W. E. B. Griffin - Presidential Agent 07 (7 page)

“Where did you get this?” Naylor asked.

“A FedEx delivery man handed it to me just now when I walked out of my quarters to come here.”

“It’s addressed to LTC McNab.”

“I noticed. It may be a typo, or it could be on purpose. My gut feeling is that it’s on purpose.”

“To attract less attention?” Naylor asked.

McNab nodded.

“I’ve been wondering if another . . .”

“Was sent to me?” Naylor finished for him.

McNab nodded again.

“Captain,” Naylor said politely, “would you ask Colonel Brewer to come up here, please?”

Colonel J. D. Brewer was Naylor’s senior aide-de-camp.

“We have been cleared for takeoff,” the public-address system announced. “Please fasten your seat belts.”

 

 

“No FedEx Overnight envelope or other communication relative to this at MacDill, General,” Colonel Brewer reported five minutes later, as the Gulfstream reached cruising altitude.

Naylor looked at McNab.

“What’s the plan at Andrews?” McNab asked.

“A Black Hawk will take us to Langley; we meet the others there.”

“Including Natalie?”

“I have been led to believe
the secretary of State
will be there.”

His tone made it clear that he thought General McNab should not refer to the secretary of State by her first name.

“I call her Natalie because I like her, General,” McNab said. “She’s my kind of gal.” And then he quoted the secretary of State: “ ‘You miserable goddamn shameless hypocritical sonofabitch!’ ”

It was what Secretary of State Natalie Cohen had said to President Clendennen in the Situation Room of the White House on February 12, immediately after the President had announced that “for the good of the country, for the good of the office of the President, I am inclined to accept Ambassador Montvale’s offer to become my Vice President.”

It was the first time anyone in the room had ever heard her say anything stronger than “darn.”

“My God!” Naylor said.

“She calls a spade a spade,” McNab said. “There aren’t many other people in Foggy Bottom—offhand, I can’t think of one—who do that.”

Naylor looked at McNab as if he were forming his words. When finally he said nothing, McNab went on:

“We can ask her at the agency if she’s been contacted, and I’m sure that among Lammelle’s gnomes is someone who can lift any fingerprints there might be on the envelope.”

Franklin Lammelle was DCI, director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

“All right,” Naylor said. “And the CIA would be the most logical choice to deal with this situation, right?”

McNab didn’t reply.

“McNab, you’re not thinking of going down there to rescue Colonel Ferris, are you?”

“General, I would say that none of us has enough information to make any decisions on how to deal with this,” McNab said. “But we can think about it while we’re at Langley doing our bit to help the President get reelected.”

“Is that how you think of it?”

McNab didn’t reply directly, instead saying, “Having complied with Action One of the SOP by notifying my superior headquarters of the situation, with your permission, General, I will now take Action Two.”

General Naylor nodded his permission.

“Al,” McNab said to Captain Walsh, “would you please bring the Brick up here?”

Sixty seconds later, Walsh laid the Brick on the table. It had been provided to General McNab by the AFC Corporation free of charge. The chairman of the board of the AFC Corporation, Dr. Aloysius Francis Casey, had, during the Vietnam war, been the communications sergeant on a Special Forces A Team.

He credited that service for giving him the confidence to do such things as apply for admission to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology without having a high school diploma, and then shortly after being awarded his Ph.D. by that institution, starting the AFC Corporation, which quickly became the world leader in data processing and encryption.

“Like the jarheads say, General,” he had told then–newly promoted Brigadier General McNab when he flew, uninvited, in one of AFC’s Learjets to Fort Bragg, “once a Green Beanie, always a Green Beanie. And now it’s payback time.”

The translation was that he was willing to provide the Special Operations community with the very latest in communication and encryption equipment free of charge. When he left Fort Bragg that day, he had taken with him Brigadier General McNab’s aide-de-camp—“You can call me Aloysius, hotshot,” Casey had told then–Second Lieutenant C. G. Castillo—so that Castillo could not only select from AFC’s existing stocks of electronic equipment but could also tell what communications abilities Delta Force and Gray Fox wished it had.

General McNab now opened the attaché case. A green LED told him the system was in STANDBY mode. He flipped a few switches and other green LEDs illuminated. One was ENCRYPTED VOICE COMMUNICATION, one ENCRYPTED DATA COMMUNICATION, and one ENCRYPTED SCAN.

General McNab removed a device about the size of a cigarette lighter from the attaché case, put it to his eye, aimed it at the FedEx Overnight envelope, and then at the photograph and message it contained.

A red LED illuminated briefly over the legend ENCRYPTED DATA TRANSMISSION IN PROGRESS, and then went out.

General McNab then picked up a telephone handset and pushed a button.

“Yes, sir?” the voice of Major General Terry O’Toole, deputy commander of SPECOPSCOM, came over the Brick’s speakers after bouncing off a satellite 27,000 miles over the earth.

