By Order of the President

by W. E. B Griffin

  He tried out his Portuguese on the assistant manager behind the registration desk, but the French hotelier insisted on responding in barely understandable German.

  In which he said welcome to Le Presidente and that he would have to keep Castillo’s passport.

  Hotels did that either to make sure they got paid—not a valid excuse here because his bills were to be paid directly by the Tages Zeitung—or so the police could have a look at it.

  The “small suite” was a sitting room, a bedroom, and an alcove with a desk and chair that wasn’t large enough to be called a room. A high-speed Internet cable was neatly coiled on the desk.

  The windows of both the sitting room and the bedroom looked out and fifteen stories down onto the bay. There was a basket of fruit and a bottle of wine on the coffee table and a terry cloth robe had been laid across the double bed.

  Castillo wondered if the room was bugged, but that was an automatic thought. As he always assumed any gun he picked up was loaded, he always assumed hotel rooms were bugged. He knew a lot of people who really should have known better who had fired “unloaded” guns and others who had wrongly presumed “There’s no way this place could be bugged.”

  He took his laptop from its briefcase and plugged the charger and the ethernet cable into it. The high-speed access to the Internet was up and running. There were three e-mail messages for him on tageszeitung.wash@aol.com. One was from a company promising to return the full purchase price (less shipping) if their product failed to increase the size of his male member. After a moment’s thought, and pleased with himself, he forwarded that one to fernandolopez@ castillo.com.

  The second offered Viagra online without a prescription and the third told him now was the time to refinance his mortgage. He deleted both.

  There was only one message on his MSN account, from shake.n.bake@yahoo.com:

  UNCLE ALLAN IS WORRIED THAT YOUR CAR BROKE DOWN. SHALL WE TELL UNCLE BILL YOU’RE COMING? LOVE MOTHER

  Major Castillo took a moment to consider his reply to the secretary of Homeland Security and then quickly typed it.

  UNCLE ALLAN IS A WORRIER. CAR RUNNING FINE.

  I’LL CALL UNCLE BILL IF I HAVE TIME TO GO THERE.

  LOVE CHARLEY

  He read the screen to make sure there were no typos and then pushed ENTER.

  Going to the American embassy here would be a waste of time, and it would almost certainly draw attention to him.

  Furthermore, he had already read, in Washington, the intel summaries. What the military attaché had sent to the Defense Intelligence Agency, what the CIA station chief had sent to Langley, and what the ambassador had sent to the State Department. If there had been significant developments on what happened to the missing 727 while he was on his way to Angola, the secretary would either have indicated that in the e-mail, or, at the least, ordered him to call home.

  His job here wasn’t to find the airplane but rather, as the president had put it, to find out who knew what and when they knew it.

  The German embassy was another matter. Not only would a German journalist be expected to check in with the embassy but Otto had sent them a message saying he was coming. More important, they might know something, or have an opinion, that they almost certainly would not have shared with the Americans.

  Castillo unpacked, then had a shower and a shave. He drew the blinds against the early morning sun, lay down on the bed, and went to sleep.

  He intended to sleep until nine or thereabouts. When he woke, it was 9:05. He dressed, brushed his teeth, and then went down to the lobby, had a cup of coffee and a croissant in the lobby lounge, and then went out and got in a taxi.

  The doorman who put him into the cab asked in Portuguese where he wanted to go and Castillo told him, in what he hoped sounded like Portuguese. The doorman seemed to understand him.

  [SEVEN]

  The Chief of Mission at the German embassy, whose name was Dieter Hausner, was about Castillo’s age. He was thin, nearly bald, and well dressed. His office overlooked an interior garden. It was impersonal. The only picture on the walls was of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, and the furniture was modern, crisp, and efficient. Castillo was not surprised that the chrome-and-leather chair into which Hausner waved him was awkward to get into and would be worse getting out of.

