Hazardous Duty (Presidential Agent 8)

To the point where he had confided to his friend Charley Castillo—to whom he no longer referred to as “Hotshot”—that he had more money than he knew what to do with. He confided this to Castillo not only as a friend, but also because he knew that Castillo, too, had more money than he knew what to do with.

One of the things Casey had done with his wealth was of course to provide prototype equipment free of charge to the Special Forces community, but this—especially after Casey’s platoon of tax lawyers taught him how to charge this off as “research and development”—didn’t make much of a dent in the bottom line.

He had spent a hell of a lot of money building the House on the Hill for Mary-Catherine, whom he had married immediately after returning from the war in Vietnam. Their first home had been a basement room in her parents’ row house in South Boston. She had supported him emotionally—his and her parents thought he was either nuts or smoking funny cigarettes—when he went to MIT. And supported them financially by stuffing bags for long hours in a Stop & Shop Supermarket.

They had four years together in the House on the Hill, and then cancer got Mary-Catherine. Got her very quickly, which was the only good thing that could be said about that.

A year after Mary-Catherine left him alone—they’d never been able to have kids—in the House on the Hill, the demise of both the Office of Organizational Analysis and the Merry Outlaws, which was a brief reincarnation of the former, caused two of its members to be without work.

Casey had come to know both of them, and felt a kinship with both.

One of these was First Lieutenant Edmund “Peg-Leg” Lorimer, MI, USA, Retired, who had worn the Green Beret as an “A” Team commo sergeant—which logically really resonated with Casey—before getting a battlefield commission. He had been an officer just long enough to make first lieutenant when he was wounded in—and ultimately lost—his left leg just above the knee.

The other was Gunnery Sergeant Lester Bradley, USMC, Retired, who was twenty-one but looked much younger. He had been part of Castillo’s operation from the very beginning, even before they had been first formalized as the Office of Organizational Analysis.

Then a corporal in the Marine Guard detachment at the American embassy in Buenos Aires, Bradley had been sent—as the man who could best be spared—to drive an embassy truck carrying two fifty-five-gallon barrels of helicopter fuel to Uruguay. He was pressed into service in support of a hastily organized raid Castillo had undertaken to snatch Dr. John Paul Lorimer, a renegade American, for forcible repatriation to the United States.

Dr. Lorimer and Lieutenant Lorimer, it should be pointed out, were in no way related.

Castillo had handed Bradley an M-14 rifle and ordered him to do what he could to protect the fuel while he and other Special Operations operators—plus an FBI agent also pressed into service from his duties in the Uruguayan embassy looking for dirty money—conducted the raid.

The raid had promptly started to go sour, and might have failed—probably would have failed—had not Bradley taken out two of the bad guys with head shots, fired offhand from one hundred yards from his M-14 rifle and the FBI agent, taking his pistol out of its holster for the first time ever except on the FBI Academy’s pistol range at Quantico, used it to take out two more of them.

When he returned to the United States, then-Major Castillo had reported to the President—President Clendennen’s predecessor—that, since they obviously couldn’t be returned to their embassy duties, he had brought Corporal Bradley and FBI Special Agent David W. Yung home with him. He also reported that Dr. Lorimer had been killed by what they had learned were agents of the SVR as he was opening his safe. The safe had a little over sixteen million dollars’ worth of bearer bonds in it the SVR thought was theirs, Castillo told the President, and he had brought that home, too.

The President had a solution that dealt with what should be done with Castillo, others on the raid (including Bradley and Yung), and the money. He issued a Top Secret Presidential Finding establishing the Office of Organizational Analysis, named Castillo its chief, assigned Bradley, Yung, and everybody involved in the raid to it, and funded it with $500,000 from his Confidential Fund.

“In the meantime, Charley,” the President went on, “understanding I’m not telling you to do this, if you should happen to find sixteen million in bearer bonds somewhere on the sidewalk, you might consider using that for the expenses of OOA until I can come up with some more money for you.”

Special Agent Yung, who was an expert in the laundering of funds, established an account for the Lorimer Charitable & Benevolent Fund in the Riggs National Bank in Washington, and deposited sixteen million dollars in bearer bonds into it.

That was the beginning of what would become the LCBF Corporation, which was formed after, shortly before his untimely death, the President found it necessary to disband the OOA and order its members to disappear from the face of the earth.

When that happened, neither Lieutenant Lorimer nor Sergeant Bradley had anywhere to go. Neither had any family to speak of, and they had been retired from the service. Neither could Bradley continue to be Castillo’s shadow. Among other reasons for that was a redheaded Russian called Sweaty, who while she really liked Lester, did not want to have him around for breakfast, lunch, and dinner seven days a week.

Aloysius Casey offered both men a job working for the AFC Corporation laboratories in Las Vegas. He was working on a new project for the gaming industry, a computer-driven system that would, when completed, discreetly scan the faces of guests as they entered the lobby and instantly come up with their biographies, credit ratings, and the balances in their bank accounts. This would be of great interest to the gaming industry, and one of the titans of that industry, who had become a pal of Aloysius, told him that they would pay through the nose for it if he could make it work.

Aloysius, not sure if he believed it, told Peg-Leg and Lester that he thought they would be useful to him as he perfected the new system. He also said that, until they got settled, they could stay with him in the House on the Hill.

“There’s certainly plenty of room,” he said.

In addition to the twenty-three rooms in which Aloysius was—with the exception of the Mexican couple who took care of him—rattling around alone, there were four “guest cottages,” each consisting of a bedroom, a living room, a game room complete with nickel slot machines—their motherboards rigged to pay out more than they took in—and a complete kitchen.

Lester moved into one of these cottages next to the putting green, and Peg-Leg into the one nearest the pool, which he used often for therapeutic reasons connected with the damaged muscles of his leg.

From the beginning, things went well—except for the incident with the motorcycle. One day when Lester was in the lobby of Mount Vesuvius Resort & Gaming Palace watching people come in, so he could determine the best

location to place the scanning cameras, he had an idle moment and dropped a quarter into a slot machine, just so he could see how it worked without anybody seeing him watching.

There then suddenly came a bleating of trumpets, the flashing of lights, the screaming of sirens, and a recorded voice repeatedly bellowing, “There is a winner!”

Lester had won the Grand Prize offered by that slot machine—an absolute top-of-the-line Harley-Davidson that was sitting on a pedestal just inside the lobby. Aloysius suspected a glitch in the slot machine’s motherboard, as that particular motorcycle had been sitting there for as long as he could remember and no one had ever won it.

The thought of Lester riding that monster up and down the Strip and then up and down the mountain every day brought forth in Aloysius what he thought of as a manifestation of the Special Operators creed that one Special Operator always covers another Special Operator’s back, but was probably more of a manifestation of previously unsuspected paternal instincts.

He conferred first with Peg-Leg, who then told Lester that while he was happy with Lester’s good fortune, his peg leg would keep him from ever getting on the motorcycle with him.

In his next tactical move, he conferred over the CaseyBerry system with David W. Yung, now the chief financial officer of the LCBF Corporation, and who was managing Lester’s investment portfolio, and got him to agree to tell Lester that the purchase of an automobile of any kind would interfere with the growth of the portfolio.