Hazardous Duty - PA 8 Read online

  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.

  While they were waiting for the CIA to write the check for the $120 million bounty they had offered for a Tupolev Tu-934A, the Merry Outlaws, as President Clendennen disparagingly had dubbed them, went to the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas to talk to Those People about their agreeing with President Clendennen’s decision to throw Charley, Sweaty, and her brother Dmitri on an Aeroflot airplane.

  With an effort, Charley rejected Edgar Delchamps’s suggestion—which had Sweaty’s enthusiastic support—on how to deal with Those People. This was to “throw them all in the great white shark aquarium at the Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino and let Neptune sort them out.”

  At the confrontation, Annapolis gave Charley his word of honor that he had been dead set against President Clendennen’s solution from the start and would not have permitted it to happen. As a former member of the Corps of Cadets at the U.S. Military Academy, Castillo knew that he could accept without question the word of honor of a former member of the Brigade of Midshipmen at the U.S. Naval Academy.

  Radio & TV Stations surprised everyone by backing up his statement that he had told Those People that they would load Charley on a Moscow-bound Aeroflot aircraft only over his dead body by revealing not only that he had been an Army helicopter pilot during the Vietnam War—it would be a toss-up between Radio & TV Stations and Lester Bradley as to which looked less like a warrior—but that Charley’s father, shortly before he was killed, had rescued him from certain death at great risk to his own life.

  But the biggest surprise of the confrontation had been that between Hotelier and Edgar Delchamps.

  “Actually,” Hotelier said, “I thought Clendennen was right.”

  That, Castillo and Casey decided instantly, meant Hotelier wasn’t going to live long enough to go swimming with the great white sharks in the Mandalay Bay aquarium. Delchamps was going to throw him out the window right there in the for
tieth-floor Venetian penthouse.

  “How’s that?” Edgar asked softly.

  “Odds are my business,” Hotelier replied. “What would you say the odds were that Colonel Castillo was going to get away with his Venezuelan incursion?”

  “Hundred to one against?” Delchamps asked.

  “I’d have taken the bet at two hundred to one against,” Hotelier said. “And that being the case, I started wondering how—or who—could get the Congo-X and Castillo and the others away from the Russians.”

  “Once they got Charley, Sweaty, and Dmitri on the nonstop to Moscow, that would be close to impossible. Even taking a shot at it would take a hell of a lot of money.”

  “I have a hell of a lot of money,” Hotelier said.

  Delchamps had looked at Hotelier for a long moment and then turned to Castillo.

  “Ace, I trust this guy,” he said. “And since you trust these two, I guess only the others go swimming with those big fishes as we discussed.”

  “If I may make a suggestion?” Hotelier had asked.

  “Why not?” Delchamps had replied.

  “As hard as you might find this to believe,” Hotelier said, “some of the guests in my places of business try to cheat. When we catch them doing so, we reason with them, point out they have made a bad decision, and tell them what’s going to happen if they ever again make such a bad decision or even think about doing so.

  “If we—you and I, Mr. Delchamps—went to the gentlemen we’re talking about and reasoned with them, I’m sure they would recognize how gross an error they have made, and would be willing to offer their solemn assurance they would never do so again. If we did this, we would not be shutting off, so to speak, the money spigot.”

  “Yeah,” Delchamps said. “Why don’t you call me Edgar?”

  Despite the satisfactory resolution of the Confrontation, Aloysius still felt he had let down Castillo—had not covered his back—as he should have and resolved never to let that happen again.

  To accomplish this he designed, built, tested, and then installed in the House on the Hill a miniature version of the interception system he had designed, built, tested, and installed for the NSA at Fort Meade.

  The system he had installed at Fort Meade had several acres of computers to perform its tasks, but the one Casey installed at home was not designed to intercept messages of all kinds but only those going through the CaseyBerry Communications System; it fit in a small case about the size of two shoe boxes stacked one upon the other, which he kept in what had been Mary-Catherine’s wardrobe.

  The best way to explain its capabilities is by example:

  For example, when the system heard Mr. Lammelle ask, “Well, what thinks the Queen of Foggy Bottom?” it automatically went into Record/Alert mode as the words “Queen,” “Foggy,” and “Bottom,” in any combination, were in the filter database.

  It turned on the Secondary Recording function, which went to the Primary Recording system, which operated all the time in a Run & Erase mode, and copied from it everything that had been recorded from a point in time ten seconds before the system had been triggered by hearing “Queen” and transferred it to the Secondary Recording function.

  It added a date and time block, identified the parties to the call as Mr. Lammelle and Secretary Cohen, and found and stored their locations. But so far it didn’t do a thing to Mr. Casey’s CaseyBerry.

  When, however, DCI Lammelle inquired of the secretary of State whether or not they should tell Truman Ellsworth that Charley was not in Budapest, “Charley,” or variations thereof, being the number one search filter, Mr. Casey’s CaseyBerry burst into life.

  It vibrated, buzzed, and tinkled pleasantly to get his attention, and when he pushed ACTIVATE BUTTON #3, flashed on its screen the names of the parties to the call, their locations, and Charley’s location. When he pushed ACTIVATE BUTTON #4, it played back the entire conversation.

