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  The teniente and one of the second sergeants then got into the Suburban, and with the second sergeant driving, made a U-turn and headed in the direction of Mexico City. The others got into the Ford F-250 and followed the Suburban.

  [TWO]

  URGENT

  SECRET

  1615 11 APRIL 2007

  FROM: AMB USEMB MEXICO CITY

  TO: PERSONAL ATTENTION SECSTATE, WASH DC

  CONFIRMING TELECON 1600 THIS DATE

  SEÑOR FERNANDO RAMIREZ DE AYALA OF THE MEXICAN FOREIGN MINISTRY TELEPHONED USAMB AT APPROXIMATELY 1505 THIS DATE REQUESTING AN EMERGENCY AUDIENCE. DE AYALA WAS RECEIVED AT THE CHANCELLERY AT 1550.

  DE AYALA REPORTED THAT HE HAD BEEN INFORMED BY THE POLICÍA FEDERAL THAT THEY HAD FOUND AT APPROXIMATELY 1200 HOURS LOCAL TIME THE BODIES OF THREE MEN WHO HAD BEEN SHOT TO DEATH ON THE SIDE OF HIGHWAY 95 APPROXIMATELY 50 MILES NORTH OF ACAPULCO DE JUÁREZ.

  THE BODIES HAVE BEEN TENTATIVELY IDENTIFIED BY DOCUMENTS FOUND ON THEM AS CHIEF WARRANT OFFICER DANIEL SALAZAR, EDUARDO TORRES AND ANTONIO MARTINEZ. THE BODIES HAVE BEEN MOVED TO HOSPITAL SANTA LUCÍA IN ACAPULCO FOR AUTOPSY AND TO VERIFY THEIR IDENTITY.

  CWO(3) DANIEL SALAZAR, USA, IS ADMINISTRATIVE OFFICER OF THE OFFICE OF THE MILITARY ATTACHÉ OF THE EMBASSY, AND EDUARDO TORRES AND ANTONIO MARTINEZ ARE SPECIAL AGENTS OF THE DRUG ENFORCEMENT ADMINISTRATION ATTACHED TO THE EMBASSY, AND I AM PROCEEDING ON THE PRESUMPTION THAT THEIR BODIES ARE THOSE FOUND BY THE POLICÍA FEDERAL.

  ALL THREE ARE KNOWN TO HAVE BEEN EN ROUTE TO ACAPULCO DE JUÁREZ TO PARTICIPATE IN A MEETING WITH US AND MEXICAN LAW ENFORCEMENT AUTHORITIES. LIEUTENANT COLONEL JAMES D. FERRIS, ASSISTANT MILITARY ATTACHÉ OF THE EMBASSY, WAS TRAVELING WITH THEM IN AN EMBASSY SUBURBAN VEHICLE WHICH BORE A

  DIPLOMATIC LICENSE PLATE. THE WHEREABOUTS OF COLONEL FERRIS AND THE SUBURBAN ARE PRESENTLY UNKNOWN.

  WHEN I INFORMED DE AYALA THAT I INTENDED TO SEND JONATHAN B. WILSON, THE EMBASSY LEGAL ATTACHÉ, TO ACAPULCO DE JUÁREZ TO IDENTIFY THE BODIES AND ASSIST IN THE INVESTIGATION, DE AYALA MADE IT CLEAR THAT WILSON’S ASSISTANCE IN THE INVESTIGATION OF THE SITUATION WOULD NOT BE WELCOME. MR. WILSON IS PRESENTLY UNDER WAY TO ACAPULCO.

  FURTHER DETAILS REGARDING THIS SITUATION WILL BE MADE AVAILABLE TO YOU BY SECURE TELEPHONE FOLLOWED BY MESSAGE AS THEY ARE LEARNED.

  RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED

  J. HOWARD MCCANN

  AMBASSADOR

  SECRET

  [THREE]

  Office of the Commanding General

  U.S. Special Operations Command

  Fort Bragg, North Carolina

  1625 11 April 2007

  There were two telephones—one black, the other red—and an open leather attaché case on the desk of Lieutenant General Bruce J. McNab, the small, muscular, ruddy-faced officer who, sporting a flowing red mustache, commanded SPECOPSCOM.

  The red telephone had both a buzzer and several light-emitting diodes (LEDs). The red one began to flash as its buzzer went off. When McNab grabbed it, a green light-emitting diode illuminated, indicating that the encryption system was functioning. Protocol required that persons privileged to have a Command Net telephone—one notch down from the White House switchboard network—answer the telephone within thirty seconds. A timer on the telephone base informed General McNab that he had done so in seven seconds.

