The Hostage

by Griffin, W. E. B.

  “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

  When Hall went to his OEOB office at nine the next morning, Castillo was there, waiting for him. In a gray suit, black wingtip shoes, a crisp white button-down shirt, and a red-striped necktie, none of which, Hall knew, had come off the racks at Sears, Roebuck.

  Good, he looks like a typical bureaucrat, Hall thought, and then changed that assessment. No. Like a successful Capitol Hill lobbyist or lawyer.

  Castillo said he’d found a hotel not far from the White House and the OEOB.

  “One you can afford?” Hall asked, with a smile.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, then, if you’re ready to go to work, I’ll have Mrs. Kensington show you how we throw away the taxpayers’ money.”

  Three days later, when Hall was dictating to Mary-Ellen, Castillo appeared at the door and said he had a little problem.

  “What’s that?”

  “I need some kind of a title, sir. I got the feeling you didn’t want the military connection, so I don’t say ‘Major. ’ When somebody asks me what I do here, I’ve been saying, ‘I work in Secretary Hall’s office.’ ”

  “That makes you sound like a clerk,” Mary-Ellen said. “Nobody will pay any attention to you.”

  Hall smiled at her. He had noticed that Mary-Ellen had liked Charley from the first day.

  “Okay, Mary-Ellen, what do you suggest?”

  “Executive assistant,” Executive Assistant Kensington replied immediately. “That has a certain je ne sais quoi in the upper echelons of the Washington bureaucracy.”

  “But he’s not an executive assistant,” Hall had protested.

  “He is if you say so, boss. And who’s to know?”

  “By the power invested in me by myself,” Hall said, “you are decreed to be my executive assistant. Go forth and do good work.”

  “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir,” Castillo replied to Hall. He turned to Mary-Ellen and added, “Et merci mille fois, madame.”

  Hall had picked up on that.

  “You speak French, do you, Charley?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Any other languages?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Hall made a come-on gesture.

  Charley hesitated, and Hall added, “Modesty does not befit an executive assistant. Which ones?”

  “Russian, sir. And Hungarian. German. Some Arabic. Several others.”

  “Jesus Christ!”

  “Languages come easy to me, sir.”

  “They don’t to me,” Hall confessed. “You have plans for the evening, Charley?”

  “No, sir.”

  “You have a dinner jacket?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Your bluff is called. We are going to a reception at the Hungarian embassy. Whenever I ask the ambassador a question he doesn’t want to answer, he forgets how to speak English. Getting the picture?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “How’d you learn to speak Hungarian?”

  “When I was a kid, sir, my mother’s aunt, who was Hungarian, lived with us. She taught me.”

  “Nice for you. Okay, Charley, I’ll have Joel pick you up on his way here to get me. Where are you living?”

  “I can meet you here, sir.”

  “Joel will pick you up. Where did you find a hotel?”

  “I’m in the Mayflower, sir.”

  “The Mayflower?” Hall asked. “Isn’t that kind of expensive on a major’s pay, including per diem?”

  “Yes, sir, it is.”

  “Joel will pick you up just before seven,” Hall said, deciding it best not now to pursue the question of affordable housing with Castillo. “Wait for him on the street.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The moment Castillo had closed the door, Hall reached for the red phone on his desk and pressed the button that would connect him over a secure line with the commander-in-chief, Central Command.

  “Hey, Matt,” Naylor said, answering almost immediately. “What’s up?”

  “I just found out my newly appointed executive assistant, Major Castillo, has taken a room in the Mayflower. How’s he going to pay for that?”

  “Would you be satisfied with ‘no problem’?”

  “No.”

  “Well, Charley told me that he’d taken a small apartment in the Mayflower,” Naylor said. “The bill will probably be paid by Castillo Enterprises of San Antonio. Or maybe by the Tages Zeitung.”

  “The what?”

  “It’s a newspaper—actually a chain of newspapers— Charley owns in Germany.”