  In a similar manner, Mr. Casey was made privy to Mr. Lammelle’s second call to Secretary Cohen; Mr. Lammelle’s call to General McNab in which he told McNab to expect General Naylor to stop by; General McNab’s call to Charley; General McNab’s second call to Charley, during which Sweaty threatened to castrate General McNab with an otxokee mecto nanara (including the translation of this phrase from the Russian language); Lammelle’s call to Colonel Torine, ordering the charter of a Panamanian Executive Aircraft Gulfstream on the CIA’s dime to be held ready to fly to Argentina; and finally Lammelle’s call to Mr. D’Alessandro telling him when the DCI’s Gulfstream was expected to arrive at Pope Air Force Base.

  At that point, Mr. Casey pushed another button, which connected him with Hotelier.

  “Listen to this,” he said, “and tell me what you think.”

  He punched a button that transmitted all of the intercepts to Hotelier’s CaseyBerry, whereupon Hotelier listened to them.

  “I would hazard the guess Clendennen has somehow gotten out of his straitjacket,” Hotelier said.

  “I’m worried that Lester will hear about this and rush down there to protect Charley,” Casey said.

  “Aloysius, as you have so often told me, acquiring as much intelligence as one can has to be the first step before taking any action. Now, who in Washington has the best access to what our President is up to at any given moment?”

  “Roscoe Danton.”

  Casey pushed a button and learned that Mr. Danton was in The Round Robin Bar of the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C.

  “And who do we have in Washington who can best extract this information from Mr. Danton?”

  “Delchamps? Or maybe Yung?”

  “Precisely. One or the other, preferably both.”

  “Thank you. I’ll keep you in the loop.”

  “Please do.”

  Casey pushed the appropriate buttons and learned that Mr. Yung was in his office in the Riggs National Bank building and Mr. Delchamps was across the Potomac River at Lorimer Manor, an assisted living facility at 7200 West Boulevard Drive in Alexandria, Virginia.

  He pushed the button that would connect him with the latter.

  [TWO]

  The Round Robin Bar

  The Willard Hotel

  1401 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.

  Washington, D.C.

  1730 5 June 2007

  When David W. Yung and Edgar Delchamps walked in, Roscoe J. Danton was sitting at the bar about to sip at his third serving—at $27.50 per serving—of Macallan’s twenty-four-year-old scotch whisky. The intoxicant was being provided to him by the lobbyist for the American Association of Motorized Wheelchair Manufacturers, who was delighted to provide a journalist such as Mr. Danton with anything at all he wished to drink.

  If he did so, the lobbyist reasoned, it was possible—not likely, but possible—that Mr. Danton’s columns might not echo the scurrilous stories going around that the furnishing of products of the AAMWCM, which cost an average of $4,550, absolutely free of charge to mobility-restricted Social Security recipients was near the top of the list of outrageous rapes of the Social Security system.

  “Well, there he is,” Mr. Yung said.

  “How are you, ol’ buddy?” Mr. Delchamps added.

  Mr. Danton turned from the bar to see who was talking to him. As he did so, Mr. Delchamps offered his hand. In a reflex action, Mr. Danton took it.

  “Your car is here, Roscoe,” Mr. Yung said.

  “Parked illegally, so we’ll have to hurry,” Delchamps said. “Say goodbye to the nice man, Roscoe, and come along.”

  Intending to say, “I’m not going anywhere with you,” he got only as far as “I’m not…” before an excruciating pain began in his hand and worked its way quickly up his arm to his neck.

  Mr. Delchamps had grasped Mr. Danton’s hand with an ancient grip he had learned from an agent of the Chos-n’g-
l, the North Korean Department of State Security, whom he had turned during his active career in the Clandestine Service of the CIA.

  No lasting damage was done to the gripee’s body, the agent had taught him, but as long as pressure was applied, gripees tended to be very cooperative.

  Waiting in the NO STANDING ZONE outside the street door of The Round Robin was a black, window-darkened Yukon Denali SUV bearing the special license plates issued by the Commonwealth of Virginia to the physically handicapped. On the door was lettered in gold LORIMER MANOR HANDICAPPED TRANSPORT # 2.

  The rear door was open. Through it one could see the driver, who looked like an actress sent over from Central Casting in response to a call for “an elegant grandmother type in her seventies,” and, sitting on his haunches in the captain’s chair beside her, a dog, a 125-pound Bouvier des Flandres.

  Mr. Yung quickly climbed in, and then Mr. Delchamps, still clutching Mr. Danton’s hand, assisted him in getting in, then got in himself.

  “Where we going?” the driver inquired.

  “We might as well go home,” Delchamps said. “This might take some time.”

  Home to Mr. Delchamps was Lorimer Manor, a large house—it could be fairly called a mansion—on an acre of manicured lawn on West Boulevard Drive in Alexandria. There was a tasteful brass sign on the lawn:

  LORIMER MANOR

  ASSISTED LIVING

  NO SOLICITING

  Lorimer Manor was also home to eleven other people—including the elegant grandmother in her seventies driving the Yukon—who were all also retired from the Clandestine Service of the CIA.

  It had been originally purchased by the Lorimer Charitable & Benevolent Fund—using the funds from Dr. Lorimer’s safe, hence the name—in the early days of the Office of Organizational Analysis as a safe house.

  On the demise of that organization, the question of what to do with the property was initially solved by Mr. Delchamps, who said he needed a place to live, and would rent it from the LCBF Corporation temporarily.