Hazardous Duty (Presidential Agent 8)

The beautiful building to which he referred had been built in Moscow in 1900 as luxury apartments renting for two or three times the norm. The Trump Towers or the One57 building of its time, so to speak. In 1919, the capitalist tenants were evicted by Felix Dzerzhinsky so that the building could be put to use for the benefit of the workers and peasants. The Cheka moved in, and the storage areas in the basement were converted to cells. The building has been occupied ever since by successor organizations to the Cheka.

His Eminence apparently knew about Lubyanka, but was again unruffled.

“And you believe, my son, that would be inevitable?”

“I don’t play Russian roulette, either,” Charley said.

Vic D’Alessandro laughed, then raised his hand and asked, “Permission to speak, Colonel, sir?”

“If you think this is funny, go fuck yourself,” Charley replied.

“I’ll take that as ‘Permission granted,’” D’Alessandro said. “Thank you, sir.”

Charley gave him the finger.

“Your Eminence,” Svetlana said, “I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive my Carlos. He tends to forget his manners when he’s a little upset.”

The archbishop graciously gestured that he was prepared to forgive Svetlana’s Carlos, and then that D’Alessandro should continue.

“Your Eminence, I have known Colonel Castillo since he was a second lieutenant maybe five months out of West Point,” D’Alessandro said. “When I met him he already had the Distinguished Flying Cross and his first Purple Heart—”

“Jesus Christ!” Charley said.

“If you love God, you should not blaspheme, my son,” the archbishop said. “Please continue, Mr. D’Alessandro.”

“And in the next couple of weeks,” D’Alessandro went on, “he had the Silver Star, another Purple Heart, and an assignment as aide-de-camp to an up-and-coming new brigadier general.

“At that point, we began to call him, and he thought of himself, as ‘Hotshot.’”

“What’s that got to do with anything?” Charley demanded. “And I never thought of myself as ‘Hotshot.’”

D’Alessandro laughed, shook his head, and then went on, “And what Hotshot decided then was that he had the Army figured out. Just so long as he kept getting medals, he wouldn’t have to do what ordinary soldiers spent most of their time doing.”

“I don’t think I understand,” the archbishop said.

“Napoleon said, ‘An army travels on its stomach,’” D’Alessandro said. “He was wrong. The army travels on paper.”

The archbishop shook his head, signaling he still didn’t understand.

“Soldiers, Your Eminence, especially officers, spend a great deal of time making reports of unimportant things that no one ever reads. For all of his career, Charley skillfully managed to avoid doing so. But that’s over.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Castillo asked.

“Solving your problem with the President.”

“By writing reports?” Castillo asked. “Reports about what?”

“On the way down here, Frank Lammelle sent me this,” D’Alessandro said, as he took out his CaseyBerry. “He recorded it while the President was telling everybody about his latest brilliant idea. Pay attention.”

He played the recording.

“Well,” D’Alessandro then asked Castillo, “what did you get out of that?”

His Eminence answered the question.

“Paraphrasing what the President said, he wants to involve Colonel Castillo as a knowledgeable, objective observer of the piracy and drug problems to see how those situations are being handled, and to report his observations and recommendations directly to him. What’s the problem there? That sounds reasonable. It doesn’t even seem hazardous.”