  Hausner told him the ambassador was sorry he couldn’t receive Herr von und zu Gossinger personally—the press of duty—but he hoped that while Herr von und zu Gossinger was in Angola he would have the chance to offer him dinner.

  “That would be very nice,” Castillo said.

  “You know, although I now consider myself a Berliner, I’m from Hesse myself,” Hausner said. “Wetzlar.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “And I’m an Alte Marburger.”

  The reference was to Phillip’s University in Marburg an der Lahn, not far from either Fulda or Wetzlar. Castillo had told people he was a Marburger. He knew enough about the school to get away with it, including the fact that the university usually turned a deaf ear to inquiries about its alumni unless they came from another university. Obviously, he couldn’t do that here, and get in a game of “did you know” with Hausner.

  “My uncle Wilhelm—Willi—was a Marburger,” Castillo said.

  “But not you? Where did you go to university?”

  I am being interrogated. Why? Because the ambassador wanted to check me out before he fed me dinner? Or is Dieter here really the agency spook? Or the spook or counter-spook in addition to his other duties?

  So far as I know, I have never done anything to arouse the curiosity of German intelligence, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have a dossier on Karl Wilhelm von und zu Gossinger.

  Would Hausner routinely have run a security check on me when he got Otto’s heads-up that I was coming? Or would he presume that if the Tages Zeitung sent me, I was who they said I was? Or will he—if I arouse his curiosity—ask for a security check the minute I walk out of here?

  “I went right from Saint Johan’s in Fulda to Georgetown, in Washington,” Castillo said. “My grandfather was a believer in the total immersion system of learning a foreign language.”

  “And did it work?”

  “I speak fluent American,” Castillo said. “And passable English.”

  Hausner laughed.

  “And you’re now based in Washington?”

  “It was either that or Fulda,” Castillo said.

  “I understand. Fulda offers about as much of the good life as Wetzlar.”

  “When I was a kid, I went to the school at the Leitz plant,” Castillo said. Leica cameras came from the Leitz factory in Wetzlar. “I used to drink in a gasthaus by the bridge.”

  “Zum Adler,” Hausner furnished. “So did I. So what brings you to Luanda?”

  “The missing airplane . . .”

  “Uh-huh,” Hausner said.

  “And the man who would ordinarily cover the story was unable to come. And I speak a little Spanish, which is a little like Portuguese.”

  “I understand.”

  “What do you think happened to that airplane?”

  “How much do you know about it?”

  “Only what I read in the newspapers. An airplane, a Boeing 727, which had been here for a year, suddenly took off without permission and hasn’t been seen since.”

  “That’s about all I know,” Hausner said.

  “Why was it here for a year? How do you hide an airplane that size? Was it stolen? What do you do with a stolen airplane? ”

  "You could fly it into a skyscraper in New York,” Hausner said. “But I don’t think that’s what the thief—thieves—had in mind.”

  "Really?”

  “It would be so much easier to steal—what’s the term?— skyjack an airplane in the United States—or, for that matter, in London, if they wanted to fly into Buckingham Palace— than it would be to fly an airplane from here to wherever they wanted to cause mischief.”

  “That’s true,” Castillo agreed.


  It probably is true, but for some reason I remain unconvinced.

  “I have a theory—but, please, Herr von und zu Gossinger, I really don’t want to be quoted.”

  “Not even as a ‘high-ranking officer, speaking on condition of anonymity’?”

  “Not at all.”

  He liked “high-ranking officer.”

  “All right, you have my word.”

  “Let me put it this way,” Hausner said. “I wouldn’t be at all surprised if in two or three weeks—or this afternoon— the airplane will be found not more than a couple of hundred miles from here, perhaps even closer, on a deserted field. The empty hulk of the airplane; everything that can be taken off of it—engines, instruments, even the wheels and tires— will have been taken off.”

  “For resale on the black market?”

  “Uh-huh. There’s a market all over Africa for aircraft parts.”

