“Yes, sir.”
“I’m really disappointed in you, General,” the President said. “I came all the way down here to see Clendennen’s Commandos getting ready to seize Drug Cartel International, and here you are telling me you don’t even know where it is.”
“Sir, what we really came down here for was to record for history you and Clendennen’s Commandos preparing to seize Drug Cartel International.”
“That’s what I just said,” the President said unpleasantly.
“Mr. President, I’m sure General Naylor here—”
“This isn’t General Naylor, for God’s sake,” the President snapped. “Naylor’s the big general with four stars. General O’Nab is the little general with three stars. Maybe you’d better write that down.”
“My name is McNab, sir.”
“Whatever.”
“What I was going to suggest, Mr. President,” Hoboken said, “is that General McNab probably has some of his people preparing to seize something as we speak. That’s what they do, seize things. Either that, or blow them up. Anyway, you could have your picture taken with them. Nobody would know the difference.”
“That’s true, but would that be honest?”
“Trust me, Mr. President, I do things like that all the time.”
The President considered that option for a moment, and then said, “Okay, we’ll do it. But let’s make it quick. Before we go back to Washington, I’ve got to go to Biloxi and get Belinda-Sue’s mother out of ja… where she is and back in the Baptist assisted living place.”
[EIGHT]
Base Operations
Pope Air Force Base, North Carolina
1005 15 June 2007
“Get a couple more shots of General Whatsisname saluting the President farewell, and then we can get out of here,” Presidential Spokesperson Robin Hoboken ordered the photographers.
General McNab saluted the President farewell for the third time and then asked, “Is there anything else I can do for you, Mr. President?”
“You’re really a slow learner, aren’t you, General?” President Clendennen replied. “We’ve already been down that street twice.”
“Excuse me, sir,” McNab said. “Is there anything else the President can do for the general?”
“The President—presuming the general can get Clendennen’s Commandos up and running and seizing Drug Cartel International smoothly—can get the general another star. How does that sound?”
“Just as soon as I can get the precise locality of the airfield, sir, I’ll get right on it.”
“And that process would be speeded up if you could get a little more enthusiasm for getting Clendennen’s Commandos into Clan Clendennen kilts, General.”
“I’ll do what I can, Mr. President,” General McNab said.
“Get Colonel Whatsisname, the Heraldry guy, to give your people a little historical background on kilts in warfare.”
“Yes, sir, I’ll do that.”
“As far as I’m concerned, those green berets you people wear make me think of wimpy Frenchmen. Who else wears a beret? Kilts, on the other hand, make me think of great big muscular, redheaded Scotchmen—like my ancestors in Clan Clendennen—waving great big swords.”
“I’ll keep that in mind, Mr. President,” General McNab said, evenly.
The President went up the stair door. Robin Hoboken and then the photographers and Supervisory Special Agent Mulligan followed him.
Sean O’Grogarty remained on the tarmac.
“Excuse me, sir,” General McNab said, “I think you’re about to get left behind.”
“That’s the idea,” Sean replied. “Special Agent Mulligan said I was to stick around and let him know how you’re doing.”
“Wonderful!” General McNab said, sharply sarcastic. “This just gets better by the moment.”
The stair door closed as the engines started. Sixty seconds later, the C-37A, call sign “Air Force One,” lifted off.
General McNab watched until the departing aircraft had vanished from sight, and then he walked away from the base operations building down a taxiway. When he was halfway to the runway and had looked around to make sure he was out of earshot, he took his CaseyBerry from his pocket and punched an autodial button.
“Good morning, Bruce,” Secretary of State Natalie Cohen said thirty seconds later.
“Madam Secretary, I believe it would be best if no one but you was in a position to hear any part of this conversation.”
“All right,” she said, and he heard her announce to someone, somewhat curtly, “You’ll have to excuse me while I take this call.”
Thirty seconds after that, she said, “I get the feeling this call is important.”
“The President just took off from here, back to Washington, via Biloxi.”
“What in the world was he doing at Fort Bragg?”
“He wanted to have his picture taken with Clendennen’s Commandos before they go to Mexico to seize Drug Cartel International Airport.”
“‘Clendennen’s Commandos’?”
“He has renamed Delta Force and Black Fox.”
“My God!”
“And he wants them to start wearing the kilts of Clan Clendennen.”
“Unbelievable!”
“I respectfully suggest, Madam Secretary, that you convene a conference of the senior officials aware of the problem to discuss bringing the matter to the Vice President and the Cabinet.”
“It looks as if we’re going to have to do that. Is that what you’re saying, Bruce?”
“Yes, Madam Secretary, it is.”
“Your formality is making me nervous, frankly.”
“I beg your pardon, if that is the case.”
“There’s a problem with convening something like that. Who are you thinking of?”
“Mr. Ellsworth, Mr. Lammelle, General Naylor, Attorney General Palmer, and FBI Director Schmidt, Madam Secretary.”
“Not the Vice President?”