  “General McNab,” he said.

  “This is the White House switchboard. Please confirm functioning encryption.”

  “Confirm,” McNab said.

  “Go ahead, Madam Secretary,” the White House operator said.

  “Bruce, this is Natalie Cohen,” the secretary of State said, then chuckled, and said, “who has just decided to call you later.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” McNab said.

  The LEDs had gone out by the time he replaced the handset.

  He turned his attention to the attaché case, which held what looked like a normal Hewlett-Packard laptop computer and a device that looked like a BlackBerry. They were cushioned in rubber foam with a small row of buttons and LEDs. Neither the laptop nor the BlackBerry was what it seemed to be.

  The attaché case was known as “The Brick,” a term going back to the first cell phones issued to senior officers that had been about the size and weight of a large brick.

  He picked up that device that looked like a BlackBerry. It was known to those who both were privileged to have one and knew the story as a “CaseyBerry.” He knew that when Secretary Cohen said she would call him later, she would do so immediately using the CaseyBerry in her Brick.

  As McNab looked at his CaseyBerry, a green LED indicating an incoming call lit up, as did a blue LED indicating that the encryption function was operating.

  Those who believed the White House switchboard and its ancillary encryption capabilities were state of the art were wrong. State of the art was really what Aloysius Francis Casey, Ph.D., termed “Prototype Systems, Undergoing Testing.”

  When, for example, the encryption system in the “Prototype, Undergoing Testing” Brick that General McNab held had all the bugs worked out, it would be made available to the White House and to the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland.

  In the meantime, even if NSA intercepted the signals transmitted—via satellites 27,000 miles over the earth—between the AFC Corporation’s test facility in Las Vegas, Nevada, and the Bricks in the hands of a few more than a dozen people around the world, they would not be able to break the encryption. Dr. Casey was sure of this because AFC, Inc., had designed, installed, and maintained the decryption computers at Fort Meade.

  Before he would turn over to the government McNab’s “Prototype, Undergoing Testing” Brick with all the bugs worked out, Casey would ensure that McNab and others on the CaseyBerry network had a newer “Prototype, Undergoing Testing” Brick whose encrypted signals NSA could not crack.

  General McNab pressed the TALK button.

  “McNab,” he said.

  “Bruce, I just sent you a radio I just got from Mexico City. Do you have it?”

  “Just came in,” he said.

  The monitor of the laptop had illuminated and was now showing the message the secretary of State had received from Ambassador McCann.

  McNab pushed three buttons on his desk, simultaneously informing his secretary, his senior aide-de-camp, and his junior aide-de-camp that he required their services.

  He still had his fingers on the buttons when the door burst open and Captain Albert H. Walsh, his junior aide-de-camp, who was six feet two inches tall and weighed 195 pounds, quickly walked in.

  “Just you, Al,” McNab said. Then he made a push-back gesture to his secretary and his senior aide, who were now standing behind Walsh. They turned and went away.

  “Just got it,” McNab said.

  McNab pointed to a chair and pushed the LOUDSPEAKER button on his CaseyBerry. Captain Walsh sat down and took a notebook and ballpoint pen from the pocket of his desert-pattern battle-dress uniform.

  General McNab finished reading Ambassador McCann’s message that had been sent to the secretary of State.

  “Shit!” he exclaimed, immediately adding, “Sorry.”

  “That was my reaction, Bruce,” the secretary of State said.

  McNab pushed one of the buttons in the attaché case. A printer on the sideboard behind his desk began to whir. McNab pointed to it, and Captain Walsh quickly went to the printer.

  “Something about this smells,” McNab said. “Danny Salazar is no novice. For that matter, neither is Ferris.”

  “You know everything I do,” she said.

  “Has the press got this yet?”

  “They will half an hour after it gets to the White House.”

  “Can I call Roscoe Danton before that happens, give him a heads-up?”

  Roscoe J. Danton was a member of the Washington Times-Post Writers Syndicate.

  “Why?”

  “Gut feeling we should. He’s almost one of us. We owe him. And we may need him.”

  “Does Danton have a Bric
k?”

  “No Brick,” McNab replied. “A CaseyBerry. Aloysius likes him. Number fourteen.”

  “I’ll call him and tell him to call Porky. But all he’ll have, Bruce, is ten or fifteen minutes.”

