The Hostage

by Griffin, W. E. B.

  “My curiosity is in high gear,” the President said.

  “Mine, too, Mr. President. It sounds wacko, frankly. If you’d like, I can call you whenever I hear something else.”

  “Do that, Ted, please.”

  “Yes, sir. Will that be all, Mr. President?”

  “Unless you’d like another cup of coffee.”

  “I’ll pass, thank you just the same, Mr. President.”

  “Thanks, Ted,” the President said.

  The President watched as the DDCI left the room, and then—almost visibly making a decision as he did so—topped off his coffee cup.

  “What the hell, why not?” he asked aloud, and picked up the telephone.

  “Will you get me the secretary of state, please?”

  “Good morning, Mr. President,” Dr. Natalie Cohen answered her phone.

  “Natalie, you want to give me your take on that diplomat’s wife who got kidnapped in Argentina?”

  “That made the DIS, did it?”

  “Uh-huh. What’s going on?”

  “I talked to the ambassador late last night, Mr. President. He—I guess I should say ‘they’—don’t know very much. He said kidnapping down there is a cottage industry, and he hopes that’s all it is. I told him to call me with any developments, but so far he hasn’t.”

  “At the risk of sounding insensitive, I could understand some lunatic trying to assassinate the ambassador, or this woman’s husband, but . . .”

  “The ambassador said just about the same thing, Mr. President. He can’t understand it, either.”

  “Ted Sawyer said the CIA guy down there called this morning and said the embassy in Uruguay had sent a couple of FBI agents from the embassy there. How come we don’t have FBI agents in Buenos Aires? That embassy is bigger than the one in Uruguay, right?”

  “The money laundering takes place in Uruguay; that’s where they need the FBI.”

  “He also said the Argentines had really mobilized their police.”

  “The ambassador told me that, too. It’s embarrassing for them, Mr. President.”

  “I had an unpleasant thought just before I called you. We don’t pay ransom, do we?”

  “No, sir, we don’t. That’s a Presidential Order. Goes back to Nixon, I think.”

  “So the best we can hope for—presuming that this is just a kidnapping, and not a political slash terrorist act— is that once these people realize they’ve kidnapped a diplomat’s wife and the heat is really going to be on, that they’ll let her go?”

  “That’s one possibility, Mr. President, that they’ll let her go.”

  He took her meaning.

  “Jesus Christ, Natalie, you think they’d . . .”

  “I’m afraid that’s also a possibility, Mr. President,” she said.

  “What odds are you giving?”

  “Fifty-fifty. That’s for their turning her loose unharmed. I would give seventy-thirty that the cops will catch them.”

  “I told Sawyer I want to be in the loop. Will you keep me advised?”

  “Yes, sir. Of course.”

  “Among other things we don’t need is terrorists deciding that kidnapping our diplomats’ wives is a good— and probably easy—thing to be doing.”

  “That thought ran through my head, too, Mr. President. But I don’t think we can do anything beyond waiting to see what happens. I just don’t see what else anyone can do right now.”

  “Keep me in the loop, please, Natalie. Thank you.”

  “Yes, sir, I will.”

  The President broke the connection with his finger.

  “I just thought what else I can do,” he said aloud, and took his finger off the telephone switch.

  “Get me the secretary of Homeland Security,” he said into the receiver to a White House operator.

  II

  [ONE]

  Office of the Secretary Department of Homeland Security Nebraska Avenue Complex Washington, D.C. 0840 21 July 2005

  In the federal government, the secretary is not that person who answers the telephone, takes dictation, makes appointments, and brings the boss coffee. In Washington, the secretary is someone as high in the bureaucracy as one can rise without being elected President, and is therefore the boss.

  In Washington, therefore, those individuals who answer the secretary’s telephone, bring the coffee, make appointments, et cetera, have titles like “executive assistant.”

  The Honorable Matthew Hall, secretary of Homeland Security, had three executive assistants.

