The Shooters (Presidential Agent 4)

"Oh. I see what you mean."

"That's the first time I can remember the ambassador saying 'please.'"

"That's probably because he's not my boss," Castillo replied. "He just thinks he is."

"That's probably even worse, isn't it?"

"Yes, it is," Castillo agreed.

Mitchell smiled and nodded.

"Okay, this'll take ten or fifteen minutes. You can start unloading whatever you have to unload."

"Thank you," Castillo said.

"Consider it your hearty meal for the condemned man," Mitchell said, shook his hand, and went to the stair door.

Castillo turned to Miller.

"So where do I find a secure phone?"

"There's one in

your Yukon."

"I said a secure phone."

"And I said, Colonel, sir, 'In your Yukon,'" Miller said, and made a grand gesture toward the stair door.

Miller motioned for Castillo to precede him into the backseat of one of the dark blue Yukons. Then, not without difficulty, he stowed his crutch, got in beside him, and closed the door.

There was a telephone handset mounted on the rear of the driver's seat in the Yukon. Except for an extraordinarily thick cord, it looked like a perfectly normal handset.

"That's secure?" Castillo asked.

"Secure and brand-new," Miller replied. "A present from your pal Aloysius."

"Really?"

"He called up three or four days ago, asked of your general health and welfare, then asked if there was anything he could do for us. I told him I couldn't think of a thing. He said he had a new toy he thought you might like to play with, one in its developmental phase."

Miller pointed at the telephone.

"So yesterday, I was not surprised when the Secret Service guy said there were some people from AFC seeking access to your throne room in the complex. I was surprised when they came up to see that one of them was Aloysius in the flesh."

Aloysius Francis Casey (Ph.D., Electrical Engineering, MIT) was a small, pale-faced man who customarily dressed in baggy black suits. He also was the founder, chairman of the board, and principal stockholder of the AFC Corporation. AFC had a vast laboratory and three manufacturing facilities that provided a substantial portion of worldwide encrypted communications to industry in the form of leased technology.

During the Vietnam War, then-Sergeant Casey had served with distinction as the commo man on several Special Forces A-Teams. He had decided, immediately after the First Desert War, that it was payback time. Preceded by a telephone call from the senior U.S. senator from Nevada, he had arrived at Fort Bragg in one of AFC's smaller jets and explained to then-Major General Bruce J. McNab that, save for the confidence that being a Green Beanie had given him, he would almost certainly have become either a Boston cop-or maybe a postman-after his Vietnam service.

Not that Casey found either occupation wanting.

Instead, he said, his Green Beanie service had given him the confidence to attempt the impossible. In his case, he explained, that meant getting into MIT without a high school diploma on the strength of his self-taught comprehension of both radio wave propagation and cryptographic algorithms.

"A professor," Casey had said, "took a chance on a scrawny little Irishman with the balls to ask for something like getting into MIT and arranged for me to audit classes. By the end of my freshman year, I got my high school diploma. By the end of my second year, I had my BS. The next year, I got my master's and started AFC. By the time I got my doctorate two years later, AFC was up and running. The professor who gave me my chance-Heinz Walle-is now AFC's vice president of research and development. I now have more money than I can spend, so it's payback time."

General McNab had asked him exactly what he had in mind. Dr. Casey replied that he knew the Army's equipment was two, three years obsolete before the first piece of it was delivered.

"What I'm going to do is see that Special Forces has state-of-the-art stuff."