Covert Warriors (Presidential Agent 7)

“If this fellow is as good as you and O’Toole say he is, he should be able to figure that out himself, wouldn’t you say?”

“Sir, as General O’Toole pointed out, he will have two missions. The first, he will have to know about that. That is, the arrival of Abrego at the prison. That’s the overt mission. The covert mission is to determine the best way of liberating Colonel Ferris. How much do you want O’Toole to tell him about that?”

The President gave that question thirty seconds of serious consideration.

“I was about to say, leave that to General O’Toole’s good judgment. He has experience in these matters. But then I realized I want General O’Toole here with me to answer the questions about this and that, ones that will inevitably arise. So, what I think we should do, General Naylor, is have you go to El Paso to give this man D’Alessandro his marching orders.”

“General, my appearance at Fort Bliss would raise questions . . .”

“Who said anything about Fort Bliss? I want you to go to El Paso.”

“Sir, Fort Bliss abuts El Paso. There is an Army airfield there, Biggs Army Airfield. If I went into El Paso International instead of Biggs, questions would be raised.”

“Well, you don’t have to travel in that Gulfstream of yours—going there on a regular airline would be one way of avoiding attention, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes, sir. If you think it’s best, I can go commercial.”

“No,” the President then said. “There would be questions about that, too; why you weren’t traveling in your Gulfstream. Besides, it will be quicker going and coming, if I need you back here. So here’s your marching orders, General: Get down to El Paso. General O’Toole will have this man D’Alessandro waiting for you, and he will have arranged for a Black Hawk to take him to meet this Mexican cop. You will give D’Alessandro his marching orders, and as soon as he’s on his way to Mexico, you come back here. Got it?”

“Yes, sir. And after Mr. D’Alessandro meets with the Mexican policeman, what should I tell him to do?”

“Tell him to go back to El Paso and await further orders. We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll leave right away.”

“Yeah,” the President said. “Have a nice flight, General.”

“Thank you, sir.”

[THREE]

Office of the Director

Central Intelligence Agency

McLean, Virginia

1310 20 April 2007

“And what can the CIA do for the most important general in the world today?” A. Franklin Lammelle answered his telephone.

“You know I don’t think that’s funny, Frank,” General Allan B. Naylor said.

“It was a perfectly serious question.”

“You can tell me where I can find Vic D’Alessandro.”

“Two questions,” Lammelle said. “What makes you think I would know, and why do you want to know?”

Lammelle held the commander in chief of the United States Central Command in the highest possible regard in terms of ability and integrity. But he didn’t like him very much—and sometimes not at all.

Naylor was deeply into the West Pointer’s creed of duty, honor, country. And while that was certainly commendable, Naylor, Lammelle had decided over the years, just went too goddamn far with it.

The best example of this was Naylor’s relationship with Charley Castillo. He had known Charley since he was a child. Charley and Naylor’s son had been a year apart in a private elementary school in Germany when Charley’s mother, suffering from terminal cancer, announced her desire to find Charley’s father. She had told Mrs. Naylor, her friend, that she’d been impregnated at seventeen by a dashing nineteen-year-old Army chopper jockey, who’d then disappeared. Mrs. Naylor pressed her husband, then-Major Naylor, to find the boy’s only living relative.

Naylor had been happy to do it. He was a highly moral man who really loathed officers who knocked up young German women and never made the slightest effort to meet their responsibilities vis-à-vis their love child.

Castillo’s father hadn’t been hard to find. He was buried in the Fort Sam National Cemetery beneath a headstone onto which had been chiseled a representation of the Medal of Honor.