The Hunters

by W. E. B Griffin

  He wondered for a moment how they’d got into the security area, then felt a little foolish when the answer came to him: Wave your Secret Service credentials and you can go anywhere in an airport you want.

  “Mr. Castillo,” the Secret Service agent said, “Major Miller said he didn’t think you would have any checked baggage.”

  That’s interesting. Mister Castillo and Major Miller. We’re both majors. And this guy has to know that.

  What did Dick say on the phone? “Get used to it, hotshot. You now really are a hotshot.”

  “I don’t,” Castillo said, smiling. He put out his hand. “I don’t think we’ve met, have we? I’m Charley Castillo.”

  The Secret Service agent gave him a firm but very quick handshake, and said, “Special Agent Dulaney, sir.”

  Castillo looked at Miller and saw that he was smiling at him.

  Special Agent Dulaney spoke to his lapel microphone.

  “Don Juan is out. No luggage. We’re on our way.”

  “I’ll push the cripple, Dulaney,” Castillo said.

  “Yes, sir. The Yukon’s right outside, sir.”

  “What happened to the Pride of the Marine Corps?” Miller asked as they moved through the airport.

  “Vic D’Allessando arranged to stash him at Bragg until I figure out what to do with him.”

  “How much help do you need to get into this?” Castillo asked when they were at the Yukon.

  “None. But you can put the wheelchair in,” Miller said.

  He came nimbly off the wheelchair, stood on one leg, pulled the door open, and then sort of dove into the rear. Castillo saw that the middle seat had been folded flat against the floorboard, and, when he looked again, Miller was already sitting up in the far backseat, his leg stretched out in front of him on the folded down seat.

  “Now is when you put the wheelchair in,” Miller said.

  “Can I help you with that, sir?” Special Agent Dulaney asked.

  “I’m all right, thanks,” Castillo said, some what struggling with collapsing the wheelchair.

  Sixty seconds later, Miller asked, “You’re not very good at that, are you?”

  “There’s a lever on the side here, sir, that lets you fold it,” Special Agent Dulaney said. “Let me show you.”

  “Thank you,” Castillo said and got in the Yukon.

  Thirty seconds later, the Yukon pulled away from the curb.

  Special Agent Dulaney spoke again to his lapel microphone.

  “Don Juan aboard. Headed for the nest.”

  “Who is he talking to?” Castillo asked, softly.

  “I asked him that,” Miller said. “He said, ‘The Secret Service has a communications system,’ and then I said, ‘Yeah, but who are you talking to?’ And he said, ‘The communications system.’”

  “Well, ask a dumb question,” Castillo said, grinning. Then he added, “You didn’t have to ride all the way out here, Dick.”

  “I had my reasons. Two of them, to be precise. The first was that it was a pleasant change from my usual routine, which is to go from the hotel to the Nebraska Avenue Complex, then back again, sometimes stopping off at the lobby bar on the way home to have a drink to recuperate from my journey.”

  “And the second?”

  “I thought you might have had it in your head to stop off in the lobby bar en route to the room tonight.”

  “You’re psychic! And I’ll even buy.”

  “And I thought I should warn you what you’re liable to find in there if you do,” Miller said, paused, then added, “The former CIA regional director for Southwest Africa.”

  “No kidding?”

  “Yes, indeed. I was having a little nip about this time night before last in the lobby bar when I sensed death rays aimed at me. I looked around and there she was, Mr. Patricia Davies Wilson, in the flesh. And very nice flesh it was, I have to admit, spilling out of her dress.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Nothing happened. She was with a fellow I strongly suspect was not Mr. Wilson. He was even younger than you or me.”

  “You’re sure she made you?”

  “The death rays made it clear that she did. They froze my martini solid. I had to chew it, like ice cubes.”

  “Well, she probably blames you for getting her fired.”

  “That thought occurred to me,” Miller said, “shortly followed by a possible worse scenario, that she didn’t get fired.”

