“Think about it a moment,” Montvale ordered, “and tell me the first name that comes to mind.”
Three seconds later, Castillo said, “Mr. Patricia Davies Wilson.”
Montvale nodded.
“Goddamn her!”
“Hell hath no fury like the female scorned, I understand. You might want to write that down to think about the next time you experience the sinful lusts of the flesh and are about to throw caution to the winds and, with it, your career, the mission you’ve been given by the President, and the many—all unpleasant to contemplate—manifestations of that.”
“The next time? What next time? I’m blown. The problem now is how to keep the Finding operation from being blown with me. I’m blown, that’s it. The most I can hope for is that I will be allowed to resign for the good of the service and go hide somewhere before this reporter can find me. Once I’m out of the service, I don’t have to even talk to this guy —if he could find me—and I don’t think he’ll be able to do that. All the Army has to do is say they’re way ahead of the reporter, and the guy with the love nest has already been allowed to resign and they have no idea where former Lieutenant Colonel Castillo is. And, by the way, he was never assigned to the DIA.” He paused. “Does General Naylor know about this?”
Montvale nodded.
“He won’t like it, but between him and Schoomaker I can be out of the Army and out of Washington by noon tomorrow.”
Montvale just looked at him.
“Is Edgar Delchamps here yet?” Castillo said.
Montvale nodded.
“Then what I suggest, sir, is that you keep him under wraps until you can recommend to the President that he turn the Finding operation over to him.”
“Why would I want to do that, Colonel?” Montvale asked, softly.
“It’s the only way I can think of to keep the Finding operation from being blown. He’s privy to just about everything, but there’s no way that he can be tied to me, the Finding operation, or anybody else I’ve been working with. Once I’m gone and he’s got the Finding operation, I can meet him someplace and give him everything he doesn’t already have. The Finding operation doesn’t have to go down the toilet with me.”
“And why in the world,” Montvale asked, “knowing what’s happened, would Mr. Delchamps take on that responsibility? If I were he, I’d think I was being set up as the fall guy. He would reason that Mr. Whelan is not going to let this story go just because he can’t find you.”
“He’s a pro, Mr. Ambassador. He knows the risks of doing something that has to be done. He’s been doing it a long time. He’ll take the job. And more than likely do a better job with it than I’ve been doing.”
“Let me get this straight, Castillo. What you are saying you want to do is quietly fold your tent and steal away into anonymity. Pay for your carnal sins with, so to speak, professional suicide?”
“I wouldn’t put it quite that way, Mr. Ambassador, but, yes, I suppose. I disappear and the Finding operation goes on. I don’t have any better ideas.”
“Fortunately, I do.”
“Sir?”
“Fortunately, I do,” Montvale repeated. “More precisely, did.”
“Whatever you want me to do, sir,” Castillo said.
“Let me tell you what I did, Colonel. When Secretary Hall called me to tell me C. Harry Whelan, Jr., wanted to talk about your eleven-hundred-dollar-a-day love nest, I suggested that he invite Mr. Whelan to luncheon with both of us the next day in his private dining room at the Nebraska Avenue Complex.”
What?
“Sir?”
“Telling him that I would tell him everything there. I further suggested that he put Major Miller back into his uniform and wheelchair—the last time Miller came here to tell me what you were up to, he was wearing civilian clothing and using canes—two of them—which naturally aroused one’s sympathy, but not as much as a fully uniformed wounded hero in a wheelchair would—and that he advise Major Miller of the situation and invite him to take lunch with us.
“I told Secretary Hall that Mr. Whelan was known to be fond of oysters, grilled Colorado trout avec beurre noir, and an obscure California Chardonnay—Judge’s Peak. I told Secretary Hall that if he could handle the oysters and the trout, I would send over a case of the Judge’s Peak.
“When I sent the wine, I also sent a team of specialists from NSA to install microphones discreetly around the dining room, and to instruct Miller in their use.”
My God, he’s telling me he bugged Hall’s private dining room!
What the hell for?
