The Hunters (Presidential Agent 3)

Kilgore did not respond directly.

“Just a question to satisfy my curiosity, Mr. Castillo,” he said. “If a messenger left an envelope here with only your name on it, would you get it? No matter the hour? Twenty-four/seven?”

“I would.”

“And no one else?”

“No one not cleared for this operation,” Castillo said.

“While of course we are both agreed that you would not ask NSA to provide intercepts of this nature if doing so would violate any part of the United States Code, and that even if you did NSA would not provide data of this nature to you under any circumstances…”

“I understand, Colonel.”

“Speaking hypothetically, of course, if NSA happened to make an intercept of wire transfers into or out of, say, a foreign bank in Mexico, that’s all it would have. The amount, the routing numbers, and the numbers of the accounts involved in both banks. There would be no way to identify the owners of the accounts by name.”

You get me the numbers, Colonel Kilgore, and my man Yung will get me the names.

“Understood,” Castillo said. “Speaking hypothetically, of course, how does this work?”

“I really don’t know,” Kilgore said, “but I’ve heard that what happens is that just about everything is recorded in real time and then run through a filter which identifies what someone is interested in. The more information that’s available for the filter…bank routing numbers, the time period in which the data sought was probably being transmitted…”

Castillo took his laptop computer from under his desk, turned it on, and called up the data he’d gotten from Secret Service Agent Harry Larsen in Pennsylvania. He then turned the computer around so Kilgore could see it.

Kilgore studied it, nodded, and said, “Certainly I’ll excuse you while you meet the call of nature, Mr. Castillo. I know how it is. When you’ve gotta go, you’ve gotta go. And while you’re gone, I don’t suppose there’s a telephone, preferably a secure one, I could use? I’d like to check in with my secretary, let her know I’ll be a little late getting to the office.”

Castillo stood up.

“The red one’s connected to the White House switchboard,” he said and went into the private restroom off his office.

Kilgore was sitting behind Castillo’s desk when three minutes later—as timed by Castillo’s watch—Castillo came out of the restroom.

“That’s an interesting handset,” Kilgore greeted him. “The small black one. It looks like something AFC would make.”

“And so it is,” Castillo said.

“You know much about AFC?” Kilgore asked.

“I even know Mr. Casey.”

“Interesting man, isn’t he? Among my other duties, I’m the liaison officer between NSA and his research facilities in Las Vegas.”

“I’ve even been there.”

“Well, that would explain, I suppose, why some people in Fort Meade are reporting a stream of gibberish coming out of here, absolutely unbreakable.”

“Who in a position to use your services would be interested in anything coming out of here?”

“I wouldn’t know, of course, but the agency is one possibility,” Kilgore said.

“I suppose it would be,” Castillo said.

“I once asked Mr. Casey about a rumor floating around that he’d given Delta Force—and only Delta Force—an encryption logarithm that was really something. He used to be a Green Beret. Did you know that?”

“As a matter of fact, I do,” Castillo said. “What did he say?”

“He said that when he was a Green Beret he was almost blown away several times because somebody with a big mouth had listened to things they didn’t need to know and that he was trying to see that that no longer could happen. He said Special Forces was like the Marines. Once a Green Beanie, always a Green Beanie.”

“I suppose that’s true,” Castillo said.