Covert Warriors (Presidential Agent 7)

“What’s up, Vic?”

“Put it on loudspeaker,” Sweaty ordered.

Castillo either didn’t hear her or chose to ignore her.

Their conservation was brief, essentially one-sided, with Castillo doing most of the listening and replying with short answers. Finally, he said, “We’ll be in touch,” and replaced the handset in the Brick.

“What is ‘Net Two’?” Sweaty demanded immediately.

It took him a moment to frame his reply.

“The reason we now have two Casey networks is because we have to cut N

atalie Cohen out of the original net, and we don’t want her to know that she’s been cut.”

“That requires an explanation,” Sweaty said.

“Let me tell you what she told Frank Lammelle,” Castillo said. “Natalie Cohen said that President Clendennen thinks we tried, we’re trying, to stage a coup d’état. First we get him to appoint Montvale as Vice President, then we get rid of Clendennen.”

“My God!” Doña Alicia said.

“That never entered my mind,” Castillo said. “Maybe it should have. But that’s moot. Montvale and Natalie and Frank no longer have the threat of impeachment to hold Clendennen in line. So now it’s his turn to get rid of people. That circus at Langley—Clendennen’s press conference—was his first move. He not only got rid of Porky Parker, but he made the point to the others that he was coming after them just as soon as he could find a reason.

“Once they get the message, he hopes they will resign. They can leave his service with their reputations intact, instead of getting fired for incompetence, as Parker was. It’s clear to both Lammelle and Cohen that he plans to use this mess in Mexico as the way to do it.

“So Natalie told Frank their only defense against this is to not give him any excuse at all to accuse them of either incompetence or disloyalty.

“Making matters worse, Lammelle says that Cohen—keep in mind that it was her idea to send Ferris, Danny Salazar, and the other Special Forces people down there in the first place—will go ballistic if she even suspects what Aleksandr Pevsner plans to do in Mexico.”

“Which is?” Doña Alicia asked softly.

“Pevsner has decided that the best defense against what Putin has in mind for us is a good offense.”

“And you, Carlos?” she asked. “How do you feel about that?”

Castillo hesitated just perceptibly before replying, “Abuela, taking into consideration both that Putin has proved—Herr Friedler was not the only man he had assassinated—that he’s willing and capable of murdering everybody he thinks is in his way, I’m afraid Pevsner is right.”

“You said, ‘taking into consideration both.’”

“Abuela, Putin’s already tried, several times, to assassinate me. There’s no question that he’s coming after Svetlana, and I can’t let that happen. I won’t let that happen.”

Doña Alicia sighed. “Oh, my. We have a very bad situation on our hands, don’t we?”

Castillo didn’t reply for a long moment. Then he said, “We thought—naïvely thought—that we had bloodied his nose when we grabbed the Tupelov and turned General Sirinov over to the CIA. We offered him an armistice; he didn’t accept it. So what we have to do now is bloody it again, hard enough this time so that he gets the message.”

She considered that for a moment.

“And so what do we do now?”

“‘So what do we do now’?” Castillo parroted, lightly sarcastic.

His grandmother stared at him icily.

“Until you lower me into my grave, Carlos, I will continue to run this family. Never forget that!”

“Sorry,” he said.

He saw Sweaty looking at her with a smile of approval.