  “You think that’s possible?”

  “You know the agency better than I do,” Miller said. “Firing somebody is an admission that the agency is less than perfect.”

  “Can we find out? Maybe ask Tom McGuire to ask a few discreet questions?”

  “I’m way ahead of you, Charley,” Miller said. “As a devout believer in Know Thy Enemy, the first thing the next morning, I called Langley, identified myself as chief of staff to the chief of the Office of Organizational Analysis…”

  “You’re not kidding, are you?”

  “Oh, no,” Miller said. “And I asked, did they happen to have an employee named Patricia Davies Wilson and, if so, what was she doing for them?”

  “And they told you?”

  “Has anyone told you, Chief, that we now have a ‘contact officer’ in most of the important agencies, under orders to give us anything we ask for?”

  “No, nobody told me.”

  “You should spend more time in the office, Chief. All sorts of things are happening. But your question was, ‘And they told you?’ Yes, they did. And what they told me—you’re going to love this—is that Mr. Wilson is a senior analyst in the South American Division’s Southern Cone Section.”

  “Jesus Christ!”

  “Yeah,” Miller said. “Where, one would presume, she would have access to everything that the agency hears—more important, does—down there.”

  “Well, I’ll have to do something about that,” Castillo said, almost to himself.

  “Short of rendering her harmless, Charley, what?”

  “I don’t know. But I don’t want that woman’s nose in what’s happened down there or what may happen.”

  “Her nose doesn’t bother me nearly as much as her mouth.”

  “Did you say anything to anybody?”

  Miller shook his head.

  “I’ll go see Matt Hall first thing in the morning,” Castillo said.

  “First thing late tomorrow afternoon,” Miller said. “He’s in Saint Louis, and from there he’s going to Chicago. He’s due back here at five-thirty. There’s a reception at the White House—command performance for him.”

  “Okay, first thing late tomorrow afternoon,” Castillo said. “Damn! I’m on my way to Europe and I wanted to see Betty in Philadelphia before I left. Now I either don’t get to see her or I leave a day later.”

  “Does this mean you’re not going to buy me a drink?”

  “I will buy you two drinks,” Castillo said. “Maybe more.”

  “In the lobby bar?”

  “As I recall that encounter, we were the innocent victims. Why should we be afraid of running into the villain in a bar?”

  “Come on, Charley! You know damned well why.”

  “I have the strength of ten, because in my heart I’m pure. I am not going to let that ‘lady,’ using the term loosely, run me out of a bar.”

  Miller snorted.

  [TWO]

  Office of Organizational Analysis

  Department of Homeland Security

  Nebraska Avenue Complex

  Washington, D.C.

  0825 4 August 2005

  Mr. Agnes Forbison, deputy chief for administration of the Office of Organizational Analysis, Major H. Richard Miller, Jr., chief of staff to the chief of the Office of Organizational Analysis, and the chief himself, Major C. G. Castillo, were standing on the carpet in just about the center of the latter’s office. Major Miller was supporting himself on a massive cane.

  It was an office befitting a senior executive of the federal go
vernment. There was an oversized, ornately carved antique wooden desk, behind which sat a red leather, high-backed “judge’s chair.”

  On the desk were two telephones, one of them red. It was a secure line, connected to the White House switchboard. There were two flags against the wall, the national colors and that of the Department of Homeland Security. In front of the desk were two leather-upholstered straight-backed chairs. There was a coffee table, with two chairs on one side of it and a matching couch on the other. There were two television sets, each with a thirty-two-inch-wide screen, mounted on the walls.

  “And that completes the tour,” Mr. Forbison said. “Say, ‘Good job, Agnes.’”

  Mr. Forbison, a GS-15—the highest rank in the General Service hierarchy—was forty-nine, gray-haired, and getting just a little chubby.

  “Jesus Christ, Agnes!” C. G. Castillo said.

  “You like?”

  “I don’t know what the hell to say,” Castillo said. “What am I supposed to do with all this?”

