“I’m in, sir,” Colonel Woods said.
“Say ‘Hoo-rah,’ Peter.”
Woods laughed, said, “Hoo-rah,” and reached for the telephone.
“Lady and alleged gentlemen,” McNab said, making a grand gesture around the room. “If I may have your attention?”
He waited until he had it.
“If this didn’t come up before,” McNab then said, “Major Homer Foster is from the 160th. He’s one of us, and he’s in on this.”
The insignia on Major Foster’s uniform indicated he was a senior Army Aviator assigned to the Army Aviation School and Center; there had been nothing to identify him as a special operator.
Castillo couldn’t remember Foster having said a word during dinner, but he had caught Foster examining everybody very carefully.
“Reverend Castillo will now give the invocation, which begins: ‘You are hereby advised that anything and everything’—”
He gestured for Castillo to pick it up, and Castillo did so: “—discussed in this meeting is classified Top Secret Presidential and is not to be disclosed in any manner to anyone without the express permission of the President or myself.”
“And since we’re not going to bother the President with any of the details at this time, that means only Colonel Castillo. I would like to add my own little caveat, and that is that every serving officer here, me included, is putting his career at risk by participation in the very discussion we’re going to have. By that I mean that if we get caught doing what we are going to do, we will all be standing beside Colonel Castillo at his retirement ceremony the end of the month. This is your last chance to get out of here, Pete and Homer. My advice is go.”
“I’m in, sir,” Colonel Woods said.
“I’m in, General,” Major Foster said.
“Okay. Next item: opening remarks. When you get to be as old as I am, and have been around the block as many times as I have, you flatter yourself to think that you wouldn’t have all these stars, or, for that matter, have come back so often from around the block, unless you are a pretty good judge of character.
“And you have learned to trust the judgment of those who have been around the block with you, or those individuals you know have been around the block many times by themselves. So if there is anybody here who thinks that Colonel Bere . . . Mister Barlow and his charming sister have not told us the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth with no mental reservations whatsoever, raise your right hand and speak now, or else forever after keep your mouth shut.”
He ran his eyes around the room, looking intently for a moment at everybody. No one said a word.
“Okay. That’s it. It is now established that there is a chemical laboratory slash factory in the Congo established by the Iranians, the Russians, or both, with the intent of waging chemical slash biological warfare against the United States, despite the fish farm opinion of the intelligence community, specifically the CIA, and that we see it as our duty to take it out before they can bring the aforementioned chemical slash biological weapon into play.”
He looked around the room again.
“Hearing no objections, the motion carries.
“Facts bearing on the problem: Colonel Castillo has concluded that the way to deal with the problem is to go to the President, lay what he believes—and I believe—are the facts before him, whereupon the President will take the necessary action.
“Colonel Castillo is wrong. The President would not take—with an exception I will get into in a minute—the necessary action without running it past the secretary of State, the secretary of Defense, and the DCI. They would all object. The DCI would insist all it is is a fish farm and the whole idea is nothing more than from the fevered imagination of a loose cannon who has, among other outrages, snatched two high-level defectors from the CIA and now refuses to turn them over for interrogation by those who know how to do that sort of thing.
“The DCI, if I have to say this, would be wrong. The secretary of State and the secretary of Defense, when the President asked them for their opinion of his intended dispatch of the military might of the United States into a poor African country, would both say, ‘Mr. President, there simply is no proof.’
“And they would be right. All we have is the word of these two, plus some circumstantial stuff, and nobody believes circumstantial.
“And then there is the problem of the Russians making fools of us with Colonel Sunev, which no one wants to see happen again.”
“General—” Berezovsky began.
“Let me guess, Colonel. You’re here because you are willing to go to the CIA and let them interrogate you using any means they think will work, including chemical. I admire that. I truly do. But it wouldn’t work. You want to know why? Because as people believe what they want to believe, they disbelieve what they don’t want to believe. If the agency had you in one of their Maryland rest homes and they couldn’t prove you were lying, they would blame the sodium pentothal, or whatever else they had been sticking in your veins, and keep trying something else until you were dead, dead, dead. Getting the picture, Colonel?”
“What you’re leading up to,” Svetlana said, “is that Carlos has to lay proof—not just what we offer as ‘facts’—on the President’s desk. Am I correct?”
“Precisely,” McNab said. “Without proof, we’re pis . . .”
“Pissing in the wind?” Svetlana asked innocently.
McNab couldn’t repress a smile. “If you’re so smart, why is it you keep looking at Charley like he’s the man of your dreams?”
“I suppose that’s because he is. Now, how do we get the proof?”
“First, we have to define proof,” McNab said.
“How do we do that?” Svetlana asked.
“We get us an expert,” McNab said.
“Fort Dietrich,” Delchamps said.
“Fort Dietrich,” McNab confirmed. “Corporal Bradley, I presume you have the AFC up and running?”
“Yes, sir,” Bradley said. He walked to General McNab and gave him the handset.
“Pay attention, please,” McNab said. “We are about to take the irreversible step. Cross the Rubicon, so to speak. This is everybody’s absolutely final last chance to bail out. And I have to say that I really wish I wasn’t running this circus, because I would be the first one out the door.”
He looked around the room one final time, then picked up the handset.
“Bruce J. McNab. Encryption Level One. Get me the White House switchboard.”
“White House. Good evening, General McNab. How can we help you?”
“Get me the commanding general of the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute at Fort Dietrich, Maryland, on a secure line, please.”
“The what?” Berezovsky asked, confused.
McNab put his hand over the mouthpiece. “They used to call it the Chemical Warfare Lab. That was before political correctness took over.”
XV
[ONE]
The Malaga Suite
Portofino Island Resort & Spa
Pensacola Beach, Florida
2359:30 6 January 2006
One of the many things then—Second Lieutenant Castillo had learned during his tenure as aide-de-camp to then-Brigadier General McNab was that McNab believed that no matter how noble one’s intentions, working when fatigued usually produced little that was useful and too often what was produced was sloppy or in error—or both.
He began a meeting like this one by judging the participants and himself and deciding how long it could profitably last.
Castillo, therefore, was not surprised when Lieutenant Colonel Peter Woods interrupted McNab in the middle of a sentence to announce, “Midnight in thirty seconds, General.”