Afternoon, General,” D’Allessando said. “Call for you.”

  He handed Naylor what looked like a BlackBerry but was in fact a CaseyBerry.

  Naylor took it.

  “General Naylor.”

  “General McNab, General. And how are things on beautiful Tampa Bay this afternoon?”

  The sonofabitch has this thing on LOUDSPEAKER.

  And I will be damned if I will give him the satisfaction of knowing I don’t know how to turn it off.

  “I’ve been wondering when we were going to hear from you, General,” Naylor said.

  “I can understand that, General.”

  “I’m a little surprised you didn’t call on a secure line.”

  “This is about as secure a line as you can get, actually.”

  “Have you found what you’re looking for?”

  “I’m always looking for peace, love, and affluence, but I suspect you’re asking, ‘Did you find Charley?’”

  D’Allessando chuckled.

  Don’t let either of these bastards make you lose your temper!

  “And did you?”

  “I managed to have a chat with him.”

  “And? Where is he?”

  “He didn’t say. But he’s agreeable to talk with you, if you like, as an old friend.”

  “Right now, General, we’re not old friends, but a general officer and a lieutenant colonel.”

  “Oh, I guess I misspoke. Or at least should have made this clear. I spoke with a German national by the name of Karl Wilhelm von und zu Gossinger. During the course of our conversation, he said he was surprised that I didn’t know that Lieutenant Colonel Castillo, Retired, having been ordered by the President of the United States to disappear and never be heard from again, was in compliance with his orders.”