“Terry, I just sent you what was handed to me as I walked out of my quarters this morning,” McNab said.

“I’m looking at it, General,” O’Toole said.

“Load up your wife and get over to Colonel Ferris’s quarters. Show her this, tell her we’re working on it, and to keep her mouth shut about it.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Tell her as soon as I learn anything, I’ll let her know.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ll be in touch.”

“Yes, sir.”

McNab replaced the handset and closed the attaché case.

 

 

“I would much rather drip ice water in his ear,” Edgar Delchamps said as he stood beside the bed of Roscoe J. Danton. “But we’re a little pressed for time.”

He picked up the foot of Danton’s bed, raised it three feet, and dropped it.

“You sonsofbitches!” Mr. Danton said upon being roused from his slumber.

He sat up suddenly, and then pushed himself back against the headboard.

“Rise and shine, Roscoe,” David W. Yung, Jr., said.

“How the hell did you two get in here?” Danton demanded.

“And good morning to you, too, Roscoe,” Delchamps said.

“The door was open,” Yung said.

Mr. Danton’s door came equipped—in addition to the locking mechanism that came with the knob—with two dead bolts, both of which Danton was sure he had set.

“How did you get through the lobby?” Danton challenged. “Or into the garage?”

“There didn’t seem to be anyone on duty,” Delchamps said. “Up and at ’em, Roscoe. Before we go out to Langley I want to pick up a little liquid courage at the Old Ebbitt Grill. They serve a magnificent Bloody Mary.”

“I’m not going out to Langley,” Roscoe said.

“And we have to talk about your million dollars,” Yung said.

Danton eyed Yung.
What did he say?

Roscoe J. Danton was a little embarrassed to privately admit that he was more than a little afraid of both men. While he didn’t think David W. Yung, Jr., was capable of the sort of violence attributed to Edgar Delchamps, on the other hand, Yung’s peers—that was to say, others in Castillo’s Merry Band of Outlaws—called him Two-Gun, and Roscoe didn’t think they’d just plucked that out of thin air.

“Time, Roscoe, is of the essence,” Delchamps said. “Remember to wash behind your ears.”

 

 

Roscoe had some time—not much—to once again think his situation over during his ablutions.

He had come close to what President Clendennen derisively called “Castillo’s Merry Band of Outlaws” in the practice of his profession, which was to say running down a story. That was a bona fide journalistic accomplishment; he was the only journalist ever to do so, and Roscoe took some justifiable pride in his having done so.

Among other things, it had resulted in a page-one, above-the-fold story in
The Washington Times-Post
:

The problem was that Roscoe not only knew the backstory, which he had not written about, but had been part of it. He knew, for example, that the President had been known to refer to Montvale as “Ambassador Stupid, director of National Ignorance.” He also knew that President Clendennen, shortly after taking office, had ordered Montvale’s “Red Phone”—which provided instant access to the President and cabinet heads—shut off, and canceled Montvale’s access to the White House fleet of limousines and GMC Yukons, in the hope that this would encourage Montvale to resign, so that he could appoint CIA Director John Powell—who
could
, in the President’s judgment, find his ass with both hands—to replace him.

He also knew, for example, that President Clendennen had named Ambassador Montvale to be his Vice President not as a reward for the intelligence coup, or because of his admiration for him, but because the alternative had been the virtually certain indictment of the President by the House of Representatives quickly followed by an impeachment trial in the Senate.

Danton knew that the delivery of the Tupelov Tu-934A into the hands of the CIA had almost been a sideshow to what had really happened: Shortly before Clendennen had become President on the sudden death of his predecessor—an aortal aneurysm had ruptured— the United States had launched a preemptive strike on a biological warfare manufactory in the Congo.

The manufactory and everything within at least two square miles around it had been bombed and incinerated with every aerial weapon in the American arsenal except nuclear. It was believed this action had removed all of an incredibly lethal substance known as Congo-X from the planet.

This assessment was proven false when FedEx delivered several liters of Congo-X to the Army’s Medical Research Institute of Infectious Disease—the euphemism for Biological Warfare Laboratories—at Fort Detrick, Maryland. This was shortly followed by the discovery of another several liters of the substance by Border Patrol agents just inside the U.S.-Mexico border.

And this was shortly followed by the SVR
rezident
in Washington, Sergei Murov, inviting A. Franklin Lammelle, then the CIA’s deputy director of operations, for drinks at the Russian embassy’s dacha on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

There he proposed a deal: The Russians would turn over all the Congo-X in their possession in exchange for the former SVR
rezident
in Berlin, Colonel Dmitri Berezovsky, and his sister, Lieutenant Colonel Svetlana Alekseeva, the former SVR
rezident
in Copenhagen, who had not only defected with the assistance of Lieutenant Colonel C. G. Castillo but had also spilled the beans to Colonel Castillo about the “Fish Farm” in the Congo. The Russians also wanted Colonel Castillo.