The Outlaws (Presidential Agent 6)

“Can I offer you something, Charles?” the President asked, his Alabama drawl pronounced. “Have you had your breakfast?”

“Yes, thank you, sir, I have. Hours ago.”

“Coffee, then?”

“Please.”

The President’s foot pressed a button under the desk.

“Would you bring us some coffee, please?”

He motioned for Montvale to take a seat on a couch facing a coffee table, and when Montvale had done so, Clendennen rose from behind his desk and walked to an armchair on the other side of the coffee table and sat down.

The coffee was delivered immediately by a steward under the watchful eye of the President’s secretary.

“Thank you,” the President said. “We can pour ourselves. And now, please, no calls, no messages, no interruptions.”

“Yes, Mr. President.”

“From anyone,” the President added.

Montvale picked up the silver coffeepot, and said, “You take your coffee ... ?”

“Black, thank you, Charles,” the President said.

Montvale poured coffee for both.

The President sipped his, and then said, “You know what I have been thinking lately? When I’ve had time to think of anything?”

“No, sir.”

“Harry Truman didn’t know of the atomic bomb—Roosevelt never told him—until the day after Roosevelt died. General Groves walked in here—into this office—ran everybody out, and then told Truman that we had the atomic bomb. That we had two of them.”

“I’ve heard that story, Mr. President,” Montvale said.

“We had a somewhat similar circumstance here. The first I heard of the strike in the Congo was after it happened. When we already were at DefConOne.”

Montvale didn’t reply.

Clendennen went on: “And he never told me about this secret organization he had running. I heard about that only after he’d died. Secretary of State Natalie Cohen came in here, and said, ‘Mr. President, there’s something I think you should know.’ That was the first I’d ever heard of the Analysis Operations Organization. They almost got us into a war, and I was never even told it existed.”

Montvale sipped his coffee, then said, “It was called the ‘Office of Organizational Analysis,’ Mr. President. And it no longer exists.”

“I wonder if I can believe that,” the President said. “I wonder how soon someone else is going to come through that door and say, ‘Mr. President, there’s something you should know. ...’”

“I think that’s highly unlikely, Mr. President, and I can assure you that the Office of Organizational Analysis is gone. I was there when the President killed it.”

“Maybe he should have sent a couple of squadrons of fighter-bombers, the way he did to the Congo, to destroy everything in a twenty-square-mile area, and to hell with collateral damage,” the President said.

“Mr. President, I understand how you feel, even if I would have been inside the area of collateral damage.”

“Tell me about Operations Analysis, Charles, and about you being there when our late President killed it.”

“He set up the Office of Organizational Analysis in a Presidential Finding, Mr. President, when the deputy chief of mission in our embassy in Argentina was murdered.”

“And put a lowly lieutenant colonel in charge?”

“At the time, Carlos Castillo was a major, Mr. President.”