Hazardous Duty

[ONE]

In the parking garage, Roscoe J. Danton stepped off the elevator and, his heart full of pleasant anticipation for what was shortly to follow, walked briskly toward his automobile.

First, just as soon as he unlocked the door and got in, his nostrils would be assailed by the smell of the fine leather in his new 2007 Jaguar XJR, a present to himself the day after he deposited his million-dollar-after-taxes bonus from the LCBF Corporation. Next, he would have the pleasure of driving this automotive masterpiece on a beautiful spring day across town to the Old Ebbitt Grill, where he would partake of his regular breakfast of Chesapeake Bay eggs Benedict (succulent lumps of blue crab meat in place of the usual leathery Canadian bacon served by lesser establishments) washed down with one — or perhaps two — Bloody Marys.

None of this was to happen.

Just as he was putting the key in the door of his automobile, a familiar voice spoke to him.

“Good morning, Mr. Danton. And how are you, sir, on this fine spring morning?”

Roscoe turned and saw Supervisory Special Agent Robert J. Mulligan of the Secret Service, head of President Clendennen’s security detail.

“What can I do for you, Mulligan?” Roscoe asked.

“Actually, sir, this is a question of what Mr. Robin Hoboken can do for you.”

“Like what, for instance?”

“Mr. Hoboken did not elect to share that with me, Mr. Danton,” the massive Irishman said. “He sent me to offer you a ride to the White House, where he is waiting for you, sir.”

“Please tell Mr. Hoboken that while I appreciate his courtesy, unfortunately my schedule is such…”

Several things then occurred with astonishing rapidity.

Mr. Mulligan raised his hand above his head.

A GMC Yukon Denali with darkened windows suddenly appeared. Two muscular men erupted from it, grabbed Roscoe’s arms, lifted him off the ground, carried him to the Yukon, and deposited him in the backseat.

Supervisory Special Agent Mulligan got in the front seat and the Yukon started off.

“What the hell is going on here?” Roscoe demanded.

“Actually, Mr. Danton, it’s the President who wants to see you. I didn’t want to say that where there was a chance I might be overheard.”

[TWO]

“Good morning, Roscoe,” President Clendennen said cordially. “I really appreciate your coming here on such short notice.” Then he ordered, “Put Mr. Danton down, fellas, get him a cup of coffee, and then get the hell out.”

The Secret Service agents carried Roscoe to an armchair and dropped him into it. Supervisory Special Agent Mulligan held open the door as they left, then closed it after them, and crossed his arms as he leaned on it.

“I hope you didn’t have to interrupt anything important to come here, Roscoe,” the President said. “The thing is, Robin and I had what we think is a splendid idea, and we wanted to share it with you as soon as possible.”

Hoboken said: “I’m sure you remember asking me, Roscoe, if the President — you referred to him as ‘the leader of the free world’—had given me ‘anything else about his out-of-the-box thinking about his unrelenting wars against the drug trade and piracy, to be slipped to you when no one else was looking.’”

“Clearly,” Roscoe admitted.

“Well, Roscoe,” the President said, “no one’s looking now. Mulligan makes sure of that.”

“Now this is sort of delicate, Roscoe,” Hoboken said. “By that I mean if anything came out — by that I mean, if anything came out prematurely—in the interest of national security, the President would have to — by that I mean, I would have to, speaking for the President, as we don’t want to involve him at all — deny any knowledge of it at all. You understand that, of course.”

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” Danton confessed.

“What he means, Roscoe,” the President said, “is that this is just between us. Okay?”

“What is just between us, Mr. President?” Danton asked.

“My out-of-the-box thinking that you asked him about.”

“And what exactly is that?”

“What would you say if I told you that I have decided to enlist the services of Lieutenant Colonel Castillo in my war against the Mexicans and the Somalians.”

“Your war against the Mexicans and the Somalians?”

“What the President meant to say, Roscoe,” Hoboken interjected, “is the Mexican drug cartels and the Somalian pirates. President Clendennen has absolutely nothing against the Mexican or Somalian people. Quite the opposite—”

“Roscoe knows that, for Christ’s sake,” the President said. “So, what do you think, Roscoe?”

“What do I think about what?”

“About getting Colonel Castillo’s opinion of the Mexican and Somalian problems.”

“What the President meant to say—” Robin Hoboken began.

“Roscoe knows what I meant,” the President interrupted. “Well, Roscoe?”

“I would say you have two problems, Mr. President,” Roscoe said. “The first is to find Colonel Castillo, and then to get him to agree to do what you want him to do.”

“A representative of General Naylor is going to meet with Castillo either late today or early tomorrow,” the President said. “He will relay to him my request that he enter upon temporary active duty to do what I want him to do.”

“That’s very interesting, Mr. President.”

“And as I’m sure you know, Roscoe, I’m the Commander in Chief, and Castillo is a retired officer so that ‘request’ is more in the nature of an order than a ‘pretty please.’”

“I suppose that’s true, Mr. President.”

“Now here’s where you fit in, Roscoe,” the President said.

“The President likes you, Roscoe,” Robin Hoboken said. “You must know that. He wouldn’t think of fitting anyone else in the White House Press Corps in. He told me that when I went to him and told him you had asked me if he had anything about his out-of-the-box thinking he wanted me to slip to you when no one else was looking. He said, correct me if I’m wrong, Mr. President, ‘It has to be old Roscoe who fits in, or nobody.’”

“That’s what I said,” the President confirmed. “And I’m sure you understand that when I said ‘old Roscoe’ it was a figure of speech. I don’t know exactly how old you are, Roscoe, but you certainly look younger than that. What I should have said was, ‘It has to be young Roscoe who fits in, or nobody.’”

“Fits in where, Mr. President?” Roscoe asked.

“You tell young Roscoe, Robin,” the President said.

“You probably have been wondering, Roscoe, what you may do for your President, not what your President can do for you, but if so, you’re wrong. This is a case where we’re going to tell you what the President is going to do for you, and later, what you can do for President Clendennen.”

“Which is?”

