W. E. B. Griffin - Presidential Agent 07 (8 page)

When this proposal was brought to the attention of President Clendennen, he thought the deal made a great deal of sense, and ordered that it be concluded. When informed that Colonel Berezovsky and Lieutenant Colonel Alekseeva were not in the hands of the CIA, but in Argentina, with Colonel Castillo, who flatly refused to turn them over to the CIA, President Clendennen ordered Director of National Intelligence Montvale to send all the alphabet agencies of the intelligence community to find them and see that they were all loaded aboard the next available Aeroflot flight to Moscow.

Frederick P. Palmer, the United States attorney general, later described this action as being of “mind-boggling illegality,” and suggested that if anything beyond President Clendennen’s caving in to the Russians was needed to convince the House of Representatives that articles of impeachment were in order, this would do it.

And the story would have come out. The simultaneous offered resignations of Secretary of State Cohen, Director of National Intelligence Montvale, General Naylor, and even presidential spokesman Porky Parker could not be swept under the rug, even if a sense of duty might keep those resigning from making public why they could no longer serve President Clendennen.

Attorney General Palmer, however, argued that the country could not take another impeachment scandal, and that it was their duty to stay in office, with the caveats that the President appoint Montvale as Vice President, that the President ask for DCI Powell’s resignation, and that he make other changes in the senior leadership that they considered necessary.

The President, having no alternative but impeachment, quickly agreed.

 

 

Roscoe Danton, running down the rumor that Lieutenant Colonel Castillo had snatched two Russian defectors from the CIA station chief in Vienna, had first encountered members of the Merry Band of Outlaws in Argentina during the time the alphabet agencies were looking for him.

Without quite knowing how it had happened, he had wound up in Mexico embroiled in Colonel Castillo’s Merry Outlaws’ current operation.

Castillo had learned that the Congo-X the Border Patrol had found just inside the Texas-Mexico border had been flown to Mexico in a Tupelov Tu-934A, and that the aircraft, presumably carrying more Congo-X, was on an air base on Venezuela’s La Orchila Island. He launched an operation to grab both the aircraft and the Congo-X.

Roscoe J. Danton had been aboard one of the Black Hawk helicopters that landed on La Orchila Island. He had not been sure then, and was not sure now, whether he was there as a courageous journalist following a story no matter where it led, or whether he was a craven coward who believed the Merry Outlaws when they made their little joke, “Now that you know that, Roscoe, we’ll have to kill you”—and actually might have done so had he not climbed aboard the Black Hawk.

Danton had managed to convince himself, before he had been so rudely awakened, that he had been more the professional journalist than professional coward. He had come to this conclusion after deciding that President Clendennen was a miserable sonofabitch for trying to swap Dmitri and Sweaty—who had also been on the Black Hawk—and Charley Castillo to the Russians.

“After the island,” when he saw Castillo and Colonel Jake Torine preparing to fly the Tupelov Tu-934A to Andrews Air Force Base, he realized that he had been accepted by the Merry Outlaws as one of their own.

There were advantages to this—for example, he had been given a CaseyBerry, over which the secretary of State had given him the scoop about the murders and kidnapping in Mexico—and he could see a cornucopia of other news that would come his way in the future.

But there were manifold disadvantages to his being a professional journalist that he could see as well.

As Roscoe pulled on his shorts in his bedroom, he said: “Guys, I really don’t want to go out there. Why? Wolf News will carry the President’s press conference from the first line of bullshit to the last.”

“You’re going, Roscoe,” Yung said. “Charley wants you to go.”

“When you get down to it, guys, I’m really not one of you.”

“Charley thinks you are,” Yung said. “That’s good enough for the executive combat pay committee.”

“For the what?”

“The executive combat pay committee,” Delchamps replied. “Two-Gun, Alex Darby, and me. We’re the ones who pass out the combat pay.”

Yung added, “The committee asked Charley, ‘What about Roscoe?’ And Charley replied, ‘He was on the island, wasn’t he?’ ”

“I was on the island as a journalist,” Roscoe replied. “A neutral, non-combatant observer.”

But Danton thought,
Shit, I don’t believe that.

“If that was the case,” Delchamps said, “we’d have to kill you. You know too much.”

“And if we killed you, then you wouldn’t get the million,” Yung said.

“What fucking million?”

“I could set up a trust fund for your kids, I suppose,” Yung said thoughtfully.

“What fucking million?”
Roscoe demanded as he rummaged through his tie rack.

“Shooters,” Delchamps said, “roughly defined as everybody who went to the island, get a million. Plus, of course, everybody who went into the Congo. Charley, Sweaty, and Dmitri opted out.”

Roscoe had a sudden, very clear flashback to what had happened several years before at the National Press Club.

Somebody had jumped on Frank Cesno, then high up in CNN’s Washington Bureau—and a hell of a journalist—about the recent tendency of TV journalists to paint themselves as absolutely neutral when covering a war.

