The Outlaws (Presidential Agent 6)

Shangri-La was not the mythical kingdom but rather Estancia Shangri-La, in Tacuarembó Province, República Oriental del Uruguay. When Castillo had led an ad hoc team of special operators there to entice Dr. Jean-Paul Lorimer to allow himself to be repatriated, Lorimer was shot to death by mercenaries seeking to recover from him money he had stolen from the Iraqi oil-for-food scam, for which he had been the “bagman” in charge of paying off whomever had to be paid off.

His safe had contained sixteen million dollars’ worth of what were in effect bearer bonds, which Castillo had taken with him to the U.S. When this was reported to the then-President of the United States, the chief executive managed to convey the impression—without coming right out in so many words—that justice would be well served if the bearer bonds were used to fund the OOA.

The following day, the Lorimer Charitable & Benevolent Fund came into being.

“Into which Charley dipped to the tune of seven and a half million to buy the Gulfstream,” Yung went on. “Call that eight million by the time we fixed everything, and rented the hangar at Baltimore/Washington. Et cetera.

“That left eight, into which Charley dipped for another two point five million to buy the safe house in Alexandria. That left five point five million.”

The house in Alexandria was used to house members of the Office of Organizational Analysis while they were in the Washington area, and also to conduct business of a nature that might have raised eyebrows had it been conducted in the OOA’s official offices in the Department of Homeland Security compound in the Nebraska Avenue complex in the District of Columbia.

“To which,” Two-Gun went on, “Mr. Philip J. Kenyon the Third of Midland, Texas, contributed forty-six point two million in exchange for his Stay Out of Jail card.”

Mr. Kenyon had mistakenly believed his $

46,255,000 in illicit profits from his participation in the Iraqi oil-for-food scam were safe from prying eyes in a bank in the Cayman Islands. He erred.

The deal he struck to keep himself out of federal prison for the rest of his natural life was to cooperate fully with the investigation, and to transfer the money from his bank account in the Cayman Islands to the account of the Lorimer Charitable & Benevolent Fund in the Riggs National Bank in Washington, D.C.

“There have been some other expenses, roughly totaling two million,” Yung continued. “What we have left is about fifty point five million, give or take a couple of hundred thousand.”

“That don’t add up, Two-Gun,” Edgar Delchamps challenged. “There shouldn’t be that much; according to your figures, we’ve got two point something million more than we should have.”

“There has been some income from our investments,” Two-Gun said. “You didn’t think I was going to leave all that money in our bank—our banks plural; there are seven—just drawing interest, did you?”

“Do we want to start counting nickels and dimes?” Colonel Castillo asked. “Or can we get to that later?”

“‘Nickels and dimes’?” Sandra Britton, a slim, tall, sharp-featured black-skinned woman, parroted incredulously. “We really are the other side of Alice’s Looking Glass, aren’t we?”

Possibly proving that opposites attract, Dr. Britton, who had been a philologist on the faculty of Philadelphia’s Temple University, was married to John M. Britton, formerly of the United States Secret Service and before that a detective working undercover in the Counterterrorism Bureau of the Philadelphia Police Department.

“I was going to suggest, Sandra,” Charley Castillo said, “that we now turn to the question before us. Questions before us. One, do we just split all that money between us and go home—”

“How the hell can Jack and I go home?” Sandra interrupted. “Not only can I not face my peers at Temple after they learned that I was hauled off by the Secret Service—with sirens screaming—but the AALs turned our little house by the side of the road into the O.K. Corral.”

Dr. Britton was making reference to an assassination attempt made on her and her husband during which their home and nearly new Mazda convertible were riddled by fire from Kalashnikov automatic assault weapons in the hands of native-born African-Americans who considered themselves converts to Islam and to whom Dr. Britton referred, perhaps politically incorrectly, as AALs, which stood for African-American Lunatics.

“If I may continue, Doctor?” Colonel Castillo asked.

Dr. Britton made a gesture with her left hand, raising it balled with the center finger extended vertically.

“I rephrase,” Castillo said. “Do we just split that money between us and go our separate ways? Or do we stay together within what used to be the OOA and would now need a new name?”

“Call the question,” Anthony “Tony” J. Santini said formally.

Santini, a somewhat swarthy, balding, short, heavyset man in his forties, until recently had been listed in the telephone book of the U.S. embassy in Buenos Aires as an assistant financial attaché. He had been, in fact, a Secret Service agent dispatched to Buenos Aires to, as he put it, “look for funny money.” Before that, he had been a member of the vice presidential protection detail. He had been relieved of that assignment when he fell off the ice-covered running board of the vice-presidential limousine. He had been recruited for the OOA shortly after it had been established, to “locate and eliminate” the parties responsible for the murder of J. Winslow Masterson.

“Second the motion,” Susanna Sieno said.

She was a trim, pale-freckled-skin redhead in a white blouse and blue jeans. She looked like she and the man sitting beside her—her husband, Paul—should be in a television commercial, where the handsome young husband comes home from the office and chastely kisses his charming young bride after she shows how easy it had been for her to polish their kitchen floor with Miracle Glow.

Actually, between the Sienos, they had more than four decades in the Clandestine Service of the CIA—Paul having served twenty-two years and Susanna just over twenty—which had been more than enough for the both of them to have elected to retire, which they had done ten days before.

“The motion having been made and seconded,” Castillo said mock-formally, “the chair calls the question: ‘Do we disband and split the money?’ All in favor raise your hand and hold it up until Two-Gun counts.”

“Okay,” Castillo said a moment later, “now those opposed, raise your hands.”

Yung again looked around the table.