“Miller, at my orders, was waiting in your office for me when I arrived at the Nebraska Avenue Complex. Mr. Whelan was already in the dining room with Secretary Hall. I shall long remember Miller’s response to my question, ‘What would you say Mr. Whelan’s frame of mind is?’
“Miller said, ‘Mr. Ambassador, his face looks like he’s happily looking forward to nailing all our nuts to the floor.’
“I then wheeled Miller, his knee again wrapped in far more white elastic gauze than was necessary, into the dining room. Whelan’s eyes lit up. They lit up even more when I introduced Miller as your roommate in the Motel Monica Lewinsky.
“Mr. Whelan said, ‘I’d like to hear about that. What happened to your knee, Major?’
“‘In good time, Harry,’ I said. ‘I’ll tell you everything. But first I’d like, and I’m sure Major Miller would like, one of those.’
“Mr. Whelan was drinking a vodka martini. A large one…”
I don’t know where he’s going with this, Castillo thought, but he loves telling the tale.
“…made with Polish hundred-twenty-proof spirits. The waiter promptly poured martinis for Miller and myself. Ours were one hundred percent ice water with a twist of lemon and two speared cocktail onions.”
“You were trying to get him drunk?”
“Not drunk. Happy. One never knows what a drunk is liable to do,” Montvale said.
“And did you get him happy?”
“Oh, yes. First, I complimented him on his piece about Senator Davis in yesterday’s Post. The senator has been using an airplane just like yours, belonging to a corporation just awarded an enormous interstate highway construction contract, as if it were his own. That put Harry in a good mood.
“As did the first of what turned out to be three bottles of the Judge’s Peak, consumed along with some Chilean oysters.
“And then we had our lunch, the grilled trout with beurre noir, washed down with more of the Chardonnay. By then, Mr. Whelan was telling us of his journalistic career, how he’d started out on a weekly and worked his way up through The Louisville Courier-Journal to the Post. It was a long story, and, fascinated with this tale of journalistic skill and prowess, I naturally kept asking him for amplification.
“Meanwhile, the wine was flowing, and there had not been a mention of Lieutenant Colonel C. G. Castillo.”
“And this reporter didn’t sense what was going on?”
“Eventually, he suspected he was being manipulated. Or he realized that he had been doing all the talking. In any event, he asked Miller, ‘I asked before what happened to your leg and never got an answer.’
“To which I quickly responded, ‘Major Miller suffered grievous wounds—he will shortly be retired—in Afghanistan. His helicopter was shot down.’
“Whelan jumped on that. ‘So what’s he doing here in this Office of Organizational Analysis? And, by the way, what is that? What does it do and for whom?’ Etcetera. One question after another.
“I asked him if he had ever heard of the West Point Protective Association,” Montvale went on. “To which he replied, ‘Of course I have. What about it? What’s Miller being protected from? And by whom?’
“At that point, I began to suspect I had him,” Montvale said. “I told him that actually Miller was doing the protecting. That was why he was sharing the apartment at the Mayflower.
“To which Whelan replied something to the effect that we were
now getting down to the nitty-gritty. What was Miller protecting you from?
“‘From himself, I’ve very sorry to have to tell you,’ I replied, and went on. ‘Major Milleris assigned, pending his retirement, to the Detachment of Patients at Walter Reed. Now he goes there daily on an outpatient basis for treatment of his knee and his other wounds. When Miller heard that Major—now Lieutenant Colonel—Castillo was in trouble, he asked—unofficially, of course—if he could try to help him. They were classmates at West Point as well as comrades-in-arms in bitter combat. Permission was granted—unofficially, of course.’”
“You told this guy Miller is protecting me?” Castillo asked, incredulously. “From what?”
Montvale ignored the question.
“This announcement caused Whelan to quiver like a pointer on a quail,” Montvale said. “He just knew he was onto something.
“‘How is this Castillo in trouble?’ Whelan asked. ‘Something to do with his eleven-hundred-dollar-a-day love nest in the Motel Monica?’
