“To accomplish that, Frank’s Gulfstream will fly Vic and Junior to scenic Tocumen International Airport in the Republic of Panama, where they will board — on the CIA’s dime, by the way — yet another Gulfstream, this one owned by Panamanian Executive Aircraft, a wholly owned subsidiary of the LCBF Corporation.
“It will then fly to Argentina piloted by Colonel Jacob Torine, USAF, Retired, who was Castillo’s de facto chief of staff in the glory days of the Office of Organizational Analysis and later in the era of the often-maligned-by-the-President Merry Outlaws.
“His co-pilot will be Major Richard Miller, USA, Retired. On one hand, Major Miller is much like Colonel Naylor. He, too, marches in the Long Gray Line, and his father, too, is a general officer. On the other, before he got himself shot down and pretty badly banged up in Afghanistan, Miller was one hell of a Special Operations pilot and not only with the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment.
“All of these people will confer with Castillo and his charming fiancée, and then we will hear whatever it is he has to say.
“That’s our best shot at this problem. The final decision, of course, is up to you, Allan. If you want to go to Argentina and deal with Charley yourself, no one can — or should — try to stop you.”
Tapping the fingertips of both hands together, General Naylor considered the question for a full thirty seconds, and then said, “Bruce, please call Mr. Lammelle and ask him to send his airplane.”
McNab nodded and then looked at Vic D’Alessandro, who gestured with his CaseyBerry.
“ETA here is fifteen minutes, General,” D’Alessandro reported.
PART II
[ONE]
The eavesdropping on the communications of the world by the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland, is a rather simple procedure: They record everything said over the telephone, over the radio — and sometimes heard by cleverly placed “bugs”—by those in whom the several intelligence agencies of the United States are interested and then run it through a computer that filters out the garbage and after cracking any cryptography involved transfers the good stuff to another tape that is then distributed to the appropriate intelligence agency for analysis.
The idea is simple, the technology required is not.
Before the AFC Corporation took over the supplying of the technology — hardware and software — the NSA was relatively as deaf and useful as a stone pole. Afterward, of course, it was not.
Before the AFC Corporation took the NSA contract, Dr. Aloysius Casey— by far the majority stockholder in AFC, and both its chief engineer and chairman of its board of directors — could not be honestly said to have been putting victuals on his table with food stamps.
After the contracts went into force, though, he really prospered.
To the point where he had confided to his friend Charley Castillo — to whom he no longer referred to as “Hotshot”—that he had more money than he knew what to do with. He confided this to Castillo not only as a friend, but also because he knew that Castillo, too, had more money than he knew what to do with.
One of the things Casey had done with his wealth was of course to provide prototype equipment free of charge to the Special Forces community, but this — especially after Casey’s platoon of tax lawyers taught him how to charge this off as “research and development”—didn’t make much of a dent in the bottom line.
He had spent a hell of a lot of money building the House on the Hill for Mary-Catherine, whom he had married immediately after returning from the war in Vietnam. Their first home had been a basement room in her parents’ row house in South Boston. She had supported him emotionally — his and her parents thought he was either nuts or smoking funny cigarettes — when he went to MIT. And supported them financially by stuffing bags for long hours in a Stop & Shop Supermarket.
They had four years together in the House on the Hill, and then cancer got Mary-Catherine. Got her very quickly, which was the only good thing that could be said about that.
A year after Mary-Catherine left him alone — they’d never been able to have kids — in the House on the Hill, the demise of both the Office of Organizational Analysis and the Merry Outlaws, which was a brief reincarnation of the former, caused two of its members to be without work.
Casey had come to know both of them, and felt a kinship with both.
One of these was First Lieutenant Edmund “Peg-Leg” Lorimer, MI, USA, Retired, who had worn the Green Beret as an “A” Team commo sergeant — which logically really resonated with Casey — before getting a battlefield commission. He had been an officer just long enough to make first lieutenant when he was wounded in — and ultimately lost — his left leg just above the knee.
The other was Gunnery Sergeant Lester Bradley, USMC, Retired, who was twenty-one but looked much younger. He had been part of Castillo’s operation from the very beginning, even before they had been first formalized as the Office of Organizational Analysis.
Then a corporal in the Marine Guard detachment at the American embassy in Buenos Aires, Bradley had been sent — as the man who could best be spared — to drive an embassy truck carrying two fifty-five-gallon barrels of helicopter fuel to Uruguay. He was pressed into service in support of a hastily organized raid Castillo had undertaken to snatch Dr. John Paul Lorimer, a renegade American, for forcible repatriation to the United States.
Dr. Lorimer and Lieutenant Lorimer, it should be pointed out, were in no way related.
Castillo had handed Bradley an M-14 rifle and ordered him to do what he could to protect the fuel while he and other Special Operations operators — plus an FBI agent also pressed into service from his duties in the Uruguayan embassy looking for dirty money — conducted the raid.
The raid had promptly started to go sour, and might have failed — probably would have failed — had not Bradley taken out two of the bad guys with head shots, fired offhand from one hundred yards from his M-14 rifle and the FBI agent, taking his pistol out of its holster for the first time ever except on the FBI Academy’s pistol range at Quantico, used it to take out two more of them.
When he returned to the United States, then-Major Castillo had reported to the President — President Clendennen’s predecessor — that, since they obviously couldn’t be returned to their embassy duties, he had brought Corporal Bradley and FBI Special Agent David W. Yung home with him. He also reported that Dr. Lorimer had been killed by what they had learned were agents of the SVR as he was opening his safe. The safe had a little over sixteen million dollars’ worth of bearer bonds in it the SVR thought was theirs, Castillo told the President, and he had brought that home, too.
The President had a solution that dealt with what should be done with Castillo, others on the raid (including Bradley and Yung), and the money. He issued a Top Secret Presidential Finding establishing the Office of Organizational Analysis, named Castillo its chief, assigned Bradley, Yung, and everybody involved in the raid to it, and funded it with $500,000 from his Confidential Fund.
“In the meantime, Charley,” the President went on, “understanding I’m not telling you to do this, if you should happen to find sixteen million in bearer bonds somewhere on the sidewalk, you might consider using that for the expenses of OOA until I can come up with some more money for you.”