The Outlaws (Presidential Agent 6)

“And so’s all of batch two one seven. You give Congo-X fifteen minutes of the helium at minus two hundred seventy Celsius, and it’s dead.”

“It would appear so.”

“Who are you going to tell, Colonel?”

“I have been considering that question, as a matter of fact. Why are you asking?”

“I don’t like what Aloysius told us they’re trying to do to Colonel Castillo.”

“Frankly, neither do I. But we are soldiers, Kevin. Sworn to obey the orders of officers appointed over us.”

“But what I’ve been wondering, Colonel, is what happens if we tell the CIA and somehow it gets out. Either we tell the Russians, ‘Fuck you, we learned how to kill this shit’ or they find out on their own?”

“Frankly, Kevin, I don’t understand the question.”

“Two things we don’t know. One, how much Congo-X the Russians have.”

“True.”

“And, two, we don’t know if they know how to kill it. But let’s say they do know that helium at near absolute zero kills it. You know how much we had to pay for the last helium we bought?”

“I entrust the details of logistics to my trusted principal assistant,” Hamilton said.

“A little over fifteen bucks a liter. You know how many liters it took to kill batch two-seventeen?”

“I don’t think, Kevin, that cost is of much consequence in the current situation.”

“Eleven liters to freeze about a half a kilo. Call it a hundred and sixty bucks. And that was freezing decimal two kilos at a time. I haven’t a clue how much helium it would take to freeze just one beer keg full of Congo-X. But a bunch.”

“I am not following your line of thought, Kevin.”

“I had to go to four different lab supply places to get the last shipment. Not one of them could ship us one hundred liters, which is what I was trying to buy. There’s not much of a demand for it out there, so there’s not a lot of it around. And we don’t have the capability of making large amounts of it, or of transporting it once it’s been liquefied.

“The Russians know this. If they hear we know how to kill Congo-X, they’re liable to use it on us—whether or not the President gives them Castillo and the Russians—before we can make enough helium to protect ourselves.”

“We don’t know how much Congo-X they have,” Hamilton said.

“We have to find out, Colonel, and I’d rather have Castillo try to find out than the CIA.”

“But is that decision ours to make, Kevin?”

“Well, it’s not mine, Colonel, and I’m glad I’m not in your shoes.”

Colonel Hamilton tapped his silver-gloved fingertips together for perhaps thirty seconds.

“Kevin, there is a military axiom that the worst action to take is none at all. If you don’t try to control a situation, your enemy certainly will.”

“That’s a little over my head, Colonel.”

“Switch your commo to the Casey network,” Colonel Hamilton

ordered.

[FOUR]

“So what’s new by you, Jack?” Aloysius Francis Casey (Ph.D., MIT) asked ten seconds later of Colonel J. Porter Hamilton (Ph.D., MIT), addressing him by his very rarely used intimate nickname.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology had brought together Casey and Hamilton, although they had not known each other at the school, or even been there at the same time. They had met at a seminar for geopolitical interdependence conducted by that institution, for distinguished alumni, by invitation only.