“Otherwise, both sides would think of us as spies, not journalists,” Cesno had announced, more than a little piously.

Whereupon he had been shot out of the saddle by Admiral Stans-field Turner, who had been director of the CIA under Jimmy Carter.

“Frank,” the admiral had said, “what do you think the Russians or the North Koreans—
or anybody
—think when they look at someone like you? Noble member of the Fourth Estate or spy?”

“David,” Roscoe J. Danton inquired, “how much of a bite would the IRS take from that million?”

 

 

Auditorium Three, unofficially known as the Director’s Auditorium, was a multipurpose room which could be used as a small theater capable of hosting forty people in theater-style seating and another eight in more elegant seats in the front row, each provided with a small table and a telephone. It could also be used as a dining room capable of feeding as many as sixty people, with five tables, each seating a dozen guests.

It was secure, which caused it also to be known as the Director’s Bubble, which meant that great effort was expended just about daily to ensure that nothing said or seen in the room could possibly be heard or seen anywhere else.

That sort of security wasn’t a consideration today, where what was to be said by President Joshua Ezekiel Clendennen would be heard and viewed in real time all over the world.

There was security, of course. Not only was this the headquarters of the CIA, but the President of the United States was going to be there. As were the Vice President, the secretary of State, and other very senior officials.

There are so many Secret Service guys in here,
Roscoe J. Danton thought as he entered Auditorium Three,
that they’re falling all over each other.

Edgar Delchamps and Two-Gun Yung had dropped off Danton at the main entrance, saying they’d wait for him in the parking garage, which caused Danton to again recall the allegation—which he believed—that Delchamps had taken out a CIA traitor in the parking garage by inserting an ice pick into his auditory canal, thereby saving the Agency from the embarrassment that trying the sonofabitch would have caused.

Some
of the White House Press Corps filled most of the seats in the auditorium. There were far more members of that elite body than there were seats for them here today.

When Roscoe had shown his White House Press Corps credentials to the first of three security points—the “outside” one, near the main entrance—one of Lammelle’s security people had handed him another credential, this one a plastic-sealed card on what Roscoe thought of as a “beaded dog tag chain.” He looked at it. It held his photo and the legend PRESIDENTIAL PRESS CONFERENCE AT CIA HEADQUARTERS
1100
APRIL
12
TH
2007
.

“You’re on the reserved-seating list, Mr. Danton,” the man said.

Roscoe found this interesting, because before he had been so rudely awakened, he had had no intention of coming out here today and hadn’t asked for credentials, let alone a reserved-seat reservation.

He knew the protocol for events like this, at which there would be far more seats requested by members of the White House Press Corps than were available. The “host”—in this case, Frank Lammelle—and Porky Parker would put their heads together and decide who got in. And who would have to wait outside, fuming.

Roscoe intuited that he was on the reserved-seating list because of Lammelle, not Porky Parker. While he had no problems with Porky, Porky could be expected to hand out reserved seats to the elite of the White House Press Corps, and Roscoe knew that he wasn’t a member of that elite. Close, but no golden ring.

And he further intuited that it was due to his new status as a member—however uncomfortable—of the Merry Outlaws. At the beginning, Frank Lammelle had headed the CIA delegation of the alphabet agencies looking for Charley Castillo.

Lammelle even had an air-powered dart gun—

—with which he planned to tranquilize Castillo so that he would be amenable to being loaded aboard the Moscow-bound Aeroflot plane.

After Vic D’Alessandro—
surprise, surprise!—
had shot Lammelle with Lammelle’s own Super Agent Whiz Bang air gun in Cancún—where his pursuit of Castillo had taken him—Lammelle had awakened in the middle of a desert in Mexico, at a secret airfield the Merry Outlaws had dubbed Drug Cartel International.

There, when he saw what Castillo’s Merry Outlaws were doing, and compared it to what the President was trying to do to Castillo, Lammelle had changed sides. He hadn’t gone to the Venezuelan island but had made a large, maybe even essential, contribution to the operation.

If I have a CaseyBerry,
Roscoe thought,
you can bet your ass Castillo gave Lammelle one. And I can hear Castillo calling Lammelle on it, and asking, “Frank, can you get Roscoe into that press conference?”

When Roscoe passed through two more security points and finally got into Auditorium Three, a uniformed CIA security officer took a close look at his new presidential press conference credentials and showed him to a seat where he was buried between fellow members of the White House Press Corps. He had half expected to be seated in one of the VIP seats in front. He saw that Andy McClarren of Wolf News and C. Harry Whelan, Jr., had been so honored.

Roscoe glanced at the open laptop computer of his seat mate, Pierre Schiff, of
L’Humanité
, and helpfully suggested that for about ten bucks, Schiff could go to Radio Shack and buy a screen that would keep people from seeing what was on his laptop screen.