It took Castillo about five minutes to bring everybody up to speed.
“Okay. That’s about it. Anybody?”
Colonel Jake Torine shook his head in wonder. He—and everyone else— had just heard that he was being sent to the Nebraska Avenue Complex, where—aided and abetted by Mrs. Agnes Forbison, their very own expert on all things bureaucratic—he was to be prepared to convince Mr. C. Harry Whelan of The Washington Post that the Office of Organizational Analysis was in fact what its name suggested, just one more small governmental agency charged with analyzing government organization, in this case that of the Department of Homeland Security.
Castillo looked at Torine. “Jake?”
“Why do I think you have a hidden agenda here, Charley?”
“Because by nature you are simply unable to trust your fellow man?”
“How about because I have been around the block with you too many times, ol’ buddy.”
“Did I forget to mention that I hope you and Sparkman will be able to tear yourself away from your analytic duties for a few hours so that you might consider the problems of getting whatever matériel and men into the Democratic Republic of the Congo in complete secrecy so they can take out a chemical laboratory/factory?”
“No, I guess that slipped your mind,” Torine said.
“And of course once they have accomplished that little task, to get them out of the Democratic Republic of the Congo as unobtrusively as they entered?”
“That presumes that you will be allowed to use the Delta Force 727.”
Castillo nodded. “And some people from Delta Force. Uncle Remus comes to mind.”
Chief Warrant Officer Five Colin Leverette, a legendary Delta Force special operator, was an enormous, very black man who was called “Uncle Remus” by his close friends—and only by his close friends—in the special operations community.
“From what you have told us of your little chat with Ambassador Montvale, are you sure that’s going to happen?”
“No,” Castillo said simply.
“Then what, Charley?”
“I haven’t quite figured that out.”
“Wonderful!”
“If you’re uncomfortable with this, Jake, don’t do it. Just con C. Harry Whelan and leave it at that.”
“Every time you lead me around the block, I’m uncomfortable,” Torine said. “But I always go, and you know that.”
“That was before,” Castillo said, “when you were able to con yourself into thinking I wasn’t really crazy.”
“Not without difficulty,” Torine said, chuckling.
“I’ve got something to tell you that will probably make you conclude I have finally really gone over the edge.”
“Frankly, Charley, that wouldn’t be hard.”
“I’m emotionally involved with Svetlana Alekseeva,” Castillo said.
Torine looked at him intensely, his eyes wary, but otherwise there was no expression on his face at all.
“To prevent any possible misinterpretation of that, Jake, let me rephrase: I am in love with her, and that emotion, I believe, is reciprocated.”
“I’m really glad to hear you say that, Ace,” Delchamps said.
Castillo instantly decided he had not correctly heard what Delchamps had said.
“Excuse me?”
“If you had said anything but almost exactly that, we would have had, added to our other burdens, the problem of protecting you from the lady’s big brother. In my brief association with him, I have learned he is one smart, tough sonofabitch, and protecting you from him might not have been possible.”
Castillo thought he saw a look of disbelief in Susanna Sieno’s eyes, then wondered if it was disbelief or contempt.
Paul Sieno and Sparkman had their eyes fixed on the floor.
“Charley,” Torine said finally, “I hope you weren’t crazy enough to tell Montvale about this.”
Castillo shook his head.
There was another long pause before Torine went on: “Insofar as reciprocity is concerned, would this explain Colonel Berezovsky’s otherwise baffling sudden change of attitude?”
Castillo first noticed the near-stilted formality of Torine’s question, then realized: He’s thinking out loud. Not as good ol’ Jake, but as Colonel Jacob D. Torine, USAF, a senior officer subconsciously doing a staff study of a serious problem and, specifically, right now, doing the Factors Bearing on the Problem part of the study.
“Pevsner told him that I was almost family. . . .”
“Supported,” Torine went on, “by Lieutenant Colonel Alekseeva’s statement, which I thought was odd: ‘So far as I am concerned, before God and the world, he is family.’ ”
“That’s what she said,” Castillo agreed.
Delchamps put in: “If I’m to believe Polkovnik Berezovsky—and truth being stranger than fiction, I do—the whole family, including the infamous Aleksandr Pevsner, is deeply religious folk with quote family values unquote that would satisfy the most pious Southern Baptist. Make that Presbyterian; they do like their booze.”
He looked at Alex Darby.
“That’s my take,” Darby said, nodding gently.
Susanna Sieno looked like she was going to say something but changed her mind.
“Following which,” Torine went on almost as if he was in a daze and hadn’t heard Delchamps, “Colonel Berezovsky began not only to answer questions he had previously answered evasively and ambiguously—if at all—and began not only to answer such questions fully, but also to volunteer intelligence bearing on the questions.”
“One explanation for the change in attitude,” Susanna Sieno said more than a little sarcastically, “might be Charley repeating his offer of two million dollars for the information.”
Delchamps looked at her coldly but didn’t challenge her.
He respects her, Castillo thought.
Susanna may look like a sweet young housewife in a laundry detergent advertisement, but she’s a good spook who has more than paid her dues in the agency’s Clandestine Services.
“No, Susanna, that wasn’t his motivation,” Castillo said. “They asked me for two million on the train to establish a credible motive for their defection. But they don’t need money. They brought out with them—it’s in various banks around the world—far more than two million. So much money I have trouble believing how much.”
Torine, deep in thought, looked out the quincho’s doors.
“That is the belief of their interrogator,” he went on in the military bureaucrat cant of the staff study, which sounded even more stilted when spoken. “Inevitably raising the question of the soundness of the interrogator’s judgment, inasmuch as the interrogator in his admission of romantic involvement has also admitted he has abandoned the professional code he has followed throughout his adult life.”
Torine stopped and tapped his fingertips together for a good thirty seconds.
Then he raised his eyes to Castillo’s. “So, you see, Colonel, the dilemma into which you have thrust me?”
“Jake, you say the word and I’ll get on Montvale’s airplane. If you tell me you think I can’t . . .”
He stopped when Torine held up his hand.
“—said dilemma makes me seriously consider that you may have in fact lost your fucking mind.”
Jack Davidson chuckled.
“So you think I should get on Montvale’s airplane?”
“No, that’s not what I said. Or mean. I just think you should keep in mind that you’re not acting rationally.”
“That’s . . .” Susanna Sieno started and then stopped.
“Go on, Susanna,” Castillo said, gesturing. “Let’s hear it.”
She met his eyes for a moment, shrugged, then went on: “What I was about to say, Charley, was that that’s something of an understatement.”