By Order of the President (Presidential Agent 1)

You suppose you should have done? You know goddamn well it should have been shredded.

“Why not?”

“Sir, I thought I was right and I thought that maybe the ‘develop further’ would come late but that it would come.”

And they found the filing that should have been shredded on his computer? And shit a brick? Is that what this is all about?

“What about the filing? Did someone find out it hadn’t been shredded?”

Whatever comes next is important. He’s trying to figure out the best way to say it.

“Sir, I gave my filing to Major Castillo.”

Jesus H. Christ!

He doesn’t mean “gave”; he means “sent.” The last I heard Castillo was passing hors d’oeuvres in Washington.

“Charley Castillo?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You mean you sent it to him?”

“He was in Luanda, sir. Undercover. As a German journalist. ”

I knew goddamn well Castillo was doing something besides passing hors d’oeuvres in Sodom on the Potomac.

“He went to you?”

“No, sir. He came on the same plane as Mrs. Wilson . . .”

“Who is?”

“Sir, Mrs. Patricia D. Wilson is the company’s regional director for Southwest Africa. My immediate supervisor in the CIA.”

“Okay.”

“Sir, she smelled something wrong about Castillo—that he wasn’t really who he said he was, Karl Gossinger or something like that—and she told me to check him out. So I did, I went to the hotel, and found out he was Charley . . . Major Castillo.”

“And you gave Major Castillo your filing?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Because you believed you had valuable intel that was being ignored and that you should get it into the right hands even if doing so violated security regulations?”

Noble thought; dumb fucking thing to do. Good God, Miller, you’re a West Pointer and a field-grade officer. You know better than to do something like that.

“Yes, sir, that too,” Miller said.

What the hell does that mean? “That too”?

“ ‘That too,’ Miller?”

“Sir, Major Castillo told me he was—sir, what he actually said was that he had been sent by . . . ‘by a guy who lives part-time in a Gone With the Wind mansion on Hilton Head island.’ ”

Two hundred and six guys live part-time in mansions on Hilton Head!

“Which you understood to mean he meant the president? ”