  John David “Porky” Parker was President Joshua Ezekiel Clendennen’s spokesman.

  “That’s a long time, sometimes.”

  “Bruce, I’m really sorry about this.”

  “I know,” McNab said.

  The LEDs went out.

  McNab put down the CaseyBerry, picked up the black telephone, and pushed one of the buttons on its base.

  “Terry,” he announced a moment later, “I need you.”

  “On my way, sir,” Major General Terry O’Toole, deputy commander of SPECOPSCOM, replied.

  He was in McNab’s office forty-five seconds later. He was trim and ruddy-faced.

  McNab pointed to the printout. O’Toole picked it up and read it.

  “Shit,” he said. “And I gave Jim Ferris to you.”

  “What you did, General,” McNab said, “was comply with my request for the name of your best field-grade trainer. What I did was send him to DEA so they could send him to Mexico. And I sent Danny Salazar with him to cover his back.”

  O’Toole looked at him.

  McNab went on: “And what you’re going to say now is, ‘Yes, sir, General, that’s the way it went down.’ ”

  O’Toole met McNab’s eyes, nodded, and repeated, “Yes, sir, General, that’s the way it went down.”

  McNab nodded.

  O’Toole said: “What happens now?”

  “Do you know Colonel Ferris’s religious persuasion?”

  “Episcopalian.”

  “Al,” General McNab ordered, “get on the horn to the Eighteenth Airborne Corps chaplain. Tell him I want the senior Episcopalian chaplain and the senior Roman Catholic chaplain here in fifteen minutes.”

  “Yes, sir,” Captain Walsh said, and went to a telephone on a side table.

  “And call my wife,” McNab said. “Same message; here in fifteen.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What about your wife, Terry? Does she know Mrs. Ferris?”

  “May I use your telephone, General?” O’Toole replied.

  “Don’t tell her who,” McNab said.

  “I understand, sir.”

  Neither Mrs. McNab nor Mrs. O’Toole would be surprised by the summons. Both had gone more times than they liked to remember to accompany their husbands when they went to inform wives that their husbands were either dead or missing.

  McNab picked up the CaseyBerry and punched in a number.

  It was answered ten seconds later in what was known as “the Stockade.” Delta Force and Gray Fox were quartered in what had once been the Fort Bragg Stockade. The joke was that all the money spent to make sure no one got out of the Stockade had not been wasted. All of the fences and razor wire and motion sensors were perfectly suited to keep people out of the Stockade.

  The CaseyBerry was answered by a civilian employee of the Department of the Army, who were known by the acronym DAC. His name was Victor D’Alessandro, a very short, totally bald man in his late forties who held Civil Service pay grade GS-15. Army regulations provided that a GS-15 held the assimilated rank of colonel. Before Mr. D’Alessandro had retired, he had been a chief warrant officer (5) drawing pay and allowances very close to those of a lieutenant colonel. And before he put on the bars of a warrant officer, junior grade, D’Alessandro had been a sergeant major.

  “Go,” Mr. D’Alessandro said by way of answering his CaseyBerry.

  “Bad news, Vic,” General McNab said. “Danny Salazar and two DEA guys with him were whacked about noon fifty miles from Acapulco. They were in an embassy SUV with Colonel Ferris. The SUV and Ferris are missing.”

  “Shit! What happened?”

  “I want you to go down there—black—and find out,” McNab said. “You and no more than two of your people. By the time you get to Pope, the C-38 will be waiting to fly you to Atlanta. By the time you get there, you should have reservations on Aeromexico to either Acapulco or Mexico City. I’ll try to confirm while you’re en route.”

  In a closely guarded hangar at Pope Air Force Base, which abutted Fort Bragg, were several aircraft, including a highly modified Boeing 727 and a C-38, the latter the military nomenclature of the Israel Aircraft Industries Ltd./Galaxy Aerospace Corporation Astra SPX business jet. The C-38 had civilian markings.

  “I’ll take Nunez and Vargas.”

  “Your call.”

  “Who’s paying for this?”

  McNab, who hadn’t considered that detail, gave it some quick thought.

  There were two options, neither of which would cost the U.S. taxpayer a dime. In D’Alessandro’s safe, together with an assortment of passports in different names, were two manila envelopes, one marked “TP” and one “Charley.” Each envelope held two inch-thick stacks of credit cards, American Express Platinum and Citibank Gold Visa cards, the names embossed on them matching the names on the passports, and two business-size envelopes, each holding $10,000 in used hundred-, fifty-, and twenty-dollar bills.