  “That would open the possibility that the owners of the aircraft—you don’t know why it sat here for a year?”

  “It may have needed parts. Do you know who owned it?”

  “A small airplane dealer in Philadelphia,” Castillo said, “that probably had it insured and will now place a claim. That may be enough in itself, but if they were involved in having the plane stolen and can sell the parts . . .”

  “Precisely,” Hausner said.

  “I’d like to see where the airplane was parked all that time,” Castillo said after a moment. “Is that going to be dif ficult?”

  “There’s not much to see,” Hausner said. “A concrete pad in a far corner of the airfield. I’ve been there. But, no, it won’t be a problem. I know the security man at the airfield. I’ll give him a call and tell him you’re coming.”

  Hausner opened his desk drawer and took two business cards from a box. He wrote a name on one of them and then handed both to Castillo.

  “A small gift for his favorite charity might be a good idea,” Hausner said, smiling.

  “I think I’ll go out there now,” Castillo said. “Before it gets hot.”

  “I’ll send you out there in one of our cars,” Hausner said. “And then you can take a taxi to your hotel when you’ve finished. ”

  “That’s very kind of you,” Castillo said.

  “Not at all,” Hausner said. He stood up and offered his hand.

  [EIGHT]

  Hausner was right. There was nothing much to see at the airport, although the “little gift” Castillo gave to the airport security manager for his favorite charity resulted in having that dignitary drive him to the remote parking area in his Citroën pickup truck.

  There were four parking pads near the north threshold of the main runway. None were in use. The one the security manager pointed out as where the 727 had been parked was identical to the others—an oil-stained square concrete pad with grass growing through its cracks.

  Controllers in the tower across the field would have seen the 727 every time they looked in the direction of the runway ’s northern threshold.

  Taking off without permission would have been simple. All the pilot would have had to do—and almost certainly did do—was call ground control for permission to taxi to the hangar/terminal area. When that permission was granted, all the pilot had had to do was make a right turn off the taxiway onto the threshold, and then another right onto the runway and go. He would have been airborne before any but the most alert controller would have noticed he wasn’t on the taxiway.

  Castillo ran the numbers in his mind:

  If the pilot kept the 727 close to the ground, he would have been out of sight in no more than a minute or two and disappeared from radar in not much more time. If he was making three hundred knots—and he almost certainly would have been going at least that fast—that was five miles a minute. In twenty minutes, he would have been a hundred miles from the airport. In half an hour, he would have been 150 miles from the airfield, and even if he had climbed out by then in the interest of fuel economy he would have just been an unidentifiable blip on the airfield’s radar screen. He certainly would not have activated his transponder.

  In the taxi—this one a Peugeot—to El Presidente Hotel, Castillo decided that he was not going to learn much more in Luanda than he already knew. The CIA and DIA and State Department intel filings would have the details of who was suspected of flying the plane off, who serviced the plane so that it would be flyable after sitting there for so long, and so on. There was no sense wasting time duplicating their efforts himself now. When he’d assembled and collated everybody ’s filings, he would know which of the agencies had made the same sort of decision to let another agency develop something they should have developed themselves. This is one of the things the president had said he wanted to know.

  The airplane was bound to show up. When that happened, he would probably be able to determine who had done the best job of finding out what had happened, and, more important, who had not learned something that should have been learned. Plus, of course, who had made the best guess about what was going to happen.

  The president had made it clear he wanted to know who had known what and when. And who had done or not done something others had done.

  Castillo decided that what he would do was go to his room and write a story for the Tages Zeitung. He would e-mail it both to Germany and to Hall. The secretary would understand from the Tages Zeitung filing that he hadn’t learned anything that hadn’t already been reported.

