The Hunters (Presidential Agent 3)

now getting down to the nitty-gritty. What was Miller protecting you from?

“‘From himself, I’ve very sorry to have to tell you,’ I replied, and went on. ‘Major Milleris assigned, pending his retirement, to the Detachment of Patients at Walter Reed. Now he goes there daily on an outpatient basis for treatment of his knee and his other wounds. When Miller heard that Major—now Lieutenant Colonel—Castillo was in trouble, he asked—unofficially, of course—if he could try to help him. They were classmates at West Point as well as comrades-in-arms in bitter combat. Permission was granted—unofficially, of course.’”

“You told this guy Miller is protecting me?” Castillo asked, incredulously. “From what?”

Montvale ignored the question.

“This announcement caused Whelan to quiver like a pointer on a quail,” Montvale said. “He just knew he was onto something.

“‘How is this Castillo in trouble?’ Whelan asked. ‘Something to do with his eleven-hundred-dollar-a-day love nest in the Motel Monica?’

“To which I replied,” Montvale went on, “that I wasn’t at all surprised that a veteran journalist like himself had found out about your suite in the Mayflower and that I therefore presumed he knew about your Gulfstream.”

He told this reporter about the Gulfstream?

Where the hell is he going with this?

“Whelan said that he had heard something about it,” Montvale continued, “although the look on his face more than strongly suggested this was news to him.

“I then told him I would fill him in on what few details he didn’t know and told him that you had paid seven and a half million dollars for what I was very afraid he would be soon calling your flying love nest. And then I told him the last anyone heard from you, you had flown it to Budapest.

“I thought carefully about telling him about Budapest, but I decided that if I was wrong, and didn’t have him in my pocket, and since you acquired it so recently he might find out about the flight there and ask questions. This way, I nipped those questions in the bud.”

“I don’t know what the hell to say,” Castillo said.

“I’ll tell you when I want a response from you, Colonel,” Montvale said, evenly. “Right now, just listen. We don’t have much time.”

Much time? For what?

“Sorry, sir.”

“So, predictably, Whelan says something to the effect that he hopes I am going to tell him where an Army officer was getting the money to live in the Mayflower and buy a Gulfstream.

“To which I replied something to the effect that I was going to tell him everything, not only because I knew he’d find out anyway, but also because I knew him well enough to trust his judgment, his decency, and his patriotism.

“At that moment, for a moment, I thought perhaps I had gone a bit too far. He was more than halfway into his cups, but, on the other hand, he didn’t get where he is by being an utter fool.

“And sure enough, the next words out of his mouth are, ‘Why do I think I’m being smoozed?’

“I didn’t reply. Instead, I took your service-record jacket from my briefcase and laid it before him…”

My jacket? Where the hell did he get my jacket? They’re supposed to be in the safe at Special Operations Command in Tampa where nobody gets to see them.

Montvale saw the look on Castillo’s face, knew what it meant, and decided to explain.

“You asked a while back if General Naylor knew of the situation you’d gotten yourself in. He knew, of course, how you’d met Mr. Wilson in Angola and even of your unwise dalliance with her. Still, it required a good deal of persuasion on my part to bring him on board to agree this was the only possible way to deal with this situation and to authorize flying your records up here.

“But that, too, was a fortunate happenstance, because once I’d brought him on board he provided me with a number of very touching details of your life that proved to be quite valuable.”

Very touching details? Oh, shit! What does that mean? “To go on: After first reminding Mr. Whelan that the Freedom of Information Act did not entitle him or anyone else to peruse your personal history data, I told him I was going to tell him everything about your distinguished record, which he could verify by checking the records I had just put into his hands.”

“You let him see my jacket? There’s a lot of classified material in there. Missions I was on that are still classified. They keep the goddamned thing in a safe in Tampa!”

“Your entire file is lassified Top Secret. That impressed Mr. Whelan in no small way. I began with going through your decorations—and, I must say, even I was impressed, Colonel—starting with your first DFC and Purple Heart, which I pointed out you had earned when you were a mere boy just months out of West Point, and ending with your last Purple Heart, in Afghanistan.

“When that was over, I knew I had Whelan hooked because he put on his tough, no-nonsense journalist’s face and tone of voice and said, ‘Okay. Very impressive. But let’s get back to the love nests, both of them. And I think you should know that I know all about this Karl Gossinger character.’

“I asked, ‘You know everything about Karl Wilhelm Gossinger?’ and he replied, ‘The eleven-hundred-dollar-a-day love nest in Motel Monica Lewinsky is registered to him. He’s supposed to be the Washington correspondent for the Tages Zeitung newspapers. Nobody I know ever heard of him and I haven’t been able to find him yet. But I will.’