The Outlaws: a Presidential Agent novel Read online

  The son followed in his father’s footsteps, and before he had been out of WP a year had won the Distinguished Flying Cross flying an Apache in the First Desert War. He went from that to flying in the Special Operations Aviation Regiment, most recently in Afghanistan. He returned from there under interesting circumstances. First, he had acquired more medals for valor than Rambo, but was also a little over the edge. Specifically, it was alleged that he either had taken against orders, or stolen, a Black Hawk to undertake a nearly suicidal mission to rescue a pal of his who had been shot down. Nearly suicidal, because he got away with it.

  Faced with the choice of giving him another medal or court-martialing him, the Army instead sent him home for psychiatric evaluation. The shrinks at Walter Reed determined that as a result of all his combat service, he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder to the point where he would never be psychologically stable enough to return to active service. They medically retired him. His retirement checks are sent to Double-Bar-C Ranch, Midland, Texas.

  I suggest this guy was unlikely to have tried to start World War III from the psychiatric ward at Walter Reed.

  Sorry, Roscoe, this was the best I could do. If you get to the bottom of this, please let me know. My curiosity is now aroused.

  Best,

  Jack

  The message gave Danton a number of things to think about. He would not have been surprised to receive a one-liner—“Sorry. Nothing. Jack.”—and this one meant that Porky had spent a lot of time, of which he understandably had little, coming up with this answer.

  Possibility One: His curiosity had been piqued and there had been time to do what he said he had done.

  Possible but unlikely.

  Possibility Two: This was a carefully thought-out ploy to get Danton off the track of a story which might, if it came out, embarrass the President, the White House, the department of State, or the Pentagon. Or all of the above.

  Possible but unlikely. There was a hell of a risk, as Porky damned well knew, in intentionally misleading (a) The Washington Times-Post and/or (b) Roscoe Danton personally.

  A short “Sorry. Nothing. Jack.” e-mail maybe. But not a long message like this one. Including all the details of this Castillo character’s military service.

  So what do I do?

  Forget it?

  No. I smell something here.

  The thing to do is find this Castillo character and talk to him; see if he has any idea why Meryl Streep and the other disgruntled whistleblower, whose thigh “accidentally” pressed against mine twice in the Old Ebbitt, are saying all these terrible things about him.

  But only after I talk to Good Ol’ Meryl and her pal, to see what else I can get out of them.

  He tapped keys on his laptop, opened a new folder, named it “Castillo,” and downloaded Porky’s e-mail into it. Then he found the piece of paper on which Good Ol’ Meryl had given him her phone number. He put this into the “Castillo” folder and entered it into his BlackBerry.

  Then he pushed the CALL key.

  [ONE]

  La Casa en el Bosque

  San Carlos de Bariloche

  Patagonia

  Río Negro Province, Argentina

  1300 3 February 2007

  “I believe in a democratic approach when having a meeting like this,” Lieutenant Colonel Carlos G. Castillo, USA (Retired), announced. “And the way that will work is that I will tell you what’s going to happen, and then everybody says ‘Yes, sir.’”

  It was summer in Argentina, and Castillo, a well-muscled, six-foot-two, one-hundred-ninety-pound, blue-eyed thirty-six-year-old with a full head of thick light brown hair, was wearing tennis whites.

  There were groans from some of those gathered around an enormous circular table in the center of a huge hall. It could have been a movie set for a motion picture about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. When this thought had occurred to Sandra Britton, Ph.D., Dr. Britton had thought Castillo could play Sir Lancelot.

  Two people, one of each gender, gave Castillo the finger.

  “We told quote unquote those people in Las Vegas that we would give them an answer in three weeks,” Castillo said. “Three weeks is tomorrow.”

  “Go ahead, Ace. Let’s get it over with,” Edgar Delchamps said. He was a nondescript man in his late fifties. The oldest man in the room, he was wearing slacks with the cuffs rolled up and a dress shirt with the collar open.

  “I would like to suggest that we appoint a chairman for this, and a secretary, and I recommend Mr. Yung for that,” Castillo said.