“I’m going to arrange for you to be with Colonel Castillo on this mission,” the President said. “Wherever it takes him, Mexico, Somalia, wherever.”

“I don’t think that Colonel Castillo would be agreeable to that, Mr. President,” Roscoe said.

“And while you’re with him you can keep the Commander in Chief and me up-to-date on how things are going,” Robin Hoboken added.

“I don’t think Colonel Castillo would be agreeable to me going along with him, Mr. President, and—”

“He was agreeable to you going along with him when he nearly got us into a war with Venezuela by invading their island and stealing that Russian airplane, so why not now? Besides, I’m not going to suggest he take you along; I’m going to tell him.”

“‘Whither Colonel Castillo goeth, thou wilt go,’ so to speak,” Robin contributed.

“… and,” Roscoe continued after a moment, “I know he won’t want me making reports on how, or what, he’s doing.”

“He doesn’t have to know about that,” the President said. “As a matter of fact, it would be better if he didn’t. Keep that part of this under your hat.”

Roscoe gathered his courage.

“Mr. President, I’m honored and flattered—”

“Why don’t you wait until the Commander in Chief tells you what he’s going to do for you before you thank him?” Robin asked, just a little sharply. “That way you would know what you’re thanking him for.”

“Robin and I are going to make sure, Roscoe,” the President said, “that as an expression of our appreciation for your cooperation in this matter, no one else will have the story. If I’m not mistaken, I think they call that a ‘scoop.’

“When it comes out — and it will — that my out-of-the-box thinking has caused significant advances in my unending war against the Mexicans and the Somalians—”

“The President meant to say, of course,” Robin interjected, “his war against the Mexican drug cartels and the Somalian pirates. As I said a moment ago, the President has nothing but the highest regard for the people of Somalia and Mexico.”

“Roscoe knows that, for Christ’s sake,” the President said, somewhat snappily. “Why do you have to keep telling him?”

“I thought, Mr. President, that it was better to repeat it, in case it had slipped Roscoe’s mind.”

“Do you know what a cretin is, Roscoe?”

“Yes, sir. A high-level moron.”

“And I’ll bet that someone like you knows what a rhetorical question is. Right?”

“I think so, Mr. President.”

“Sometime when you have a spare moment, Roscoe, you might tell Robin.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll be happy to.”

“As I was saying, Roscoe, when it comes out that we’re making significant advances against the drug cartels and the pirates, the press will wonder how that happened. They will ask questions, and I will tell them. A week after I tell you you can write the story about my out-of-the-box thinking. And you write the story. Now, is that a scoop, or isn’t it?”

“Yes, sir. That would be a scoop,” Roscoe replied. He found his courage again. “Mr. President, I can’t go along with this.”

“You know what would happen, Roscoe, if you refused an offer like this from your Commander in Chief?”

“No, sir.”

“A couple of things come immediately to mind,” the President said. “Like, for example, I ask your pal C. Harry Whelan to come see me, the way I asked you. And I tell ol’ C. Harry that I first thought of you to provide this service to your Commander in Chief, but then I heard something that really shocked me about you.”

“What would that be, Mr. President?”

“I wouldn’t make any wild accusations, of course, but I would tell ol’ C. Harry that I heard that the IRS was looking into the one million dollars you recently deposited into your account at the Riggs National Bank and ask him if he had heard that your columns were for sale to the highest bidder. I sort of think that would excite ol’ C. Harry’s journalistic curiosity, don’t you, Roscoe?

“I’d tell ol’ C. Harry I didn’t believe for a second that the million dollars had come from Somalian pirates and/or Mexican drug lords, but you never know, and the IRS was going to find out. And suggest to him that if he found out where that money had come from before the IRS did, he’d have two scoops.”

The President let that sink in a moment.

“‘Don’t make any hasty decisions’ has always been my motto, Roscoe,” the President went on. He turned to Supervisory Special Agent Mulligan. “Get those two goons of yours to take Mr. Danton back to the Watergate. He’s got some thinking to do.”

He turned back to Roscoe Danton.

“Give me a call, Roscoe. Before five, and tell me what you’ve decided to do.”

[THREE]

If it had been anyone else but Miss Louise Chambers, the silver-haired septuagenarian who proposed the motto for Lorimer Manor and rammed it through the Management Committee and then insisted it be applied, there probably would have been no motto.

“Ask not what Lorimer Manor can do for you, but what you can do for Lorimer Manor” sounded socialist at best, the naysayers complained.

But Miss Chambers prevailed, in large part because she had early on enlisted the support of Mr. Edgar Delchamps. It was whispered about that she had plied him with most of a half-gallon of twenty-four-year-old Dewar’s Scotch whisky before seeking his support, but however she got it, she had it.

And while the personal courage of the ladies and gentlemen of Lorimer Manor, all of whom were retired from the Clandestine Service of the CIA, could not be questioned, none of them was willing to take on the most carnivorous of all their fellow dinosaurs, as Miss Chambers and Mr. Delchamps were universally recognized to be.

What Edgar Delchamps decided he could do for Lorimer Manor was enlist the contribution of someone who was not a resident of Lorimer Manor, but who had laid his head on one of its pillows often in the past and was sure to do so again in the future.

He went to David W. Yung, Junior, and announced, “Louise Chambers tells me she has a hole in her schedule, noon on the first Friday of each month, so you’re elected.”

“Excuse me?”

“You know Louise is chairwoman of the Lorimer Education and Recreation Committee, right?”

“So what?”

“I told you: She has a hole in her schedule, which you’re going to fill by either doing magic tricks — pulling a rabbit out of a hat, for example — or delivering some sort of educational lecture.”

“Why should I do that? I don’t live there.”

“Because you’re interested in the welfare and morale of the senior citizens, and also because if you don’t, Louise will booby-trap your new electric automatic flushing toilet. She was very good at that sort of thing in her prime.”

“As a matter of fact, there is something I could talk to the old folks about, but you’d have to help me.”

“Help you how?” Delchamps inquired dubiously.

“Move charts onto the easel, that sort of thing.”

“What the hell, Two-Gun, why not?”