  The first of these was Mrs. Mary-Ellen Kensington, who was fifty, gray-haired, and slim. She was a GS-15, the highest grade in the career Civil Service. She maintained Hall’s small and unpretentious suite of offices in the Old Executive Office Building, near the White House. Secretary Hall and the President were close friends, which meant that the President liked to have him around more than he did some other members of his cabinet. When Hall was in Washington he could usually be found in his OEOB office, so that he was readily available to the President.

  The second was Mrs. Agnes Forbison, who was forty-nine, gray-haired, and getting just a little chubby. She was also a GS-15. She reigned over the secretary’s office staff in his formal office, a suite of well-furnished rooms in the Nebraska Avenue Complex, which is just off Ward Circle in the northwest of the District of Columbia. The complex had once belonged to the Navy, but it had been turned over in 2004 by an act of Congress to the Department of Homeland Security when that agency had been formed after 9/11.

  When the red telephone on the coffee table in the secretary’s private office in the complex buzzed, and a red light on it flashed—signaling an incoming call from either the President himself, but more than likely from one of the other members of the President’s cabinet; or the directors of either the FBI or the CIA; or the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; or the commander-in-chief of Central Command—Mrs. Forbison was in the process of pouring a cup of coffee for the secretary’s third executive assistant, C. G. Castillo.

  Castillo, who was thirty-six, a shade over six feet tall, and weighed 190 pounds, was lying on the secretary’s not-quite-long-enough-for-him red leather couch with his stockinged feet hanging over the end of it.

  Castillo looked at the red telephone, saw that Agnes was holding the coffeepot, and reached for the telephone.

  “Secretary Hall’s line. Castillo speaking.”

  “Charley,” the caller said, “I was hoping to speak to your boss.”

  Castillo sat up abruptly, spilling a stack of papers onto the floor.

  “Mr. President, the secretary’s en route from Chicago. He should be landing at Andrews in about an hour.”

  “Aha! The infallible White House switchboard apparently is not so infallible. I can’t wait to tell them. Nice to talk to you, Charley.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  The line went dead. Charley, as he put the phone back in its cradle, exchanged I wonder what that was all about? looks with Agnes.

  The phone buzzed again.

  “Secretary Hall’s line. Castillo speaking.”

  “What I was going to ask your boss, Charley, is if there is some good reason you can’t go to Buenos Aires right now.”

  Buenos Aires? What the hell is going on in Argentina?

  “Sir, I’m sure the secretary would tell you that I’m at your disposal.”

  “Well, I’ll ask him anyway. But you might want to start packing. I’ve just been told the wife of our deputy chief of mission was kidnapped early last night. I want to know how and why that happened, and I want to know now, and I don’t want to wait until whoever’s in charge down there has time to write a cover-his-ass report. Getting the picture?”

  “Yes, Mr. President.”

  After a moment, Charley realized the President had hung up.

  Agnes waited for a report.

  “He wants me to go to Buenos Aires,” Charley replied, obviously thinking that over. “It seems somebody kidnapped the deputy chief of missi
on’s wife. He wants me to find out about it. He’s apparently laboring under the misconception that I’m some kind of a detective.”

  “You’re not bad at finding missing airplanes, Sherlock.”

  “Jesus, Agnes, that’s a big embassy. They probably have ten FBI agents, plus CIA spooks, plus Drug Enforcement guys . . . not to mention the State Department’s own security people.”

  “But the President doesn’t know any of them, Charley. And he knows you. Trusts you,” Agnes said, and then added, “But to buttress your argument, there’s also a heavy hitter Secret Service guy in Buenos Aires. Name of Tony Santini. He’s an old pal of Joel’s. The reason I know is that once a month or so he sends Joel twenty, twenty-five pounds of filet mignon steaks on the courier plane. They’re in a box marked TISSUE SAMPLES.”

  “Maybe I can tell the boss that, and get Joel’s pal to find out what happened. I really don’t want to go down there.”