  “Cut the crap, Ace,” Delchamps said. “Everyone knows you’re calling the shots, but if you’re going to make Two-Gun something, I more or less respectfully suggest you make him secretary-treasurer.”

  Men who have spent more than three decades in the Clandestine Service of the Central Intelligence Agency tend not to be impressed with Army officers who had yet to make it even to West Point while they themselves were matching wits with the KGB in Berlin and Vienna.

  “Two-Gun, you’re the secretary-treasurer,” Castillo said to David William Yung, Jr.

  Yung was a round-faced, five-foot-eight, thirty-six-year-old, hundred-fifty-pound Chinese-American whose family had immigrated to the United States in the 1840s. In addition to a law degree, he held a master’s degree in business administration from the University of Pennsylvania, and was fluent in four languages, none of them Asian.

  Before he had become a member of the OOA, he had been an FBI agent with a nearly legendary reputation for being able to trace the path of money around the world no matter how often it had been laundered.

  Before his association with OOA, Yung had never—except at the Quantico FBI base pistol range—taken his service pistol from its holster. Within days of being drafted into the OOA, he had been in a gun battle and killed his first man.

  But the “Two-Gun” appellation had nothing to do with that. That had come after Delchamps, who was not authorized at the time to be in possession of a firearm in Argentina, had Yung, whose diplomatic status at the time made him immune to Argentine law, smuggle his pistol across the border. Yung thus had two guns and was thereafter Two-Gun.

  Two-Gun Yung signified his acceptance of his appointment by raising his balled fist thumbs up, and then opening up his laptop computer.

  “First things first, Mr. Secretary-Treasurer,” Castillo said. “Give us a thumb-nail picture of the assets of the Lorimer Charitable and Benevolent Fund.”

  Two-Gun looked at his computer screen.

  “This is all ballpark, you understand,” he said. “You want the history?”

  “Please,” Castillo said.

  “We started out with those sixteen million in bearer bonds from Shangri-La,” Yung said.

  Shangri-La was not the mythical kingdom but rather Estancia Shangri-La, in Tacuarembó Province, República Oriental del Uruguay. When Castillo had led an ad hoc team of special operators there to entice Dr. Jean-Paul Lorimer to allow himself to be repatriated, Lorimer was shot to death by mercenaries seeking to recover from him money he had stolen from the Iraqi oil-for-food scam, for which he had been the “bagman” in charge of paying off whomever had to be paid off.

  His safe had contained sixteen million dollars’ worth of what were in effect bearer bonds, which Castillo had taken with him to the U.S. When this was reported to the then-President of the United States, the chief executive managed to convey the impression—without coming right out in so many words—that justice would be well served if the bearer bonds were used to fund the OOA.

  The following day, the Lorimer Charitable & Benevolent Fund came into being.

  “Into which Charley dipped to the tune of seven and a half million to buy the Gulfstream,” Yung went on. “Call that eight million by the time we fixed everything, and rented the hangar at Baltimore/Washington. Et cetera.

  “That left eight, into which Charley dipped for another two point five million to buy the safe house in Alexandria. That lef
t five point five million.”

  The house in Alexandria was used to house members of the Office of Organizational Analysis while they were in the Washington area, and also to conduct business of a nature that might have raised eyebrows had it been conducted in the OOA’s official offices in the Department of Homeland Security compound in the Nebraska Avenue complex in the District of Columbia.

  “To which,” Two-Gun went on, “Mr. Philip J. Kenyon the Third of Midland, Texas, contributed forty-six point two million in exchange for his Stay Out of Jail card.”

  Mr. Kenyon had mistakenly believed his $46,255,000 in illicit profits from his participation in the Iraqi oil-for-food scam were safe from prying eyes in a bank in the Cayman Islands. He erred.

  The deal he struck to keep himself out of federal prison for the rest of his natural life was to cooperate fully with the investigation, and to transfer the money from his bank account in the Cayman Islands to the account of the Lorimer Charitable & Benevolent Fund in the Riggs National Bank in Washington, D.C.

  “There have been some other expenses, roughly totaling two million,” Yung continued. “What we have left is about fifty point five million, give or take a couple of hundred thousand.”

