“In that case, Uncle Allan, I’m damned glad to see you, even in these circumstances.”
“Me, too, Charley,” Naylor said, and after an awkward fifteen seconds, they embraced.
“Lunch is being prepared,” Sweaty said. “The beef, compared to Argentina, is unbelievably bad.”
“Do we have to do anything for Lammelle, Vic?” Castillo asked.
“Castration with a dull knife might be a good idea, but if you’re asking because of the dart, no.” He looked at his watch. “He should be coming out of it in the next ten minutes or so. I’d love to be there when he wakes up and finds those two Russians sitting on him. He’ll think he’s been shipped off to Moscow. What are they, Charley? Spetsnaz?”
“Ex.”
“Where’d you get them?”
“We borrowed them from Sweaty’s and Dmitri’s cousin. He flew a dozen up yesterday from Argentina after Sweaty had another good idea.”
“Which was?”
“I’ll tell you when we’re upstairs,” Castillo said, and gestured toward the elevator. Then he added, “Thank God you can’t trust lawyers—maybe especially Mexican lawyers. Isn’t there a politically incorrect joke about that?”
“Meaning what?”
“Cutting a long story short, this place was supposed to have been burned to the ground after they exploded all the butane. But the Mexican lawyer who was supposed to do that—was trusted to do that—didn’t.”
“Aleksandr will kill him,” Sweaty said.
“Pay attention, Allan,” Castillo said. “That was not a figure of speech.”
General Naylor thought: And that comment was not Charley being cute.
[SEVEN]
Castillo led the group into a dining room and waved them into chairs around an enormous table. Naylor saw there was already one man sitting at the table—I wonder who that guy is?—and two burly, fair-skinned men armed with Uzi submachine guns, one sitting by each of the room’s two doors.
And I don’t think Charley’s pulling our leg about the Spetsnaz, either.
They look like Russians and they look like special operators.
Proof of that came immediately when Sweaty said something to them in Russian, to which one of them responded as an enlisted man does to an officer.
Castillo added something—gave an order—in Russian and the other Russian popped to attention and said something that was obviously, “Yes, sir.”
Both of them left the dining room.
“Sweaty ordered one of them to get us some coffee,” Castillo explained, “and I told the other one to fetch Mr. Danton.”
“May I ask questions?” General Naylor said.
“Yes, sir. Of course,” Castillo replied.
“Danton is the reporter?”
“Yes, sir. That was Sweaty’s idea. I’ll get into that in a minute.”
“And General McNab? Has he also given you his parole?”
“Charley never asked me for it, General,” McNab answered for him.
Thirty seconds later, one of the Russians led Roscoe J. Danton into the room.
“Please have a seat, Mr. Danton,” Castillo said. “I presume you know everybody?”
“I don’t know who these gentlemen are,” Danton said, indicating Colonel Brewer, Allan Junior, Vic D’Allessando, and Aloysius Francis Casey.
“My name is Casey,” Aloysius said.
“Colonel Brewer is my senior aide-de-camp,” General Naylor said. “And that’s my son, Lieutenant Colonel (Designate) Allan Naylor, Junior.”
“I try very hard to keep my name out of the newspapers, Mr. Danton,” D’Allessando said. “Think of me as a friend of Charley’s. You can call me Vic.”
“And was that Frank Lammelle they just carried into my cell?”
“Yes, it was,” Castillo said. “And I’m crushed that you think of that lovely room with an en suite bath and such a lovely view as a cell.”
“If there’s a guy with a submachine gun at the door keeping you inside,” Danton said, “that’s a cell.”
“Point taken,” Castillo said. “I think I should begin this by telling you, Mr. Danton, that General Naylor, Colonel Brewer, and Lieutenant Colonel (Designate) Naylor are not here voluntarily. They have given me their parole.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“It means that under the Code of Honor, they will—”
“What ‘Code of Honor’?” Danton interrupted.
“I don’t really know. I think of it as the Code of Honor,” Castillo said, and looked at General Naylor. “Is there a more formal name, sir?”