  The tour had been of the suite of offices newly assigned to the Office of Organizational Analysis of the Department of Homeland Security in the Nebraska Avenue Complex, which is just off Ward Circle in the northwest section 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.

  “You need it now,” she said. “And the way things are going, I don’t think it will be long before we’ll be cramped in here.”

  Until very recently, Mr. Forbison had been one of the two executive assistants to Secretary of Homeland Security Matt Hall. When the Office of Organizational Analysis had been formed within the Department of Homeland Security, Mr. Forbison had been—at her request—assigned to it.

  She had known from the beginning that the Office of Organizational Analysis had nothing to do with organizational analysis and very little to do with the Department of Homeland Security. Secretary Hall had shown her the Top Secret Presidential Finding the day after it had been issued.

  Agnes, who had been around Washington a long time, had suspected that Secretary Hall was going to have to have an in-house intelligence organization—Homeland Security was the only department that didn’t have one—if for no other reason than to do a better job than she and her staff were capable of doing, sorting through the daily flood of intelligence received from the entire intelligence community.

  And she had suspected, when the President had gone to Biloxi to meet the plane carrying the bodies of Masterson and the sergeant and given his speech—“…to those who committed the cowardly murders of these two good men, I say to you that this outrage will not go unpunished…”—that Charley Castillo was going to be involved in that punishment. He not only had found the stolen 727 when the entire intelligence community couldn’t, but had stolen it back from the terrorists.

  It would have been in character for the President to send Charley off as his agent to find the people who had killed Masterson and the sergeant, much as he’d sent him off to locate the stolen 727.

  But she hadn’t expected the Presidential Finding. With a stroke of his pen—actually, the secretary of state’s pen—the President had given Castillo a blank check to do anything he thought he had to do “to render harmless” the people responsible for the murders. And he had to answer to the President alone, not even Secretary Hall. And the Finding had given him an organization to do it with.

  When Secretary Hall had shown her the Finding, she’d read it, then handed it back and said, “Wow!”

  “You don’t think he’s up to it?” Hall had asked.

  “I think he can handle the terrorists, but I’m not so sure about Washington,” she said. “Top Secret Presidential or not, this is going to get out, and as soon as it does so do the long knives. The FBI and the CIA are going to have a fit when they hear about this. And Montvale—especially Montvale—he is not going to like this at all.”

  “Would you, if you were the ambassador? He’s supposed to be in charge of all intelligence and the President makes an exception—for a young major answerable only to him?”

  “Montvale can take care of himself,” she said. “It’s Charley I’m worried about.”

  “You think he needs some mentor, wise in the ways of Washington back-stabbing? Like you, for example?”

  “Like you, of course,” she said. “But, yeah, like me, too.”

  “Then you would not consider being transferred to the Office of Organizational Analysis as, say, deputy chief for administration, as an indication that I was less than satisfied with your performance of your duties and, since I couldn’t fire you, promoted you out?”

  “That has a nice ring to it, ‘Deputy Chief for Administration, ’” Agnes said.

  “Then, since I have no authority over this new organization—or him—I will suggest that to Charley.”

  Agnes now said to Castillo, “What I did, boss—”

  “I’d rather be called Charley,” Castillo said.

  “I’d rather be called ‘My Beauty, ’ ‘My Adored One, ’ but this isn’t the place for that. This is where the boss gets called ‘boss’ or ‘sir.’ Your choice.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  “What I did, boss, was move everybody off the floor but the secretary’s office. And since he uses that for about twenty minutes once a month, that means there will not be a stream of curious people getting off the elevator. I’m also having the engineer put in one of those credit-card-swipe gadgets in the lobby and in the garage, for what will be our elevator. When he gets that in, he’ll rig the other elevators so they can’t come up here.”

  “You’re amazing,” Charley said.

