Hazardous Duty (Presidential Agent 8)

I

[ONE]

The James S. Brady Press Briefing Room

The White House

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.

Washington, D.C.

1315 5 June 2007

“I will take one last question,” President Joshua Ezekiel Clendennen announced from behind the podium. He pointed. “Mr. Danton, there in the back.”

President Clendennen, a pudgy, pale-skinned fifty-two-year-old Alabaman who kept his tiny ears hidden under a full head of silver hair, was, kindly, not very tall. If he had not been standing on a small platform behind the podium it would have hidden him from the White House Press Corps.

As Roscoe J. Danton—a tall, starting-to-get-a-little-plump thirty-eight-year-old—rose to his feet he thought, The sonofabitch got me!

Roscoe J. Danton, of the Washington Times-Post Writers Syndicate, as his byline read, was, depending on to whom one might talk, either near the bottom of the list of first-tier Washington journalists, or at the very top of the second tier.

Roscoe was surprised—even startled—that the President had honored him by selecting him to pose the last question of the press conference. For one thing, his hand had not been one of those raised in the sea of hands begging, like so many third-graders having urgent need of permission to visit the restroom, for the President’s attention.

Moreover, Danton had good reason to believe that the President could not be counted among his legion of fans. He had often heard the President refer to him as “that pissant,” which Roscoe had learned from The Oxford Un-Abridged Dictionary of the English Language was Alabama-speak for, one who is irritating or contemptible out of proportion to his or her significance.

The first thing Roscoe thought when called upon was that he had fallen asleep, and the President, seeing this, had seen it as an opportunity to embarrass him. Clendennen liked to embarrass people, and did so often.

Roscoe thought it was entirely possible that he had dozed off. He was not in the briefing room to make notes on what the President would say but rather because it was one of the very few places in Washington where Miss Eleanor Dillworth could not follow him.

Miss Dillworth, who brought to her stalking techniques her twenty-seven years’ experience in the Clandestine Service of the Central Intelligence Agency, had been lurking in a dark corner of the bar in the Old Ebbitt Grill on Fifteenth Street, N.W.—around the corner from the White House—at noon when Roscoe had entered for his breakfast Bloody Mary.

He managed to make it to the White House press conference safely, thus sparing himself from being presented with yet another cornucopia of unpleasant revelations vis-à-vis the CIA Miss Dillworth wanted to bring to the attention of the American people via Roscoe’s columns, which were published in more than three hundred newspapers in the United States and around the world.

Miss Dillworth, Roscoe had learned some months ago when he first met her, was a disgruntled former employee who had been relieved of her position as CIA station chief in Vienna, Austria—and later fired—for bungling the defection of two very senior officers of the SVR—the Russian Service for the Protection of the Constitutional System, renamed from KGB.

Since meeting Miss Dillworth, and becoming close—he often thought “much too uncomfortably close”—to others involved in the incident, Roscoe had come to the conclusion that the facts were not quite as she presented them and that she royally deserved getting the boot from the CIA.

But, surprising Roscoe not at all—there was a former Mrs. Roscoe Danton who was also highly intelligent, strong-willed, and found it impossible to accept that she could ever do anything wrong even if the facts clearly proved otherwise—Miss Dillworth was determined to wreak havoc on the CIA and had selected Roscoe as her instrument to do so.

“Well, Mr. Danton?” the President asked, flashing his famous benign smile.

Danton’s brain went on autopilot. He heard his words as they came out of his mouth.

“I was wondering, Mr. President, how goes your unrelenting war on drugs and piracy?”

That ought to fix you, you bastard!

You know as well as I do that you’re losing it.

“Unmitigated disaster” is a gross understatement.

The President’s benign smile widened as he replied.

“I’m glad you asked that, Roscoe,” the President replied. “I didn’t have a chance to get into that earlier in the press conference.”

I recognize that “gotcha” smile!

And I wouldn’t be getting it unless he somehow got me again. But how?

I’ll be goddamned!

That had to be the one question he didn’t want to “get into earlier.”

Or ever.

“Just as soon as this press conference is over,” the President went on, “I’m going to meet with members of my Cabinet, and other senior officials, to deal with those wars. I’ll be the first to admit they haven’t been going well, and frankly, I think it’s time for everyone to start thinking out of the box.”

That’s my cue to ask for a follow-up question.

And whatever the question is—such as “How high is the moon?”—the answer will be whatever he already plans to say.

He’s playing me like a violin.

“Follow-up, Mr. President?” Roscoe asked.

“Roscoe,” the President said in a gently chiding tone, “we’ve known one another more than long enough for you to know that I always say what I mean and always mean what I say. I said ‘one last question’ and that’s what I meant.”

“Thank you, Mr. President,” Robin Hoboken, the presidential press secretary, said. President Clendennen disappeared for a moment as he stepped off the stool behind the podium and then reappeared a moment later marching purposefully out of the room.

Mr. Hoboken was new on the job. His predecessor, Press Secretary Clemens McCarthy, had died in a spectacular explosion. The White House Yukon sport utility vehicle in which he was riding had collided as it approached Andrews Air Force Base with a huge tank of butane mounted on a sixteen-wheeler tractor trailer. The resultant fireball had incinerated McCarthy and Secret Service Agent Mark Douglas, and closed down the Beltway for two days.

Roscoe had heard a story that it was no tragic accident, that both men had been agents of the SVR and disposed of by a CIA dinosaur. The story would have been incredible on its face except that Roscoe had very good reason to believe the same CIA dinosaur had disposed of a treasonous CIA agent by sticking an ice pick in his ear in the CIA parking lot in Langley, Virginia, and also that Miss Eleanor Dillworth believed deep in her soul that the same dinosaur had expressed his displeasure with her and the Russian SVR rezident in Vienna by leaving the garroted corpse of the latter sitting in a taxi outside the U.S. embassy in Vienna with her official calling card on his chest.

Robin Hoboken was a pleasant, Ivy League–type young man who didn’t look like he could be an SVR agent, but neither had Clemens McCarthy or Mark Douglas. For that matter, the dinosaur in question didn’t look like someone who had more notches on his gun, figurative

ly speaking, for disposing of SVR agents than Clint Eastwood ever had in the bloodiest of his spaghetti western motion pictures.