“I don’t really know,” Naylor said. “What it means, Mr. Danton, is that I—personally and on behalf of my staff—have given Colonel Castillo our parole, which means that we will neither attempt escape nor undertake any hostile action without first notifying him that we have withdrawn our parole.”
“You’re serious, aren’t you?” Danton asked, and when Naylor nodded, said, “You take that Code of Honor business seriously? Incredible!”
“I don’t think that’s the only thing you’re going to hear, or see, in the next couple of days that you may find incredible,” Castillo said.
Two Russians appeared with a huge thermos of coffee and a tray with cups, cream, and sugar.
Castillo waited until the fuss caused by that dissipated and then rapped his spoon against the thermos. Everybody looked at him.
“Here we go,” he said. “While I am a graduate of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff School—where one learns how to write a staff study—I have to confess that when it was time for me to actually go to Fort Leavenworth, either they really couldn’t find room for me, or an unnamed senior officer decided I could make a greater contribution to the Army by running his errands. So he pulled some strings, the result of which was that I took the course by correspondence—in addition to my other duties—rather than in the academic setting of Leavenworth.”
General Naylor realized he was smiling, and when he looked, he saw General McNab—the unnamed senior officer—was, too.
“The result of that was I cannot come up with as good a staff study as most people can. But as General McNab has told me so many times over the years, you gotta go with what you got.
“Statement of the Problem: The Russians and the Iranians, probably with a lot of help from former East Germans and maybe the Czechs and even the Japanese, none of whom find anything wrong with using biological weapons on soldiers and civilians, came up with a substance we now call Congo-X, because it was manufactured in a laboratory in the Congo.
“Our own expert in this area, Colonel J. Porter Hamilton, cutting to the chase, describes Congo-X as ‘an abomination before God.’
“Surprising me not a hell of a lot, Congo-X slipped through the cracks at Langley. It was the stated opinion of the CIA that what was going on in the Congo was a fish farm.
“We learned what was really going on there through dumb luck—”
“Colonel,” Roscoe J. Danton interrupted, “if I take notes, will I be wasting my time?”
“I think taking notes is a good idea.”
“I’ll need my laptop.”
Castillo said something in Russian, and then, “Your laptop’s on the way. Now, where was I?”
“Something about dumb luck,” Danton said.
“Oh, yeah. What I should have said was ‘stupidity and incompetence.’ I’ve got to go off at a tangent here. I’m sure that everybody here will be surprised when I tell you that there are some Russians who have moral qualms about biological warfare because of their deep religious convictions. And even more surprised that some of these good Russians get to rise high in the ranks of the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki, which in English is the Service for the Protection of the Constitutional System.
“And I’m sure that you will be shocked to hear that the SVR is just as bad as our beloved CIA when it comes to bureaucratic infighting and empire-building. The head villain here is Vladimir Putin, who—despite what title
he’s running under—actually runs the SVR, which among other things ran the ‘Fish Farm’ in the Congo.
“In an attempt to restore the SVR to the sort of glory their predecessor secret police organization had before the Soviet Union imploded, Putin decided that a number of people—Russians, Germans, Austrians, Argentines, and Americans, the latter including your lecturer here today—had to be whacked or eliminated.
“He succeeded in whacking the German, a journalist who was asking too many questions about German involvement in supplying the Fish Farm, and the Austrians, who had been deep-cover CIA assets successfully engaged over the years in getting Russians and other Eastern Bloc people to switch sides.
“The attempted assassination of the Argentine failed, but Putin still had high hopes of taking me out when I went to the German’s funeral. The murdered German worked for the Tages Zeitung newspaper chain, which, as most of you know, I own—”
“You own the Tages Zeitung chain?” Danton asked incredulously.
Castillo nodded. “Incredible, right? Stick around. It gets better. Anyway, they knew I would go to the funeral. So Putin sent a team of assassins—former members of the Hungarian Államvédelmi Hatóság—to Germany, with orders to report to Colonel Berezovsky, the SVR rezident in Berlin. Berezovsky would tell them when and where to whack me when I showed up at the funeral.”