  “That don’t add up, Two-Gun,” Edgar Delchamps challenged. “There shouldn’t be that much; according to your figures, we’ve got two point something million more than we should have.”

  “There has been some income from our investments,” Two-Gun said. “You didn’t think I was going to leave all that money in our bank—our banks plural; there are seven—just drawing interest, did you?”

  “Do we want to start counting nickels and dimes?” Colonel Castillo asked. “Or can we get to that later?”

  “‘Nickels and dimes’?” Sandra Britton, a slim, tall, sharp-featured black-skinned woman, parroted incredulously. “We really are the other side of Alice’s Looking Glass, aren’t we?”

  Possibly proving that opposites attract, Dr. Britton, who had been a philologist on the faculty of Philadelphia’s Temple University, was married to John M. Britton, formerly of the United States Secret Service and before that a detective working undercover in the Counterterrorism Bureau of the Philadelphia Police Department.

  “I was going to suggest, Sandra,” Charley Castillo said, “that we now turn to the question before us. Questions before us. One, do we just split all that money between us and go home—”

  “How the hell can Jack and I go home?” Sandra interrupted. “Not only can I not face my peers at Temple after they learned that I was hauled off by the Secret Service—with sirens screaming—but the AALs turned our little house by the side of the road into the O.K. Corral.”

  Dr. Britton was making reference to an assassination attempt made on her and her husband during which their home and nearly new Mazda convertible were riddled by fire from Kalashnikov automatic assault weapons in the hands of native-born African-Americans who considered themselves converts to Islam and to whom Dr. Britton referred, perhaps politically incorrectly, as AALs, which stood for African-American Lunatics.

  “If I may continue, Doctor?” Colonel Castillo asked.

  Dr. Britton made a gesture with her left hand, raising it balled with the center finger extended vertically.

  “I rephrase,” Castillo said. “Do we just split that money between us and go our separate ways? Or do we stay together within what used to be the OOA and would now need a new name?”

  “Call the question,” Anthony “Tony” J. Santini said formally.

  Santini, a somewhat swarthy, balding, short, heavyset man in his forties, until recently had been listed in the telephone book of the U.S. embassy in Buenos Aires as an assistant financial attaché. He had been, in fact, a Secret Service agent dispatched to Buenos Aires to, as he put it, “look for funny money.” Before that, he had been a member of the vice presidential protection detail. He had been relieved of that assignment when he fell off the ice-covered running board of the vice-presidential limousine. He had been recruited for the OOA shortly after it had been established, to “locate and eliminate” the parties responsible for the murder of J. Winslow Masterson.

  “Second the motion,” Susanna Sieno said.

  She was a trim, pale-freckled-skin redhead in a white blouse and blue jeans. She looked like she and the man sitting beside her—her husband, Paul—should be in a television commercial, where the handsome young husband comes home from the office and chastely kisses his charming young bride after she shows how easy it had been for her to polish their kitchen floor with Miracle Glow.

  Actually, between the Sienos, they had more than four decades in the Clandestine Service of the CIA—Paul having served twenty-two years and Susanna just over twenty—which had been more than enough for the both of them to have elected to retire, which they had done ten days before.

  “The motion having been made and seconded,” Castillo said mock-formally, “the chair calls the question: ‘Do we disband and split the money?’ All in favor raise your hand and hold it up until Two-Gun counts.”

  “Okay,” Castillo said a moment later, “now those opposed, raise your hands.”

  Yung again looked around the table.

  “I make it unanimously opposed,” Yung said. “OOA lives!”

  “OOA’s dead,” Castillo said. “The question now is, what do we do with the corpse?”

  Delchamps said, “Sweaty, Dmitri—excuse me, Tom—and Alfredo didn’t vote.”

  “I didn’t think I had the right,” Alfredo Munz, a stocky blond man in his forties, said.

  Munz, at the time of Masterson’s kidnapping, had been an Argentine Army colonel in command of SIDE, an organization combining the Argentine versions of the FBI and CIA. Embarrassed by the incident and needing a scapegoat, the interior ministry had, as a disgusted Charley Castillo had put it, “thrown Munz under the bus.” Munz had been relieved of his command of SIDE and forced to retire. Castillo had immediately put him on the OOA payroll.