“Vice President Montvale, Madam Secretary, came to me privately and said that if the situation ever came to this, he wished not to be involved, so that later there could be no accusations that he had led a coup.”
“He came to me saying the same thing. And he’s right. But if the President learns, as I am very afraid he will, that I have convened these people, he’s going to cry coup. What are we going to do about that?”
“Hold the meeting in secret, Madam Secretary.”
“That would be just about impossible, Bruce, and you know it.”
“Madam Secretary, I suggest we could hold the meeting in secret if we went to Greek Island.”
It took her a moment to reply.
“If we’re talking about the same Greek Island, Bruce, that was shut down shortly after the Berlin Wall came down.”
“It’s still there, Madam Secretary. No longer controlled by the government, but still there.”
“Are you suggesting we go to West Virginia, to the Greenbrier Hotel, and reopen Greek Island? For one thing, how could we get in? If they haven’t bricked up the opening, then they have gutted it.”
“No, ma’am,” McNab said. “When there was no longer a need for a place for Congress to go in case of a nuclear attack, the government stripped the place and turned it back over to its owner.”
“So?”
“The owner is one of Those People in Las Vegas.”
“And?”
“Frank, who was then working in Covert Operations at the Company, and had already started a relationship with Those People, went to them and told Hotelier he could put the place to good use, but it had to be kept quiet.”
“I think I know where you’re going,” Secretary Cohen said.
“It’s an ideal place to conduc
t interrogations of people we don’t want anybody to know we’re talking to. And to store things the Agency needs.”
“The Agency and Special Operations Command, you mean?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And by people you don’t want anyone to know you’re talking to, you mean people who didn’t want to talk to you in the first place, right? People who didn’t volunteer to come to the United States?”
McNab didn’t answer.
“Sometimes, Bruce, I think that you and Frank Lammelle are as dangerous as President Clendennen.”
“Well, just forget… please… that I even mentioned the hotel.”
“Is that what you call it, ‘the hotel’? Well, that sounds innocent enough, doesn’t it?”
Again McNab didn’t reply.
“The Lindbergh Act doesn’t give either you or Frank an exemption from anti-kidnapping laws. I presume both of you loose cannons know that.”
“Yes, ma’am. We’re aware of that.”
“Well, let’s hear your plan, Bruce.”
“Excuse me?”
“How are we going to get all these people to the hotel without letting anyone—especially the President—know?”
“May I infer, Madam Secretary…”
“Desperate times call for desperate measures. You may want to write that down.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Damn it, Bruce, now that we’re—at least so far—unindicted co-conspirators, the least you can do is stop calling me ‘ma’am.’”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said automatically.
They laughed.
“One more uncomfortable question, Bruce. What are you going to do about the others? If they go to your hotel, they will know about your hotel.”
“They don’t want to know about the hotel. General Naylor’s the only problem I see about that.”
“In other words, everybody knows—or at least suspects—about the hotel except General Naylor, right?”
“Now that you know, he’s the only one who doesn’t.”
“So, what are you going to do about him?”
“Pray that he doesn’t want to see the rest of us go to jail. As you just said, desperate times call for desperate measures.”
“Let’s hear the plan.”
“Frank brings the attorney general, the secretary of Defense, and the FBI director with him from Washington in his Gulfstream. You pick up General Naylor in yours, and then stop here and pick me up.”
After a moment, the secretary of State said, “Okay, General, I’ll see you soon. Should I bring my golf clubs to the Greenbrier?”
VIII
[ONE]
Saint Johan’s Cemetery
Bad Hersfeld, Kreis Hersfeld-Rotenburg
Hesse, Germany
1605 15 June 2007
“It’s over there,” Charley said to Sweaty, pointing to the Gossinger plot in the cemetery.
Sweaty headed toward the plot, which Charley had always thought was sort of a cemetery within the cemetery. The whole thing was fenced in by a waist-high barrier of bronze poles between granite posts. In the center was an enormous pillar, topped by a statue of a weeping saint.
He had no idea how many graves were within the barrier, but there were at least fifty. The one they were looking for was near the pillar, under a gnarled thirty-foot tree.
“Over there, under the tree,” Charley said, again pointing.
Sweaty followed his directions and found what they were looking for. A row of granite markers, into one of which was chiseled:
ERIKA VON UND ZU GOSSINGER
7 MAI 1952 — 13 JULI 1982
Sweaty dropped to her knees, bowed her head, and held her palms together.
Charley thought, and almost said, You can knock that off; the chauffeur can’t see you.
And then the epiphany.
Jesus Christ, she’s actually praying!
This was closely followed by the deeply shaming realization that, ever since they had arrived in Hersfeld a half hour before, he had really been a callous, unfeeling bastard, and that it had only been dumb luck that had kept Sweaty from seeing this.
Otto Göerner, the managing director of Gossinger Beteiligungsgesellschaft, G.m.b.H., had met them at the Das Haus im Wald airfield, after they had flown from Budapest. At that point, Charley had been greatly concerned about what Otto’s reaction to Sweaty was going to be; they had never met.
