The Outlaws (Presidential Agent 6)

“Aloysius, I’m going to need some cash,” Castillo said.

“No problem. How much?”

“Will those people stand still for two hundred thousand?”

“Where do you want it?”

Castillo was now aware Svetlana was shaking her head in what looked like incredulity but could have been disgust.

“Send it to Otto Görner and tell him to put it in my personal account.”

“Otto will have it within the hour. Anything else?”

“That’s all I can think of.”

“Let me know,” Aloysius Casey said. “And thanks, Charley. Break it down.”

Castillo looked over his shoulder at Svetlana.

“You’re going to tell me what I did wrong, aren’t you, my love?”

“I meant two million dollars. Now those people are going to think they can hire you for an unimportant sum. The more people pay you, the more important they think you are.”

“Well, my love, you’ll have to excuse my naïveté. This is the first time I’ve signed on as a mercenary.”

“Well, my darling, you’d better get used to it.”

“What you’d better get used to, Ace,” Delchamps said, “is thinking of Sweaty as Robert Duvall.”

[THREE]

The Oval Office

The White House

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.

Washington, D.C.

1715 5 February 2007

It had proven impossible to gather together all the people the President had wanted for the meeting. The secretary of Defense was in Europe at a NATO meeting, and the commanding general of the Defense Intelligence Agency had gone with him. The secretary of Homeland Security was in Chicago.

When Charles M. Montvale, the director of Natio

nal Intelligence, and Colonel J. Porter Hamilton, MC, USA, walked into the Oval Office, the secretary of State, Natalie Cohen; John Powell, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency; and Mark Schmidt, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, were sitting in chairs forming a rough semicircle facing the President’s desk.

So were Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security Mason Andrews, standing in for the secretary, and General Allan B. Naylor, USA, commanding general of United States Central Command, who was representing both the secretary of Defense and the commanding general of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Presidential spokesman Jack “Porky” Parker sat at a small table—just large enough to hold his laptop computer—to one side of the President.

“I’m sorry to be late, Mr. President,” Montvale said.

“It’s my fault, Mr. President,” Hamilton said. “I was engaged in some laboratory processes I couldn’t interrupt.”

“Not even for the commander in chief?” Clendennen asked unpleasantly.

“If I had stopped doing what I was doing when Mr. Montvale asked me to, it would have caused a two- or three-hour loss of time,” Hamilton said. “I considered a fifteen- or twenty-minute delay in coming here the lesser of two evils.”

“Until just now, Colonel, I wasn’t aware that colonels were permitted to make decisions like that,” Clendennen said sarcastically.