Hazardous Duty (Presidential Agent 8)

“So, what are you going to do about him?”

“Pray that he doesn’t want to see the rest of us go to jail. As you just said, desperate times call for desperate measures.”

“Let’s hear the plan.”

“Frank brings the attorney general, the secretary of Defense, and the FBI director with him from Washington in his Gulfstream. You pick up General Naylor in yours, and then stop here and pick me up.”

After a moment, the secretary of State said, “Okay, General, I’ll see you soon. Should I bring my golf clubs to the Greenbrier?”

VIII

[ONE]

Saint Johan’s Cemetery

Bad Hersfeld, Kreis Hersfeld-Rotenburg

Hesse, Germany

1605 15 June 2007

“It’s over there,” Charley said to Sweaty, pointing to the Gossinger plot in the cemetery.

Sweaty headed toward the plot, which Charley had always thought was sort of a cemetery within the cemetery. The whole thing was fenced in by a waist-high barrier of bronze poles between granite posts. In the center was an enormous pillar, topped by a statue of a weeping saint.

He had no idea how many graves were within the barrier, but there were at least fifty. The one they were looking for was near the pillar, under a gnarled thirty-foot tree.

“Over there, under the tree,” Charley said, again pointing.

Sweaty followed his directions and found what they were looking for. A row of granite markers, into one of which was chiseled:

ERIKA VON UND ZU GOSSINGER

7 MAI 1952 — 13 JULI 1982

Sweaty dropped to her knees, bowed her head, and held her palms together.

Charley thought, and almost said, You can knock that off; the chauffeur can’t see you.

And then the epiphany.

Jesus Christ, she’s actually praying!

This was closely followed by the deeply shaming realization that, ever since they had arrived in Hersfeld a half hour before, he had really been a callous, unfeeling bastard, and that it had only been dumb luck that had kept Sweaty from seeing this.

Otto Göerner, the managing director of Gossinger Beteiligungsgesellschaft, G.m.b.H., had met them at the Das Haus im Wald airfield, after they had flown from Budapest. At that point, Charley had been greatly concerned about what Otto’s reaction to Sweaty was going to be; they had never met.

The only reason Otto had not become Charley’s stepfather when Charley was an infant, as his grandfather, the late Oberst Wilhelm von und zu Gossinger, and his late uncle Hermann Wilhelm von und zu Gossinger, had desperately hoped he would was because—despite enormous pressure from her father and her brother—Charley’s mother had refused to marry Otto.

Otto still retained fatherly feelings for Charley. He had functioned as a de facto stepfather to him until, shortly before his mother’s death, Karl Wilhelm von und zu Gossinger had been taken to the United States to become Carlos Guillermo Castillo.

And Otto didn’t like Russians generally and hated the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki with a cold passion. Charley had dropped that nugget of information—that Sweaty had been an SVR lieutenant colonel—into his announcement of his pending marriage, deciding that getting that out in the open sooner was better than later.

The term “SVR podpolkovnik” had produced in Otto’s mind the stereotype of a short-haired female with stainless steel teeth who looked like a weight lifter. When Sweaty came down the aircraft door stairs his face had shown his surprise at what he was getting—a spectacularly beautiful redhead—instead of what he had expected.

His biggest surprise, however, was to come shortly after they were loaded into Otto’s Jaguar Vanden Plas, when, with visible effort, Otto produced a smile and inquired, “My dear, now that you’re here in Hersfeld, what would you like to do?”

“Aside from going to the cemetery, which of course my Carlos wants to do before anything else, we’re completely in your hands, Herr Göerner.”