The Outlaws (Presidential Agent 6)

“Sorry.”

“As I was saying . . . Dmitri, clever fellow that he is, reasoned that if he called off the Államvédelmi Hatóság and I was not whacked, maybe I would show my gratitude to him by flying him and Sweaty out of Europe. Which is what happened.”

“Is it?” General Naylor asked. “Is that what actually happened, Charley?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I never understood why you would steal the defectors from the CIA,” Naylor admitted.

“I didn’t know about Miss Dillworth until later, General. What Dmitri told me at the time was that the SVR was going to be waiting for him and Svetlana in the Sudbahnhof in Vienna.”

“So you flew them to Argentina? Why Argentina?”

“They have family there, sir,” Castillo said.

“Well, why didn’t you turn them over to the CIA in Argentina?” Naylor asked.

“Well, just about as soon as we got to Vienna, sir, Dmitri, as an expression of his gratitude, told me about the Fish Farm in the Congo. When Ambassador Montvale came down there, I tried to tell him about the Fish Farm, but he gave me the CIA answer: It was nothing but a fish farm.”

“You still should have turned these people over to the CIA.”

“Two reasons I didn’t, sir. The first being that I believed Dmitri about the Fish Farm, and knew that if I turned them over to the CIA, they would not believe him, and that would be the end of it. I knew I had to follow that path.”

“And the second reason?”

Castillo exhaled audibly.

“Maybe I . . . no . . . certainly I should have given this as my first reason, sir: By the time Montvale showed up in Buenos Aires, certain things had happened between Svetlana and me. I knew there was no way I was ever going to turn her or her brother over to the CIA, the Argentine SIDE, the Rotary Club of East Orange, New Jersey, or anyone else.”

Naylor shook his head, but said nothing.

“In the end,” Castillo went on, “that turned out, for several reasons, to be the right decision. I decided that my duty required I take action on my own. And that turned out to be the right decision, too. And is why I decided to take action on my own in that situation.”

“What action was that, Colonel?” Danton asked.

“The question obviously was: ‘What’s really going on in the Congo?’ There was only one way to find out. I arranged to send people in there to find out.”

“On your own authority,” General Naylor said. “You had no right to do that, and you knew it.”

“I saw it as my duty to do just that,” Castillo said.

“What exactly did you do?” Danton asked.

“I sent Colonel J. Porter Hamilton, the man who runs our bio-warfare laboratory at Fort Detrick, to the Congo with a team of special operators. He found out it was even worse than we suspected, told—more importantly, convinced—our late President of this, and the President ordered it destroyed.”

“And what happened to you for doing what you did without authorization?”

“Well, for a couple of minutes the President wanted to make me director of National Intelligence ... I’m kidding. What the President did was tell me to take everybody in OOA to the end of the earth, fall off, and never be seen again. And I’ve tried—we’ve all tried—to do just that.”

“And?” Danton pursued.

“The curtain went up on Act Two. Two barrels of Congo-X appeared, one FedExed from Miami to Colonel Hamilton at Fort Detrick, the second left for the Border Patrol to find on the Texas-Mexico border.”

“Where did it come from?”

“Almost certainly from the Congo. We know that a Russian Special Operations airplane—a Tupolev Tu-934A—landed at El Obeid Airport, in North Kurdufan, Sudan—which is within driving range of the Fish Farm—and took off shortly afterward, leaving seventeen bodies behind.

“We suspect it flew first to Cuba for refueling, and then it flew here, where two barrels of Congo-X were given to the Mexico City rezident of the SVR, who then drove off with them, presumably to get them across the border into the United States.”