  “And, as we speak, they’re putting in additional secure telephones. You and Dick and I will have our own, of course, and so will Tom McGuire. And there will be one in the conference room. I told our new liaison officer, Mr. Ellsworth, that I will get him one just as soon as I can. No telling how long that will take.”

  “What do you think of Mr. Ellsworth?”

  “He’s smart, tough, and experienced, which is to be expected of someone who has worked for Ambassador Montvale for a longtime.”

  Miller snorted.

  “Why am I not surprised?” Castillo asked.

  “And he requests an audience with you, boss, as soon as you can fit him in.”

  “Can I stall him for today? I’m going to Europe—Paris, Fulda, and Budapest, and maybe Vienna—tomorrow. Maybe by the time I get back, I’ll have thought of some clever way to send him back to Montvale.”

  “I can stall him,” she said. “But not indefinitely. How long will you be gone?”

  “Just a couple of days. I’d go right now, but I have to talk to Hall. He sent for me, but he won’t be back until late this afternoon.” He paused. “The silver lining in that black cloud is that maybe I can talk to him about this Mr. Ellsworth.”

  “Charley,” Agnes said, hesitantly, and then went on: “Charley, you’re going to have to understand that you don’t work for Matt Hall any longer.”

  “If Matt Hall says he wants to see me, he will see me standing there at attention.”

  “That’s your choice. But you don’t have to. And the black lining in that silver cloud is that it wouldn’t really be fair of you to ask Hall to fight your battles with Montvale. Since he no longer has authority over you, he has no responsibility for you.”

  “She’s right, Charley,” Miller said. “Like I said, get used to being a hotshot, hotshot.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Castillo said.

  “And you’re going to have to get used to, as of yesterday, playing that role,” Agnes said. “That’s the reason for the fancy office and the Secret Service Yukon. Those are D.C. status symbols, Charley. Middle-level bureaucrats get a parking space with their name on it. One step up from that is getting to ride around town in a government car, but not back and forth to work. One up from that is having a Yukon bu
t your people drive it, not the Secret Service. At the top of the heap is a Secret Service Yukon at your beck and call. That’s why Tom McGuire set that up. He knows how the game is played and you better learn quick.”

  Castillo shook his head, then asked, “Where is Tom?”

  There was no time for a reply. There was a tinkling sound and a red light on the red telephone began to flash.

  “That one you answer yourself,” Agnes said.

  Castillo walked over to the huge desk and picked up the telephone.

  “Castillo.”

  “Natalie Cohen, Charley.”

  “Good morning, Madam Secretary.”

  “I just got off the phone with Ambassador Lorimer,” she said. “I called Mr. Masterson first and told him that Mr. Lorimer had been found, and the circumstances, and asked how a call from me would be received.”

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  “He told me that someone from our embassy in Montevideo had called the ambassador—as next of kin—and told him what had happened.”

  “I didn’t even think about that,” Castillo said.

  “There’s a procedure in cases like this and it kicked in when Mr. Lorimer was identified,” she said. “And they had no way of knowing, of course, that he had a heart condition, or, indeed, that he is a retired ambassador.”

  “How did he take it?”

  “Well. And he and Mr. Masterson both expressed their appreciation for your offer to look after Mr. Lorimer’s affairs in Uruguay and France. That was a nice thing for you to do, Charley.”

  “The truth is, I wanted a legal reason to get into his apartment in Paris and the Uruguay estancia to see what I could find. And maybe keep quiet some questions being asked about Lorimer’s bank accounts in Uruguay.”

  She took that without breaking stride.

  “And how did that go?”

  “Special Agent Yung had an account in the Liechtensteinische Landesbank in the Caymans—in connection with what he was doing for the FBI down there. Getting it in there went smoothly. The next step is getting it out of that account and into one that was supposed to be opened for me. I’m going to see if I can do that this morning.”

  “The reason I asked is the same standard procedures that come into play when an American dies abroad that require the notification of the next of kin also require the protection of assets. Even if you got it out of Uruguay, obviously, it was after his death. There will probably be some questions asked.”