  “You didn’t tell me much about this guy, did you, Allan?”

  “You didn’t ask. All you wanted was somebody who would carry your suitcase and who spoke Spanish. That’s what I gave you.”

  “What’s your connection with Charley, Allan? Other than the usual relationship between a four-star general and one of his five thousand majors?”

  “Elaine thinks of him—and I do, too, truth to tell—as the third son. We’ve known him since he was a twelve-year-old orphan.”

  “You didn’t mention that, either.”

  “You didn’t ask, Matt,” Naylor said. “What do you want to do with him? Send him back?”

  “No,” Hall had said. “Presuming there is no further deep dark secret you’re leaving for me to discover, I think he’s going to be pretty useful around here.”

  Major/Executive Assistant Castillo did, in fact, and quickly, prove himself useful to the secretary of Homeland Security. And he fit in. Both Mary-Ellen Kensington and Agnes Forbison were clearly taken with him. Hall kindly ascribed this to maternal instincts, but he confided to his wife that he suspected both had amorous fantasies about Castillo.

  “He’s one of those guys women are drawn to like moths to a candle.”

  “I hate men to whom women are drawn like moths to a candle,” Janice Hall had said.

  The day Janice came to the office and met Castillo, she suggested to her husband that they have him to dinner.

  “He’s probably lonely living in a hotel,” Janice said, “and would really appreciate a home-cooked meal.”

  “I thought you hated men to whom women were drawn like moths to a candle.”

  “That’s not his fault, and he’s obviously a nice guy. Ask him.”

  Castillo also got along from the start with Joel Isaacson and Tom McGuire. Hall had worried a little about that; Secret Service guys aren’t impressed with most anyone. But Joel and Tom—both excellent judges of character—seemed to sense that Special Forces Major C. G. Castillo wasn’t most anyone. Isaacson had even gone to Hall and suggested that Castillo be given credentials as a Secret Service agent.

  “He could get through airport security that way. And carry a gun. I’ll handle the credentials guys at Secret Service, if you like.”

  What really moved Castillo from being sort of a male secretary cum interpreter in whose presence it was possible to imbibe intoxicants and relate ribald stories to being a heavy hitter in Hall’s office was a fey notion of the President of the United States.

  In May 2005, an old Boeing 727 that had been sitting at the airport at Luanda, Angola, waiting for parts for more than a year, suddenly took off without permission and disappeared. No one really thought it had been stolen by terrorists and was going to be flown into some American landmark in a repeat of 9/11—that had quickly become regarded as a ridiculous notion at the highest levels; for one thing, the aged bird didn’t have the range to fly to the United States—but no agency in what the President described as “our enormous and enormously expensive intelligence community” seemed to be able to learn what had happened to it.

  The President was annoyed. At a private dinner— really private, just the President, the first lady, and Secretary and Mrs. Hall—the President said that he had been talking to Natalie Cohen—then his national security advisor, and now the secretary of state—and they had come up with an idea.

  Hall understood that “they had come up with an idea” meant it w
as the President’s idea. If it had been Natalie’s, the President would have said so. What had probably happened was that he had proposed the idea, she had first argued against it, but then had given in to the President’s logic, and the idea had become “their” idea. If she hadn’t given in, and he had decided to go ahead anyhow, he would have claimed the idea as his own.

  “You’re the only department without an in-house intelligence operation,” the President had said. “So this will work. Natalie will send everybody in the intelligence community a memo saying that since this stolen airliner poses a potential threat to the homeland, you are to be furnished, immediately, all the intelligence they’ve developed about this missing airplane.

  “That will give us who knew what and when they knew it. Then, very quietly, we send somebody—just one man—to go over the scene quietly, very quietly, and see if he can find out why the CIA, for instance, knew something on Tuesday that the DIA didn’t find out until Thursday. Or why the FBI didn’t find out at all. You with me?”

  “Yes, sir, Mr. President.”