Edgar Delchamps was arranging charts and diagrams on the easel and David W. Yung, Junior, Esquire, was standing at his lectern preparing to deliver this month’s lecture, “How to Turn the Gaping Gaps in the IRS Code to Your Advantage,” to the ladies and gentlemen residing in Lorimer Manor when Miss Louise Chambers got quickly out of her La-Z-Boy recliner, walked to his lectern, and whispered in his ear.

“David, dear,” the elegantly attired septuagenarian said, “I think you and Edgar should see to your journalist friend. It appears to me that something has him scared shitless.”

Two-Gun looked at the door to the recreation room, saw Roscoe J. Danton’s face, and immediately agreed with Miss Chambers’s analysis of the situation.

“You’ll have to excuse me a moment,” he announced to his audience, and started toward the door. Miss Chambers and Mr. Delchamps followed him.

“What’s up, Roscoe?” Two-Gun asked.

“You two bastards got me into this mess,” Roscoe replied. “And you sonsofbitches are going to have to get me out of it!” He heard what he had said, and added, “Please excuse the language, ma’am.”

“Hell, a man who doesn’t swear is like a soldier who won’t… you know what,” Louise said. “And you know what Patton said about soldiers who won’t you know what.”

“Tell us exactly what’s bothering you,” Delchamps said.

“I was kidnapped,” Roscoe announced.

“Who kidnapped you, dear?” Louise asked.

“The Secret Service,” Roscoe announced.

“But you got away, obviously,” Louise said. “Good for you!”

“Why did the Secret Service kidnap you?” Two-Gun asked.

“The President told them to.”

“Cutting to the chase, Roscoe,” Delchamps said, “why did the President tell the Secret Service to kidnap you?”

Roscoe told them.

“Frankly, Roscoe,” Delchamps said, “I don’t see that as much of a problem.”

“Actually, I would suggest that it offers a number of interesting opportunities, scenario-wise,” Louise said.

“That’s because the President is not sending you two to Mogadishu,” Roscoe said. “With the choice between lying to the President or having Castillo kill me for telling the truth.”

“Well, I’ll admit that Mogadishu isn’t Paris,” Louise said, “but the current scenario sees Charley going to Budapest before he goes to Mogadishu. I’ve always loved Budapest.”

“Roscoe, you know that Charley’s not going to kill you unless he has a good reason,” Delchamps said. “But since you’re concerned, what we’ll do is see what our so-far-unindicted co-conspirators have to say.”

He took his CaseyBerry from his pocket and punched the buttons that set up a conference call between the secretary of State, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and himself. He also activated the speakerphone function.

When green LEDs indicated the circuit was complete, he said, “Langley, Foggy Bottom, this is Mission Control. We may have a little problem.”

Neither Secretary Cohen nor DCI Lammelle saw any great problems in Roscoe’s situation. To the contrary, Mr. Lammelle saw it as a great opportunity to provide the President with disinformation.

“I don’t see where Roscoe has any choice but to do what the President wants him to do,” Secretary Cohen said.

“Except tell him what’s really going on, of course,” Lammelle said.

“Looking at Roscoe’s face,” Delchamps said, “I suspect he’s considering another alternative. Like, for example, going to the President, telling him what’s really going on, and placing himself, so to speak, at the mercy of the dingbat in the Oval Office.”

Roscoe, who had in fact been considering that alternative, did not reply.

“You know what would happen in that happenstance, Roscoe?” Delchamps asked rhetorically. “Two things. One, the President would tell you to join Charley and do what he told you to do. Two, Sweaty would consider that what you had done had placed her Carlos in danger and she would come after you with her otxokee mecto nanara.”

“With her what?”

“It means latrine shovel,” Louise explained. “I don’t know about you, dear, but I wouldn’t want any woman, much less a former SVR podpolkovnik protecting her beloved, coming after me with an otxokee mecto nanara.”

Thirty minutes later, after his third stiff drink of twelve-year-old Macallan single malt Scotch whisky, Roscoe called the White House, asked for and was connected with the President, and then read from the sheet of paper on which Edgar Delchamps had written his suggestions vis-à-vis what Roscoe should tell the Commander in Chief:

“Mr. President, sir, after serious consideration, I have decided to accept your kind offer to serve my Commander in Chief to the best of my ability.”

He did not read the last four words Mr. Delchamps had suggested: “So help me God.” That was just too much.

[FOUR]

General Sergei Murov had known when, in February, he had been relieved of his duties as cultural counselor of the embassy of the Russian Federation in Washington, D.C., and ordered home that he stood a very good chance of being summarily executed.

His family has been intelligence officers serving the motherland for more than three hundred years, starting with Ivan the Terrible’s Special Section, and then in the Cheka, the OGPU, the NKVD, the KGB, and finally the SVR. He knew the price of failure, even when that failure was not due to something one did wrong.

It was presumed that if there was a failure, and if it wasn’t due to someone doing something wrong, it was because someone had not done what should have been done.

General — then-Colonel — Murov’s failure had nothing to do with culture. He had been the SVR’s man, the rezident, in Washington. His cultural counselor title had been his cover. It had been no secret to the FBI or the CIA, or even to some members of the Washington Press Corps, that he been the ranking member of the SVR in the United States. A. Franklin Lammelle, then the deputy director for operations of the CIA, had met his Aeroflot flight from Moscow at Dulles, greeted him warmly, and told him he thought it appropriate he greet the new rezident in person, as they would be “working together.”

Murov knew he was more than likely going to be held responsible for not doing what should have been done to prevent the failure of several of the most important kinds of operations, defined as those conceived and ordered executed by Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin himself.

Those operations had turned out disastrously. The first was intended to show the world, and, perhaps more importantly, the SVR itself, that Putin was back running the SVR and that the SVR was to be feared. It called for the assassination of people — a police official in Argentina; a CIA asset in Vienna; and a journalist in Germany — who had gotten in the way of the SVR in one way or another, followed by the assassinations of the publisher and the owner of the Tages Zeitung newspaper chain.

The latter was so important to Putin that he ordered the Berlin rezident to take personal control of the action.

