Black Ops (Presidential Agent 5)

After a long moment he decided that he had done everything necessary, and that it was highly unlikely that anything else was going to come up and interfere with their Christmas dinner.

That carefully considered prediction proved false about seventeen minutes later, when the cellular in his trousers pocket vibrated against his leg while his grandmother was invoking the Lord's blessing on all those gathered at the table.

He of course could not answer it while his grandmother was praying.

Sixty seconds later, the White House phone buzzed imperiously. One of the Secret Service agents quickly rose from the table to answer it.

Thirty seconds after that, surprising Castillo not at all, the agent reappeared and mimed that the call was for Castillo.

Dona Alicia looked at him as he rose from the table. He wasn't sure if she was annoyed or felt sorry for him.

The legend on the small LCD screen next to the telephone read: SECURE JOEL ISAACSON SECURE.

Castillo picked up the handset, said "C. G. Castillo," waited for the voice recognition circuitry to kick in, then said, "What's up, Joel?"

Joel Isaacson was the Secret Service supervisory special agent in charge of the protection detail for Homeland Security Secretary Matt Hall. But the tall, slim, forty-year-old Isaacson, who had once been number two on the presidential detail, was de facto more than that.

In the reorganization after 9/11, the Secret Service, which had been under the Treasury Department, was transferred to the newly formed Department of Homeland Security.

The chief of the Secret Service had assigned two old and trusted pals, Supervisory Special Agents Joel Isaacson and Tom McGuire, to the secretary's protection detail. It was understood between them that their mis

sion was as much to protect the Secret Service from its new boss--new brooms have been known to sweep out the good and keep the garbage--as it was to protect him from Islamic lunatics.

It had worked out well from the beginning. The secretary quickly learned that if he wanted something from the Secret Service--about whose operations he knew virtually nothing--Isaacson or McGuire could get it for him. Similarly, the chief of the Secret Service quickly learned that if he wanted something from the secretary, it was better and quicker to make the request of McGuire or Isaacson than directly of the secretary, who made no decisions involving the Secret Service without getting the opinion of one or the other.

And then when the President issued the Finding setting up the Office of Organizational Analysis--which in the chief of the Secret Service's very private opinion was not one of his wiser decisions--Tom McGuire was one of the first people assigned to it. The chief did not entirely trust Isaacson's and McGuire's opinion that despite his youth, junior rank, and reputation, Major C. G. Castillo was just the guy to run what the chief very privately thought of as the President's Own CIA/FBI/Delta Force.

The assignment of McGuire to OOA left Isaacson as the chief's conduit to the secretary, and that was just fine. But he worried about Tom McGuire getting burned when someone burned the OOA, which seemed to the chief to be inevitable.

My God, that crazy Green Beret launched an invasion of Paraguay to rescue a DEA agent the druggies had kidnapped.

That the mission had succeeded did not, in the chief's opinion, mean the operation was not as lunatic an operation as he had ever heard of, and he'd been around the Secret Service for a long time.

"Jack Britton and his wife are on their way out there, Charley," Joel Isaacson announced without any preliminaries. "I need you to talk to him. Okay? As a favor to me?"

"Talk to him about what?" Castillo replied, and then: "And his wife?"

"They had to take him off the Vice President's protection detail. And he's pretty annoyed."

"What did he do to get canned?"

"Somebody, most likely those AALs in Philadelphia, tried to take out him, and his wife, yesterday afternoon."

"Is he all right?"

"They weren't hit, but the supervisor in Philadelphia told me he counted sixteen bullet holes in Britton's new car. Plus about that many in his front door, picture window, etcetera. They used automatic Kalashnikovs."

"What's this got to do with him getting taken off the Vice President's protection detail?"

There was a just-perceptible pause before Isaacson said, "Think about it, Charley. These people try to take him out again when he's on duty, then the Vice President becomes collateral damage."

"Stupid question. Sorry. Britton didn't understand?"

"What he didn't understand was being brought here. Standard procedure when something like this happens. Gets them out of the line of fire."

"That made him mad?"

"What made him mad was being told that he was going to be placed on administrative duties in--I forget where; probably Saint Louis--until the matter is resolved. When he heard that, the kindest thing he had to say to the supervisor on duty downtown was that the supervisor could insert the whole Secret Service into his anal orifice. That's when they brought him to me."