Covert Warriors (Presidential Agent 7)

“Is he a friend?” one of the men in a wheelchair asked.

“Roscoe vouches for him,” Delchamps said, “and Roscoe—in case you didn’t know—is one of us.”

“In that case, tell him.”

“Sure. Tell him.”

“Why not?”

The elderly lady added: “As long as he understands that if he runs at the mouth . . .”

Oh, no! Danton thought. Not the old woman, too!

“. . . we’ll have to kill him.”

Another of the men, about Delchamps’s age, pointed at the centerpiece of dinosaurs, and said: “That should make it quite obvious, Mr. Parker. This is where us old dinosaurs come to die.”

There were grunts, and then came what appeared to Parker and Danton to be a regular war of words among the residents.

“Oh, shit, there he goes again with that crap!”

“Jesus Christ, Mac, will you knock off with that come-to-die nonsense?”

“Speak for yourself, John Alden! You’ve always—”

“Let me have a shot at this!” Dianne Sanders interrupted. “Mr. Parker, everybody in this room—except those two and me—is retired from the Company.”

She pointed to the enormous black man and to a man who looked to be in his late forties.

“That’s Dick Miller and Tom, my husband. They used to run around the block with Charley Castillo and General McNab until the Army decided they were no longer able to play Rambo, and medically retired them. I was a cryptographer, and took my retirement, too. Then came the glory days of the Office of Organizational Analysis . . . you both know what that was?”

Parker and Danton nodded.

“Charley needed a safe house here, and OOA bought this. Then Uncle Remus—you know who he is?”

Roscoe Danton knew that Uncle Remus was the politically incorrect—and some suggested racist—name that only his close friends could call Chief Warrant Officer (5) Colin Leverette, U.S. Army, Retired.

Danton nodded.

Porky shook his head.

“He’s the guy who took Colonel Hamilton to the Fish Farm in the Congo,” Delchamps clarified.

“One of the better snake eaters,” Tom Sanders further clarified. “Dianne and I were in our happy, exciting retirement in Fayetteville, watching the mildew grow in the bathtub when Uncle Remus showed up and asked if we’d be interested in running this place. We were on the next plane up here.”

“Then we thought we’d be out of a job when OOA was broken up,” Dianne picked up. “But when Edgar said he needed a place to live now that he was retired, he moved in ‘as a temporary measure.’ ”

“And then the other dinosaurs started moving in, one by one,” the elderly lady offered. “We were scattered all around D.C. I was in the Silver Oaks Methodist Episcopal Ladies Retirement Community in Silver Spring. You can imagine how much I had in common with the ladies there.”

“So you’re also retired from the CIA?” Danton asked.

“Thirty-four years in the Clandestine Service,” she said with quiet pride.

“Dinosaurs?” Porky Parker asked.

“That’s what they call us at Langley,” the elderly lady said. “We still believe that the only good Communist is a dead Communist, so we’re dinosaurs to them.”

“And, so,” one of the men in a wheelchair said, “with the not inconsiderable help of Two-Gun, we formed Lorimer Manor, Inc., and bought this place from the Lorimer Charitable and Benevolent Trust. When one of Castillo’s Merry Outlaws needs to use a safe house—Edgar, Two-Gun, and Gimpy stayed here last night, for example—we send a bill to the LCBF Corporation.”