Only the CIA asset and the journalist lost their lives. The Berlin rezident and his sister, who had been the Copenhagen rezident, not only defected but tipped off the Americans to a secret biological warfare operation run by the SVR in the Congo. The Americans promptly bombed the Congo operation into oblivion. The Vienna rezident responsible for the CIA asset elimination was found garroted to death outside the American embassy in Vienna.

In an attempt to double down, Putin then ordered General Vladimir Sirinov of the SVR to exchange a small quantity of the biological warfare substance, dubbed Congo-X, for the two rezidents who had defected, and the American intelligence officer who had aided their defection.

That, too, had turned out to be a disaster for him. The American intelligence officer who was supposed to have been kidnapped and taken to Russia, instead staged a raid on a Venezuelan island where Sirinov was waiting. He left the island in the highly secret Tupolev Tu-934A airplane Sirinov had flown from Russia, taking with him the Congo-X and Sirinov. On landing in Washington, General Sirinov, whom Putin expected to commit suicide under such conditions, instead placed himself under the protection of the CIA and began to sing, as the Americans so aptly put it, like a lovesick canary.

Colonel Sergei Murov was responsible for nothing that caused the multiple disasters. But he had done nothing, either, that might have caused the disasters not to happen.

That was enough, in his really solemn judgment, to earn him a bullet behind the ear in the basement of that infamous building on Lubyanka Square. Or at least an extended stay in Siberia cutting down trees and feasting on bean soup twice a day.

But that hadn’t happened.

General Vladimir Sirinov’s treason had been Murov’s salvation. Vladimir Vladimirovich had sent for Murov the day after he returned to Moscow, greeted him like an old friend — which in fact he was — and told him that he was going to “have to pick up the pieces and get what has to be done finally done.”

Murov was appointed to replace Sirinov as first director of the SVR, and his promotion to general came through the day he actually moved into Sirinov’s old office.

Vladimir Vladimirovich didn’t have to tell him specifically what he wanted; Murov knew. Vladimir Vladimirovich wanted former SVR Polkovnik Dmitri Berezovsky; his sister, former SVR Podpolkovnik Svetlana Alekseeva, and Lieutenant Colonel Carlos G. Castillo, USA, Retired, in one of the rooms in the basement of the building on Lubyanka Square. He would be barely satisfied to hear they were dead, even if they were disposed of with great imagination — for example, skinned alive and then roasted while hanging head down over a small fire.

Vladimir Vladimirovich wanted them alive.

Murov didn’t think getting all three in the bag was going to be that difficult. He thought the negatives involved were outweighed by the positives.

The negatives were that none of the three were naïve about the SVR. They knew its capabilities and would be prepared for them. The “extended families”—Aleksandr Pevsner and Nicolai Tarasov in the case of Berezovsky and Alekseeva; Castillo’s former associates in the American intelligence community — would have to be dealt with, of course. That wouldn’t be easy. Both Pevsner and Tarasov were former colonels in the KGB, which had evolved into the SVR. Pevsner had what amounted not only to a private army but a private army of former KGB people and Spetsnaz officers and soldiers of unquestioned loyalty to him.

Murov not only had no one inside Pevsner’s estate in Bariloche, his home outside Buenos Aires, or even in the Grand Cozumel Beach & Golf Resort in Mexico, or for that matter on any of the vessels of his fleet of cruise ships, he had little hope of getting someone inside Pevsner’s organization. All attempts to get people inside, which dated from the earliest days, had resulted in dead operatives.

Only once, when a former FBI agent in Pevsner’s employ had been turned by the offer of a great deal of money, had there been even a suggestion of success in that area. Pevsner’s assassination had been set up but had failed when the American, Castillo, got wind of it and ambushed the ambushers. The former FBI agent had been slowly beaten to death, possibly by Aleksandr Pevsner himself, in the Conrad, a gambling resort in Punta del Este, Uruguay.

Getting at any of them when they were traveling was made next to impossible, as they traveled only by aircraft owned by Pevsner or Tarasov. Or, in the case of Castillo, on aircraft he owned or were owned by Panamanian Executive Aircraft, which he controlled, the crews of which were all former members of the USAF Special Operations Command—“Air Commandos”—or the U.S. Army’s 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment.

On the other hand, there were some things that almost certainly were going to make things easier. The most significant of these was the incredible stupidity of Lieutenant Colonel Castillo. He fancied himself to be in love with former SVR Podpolkovnik Alekseeva.

When he’d first heard that, Murov had had a hard time believing it. Getting emotionally involved with someone with whom one was professionally involved was something an intelligence officer — and giving the devil his due, Colonel Castillo was an extraordinarily good intelligence officer — simply did not do.

But it was true. The fool actually wanted to marry her. The proof was there. The Widow Alekseeva had gone to the head of the Orthodox Church Outside Russia and asked for permission to marry. He in turn had gone to the Patriarch of Moscow. Murov had people there, and Murov had learned of it immediately.

Very conscious that he himself had an emotional, as well as a professional, interest in the players involved — he had known Svetlana and Dmitri Berezovsky since childhood; had in fact had a schoolboy’s crush on Svetlana when he was fourteen, and had been a guest at her wedding when she married Evgeny Alekseev, another childhood friend — Murov had proceeded very cautiously.

He had informed His Beatitude that the circumstances of the death of Evgeny Alekseev — which, of course, had made Svetlana the Widow Alekseeva and freed her to marry — were suspicious. That put the marriage on hold.

The bodies of Lavrenti Tarasov and Evgeny Alekseev had been found near the airport in Buenos Aires. Murov didn’t know the facts. It was possible that they had been killed by the Argentine policeman Liam Duffy as revenge for the failed attempt to assassinate him and his family. Duffy was known to have terminated on the spot individuals he apprehended moving drugs through Argentina. That interference with the SVR operation that funded many operations in South America had been the reason Vladimir Vladimirovich had ordered his termination.

