Hazardous Duty (Presidential Agent 8)

“You have a point,” Castillo admitted. “Does that mean I can charter the Czarina of the Gulf?”

“Absolutely!”

[FIVE]

Aboard Cessna Mustang “Happy 38th Birthday”

31,000 feet above Petersburg, Virginia

1015 21 June 2007

“Roscoe,” Major Dick Miller, USA, Retired, said to Roscoe J. Danton, who was sitting beside him in the co-pilot’s seat of the aircraft, “I’m about to begin our descent into John Foster Dulles International Airport. Should I call ahead and get a limousine for you?”

“You mean a limousine for us?”

“No, I mean a limousine for you.”

“You’re not going to the White House with me?”

“What I’m going to do is drop you off and then fly to Chicago to pick up Archbishop Valentin and Archimandrite Boris and take them to Cozumel.”

“Who the hell are they?”

“The clergymen who are going to unite Sweaty and Charley in holy matrimony.”

After a moment’s thought, Roscoe said, “Thank you, Dick, but no. I’ll just get a taxi.”

“Why not a limousine? We’re living high on the CIA’s dime. If Charley can charter a Gulfstream Five, the Rhine River cruiser Die Stadt Köln, and now the two-thousand-plus-passenger Czarina of the Gulf, why can’t you ride to the White House in a limousine?”

“Frankly, Dick, I’m shocked at the suggestion. Here you are marching along in the Great Gray Line of West Pointers and suggesting that I waste the taxpayers’ hard-earned money by taking a limousine.”

“And now that I think of it, Charley’s going to bill the CIA five thousand dollars an hour for flying you here in his thirty-eighth birthday present.”

“Be that as it may, I will take a cab.”

“Suit yourself. And that’s the Long Gray Line of West Pointers, not the Great Gray Line.”

“Thank you. I’ll make a note of that. As a journalist I pride myself on making accurate statements.”

“If that’s the case, since my leg is still pretty well fucked up, you should have said, ‘Here you are limping along in the Long Gray Line.’”

“I’ll make a note of that, too. Accuracy and truth in all things has long been the creed of Roscoe J. Danton.”

The truth of the matter here was that Mr. Danton not only did not wish to go to the White House in a limousine, he had no intention of going to the White House at all.

He had made that decision while Castillo was still on his CaseyBerry speaking with Secretary of State Cohen and DCI Lammelle. She had called to say that the First Lady wanted Danton’s version—in person—of why Red Ravisher had thrown the paparazzo at him, and the President wanted to hear—in person—what he was doing in Las Vegas with Miss Ravisher when he was supposed to be in Budapest trying to sneak into Somalia.

The moment Castillo had said, “Well, okay. If you two are agreed it’s that important, I’ll have Dick Miller fly him up there in the morning,” Roscoe had had an epiphany, the first he could ever recall having, and which he had previously believed was a religious holiday, falling somewhere during Lent.

I’m not going, his epiphany had told him. I don’t know how I’m not going, but I am not going to try to explain to the President or the First Lady what happened at the airport in Las Vegas. Cohen and Lammelle and Castillo want to throw me at them—like a chunk of raw meat thrown to a starving tiger—to get the pressure off themselves, and I am just not going to permit that to happen.

He had had no idea how he was just not going to permit that to happen until Miller had brought up the subject of a limousine to take him from Dulles to the White House. Then, in an instant, he had another epiphany: He would get in a taxi, go directly to Union Station, take the train to New York, and seek asylum in the embassy of the People’s Democratic Republic of Burundi.

Several months before, while driving home from a party at the Peruvian embassy, he had come across a sea of flashing lights on patrol cars and police prisoner transport vehicles, and stopped to investigate. He had quickly learned what was going on.

The police were in the process of raiding the K Street Stress

Relief Center, as the stress relief techniques offered apparently violated the District’s ordinances vis-à-vis the operation of what were known as disorderly houses.