The Hunters (Presidential Agent 3)

Castillo nodded. He’s right. You’re only fooling yourself thinking you can push yourself when you’re wiped out. And I’m wiped out. We’re all wiped out.

“Fine with me,” Castillo had quickly agreed.

Juliet Knowles and the English girl—he finally had learned her name was Heather Maywood—had been wiped out when they quit at half past four, thirty minutes after normal quitting time. Since then, Castillo and Miller had been manning the laptops.

Surprising Castillo, Doherty had not wanted to talk to anyone at the safe house in the Mayerling Country Club. When he saw the look on Castillo’s face, he offered a terse explanation.

“We’ll start with what I get from you here. Then we’ll get what they have and start looking for both confirmation and anomalies.”

With no enthusiasm at all, Castillo had decided that he had no choice but to let Doherty do whatever the hell Doherty was doing the way Doherty wanted to do it.

Castillo had given Delchamps the printouts of the material Eric Kocian had given him in Budapest as soon as they had been ready. He had read them with one eye, keeping the other on the blackboards until immediately after lunch—paper cartons of allegedly Chinese food, the remnants of which

filled a wastebasket—for Langley to see, as he put it, “First, if Montvale really got me in over there and, second, if he did, to see what I can find in the file-and-forget cabinets that matches this stuff.”

At four o’clock, Yung had called saying he was about to get on an airplane in New Orleans and did Castillo want him to come to the office or what?

Castillo had told him there was nothing for him do right now, he didn’t “have the data yet”—by which he meant the intercepts from NSA, which at that point he didn’t expect until the next day—but to come to the Nebraska Complex at eight the next morning.

Delchamps had called a little after six and reported that “the door was really open, to my surprise,” but that he’d had enough and was quitting for the day. He had refused Castillo’s offer of supper, saying he was going to his room in the Marriott and get on the horn to some other dinosaurs to see what they remembered, and would see them in the morning.

Doherty had left immediately. Castillo and Miller had stayed until NSA technicians had swept the room and Department of Homeland Security maintenance personnel had cleaned it up. Then they had set up a security officer outside the door to the conference room from the corridor, locked the door to it from Castillo’s office, and were driven to the Mayflower in a Secret Service Yukon XL.

In the SUV, they confessed to one another that they had no idea where Doherty was headed with his blackboard, but that he obviously did and maybe they could make sense of them in the morning when their heads were clear.

They went to the suite, ordered club sandwiches and beer from room service, and went to bed before ten, both of them first having fallen asleep watching television in the living room.

[THREE]

Conference Room

Office of the Chief of Operational Analysis

Department of Homeland Security

Nebraska Avenue Complex

Washington, D.C.

0555 12 August 2005

Castillo nearly didn’t pick up when the red bulb flashed on the White House telephone on the conference table. For one thing he seriously doubted that the President of the United States wished to speak personally to him—especially at this hour—and he didn’t want to talk to anyone else—especially Ambassador Montvale—who was authorized to use the system.

What he wanted to do—and had, in fact, ninety seconds earlier begun to do—was study the half dozen blackboards in the room to see if he could make any sense out of Doherty’s symbols, arrows, and question marks.

And he knew that if he didn’t pick up the red handset, Miller would.

But he picked it up anyway.

Before he could open his mouth, a male voice said, “Not bad. I understand the protocol requires a pickup in thirty seconds or less. That took you twenty-two.”

“Who’s this?” Castillo asked, although he had suspicions.

The reply came in a voice which would not win any amateur night contests, softly singing a song from Castillo’s past: “We’ll bid fare-well to Kay-det Gray, and don the Army Blue…”

“How can you be so cheerful at this hour?” Castillo asked.

“I’ve been up since three,” Colonel Gregory J. Kilgore said. “That’s when the fisherman called to tell me he’d hooked a whopper. And by the time I got over here, about four, he was waiting to tell me he’d hooked all kinds of things. And more have been caught in the net since then. I’m separating the shellfish from the trash fish right now.”