It was also possible that Svetlana or her brother had been involved in the death of her husband. They both knew that the only way Evgeny could have redeemed his own SVR career after her defection was to find and terminate her. The unwritten rule was that if an SVR officer could not control his own wife, how could he control others? So when he had appeared in Argentina, her brother had decided — or she had, or they had — that Evgeny had to go.

That was credible, but Murov thought the most likely scenario was that Colonel Castillo had taken out Evgeny. Doing so would not only have protected Svetlana from Evgeny but make her eligible as a widow to marry him in the church.

Whatever the actuality, Murov’s whispered word in the ear of His Beatitude had resulted in a report from Murov’s people at the wonderfully named Aeropuerto Internacional Teniente Luis Candelaria in Bariloche that His Eminence Archbishop Valentin, the head of ROCOR, and his deputy, the Archimandrite Boris, had flown in there, nonstop from Chicago, in a Gulfstream V aircraft belonging to Chilean Sea Foods, which Murov knew was yet another business formed by Aleksandr Pevsner from the profits of hiding the SVR’s money.

Murov believed that His Eminence would decide there was nothing to the rumors that Svetlana had been involved in the termination of her husband, and the marriage could take place. For one thing, Aleksandr Pevsner’s generosity to ROCOR was well known. For another, Colonel Castillo could credibly say that he had never had the privilege of the acquaintance of his fiancée’s late husband. And if nothing else worked, Dmitri Berezovsky would confess that he had taken out Evgeny to protect his little sister.

All of these factors came together to convince General Murov that his best opportunity to deal with the problem was during the wedding.

It would not be easy, of course. He could not personally go to Bariloche, running the risk of being seen by any of the players, all of whom knew him.

And the team would have to be able to blend, so to speak, into the woodwork, which meant Spanish-speaking terminators would be needed. There were people available in Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay, but Liam Duffy would know who they were and have an eye on them.

That left Cuba and Venezuela. The successor to Hugo Chávez, whom Murov thought of privately as something of a joke, would be more than willing to do what he could for the SVR, but his people were, compared to the Cuban Dirección General de Inteligencia, bumbling amateurs.

Furthermore, earlier on Colonel Castillo had taken out Major Alejandro Vincenzo of the DGI in Uruguay. That was something the Cubans, in particular Fidel’s little brother, Raúl — who before he took over from Fidel had run the DGI — had never forgotten and would love to avenge.

General Murov picked up his telephone and ordered that five seats on the next Aeroflot flight to Havana be reserved for him and his security detail.

He hung up and then picked up the telephone again.

“When you pack me for the Havana trip,” he ordered, “put a case of Kubanskaya with my luggage.”

Not only was Kubanskaya one of the better Russian vodkas — and ol’ Raúl really liked a taste a couple times a day — but he liked to let visiting American progressives read the label and get the idea it was made right there in Cuba.

[FIVE]

“Mr. President,” Supervisory Secret Service Agent Robert J. Mulligan announced, “the secretary of State and the DCI are here.”

“Let them wait five minutes and then escort them in,” President Clendennen ordered.

After consulting his watch, presidential spokesperson Robin Hoboken announced, “That will be at nine-forty, plus a few seconds, Agent Mulligan.”

“Good evening, Mr. President,” Secretary Cohen said, five minutes and seven seconds later.

“What’s he doing here?” the President asked, indicating DCI Lammelle.

“The DCI was with me, Mr. President, when Lieutenant Colonel Naylor’s message was delivered to me. I suggested he come with me in case he might be helpful.”

“Let’s see the message,” the President said.

She handed it to him and he read it, and then passed it to Robin Hoboken.

“Who the hell does he think he is?” the President snapped. “Telling me his conditions?”

He looked at Robin Hoboken in expectation of an answer to his rhetorical question.

When none was forthcoming, the President asked, “What the hell is Sparkling Water?”

“It’s what some people call soda water, Mr. President,” Supervisory Secret Service Agent Mulligan replied. “You know, sir, like scotch and soda.”

In the split second before he was to say something both unkind and rude, the President realized Mulligan had not seen the message.

He turned to DCI Lammelle and said, “You’re the DCI, Lammelle. You’re supposed to know everything. What the hell is Sparkling Water?”

“It’s a contracting firm, sir, one of the better ones.”

“It sounds as if Colonel Castillo wants to build a garage, or put in a swimming pool,” Robin said thoughtfully, “and wants the U.S. government to pay for it. That’s outrageous!”

“Mr. President,” the secretary of State said, “as I’m sure you know, from time to time it is in the best interests of the government, for any number of reasons, not to use a governmental agency, or government employees, to accomplish a specific mission, but rather to turn to the private sector and contract for their services—”

“In other words,” the President interrupted, “Sparkling Water is one of those Rent-a-Spook outfits, right?”

“Yes, sir. You could put it that way,” the secretary said.

“Renting a spook, a good one, that’s pretty expensive, right?” the President asked.

“You get what you pay for, sir,” Lammelle said.

“And this airplane he wants us to rent for him in Panama, that’s going to cost a bundle, too, am I right?”

“I’m afraid so, Mr. President,” Lammelle said.

“And those five-star hotels he wants everybody to stay in,” Robin Hoboken chimed in. “That’s really going to cost a fortune, isn’t it?”

“I wouldn’t say a fortune,” the secretary of State said. “But it will be very expensive.”

“Not a problem,” the President said. “Since this is an intelligence-gathering project, I’ll send the bills to ol’ Truman C. Ellsworth. The director of National Intelligence can figure out who’s going to pay for it — the CIA, the DIA, the FBI, anybody just so it doesn’t come out of the White House budget.”

“Good thinking, Mr. President,” Robin Hoboken said.

“But there are a couple of tiny tweaks to the deal I want to make. First, Colonel Castillo will send me a report not less than once every two days, not less than once every two weeks. And second, tell him he’s going to have to find a seat on that expensive airplane ol’ Truman’s going to rent for him for ol’ Roscoe J. Danton.”

“Excuse me?” the secretary of State asked.

“Wither Castillo goeth, so goeth Roscoe,” the President said. “I made a deal — the nature of which is none of your business — with Danton.” He paused. “You can show these nice people out now, Mulligan.”

