The Outlaws (Presidential Agent 6)

“I sent him to you, Scotty,” Naylor heard himself say, “to get him out of the line of fire.”

“Didn’t work out that way, General,” McNab said. “Charley’s a warrior.”

“I have General McNab for you, sir,” Command Sergeant Major Wes Suggins, the senior noncommissioned officer of the United States Central Command, announced to General Naylor from the office door.

Naylor gave him a thumbs-up gesture and snatched the secure telephone from his desk.

“Good evening, sir,” Lieutenant General Bruce J. McNab, commanding general of the Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, said cheerfully. “And how are things on beautiful Tampa Bay?”

“General, I want you in my office at oh-seven-thirty tomorrow,” Naylor said.

“Perhaps, if I may make the suggestion, sir, your quarters would be a better place to meet, sir,” McNab said. “I suspect we are going to say unkind things to one another, and that sometimes adversely affects the morale of your gnomes.”

“Oh-seven-thirty, General,” Naylor said, coldly furious. “My office, and leave your wiseass mouth at Bragg.”

“I hear and obey, my general,” McNab said cheerfully.

Naylor slammed the secure telephone into its cradle.

The damned call didn’t take thirty seconds and he made me lose my temper!

Referring to my staff as my “gnomes”! Goddamn him!

Allan B. Naylor had never liked Bruce J. McNab during their four years at the United States Military Academy at West Point. He had come to dislike him intensely in later years, and now he could not think of an officer he had ever despised more.

[THREE]

Morton’s Steakhouse

1050 Connecticut Avenue, N.W.

Washington, D.C.

1930 8 February 2007

Sergei Murov sat at the bar of the restaurant, drinking twelve-year-old Chivas Regal while he watched in the mirror behind the row of bottles the headwaiter stand at the entrance. Murov was waiting for the syndicated columnist C. Harry Whelan, Jr., to show up.

Murov knew that the headwaiter—and other restaurant staff—were aware of who the freely spending cultural attaché of the embassy of the Russian Federation was. And he was equally certain—Washington being the small town that it really was, where everybody knew each other’s business—that they had at least heard and probably believed that he was the head Russian spy.

Murov wanted the word to get out around town that he had had a private dinner in Morton’s with Whelan. The FBI would be helpful in this regard. The usual quartet of FBI special agents had been waiting outside the embassy with two cars and had followed him here.

He knew how they worked. The cars were now parked on opposite sides of Connecticut Avenue so that they could easily follow him no matter which direction he took when he left the restaurant. One special agent had followed him into the restaurant and was now sitting at the end of the bar. The second agent-on-foot was now standing in the alley outside the kitchen against the possibility that the wily Russian spy might try to elude surveillance by sneaking out of Morton’s through the kitchen.

One of the FBI men had almost certainly already radioed the information to whoever was supervising his surveillance that he was in Morton’s, and just as soon as C. Harry Whelan arrived and joined him, that information, too, would be passed on.

That information, however, would not be shared with anyone—at least immediately—outside the J. Edgar Hoover Building. But the information would get around where Murov wanted it to go via the headwaiter, who would be on the receiving end of at least one “Flying C-Note”—he loved that phrase—for making discreet telephone calls to various print and television journalists telling them that C. Harry Whelan, Jr., had just walked into Morton’s and was breaking bread with Sergei Murov behind a screen erected at Murov’s request.

“Good evening, Mr. Whelan,” the headwaiter said when the journalist walked through the door. “Nice to see you again. Your regular table?”

“I think I’ll have a little taste first, thank you,” Whelan said, gesturing toward the bar. “Oh, look who’s there!”

Sergei Murov had gotten off his bar stool and was smiling at Whelan. Whelan walked to him and they shook hands.

Whelan, too, knew that a substantial percentage of the headwaiter’s income came to him off the books and thus tax-free in the form of Flying C-Notes given him as an expression of gratitude by various print journalists and television producers for keeping them up to date on where C. Harry Whelan and others of Inside-the-Beltway prominence were, had been, or were going to be, and who they were talking to.

Whelan was usually delighted with the system, and especially so today when he knew the word would spread that he had had dinner with Murov. Murov met with only the more important journalists, and actually very few of those.

Whelan had no idea what Murov wanted from him, and would have been very surprised if he got anything at all useful from the Russian. But the word would spread. Among those it would annoy to learn that he was bending elbows with the Russian spymaster was Andy McClarren, anchor of Wolf News’s most popular program. Whelan recently had come to think that Straight Scoop McClarren was getting more than a little too big for his kilt.