Kranz handed him a telephone handset, a small black one that looked like it belonged hanging on a Reduced to $79.90 fax machine at Radio Shack.
"Encrypted voice all green, sir."
"I'm not going to need cans?" Castillo asked.
"With the signal I've got, I can put it on the speakerphone."
"Do it," Castillo ordered, and handed him the handset.
"Encrypted speakerphone green, sir," Kranz announced a moment later.
"Dick?" Castillo asked conversationally.
Castillo's voice was then converted to digital electronic pulses, encrypted, reduced to a message lasting just a few milliseconds, transmitted to satellite 22,300 miles above the earth, relayed to another satellite, and then relayed to the dish sitting on the roof at the Nebraska Avenue Complex. There, the "burst" was expanded, decrypted, and fed to the handset Major H. Richard Miller, Jr., was holding to his ear.
A just-perceptible delayed moment later, Miller's voice-having gone through the same series of events- came over the loudspeaker next to the stable near Bad Hersfeld: "Hey, Charley!"
"Where the hell have you been? We've been calling you for hours."
"You went up twelve seconds ago," Miller said.
"Anybody there with you?"
"Secretary Hall, Agnes, and Tom."
"Have you got signal strength for speakerphone?"
A moment later, another male voice said, "Encrypted speakerphone green," and a moment after that came the voice of Secretary of Homeland Security Hall. "How's that, Charley?"
"Loud and clear, sir."
"Tell me what you've got, Charley, and then I'll give you the good news," Hall said.
"Lorimer was a bagman in the oil-for-food thing," Castillo said. "A whole lot of people want him dead, both for what he knows and for skimming a lot of money-maybe sixteen million U.S.-from the players."
"You're saying he's dead?"
"The CIA guy in Paris thinks he is. I'm not at all sure. I'm going looking for him."
"Where?"
"There's a man in Budapest I want to talk to. He may have some ideas."
"Where are you?"
"In Bad Hersfeld. We're going to Budapest first thing in the morning."
"I knew you weren't in Paris," Hall said. "Ambassador Montvale told me. That's the good news."
"What?"
"He said he had some information for you, and wondered where you were. I told him."
"What's the information?"
"He seemed a little reluctant to share that with me," Hall said dryly. "And I thought it would probably be easier for him to give it to you-perhaps you would share it with me-than for me to go to the President."
"When is he going to share it with me?" Castillo asked. His eyes met Torine's. Torine disgustedly threw up his hands in a "what now?" gesture.