[SIX]

A Chrysler van, bearing diplomatic license plates, pulled up before the veranda of the big house, and C. Gregory Damon, who was the chief security officer of the United States embassy in Montevideo, got out. Mr. Damon, who was forty-four years old and a very black-skinned man of African heritage, stood six feet three inches tall and weighed 225 pounds.

He bounded agilely up the steps to the veranda and said, “Good morning, Mr. Ambassador.”

“Damon,” Ambassador Philippe Lorimer, Retired — a seventy-four-year-old very black-skinned man of African heritage who stood five feet four inches tall and weighed 135 pounds — replied. “It’s always a pleasure to welcome you to Shangri-La.”

Mr. Damon walked to Lieutenant Colonel Allan B. Naylor, Junior, said, “You must be Naylor. I know these other three clowns,” and handed him a manila envelope.

The three clowns to whom he referred were Chief Warrant Officer Five Colin Leverette, USA, Retired, a forty-five-year-old, very black-skinned man of African heritage who stood six feet two inches tall and weighed 210 pounds; Major H. Richard Miller, Junior, USA, Retired, a thirty-six-year-old, six-foot-two, 220-pound, very dark-skinned man of African heritage; and Lieutenant Colonel Carlos G. Castillo, USA, Retired, who was not only not of African heritage but whose fair skin didn’t even suggest he might be of Spanish heritage.

Colonel Naylor took the envelope, extracted a single sheet of paper from it, read it, and handed it to Colonel Castillo.

Castillo read the message and handed it to Mr. Leverette.

“Well, Uncle Remus, now we know what she told us on the CaseyBerry last night,” he said. “But not what this business about Roscoe is all about.”

“I’m sure he will tell us when he gets here,” Leverette said.

“And I’m sure someone is going to tell me what this Southern Cone meeting of the NAACP is all about,” C. Gregory Damon said.

“We really don’t want that word to get out in the State Department, Greg,” Castillo said. “And since you’ve put on those striped pants and thus abandoned your friends in the special ops community…”

“With all possible respect, Colonel, sir,” Mr. Damon said, and gave Castillo the finger.

“We have returned to where it all began to start again,” Castillo said, “for a period not to exceed ninety days. I’m on a recruiting mission. Are you interested?”

“Hell no, I’m not interested. You’ve recruited me before, and every time I went along, people tried to kill me. And what do you mean, ‘where it all began’?”

“If I told you, Greg, I’d have to kill you,” Castillo said. “You know about the rule.”

Leverette shook his head.

“Remember,” he said, “when Jack the Stack Masterson got kidnapped and then whacked?”

Damon nodded. “You and I were in Afghanistan.”

“And Charley and Dick here had just left Afghanistan, Dick on a medical evacuation flight — he’d dumped his bird — and Charley under something of a cloud for stealing a bird and going to pick him up where he’d dumped the bird and after he’d been given a direct order not to try it.”

“I heard about that,” Damon said.

“McNab saved his ass by getting him assigned to the head of Homeland Security in Washington as an interpreter and canapé passer.”

“I hadn’t heard that.”

“Did you know that Jack the Stack was Ambassador Lorimer’s son-in-law?” Leverette asked.

“Secretary Cohen told me,” Damon said. “Just before I came down here, when she called me in and told me that anything the ambassador wanted—”

“When the President — the last President, not the current loony-tune — heard that Masterson had been snatched,” Leverette went on, “and didn’t like what he heard the embassy in Buenos Aires was doing about it, he had an idea. Send somebody down here to find out what was going on, somebody who would…”

“Charley, you mean?” Damon asked, but it was a statement, not a question.

“… know what to look for, and report to him.”

“So this current idea of our Commander in Chief is not only nutty, but not original,” Castillo said. “He stole it from his predecessor.”

“You want to tell this story, or should I?” Leverette asked.

Castillo answered by continuing.

“So I was taken off the canapé circuit and sent down here. The day after they arrived, they found Mrs. Masterson…”

“My daughter,” the ambassador said softly.

“… drugged, sitting in a car down by the river, beside her husband, who had been assassinated in front of her. When the President heard this, he went ballistic. He got on the horn and told the ambassador he was putting me in charge of getting Mrs. Masterson and the kids safely out of Argentina and to the States, and that he was sending a Globemaster to do that.

“So, a couple of days later, I loaded everybody on the Globemaster and took off for Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi. En route, Mrs. Masterson told me that the people who had kidnapped her and killed her husband wanted her to tell them how to find her brother. They told her that unless she told them, they would kill her children, and proved their sincerity by killing her husband while she watched.”

“Who was her brother?”

“My son, Dr. Jean-Paul Lorimer, at the time was an official of the United Nations stationed in Paris,” Ambassador Lorimer said.

“Where he was the bagman for that Iraqi Oil-for-Food scandal,” Castillo amplified, “but I didn’t know that until later. Mrs. Masterson said so far as she knew he was in Paris.

“Air Force One, the President, and Natalie Cohen were waiting at Keesler Air Force Base in Mississippi.”

“As I was,” Ambassador Lorimer added.

“Natalie Cohen handed me this even before I had a chance to tell her what Mrs. Masterson had told me,” Castillo said.

Castillo appeared to be opening his laptop, from which he extracted and handed Damon two sheets of paper.

“You carry this around, Charley, in case the cops stop you for speeding, right?” Damon asked, as he handed it back.

“I’ve been carrying it around in the false cover of my laptop until I decide what to do with it,” Castillo said, and then continued, “When I told the President what Mrs. Masterson had told me, he told me to find the brother and find out what was going on.

“Mrs. Masterson had told me he was living in Paris, so I went there. The CIA station chief was a guy named Edgar Delchamps, a dinosaur who knew so many embarrassing things about the Agency they were happy he was happy with the Paris assignment.

“He told me that it wouldn’t surprise him if Dr. Lorimer had been cut in little pieces and tossed in the Seine River. He said the word he had was that Jean-Paul had been the bagman for the Oil-for-Food people, had gotten greedy and walked off with sixteen million dollars and was either in the Seine or somewhere in South America.