“To which I replied,” Montvale went on, “that I wasn’t at all surprised that a veteran journalist like himself had found out about your suite in the Mayflower and that I therefore presumed he knew about your Gulfstream.”
He told this reporter about the Gulfstream?
Where the hell is he going with this?
“Whelan said that he had heard something about it,” Montvale continued, “although the look on his face more than strongly suggested this was news to him.
“I then told him I would fill him in on what few details he didn’t know and told him that you had paid seven and a half million dollars for what I was very afraid he would be soon calling your flying love nest. And then I told him the last anyone heard from you, you had flown it to Budapest.
“I thought carefully about telling him about Budapest, but I decided that if I was wrong, and didn’t have him in my pocket, and since you acquired it so recently he might find out about the flight there and ask questions. This way, I nipped those questions in the bud.”
“I don’t know what the hell to say,” Castillo said.
“I’ll tell you when I want a response from you, Colonel,” Montvale said, evenly. “Right now, just listen. We don’t have much time.”
Much time? For what?
“Sorry, sir.”
“So, predictably, Whelan says something to the effect that he hopes I am going to tell him where an Army officer was getting the money to live in the Mayflower and buy a Gulfstream.
“To which I replied something to the effect that I was going to tell him everything, not only because I knew he’d find out anyway, but also because I knew him well enough to trust his judgment, his decency, and his patriotism.
“At that moment, for a moment, I thought perhaps I had gone a bit too far. He was more than halfway into his cups, but, on the other hand, he didn’t get where he is by being an utter fool.
“And sure enough, the next words out of his mouth are, ‘Why do I think I’m being smoozed?’
“I didn’t reply. Instead, I took your service-record jacket from my briefcase and laid it before him…”
My jacket? Where the hell did he get my jacket? They’re supposed to be in the safe at Special Operations Command in Tampa where nobody gets to see them.
Montvale saw the look on Castillo’s face, knew what it meant, and decided to explain.
“You asked a while back if General Naylor knew of the situation you’d gotten yourself in. He knew, of course, how you’d met Mr. Wilson in Angola and even of your unwise dalliance with her. Still, it required a good deal of persuasion on my part to bring him on board to agree this was the only possible way to deal with this situation and to authorize flying your records up here.
“But that, too, was a fortunate happenstance, because once I’d brought him on board he provided me with a number of very touching details of your life that proved to be quite valuable.”
Very touching details? Oh, shit! What does that mean? “To go on: After first reminding Mr. Whelan that the Freedom of Information Act did not entitle him or anyone else to peruse your personal history data, I told him I was going to tell him everything about your distinguished record, which he could verify by checking the records I had just put into his hands.”
“You let him see my jacket? There’s a lot of classified material in there. Missions I was on that are still classified. They keep the goddamned thing in a safe in Tampa!”
“Your entire file is lassified Top Secret. That impressed Mr. Whelan in no small way. I began with going through your decorations—and, I must say, even I was impressed, Colonel—starting with your first DFC and Purple Heart, which I pointed out you had earned when you were a mere boy just months out of West Point, and ending with your last Purple Heart, in Afghanistan.
“When that was over, I knew I had Whelan hooked because he put on his tough, no-nonsense journalist’s face and tone of voice and said, ‘Okay. Very impressive. But let’s get back to the love nests, both of them. And I think you should know that I know all about this Karl Gossinger character.’
“I asked, ‘You know everything about Karl Wilhelm Gossinger?’ and he replied, ‘The eleven-hundred-dollar-a-day love nest in Motel Monica Lewinsky is registered to him. He’s supposed to be the Washington correspondent for the Tages Zeitung newspapers. Nobody I know ever heard of him and I haven’t been able to find him yet. But I will.’
“I told him that he already had, that you and Gossinger were one and the same…”
“Jesus Christ!”
“…and that you were born out of wedlock and never knew your father. That your mother was a teenage German girl whose name was Gossinger.”
“You had no right to get into that!” Castillo flared. “That’s my personal business.”
