Hazardous Duty (Presidential Agent 8)

Roscoe was not at his usual place at the bar. But five stools down the bar was a familiar face, that of Sean O’Grogarty, a large redheaded young man of Irish heritage wearing an almost black suit of the kind favored by Secret Service agents.

Roscoe happily thought: O’Grogarty just might know where Roscoe is!

C. Harry took the empty stool beside O’Grogarty but did not speak to him at first. Neither did O’Grogarty acknowledge C. Harry. C. Harry thought of Sean as his “mole in the motor pool,” and neither wished to have people know they knew one another.

Mr. O’Grogarty was a member of the uniformed division of the Secret Service, but he didn’t wear a uniform on duty. He was out of uniform, so to speak, because he was a driver of one of the White House’s fleet of two-year-old Yukons, in which members of President Clendennen’s lesser staff were chauffeured hither and yon.

A delegation of lesser staff personnel had gone to Supervisory Secret Service Agent Mulligan—who was in charge of everything the Secret Service did in and around the White House—and complained that having uniformed officers drive the vehicles and usher them into the backseats thereof gave the impression they were being arrested.

Mrs. Florence Horter had been chosen as the delegation’s spokesperson not only because she looked like Whistler’s mother but also because she suffered from an ocular malady that caused her eyes to water copiously whenever she squinted.

She borrowed a wheelchair, had herself wheeled into Mulligan’s office, and, squinting, asked, “Please, Mr. Mulligan, sir, could the drivers be put into civilian clothing? I don’t want to have my grandchildren think I’m being busted.”

Mulligan knew the real reason the lesser staff people wanted the drivers in mufti was because they wanted people to think they were upper-level staff people. Upper-level members of the President’s staff had, of course, their own brand-new Yukons, which were driven by Secret Service agents.

Mulligan granted the request, however, as he knew doing so would place the lower-level staff people in his debt. One day, inevitably, he would need a favor from them, and they would owe him one.

Mulligan had not come to this plan of action on his own, but rather had learned it from Mr. Francis Ford Coppola’s three-part masterpiece titled The Godfather. Every time he watched it—and he watched at least one of the three parts once a week, usually on Sunday, when he came home from Mass—Mulligan was deeply impressed by how easily the moral lessons of the Mafia saga could be applied to the White House and to official Washington in general.

For a long time now, whenever he had a problem, he had asked himself how Marlon Brando would deal with it.

At the bar, C. Harry Whelan ordered a Johnnie Walker Black on the rocks. When it was served, he picked it up and took a long look down the bar toward the Fifteenth Street entrance, and with the glass still at his mouth, he softly inquired, “Got something for me?”

When he saw in the mirrors behind the rows of whisky bottles that O’Grogarty had nodded, C. Harry laid a fifty-dollar bill on the bar.

“It better be good, O’Grogarty.”

“So good it’s worth two of these bills,” O’Grogarty replied.

C. Harry considered that for a long moment before adding two twenties and a ten on the bar.

“He whose name we dare not speak is going to Fort Bragg,” O’Grogarty said sotto voce.

C. Harry’s hand slammed down on the money.

“That’s not worth a hundred bucks,” C. Harry declared.

“He’s going there secretly,” O’Grogarty amplified. “First thing tomorrow morning. And not in Air Force One.”

“What do you mean, not in Air Force One?”

“They laid on a Gulfstream. You know, that little airplane?”

“I know what a Gulfstream is. No limousine?”

“Just him and Robin Hoboken, Mulligan, a photographer, and a couple of Protection Detail guys.”

“What are they going to do at Fort Bragg?”

“If I knew that, C. Harry, it would cost you a lot more than a hundred bucks.”

“If you can find out, it would be worth more—a little more—than a hundred.”

C. Harry lifted his hand off the bills on the bar. O’Grogarty pocketed them, and then pushed away from the bar and walked quickly out of the Old Ebbitt.

[FOUR]

The Office of the Presidential Spokesperson