W Griffin - The outlaws

"Do we want to start counting nickels and dimes?" Colonel Castillo asked. "Or can we get to that later?"

"'Nickels and dimes'?" Sandra Britton, a slim, tall, sharp-featured black-skinned woman, parroted incredulously. "We really are the other side of Alice's Looking Glass, aren't we?"

Possibly proving that opposites attract, Dr. Britton, who had been a philologist on the faculty of Philadelphia's Temple University, was married to John M. Britton, formerly of the United States Secret Service and before that a detective working undercover in the Counterterrorism Bureau of the Philadelphia Police Department.

"I was going to suggest, Sandra," Charley Castillo said, "that we now turn to the question before us. Questions before us. One, do we just split all that money between us and go home-"

"How the hell can Jack and I go home?" Sandra interrupted. "Not only can I not face my peers at Temple after they learned that I was hauled off by the Secret Service-with sirens screaming-but the AALs turned our little house by the side of the road into the O.K. Corral."

Dr. Britton was making reference to an assassination attempt made on her and her husband during which their home and nearly new Mazda convertible were riddled by fire from Kalashnikov automatic assault weapons in the hands of native-born African-Americans who considered themselves converts to Islam and to whom Dr. Britton referred, perhaps politically incorrectly, as AALs, which stood for African-American Lunatics.

"If I may continue, Doctor?" Colonel Castillo asked.

Dr. Britton made a gesture with her left hand, raising it balled with the center finger extended vertically.

"I rephrase," Castillo said. "Do we just split that money between us and go our separate ways? Or do we stay together within what used to be the OOA and would now need a new name?"

"Call the question," Anthony "Tony" J. Santini said formally.

Santini, a somewhat swarthy, balding, short, heavyset man in his forties, until recently had been listed in the telephone book of the U.S. embassy in Buenos Aires as an assistant financial attache. He had been, in fact, a Secret Service agent dispatched to Buenos Aires to, as he put it, "look for funny money." Before that, he had been a member of the vice presidential protection detail. He had been relieved of that assignment when he fell off the ice-covered running board of the vice-presidential limousine. He had been recruited for the OOA shortly after it had been established, to "locate and eliminate" the parties responsible for the murder of J. Winslow Masterson.

"Second the motion," Susanna Sieno said.

She was a trim, pale-freckled-skin redhead in a white blouse and blue jeans. She looked like she and the man sitting beside her-her husband, Paul-should be in a television commercial, where the handsome young husband comes home from the office and chastely kisses his charming young bride after she shows how easy it had been for her to polish their kitchen floor with Miracle Glow.

Actually, between the Sienos, they had more than four decades in the Clandestine Service of the CIA-Paul having served twenty-two years and Susanna just over twenty-which had been more than enough for the both of them to have elected to retire, which they had done ten days before.

"The motion having been made and seconded," Castillo said mock-formally, "the chair calls the question: 'Do we disband and split the money?' All in favor raise your hand and hold it up until Two-Gun counts."

"Okay," Castillo said a moment later, "now those opposed, raise your hands."

Yung again looked around the table.

"I make it unanimously opposed," Yung said. "OOA lives!"

"OOA's dead," Castillo said. "The question now is, what do we do with the corpse?"

Delchamps said, "Sweaty, Dmitri-excuse me, Tom-and Alfredo didn't vote."

"I didn't think I had the right," Alfredo Munz, a stocky blond man in his forties, said.

Munz, at the time of Masterson's kidnapping, had been an Argentine Army colonel in command of SIDE, an organization combining the Argentine versions of the FBI and CIA. Embarrassed by the incident and needing a scapegoat, the interior ministry had, as a disgusted Charley Castillo had put it, "thrown Munz under the bus." Munz had been relieved of his command of SIDE and forced to retire. Castillo had immediately put him on the OOA payroll.

"Don't be silly," Castillo said. "You took a bullet for us. You're as much a part of us as anyone else."

Munz had been wounded during the Estancia Shangri-La operation.

"Hear, hear," Yung said.

"I didn't say the Argentine Kraut didn't have every right to vote," Delchamps said. "I simply stated that he, Sweaty, and Tom didn't vote."

"If I have a vote," Sweaty said, "I will vote however my Carlos votes."

"Sweaty," also in tennis whites, sat next to Castillo. She was a tall, dark-red-haired, stunningly beautiful woman, who had been christened Svetlana. Once associated with this group of Americans, "Svetlana" had quickly morphed to "Svet" then to "Sweaty."

Susanna's eyebrows rose in contempt, or perhaps contemptuous disbelief. In her long professional career, she had known many intelligence officers, and just about the best one she had ever encountered was Castillo.

The most incredibly stupid thing any spook had ever done was become genuinely emotionally involved with an enemy intelligence officer. Within twenty-four hours of Lieutenant Colonel C. G. Castillo having laid eyes on Lieutenant Colonel Svetlana Alekseeva of the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki-the SVR, the Russian Service for the Protection of the Constitutional System, renamed from "KGB"-on a Vienna-bound railroad train in Germany, she had walked out of his bedroom in a safe house outside Buenos Aires wearing his bathrobe and a smug smile, and calling him "my Carlos."

Dr. Britton smiled fondly at Sweaty when she referred to Castillo now as "my Carlos." She thought it was sweet. Sandra Britton knew there really was such a thing as Love at First Sight. She had married her husband two weeks after she had met him and now could not imagine life without him.

Their meeting had occurred shortly after midnight eight years before on North Broad Street in Philly when Jack had appeared out of nowhere to foil a miscreant bent on relieving her of her purse, watch, jewelry-and very possibly her virtue. In the process, the miscreant had suffered a broken arm, a dislocated shoulder, testicular trauma, and three lost teeth.

Britton had then firmly attached the miscreant to a fire hydrant with plastic handcuffs, loaded the nearly hysterical Dr. Britton in her car, and set off to find a pay telephone.

There were not many working pay telephones in that section of Philadelphia at that hour, and to call the police it had been necessary to go to Dr. Britton's apartment.

After Britton had called Police Emergency to report that the victim of an assault by unknown parties could be found at North Broad and Cecil B. Moore Avenue hugging a fire hydrant, one thing had led to another. Sandra made Jack breakfast the next morning, and they were married two weeks later.

"I don't think I have a vote," Tom Barlow said. "But if I do, I'll go along with however Sweaty's Carlos votes."

Barlow, a trim man of about Castillo's age and build, whose hair was nearly blond, and who bore a familial resemblance to Sweaty-he was in fact her brother-until very recently had been Colonel Dmitri Berezovsky, the SVR rezident in Berlin.

Castillo and Sweaty gave Barlow the finger.

"I would say the motion has been defeated," Yung said. "I didn't see any hands. And I have the proxies of Jake, Peg-Leg, the Gunnery Sergeant, Sparky, and Miller. They all like the idea of keeping OOA going."

Jake and Sparky were, respectively, Colonel Jacob S. Torine, USAF (Retired), and former Captain Richard Sparkman, USAF. Torine had been in on OOA since the beginning, when he had flown a Globemaster to Argentina to bring home the body of Jack the Stack Masterson, and his family. Torine had been quietly retired with all the other military members of OOA who had more than twenty years' service when OOA had shut down.