Special Agent Yung, who was an expert in the laundering of funds, established an account for the Lorimer Charitable & Benevolent Fund in the Riggs National Bank in Washington, and deposited sixteen million dollars in bearer bonds into it.
That was the beginning of what would become the LCBF Corporation, which was formed after, shortly before his untimely death, the President found it necessary to disband the OOA and order its members to disappear from the face of the earth.
When that happened, neither Lieutenant Lorimer nor Sergeant Bradley had anywhere to go. Neither had any family to speak of, and they had been retired from the service. Neither could Bradley continue to be Castillo’s shadow. Among other reasons for that was a redheaded Russian called Sweaty, who while she really liked Lester, did not want to have him around for breakfast, lunch, and dinner seven days a week.
Aloysius Casey offered both men a job working for the AFC Corporation laboratories in Las Vegas. He was working on a new project for the gaming industry, a computer-driven system that would, when completed, discreetly scan the faces of guests as they entered the lobby and instantly come up with their biographies, credit ratings, and the balances in their bank accounts. This would be of great interest to the gaming industry, and one of the titans of that industry, who had become a pal of Aloysius, told him that they would pay through the nose for it if he could make it work.
Aloysius, not sure if he believed it, told Peg-Leg and Lester that he thought they would be useful to him as he perfected the new system. He also said that, until they got settled, they could stay with him in the House on the Hill.
“There’s certainly plenty of room,” he said.
In addition to the twenty-three rooms in which Aloysius was — with the exception of the Mexican couple who took care of him — rattling around alone, there were four “guest cottages,” each consisting of a bedroom, a living room, a game room complete with nickel slot machines — their motherboards rigged to pay out more than they took in — and a complete kitchen.
Lester moved into one of these cottages next to the putting green, and Peg-Leg into the one nearest the pool, which he used often for therapeutic reasons connected with the damaged muscles of his leg.
From the beginning, things went well — except for the incident with the motorcycle. One day when Lester was in the lobby of Mount Vesuvius Resort & Gaming Palace watching people come in, so he could determine the best location to place the scanning cameras, he had an idle moment and dropped a quarter into a slot machine, just so he could see how it worked without anybody seeing him watching.
There then suddenly came a bleating of trumpets, the flashing of lights, the screaming of sirens, and a recorded voice repeatedly bellowing, “There is a winner!”
Lester had won the Grand Prize offered by that slot machine — an absolute top-of-the-line Harley-Davidson that was sitting on a pedestal just inside the lobby. Aloysius suspected a glitch in the slot machine’s motherboard, as that particular motorcycle had been sitting there for as long as he could remember and no one had ever won it.
The thought of Lester riding that monster up and down the Strip and then up and down the mountain every day brought forth in Aloysius what he thought of as a manifestation of the Special Operators creed that one Special Operator always covers another Special Operator’s back, but was probably more of a manifestation of previously unsuspected paternal instincts.
He conferred first with Peg-Leg, who then told Lester that while he was happy with Lester’s good fortune, his peg leg would keep him from ever getting on the motorcycle with him.
In his next tactical move, he conferred over the CaseyBerry system with David W. Yung, now the chief financial officer of the LCBF Corporation, and who was managing Lester’s investment portfolio, and got him to agree to tell Lester that the purchase of an automobile of any kind would interfere with the growth of the portfolio.
The CIA had promptly paid to the LCBF Corporation the $120 million it had been offering to anyone who could deliver a Top Secret Russian Tupolev Tu-934A aircraft to them when Colonel Jake Torine and Lieutenant Colonel Charley Castillo had brought one back with them from the Venezuelan incursion known as Operation March Hare.
The Executive Compensation Committee of the LCBF Corporation — David Yung and Edgar Delchamps — had determined that Lester was one of those entitled to one of the one-million-dollar (after taxes) bonuses to be paid to active participants in Operation March Hare.
Aloysius did not want Lester to consider that he was in a financial position to walk into the Las Vegas showroom of Bentley Motor Cars and write them a $245,000 check for their best red convertible if he wanted to.
A red convertible did figure in the final step of Aloysius’s covering of Lester’s back, however — a Ford Mustang. One was sitting, gleaming, top down, in the lobby of the Mount Vesuvius, when Lester came in to claim his prize.
So was the general manager of the Mount Vesuvius, who was beside himself with remorse for having to tell Lester that his prize had been recalled by the Harley-Davidson people for unspecified mechanical problems and that it would be a month, six weeks, perhaps even longer, before a replacement could be made available.
“Perhaps, sir,” the manager asked, “you might be interested in the Mustang as your prize in lieu of the Harley-Davidson with mechanical problems you can’t get for a month, six weeks, perhaps even longer anyway?”
Ten minutes later, Lester drove the red Mustang down the Strip and then up the mountain to the House on the Hill, where he showed it to Aloysius and Peg-Leg, who both agreed with him that the red Mustang was one hell of a set of wheels.
The general manager of the Mount Vesuvius had been so obliging because he had standing orders from the man who owned the Mount Vesuvius, three other of the more glitzy Las Vegas hotels, and three more in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and Biloxi, Mississippi, to do for Aloysius Casey whatever he wanted done.
This gentleman, whose code name was “Hotelier,” was one of five members of a group of men known to very senior officers of the intelligence community as “Those People in Las Vegas.”
The others were a well-known, perhaps even famous, investment banker, whose code name understandably was “Banker.” Another, who had made an enormous fortune in the data processing business, was a Naval Academy graduate whose code name was “Annapolis.” A fourth, who had once confessed to a reporter from Forbes magazine that he didn’t really know how many radio and television stations he owned, had the code name “Radio & TV Stations.” The fifth important member of Those People in Las Vegas was Dr. Aloysius Casey, whose code name was “Irish.”
What Those People did was secretly fund covert intelligence operations of the various “Alphabet Agencies” when the agencies could not either get the funds to do so from Congress or even dare to ask for such funds. Those People didn’t want credit for what they were doing, and for that reason — and also because what they were doing was, while inarguably patriotic, almost certainly illegal — used code names.
Dr. Casey’s role in Those People was unique. He had been asked to join, and been happy to do so, shortly after he moved about half of the AFC’s manufacturing capability and its most important research and development laboratory to Las Vegas.
Hotelier had learned that the redheaded middle-aged woman with the Boston accent who religiously — and for precisely one hour — dropped quarters into the slots in one of his places of business every morning after Mass was married to the chairman of the board of the AFC Corporation and drove a Chevrolet Suburban with Special Forces stickers on both its rear window and windshield.