Bradley handed him a sheet of paper. Castillo looked at it a moment, then tossed it onto the table.
“I don’t know what I’m looking at, and it just occurred to me—some of you may have noticed that I am not functioning too well in the I’m-on-top-of-everything department—that when you don’t know something it usually helps to ask somebody who does.”
He leaned forward and touched a button on the AFC handset.
“C. G. Castillo. Dr. Casey. Encryption Level One.”
“One moment, please, Colonel,” a sultry, electronically generated voice replied. “I will attempt to connect you.”
The voice of Aloysius Francis Casey, Ph.D.—in an interesting mixture of the accents of a Boston Irish “Southie” and a Southwesterner—came over the speaker ten seconds later.
“Hey, Charley. What the hell are you doing twenty-two-point-five miles outside of Midland, Texas?”
How the hell does he know that?
“Good morning, Dr. Casey.”
“You call me that one more time, and I’ll not only hang up but will make the handset blow up in your ear.”
“Sorry.”
“You’re forgiven. I know you can’t handle the booze. I can’t detonate the handset—but that’s a thought; I may work on that—but that GPS function works all right, doesn’t it? Providing you are twenty-two-point-five miles from Midland, Texas.”
“That’s where I am.”
“I can whittle down that tenth-of-a-mile indicator some—probably to within a couple of meters—when I have more time to fiddle with it. What can I do for you, Charley?”
“I’m about to send Lester shopping in Radio Shack or someplace—”
“The Boy Jarhead is there? Semper Fi, Les!”
“Good morning, Dr. Casey,” Bradley said.
“You can call me that. You Gyrenes should always show a little respect for people like me.”
Bradley grinned at the term Marines normally took some offense at. “Yes, sir.”
“Charley, you’re sending Les shopping for what?”
“We need storage devices to receive a lot of data from a long way away from one AFC to another—maybe multiple more AFCs. So they’ll have to be high speed.”
“And portable? Self-powered and/or uninterruptible battery powered for at least a couple of hours?”
“All of the above.”
“And what else?”
“High-speed printers with lots of resolution for photos and maps. And a similar scanner or three, ditto. I need to keep in contact with one—or two—teams of shooters and a couple of people maybe running around by themselves.”
“Charley, the limiting factor is the speed of the relay in the satellites. I have to run them a lot slower than their capacity because of the equipment on the ground—equipment I didn’t make. I’m getting the idea you’re about to run an op?”
“Yes, we are. Operation Fish Farm.”
“I think I know what you need, Charley. No problem.”
There was a long silence. Then Castillo said, “You are going to tell me what it is, right, Aloysius?”
“You’ll see what it is when I get there. If it doesn’t work, we’ll work on it until we get it right.”
“I called to ask you to tell me what we need, not with my hand out.”
“Is there an airport any closer to where you are than Midland? Where do I tell the pilot to go?”
“Home. You go home after you tell me what we need. Then Les will go buy it.”
“Like hell he will. Now, where do I tell the pilot to go?”
Castillo shook his head, but he was smiling. “You have my coordinates?”
“Yeah. Like I told you, within a tenth of a mile and maybe five hundred feet altitude.”
“There’s a strip three-tenths of a mile to the south.”
“Will it take a Gulfstream V, or should I bring something smaller?”
“It’ll take a G-Five, but I can’t get something that big in my hangar, and if you park it here, people might get curious.”
“That kind of an op, huh? No problem. I’ll just have them drop me off—not to worry, they won’t remember where—and worry about getting back to Vegas later. It’s seven hundred nautical miles. Figure an hour to get to the airport and off the ground and an hour and three-quarters in the air. Add all that up, Charley, and I’ll see you then. Casey out.”
Castillo pushed a button, turning off the AFC speakerphone function.
“You really have such interesting friends, Carlos,” Svetlana said. “That was the Casey of the AFC Corporation?”
“You know about him, huh, Svet? What that was was a very lonely man—his wife just died—who I think I just made very happy. He’s sitting all alone in a house about twice the size of the one in Golf and Polo, or vice versa, that you like so much, on several hundred hectares of very expensive real estate overlooking Las Vegas and of course the AFC labs and plants.”
“I don’t understand,” Berezovsky said.
“When Aloysius was a kid, Colonel,” Davidson offered, “he was in the Vietnam War, the commo—communications—sergeant on a Special Forces A-Team operating black in Cambodia and other places. When he gets here, you will learn how he almost won that war all by himself. He never really took off the suit.”
“What does that mean?” Svetlana asked.
“He still thinks of himself as a special operator,” Castillo said.
“And Charley just told him he could come out and play. No, not play. This is for real, and that makes it better; he can tell us young guys how to do an operation the right way. For Aloysius, that’s better than Christmas, his birthday, and Saint Patrick’s Day all rolled into one.”
“He’s stopped talking to Billy Waugh,” Castillo said. “Did you hear that?”
Davidson nodded. “Uh-huh.”
“Isn’t that the fellow who caught Carlos the Jackal?” Berezovsky asked.
“One and the same,” Davidson said. “Aloysius and Billy were young green beanies together, and Billy’s still out there—the last I heard he was in Afghanistan again—going after the bad guys. Meanwhile, Aloysius is behind a desk—and can’t stand that Billy isn’t pushing a walker rather than making HALO jumps.”
“How old are they?” Castillo mused. “Seventy-five, anyway. Pushing eighty.”
“Then they ought to have enough sense to stand down,” Svetlana said. “If they’re that old.”
“And do what?” Berezovsky said. “The American general Patton said it, Svet. The only good death for a soldier is to die from the last bullet fired in the last battle.”
Castillo said, “How about me having a heart attack on the ninth green, or whatever they call it, of Golf and Polo, and then you having one trying to load me into the golf cart? That way, we could go out together and wouldn’t have to look for a job. Or play golf.”
“I think I’d rather take that last bullet,” Berezovsky said. “Even though it no longer seems we have that option.”
“Or we could go fishing in that lake with Aleksandr, fall out of the boat and drown,” Castillo said.
“Your William Colby went out that way,” Berezovsky said.
“Who?” Svetlana said.
“He was a director of Central Intelligence,” Berezovsky said.
“And he fell out of his canoe,” Castillo said. “And drowned.”
“I think I’d prefer the bullet,” Berezovsky said.
“Me, too,” Castillo said. “All things considered. God knows I can’t see myself on a golf course.”
“The both of you make me sick!” Svetlana said furiously. “May God forgive you both!”
She stormed out of the library.
“What the hell’s the matter with her?” Castillo asked.