“So I went back to South America, specifically here. And got lucky. I asked one of the so-called ‘legal attachés’ in the embassy if he had ever heard of Jean-Paul, and showed him his picture. He said he knew who it was, an antiquities — not antiques—dealer named Jean-Paul Bertrand; he had been watching him launder money.

“The simplest way to have him properly interrogated, I decided, was to get him to the States and let the FBI or IRS have at him. It wouldn’t be a problem, I thought. He was living here in the middle of nowhere. So I set up a quick, simple op to snatch him and get him on a C-37 I had waiting at Jorge Newbery.

“I stupidly decided I didn’t need Delta or Gray Fox, since I had a team consisting of myself, a very good sergeant named Jack Kensington—”

“This is the quick, simple op in which Jack got blown away?” Damon asked.

“Unfortunately, and my fault. I really fucked up. I really thought I could do it with just Jack and me, and some amateurs.

“Like Alfredo Munz, the former head of SIDE; Alex Darby, the CIA guy in Buenos Aires; Tony Santini and Jack Britton, of the Secret Service in Buenos Aires; Dave Yung, the FBI money-laundering guy from the Montevideo embassy; and last and least, I thought, nineteen-year-old Corporal Lester Bradley of the Marine guard at the Buenos Aires embassy.

“In addition to the C-37, I borrowed a chopper—”

“‘Borrowed,’ Charley? Or stole?”

“Aleksandr Pevsner owed me a favor. He loaned me a Bell.”

“Aleksandr Pevsner as in ‘notorious arms dealer’? That Aleksandr Pevsner?”

“That one. Don’t be so judgmental, Greg,” Castillo said. “Remember what it says in the Good Book: ‘Judge not…’”

“So, what the hell went wrong?”

“I flew the chopper here, and refueled it. Corporal Bradley had driven over with two fifty-five-gallon barrels in the back of a Yukon. Then I left Bradley with the bird and Jack Kensington’s rifle, telling him to guard the bird.

“All Jack and I had to do then was get in the house under a simple pretense, bag Jean-Paul, and convince him to come home with us. The worst scenario was that he would be reluctant to do so, which would mean that Jack would have had to stick him with a needle. Then we would load him into the Bell, fly back across the River Plate to Jorge Newbery, and get wheels up in the C-37. A piece of cake.

“We got as far as introducing ourselves to Dr. Lorimer when there came — what did MacArthur call it? — ‘the rattle of musketry.’ Some of it came from Corporal Bradley’s musket but most of it came from the fully automatic weapons of eight guys in black coveralls aimed at us.”

“Who were they?”

“At the time we didn’t know, so we called them the Ninjas; they looked like characters in a comic book. Later we found out they were ex—Államvédelmi Hatóság being run by a major from the Cuban Dirección General de Inteligencia named Alejandro Vincenzo.”

“And the kid from the Marines actually got in the firefight?”

“The kid from the Marines took out two of them with head shots fired offhand from at least a hundred yards. What the Ninjas were after was Dr. Lorimer dead and the sixteen million he’d stolen back. They got him, but we got the money. When we got back to the States, and I told the President about the money — actually, it was in bearer bonds — he told me I hadn’t mentioned bearer bonds, but apropos of nothing at all, if I happened to find some, they would make a nice source of funding for OOA.

“He also gave me permission to keep Lester the Marine and Yung, the FBI’s money-laundering expert — actually permission to recruit, draft, anybody I wanted.”

“At this point the ambassador and I got in the picture,” Leverette put in. “I was running Camp McCall, and all of a sudden this teenaged Marine showed up. Superb judge of military men that I am, I immediately decided that he was wholly unfit to be a Special Operator and put him to work on a computer ordering laundry supplies, and that sort of thing.

“Then McNab choppers into McCall with the announcement he’s there to take Lester to Arlington for Jack Kensington’s funeral, and that, since Jack and I had been around the block together on several occasions, I was welcome to come along if I wanted to.

“I was so shocked by this that I momentarily forgot my military courtesy and asked the general what the hell the boy Marine had to do with Jack and his funeral.

“‘I can’t imagine why nobody told you,’ the general replied, ‘that Corporal Bradley put a 7.62-millimeter slug in the ear of the bad guy who put Jack down and another in the back of the head of the bad guy who was shooting at Charley.’

“He went on to explain that Lester now worked for Charley, and that Charley had sent him to McCall — to me — so he could get a quick run-through of the Qualification Course. Just the highlights. None of the psychological harassment to give us an idea how he’d behave when someone was shooting at him. We already knew that.

“By the time we came back from Washington, I knew all about the OOA and by prostrating myself before McNab and weeping piteously, got him to let me go work for Charley.”

“I put Dave Yung in charge of the money,” Castillo said, “reasoning that if he was so good in finding out who was laundering money, he’d probably be just as good at hiding our sixteen million from prying eyes. And thus was born the Lorimer Charitable and Benevolent Fund.”

“That’s when I met Mr. Yung and Mr. Leverette,” Ambassador Lorimer said. “They came to Louisiana, where Jack’s father and mother had graciously taken me in after Hurricane Katrina had destroyed my home in New Orleans.

“Secretary Cohen knew what had happened here at Shangri-La, and of my son’s shameful behavior. And she knew Mr. Yung, who had been working for her, sub rosa, in his money-laundering investigations in Uruguay before he had met Charley.

“She knew that Mr. Yung would be familiar with the Uruguayan inheritance laws, as indeed he was. I was now the owner of Estancia Shangri-La. Charley sent Mr. Leverette with him because he’s a fellow New Orleanian, and also to tell me that he felt I was also entitled to the bearer bonds from my son’s safe.”

“The ambassador wanted neither,” Leverette picked up the story. “It was only after Yung told him that he either took Shangri-La or it would wind up in the possession of some highly deserving Uruguayan politician that he agreed to take it. And he said he could think of no better use for the sixteen million than where it was, funding the OOA.”

