Hazardous Duty (Presidential Agent 8)

“He also asked, ‘How soon can we get him in here?’” Castillo said. “That sounds hazardous to me.”

“Cutting to the chase, Charley,” D’Alessandro said, “all you have to do is stall until the President gets tired of this nutty idea and moves on to the next one.”

“If ‘stall’ means ignore him, I’ve already figured that out myself,” Castillo said.

“Ignoring him won’t work. I said, ‘stall.’”

“How do I do that?”

“Tomorrow, Allan sends an Urgent message through the proper channels to POTUS—”

“POTUS?” His Eminence parroted.

“President of the United States, Your Eminence,” D’Alessandro explained. “And we send it through the military attaché at the embassy in Buenos Aires; that should slow it down three or four hours, maybe longer.”

“I don’t understand,” the archbishop said. “It sounds as if you intentionally wish to slow down what you just said was an urgent message.”

“Precisely,” D’Alessandro said. “An Urgent message, big ‘U,’ is the second-highest priority message. Operational Immediate is the highest. That’s reserved for ‘White House Nuked’ and things like that.

“So, what happens here is that Allan sends a message to the people who sent him down here. I mean the secretary of State, the CIA director, the director of National Intelligence, and of course, his daddy.

“The message says something like, ‘Located Castillo. Hope to establish contact with him within twenty-four hours.’

“That message goes from the embassy to the State Department. It will have to be encrypted in Buenos Aires and then decrypted at the State Department, and then forwarded to the Defense Department, the director of National Intelligence, and of course his daddy.

“That process will buy us probably three or four hours.

“Finally, Allan’s daddy—or maybe Natalie Cohen, that makes more sense—gets on the telephone to the White House and hopes the President is not available. But eventually the President will get the message and learn that his orders are being carried out.

“And then, twenty-four hours after the first message we send another, ‘Meeting with Castillo delayed for twenty-four hours.’ And we start that process all over. Getting the picture, Hotshot?”

“Vic,” Castillo said, “you know I never agreed with everyone who said you were a nice guy but a little slow and with no imagination.”

“I’m curious,” the archbishop said. “If you really had to communicate as quickly as possible with the President, or Colonel Naylor’s father in a hurry, urgently, how would you do that?”

D’Alessandro held out his CaseyBerry.

“If I push this button,” he said, “I’m connected with the White House switchboard. It will tell the operator I’m calling from Fort Bragg. If I push this button, the telephone on General Naylor’s desk will ring. The caller ID function will tell him I’m calling from Las Vegas, confirming General Naylor’s belief that I spend my time gambling and chasing scantily clad women.”

“Fascinating,” the archbishop said.

“But speaking of Vegas—with your kind permission, Colonel Castillo, sir, I’m going to call Aloysius and ask him to send Peg-Leg and your faithful bodyguard down here, just as soon as they can go wheels up in Aloysius’s Gulfstream.”

“Why Peg-Leg?” Castillo asked.

“Peg-Leg?” His Eminence repeated. “Bodyguard?”

“First Lieutenant Edmund Lorimer, Retired,” D’Alessandro answered most of both questions at once, “after losing his leg—hence the somewhat cruel if apt appellation—became expert in what might be called obfuscatory paper shuffling.

“I think we have to go with the worst scenario—that our beloved Commander in Chief will cling to this nutty idea of his for a long time—Peg-Leg can prepare the reports of your progress we’re going to have to send him from various tourist destinations around the world.”

“Yeah,” Castillo agreed.

“Bodyguard?” His Eminence asked. “You have a bodyguard, Carlos?”

Aleksandr Pevsner answered that question.

“To whom, Your Eminence, I owe my life,” he said. “He looks like he belongs in high school, but he’s very good at what he does.”