The Outlaws (Presidential Agent 6)

“And you and Natalie Cohen went along with this?”

“The Presidential Finding was issued over our objections, sir. And at the time, Natalie was the national security advisor, not secretary of State.”

“Where did he find this Major Castillo? What i

s he, an Italian, a Mexican? Cuban? What?”

“A Texican, sir. His family has been in Texas since before the Alamo. He’s a West Pointer—”

“I seem to recall that Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, who almost got us into a war in Nicaragua, was an Annapolis graduate,” the President interrupted. “What do they do at those service academies, Charles, have a required course, How to Start a War One-Oh-One?”

Montvale didn’t respond directly. Instead, he said, “Castillo came to the President’s attention over that stolen airliner. You remember that, Mr. President?”

“Vaguely.”

“Well. An airliner, a Boeing 727, that had been sitting for a year in an airport in Luanda, Angola, suddenly disappeared. We—the intelligence community—were having a hard time finding it. Those things take time, something the President didn’t always understand. And as you know, sir, the President was very close to the then-secretary of Homeland Security, Matt Hall. He talked to him about this, and either he or the secretary thought it would be a good idea to send someone to see which intelligence agency had learned what, and when they had learned it.

“Hall told the President that he had just the man for the assignment, Major Castillo, who was just back from Afghanistan, and working for him as an interpreter /aide.”

“And?”

“To cut a long story short, Mr. President, Major Castillo not only located the missing aircraft but managed to steal it back from those who had stolen it, and flew it to MacDill Air Force Base—Central Command—in Tampa.”

“I heard a little, very little, about that,” the President said.

“The President decided, and I think he was right, that the less that came out about that incident, the better.”

“And make sure to keep Clendennen out of the loop, right?” the President said, more than a little bitterly.

Montvale didn’t respond directly. Instead, he said, “The people who stole the airplane planned to crash it into the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia. We would not have let that happen, but if the story had gotten out, the President believed there would have been panic.”

President Clendennen considered that a moment, and then asked, “So where does the Finding fit in all this?”

“The wife of one of our diplomats in Argentina. The deputy chief of mission, J. Winslow Masterson—‘Jack the Stack’?”

“I know who he was, Charles. Not only was he the basketball player who got himself run over by a beer truck, for which he collected a very large bundle, but he was the son of Winslow Masterson, who is arguably the richest black guy—scratch black—the richest guy in Mississippi. And they even—surprise, surprise—told me that Winslow’s son had been killed.”

“Yes, sir. First they kidnapped his wife. The minute the President heard about that, he sent Major Castillo down there. What Castillo was supposed to do was keep an eye on the investigation, and report directly to the President.

“By the time Castillo got to Buenos Aires, Masterson had eluded the State Department security people who had been guarding him, and gone to meet the kidnappers. They killed him in front of his wife, then doped her up and left her with the body.”

“What was that all about?”

“We didn’t know it at the time, but it was connected with the Iraqi oil-for-food scandal. Mrs. Masterson’s brother was not only involved, but had stolen money from the thieves. They thought she would know where he was—she didn’t; there was enormous friction between her husband and her brother—and they told her unless she told them where he was, they would kill her children.”

“You didn’t know this at the time?”

“No, sir. But when the President learned that Masterson had gotten away from his State Department guards, and had been assassinated, he went ballistic—”

“He had a slight tendency to do that, didn’t he?” the President said sarcastically.

“—and got on the phone to the ambassador and told him that Castillo was now in charge of getting Mrs. Masterson and the children safely out of Argentina.”

“And?”

“Which he did. The President send a Globemaster down there to bring Masterson’s body and his family home. And when the plane got to the air base in Biloxi, Air Force One was sitting there waiting for it. And so was the Presidential Finding. The President had found that the national interest required the establishment of a clandestine unit to be known as the Office of Organizational Analysis, which was charged with locating and terminating those responsible for the assassination of J. Winslow Masterson. Major Carlos Castillo was named chief.” He paused. “That’s how it started, Mr. President.”

“‘Terminating’ is that nice little euphemism for murder, right?”