  What I really want to do is go to Glynco, Georgia— wherever the hell that is—and see how ex-Sergeant Betty Schneider is doing in Secret Service school.

  “I understand, Mr. President,” the secretary of Homeland Security said into the red phone. “Consider Charley gone.” He laid the telephone back in the cradle and turned to Castillo.

  Matthew Hall was a large man—his Secret Service code name was “Big Boy”—with a full head of hair. While he usually presented the image of a dignified senior government officer with the means to employ a good tailor, right now he looked a little rumpled.

  His necktie was pulled down, and his collar button open. His suit needed pressing, and his beard was starting to show.

  His appearance was temporary. As soon as the Citation had landed at Andrews Air Force Base, he had come to the Nebraska Complex to check on what was going on before going home. An hour from now, he would be freshly shaven, in a crisply starched white shirt and a freshly pressed suit.

  “No go, Charley,” Hall said. “He doesn’t want it to get out that he’s taking a personal interest.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Sir, what about Tony Santini?” Joel Isaacson asked. “He could probably be helpful as hell to Charley. You want me to give him a heads-up?”

  Hall had told the President that Isaacson—a tall, slim, forty-year-old very senior Secret Service agent who was head of Hall’s security detail and had once been number two on the presidential detail—had said he had a good friend in Buenos Aires, a Secret Service agent who could probably report on the kidnapping more quickly than Castillo possibly could. The President had been unimpressed.

  “Santini?” Hall asked. “That’s your friend’s name?”

  Isaacson nodded. “He and I—and Tom—go way, way back. Tony’s down there working funny money.”

  Secret Service agent Tom McGuire, a large, red-haired Irishman, had also come from the presidential detail to protect Hall.

  “You trust him to keep his mouth shut?”

  Isaacson raised his hands in a gesture suggesting “dumb question.”

  “Sorry, Joel,” Hall said. “Okay, give him a heads-up. And find out how Charley can quietly get in touch with him.”

  “If I’m to do this quietly, sir,” Charley asked, “can I go as Gossinger?”

  Hall considered that a moment, too, before replying.

  “Your call, Charley.”

  Secretary Hall had decided about six months earlier— political correctness be damned—that he needed a male assistant, preferably unmarried. He was constantly on the move all over the country and sometimes outside it. He almost always flew on a Cessna Citation X. The airplane belonged to the Secret Service, which had been transferred from the Treasury Department to Homeland Security after 9/11.

  Hall almost always traveled with Joel Isaacson and Tom McGuire. They often left for where they were goingin the wee hours of the morning, and/or came back to Washington at the same ungodly hour.

  Both Mrs. Kensington and Mrs. Forbison were married and not thrilled with the idea of flying on half an hour’s notice to, say, Spokane, Washington, at half past five in the morning with no hint of when they’d be coming back to feed their husbands or play with their grandchildren.

  Moving down the staff structure, Hall had taken maybe a dozen female administrative types with him on thirty or more trips, women with job titles like “senior administrative assistant.” While all had been initially thrilled with the prospect of personally working for the secretary, none of them had kept at it for long.

  Primarily, the ones who weren’t married had boyfriends, and they all had grown accustomed to the federal government’s eight-to-five, Monday-to-Friday workweek, and its generous day-off recognition of holidays. Hall worked a seven-day week, with an exception for, say, Christmas.

  Moreover, having some female in the confines of the Citation X cabin posed problems. For one thing, Matt Hall believed with entertainer Ed McMahon that alcohol—especially good scotch—was God’s payment for hard work. With a female in the cabin, that meant he had to drink alone, and he didn’t like that.

  Joel Isaacson and Tom McGuire couldn’t drink with him if a senior administrative assistant—or someone of that ilk—was on the plane. Both were fully prepared to lay down their lives for the secretary, both as a professional duty and because they had come to deeply admire Hall. But as a practical matter, once the local security detail had loaded them on the Citation and they’d gotten off the ground and were on their way home, having a belt—or two—with the secretary in no way reduced—in their judgment and the secretary’s—the protection they were sworn to provide.

