Hazardous Duty (Presidential Agent 8)

“I flew the chopper here, and refueled it. Corporal Bradley had driven over with two fifty-five-gallon barrels in the back of a Yukon. Then I left Bradley with the bird and Jack Kensington’s rifle, telling him to guard the bird.

“All Jack and I had to do then was get in the house under a simple pretense, bag Jean-Paul, and convince him to come home with us. The worst scenario was that he would be reluctant to do so, which would mean that Jack would have had to stick him with a needle. Then we would load him into the Bell, fly back across the River Plate to Jorge Newbery, and get wheels up in the C-37. A piece of cake.

“We got as far as introducing ourselves to Dr. Lorimer when there came—what did MacArthur call it?—‘the rattle of musketry.’ Some of it came from Corporal Bradley’s musket but most of it came from the fully automatic weapons of eight guys in black coveralls aimed at us.”

“Who were they?”

“At the time we didn’t know, so we called them the Ninjas; they looked like characters in a comic book. Later we found out they were ex–Államvédelmi Hatóság being run by a major from the Cuban Dirección General de Inteligencia named Alejandro Vincenzo.”

“And the kid from the Marines actually got in the firefight?”

“The kid from the Marines took out two of them with head shots fired offhand from at least a hundred yards. What the Ninjas were after was Dr. Lorimer dead and the sixteen million he’d stolen back. They got him, but we got the money. When we got back to the States, and I told the President about the money—actually, it was in bearer bonds—he told me I hadn’t mentioned bearer bonds, but apropos of nothing at all, if I happened to find some, they would make a nice source of funding for OOA.

“He also gave me permission to keep Lester the Marine and Yung, the FBI’s money-laundering expert—actually permission to recruit, draft, anybody I wanted.”

“At this point the ambassador and I got in the picture,” Leverette put in. “I was running Camp McCall, and all of a sudden this teenaged Marine showed up. Superb judge of military men that I am, I immediately decided that he was wholly unfit to be a Special Operator and put him to work on a computer ordering laundry supplies, and that sort of thing.

“Then McNab choppers into McCall with the announcement he’s there to take Lester to Arlington for Jack Kensington’s funeral, and that, since Jack and I had been around the block together on several occasions, I was welcome to come along if I wanted to.

“I was so shocked by this that I momentarily forgot my military courtesy and asked the general what the hell the boy Marine had to do with Jack and his funeral.

“‘I can’t imagine why nobody told you,’ the general replied, ‘that Corporal Bradley put a 7.62-millimeter slug in the ear of the bad guy who put Jack down and another in the back of the head of the bad guy who was shooting at Charley.’

“He went on to explain that Lester now worked for Charley, and that Charley had sent him to McCall—to me—so he could get a quick run-through of the Qualification Course. Just the highlights. None of the psychological harassment to give us an idea how he’d behave when someone was shooting at him. We already knew that.

“By the time we came back from Washington, I knew all about the OOA and by prostrating myself before McNab and weeping piteously, got him to let me go work for Charley.”

“I put Dave Yung in charge of the money,” Castillo said, “reasoning that if he was so good in finding out who was laundering money, he’d probably be just as good at hiding our sixteen million from prying eyes. And thus was born the Lorimer Charitable and Benevolent Fund.”

“That’s when I met Mr. Yung and Mr. Leverette,” Ambassador Lorimer said. “They came to Louisiana, where Jack’s father and mother had graciously taken me in after Hurricane Katrina had destroyed my home in New Orleans.

“Secretary Cohen knew what had happened here at Shangri-La, and of my son’s shameful behavior. And she knew Mr. Yung, who had been working for her, sub rosa, in his money-laundering investigations in Uruguay before he had met Charley.

“She knew that Mr. Yung would be familiar with the Uruguayan inheritance laws, as indeed he was. I was now the owner of Estancia Shangri-La. Charley sent Mr. Leverette with him because he’s a fellow New Orleanian, and also to tell me that he felt I was also entitled to the bearer bonds from my son’s safe.”

“The ambassador wanted neither,” Leverette picked up the story. “It was only after Yung told him that he either took Shangri-La or it would wind up in the possession of some highly deserving Uruguayan politician that he agreed to take it. And he said he could think of no better use for the sixteen million than where it was, funding the OOA.”

“Turning ill-gotten gains into something constructive, so to speak,” Ambassador Lorimer clarified. “And I frankly had a second motive. If I came here to examine my inheritance, I would have an excuse to leave the Mastersons’ home, where I

strongly suspected my extended stay was beginning to strain even their extraordinarily gracious hospitality.

“So I came down here accompanied by Mr. Yung and the man I had by then become close enough to so as to have the privilege of addressing him as ‘Uncle Remus’ without, in his charming phraseology, ‘being handed my ass on a pitchfork.’”

“Natalie Cohen is one of the ambassador’s many admirers, Greg,” Castillo said. “And as I am one of hers, when she said she was a little worried about his coming down here alone, I told Uncle Remus and Two-Gun to pack their bags.”

“For me, it was love at first sight,” Uncle Remus said.

“You’ve got a crush on Secretary Cohen?” Damon asked.

“Greg,” Leverette said patiently, “try turning on your brain before you open your mouth. How many times have you heard one of us with a few belts aboard say, ‘I’ve had enough of this Special Operations bullshit. What I’m going to do is retire and buy a chicken farm’?”

“Not more than two or three hundred times, now that you mention it,” Damon said.

“I took one look at this place,” Uncle Remus said, gesturing at the verdant pasturelands of Estancia Shangri-La and the cattle roaming them, “and said, ‘Fuck the chickens; this is what I want when I retire.’

“So I struck a partner deal with the ambassador right then, Two-Gun drew it up, and got the LCBF to make me a little loan for my ante. And then when the President—the sane one, not Clendennen—pulled the plug on OOA, I retired and came down here.”

“Good story, Uncle Remus,” Damon said. “It almost, but not quite, makes me yearn for the good old days. But it doesn’t answer my question, ‘What’s the reason for this Southern Cone meeting of the NAACP—plus two honkies, no offense, Colonels—all about?’”