  “The question is: Who can we send to do this without setting off a turf war?”

  After meeting Major Carlos G. Castillo, the President decided he was just the man to very quietly, without setting off a turf war, find out which intelligence agencies were running with the ball; or had fumbled the ball; or had just sat on it, waiting for another agency to do the work.

  Castillo went to Luanda, Angola, where the whole thing had started, and immediately ignited a turf war that had very nearly cost Secretary Hall his job.

  He not only learned that the missing 727 had been stolen by Somalian terrorists, who planned to crash it into the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, but with the help of Aleksandr Pevsner, an infamous Russian arms dealer, located the airplane no one else could find, and then with the help of the ultrasecret Gray Fox unit of Delta Force, stole the missing airplane back from the terrorists. With Castillo flying as copilot, Air Commando Colonel Jake Torine had flown the airplane from Costa Rica to Central Command headquarters at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida.

  When the President had authorized the Gray Fox mission he had done so fully prepared to pay the price of an outraged Costa Rica—for that matter, the outraged membership of the United Nations—for launching a military operation without warning on a peaceful country that didn’t even have an army.

  With his imagination seeing the world’s television screens lit up with CNN’s—and Deutsche Welle’s, and the BBC’s, and everybody else’s—report of the shocking, unilateral American incursion of poor little Costa Rica, with pictures of the flaming hulk of the airplane surrounded by dead Costa Ricans, the President was understandably delighted to hear that the only loss in Costa Rica was a fuel truck.

  True to its professionalism, Gray Fox had left behind no bodies—American or Costa Rican—and no 727 gloriously in flames, and no traceable evidence that could place them ever at the scene.

  Dissuaded by General Naylor from awarding Torine and Castillo medals for valor—which would have necessarily entailed detailing the valor—the President settled for awarding them Distinguished Flying Crosses “for superb airmanship in extremely difficult circumstances.” It was Colonel Torine’s thirteenth DFC and Castillo’s third.

  The President also had them down to the Carolina White House for a weekend.

  There was a downside to this happy ending, of course. The director of Central Intelligence and the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation were unhappy with the secretary of Homeland Security and his goddamn executive assistant for a number of reasons.

  The DCI was of course smarting because Castillo had found the missing airplane before the agency could. And because Castillo had been able to talk the CIA station chief in Angola out of CIA intelligence files.

  The director of the FBI was smarting because after the special agent in charge of the bureau’s Philadelphia office had reported to him his belief that the missing airplane almost certainly had been “stolen” by its owners, a small-time aircraft leasing company on the edge of bankruptcy, so they could collect the insurance, and he had reported this to the President, Castillo had gone to Philadelphia and learned that the airplane had indeed not only been stolen, but stolen by Somalian terrorists whose names—as possible terrorists—had been provided to the FBI by the Philadelphia police some time before. The FBI had told the cops that the Somalians were okay, just some African airline pilots in the United States for training.

  And because when an FBI inspector had been sent to Major/Executive Assistant Castillo to tell him he was confident that whenever Castillo heard from Alex Pevsner or his assistant, a former FBI agent named Howard Kennedy, again, Castillo would immediately notify the FBI, Castillo had told him not to hold his breath.

  But since it had to be admitted by both the FBI and the CIA that they had not, in fact, furnished to the secretary of Homeland Security all the material they had been directed to furnish by then National Security Advisor Natalie Cohen, the directors vowed this would never happen again.

  From this moment on, Homeland Security would get copies of every bit of intelligence generated that had, even remotely, to do with Homeland Security.

  And if it kept that goddamn Castillo up all night reading it, and if he went blind reading it, so much the better.

  When the red telephone on the coffee table buzzed, Charley Castillo was working his way through that day’s intelligence—everything that had come in since five the previous afternoon—graciously furnished by the FBI and the CIA. He had been at this task since half past six.

  The secretary hadn’t made up his mind how to deal with the wealth of intelligence—most of it useless—that they were getting from the FBI and the CIA every day, but he and Charley and Joel and Tom were agreed that it had to be read.