  Afterward, he would spend the afternoon hanging around the hotel bar. Striking up conversations with strangers often produced an amazing amount of information. If something new—or even the suggestion of something new—came up, he would run it down. If not, he’d go back to Germany, and from Germany home. Until the plane showed up, there was really nothing else he could do, and the plane might not show up for weeks. Unless, of course, he thought wryly, he went back to Washington, where the 727 would show up when he was halfway across the Atlantic.

  And, as a corollary of this reasoning, Castillo decided he would stay away from Miss Patricia Wilson. For one thing, she wasn’t what she announced herself to be and that made a dalliance with her, if not actually dangerous, then an awkward situation very likely to explode in his face. For another, he had the feeling she was not the sort of female who could be lured into his bed in the little time he planned to be in Luanda.

  [NINE]

  There was no blinking green light in the locking mechanism of Castillo’s hotel room door when he slid the plastic “key” into it.

  He tried reinserting it in all possible ways, simultaneously working the lever-type doorknob. He had just inserted it, as he thought of it, wrong side out and upside down, when the door was opened from the inside.

  As a reflex action, he jumped away and flattened his back against the corridor wall.

  There was no explosion, either per se, or of persons bursting into the corridor with weapons ready.

  Instead, a chubby, smiling, very black face looked around the doorjamb into the corridor. He recognized it immediately. It belonged to Major H. Richard Miller, Jr., Aviation, U.S. Army, a USMA classmate of Castillo’s. The major was wearing a not-very-well-fitting, single-breasted black suit, a frayed-collar white shirt, and a somewhat ragged black tie.

  He looks like those drivers at the airport, Castillo thought. And that’s probably on purpose.

  What the hell is he doing here?

  “We’re going to have to stop meeting this way, Charley,” Miller said, softly. “People will start to talk.”

  “You sonofabitch!” Castillo said. “You scared hell out of me!”

  He quickly entered his room and closed the door.

  The two men looked at each other for a moment.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” Castillo asked.

  “That’s what I was about to ask you,” Miller, who was fifty pounds heavier and four inches taller than Castillo, replied. “Plus, who the hell are you?”

  “Oh, shit,” Castillo said, and the
n the two embraced, in the manner of brothers. They had last seen one another, in less than pleasant circumstances, eighteen months before, in Afghanistan.

  “Sorry about the door,” Miller said when they broke apart.

  “What the hell did you do to it?”

  Miller took an unmarked black aluminum box, about the size of a cellular telephone, from his pocket.

  “I give this thing ten seconds to find what it’s looking for and then I hit the EMERGENCY button. That opens the lock, but sometimes it upgefucks the mechanism. Which, apparently, my dear Major Whatever-the-Hell-Your-Name-Is-Today, is what happened in the present instance.”

  Castillo shook his head.

  “I suppose the lock on the minibar is similarly destroyed? ”

  “No. That’s a mechanical lock. I opened that with a pick. All the wine is French, which of course as a patriotic American I don’t drink. But there is—or was—Jack Daniel’s and several kinds of scotch.”

  “How long have you been here?” Castillo asked as he opened the minibar.

  “About an hour. Which gave me plenty of time to sweep the room. It’s clean.”

  Castillo nodded, then held up two miniature whiskey bottles, one scotch and one Jack Daniel’s. Miller pointed to the bourbon and Castillo tossed it to him.

  He opened the scotch and poured it into a glass as Miller did the same with his still-half-full glass.

  Castillo walked to him and they touched glasses.

  “It’s good to see you, Dick,” Castillo said.

  “Yeah, you, too, Charley,” Miller said. “I never got a chance to say, ‘Thanks for the ride.’ ”

  Castillo made a deprecating gesture.

  “You were pretty much out of it, Dick,” he said.

  “Now I know why the Mafia shoots bad mob guys in the knee,” Miller said. “It smarts considerable.”

  “How is it?”

  “That depends on who you ask,” Miller said. “So far as I’m concerned, it’s fine. I have so far been unable to convince even one flight surgeon of that. But hope springs eternal, or so I’m told.”