Hazardous Duty (Presidential Agent 8)

“Hell no, I’m not interested. You’ve recruited me before, and every time I went along, people tried to kill me. And what do you mean, ‘where it all began’?”

“If I told you, Greg, I’d have to kill you,” Castillo said. “You know about the rule.”

Leverette shook his head.

“Remember,” he said, “when Jack the Stack Masterson got kidnapped and then whacked?”

Damon nodded. “You and I were in Afghanistan.”

“And Charley and Dick here had just left Afghanistan, Dick on a medical evacuation flight—he’d dumped his bird—and Charley under something of a cloud for stealing a bird and going to pick him up where he’d dumped the bird and after he’d been given a direct order not to try it.”

“I heard about that,” Damon said.

“McNab saved his ass by getting him assigned to the head of Homeland Security in Washington as an interpreter and canapé passer.”

“I hadn’t heard that.”

“Did you know that Jack the Stack was Ambassador Lorimer’s son-in-law?” Leverette asked.

“Secretary Cohen told me,” Damon said. “Just before I came down here, when she called me in and told me that anything the ambassador wanted—”

“When the President—the last President, not the current loony-tune—heard that Masterson had been snatched,” Leverette went on, “and didn’t like what he heard the embassy in Buenos Aires was doing about it, he had an idea. Send somebody down here to find out what was going on, somebody who would…”

“Charley, you mean?” Damon asked, but it was a statement, not a question.

“. . . know what to look for, and report to him.”

“So this current idea of our Commander in Chief is not only nutty, but not original,” Castillo said. “He stole it from his predecessor.”

“You want to tell this story, or should I?” Leverette asked.

Castillo answered by continuing.

“So I was taken off the canapé circuit and sent down here. The day after they arrived, they found Mrs. Masterson…”

“My daughter,” the ambassador said softly.

“. . . drugged, sitting in a car down by the river, beside her husband, who had been assassinated in front of her. When the President heard this, he went ballistic. He got on the horn and told the ambassador he was putting me in charge of getting Mrs. Masterson and the kids safely out of Argentina and to the States, and that he was sending a Globemaster to do that.

“So, a couple of days later, I loaded everybody on the Globemaster and took off for Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi. En route, Mrs. Masterson told me that the people who had kidnapped her and killed her husband wanted her to tell them how to find her brother. They told her that unless she told them, they would kill her children, and proved their sincerity by killing her husband while she watched.”

“Who was her brother?”

“My son, Dr. Jean-Paul Lorimer, at the time was an official of the United Nations stationed in Paris,” Ambassador Lorimer said.

“Where he was the bagman for that Iraqi Oil-for-Food scandal,” Castillo amplified, “but I didn’t know that until later. Mrs. Masterson said so far as she knew he was in Paris.

“Air Force One, the President, and Natalie Cohen were waiting at Keesler Air Force Base in Mississippi.”

“As I was,” Ambassador Lorimer added.

“Natalie Cohen handed me this even before I had a chance to tell her what Mrs. Masterson had told me,” Castillo said.

Castillo appeared to be opening his laptop, from which he extracted and handed Damon two sheets of

paper.

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