  But what they could not afford was Miss Whateverhername rushing home to her boyfriend’s pillow to regale him with tales of the secretary and his security detail sucking scotch all the way across the country while they exchanged politically incorrect and often ribald jokes.

  When General Allan Naylor, the Central Command commander-in-chief, had been a captain in Vietnam, Matt Hall had been one of his sergeants. They had remained friends as Naylor had risen in the Army hierarchy and Hall had become first a congressman and then governor of North Carolina and then secretary of Homeland Security.

  Their relationship was now professional as well. Central Command, de facto if not de jure, was the most important operational headquarters in the Defense Department. It controlled Special Operations, among many other things. The President had made it clear that whatever the secretary of Homeland Security wanted from Central Command he was to have, and if that violated procedure or regulations, either change the procedures or regulations, or work around them.

  Hall and Naylor talked at least once a day on a secure communications link—sometimes a half dozen times a day when world events dictated—and they met as often as that worked out.

  At a mixed business and social meeting, over drinks in the bar of the Army-Navy Club in Washington, Hall had confided in Naylor his problem traveling with females, and almost jokingly asked if Naylor happened to know of some young officer—male and unmarried—he could borrow as an assistant.

  “Aside from carrying your suitcase and answering your phone, what else would he have to do?”

  “It would help if he could type, and had decent table manners.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Seriously?” Hall asked, and Naylor nodded.

  “Handle his booze, know how to keep his mouth shut,” Hall furnished. “And since this is a wish list, maybe speak a foreign language or two. Especially Spanish.”

  “How about one who speaks Spanish like a Spaniard?”

  “You’ve got somebody?”

  Naylor nodded. “Just back from Afghanistan. He’s on the five-percent list for lieutenant colonel. They’ve been wondering where to assign him.”

  “How come you know a lowly major?”

  “I’ve known this fellow a long time. West Pointer. Green Beret. About as bright as they come.”

  “And I can have him?”

  Naylor nodded.

  “Why?”

/>   “Maybe because I like you, and maybe because I think he’d learn something working for you. If he doesn’t work out, you can send him back.”

  Major Carlos Guillermo Castillo, Special Forces, had shown up at the Nebraska Complex three days later. In uniform, which displayed an impressive row of decorations and I-Was-There ribbons, plus a Combat Infantry Badge and a set of Senior Army Aviator wings. The latter surprised Hall, as Naylor hadn’t mentioned that Castillo was a pilot.

  He was also surprised at his appearance. He didn’t look Latin. He was blue-eyed, fair-skinned, and Hall suspected his light brown hair had once been blond.

  Hall, who had a CIB of his own, liked what he saw.

  “Major, would it offend you if I called you ‘Carlos’?”

  “Not at all, sir. But I’d prefer ‘Charley,’ sir.”

  “‘Charley’ it is. And—so people don’t start asking ‘who’s that Army officer working for Hall?’—I’d like you to wear civvies. A suit, or a sports coat with a shirt and tie. Is that going to pose a problem?”

  “No, sir.”

  Hall had stopped himself just in time from saying, “Don’t go out and spend a lot of money on civvies; this may not work out.”

  Instead, he asked, “You’re going to try to get in the BOQ at Fort Myer?”

  “Sir, I’m on per diem, and I’ve spent more than my fair share of time in BOQs. I thought I’d look for a hotel, or an apartment.”

  “Up to you,” Hall had said, “but—frankly, this may not work out for either of us—I wouldn’t sign a lease on an apartment right away.”

  “Yes, sir. A hotel.”

  “If such a thing exists, try to find a reasonably priced hotel near the White House—you might try the Hotel Washington. I spend most of my time in the OEOB, which means you will, too.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Hall had risen and put out his hand.

  “Welcome aboard, Charley. You come recommended by General Naylor, and with that in mind, and from what I’ve seen, I think you’re going to fit in very well around here. Get yourself settled—take your time, do it right— and when you’re finished, come to work.”