The Outlaws (Presidential Agent 6)

“Surprising me not a hell of a lot, Congo-X slipped through the cracks at Langley. It was the stated opinion of the CIA that what was going on in the Congo was a fish farm.

“We learned what was really going on there through dumb luck—”

“Colonel,” Roscoe J. Danton interrupted, “if I take notes, will I be wasting my time?”

“I think taking notes is a good idea.”

“I’ll need my laptop.”

Castillo said something in Russian, and then, “Your laptop’s on the way. Now, where was I?”

“Something about dumb luck,” Danton said.

“Oh, yeah. What I should have said was ‘stupidity and incompetence.’ I’ve got to go off at a tangent here. I’m sure that everybody here will be surprised when I tell you that there are some Russians who have moral qualms about biological warfare because of their deep religious convictions. And even more surprised that some of these good Russians get to rise high in the ranks of the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki, which in English is the Service for the Protection of the Constitutional System.

“And I’m sure that you will be shocked to hear that t

he SVR is just as bad as our beloved CIA when it comes to bureaucratic infighting and empire-building. The head villain here is Vladimir Putin, who—despite what title he’s running under—actually runs the SVR, which among other things ran the ‘Fish Farm’ in the Congo.

“In an attempt to restore the SVR to the sort of glory their predecessor secret police organization had before the Soviet Union imploded, Putin decided that a number of people—Russians, Germans, Austrians, Argentines, and Americans, the latter including your lecturer here today—had to be whacked or eliminated.

“He succeeded in whacking the German, a journalist who was asking too many questions about German involvement in supplying the Fish Farm, and the Austrians, who had been deep-cover CIA assets successfully engaged over the years in getting Russians and other Eastern Bloc people to switch sides.

“The attempted assassination of the Argentine failed, but Putin still had high hopes of taking me out when I went to the German’s funeral. The murdered German worked for the Tages Zeitung newspaper chain, which, as most of you know, I own—”

“You own the Tages Zeitung chain?” Danton asked incredulously.

Castillo nodded. “Incredible, right? Stick around. It gets better. Anyway, they knew I would go to the funeral. So Putin sent a team of assassins—former members of the Hungarian Államvédelmi Hatóság—to Germany, with orders to report to Colonel Berezovsky, the SVR rezident in Berlin. Berezovsky would tell them when and where to whack me when I showed up at the funeral.”

Danton pointed to Berezovsky and asked with his eyebrows: Him?

Castillo nodded.

“It was to be Colonel Berezovsky’s final assignment. When he was finished whacking me and went—with his sister, Lieutenant Colonel Svetlana Alekseeva, the SVR rezident in Copenhagen—to an SVR meeting in Vienna, they were going to be charged with embezzlement and flown off to Moscow. Berezovsky was a threat to Putin’s control of the SVR, and had to go. And so did his sister.

“The mistake Putin made—the stupidity he demonstrated—was to underestimate Colonel Berezovsky. Berezovsky knew all about Putin’s plans for him and Sweaty—”

Danton pointed at Svetlana and asked, “‘Sweaty’?”

“Only to her friends,” Castillo said. “Anyway, Berezovsky had gotten in touch with the CIA station chief in Vienna, Miss Eleanor Dillworth, and told her he and his sister were willing to defect.

“Miss Dillworth lost no time in telling Jack Powell, and Jack Powell lost no time in telling our late President of the genius of his Vienna station chief, implying that Miss Dillworth had brilliantly entrapped Dmitri and Sweaty when, in fact, they had walked in her door.

“Colonel Berezovsky was not very impressed with Miss Dillworth. He was in fact very nervous about what was going to happen in Vienna. He thought she was entirely capable of throwing him and Sweaty under the bus if anything—any little thing—went wrong.

“And then Dmitri saw in the Frankfurter Rundschau a picture of me getting off my Gulfstream on the way to the funeral. He knew that Karl Wilhelm von und zu Gossinger was also a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army with alleged intelligence and Special Operations connections. And who had his own airplane.

“Brilliant fellow that my future brother-in-law is, he reasoned—”

“Did you say ‘future brother-in-law’?” Danton asked incredulously.

General Naylor thought: That’s exactly what he said. My God!

“I thought everybody knew,” Castillo said. “Love is where you find it, Mr. Danton.”

“Jesus Christ!”

“My fiancée is offended when someone takes the Lord’s name in vain, Mr. Danton.”