Danton pointed to Berezovsky and asked with his eyebrows: Him?
Castillo nodded.
“It was to be Colonel Berezovsky’s final assignment. When he was finished whacking me and went—with his sister, Lieutenant Colonel Svetlana Alekseeva, the SVR rezident in Copenhagen—to an SVR meeting in Vienna, they were going to be charged with embezzlement and flown off to Moscow. Berezovsky was a threat to Putin’s control of the SVR, and had to go. And so did his sister.
“The mistake Putin made—the stupidity he demonstrated—was to underestimate Colonel Berezovsky. Berezovsky knew all about Putin’s plans for him and Sweaty—”
Danton pointed at Svetlana and asked, “‘Sweaty’?”
“Only to her friends,” Castillo said. “Anyway, Berezovsky had gotten in touch with the CIA station chief in Vienna, Miss Eleanor Dillworth, and told her he and his sister were willing to defect.
“Miss Dillworth lost no time in telling Jack Powell, and Jack Powell lost no time in telling our late President of the genius of his Vienna station chief, implying that Miss Dillworth had brilliantly entrapped Dmitri and Sweaty when, in fact, they had walked in her door.
“Colonel Berezovsky was not very impressed with Miss Dillworth. He was in fact very nervous about what was going to happen in Vienna. He thought she was entirely capable of throwing him and Sweaty under the bus if anything—any little thing—went wrong.
“And then Dmitri saw in the Frankfurter Rundschau a picture of me getting off my Gulfstream on the way to the funeral. He knew that Karl Wilhelm von und zu Gossinger was also a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army with alleged intelligence and Special Operations connections. And who had his own airplane.
“Brilliant fellow that my future brother-in-law is, he reasoned—”
“Did you say ‘future brother-in-law’?” Danton asked incredulously.
General Naylor thought: That’s exactly what he said. My God!
“I thought everybody knew,” Castillo said. “Love is where you find it, Mr. Danton.”
“Jesus Christ!”
“My fiancée is offended when someone takes the Lord’s name in vain, Mr. Danton.”
“Sorry.”
“As I was saying . . . Dmitri, clever fellow that he is, reasoned that if he called off the Államvédelmi Hatóság and I was not whacked, maybe I would show my gratitude to him by flying him and Sweaty out of Europe. Which is what happened.”
“Is it?” General Naylor asked. “Is that what actually happened, Charley?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I never understood why you would steal the defectors from the CIA,” Naylor admitted.
“I didn’t know about Miss Dillworth until later, General. What Dmitri told me at the time was that the SVR was going to be waiting for him and Svetlana in the Sudbahnhof in Vienna.”
“So you flew them to Argentina? Why Argentina?”
“They have family there, sir,” Castillo said.
“Well, why didn’t you turn them over to the CIA in Argentina?” Naylor asked.
“Well, just about as soon as we got to Vienna, sir, Dmitri, as an expression of his gratitude, told me about the Fish Farm in the Congo. When Ambassador Montvale came down there, I tried to tell him about the Fish Farm, but he gave me the CIA answer: It was nothing but a fish farm.”
“You still should have turned these people over to the CIA.”
“Two reasons I didn’t, sir. The first being that I believed Dmitri about the Fish Farm, and knew that if I turned them over to the CIA, they would not believe him, and that would be the end of it. I knew I had to follow that path.”
“And the second reason?”
Castillo exhaled audibly.
“Maybe I . . . no . . . certainly I should have given this as my first reason, sir: By the time Montvale showed up in Buenos Aires, certain things had happened between Svetlana and me. I knew there was no way I was ever going to turn her or her brother over to the CIA, the Argentine SIDE, the Rotary Club of East Orange, New Jersey, or anyone else.”
Naylor shook his head, but said nothing.
“In the end,” Castillo went on, “that turned out, for several reasons, to be the right decision. I decided that my duty required I take action on my own. And that turned out to be the right decision, too. And is why I decided to take action on my own in that situation.”
“What action was that, Colonel?” Danton asked.