“I had, of course, considered your personal business, before I decided I had to deal with Whelan, and concluded that protecting the president of the United States, certain members of his cabinet, and finding out who the people who murdered Masterson are and dealing with them was the most important thing and far outweighed any momentary embarrassment you might feel. You get the picture, Colonel? If you had kept your male member behind its zipper when you should have, you and I would not be sitting here, would we?”
Goddamn him…he’s right!
“No, sir. We would not. I apologize for the outburst.”
“Fuck the outburst, Castillo. Apologize for not thinking!”
“Yes, sir. No excuse, sir.”
Montvale looked coldly at Castillo for a moment, then went on, conversationally, the anger gone from his voice.
“So I told Mr. Whelan that your father was a teenage American helicopter pilot who died for our country in Vietnam without ever knowing he had a son. And, of course, that Warrant Officer Junior Grade Jorge Alejandro Castillo was a true hero, a legend in Army Aviation, in the Army.
“I could tell from the look on his face that while he was impressed, he thought I was laying it on a little thick. Of course I wasn’t through.
“I asked him if he knew General Naylor and of course he said he did. And then I told him how General Allan Naylor becomes involved in the saga of Lieutenant Colonel Castillo.”
“I really don’t want to know what else you told this man, but I realize I should know.”
“Yes, you should,” Montvale said. “I told Mr. Whelan that when you were twelve, your mother, the sole heiress to the Gossinger fortune—I told him I was sure he knew that the Tages Zeitung newspaper chain was owned by Gossinger Beteiligungsgesellschaft G.m.b.H.; he nodded, although I’ll bet he was hearing that for the first time—was diagnosed with a terminal illness. I told him your mother went to the U.S. Army—specifically, to then-Major Allan Naylor, who was stationed nearby—and asked for help to find her son’s father in the United States and told him why.
“I told him that Allan Naylor told me he promised some what reluctantly to see what he could do, as he had no respect for an officer who would leave a
love child behind him, and was concerned about what would happen when a man of such low character came into the fortune the boy would inherit.
“And, of course, that when he did look into it, he learned that your father was a posthumous recipient of the Medal of Honor, and, not only that, but the only son of a distinguished and equally wealthy family in San Antonio. The question then became would the Castillos, who traced their Texas lineage back to two men who fell beside Davy Crockett and the other heroes of the Alamo, accept their son’s illegitimate German son?”
Castillo’s anger began to build again. “Why the hell did you tell him all this? I don’t want any pity.”
“Well, then you’re not going to like the rest of this,” Montvale said. “By the time I was through, I was nearly in tears myself about poor Charley Castillo.”
“Oh, shit!” Castillo said, softly.
“I told him that that hadn’t turned out to be a problem. That your grandmother took one look at the picture of you that Naylor had shown her and said, ‘He has my Jorge’s eyes,’ and was on a plane to Germany that night.
“I then painted a touching picture of this poor, illegitimate, parentless boy being suddenly thrust into an alien culture with nothing to hang on to but memories of his late mother and the legend of his heroic father, of his going to West Point and then to war, determined to be worthy of his hero father. I went over your list of decorations…”
“Mr. Ambassador,” Castillo interrupted, “I don’t think that’ll keep this guy from writing just about what he started to write in the first place. In fact, it would appear that he now has a bigger story…”
“If you’ll indulge me, Colonel,” Montvale said, icily, “I’ll tell you how I did just that.”
“Sorry.”
“I ended your touching life story by telling him that you stole a helicopter in Afghanistan to save Miller’s crew at great risk not only to your career but your life itself.”
“Oh, boy!”
“Hearing that, Mr. Whelan really fixed the hook in himself. ‘Mr. Ambassador,’ he asked, ‘forgive me, but wasn’t that a crazy thing to do?’
“Whereupon I looked at him sadly and said, ‘Precisely. It was an insane, irrational act. Major Castillo had gone to the well of his resources once too often and found it dry. Everybody has a breaking point and Castillo had reached his.’”
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