The moment Castillo had closed the door, Hall reached for the red phone on his desk and pressed the button that would connect him over a secure line with the commander-in-chief, Central Command.
"Hey, Matt," Naylor said, answering almost immediately. "What's up?"
"I just found out my newly appointed executive assistant, Major Castillo, has taken a room in the Mayflower. How's he going to pay for that?"
"Would you be satisfied with 'no problem'?"
"No."
"Well, Charley told me that he'd taken a small apartment in the Mayflower," Naylor said. "The bill will probably be paid by Castillo Enterprises of San Antonio. Or maybe by the Tages Zeitung."
"The what?"
"It's a newspaper-actually a chain of newspapers- Charley owns in Germany."
"You didn't tell me much about this guy, did you, Allan?"
"You didn't ask. All you wanted was somebody who would carry your suitcase and who spoke Spanish. That's what I gave you."
"What's your connection with Charley, Allan? Other than the usual relationship between a four-star general and one of his five thousand majors?"
"Elaine thinks of him-and I do, too, truth to tell-as the third son. We've known him since he was a twelve-year-old orphan."
"You didn't mention that, either."
"You didn't ask, Matt," Naylor said. "What do you want to do with him? Send him back?"
"No," Hall had said. "Presuming there is no further deep dark secret you're leaving for me to discover, I think he's going to be pretty useful around here." Major/Executive Assistant Castillo did, in fact, and quickly, prove himself useful to the secretary of Homeland Security. And he fit in. Both Mary-Ellen Kensington and Agnes Forbison were clearly taken with him. Hall kindly ascribed this to maternal instincts, but he confided to his wife that he suspected both had amorous fantasies about Castillo.
"He's one of those guys women are drawn to like moths to a candle."
"I hate men to whom women are drawn like moths to a candle," Janice Hall had said.
The day Janice came to the office and met Castillo, she suggested to her husband that they have him to dinner.
"He's probably lonely living in a hotel," Janice said, "and would really appreciate a home-cooked meal."
"I thought you hated men to whom women were drawn like moths to a candle."
"That's not his fault, and he's obviously a nice guy. Ask him."
Castillo also got along from the start with Joel Isaacson and Tom McGuire. Hall had worried a little about that; Secret Service guys aren't impressed with most anyone. But Joel and Tom-both excellent judges of character-seemed to sense that Special Forces Major C. G. Castillo wasn't most anyone. Isaacson had even gone to Hall and suggested that Castillo be given credentials as a Secret Service agent.
"He could get through airport security that way. And carry a gun. I'll handle the credentials guys at Secret Service, if you like." What really moved Castillo from being sort of a male secretary cum interpreter in whose presence it was possible to imbibe intoxicants and relate ribald stories to being a heavy hitter in Hall's office was a fey notion of the President of the United States.
In May 2005, an old Boeing 727 that had been sitting at the airport at Luanda, Angola, waiting for parts for more than a year, suddenly took off without permission and disappeared. No one really thought it had been stolen by terrorists and was going to be flown into some American landmark in a repeat of 9/11-that had quickly become regarded as a ridiculous notion at the highest levels; for one thing, the aged bird didn't have the range to fly to the United States-but no agency in what the President described as "our enormous and enormously expensive intelligence community" seemed to be able to learn what had happened to it.
The President was annoyed. At a private dinner- really private, just the President, the first lady, and Secretary and Mrs. Hall-the President said that he had been talking to Natalie Cohen-then his national security advisor, and now the secretary of state-and they had come up with an idea.
Hall understood that "they had come up with an idea" meant it was the President's idea. If it had been Natalie's, the President would have said so. What had probably happened was that he had proposed the idea, she had first argued against it, but then had given in to the President's logic, and the idea had become "their" idea. If she hadn't given in, and he had decided to go ahead anyhow, he would have claimed the idea as his own.
"You're the only department without an in-house intelligence operation," the President had said. "So this will work. Natalie will send everybody in the intelligence community a memo saying that since this stolen airliner poses a potential threat to the homeland, you are to be furnished, immediately, all the intelligence they've developed about this missing airplane.
"That will give us who knew what and when they knew it. Then, very quietly, we send somebody-just one man-to go over the scene quietly, very quietly, and see if he can find out why the CIA, for instance, knew something on Tuesday that the DIA didn't find out until Thursday. Or why the FBI didn't find out at all. You with me?"
"Yes, sir, Mr. President."
"The question is: Who can we send to do this without setting off a turf war?" After meeting Major Carlos G. Castillo, the President decided he was just the man to very quietly, without setting off a turf war, find out which intelligence agencies were running with the ball; or had fumbled the ball; or had just sat on it, waiting for another agency to do the work.
Castillo went to Luanda, Angola, where the whole thing had started, and immediately ignited a turf war that had very nearly cost Secretary Hall his job.
He not only learned that the missing 727 had been stolen by Somalian terrorists, who planned to crash it into the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, but with the help of Aleksandr Pevsner, an infamous Russian arms dealer, located the airplane no one else could find, and then with the help of the ultrasecret Gray Fox unit of Delta Force, stole the missing airplane back from the terrorists. With Castillo flying as copilot, Air Commando Colonel Jake Torine had flown the airplane from Costa Rica to Central Command headquarters at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida.
When the President had authorized the Gray Fox mission he had done so fully prepared to pay the price of an outraged Costa Rica-for that matter, the outraged membership of the United Nations-for launching a military operation without warning on a peaceful country that didn't even have an army.
With his imagination seeing the world's television screens lit up with CNN's-and Deutsche Welle's, and the BBC's, and everybody else's-report of the shocking, unilateral American incursion of poor little Costa Rica, with pictures of the flaming hulk of the airplane surrounded by dead Costa Ricans, the President was understandably delighted to hear that the only loss in Costa Rica was a fuel truck.
True to its professionalism, Gray Fox had left behind no bodies-American or Costa Rican-and no 727 gloriously in flames, and no traceable evidence that could place them ever at the scene.
Dissuaded by General Naylor from awarding Torine and Castillo medals for valor-which would have necessarily entailed detailing the valor-the President settled for awarding them Distinguished Flying Crosses "for superb airmanship in extremely difficult circumstances." It was Colonel Torine's thirteenth DFC and Castillo's third.
The President also had them down to the Carolina White House for a weekend. There was a downside to this happy ending, of course. The director of Central Intelligence and the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation were unhappy with the secretary of Homeland Security and his goddamn executive assistant for a number of reasons.
The DCI was of course smarting because Castillo had found the missing airplane before the agency could. And because Castillo had been able to talk the CIA station chief in Angola out of CIA intelligence files.
The director of the FBI was smarting because after the special agent in charge of the bureau's Philadelphia office had reported to him his belief that the missing airplane almost certainly had been "stolen" by its owners, a small-time aircraft leasing company on the edge of bankruptcy, so they could collect the insurance, and he had reported this to the President, Castillo had gone to Philadelphia and learned that the airplane had indeed not only been stolen, but stolen by Somalian terrorists whose names-as possible terrorists-had been provided to the FBI by the Philadelphia police some time before. The FBI had told the cops that the Somalians were okay, just some African airline pilots in the United States for training.