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  “To accomplish that, Frank’s Gulfstream will fly Vic and Junior to scenic Tocumen International Airport in the Republic of Panama, where they will board — on the CIA’s dime, by the way — yet another Gulfstream, this one owned by Panamanian Executive Aircraft, a wholly owned subsidiary of the LCBF Corporation.

  “It will then fly to Argentina piloted by Colonel Jacob Torine, USAF, Retired, who was Castillo’s de facto chief of staff in the glory days of the Office of Organizational Analysis and later in the era of the often-maligned-by-the-President Merry Outlaws.

  “His co-pilot will be Major Richard Miller, USA, Retired. On one hand, Major Miller is much like Colonel Naylor. He, too, marches in the Long Gray Line, and his father, too, is a general officer. On the other, before he got himself shot down and pretty badly banged up in Afghanistan, Miller was one hell of a Special Operations pilot and not only with the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment.

  “All of these people will confer with Castillo and his charming fiancée, and then we will hear whatever it is he has to say.

  “That’s our best shot at this problem. The final decision, of course, is up to you, Allan. If you want to go to Argentina and deal with Charley yourself, no one can — or should — try to stop you.”

  Tapping the fingertips of both hands together, General Naylor considered the question for a full thirty seconds, and then said, “Bruce, please call Mr. Lammelle and ask him to send his airplane.”

  McNab nodded and then looked at Vic D’Alessandro, who gestured with his CaseyBerry.

  “ETA here is fifteen minutes, General,” D’Alessandro reported.

  PART II

  [ONE]

  The House on the Hill

  Las Vegas, Nevada

  1605 5 June 2007

  The eavesdropping on the communications of the world by the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland, is a rather simple procedure: They record everything said over the telephone, over the radio — and sometimes heard by cleverly placed “bugs”—by those in whom the several intelligence agencies of the United States are interested and then run it through a computer that filters out the garbage and after cracking any cryptography involved transfers the good stuff to another tape that is then distributed to the appropriate intelligence agency for analysis.

  The idea is simple, the technology required is not.

  Before the AFC Corporation took over the supplying of the technology — hardware and software — the NSA was relatively as deaf and useful as a stone pole. Afterward, of course, it was not.

  Before the AFC Corporation took the NSA contract, Dr. Aloysius Casey— by far the majority stockholder in AFC, and both its chief engineer and chairman of its board of directors — could not be honestly said to have been putting victuals on his table with food stamps.

  After the contracts went into force, though, he really prospered.

  To the point where he had confided to his friend Charley Castillo — to whom he no longer referred to as “Hotshot”—that he had more money than he knew what to do with. He confided this to Castillo not only as a friend, but also because he knew that Castillo, too, had more money than he knew what to do with.

  One of the things Casey had done with his wealth was of course to provide prototype equipment free of charge to the Special Forces community, but this — especially after Casey’s platoon of tax lawyers taught him how to charge this off as “research and development”—didn’t make much of a dent in the bottom line.

  He had spent a hell of a lot of money building the House on the Hill for Mary-Catherine, whom he had married immediately after returning from the war in Vietnam. Their first home had been a basement room in her parents’ row house in South Boston. She had supported him emotionally — his and her parents thought he was either nuts or smoking funny cigarettes — when he went to MIT. And supported them financially by stuffing bags for long hours in a Stop & Shop Supermarket.

  They had four years together in the House on the Hill, and then cancer got Mary-Catherine. Got her very quickly, which was the only good thing that could be said about that.

  A year after Mary-Catherine left him alone — they’d never been able to have kids — in the House on the Hill, the demise of both the Office of Organizational Analysis and the Merry Outlaws, which was a brief reincarnation of the former, caused two of its members to be without work.

  Casey had come to know both of them, and felt a kinship with both.

