W. Griffin - Covert Warriors

The herd of Bouviers des Flandres gamboled on toward her. She put her fingers to her lips and whistled shrilly. The dogs stopped as if they had encountered a glass wall.

“Go chase a cat,” Mrs. Sanders ordered sternly, pointing out the garage door.

Reluctantly but obediently the herd slowly walked out of the garage.

She looked at Delchamps and said: “Am I supposed to pretend I don’t know who your friends are? In addition to inside plumbing, Lorimer Manor offers television.”

“Think of that one,” Delchamps said, pointing at Parker, “as a lonely stranger desperately needing the hospitality of friends. And also some lunch, if that’s possible. I thought you knew Roscoe.”

“Only by reputation,” she said.

“You know he’s one of us,” Yung said.

“I heard.”

“And now that you know that, Mr. Parker,” Yung said, “we’ll have to kill you.”

Oh, Jesus, here we go again!

Porky will go bananas.

“May I ask what’s going on here?” Parker asked. “What is this place?”

“Of course you can ask, but as Two-Gun just said, what you know can get you killed,” Delchamps said. He smiled, then added: “Well, let’s go get some lunch.”

In the house, Parker looked around. Plate-glass windows across the back wall offered a view of an enormous grassy area. There was a croquet field and a cabana with a grill beside an enormous in-ground swimming pool. Two of the Bouviers, their red tongues hanging and their stub tails wagging, were looking in through one of the plate-glass windows; the rest of the herd was chasing birds on the grass.

And Parker noted the residents: First he saw four elderly men, two in wheelchairs, three of whom looking roughly as old as Edgar Delchamps. There also was a very large-six-foot-two, 220-pound- and very black man wearing aviator sunglasses who appeared to be in his late thirties, and a woman who looked about sixty. She had a chrome walker next to her chair at a large dining table that was covered with food.

In the center of the table was a centerpiece: Two dinosaurs, each about two feet long, faced each other. There was a pink bow around the neck of one of them.

“I think everybody knows who Mr. Parker is,” Delchamps announced to the residents.

Everybody nodded.

“He wants to know what’s going on here,” Delchamps said, “what this place is. Can I tell him?”

“Is he a friend?” one of the men in a wheelchair asked.

“Roscoe vouches for him,” Delchamps said, “and Roscoe-in case you didn’t know-is one of us.”

“In that case, tell him.”

“Sure. Tell him.”

“Why not?”

The elderly lady added: “As long as he understands that if he runs at the mouth. .”

Oh, no! Danton thought. Not the old woman, too!

“. . we’ll have to kill him.”

Another of the men, about Delchamps’s age, pointed at the centerpiece of dinosaurs, and said: “That should make it quite obvious, Mr. Parker. This is where us old dinosaurs come to die.”

There were grunts, and then came what appeared to Parker and Danton to be a regular war of words among the residents.

“Oh, shit, there he goes again with that crap!”

“Jesus Christ, Mac, will you knock off with that come-to-die nonsense?”

“Speak for yourself, John Alden! You’ve always-”

“Let me have a shot at this!” Dianne Sanders interrupted. “Mr. Parker, everybody in this room-except those two and me-is retired from the Company.”

She pointed to the enormous black man and to a man who looked to be in his late forties.

“That’s Dick Miller and Tom, my husband. They used to run around the block with Charley Castillo and General McNab until the Army decided they were no longer able to play Rambo, and medically retired them. I was a cryptographer, and took my retirement, too. Then came the glory days of the Office of Organizational Analysis. . you both know what that was?”

Parker and Danton nodded.

“Charley needed a safe house here, and OOA bought this. Then Uncle Remus-you know who he is?”

Roscoe Danton knew that Uncle Remus was the politically incorrect-and some suggested racist-name that only his close friends could call Chief Warrant Officer (5) Colin Leverette, U.S. Army, Retired.

Danton nodded.

Porky shook his head.

“He’s the guy who took Colonel Hamilton to the Fish Farm in the Congo,” Delchamps clarified.

“One of the better snake eaters,” Tom Sanders further clarified. “Dianne and I were in our happy, exciting retirement in Fayetteville, watching the mildew grow in the bathtub when Uncle Remus showed up and asked if we’d be interested in running this place. We were on the next plane up here.”

“Then we thought we’d be out of a job when OOA was broken up,” Dianne picked up. “But when Edgar said he needed a place to live now that he was retired, he moved in ‘as a temporary measure.’ ”

“And then the other dinosaurs started moving in, one by one,” the elderly lady offered. “We were scattered all around D.C. I was in the Silver Oaks Methodist Episcopal Ladies Retirement Community in Silver Spring. You can imagine how much I had in common with the ladies there.”

“So you’re also retired from the CIA?” Danton asked.

“Thirty-four years in the Clandestine Service,” she said with quiet pride.

“Dinosaurs?” Porky Parker asked.

“That’s what they call us at Langley,” the elderly lady said. “We still believe that the only good Communist is a dead Communist, so we’re dinosaurs to them.”

“And, so,” one of the men in a wheelchair said, “with the not inconsiderable help of Two-Gun, we formed Lorimer Manor, Inc., and bought this place from the Lorimer Charitable and Benevolent Trust. When one of Castillo’s Merry Outlaws needs to use a safe house-Edgar, Two-Gun, and Gimpy stayed here last night, for example-we send a bill to the LCBF Corporation.”

Gimpy, Danton thought, must be the big black guy in the aviator sunglasses.

“What’s the LCBF Corporation?” he asked.

“That’s who’s going to pay you your combat pay, Roscoe,” Delchamps said.

Porky Parker’s eyebrows rose at that.

“Think of it as our basic corporate structure,” Two-Gun amplified. “Providing complete financial services to our little community.”

“All right, David,” the elderly lady said, a little impatiently. “Now it’s your turn. What the hell happened at Langley this morning?”

“. . And so the President told me he was accepting my resignation and to get off his goddamn helicopter, and then I ran into Roscoe, and he brought me here,” Porky Parker concluded.

“I said, and you all heard me,” one of the middle-aged men said, “that there was something phony about that failed microphone.”

“What is that sonofabitch up to?” the elderly lady asked softly.

“I have no idea,” Parker said. “My question is, what do I do now?”

“You stay out of sight,” Delchamps said. “I already told you that. Maybe go to Mexico with us. You’ve got your passport?”

“My official passport is in my briefcase with my laptop,” Parker said. “The last time I saw it was when I asked one of the Secret Service guys to watch it for me backstage in Auditorium Three.”

“I hoped you kissed it- them. . the passport and laptop-good-bye,” Delchamps said.

“My regular passport is in my apartment,” Parker said.

“Outside of which members of the media can be counted on, sitting,” Roscoe said, “burning with desire to hear your version of your surprising and sudden departure from distinguished government service.”

Which will also screw up my exclusive interview with Porky.