  Joel Isaacson said—only half jokingly—that both directors were entirely capable of sending over hard intel that a nuclear device in a container was about to arrive in Baltimore harbor, sandwiched between intel about two suspicious-looking Moroccan grandmothers, and an overheard and unsubstantiated rumor that the bishop of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, was a crossdresser, and that therefore it had to be read.

  What would seem to be the obvious solution to the problem—Hall calling the directors of the CIA and FBI and saying, “Okay, enough is enough, stop sending the garbage”—almost certainly wouldn’t work. It was possible—maybe even more than likely—that the directors, with straight faces, would tell the secretary they had no idea what he was talking about. And that would mean Hall would have to go to the President. He didn’t want to do that; he was trying to spread oil on the troubled waters, not onto the smoldering fire.

  One possible solution—which Agnes thought the most likely—was to bring into the office two Secret Service agents-in-training now going through the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Glynco, Georgia, just as soon as they were, as Joel put it, “credentialed.”

  Both were experienced police officers, recruited at the suggestion of Secretary Hall from the Philadelphia Police Department as a result of his and Castillo’s experience with them looking for the 727. One had been a sergeant in the intelligence unit, and the other a detective in the counterterrorism division, who had worked for years undercover infiltrating Muslim communities considered potentially dangerous. Both would be able to sort through the stacks of intel reports knowing what to look for, and what was garbage.

  But this would mean they would be working directly for the secretary, instead of just—Hall’s original idea— becoming Secret Service agents with far more experience and knowledge than the usual rookies, and being assigned to a field office somewhere.

  Agnes knew that Hall was reluctant to have his own in-house intelligence unit, but she thought sooner or later—probably sooner, since while Charley was sifting through the garbage he was not available to him; he had not gone with Hall to Chicago last night because he had to read the overnight files—he was going to have to face the fa
cts.

  The secretary of Homeland Security picked up the red handset and punched one of the buttons on the base.

  “Natalie Cohen.”

  “Good morning, Mademoiselle Secretary,” Hall said.

  “Goddammit, Matt, you know I don’t think that’s funny,” the secretary of state said.

  “It makes more sense than a female lawyer calling herself ‘Esquire,’” Hall went on, undaunted. “I learned in school that ‘madam’ is a married lady and an unmarried one a ‘mademoiselle’—”

  “Is there something on your sophomoric mind, Matt? Or are you just seeing what happens when you push the buttons on your red phone?”

  “The President, Mizz Secretary . . .”

  She chuckled. “Better. Not good. But better.”

  “. . . is sending Charley to Buenos Aires. I guess you can figure out why.”

  There was a perceptible pause before the secretary of state replied.

  “To find out who knew what, and when they knew it,” she said, just a little bitterly. Those had been the President’s instructions to Castillo when the President had sent him off to learn what he could about the missing airliner. “I should have seen this coming, I suppose.”

  “I tried to talk him out of it. You want to try?”

  “(A) I don’t think he wants me to know that he’s sending Charley down there, and (b) I think the reason he didn’t tell me was because he knew I would argue against it, and (c) if I happened to mention this to him, he’d know I heard it from you, and we both would be on the bad-guy list.”

  “It wasn’t my idea, Nat.”

  “I know,” she said. “Actually, now that I’ve had thirty whole seconds to think about it, I’m not nearly as livid as I was. Maybe Charley will come up with something the ambassador down there would rather that I didn’t hear. You will . . .”

  “Give you what he gets? Absolutely.”

  “Thanks for the heads-up, Matt.”

  “Do you know something about the ambassador that Charley should?”

  “I never met him. I talked to him last night on the telephone, and I was favorably impressed. And everything I hear about him is that he’s first-rate. He’s a Cuban. You might tell Charley that, so he’ll expect a Cuban temper if the ambassador finds out he’s snooping around down there.”