  “Don’t be silly,” Castillo said. “You took a bullet for us. You’re as much a part of us as anyone else.”

  Munz had been wounded during the Estancia Shangri-La operation.

  “Hear, hear,” Yung said.

  “I didn’t say the Argentine Kraut didn’t have every right to vote,” Delchamps said. “I simply stated that he, Sweaty, and Tom didn’t vote.”

  “If I have a vote,” Sweaty said, “I will vote however my Carlos votes.”

  “Sweaty,” also in tennis whites, sat next to Castillo. She was a tall, dark-red-haired, stunningly beautiful woman, who had been christened Svetlana. Once associated with this group of Americans, “Svetlana” had quickly morphed to “Svet” then to “Sweaty.”

  Susanna’s eyebrows rose in contempt, or perhaps contemptuous disbelief. In her long professional career, she had known many intelligence officers, and just about the best one she had ever encountered was Castillo.

  The most incredibly stupid thing any spook had ever done was become genuinely emotionally involved with an enemy intelligence officer. Within twenty-four hours of Lieutenant Colonel C. G. Castillo having laid eyes on Lieutenant Colonel Svetlana Alekseeva of the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki—the SVR, the Russian Service for the Protection of the Constitutional System, renamed from “KGB”—on a Vienna-bound railroad train in Germany, she had walked out of his bedroom in a safe house outside Buenos Aires wearing his bathrobe and a smug smile, and calling him “my Carlos.”

  Dr. Britton smiled fondly at Sweaty when she referred to Castillo now as “my Carlos.” She thought it was sweet. Sandra Britton knew there really was such a thing as Love at First Sight. She had married her husband two weeks after she had met him and now could not imagine life without him.

  Their meeting had occurred shortly after midnight eight years before on North Broad Street in Philly when Jack had appeared out of nowhere to foil a miscreant bent on relieving her of her purse, watch, jewelry—and very possibly her virtue. In the process, the miscreant had suffered a br
oken arm, a dislocated shoulder, testicular trauma, and three lost teeth.

  Britton had then firmly attached the miscreant to a fire hydrant with plastic handcuffs, loaded the nearly hysterical Dr. Britton in her car, and set off to find a pay telephone.

  There were not many working pay telephones in that section of Philadelphia at that hour, and to call the police it had been necessary to go to Dr. Britton’s apartment.

  After Britton had called Police Emergency to report that the victim of an assault by unknown parties could be found at North Broad and Cecil B. Moore Avenue hugging a fire hydrant, one thing had led to another. Sandra made Jack breakfast the next morning, and they were married two weeks later.

  “I don’t think I have a vote,” Tom Barlow said. “But if I do, I’ll go along with however Sweaty’s Carlos votes.”

  Barlow, a trim man of about Castillo’s age and build, whose hair was nearly blond, and who bore a familial resemblance to Sweaty—he was in fact her brother—until very recently had been Colonel Dmitri Berezovsky, the SVR rezident in Berlin.

  Castillo and Sweaty gave Barlow the finger.

  “I would say the motion has been defeated,” Yung said. “I didn’t see any hands. And I have the proxies of Jake, Peg-Leg, the Gunnery Sergeant, Sparky, and Miller. They all like the idea of keeping OOA going.”

  Jake and Sparky were, respectively, Colonel Jacob S. Torine, USAF (Retired), and former Captain Richard Sparkman, USAF. Torine had been in on OOA since the beginning, when he had flown a Globemaster to Argentina to bring home the body of Jack the Stack Masterson, and his family. Torine had been quietly retired with all the other military members of OOA who had more than twenty years’ service when OOA had shut down.

  Sparkman, who on active duty had served under Torine on a number of black missions of the Air Force Special Operations Command, had been flying Washington political VIPs around in a Gulfstream and hating it when he heard (a) of OOA and (b) that Colonel Torine was involved. He made his way through the maze designed to keep OOA hidden in the bushes, found Torine, and volunteered to do whatever was asked, in whatever Torine was involved.