“The question obviously was: ‘What’s really going on in the Congo?’ There was only one way to find out. I arranged to send people in there to find out.”
“On your own authority,” General Naylor said. “You had no right to do that, and you knew it.”
“I saw it as my duty to do just that,” Castillo said.
“What exactly did you do?” Danton asked.
“I sent Colonel J. Porter Hamilton, the man who runs our bio-warfare laboratory at Fort Detrick, to the Congo with a team of special operators. He found out it was even worse than we suspected, told—more importantly, convinced—our late President of this, and the President ordered it destroyed.”
“And what happened to you for doing what you did without authorization?”
“Well, for a couple of minutes the President wanted to make me director of National Intelligence ... I’m kidding. What the President did was tell me to take everybody in OOA to the end of the earth, fall off, and never be seen again. And I’ve tried—we’ve all tried—to do just that.”
“And?” Danton pursued.
“The curtain went up on Act Two. Two barrels of Congo-X appeared, one FedExed from Miami to Colonel Hamilton at Fort Detrick, the second left for the Border Patrol to find on the Texas-Mexico border.”
“Where did it come from?”
“Almost certainly from the Congo. We know that a Russian Special Operations airplane—a Tupolev Tu-934A—landed at El Obeid Airport, in North Kurdufan, Sudan—which is within driving range of the Fish Farm—and took off shortly afterward, leaving seventeen bodies behind.
“We suspect it flew first to Cuba for refueling, and then it flew here, where two barrels of Congo-X were given to the Mexico City rezident of the SVR, who then drove off with them, presumably to get them across the border into the United States.”
“How do you know that?” General Naylor challenged.
“We have it all on surveillance tape, sir. I’ll show the tapes to you, if you’d like. There’s a very clear picture of General Yakov Sirinov, who is apparently in charge of the operation. The Tupolev Tu-934A then left here, and is presently on the ground at La Orchila airfield. That’s on an island off the coast of Venezuela.”
“How could you possibly know that?” General Naylor demanded.
“I’d show you the satellite imagery, sir, but if I did, you’d know where I got them.”
“I don’t think I’d have to look very far, would I, General McNab?” Naylor asked unpleasantly.
Castillo said, “You have my word that I did not get them from General McNab. And, sir, with respect, your parole does not give you the right to question me, or anyone else. Please keep that in mind.”
He let that sink in, and then went on: “Now, for Facts Bearing on the Problem, Scene Two. The Russian rezident in Washington, Sergei Murov, had Frank Lammelle—speaking of whom, Vic: Should we have someone take a look at him?”
“He has two of your Spetsnaz watching him, Charley. I think they’ll be able to tell if the SOB croaks.”
Castillo nodded, then went on: “The Russians had Lammelle over to their dacha on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, where Murov, the rezident, admitted they sent the Congo-X to Colonel Hamilton, and then offered to turn over all Congo-X in their control and give us their assurance that no more will ever turn up. All they want in return is Dmitri, Sweaty, and me.
“The President thinks the price is fair. He sent General Naylor to arrest me, and Frank Lammelle to arrest Sweaty and Dmitri. . . .”
“Is that true, General Naylor?” Danton asked.
“Any conversations I may or may not have had with the President, Mr. Danton,” Naylor said, “are both privileged and classified.”
“It’s true,” General McNab said.
“How do you know?” Danton asked.
“Because that’s what General Naylor told me,” McNab said. “Under the Code of Honor, people—especially general officers—don’t tell fibs to each other. They may try to make human sacrifices of fellow officers, but telling fibs is a no-no. Telling a fib will get you kicked right off that Long Gray Line.”
“Colonel Brewer, please be prepared to report that exchange in detail,” Naylor said.
“Jesus Christ, Allan!” McNab said. Then, “Sorry, Sweaty, that just slipped out.”
“The question is moot,” Castillo said. “Colonel Berezovsky and Lieutenant Colonel Alekseeva are not going to be involuntarily repatriated. And I ain’t goin’ nowhere I don’t want to go, neither.”
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