“I presume that you are also going to cheerfully and willingly obey my orders to you, Madam Secretary, vis- a-vis having Ambassador McCann deliver Clemens’s brilliant letter to President Martinez?”
“I will take the letter to Ambassador McCann, Mr. President, but I’m not sure he will be willing to take it to President Martinez, and I have no idea how President Martinez would react to it if he does.”
“McCann will do it because he works for you, Madam Secretary-although actually, since I appointed him, he’s
He turned to Defense Secretary Beiderman and General Naylor.
“Now, as far as you two are concerned, I presume that you two, as loyal subordinates of your Commander in Chief, will both cheerfully and willingly obey this direct order: I don’t want any involvement by the military in this. Period. None. Either of you have any problems with that?”
“No, sir,” Beiderman said.
“No, Mr. President,” Naylor said.
“Okay,” the President said. “That’s it. Thank you for coming in. Douglas, show them out.”
“Yes, Mr. President,” Special Agent Douglas said.
Attorney General Crenshaw caught up with Secretary of State Cohen as she was about to get into her limousine in the driveway.
“Natalie, we’re going to have to talk.”
“Not now,” she replied as she slid onto the backseat. “I tend to make bad decisions when I am so upset that I feel sick to my stomach.”
“We can’t pretend this didn’t happen,” he insisted.
“Give me twenty-four hours to think it over,” she said, and then pulled the limousine door closed.
FOUR
United States Post Office 8401 Boeing Drive El Paso, Texas 1005 18 April 2007
A very short, totally bald, barrel-chested man in a crisp tan suit leaned against the post office wall, puffing on a long, thin black cigar while reading
A man in filthy clothing-with an unshaven and unwashed face, and sunken eyes-sidled up to the nicely dressed man. If profiling was not politically incorrect, he might have caused many police officers and Border Patrol officers to think of him as possibly an undocumented immigrant or someone suffering from substance abuse or both.
The wetback junkie looked around as if to detect the presence of law enforcement officers, and then inquired, “Hey, gringo, you wanna fook my see-ster?”
“Your wife, maybe,” the well-dressed man replied. “But the last time I saw your sister, she weighed three hundred pounds and needed a shave.”
The junkie then shook his head, smiled, and with no detectable accent said, “You sonofabitch!”
“There’s a Starbucks around the corner,” the well-dressed man said.
“Dressed like this? Where’s your car?”
“In the next parking lot,” the well-dressed man said, and nodded across the street. “Walk down the street. I’ll pick you up.”
The well-dressed man walked away to the left, and the junkie to the right.
Five minutes later, sitting with the junkie in a rented Lincoln parked five blocks from the post office on Boeing Drive, Vic D’Alessandro punched the appropriate buttons on his Brick, and fifteen seconds later was rewarded with the voice of A. Franklin Lammelle, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
“And how, Vic, are things in scenic El Paso?”
“Pics coming through all right?”
“I’m looking at them now,” Lammelle said. “Who am I looking at?”
“That’s the guy who dropped a letter addressed to Box 2333 into the slot in the post office.”
“The FBI told you that?” Lammelle asked.
“No,” the junkie offered. “But when, thirty seconds after this guy dropped his envelope into the slot, half a dozen FBI guys inside the lobby started baying and going on point like so many Llewellin setters, we took a chance.”
“Hey, Tommy, how are you?” Lammelle said.
“Very well, Mr. Director, sir,” CIA Agent Tomas L. Diaz replied. “How are things in the executive suite, Mr. Director, sir?”
“You don’t want to know,” Lammelle said. “So what happened next?”
“He walked back to his car, more or less discreetly trailed by the aforementioned Llewellins and a dozen unmarked vehicles, including, so help me God, Frank, a Model A hot rod.”
“Jesus,” Lammelle said. “So he cleverly deduced he was being followed?”
“I’m sure he expected it,” Diaz said. “He didn’t try to lose anybody until he was in Mexico, and then he became professional. He didn’t have to. The FBI stopped at the border.”
“But you didn’t lose him?”
“It’s been a long time since I did this, Frank, but it’s like riding a bicycle. Once you learn how. .”
“You didn’t lose him,” Lammelle pursued.
“He changed cars three times. I don’t know about the first two, but you’ll notice the dip plate on the Mercedes.”
“I noticed. You get a gold star to take home to Mommy, Tommy.”
“These aren’t drug guys, Frank. This is too professional.”
“SVR?”
“Who else? Mexican intelligence is an oxymoron. Maybe Cuban, maybe even some of Chavez’s people. But I’d go with SVR.”
“Castillo thinks this whole thing is an SVR operation,” Lammelle said, and then asked, “Tommy, did the FBI make you?”
“No. They were too busy falling all over each other to look for something like that.”
“I’d love to know what was in that envelope,” Lammelle said.
“So would I,” D’Alessandro said. “But once it went into the slot, it was firmly in the clutch of the FBI; we couldn’t get close, and I didn’t think I should ask for a look. Can you find out?”
“I’ll try. Where are things now?”
Diaz said: “Vic’s got half a dozen guys standing by in Juarez-”
“Who, Vic?” Lammelle interrupted.
“China Post. On Castillo’s dime. He-we-didn’t want to use anybody from the Stockade.”
Lammelle knew that American Legion China Post #1 in Exile enjoyed among its membership certain retired special operators. And he knew that Castillo often hired the highly skilled warriors.
“And what are they doing now?”
“Things that I could not do without getting my cover blown,” Diaz said. “And now we have both the dip license plate and the photos of the people-all of the people, not just the letter dropper. If we can get a positive ID on any of them-”
Lammelle put in: “The dip plate-I got this just now-goes on a Venezuelan-embassy Toyota Camry assigned to their consulate in Juarez.”
“That’s where it was,” Diaz said. “So we will-because we don’t have anything better-radio the code word ‘Hugo’ to the China Post guys, and they will start sitting on the Venezuelan consulate. Two questions.”
“Shoot.”