  One of these was First Lieutenant Edmund “Peg-Leg” Lorimer, MI, USA, Retired, who had worn the Green Beret as an “A” Team commo sergeant — which logically really resonated with Casey — before getting a battlefield commission. He had been an officer just long enough to make first lieutenant when he was wounded in — and ultimately lost — his left leg just above the knee.

  The other was Gunnery Sergeant Lester Bradley, USMC, Retired, who was twenty-one but looked much younger. He had been part of Castillo’s operation from the very beginning, even before they had been first formalized as the Office of Organizational Analysis.

  Then a corporal in the Marine Guard detachment at the American embassy in Buenos Aires, Bradley had been sent — as the man who could best be spared — to drive an embassy truck carrying two fifty-five-gallon barrels of helicopter fuel to Uruguay. He was pressed into service in support of a hastily organized raid Castillo had undertaken to snatch Dr. John Paul Lorimer, a renegade American, for forcible repatriation to the United States.

  Dr. Lorimer and Lieutenant Lorimer, it should be pointed out, were in no way related.

  Castillo had handed Bradley an M-14 rifle and ordered him to do what he could to protect the fuel while he and other Special Operations operators — plus an FBI agent also pressed into service from his duties in the Uruguayan embassy looking for dirty money — conducted the raid.

  The raid had promptly started to go sour, and might have failed — probably would have failed — had not Bradley taken out two of the bad guys with head shots, fired offhand from one hundred yards from his M-14 rifle and the FBI agent, taking his pistol out of its holster for the first time ever except on the FBI Academy’s pistol range at Quantico, used it to take out two more of them.

  When he returned to the United States, then-Major Castillo had reported to the President — President Clendennen’s predecessor — that, since they obviously couldn’t be returned to their embassy duties, he had brought Corporal Bradley and FBI Special Agent David W. Yung home with him. He also reported that Dr. Lorimer had been killed by what they had learned were agents of the SVR as he was opening his safe. The safe had a little over sixteen million dollars’ worth of bearer bonds in it the SVR thought was theirs, Castillo told the President, and he had brought that home, too.

  The President had a solution that dealt with what should be done with Castillo, others on the raid (including Bradley and Yung), and the money. He issued a Top Secret Presidential Finding establishing the Office of Organizational Analysis, named Castillo its chief, assigned Bradley, Yung, and everybody involved in the raid to it, and funded it with $500,000 from his Confidential Fund.

  “In the meantime, Charley,” the President went on, “understanding I’m not telling you to do this, if you should happen to find sixteen million in bearer bonds somewhere on the sidewalk, you might consider using that for the expenses of OOA until I can come up with some more money for you.”

  Special Agent Yung, who was an expert in the laundering of funds, established an account for the Lorimer Charitable & Benevolent Fund in the Riggs National Bank in Washington, and deposited sixteen million dollars in bearer bonds into it.

  That was the beginning of what would become the LCBF Corporation, which was formed after, shortly before his untimely death, the President found it necessary to disband the OOA and order its members to disappear from the face of the earth.

  When that happened, neither Lieutenant Lorimer nor Sergeant Bradley had anywhere to go. Neither had any family to speak of, and they had been retired from
the service. Neither could Bradley continue to be Castillo’s shadow. Among other reasons for that was a redheaded Russian called Sweaty, who while she really liked Lester, did not want to have him around for breakfast, lunch, and dinner seven days a week.

  Aloysius Casey offered both men a job working for the AFC Corporation laboratories in Las Vegas. He was working on a new project for the gaming industry, a computer-driven system that would, when completed, discreetly scan the faces of guests as they entered the lobby and instantly come up with their biographies, credit ratings, and the balances in their bank accounts. This would be of great interest to the gaming industry, and one of the titans of that industry, who had become a pal of Aloysius, told him that they would pay through the nose for it if he could make it work.

  Aloysius, not sure if he believed it, told Peg-Leg and Lester that he thought they would be useful to him as he perfected the new system. He also said that, until they got settled, they could stay with him in the House on the Hill.

  “There’s certainly plenty of room,” he said.

