Hazardous Duty (Presidential Agent 8)

“We might as well go home,” Delchamps said. “This might take some time.”

Home to Mr. Delchamps was Lorimer Manor, a large house—it could be fairly called a mansion—on an acre of manicured lawn on West Boulevard Drive in Alexandria. There was a tasteful brass sign on the lawn:

LORIMER MANOR

ASSISTED LIVING

NO SOLICITING

Lorimer Manor was also home to eleven other people—including the elegant grandmother in her seventies driving the Yukon—who were all also retired from the Clandestine Service of the CIA.

It had been originally purchased by the Lorimer Charitable & Benevolent Fund—using the funds from Dr. Lorimer’s safe, hence the name—in the early days of the Office of Organizational Analysis as a safe house.

On the demise of that organization, the question of what to do with the property was initially solved by Mr. Delchamps, who said he needed a place to live, and would rent it from the LCBF Corporation temporarily.

Word spread quickly among the Retired Clandestine Community—known disparagingly by many newcomers to the CIA as “the Dinosaurs”—that ol’ Edgar Delchamps was holed up comfortably in a big house in Alexandria. Perhaps there would be room for one more of them?

The place was shortly full up, and there was a waiting list. It was of particular interest to females who had retired from the Clandestine Service. They were uncomfortable living, for example, in the Silver Springs Methodist Retirement Home for Christian Ladies, and places of that nature.

Mr. David W. Yung—he was good at this sort of thing—had quickly set up a nonprofit corporation to handle the administration of the facility. A housekeeper—herself a retired Special Operations cryptographer married to a retired member of Delta Force—was engaged, rates were set, a board of directors established, and so on, and soon Lorimer Manor was off and running, so to speak.

As part of the deal, two rooms in Lorimer Manor were always kept in readiness for Merry Outlaws who happened to be in our nation’s capital and needed a discreet place to rest their heads.

Mr. Delchamps led Mr. Danton into Lorimer Manor’s recreation room, which was essentially a bar offering as large a selection of intoxicants as the one in the Willard he had just left.

The centerpiece decoration of the bar was two dinosaurs, facing each other. One of them had a pink ribbon around its neck.

“Sit, Roscoe,” Edgar ordered. “And tell Two-Gun and me everything you know about how our President’s latest aberration affects our leader.”

Mr. Delchamps’s reference to Mr. Yung as “Two-Gun” unnerved him. He had no idea why the Merry Outlaws so referred to Mr. Yung, but the mental image of Mr. Yung with a pistol in each hand, blazing away at the bad guys, à la Mr. Bruce Willis in many of his motion pictures, was menacing.

The explanation was simple. In the very first days, Mr. Yung and Mr. Delchamps had gone from Montevideo, Uruguay, to Buenos Aires. Both had pistols. In the case of Mr. Yung, this was perfectly legal, as Mr. Yung was then still officially a legal attaché of the U.S. embassy in Montevideo, which position afforded him diplomatic status. Diplomatic status, in turn, permitted him to go about armed and to park wherever he wanted to.

Mr. Delchamps, who did not have diplomatic status, not only had to pay to park his car like ordinary people, but would have been arrested had he attempted to pass through Argentine customs with his preferred lethal weapon—a Colt Officer’s Model 1911A1 .45 ACP semiautomatic pistol—tucked in the back of his trousers. The solution was simple. He handed the .45 to Mr. Yung, who passed through customs carrying both. He had thereafter been known to his fellow Merry Outlaws as “Two-Gun Yung,” which had a certain onomatopoetic ring to it.

Thus Mr. Danton, reasonably, was unnerved by the moniker. As was he unnerved after having been kidnapped from The Round Robin Bar.

But what really unnerved him was being reminded that both Delchamps and Yung regarded him as one of their own—as, in other words, a fellow Merry Outlaw.

Roscoe was willing to admit they had their reasons. One was that he had permitted dreams of journalistic glory to overwhelm his common sense. Specifically, armed with a borrowed Uzi machine pistol, he had jumped aboard the Black Hawk helicopter that Castillo had bought from a corrupt Mexican police official just before it had taken off in the Venezuelan incursion known as Operation March Hare.

And, Roscoe was willing to admit, he had taken “the King’s Shilling.” Actually, it was “the Merry Outlaws’ Million Dollars After Taxes.” Mr. Delchamps and Mr. Yung had decided that since Roscoe had gone to the Venezuelan airbase on La Orchila Island carrying an Uzi, he was as much entitled to the bonus as anybody else who had gone on the operation.

When the money was offered, Roscoe had thought only a fool would refuse a million dollars after taxes. He had since often wondered if that had been the right decision.

“Edgar,” Roscoe said, with all the sincerity he could muster, “with Almighty God as my witness, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“My sainted mother, Roscoe,” Delchamps said, “taught me that religion is the last refuge of the scoundrel.”

“Have Roscoe play the intercepts,” Two-Gun said. “If that doesn’t trigger his memory, we’ll let him play with the dogs.”

Edgar could see from the recreation room windows the dogs to which Two-Gun referred. There were eight or nine Bouviers des Flandres in the backyard of Lorimer Manor. One of them was playing tug-of-war with the garden hose. The gardener had one end still in his hands as the Bouvier dragged him around the garden on his stomach. The rest of the Bouviers, like a herd of buffalo, bounded after them, competing for the gardener’s back, onto which they leapt and rode like a sled until one of their siblings knocked them off and took their place.

“Roscoe, take out your CaseyBerry and push button number nine, which will cause some intercepts to play. When you have listened carefully, tell us what you think.”

While Roscoe was doing so, Edgar went behind the bar and prepared three drinks of twelve-year-old Macallan single malt whisky. He then signed Roscoe’s name to the honor system bar tab. He slid one glass to Two-Gun, but when Roscoe reached for what he thought was intended for him, Edgar waved his index finger at him negatively and said, “First, analysis, then booze.”

“Depending, of course,” Two-Gun amplified, “on the quality of your analysis.”