Mrs. Agnes Forbison, a very senior civil servant (GS-15, the highest pay grade) had been one of the first members of OOA, as its chief of administration.
Dianne and Harold Sanders were both retired special operators. They had been thinking of opening a bed-and-breakfast when Uncle Remus Leverette told them Castillo needed someone to run a safe house just outside Washington. They had jumped at the opportunity, and Castillo had jumped at the opportunity to have them. He'd been around the block with Harold on several occasions, and Dianne, in addition to being an absolutely marvelous cook, was also an absolutely marvelous cryptographer.
"Okay," Leverette then said, "after we approve that, can I go fishing?"
Castillo said, "Then there's the final question: What do we do about the offer from those people in Las Vegas?"
"I was afraid you'd bring that up, Ace," Delchamps said. "I have mixed feelings about that."
"We told them we'd let them know today," Castillo said.
"No, they told us to let them know by today," Delchamps said. "I'm not happy with them telling us anything."
"Call them up, Charley," Jack Britton said, "and tell them we're still thinking about it."
"Second the motion," Davidson said.
"Why not?" Castillo said. "The one thing we all have now is time on our hands. All the time in the world. Any objections?"
There were none and the motion carried.
"I'm going fishing," Leverette said, and grabbed his fly rod from where he'd left it on a table, then headed for the door. [TWO] Office of the Managing Editor The Washington Times-Post 1365 15th Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 1605 3 February 2007 The managing editor's office was across the newsroom from Roscoe Danton's office, substantially larger and even more crowded. The exterior windows opened on 15th Street, and the interior windows overlooked the newsroom. The latter were equipped with venetian blinds, which were never opened.
Managing Editor Christopher J. Waldron had begun smoking cigars as a teenager and now, at age sixty-two, continued to smoke them in his office in defiance of the wishes of the management of The Washington Times-Post and the laws of the District of Columbia. His only capitulation to political correctness and the law had been the installation of an exhaust fan and a sign on his door in large red letters that said: KNOCK BEFORE ENTERING!!!!
This served, usually, to give him time to exhale and to place his cigar in a desk drawer before any visitor could enter and catch him in flagrante delicto, which, as he often pointed out, meant "while the crime is blazing."
There had been complaints made about his filthy habit, most of them from the female staff but also from those of the opposite and indeterminate genders, but to no avail. Chris Waldron was about the best managing editor around, and management knew it.
Roscoe Danton knocked on Waldron's door, waited for permission to enter, and, when that came, went in, closing the door behind him.
Chris Waldron reclaimed his cigar from the ashtray in his desk drawer and put it back in his mouth.
He raised his eyebrows to ask the question, Well?
Danton said, "I am fully aware that I am neither Woodward nor Bernstein, but-"
"Thank you for sharing that with me," Waldron interrupted.
"-but I have a gut feeling I'm onto a big story, maybe as big as Watergate, and I want to follow it wherever it goes."
"And I had such high hopes that you'd really stopped drinking," Waldron said, and then made two gestures which meant, Sit down and tell me about it. "So what do we know about these two disgruntled employee whistleblowers?" Waldron asked.
"The younger one, Wilson, was an agricultural analyst at Langley before she got married to Wilson, who's a career bureaucrat over there. The gossip, which I haven't had time to check out, is that he's light on his feet. He needed to be married, and she needed somebody to push her career. Anyway, she managed to get herself sent through The Farm and into the Clandestine Service. They sent her to Angola, and then she got herself sent back to Langley. A combination of her husband's influence and her vast experience-eleven months in Angola-got her a job as regional director for Southwest Africa, everything from Nigeria to the South African border. She was where she wanted to be, back in Washington, with her foot on the ladder to greater things. She was not very popular with her peers."
"What got her fired?"
"According to her, this Colonel Castillo said terrible things about her behind her back about her handling of that 727 that was stolen. Remember that?"
Waldron nodded. "What sort of things?"
"She didn't tell me, not that she would have told me the truth. But anyway, that got her relieved from the Southwest Africa desk, and assigned to the Southern Cone desk-"
"The what?"
"Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile-otherwise known as the Southern Cone."
"From which she got fired?" Waldron asked, and when Danton nodded, asked, "Why?"
"I got this from a friend of mine who's close to the DCI and doesn't like her. Somebody sent the DCI a tape on which our pal C. Harry Whelan, Jr., proudly referred to her as his 'personal mole' in Langley."
C. Harry Whelan, Jr., was a prominent and powerful Washington-based columnist.
"That would do it, I guess. You check with Harry?"
Danton nodded.
"And did he admit knowing this lady?"
"More or less. When I called him, I said, 'Harry, I've been talking with Patricia Davies Wilson about you.' To which he replied, 'Don't believe a thing that lying bitch says.' Then I asked, 'Is it true somebody told the DCI she was your personal mole over there?' And Harry replied, 'Go fuck yourself, Roscoe,' and hung up."
"I can see where losing one's personal mole in the CIA might be a trifle annoying," Waldron said. "But-judging from what you've told me about this lady-might one suspect she is what our brothers in the legal profession call 'an unreliable witness'?"
"Oh, yeah," Roscoe agreed. "But the other one, Dillworth, is different."
"How different?"
"Well, for one thing, everybody I talked to liked her, said she was really good at what she did, and was sorry she got screwed."
"How did she, figuratively speaking of course, 'get screwed'?"
"She was the CIA station chief in Vienna. She had been working on getting a couple of heavy-hitter Russians to defect. Really heavy hitters, the SVR rezident in Berlin and the SVR rezident in Copenhagen, who happen to be brother and sister. Dillworth was so close to this coming off that she had had Langley send an airplane to Vienna, and had them prepare a safe house for them in Maryland."
"And it didn't come off?"
"Colonel Castillo showed up in Vienna, loaded them on his plane, and flew them to South America."
"She told you this?"
"No. What actually happened was that Dillworth said she wasn't going to tell me what had happened, because I wouldn't believe it. She said she would point me in the right direction, and let me find out myself; that way I would believe it."
"Is this Russian defectors story true?"
"There's an Interpol warrant out for"-Roscoe stopped and consulted his organizer, and then went on-"Dmitri Berezovsky and Svetlana Alekseeva, who the Russians say stole several million euros from their embassies in Germany and Denmark."
"And you know that Castillo took these Russians to South America? How do you know?"
"My friend who is close to the DCI and doesn't like Ambassador Montvale told me that Montvale told the DCI that he was going to South America to get the Russians. And that when he got down there, Castillo told him the Russians had changed their minds about defecting."
"And you believe this?"
"I believe my friend."
"So what happened is that when Castillo stole the Russians from Dillworth, blew her operation, the agency canned her?"
"That got Dillworth in a little hot water, I mean when the Russians didn't come in after she said they were, but what got her recalled was really interesting. Right after this, they found the SVR rezident in Vienna sitting in the backseat of a taxi outside our embassy. He had been strangled to death-they'd used a garrote-and on his chest was the calling card of Miss Eleanor Dillworth, counselor for consular affairs of the U.S. embassy."