Hazardous Duty (Presidential Agent 8)

“And I’ll bet that someone like you knows what a rhetorical question is. Right?”

“I think so, Mr. President.”

“Sometime when you have a spare moment, Roscoe, you might tell Robin.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll be happy to.”

“As I was saying, Roscoe, when it comes out that we’re making significant advances against the drug cartels and the pirates, the press will wonder how that happened. They will ask questions, and I will tell them. A week after I tell you you can write the story about my out-of-the-box thinking. And you write the story. Now, is that a scoop, or isn’t it?”

“Yes, sir. That would be a scoop,” Roscoe replied. He found his courage again. “Mr. President, I can’t go along with this.”

“You know what would happen, Roscoe, if you refused an offer like this from your Commander in Chief?”

“No, sir.”

“A couple of things come immediately to mind,” the President said. “Like, for example, I ask your pal C. Harry Whelan to come see me, the way I asked you. And I tell ol’ C. Harry that I first thought of you to provide this service to your Commander in Chief, but then I heard something that really shocked me about you.”

“What would that be, Mr. President?”

“I wouldn’t make any wild accusations, of course, but I would tell ol’ C. Harry that I heard that the IRS was looking into the one million dollars you recently deposited into your account at the Riggs National Bank and ask him if he had heard that your columns were for sale to the highest bidder. I sort of think that would excite ol’ C. Harry’s journalistic curiosity, don’t you, Roscoe?

“I’d tell ol’ C. Harry I didn’t believe for a second that the million dollars had come from Somalian pirates and/or Mexican drug lords, but you never know, and the IRS was going to find out. And suggest to him that if he found out where that money had come from before the IRS did, he’d have two scoops.”

The President let that sink in a moment.

“‘Don’t make any hasty decisions’ has always been my motto, Roscoe,” the President went on. He turned to Supervisory Special Agent Mulligan. “Get those two goons of yours to take Mr. Danton back to the Watergate. He’s got some thinking to do.”

He turned back to Roscoe Danton.

“Give me a call, Roscoe. Before five, and tell me what you’ve decided to do.”

[THREE]

Lorimer Manor

7200 West Boulevard Drive

Alexandria, Virginia

1155 8 June 2007

If it had been anyone else but Miss Louise Chambers, the silver-haired septuagenarian who proposed the motto for Lorimer Manor and rammed it through the Management Committee and then insisted it be applied, there probably would have been no motto.

“Ask not what Lorimer Manor can do for you, but what you can do for Lorimer Manor” sounded socialist at best, the naysayers complained.

But Miss Chambers prevailed, in large part because she had early on enlisted the support of Mr. Edgar Delchamps. It was whispered about that she had plied him with most of a half-gallon of twenty-four-year-old Dewar’s Scotch whisky before seeking his support, but however she got it, she had it.

And while the personal courage of the ladies and gentlemen of Lorimer Manor, all of whom were retired from the Clandestine Service of the CIA, could not be questioned, none of them was willing to take on the most carnivorous of all their fellow dinosaurs, as Miss Chambers and Mr. Delchamps were universally recognized to be.

What Edgar Delchamps decided he could do for Lorimer Manor was enlist the contribution of someone who was not a resident of Lorimer Manor, but who had laid his head on one of its pillows often in the past and was sure to do so again in the future.

He went to David W. Yung, Junior, and announced, “Louise Chambers tells me she has a hole in her schedule, noon on the first Friday of each month, so you’re elected.”

“Excuse me?”

“You know Louise is chairwoman of the Lorimer Education and Recreation Committee, right?”

“So what?”