By Order of the President (Presidential Agent 1)

“Let me think about it on the way home,” he said. "Do that, John,” she said. “Think about it.”

Then she hung up.

[TWO]

The Mayflower Hotel 1127 Connecticut Avenue NW Washington, D.C. 1925 6 June 2005

The director of Central Intelligence had been driven alone— his choice—from his home to the Mayflower Hotel in a dark blue GMC Yukon. The Yukon was armored and the windows were deeply tinted. There were three shortwave antennae on the roof.

But the vehicle, the director believed, would not attract very much attention. There were probably three hundred nearly identical vehicles moving around the district and by no means did all of them belong to the government. He suspected that maybe half of them belonged to, say, middle-level bureaucrats in, say, the Department of Agriculture, who had bought them to impress the neighbors, as a, say, middle-level bank manager in St. Louis, Missouri, would have bought a Jaguar or a Cadillac he really couldn’t afford for the same purpose.

In Washington, prestige came with power rather than money. In Washington, and environs, the way to impress the neighbors was to look as if you were important enough to move around in an armored, window-darkened Yukon with antennae on the roof.

The DCI’s Yukon and the DCI himself attracted little attention when he rolled up in front of the Mayflower, quickly got out, and marched across the lobby to the bank of elevators, even though he was preceded and trailed by security men.

They ascended to the fourth floor. One of the security men got off the elevator first, looked up and down the corridor, and then indicated the direction of Suite 404 with a nod of his head.

The security man waited until the DCI started off the elevator, then led the way down the corridor to 404, where he knocked three times on the door.

It was opened by a young man in a dinner jacket. The security man quickly scrutinized the guy. He was not of the beady-eyed political lackey sort that the security man was accustomed to encountering in this town. He showed confidence and control.

“Who are you?” the security man asked, not very politely.

The young man glanced down the corridor, saw the DCI approaching, and evenly replied, “If you’re looking for Secretary Hall, this is it.” He opened the door wider.

The DCI appeared in the doorway.

“Come on in, John,” the secretary of Homeland Security called.

The DCI entered the suite.

The living room looked like someone lived there, he thought, rather than as if it were just one more “executive suite” occupied by some businessman—not government employee; a government per diem allowance wouldn’t come close to paying for this place—in Washington for a few days.

The young man in the dinner jacket started to close the door in the face of the security guard, who held it open with his foot and hand and looked to the DCI for guidance.

“It’s okay,” the DCI said, and the security man removed his foot and hand and the door closed in his face.

“John, this is my executive assistant, Charley Castillo,” the secretary said.

The DCI smiled and put out his hand but didn’t say anything.

“How do you do, sir?” Castillo said politely, shaking the hand.

“Eleanor downstairs?” the secretary asked.

“No. She’s coming in later. I told her to call my cellular when she got close,” the DCI said.

“Well, maybe we can wrap this up before she gets here,” the secretary said. “Can we get you a drink, John?”

“Thank you, no. What’s this all about, Matt?”

The secretary picked up a folder from the coffee table— the DCI noticed that it bore no security stamps of any kind—and handed it to him.

The document inside, six single-spaced pages, also was barren

of security stamps of any kind. But two sentences into it, the DCI was aware he was reading an intel filing.

This one suggested the strong possibility that the Boeing 727 that had gone missing from Luanda, Angola, had been stolen by or for a Russian arms dealer by the name of Vasily Respin either for parts to be used by one of his enterprises or to be sold to others.