Hazardous Duty pa-8 Page 5

  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 fortieth-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.
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  [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.

  Word spread quickly among the Retired Clandestine Community — known disparagingly by many newcomers to the CIA as “the Dinosaurs”—that ol’ Edgar Delchamps was holed up comfortably in a big house in Alexandria. Perhaps there would be room for one more of them?

  The place was shortly full up, and there was a waiting list. It was of particular interest to females who had retired from the Clandestine Service. They were uncomfortable living, for example, in the Silver Springs Methodist Retirement Home for Christian Ladies, and places of that nature.

  Mr. David W. Yung — he was good at this sort of thing — had quickly set up a nonprofit corporation to handle the administration of the facility. A housekeeper — herself a retired Special Operations cryptographer married to a retired member of Delta Force — was engaged, rates were set, a board of directors established, and so on, and soon Lorimer Manor was off and running, so to speak.

  As part of the deal, two rooms in Lorimer Manor were always kept in readiness for Merry Outlaws who happened to be in our nation’s capital and needed a discreet place to rest their heads.

  Mr. Delchamps led Mr. Danton into Lorimer Manor’s recreation room, which was essentially a bar offering as large a selection of intoxicants as the one in the Willard he had just left.

  The centerpiece decoration of the bar was two dinosaurs, facing each other. One of them had a pink ribbon around its neck.

  “Sit, Roscoe,” Edgar ordered. “And tell Two-Gun and me everything you know about how our President’s latest aberration affects our leader.”

  Mr. Delchamps’s reference to Mr. Yung as “Two-Gun” unnerved him. He had no idea why the Merry Outlaws so referred to Mr. Yung, but the mental image of Mr. Yung with a pistol in each hand, blazing away at the bad guys, à la Mr. Bruce Willis in many of his motion pictures, was menacing.

  The explanation was simple. In the very first days, Mr. Yung and Mr. Delchamps had gone from Montevideo, Uruguay, to Buenos Aires. Both had pistols. In the case of Mr. Yung, this was perfectly legal, as Mr. Yung was then still officially a legal attaché of the U.S. embassy in Montevideo, which position afforded him diplomatic status. Diplomatic status, in turn, permitted him to go about armed and to park wherever he wanted to.

  Mr. Delchamps, who did not have diplomatic status, not only had to pay to park his car like ordinary people, but would have been arrested had he attempted to pass through Argentine customs with his preferred lethal weapon — a Colt Officer’s Model 1911A1 .45 ACP semiautomatic pistol — tucked in the back of his trousers. The solution was simple. He handed the .45 to Mr. Yung, who passed through customs carrying both. He had thereafter been known to his fellow Merry Outlaws as “Two-Gun Yung,” which had a certain onomatopoetic ring to it.

  Thus Mr. Danton, reasonably, was unnerved by the moniker. As was he unnerved after having been kidnapped from The Round Robin Bar.

  But what really unnerved him was being reminded that both Delchamps and Yung regarded him as one of their own — as, in other words, a fellow Merry Outlaw.

  Roscoe was willing to admit they had their reasons. One was that he had permitted dreams of journalistic glory to overwhelm his common sense. Specifically, armed with a borrowed Uzi machine pistol, he had jumped aboard the Black Hawk helicopter that Castillo had bought from a corrupt Mexican police official just before it had taken off in the Venezuelan incursion known as Operation March Hare.

  And, Roscoe was willing to admit, he had taken “the King’s Shilling.” Actually, it was “the Merry Outlaws’ Million Dollars After Taxes.” Mr. Delchamps and Mr. Yung had decided that since Roscoe had gone to the Venezuelan airbase on La Orchila Island carrying an Uzi, he was as much entitled to the bonus as anybody else who had gone on the operation.

  When the money was offered, Roscoe had thought only a fool would refuse a million dollars after taxes. He had since often wondered if that had been the right decision.

  “Edgar,” Roscoe said, with all the sincerity he could muster, “with Almighty God as my witness, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “My sainted mother, Roscoe,” Delchamps said, “taught me that religion is the last refuge of the scoundrel.”

  “Have Roscoe play the intercepts,” Two-Gun said. “If that d
oesn’t trigger his memory, we’ll let him play with the dogs.”

  Edgar could see from the recreation room windows the dogs to which Two-Gun referred. There were eight or nine Bouviers des Flandres in the backyard of Lorimer Manor. One of them was playing tug-of-war with the garden hose. The gardener had one end still in his hands as the Bouvier dragged him around the garden on his stomach. The rest of the Bouviers, like a herd of buffalo, bounded after them, competing for the gardener’s back, onto which they leapt and rode like a sled until one of their siblings knocked them off and took their place.

  “Roscoe, take out your CaseyBerry and push button number nine, which will cause some intercepts to play. When you have listened carefully, tell us what you think.”

  While Roscoe was doing so, Edgar went behind the bar and prepared three drinks of twelve-year-old Macallan single malt whisky. He then signed Roscoe’s name to the honor system bar tab. He slid one glass to Two-Gun, but when Roscoe reached for what he thought was intended for him, Edgar waved his index finger at him negatively and said, “First, analysis, then booze.”

  “Depending, of course,” Two-Gun amplified, “on the quality of your analysis.”

  As Roscoe listened to the intercepts, the elegant grandmother type in her seventies came into the recreation room with a tray of hors d’oeuvres.

  “If you give me one of those,” she said, pointing to his drink, “I will give you access to these.” She held up the tray.

  “Deal,” Delchamps said, and made her a drink.

  By the time he was finished, Roscoe had finished listening. He began to deliver his preliminary analysis: “I would hazard the guess that Jake Torine and Dick Miller are going to Argentina.”

  “The question then becomes, ‘Why are they going to Argentina on Frank Lammelle’s dime?’” Two-Gun said.