Hazardous Duty (Presidential Agent 8)

“Well,” Truman Ellsworth said to Natalie Cohen as they and General Naylor and DCI Lammelle waited for their various vehicles to pull up, “on balance, I’d say that went well.”

“I’m not so sure,” she replied.

“And what do you think, General?” Ellsworth inquired of Naylor.

“I am very uncomfortable with the entire situation,” Naylor replied. “I suspect that what Mr. Ellsworth means—”

“You can call me Truman,” Ellsworth interrupted. “We are all in this together. Succeeding together, I would suggest.”

“Forgive me, Mr. Ellsworth,” Naylor said, “for not sharing your pleasure in our successfully deceiving the President.”

“What would you have us do?” Lammelle asked. “Go to the Vice President and the Cabinet and ask them to bring on the men in the white coats and the straitjacket?”

“This is going to end badly,” General Naylor said.

“Possibly,” Lammelle said. “Everybody knows that. But the operative word is ‘possibly.’ It is also possible that we’ll get away with it.”

“Possible, but unlikely,” Secretary Cohen said. “He told you and Truman to come up with a plan to shut down that Mexican airfield. What are you going to do about that?”

“Take a long time coming up with a plan,” Lammelle said. “Hoping that he’ll forget he told me that.”

“And if he doesn’t forget?” General Naylor asked.

“Then I will stall him, using Castillo, for as long as I can.”

“And what if that doesn’t work?” Naylor asked. “What if he says, ‘Shut down that Mexican airfield now’?”

“Correct me if I’m wrong, General,” Truman Ellsworth said, “but wasn’t General Patton quoted as saying… something along this line—‘Don’t take counsel of your fears’?”

“That’s your recommended course of action?” Naylor demanded tartly. “‘Don’t worry about it!’”

Just as tartly, Ellsworth replied, “General, our course of action, repeat, our course of action, mutually agreed between the four of us, is to indulge the President as long as we can do that without putting the country at serious risk. I don’t see any greater risk to the country coming out of that meeting than I did going in. If you do, please share what you saw with us.”

“The President told you and Lammelle to prepare a plan to shut down that airfield,” Naylor said.

“And I just told you, General,” Lammelle said, “that we will do so very, very slowly. If he persists in this notion to the point where I think it’s necessary—let me rephrase, to the point where the four of us, repeat, the four of us, think it’s necessary—we will have Natalie explain to him that shutting down that airfield would be an act of war. If he still insists, then, presuming we four are then in agreement, the four of us will go to the Cabinet and tell them he’s out of control. Do you agree with that, or not?”

Naylor did not reply directly. Instead, he said, “I don’t think any of us should forget that the President, under the War Powers Act, has the authority to order troops into action for thirty days wherever and whenever he thinks that’s necessary. During those thirty days, if he tells me to shut down that airfield, I’ll have to shut down that airfield.”

“I think, General, that each of us is aware of the War Powers Act,” Secretary Cohen said. “We’ll have to deal with that if it comes up.”

“Relax, Allan,” Lammelle said. “Three will get you five that the Sage of Biloxi has already forgotten that notion and is now devoting all of his attention to getting the First Mother-in-Law out of jail.”

Ellsworth chuckled. Secretary Cohen smiled.

“And there’s one more thing, General,” Ellsworth said. “Have you noticed that Hackensack—”

“I think you mean Hoboken, Truman,” the secretary of State corrected him gently.

“Right. Hoboken. Have you noticed what a splendid job Hoboken does with what are known, I believe, as ‘Presidential Photo-Ops’?”

Cohen, Lammelle, and Naylor all shrugged, suggesting, in the cases of Cohen and Naylor, that they were not aware of the splendid job Presidential Spokesperson Hoboken was doing with Presidential Photo-Ops. Lammelle’s shrug asked, so to speak, “So what?”

“Every time a dozen Rotarians,” Ellsworth clarified, “or for that matter eight Boy Scouts, come to Washington, they can count on getting their picture taken with the President.”

“And Special Agent Mulligan,” the secretary of State said. “He’s usually in the picture.”

“At the risk of repeating my shrug,” Lammelle said, “so what?”