Torine’s eyebrows rose, but he didn’t speak for a long moment.
“How do you know about the Gulfstream?” he asked finally.
“I saw you doing a walkaround at Andrews, sir.”
Torine shook his head.
“Make a note, Captain. You never saw me with a Gulfstream at Andrews or anywhere else.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Still driving a gunship, are you, Sparkman?”
“No, sir. I’m flying the right seat of mostly C-20s for the Presidential Airlift Group.”
“How did you get a soft billet like that?”
“Over my strongest objections, sir.”
“How much Gulfstream time do you have?”
“Pushing six hundred hours, sir.”
Torine tapped the balls of his fingers together for perhaps fifteen seconds, then shrugged and punched buttons on a telephone.
“Got a minute, boss?”
“Sure,” a voice came from a speaker Sparkman could not see.
“Put your shoes on and restrain the beast. I’m on my way.”
Torine led Sparkman through an inner corridor to a closed door. He knocked, but went through it without waiting for a reply.
Sparkman found himself in an even more impressive office. It was occupied by a very large—six-foot-two, two-twenty—very black man, a slightly smaller white man, and a very large dog that held a soccer ball in his mouth with no more difficulty than a lesser dog would have with a tennis ball.
When the dog saw Sparkman, he dropped the soccer ball, walked to Sparkman, and showed him what looked like five pounds of sharp white teeth.
The white man said something to the dog in a foreign language Sparkman could not identify, whereupon the dog sat on his haunches, closed his mouth, and offered Sparkman his paw.
“Shake Max’s hand, Sparkman,” Torine ordered.
Sparkman did so.
Pointing first at the black man, then at the white man, Torine said, “Major Miller, Colonel Castillo, this is Captain Dick Sparkman, whom, I believe, the good Lord has just dropped in our lap.”
Sparkman saw the nameplate on the desk: LT. COL. C. G. CASTILLO.
“I have this unfortunate tendency to look your gift horses in the mouth, Jake,” Castillo had said as he took a long, thin black cigar from a humidor and started to clip the end.
“Do you remember Captain Sparkman?”
“I just did. You were driving a Gulfstream that gave me a ride to Fort Rucker, right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Captain Sparkman has nearly six hundred hours in the right seat of a G-III,” Torine explained.
“Ah!” Lieutenant Colonel Castillo said.
“Before that, he was flying an AC-130H gunship out of Hurlburt,” Torine went on. “We once very quietly toured Central America together.”
“Ah ha!” Lieutenant Colonel Castillo said.
“And he saw me doing a walkaround of our bird at Andrews.”
“And, Captain, who did you tell about that?” Major Miller asked.
“No one, sir,” Sparkman said.
“And how did you find Colonel Torine, Captain?” Lieutenant Colonel Castillo asked.
“I asked around, sir.”
“And how did you get past the receptionist downstairs?” Major Miller asked. “He’s supposed to tell people he has never heard of Colonel Jake Torine.”
“The receptionist did,” Torine said. “The captain here then told him, forcefully, to get on the phone and tell me that he had to see me on a matter of great importance.”
“Ah ha!” Lieutenant Colonel Castillo said.
“Which was?” Major Miller inquired.
“That if I had to fly the right seat of a Gulfstream,” Sparkman offered, “I’d rather fly Colonel Torine’s.”
“Ah ha!” Lieutenant Colonel Castillo said for the third time, then looked at Major Miller, who paused a moment for thought and then shrugged.
“Tell me, Captain,” Castillo said. “Is there any pressing business, personal or official, which would keep you from going to Buenos Aires first thing in the morning?”
“I’m on the board for a flight to Saint Louis at 0830, sir.”
“Jake, call out there and tell them the captain will be otherwise occupied,” Castillo said, and then turned to Sparkman. “Prefacing this with the caveat that anything you hear, see, or intuit from this moment on is classified Top Secret Presidential, the disclosure of which will see you punished by your castration with a very dull knife, plus imprisonment for the rest of your natural life, let me welcome you to the Office of Organizational Analysis, where you will serve as our most experienced Gulfstream jockey and perform such other duties as may be required.”
“Just like that?” Sparkman blurted.
“Just like that, Dick,” Torine said, chuckling.
“Go pack a bag with enough civvies—you won’t need your uniform—for a week, and then come back here,” Castillo ordered. “Major Miller here will run you through our in-processing procedures.”
At the safe house in Alexandria, Castillo cut his end of the cellular telephone connection with Torine, put the telephone in his trousers pocket, then picked up the handset of another secure telephone on his office desk. He pushed one key on the base and said, “C. G. Castillo.”
It took a second or two—no more—for the voice-recognition circuitry to function, flashing the caller’s name before the White House operator.
“White House,” the pleasant young female operator’s voice said. “Merry Christmas, Colonel Castillo.”
“Merry Christmas to you, too. Can you get me Ambassador Montvale on a secure line, please?”
The rule was that those people given access to the special White House switchboard circuit were expected to answer their telephones within sixty seconds. Charles W. Montvale, former deputy secretary of State, former secretary of the Treasury, former ambassador to the European Union, and currently United States director of National Intelligence, took twenty-seven seconds to come on the line.
“Charles Montvale,” he said. His voice was deep, cultured, and charming.
“Merry Christmas, Mr. Ambassador. Colonel Castillo for you,” the White House operator told him. “The line is secure.”
Castillo picked up on the ambassador’s failure to return the operator’s Christmas greetings.
“Merry Christmas and a
The ambassador did not respond in kind, but instead said, “Actually, I was about to call you, Charley.”
“Mental telepathy, sir?”
“Does the name Kurt Kuhl mean anything to you, Colonel?”
Montvale’s tone, and the use of Castillo’s rank, suggested that Montvale was displeased with him. Again. As usual.
There is an exception, so they say, to every absolute statement. The exception to the absolute statement that the director of National Intelligence exercised authority over everyone and everything in the intelligence community was the Office of Organizational Analysis, which answered only to the commander in chief.
Ambassador Montvale found this both absurd and unacceptable, but had been unable to take OOA under his wing beyond an agreement with Castillo that he would be informed in a timely fashion of what Castillo was up