  In addition to the twenty-three rooms in which Aloysius was — with the exception of the Mexican couple who took care of him — rattling around alone, there were four “guest cottages,” each consisting of a bedroom, a living room, a game room complete with nickel slot machines — their motherboards rigged to pay out more than they took in — and a complete kitchen.

  Lester moved into one of these cottages next to the putting green, and Peg-Leg into the one nearest the pool, which he used often for therapeutic reasons connected with the damaged muscles of his leg.

  From the beginning, things went well — except for the incident with the motorcycle. One day when Lester was in the lobby of Mount Vesuvius Resort & Gaming Palace watching people come in, so he could determine the best location to place the scanning cameras, he had an idle moment and dropped a quarter into a slot machine, just so he could see how it worked without anybody seeing him watching.

  There then suddenly came a bleating of trumpets, the flashing of lights, the screaming of sirens, and a recorded voice repeatedly bellowing, “There is a winner!”

  Lester had won the Grand Prize offered by that slot machine — an absolute top-of-the-line Harley-Davidson that was sitting on a pedestal just inside the lobby. Aloysius suspected a glitch in the slot machine’s motherboard, as that particular motorcycle had been sitting there for as long as he could remember and no one had ever won it.

  The thought of Lester riding that monster up and down the Strip and then up and down the mountain every day brought forth in Aloysius what he thought of as a manifestation of the Special Operators creed that one Special Operator always covers another Special Operator’s back, but was probably more of a manifestation of previously unsuspected paternal instincts.

  He conferred first with Peg-Leg, who then told Lester that while he was happy with Lester’s good fortune, his peg leg would keep him from ever getting on the motorcycle with him.

  In his next tactical move, he conferred over the CaseyBerry system with David W. Yung, now the chief financial officer of the LCBF Corporation, and who was managing Lester’s investment portfolio, and got him to agree to tell Lester that the purchase of an automobile of any kind would interfere with the growth of the portfolio.

  The CIA had promptly paid to the LCBF Corporation the $120 million it had been offering to anyone who could deliver a Top Secret Russian Tupolev Tu-934A aircraft to them when Colonel Jake Torine and Lieutenant Colonel Charley Castillo had brought one back with them from the Venezuelan incursion known as Operation March Hare.

  The Executive Compensation Committee of the LCBF Corporation — David Yung and Edgar Delchamps — had determined that Lester was one of those entitled to one of the one-million-dollar (after taxes) bonuses to be paid to active participants in Operation March Hare.

  Aloysius did not want Lester to consider that he was in a financial position to walk into the Las Vegas showroom of Bentley Motor Cars and write them a $245,000 check for their best red convertible if he wanted to.

  A red convertible did figure in the final step of Aloysius’s covering of Lester’s back, however — a Ford Mustang. One was sitting, gleaming, top down, in the lobby of the Mount Vesuvius, when Lester came in to claim his prize.

  So was the general manager of the Mount Vesuvius, who was beside himself with remorse for having to tell Lester that his prize had been recalled by the Harley-Davidson people for unspecified mechanical problems and that it would be a month, six weeks, perhaps even longer, before a replacement could be made available.

  “Perhaps, sir,” the manager asked, “you might be interested in the Mustang as your prize in lieu of the Harley-Davidson with mechanical problems you can’t get for a month, six weeks, perhaps even longer anyway?”

  Ten minutes later, Lester drove the red Mustang down the Strip and then up the mountain to the House on the Hill, where he showed it to Aloysius and Peg-Leg, who both agreed with him that the red Mustang was one hell of a set of wheels.

  The general manager of the Mount Vesuvius had been so obliging because he had standing orders from the man who owned the Mount Vesuvius, three other of the more glitzy Las Vegas hotels, and three more in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and Biloxi, Mississippi, to do for Aloysius Casey whatever he wanted done.

  This gentleman, whose code name was “Hotelier,” was one of five members of a group of men known to very senior officers of the intelligence community as “Those People in Las Vegas.”