“Turning ill-gotten gains into something constructive, so to speak,” Ambassador Lorimer clarified. “And I frankly had a second motive. If I came here to examine my inheritance, I would have an excuse to leave the Mastersons’ home, where I strongly suspected my extended stay was beginning to strain even their extraordinarily gracious hospitality.

“So I came down here accompanied by Mr. Yung and the man I had by then become close enough to so as to have the privilege of addressing him as ‘Uncle Remus’ without, in his charming phraseology, ‘being handed my ass on a pitchfork.’”

“Natalie Cohen is one of the ambassador’s many admirers, Greg,” Castillo said. “And as I am one of hers, when she said she was a little worried about his coming down here alone, I told Uncle Remus and Two-Gun to pack their bags.”

“For me, it was love at first sight,” Uncle Remus said.

“You’ve got a crush on Secretary Cohen?” Damon asked.

“Greg,” Leverette said patiently, “try turning on your brain before you open your mouth. How many times have you heard one of us with a few belts aboard say, ‘I’ve had enough of this Special Operations bullshit. What I’m going to do is retire and buy a chicken farm’?”

“Not more than two or three hundred times, now that you mention it,” Damon said.

“I took one look at this place,” Uncle Remus said, gesturing at the verdant pasturelands of Estancia Shangri-La and the cattle roaming them, “and said, ‘Fuck the chickens; this is what I want when I retire.’

“So I struck a partner deal with the ambassador right then, Two-Gun drew it up, and got the LCBF to make me a little loan for my ante. And then when the President — the sane one, not Clendennen — pulled the plug on OOA, I retired and came down here.”

“Good story, Uncle Remus,” Damon said. “It almost, but not quite, makes me yearn for the good old days. But it doesn’t answer my question, ‘What’s the reason for this Southern Cone meeting of the NAACP — plus two honkies, no offense, Colonels — all about?’”

“You tell him, Colonel Naylor,” Castillo said. “If I tell him, I’d have to shoot him, and I really would hate to do that. Every time he gets shot, he sounds like Madonna having a baby.”

Colonel Naylor explained what they were doing at Estancia Shangri-La.

“Even with your brain in neutral, Damon, you can see why Charley is recruiting those of African heritage, right?” Uncle Remus asked. “That he and Colonel Naylor would have just a little bit of trouble in Mogadishu trying to pass themselves off as native Somalians?”

“I don’t know why,” Damon said, “I know Charley speaks Af-Soomaali and Arabic… Oh!”

“Yeah.”

“Well, count me in, Uncle Remus,” Damon said.

“Count you in where?”

“If Charley’s going to Mogadishu, I’m going.”

“You weren’t listening, Greg,” Castillo said. “I’m not going to Mogadishu. Uncle Remus is going to Mogadishu with Dick and Master Sergeant Phineas DeWitt, Retired — and now gainfully employed by Sparkling Water Due Diligence, Inc. — and Jack Britton.”

“Who?”

“He used to be an undercover cop in Philadelphia, specializing in infiltrating would-be rag-head terrorist groups,” Castillo clarified. “He is also now associated with Sparkling Water.”

“And what we are going to do in picturesque Mogadishu,” Dick Miller said, “is take photographs of each other standing in front of easily recognizable landmarks—”

“Which I will send to POTUS as visual proof that we are carrying out his orders,” Castillo said, finishing the sentence for him.

“Which are, specifically?” Damon asked.

“To assess the situation and make recommendations vis-à-vis the solution of the problems known as the Mexican drug cartels and Somalian pirates.”

“What are you going to suggest?” Damon asked.

“Ambassador Lorimer suggests that following the motto of Special Forces—‘Kill Them All and Let God Sort It Out’—would be one solution, but I don’t think the President would go along with it. He doesn’t stand a chance of reelection without the Somali-American vote.”

“Charley,” Ambassador Lorimer said, laughing, “that’s not what I said and you know it. What I said was that President Clendennen is going to have a harder problem with the pirates than President Thomas Jefferson did. The law then — I said the law then, Charley — permitted Jefferson to hang pirates from the nearest yardarm. Now they have to be tried in a court of law.”

“Well, maybe President Clendennen doesn’t know that,” Castillo said, “or I’ll have to think of some other suggestion to make.”

“And what are you going to be doing, Charley, while Uncle Remus is in picturesque Mogadishu, besides thinking of another suggestion to make to the President?” Damon asked.

“Hoping he has another nutty idea that will make him forget this one.”

“And where are you going to do that?”

“We were discussing that when you drove up in that car with the ‘I can park anywhere, I’m a diplomat’ license plates. There were two possibilities for a location for my command post. One was the Danubius Hotel Gellért in Budapest. The advantages of that would be that I could talk to my Uncle Billy Kocian…” He stopped, said, “I have now stopped pulling your chain, Greg,” and then went on, “about the pirates. He has amazing contacts. And also it has a foreign-intrigue sound to it that I suspect will appeal to the President. The other option was the Grand Cozumel Beach and Golf Resort in Mexico. That would probably make the President think that we’re all sunning ourselves on a beach while sucking on bottles of Dos Equis instead of investigating the bad guys. But I have a friend, a lifelong friend, a Mexican cop — an honest Mexican cop — who knows all about the cartels and will have some practical ideas about how to deal with them the President should hear.”

“So, what did you decide?” Damon asked.

“My fiancée just told me we’re going to Mexico first, and then Budapest.”

“Your fiancée? You’re back to pulling my leg?”

“Not at all.”

“You have a fiancée?”

“Indeed, I do. You’ll meet Sweaty on our way to Cozumel.”

“On our way to Cozumel?”

“Sweaty said the smart way to do this is to go to Mexico, get organized there, see my cop friend Juan Carlos Pena, then go to Budapest, and then sneak you tourists into Mogadishu on Air Bulgaria. So that’s what we’re going to do.”

“I’m going to have to come up with some story to tell the ambassador. I can’t just disappear, Charley.”

“When you get back to Montevideo,” Uncle Remus said, “the ambassador will tell you he’s just had a call from the secretary of State ordering you to Washington immediately for an indefinite period to assist her in some unspecified task.”

“You can do that?”

“It’s already done.”