  There had been a “TP” envelope in the safe for several years. TP stood for Those People. Those People were an anonymous group of very wealthy businessmen who saw it as their patriotic duty to fund black Special Operations missions when getting official funds to do so would be difficult or impossible.

  The “Charley” envelope was a recent addition to D’Alessandro’s safe. Charley stood for Lieutenant Colonel Carlos G. Castillo, Special Forces, U.S. Army, Retired. The Amex Platinum and Citibank Gold Visa cards in the Charley envelope identified their holders as officers of the LCBF Corporation.

  During a recent covert operation—which went so far beyond black that McNab had dubbed it Operation March Hare, as in “mad as a March hare”—Castillo and McNab had learned that Those People had concluded that since they were making a financial contribution to an operation, they had the right to throw the special operators under the bus when it seemed to be the logical thing to do, considering the big picture.

  One of the results of that was the LCBF Corporation’s decision to provide General McNab with the same sort of stand-by funding as Those People provided. It had not posed any financial problems for the LCBF Corporation to do so. The LCBF Corporation already had negotiable assets of more than $50 million when the director of the Central Intelligence Agency handed Mr. David W. Yung—LCBF’s vice president, finance—a Treasury check for $125 million in settlement of the CIA’s promise to pay that sum, free of any tax liabilities, to whoever delivered to them an intact Russian Tupelov Tu-934A transport aircraft.

  Mr. D’Alessandro had written “Charley” on the LCBF envelope without thinking about it. D’Alessandro had still been a sergeant major when Second Lieutenant Castillo had first been passed behind the fences of the Stockade. And as good sergeants major do, he had taken the young officer under his wing. Both D’Alessandro and General McNab devoutly believed they had raised Castillo from a pup.

  General McNab would have dearly liked to stick Those People with the costs of D’Alessandro’s reconnaissance mission, but decided in the end it would not be the thing to do now. He would think of something else—a bayonet, maybe—to stick them with at a later time.

  “Let Charley pay for it, Vic,” he said.

  “I’ll be in touch,” D’Alessandro said, and broke the CaseyBerry connection.

  [FOUR]

  The Machiavelli Penthouse Suite

  The Venetian

  3355 Las Vegas Boulevard South

  Las Vegas, Nevada

  1710 11 April 2007

  Aloysius F. Casey, Ph.D., chairman of the board of the AFC Corporation, stepped off the elevator onto the upper-level reception foyer of the Machiavelli Suite, and then stepped to one side, graciously waving out the two females from the elevator.

  The first woman was Mrs. Agnes Forbison, who was fifty-one, gray-haired, and getting just a little chub
by. Mrs. Forbison was vice president, administration, of the LCBF Corporation. Previously she had been—as a GS-15—administrative assistant to the Honorable Thomas Hall, secretary of the then–newly formed Department of Homeland Security, and after that, deputy chief for administration of the now-defunct Office of Organizational Analysis.

  Second to get off the elevator was a stunningly beautiful woman with luxuriant dark red hair. Her passport identified her as a Uruguayan citizen by the name of Susanna Barlow.

  Following Señorita Barlow off the elevator was Lieutenant Colonel Carlos G. Castillo, Ret.—a good-looking, six-foot, 190-pound thirty-seven-year-old—who was the president of the LCBF Corporation. Castillo was followed by an enormous black dog, a Bouvier des Flandres, who answered to Max.

  As Castillo stood beside Miss Barlow, she said—hissed perhaps would be more accurate—“You remember I told you this was a mistake.”

  On Castillo’s heels came Mr. Edgar Delchamps, a nondescript man in his early sixties, who was vice president, planning and operations, of the LCBF Corporation. He was retired from the Central Intelligence Agency, where he had served for more than thirty years as an officer of the Clandestine Service.

  Delchamps was followed by thirty-three-year-old David W. Yung, Jr., who stood five feet eight and weighed 150 pounds. Despite his obvious Oriental heritage, Mr. Yung could not speak any of the languages of the Orient. He was fluent, however, in four other languages. The vice president, financial, of the LCBF Corporation was an attorney and previously had been a special agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

  The final passenger stepped off the elevator. His Argentine passport identified him as Tomás Barlow. He was about the same age as Castillo and was built like him. He was Señorita Barlow’s brother. In a previous life, they had been Colonel Dmitri Berezovsky, the SVR rezident in Berlin, and Lieutenant Colonel Svetlana Alekseeva, the SVR rezident in Copenhagen.