W. Griffin - The Hostage

"That makes you sound like a clerk," Mary-Ellen said. "Nobody will pay any attention to you."

Hall smiled at her. He had noticed that Mary-Ellen had liked Charley from the first day.

"Okay, Mary-Ellen, what do you suggest?"

"Executive assistant," Executive Assistant Kensington replied immediately. "That has a certain je ne sais quoi in the upper echelons of the Washington bureaucracy."

"But he's not an executive assistant," Hall had protested.

"He is if you say so, boss. And who's to know?"

"By the power invested in me by myself," Hall said, "you are decreed to be my executive assistant. Go forth and do good work."

"Yes, sir. Thank you, sir," Castillo replied to Hall. He turned to Mary-Ellen and added, "Et merci mille fois, madame."

Hall had picked up on that.

"You speak French, do you, Charley?"

"Yes, sir."

"Any other languages?"

"Yes, sir."

Hall made a come-on gesture.

Charley hesitated, and Hall added, "Modesty does not befit an executive assistant. Which ones?"

"Russian, sir. And Hungarian. German. Some Arabic. Several others."

"Jesus Christ!"

"Languages come easy to me, sir."

"They don't to me," Hall confessed. "You have plans for the evening, Charley?"

"No, sir."

"You have a dinner jacket?"

"Yes, sir."

"Your bluff is called. We are going to a reception at the Hungarian embassy. Whenever I ask the ambassador a question he doesn't want to answer, he forgets how to speak English. Getting the picture?"

"Yes, sir."

"How'd you learn to speak Hungarian?"

"When I was a kid, sir, my mother's aunt, who was Hungarian, lived with us. She taught me."

"Nice for you. Okay, Charley, I'll have Joel pick you up on his way here to get me. Where are you living?"

"I can meet you here, sir."

"Joel will pick you up. Where did you find a hotel?"

"I'm in the Mayflower, sir."

"The Mayflower?" Hall asked. "Isn't that kind of expensive on a major's pay, including per diem?"

"Yes, sir, it is."

"Joel will pick you up just before seven," Hall said, deciding it best not now to pursue the question of affordable housing with Castillo. "Wait for him on the street."

"Yes, sir."

The moment Castillo had closed the door, Hall reached for the red phone on his desk and pressed the button that would connect him over a secure line with the commander-in-chief, Central Command.

"Hey, Matt," Naylor said, answering almost immediately. "What's up?"

"I just found out my newly appointed executive assistant, Major Castillo, has taken a room in the Mayflower. How's he going to pay for that?"

"Would you be satisfied with 'no problem'?"

"No."

"Well, Charley told me that he'd taken a small apartment in the Mayflower," Naylor said. "The bill will probably be paid by Castillo Enterprises of San Antonio. Or maybe by the Tages Zeitung."

"The what?"

"It's a newspaper-actually a chain of newspapers- Charley owns in Germany."

"You didn't tell me much about this guy, did you, Allan?"

"You didn't ask. All you wanted was somebody who would carry your suitcase and who spoke Spanish. That's what I gave you."

"What's your connection with Charley, Allan? Other than the usual relationship between a four-star general and one of his five thousand majors?"

"Elaine thinks of him-and I do, too, truth to tell-as the third son. We've known him since he was a twelve-year-old orphan."

"You didn't mention that, either."

"You didn't ask, Matt," Naylor said. "What do you want to do with him? Send him back?"

"No," Hall had said. "Presuming there is no further deep dark secret you're leaving for me to discover, I think he's going to be pretty useful around here." Major/Executive Assistant Castillo did, in fact, and quickly, prove himself useful to the secretary of Homeland Security. And he fit in. Both Mary-Ellen Kensington and Agnes Forbison were clearly taken with him. Hall kindly ascribed this to maternal instincts, but he confided to his wife that he suspected both had amorous fantasies about Castillo.

"He's one of those guys women are drawn to like moths to a candle."

"I hate men to whom women are drawn like moths to a candle," Janice Hall had said.

The day Janice came to the office and met Castillo, she suggested to her husband that they have him to dinner.

"He's probably lonely living in a hotel," Janice said, "and would really appreciate a home-cooked meal."

"I thought you hated men to whom women were drawn like moths to a candle."

"That's not his fault, and he's obviously a nice guy. Ask him."

Castillo also got along from the start with Joel Isaacson and Tom McGuire. Hall had worried a little about that; Secret Service guys aren't impressed with most anyone. But Joel and Tom-both excellent judges of character-seemed to sense that Special Forces Major C. G. Castillo wasn't most anyone. Isaacson had even gone to Hall and suggested that Castillo be given credentials as a Secret Service agent.

"He could get through airport security that way. And carry a gun. I'll handle the credentials guys at Secret Service, if you like." What really moved Castillo from being sort of a male secretary cum interpreter in whose presence it was possible to imbibe intoxicants and relate ribald stories to being a heavy hitter in Hall's office was a fey notion of the President of the United States.

In May 2005, an old Boeing 727 that had been sitting at the airport at Luanda, Angola, waiting for parts for more than a year, suddenly took off without permission and disappeared. No one really thought it had been stolen by terrorists and was going to be flown into some American landmark in a repeat of 9/11-that had quickly become regarded as a ridiculous notion at the highest levels; for one thing, the aged bird didn't have the range to fly to the United States-but no agency in what the President described as "our enormous and enormously expensive intelligence community" seemed to be able to learn what had happened to it.

The President was annoyed. At a private dinner- really private, just the President, the first lady, and Secretary and Mrs. Hall-the President said that he had been talking to Natalie Cohen-then his national security advisor, and now the secretary of state-and they had come up with an idea.

Hall understood that "they had come up with an idea" meant it was the President's idea. If it had been Natalie's, the President would have said so. What had probably happened was that he had proposed the idea, she had first argued against it, but then had given in to the President's logic, and the idea had become "their" idea. If she hadn't given in, and he had decided to go ahead anyhow, he would have claimed the idea as his own.

"You're the only department without an in-house intelligence operation," the President had said. "So this will work. Natalie will send everybody in the intelligence community a memo saying that since this stolen airliner poses a potential threat to the homeland, you are to be furnished, immediately, all the intelligence they've developed about this missing airplane.

"That will give us who knew what and when they knew it. Then, very quietly, we send somebody-just one man-to go over the scene quietly, very quietly, and see if he can find out why the CIA, for instance, knew something on Tuesday that the DIA didn't find out until Thursday. Or why the FBI didn't find out at all. You with me?"

"Yes, sir, Mr. President."

"The question is: Who can we send to do this without setting off a turf war?" After meeting Major Carlos G. Castillo, the President decided he was just the man to very quietly, without setting off a turf war, find out which intelligence agencies were running with the ball; or had fumbled the ball; or had just sat on it, waiting for another agency to do the work.