The only reason Otto had not become Charley’s stepfather when Charley was an infant, as his grandfather, the late Oberst Wilhelm von und zu Gossinger, and his late uncle Hermann Wilhelm von und zu Gossinger, had desperately hoped he would was because—despite enormous pressure from her father and her brother—Charley’s mother had refused to marry Otto.
Otto still retained fatherly feelings for Charley. He had functioned as a de facto stepfather to him until, shortly before his mother’s death, Karl Wilhelm von und zu Gossinger had been taken to the United States to become Carlos Guillermo Castillo.
And Otto didn’t like Russians generally and hated the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki with a cold passion. Charley had dropped that nugget of information—that Sweaty had been an SVR lieutenant colonel—into his announcement of his pending marriage, deciding that getting that out in the open sooner was better than later.
The term “SVR podpolkovnik” had produced in Otto’s mind the stereotype of a short-haired female with stainless steel teeth who looked like a weight lifter. When Sweaty came down the aircraft door stairs his face had shown his surprise at what he was getting—a spectacularly beautiful redhead—instead of what he had expected.
His biggest surprise, however, was to come shortly after they were loaded into Otto’s Jaguar Vanden Plas, when, with visible effort, Otto produced a smile and inquired, “My dear, now that you’re here in Hersfeld, what would you like to do?”
“Aside from going to the cemetery, which of course my Carlos wants to do before anything else, we’re completely in your hands, Herr Göerner.”
Charley was shamed to painfully remember his reaction to that had been thinking, What the hell is Sweaty talking about?
“Karl wants to go to the cemetery?” Otto had asked incredulously.
“He’s told me what a saint, a truly godly woman, his mother was,” Sweaty went on. “I want to be there when he asks her blessing on our marriage.”
“Karl’s mother was truly a saint,” Otto agreed.
Charley was even more ashamed to remember his reaction to that, his thinking: Jesus Christ, she’s amazing. She hasn’t been in his car thirty seconds and she’s put ol’ Otto in her pocket. Well, you don’t get to be an SVR podpolkovnik without being able to manipulate people.
Proof that Otto was in Sweaty’s pocket had come almost immediately. As soon as they got to the house—several minutes later—Otto turned from the front seat and announced, “There’s no sense in you two going into the house. I’ll have someone take care of your luggage and then Kurt can take you to the cemetery.”
The only reason, Charley remembered with chagrin, that he hadn’t congratulated Sweaty on her manipulation of Otto on the way to the cemetery was because the chauffeur would have heard him.
Sweaty looked up at Charley.
“Aren’t you going to pray?” she asked.
“I’m an Episcopalian,” he said. “We pray standing up.”
That’s bullshit and I know it is. What it is is yet another proof that I’m a shameless liar. I wasn’t praying.
And don’t try to wiggle out of the shameless liar business by saying that you’re a professional intelligence officer trained to instantly respond to a challenge by saying whatever necessary to get yourself off the hook.
Sweaty stood, took his hand, and kissed him tenderly on the cheek.
“I’m glad we came here,” she said.
They started back to the car.
“What exactly did you pray for?” Charley asked.
“That’s between God, your mother, and me.”
“Okay.”
“Okay,” Sweaty said, obviously changing her mind. “I asked God to reward your mother for being such a good mother to you, and to give her everlasting peace now that I’ve taken over for her. And I asked your mother to pray to the Holy Virgin that I will be as good a mother to our baby as she was to you. And you?”
The reflexes of a professional intelligence officer trained to instantly respond to a challenge by saying whatever necessary to get himself off the hook kicked in automatically.
“I asked God to give my mother peace, and prayed for you and our baby,” he heard himself say.
Where the hell did that come from?
It doesn’t matter. If I didn’t actually do that, I should have.
God, if there are really no secrets from You, You know that.
And by the way, thank You for Sweaty and the baby she’s carrying.
When they got back in the car, Sweaty asked, in Russian, “Kurt, do you speak Russian?”
When it became evident that Kurt did not speak Russian, Sweaty said, in German, “I was just curious.”
Then she switched back to Russian.
“Well, what do you think is going to happen tonight? Do we get to fool around in your childhood bed, or is Otto the Pure going to put us in separate rooms at opposite ends of that factory you call a house?”
“Sweaty, I just don’t know.”
God, if You didn’t hear me the first time, thank You for this woman.
[TWO]
When they got to Das Haus im Wald they found the Merry Outlaws, less Master Sergeant C. Gregory Damon, Retired, John and Sandra Britton, and Vic D’Alessandro—whom they had left behind in Budapest to deal with the logistical and other problems of getting into Somalia on some credible excuse—sitting in an assortment of chairs and couches in the top-floor living room of the House in the Woods snacking on a massive display of cold cuts. Castillo saw that Peg-Leg Lorimer was working at his laptop.
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