Mine are in my kitchen. As far as the monitors go, get the best they have. I don’t want to have to fix monitors in addition to everything else I have to do around here.”
He reached for his wallet. “Let me give you a credit card.”
“I have a credit card, thank you. The Lorimer Charitable and Benevolent Fund will pick up the tab.”
Castillo was almost out the front door when he remembered that if he used the Lorimer AmEx, or anything with his name on it, the FBI would quickly learn his whereabouts.
Abuela, Estella, and Svetlana were cleaning up the kitchen after breakfast when he walked in.
“Abuela, I need you to go into town with me to buy some things. And bring your credit card, please. I’ll pay you back later.”
“Carlos, you don’t have a credit card?” she said incredulously, if disapprovingly.
“I do. But if I use it, the FBI will know I’m in Midland, and I don’t want them to know that.”
That announcement didn’t faze her.
“I was just about to ask, Carlos, if it would be safe for Svetlana to go into Midland.”
Castillo looked at her. “Why do you want to, Svet?”
Dona Alicia answered for her. “I promised her I’d show her St. Agnes’s, where you sang in the choir . . .”
“
“. . . and she wants to buy some denims,” Dona Alicia picked up.
“I became neither a heathen nor a Roman Catholic,” Castillo said.
“He doesn’t mean that the way it sounds, dear. He’s a Protestant—”
“He’s not a very good anything now,” Svetlana said. “That I will change.”
“And I was thinking if you could get what you need in Sam’s . . .”
“Sam’s and Radio Shack, probably.”
“. . . Svetlana could get the denims there. And if you’re going to have to go to Radio Shack, that’s right down the street from Western World. They have some very nice ready-to-wear boots, and blouses and things. That’s if it’s safe for her to go into town.”
“Whenever you’re ready, ladies,” Castillo said.
“Svetlana can ride with me. That would attract less attention,” Dona Alicia said.
[EIGHT]
1745 8 January 2006
The Yukons returned to the Double-Bar-C each transporting two fifty-six-inch flat-screen liquid-crystal monitors, one strapped to each roof and one extending four feet out the rear door of each with a little flag flying from the boxes—Lester Bradley had said there was no reason not to avoid a conflict with the cops for having something hanging out the back of the truck.
Dona Alicia and Svetlana, carrying boxes of denim clothing and whatever the big box labeled WESTERN WORLD contained, disappeared into the house.
Ernesto—Estella’s son—and Bradley and Castillo started off-loading the monitors. After they had carried the first one into the library—which was now a sea of electronic devices and parts there for—Davidson came out to help with the others.
“Miller called, Charley.”
“And?”
“Colonel Hamilton and Phineas will arrive at Reagan at oh-nine-something. He’ll take them to the Motel Monica. Tom McGuire has some Secret Service guys who’ll sit on them tonight and tomorrow without asking any questions. He said there’s nothing to connect them with us anyway.
“And Delchamps is on the 2130 Lufthansa flight to Munich, and Darby on the 2150 American flight to Frankfurt, both out of Dulles. Miller gave them $9,900 apiece—a hundred under the law requiring anything over ten grand taken out of the country to be declared.”
Castillo nodded. “What else?”
“He’s got a Beechcraft King Air laid on from noon tomorrow to take Hamilton’s stuff to Bragg. Actually to Fayetteville, where Vic will have somebody meet it. No jet was available, and he said it won’t make any difference anyhow, as Torine can’t leave without that stuff or the shooters, and Uncle Remus is not finished with the paperwork for the shooters.”
“But he has them, right?”
“Uncle Remus said he’s got eighteen coal-blacks, five a little lighter, and one he says they may have to leave in Tanzania he’s so light.”
“Okay. I guess that leaves us with nothing to do now but set up Casey’s toys and wait.”
“I have the feeling we’ll be doing a lot of that, Charley. Waiting.”
“Do they have sophisticated tools like this in Marine Corps communications, Bradley?” Casey asked, holding up a very-fine-pointed soldering iron from Radio Shack.
“I don’t know what they have in Marine Corps communications, sir,” Bradley replied. “I was a designated marksman, not in that. I think they mostly use semaphore flags.”
He mimed waving semaphore flags.
Casey shook his head. “What’s a designated marksman? That anything like a shooter?”
“I really don’t know how well your shooters shoot, Dr. Casey, so I don’t know if they would qualify to be a Marine Corps designated shooter. But if you were asking can I use that soldering iron, then yes, sir, I can. Before I joined the Corps, I was in the AARRL. I made most of my stuff.”
“I was also in the American Amateur Radio Relay League,” Casey said. “That’s how I got suckered into Special Forces; they needed people who knew the difference between an ohm and a watt.”
He pointed to a rat’s nest of twisted-together wires on the table.
“Why don’t you see what you can do with that?” Then he turned to Castillo, Ernesto, and Davidson, who were resting from their monitor-carrying labors. “Why don’t you guys get out of here and leave those of us who know what we’re doing to do it?”
Castillo and Davidson went to the kitchen, carrying an AFC handset with them. Estella offered them coffee. Castillo had just picked up his mug when Svetlana came into the room, almost causing him to drop the mug.
She was wearing her cowboy suit, which included a light gray Stetson hat, a denim jacket worn open over a translucent blouse of Western cut—through which he could see her upper undergarment—a pair of lizard-skin boots, and of course denim trousers.
She spun around.
“No comment?” she asked.
“How the hell did you get those pants on? With a paintbrush?”
“You’re not supposed to ask questions like that of a lady, my heathen,” she said.
“Jesus, Charley!” Davidson said in mock disapproval of his query. “Even I know that.”
Svetlana smiled at Davidson, then went to Castillo, put her arms around him, and whispered in his ear, “If you will be a good boy, later I will show you how I get them off.”
[NINE]
0700 9 January 2006
When Castillo walked into the library he saw that while it was not going to win any prizes for order and cleanliness, it was a great deal cleaner and more in order than it was the last time he had seen it the night before.
He also saw Lester Bradley sound asleep in an armchair, and that Casey, heavy-eyed, was sitting in another.
“He wouldn’t go to bed when we finished about oh-five-hundred,” Casey greeted him. “Said he ‘had the duty.’ He’s been like that since about ten after five.”
Castillo gently shook Bradley’s shoulder and, when he opened his eyes, said, “Wake up and go to bed,
