"It's true," General McNab said.
"How do you know?" Danton asked.
"Because that's what General Naylor told me," McNab said. "Under the Code of Honor, people-especially general officers-don't tell fibs to each other. They may try to make human sacrifices of fellow officers, but telling fibs is a no-no. Telling a fib will get you kicked right off that Long Gray Line."
"Colonel Brewer, please be prepared to report that exchange in detail," Naylor said.
"Jesus Christ, Allan!" McNab said. Then, "Sorry, Sweaty, that just slipped out."
"The question is moot," Castillo said. "Colonel Berezovsky and Lieutenant Colonel Alekseeva are not going to be involuntarily repatriated. And I ain't goin' nowhere I don't want to go, neither."
"So what are you going to do, Charley?" Allan Junior asked.
"It took me a lot longer than it should have for me to figure this out, Allan, but what I'm going to do is something they told me on that fabled plain overlooking the Hudson when I was eighteen. When, if I made it through Hudson High and became an officer, my first duty would be to take care of my people.
"I forgot that over the years. The truth of the matter was that falling off the face of the earth didn't bother me much. There I was, with Sweaty, on the finest trout-fishing river in the world. The President of the United States had relieved me of my responsibilities.
"Then Dmitri and Sweaty's cousin, Colonel V. N. Solomatin, who runs the Second Directorate of the SVR with Putin looking over his shoulder, wrote a letter to Dmitri and Sweaty, telling them to come home, all is forgiven.
"Since he didn't know where they were, he had the rezident in Budapest give the letter to a friend of mine there who he thought knew how to get in touch with me. He was right. Several hours later, Sweaty and I were reading it in Patagonia.
"What was significant about the letter was not that Putin thought anybody would believe that all was forgiven, but that he wasn't going to stop until Sweaty and Dmitri paid for their sins. That letter was intended to give Clendennen an out: He wasn't forcing Sweaty and Dmitri to go back to Russia. 'Knowing that all was forgiven-here's the letter to prove that-they went back willingly.'
"Then the Congo-X appeared in Fort Detrick. Just about as soon as that happened, some people who knew the OOA-"
"The what?" Roscoe Danton interrupted.
"The Office of Organizational Analysis, the President's-"
"Okay. Now I'm with you," Danton said.
"Okay. Some people-"
"What people?" Danton interrupted again.
"I'm not going to tell you that now; I may never tell you. I haven't figured out what to do about them yet."
"Let me deal with the bastards, Charley," Aloysius said.
"I'd love to, Aloysius, but I want to be invisible when this is all over, and that would be hard to do if all those people suddenly committed suicide by jumping off the roller coaster on top of that tower in Las Vegas. People would wonder why they did that."
Casey chuckled.
"That's not exactly what I had in mind, but close," he said.
"You realize, Colonel," Danton said, "that all you're doing is whetting my appetite. Presuming that I come out of this alive, I'm going to find out who these people are. So, why don't you tell me now?"
Castillo considered that.
"Tell him, Carlos," Sweaty said.
"You think that's smart?"
"I think you have to tell Mr. Danton everything," she said. "Or eliminate him. He either trusts you-us-completely, or he's too dangerous to us to stay alive…"
"Was that a threat?" Danton challenged, and thought: No, it was a statement of fact. And the frightening thing about that is I think he's going to listen to her.
Sweaty ignored him. She went on: "… and now is when you have to make that decision."
Danton thought: I realize this is overdramatic, but the cold truth is that if these people think I'm a danger to them, they're entirely capable of taking me out in the desert, shooting me, and leaving me for the buzzards.
Why the fuck did I ever agree to come here?
"Dmitri?" Castillo asked.
"I think she's right again," Berezovsky said, after a moment's consideration of the question.
"My consiglieri having spoken, Mr. Danton…" Castillo said, and paused.
Roscoe Danton wondered: Consiglieri?
Where the hell did he get that? From The Godfather?
Castillo met Danton's eyes, then went on: "There is a group of men in Las Vegas who have both enormous wealth and influence, the latter reaching all over, and, in at least two cases I'm sure of, into the Oval Office. Not to the President, but to several members of his cabinet. They're all patriots, and they use their wealth and influence from time to time to fund intelligence activities for which funds are not available.
"When those people learned that OOA had been disbanded, they thought they could hire it as sort of a mercenary Special Operations organization."
"Those people have names?" Danton asked.
"Giving them to you would be a breach of trust," Castillo said. "We never agreed to this proposal when it was made, but neither, apparently, did we say 'Hell, no' with sufficient emphasis.
"It was from those people that we first learned of the Congo-X at Fort Detrick. They got in touch and wanted us to look into it. I was going to do that anyway, as it obviously was likely to have something to do with Dmitri and Sweaty as well as the threat it posed to the country.
"I made the mistake of taking two hundred thousand dollars in expense money, following my rule of whenever possible you should spend other people's money rather than your own, and this, I am afraid, allowed them to think the mercenaries were on their payroll."
"What was wrong with that?" Danton asked.
"Well, for one thing, we're not for hire. But what happened, I have come to believe, is that when they learned that President Clendennen had decided to swap Dmitri, Sweaty, and me in exchange for the Congo-X that the Russians have, they decided that made sense, and that since I was a mercenary, I was expendable."
"They told you this?" Danton asked.
"No. But I'm not taking any of their calls," Castillo said. "Or letting them know where I am."
"They think Charley's on a riverboat between Budapest and Vienna," Aloysius said. "And that I'm in Tokyo."
"I don't understand that," Danton said.
"You're not supposed to," Sweaty said. "Go on, Carlitos."
"What are you going to do?" Danton said.
"Well, there is some good news. We've learned how to kill Congo-X," Castillo said. "Right now, nobody knows that but us-"
"You know something that important and you're not going to tell the President?" General Naylor blurted.
"If we told him, sir, there are several probabilities I'm not willing to accept. One would be that he would want to know how we came to know this before he did; that would place Colonel Hamilton in an awkward position."
"Goddamn it, Charley!" Naylor exploded. "Hamilton is a serving officer. He is duty-bound."
"Sir, with respect. You are violating your parole. I have told you that you are not permitted to question me. But I'll answer that. Inasmuch as Colonel Hamilton marches beside us in the Long Gray Line, I'm sure he considered the Code of Honor before deciding that to keep this information to ourselves for the time being was necessary. He realized that if President Clendennen knew that we can now neutralize Congo-X, the Russians would learn that in short order. Right now, we don't want to give them that."
There was silence for a moment.
Then Danton asked, "So, what are you going to do, Colonel?"
"Depending on how much Congo-X the Russians have, that reduces the threat to the United States just about completely, or doesn't reduce it much at all," Castillo went on.
"The odds are that the Congo-X that General Sirinov flew out of Africa is all of it. Dmitri says that the Russians knew how awful this stuff is. Burned once, no pun intended, by Chernobyl, they didn't want to run the risk of having any of this stuff inside Russia.