  The others were a well-known, perhaps even famous, investment banker, whose code name understandably was “Banker.” Another, who had made an enormous fortune in the data processing business, was a Naval Academy graduate whose code name was “Annapolis.” A fourth, who had once confessed to a reporter from Forbes magazine that he didn’t really know how many radio and television stations he owned, had the code name “Radio & TV Stations.” The fifth important member of Those People in Las Vegas was Dr. Aloysius Casey, whose code name was “Irish.”

  What Those People did was secretly fund covert intelligence operations of the various “Alphabet Agencies” when the agencies could not either get the funds to do so from Congress or even dare to ask for such funds. Those People didn’t want credit for what they were doing, and for that reason — and also because what they were doing was, while inarguably patriotic, almost certainly illegal — used code names.

  Dr. Casey’s role in Those People was unique. He had been asked to join, and been happy to do so, shortly after he moved about half of the AFC’s manufacturing capability and its most important research and development laboratory to Las Vegas.

  Hotelier had learned that the redheaded middle-aged woman with the Boston accent who religiously — and for precisely one hour — dropped quarters into the slots in one of his places of business every morning after Mass was married to the chairman of the board of the AFC Corporation and drove a Chevrolet Suburban with Special Forces stickers on both its rear window and windshield.

  He reasoned that Dr. Casey, as a Special Forces veteran, might be willing to make substantial financial contributions to the patriotic activities of Those People. And Dr. Casey, when approached, had been happy to do so.

  Hotelier didn’t ask any questions about — and Dr. Casey did not volunteer any information about — Dr. Casey’s current and ongoing involvement with the intelligence or Special Operations communities.

  It never entered Hotelier’s mind, either — or the minds of the other Those People — that Casey regarded them as no more than well-meaning amateurs whose money sometimes came in handy.

  This came to a head when Casey learned that some of Those People had concluded that President Clendennen’s somewhat cold-blooded solution to a serious problem made sense.

  The problem was that not all of an incredibly lethal biological warfare substance known as Congo-X had been destroyed when President Clendennen’s predecessor, shortly before his untimely death, had ordered the obliteration of a twenty-square-mile
area in the former Belgian Congo on which was situated the laboratory that invented Congo-X and the manufactory, operated by former East Germans.

  The President had ordered the use of every explosive weapon, except nuclear, in the American arsenal to be used for this purpose. It hadn’t worked. There wasn’t a tree left standing in the target area, but the Russians soon provided proof they still had some Congo-X. They proposed, in the spirit of international love and brotherhood, that they would turn over all they had and swear on all they held dear never again to make any.

  In exchange, all they asked for was the return to the motherland of two SVR officers, Colonel Dmitri Berezovsky and Lieutenant Colonel Svetlana Alekseeva, who had defected from their posts as the SVR rezidents in Berlin and Copenhagen, respectively, and promptly told the American intelligence officer who had arranged their defection all about Congo-X. The Russians wanted him, too. His name was Lieutenant Colonel Carlos G. Castillo.

  President Clendennen thought this seemed like a reasonably fair deal and ordered that the swap be made. Some of Those People thought the President had made the right decision.

  Before the people sent to find Castillo and the two Russians and to load them onto an Aeroflot aircraft could do so, Castillo learned that the Congo-X that the Russians had sent to the Army’s Medical Research Laboratory at Fort Detrick, Maryland, had been flown to the Western Hemisphere aboard a Tupolev Tu-934A, which was then sitting on the tarmac of an airfield on Venezuela’s La Orchila Island with the last liter of Congo-X aboard.

  About a week later, the Tupolev landed at Andrews Air Force Base flown by Jake Torine and Charley Castillo. On board, in addition to the last liter of Congo-X, were some people, including General Vladimir Sirinov of the SVR, whom President Putin had personally put in charge of the operation, and Mr. Roscoe J. Danton, of the Washington Times-Post Writers Syndicate.