The problem went up the chain of command. Senior officers of the Judge Advocate General’s Corps were directed to find ways to save the boy’s inheritance from squander by his new family.
Naylor was flown to San Antonio to “reconnoiter the situation” two days after Elaine had walked into his office with the bad news. The commanding general V U.S. Corps telephoned the commanding general of the Fifth United States Army at Fort Sam Houston, and told him Naylor was coming and why.
That officer quickly informed Naylor that the problem was not that the Castillo family was going to squander the inheritance—they owned square blocks of downtown San Antonio, and a great deal else, and didn’t need anyone else’s money.
Naylor’s—and the Army’s—problem was going to be to convince them that the boy’s mother was not some fraulein of loose morality trying to dump someone else’s bastard on them to get her hands into the Castillo cashbox.
Naylor found Doña Alicia Castillo at her office near the Alamo.
When she telephoned her husband, who was in New York City on business, to tell him she had just been told that their only son had left behind a son in Germany, he begged her to take things very slowly, and to do nothing until he could return to Texas and look into it himself.
“He has Jorge’s eyes,” Doña Alicia had said, and hung up.
Juan Fernando Castillo caught the next flight he could get on to Texas. It took him to Dallas, not San Antonio, but that wasn’t going to pose a problem. He had called Lemes Aviation and told them to have the Lear waiting for him in Dallas for the final leg to San Antonio.
When he got to Dallas, however, the Lear wasn’t there. When he called Lemes Aviation, he was told that Doña Alicia had taken the jet to New York, so that she and some Army officer could make the five-fifteen Pan American flight to Frankfurt.
Within twenty-four hours of meeting Doña Alicia Castillo, Allan and Elaine Naylor stood in the corridor outside Erika von und zu Gossinger’s room in the castle and overheard Doña Alicia say, “I’m Jorge’s mother, my dear. I’m here to take care of you and the boy.”
Juan Fernando Castillo arrived in Germany ten hours after his wife.
A week later—Erika having decided she didn’t want the boy to see her in the final stages of her illness—Naylor and Elaine and Allan Junior had shaken hands and hugged the boy, who now carried an American passport in the name of Carlos Guillermo Castillo and was preparing to board a Pan American 747 airliner bound for New York.
“You don’t happen to know where your friend Lieutenant Colonel Castillo is, do you, General?” President Clendennen asked.
“No, sir, I do not.”
“Well, I’ve got a mission for you, General. I want you—as your highest priority—to find Lieutenant Colonel Castillo, wherever he might be, whereupon you will personally hand him orders recalling him from retirement to active duty. You will then personally order him to turn these Russian traitors over to the CIA. And when he has done so, then I want you to place Castillo under arrest, pending investigation of charges that may be laid against him under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Do you understand these orders?”
Allan Naylor stood stonefaced, and thought: Goddamn you to hell, Bruce McNab!
He then said: “May I ask questions, sir?”
The President wiggled his fingers, granting permission.
“Sir, what is my authority to detain or arrest the Russians?”
“That won’t pose a problem for you, General. Mr. Lammelle will deal with that.”
“Sir, I don’t understand.”
“From right now—or at least from as soon as Mr. Lammelle can get here from Langley—until this mission has been accomplished, you and Lammelle will be, so to speak, joined at the hip. I wouldn’t think, General, of asking you or the Army to do anything that would constitute a violation of any law. Nor would I ask that Mr. Lammelle or the CIA violate any laws. Having said that, we all know that the agency has a certain latitude in the gray areas, and I will personally accept full responsibility for any action that Mr. Lammelle feels he should take to carry out the desires of the commander in chief in this matter. Does that answer your question, General Naylor?”
“Yes, sir.”
“How soon can you start on this, General?”
“Sir, I’ll have to set up things at MacDill so that I can devote my full time to this. So, as soon as Mr. Lammelle gets here, I’ll go there.”
“Jack,” the President said to the DCI, “Lammelle has a radio in his car, right? Why don’t you get on the horn and tell him to meet the general at Andrews? There’s no reason he actually has to come here.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good hunting, General,” the President said. “I don’t think I have to tell you to keep me posted, do I?”
“No, sir.”
[TWO]