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"Then it wouldn't matter, would it, if it's on or off?"
"What's up, Howard?"
"You have really opened a can of truly poisonous worms with that pal of yours, the one you asked me to find."
"What kind of poisonous worms?"
"The kind I have been absolutely forbidden to talk about on the telephone," Kennedy said.
"That bad?"
"Worse than that bad. Where can we meet?"
"Where are you?"
"Answer the question."
"As soon as I can go by the hotel and pack some clothes, and after a stop at Hall's coffee shop on Pennsylvania Avenue, I'm going to get on an airplane for Paris."
"What flight?"
"Air San Antonio, flight seventeen."
"Oh, really? Anybody I know coming with you?"
"The same crew we had in Cozumel. You know both of them."
"Interesting. And where will you be staying in Paris?"
"The Crillon."
"Lovely hotel. Unfortunately, too close for me to some former associates of mine who work close by."
Christ, I forgot to tell, or remind, Tom McGuire to find out what Special Agent Yung of the FBI is really doing in Montevideo! Castillo thought, then said, "What do you suggest?"
"When did you say you're leaving?"
"As soon as we can."
"You can't make it nonstop in that airplane, can you?"
"No. We're going to have to refuel at Gander, Newfoundland, and Shannon, Ireland. I figure it's going to take us, factoring in two one-hour fuel stops, about ten hours."
"Well, it's nearly half past four in Paris," Kennedy said. "If you get off the ground in an hour, that would make it half past five. Five plus ten is three o'clock in the morning. Figure another hour at least to get through customs and immigration, to get to the Crillon from Le Bourget… Is that where you're headed, Le Bourget?"
"Yeah," Cas
tillo said.
"It will be five o'clock when you get to the hotel from Le Bourget. Factor in another hour for delays, call it six. See you in the morning, Charley. We really do need to talk."
There was a change in the background noise, and Castillo realized that Kennedy had hung up. [TWO] Old Executive Office Building Seventeenth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, NW Washington, D.C. 1120 26 July 2005 "The President told me you'd had a little chat," the Honorable Matthew Hall, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, said. "You have any questions about that?"
"One big one," Castillo replied. "The soldier in me is uncomfortable not understanding my chain of command."
"The simple answer to that is that you answer to the President directly," Hall said. "But I think I know what you're asking. And proving that I'm learning to be a Washington bureaucrat, let me answer obliquely. When he came up with that finding, I wondered why I had been taken out of the loop. Then I realized I had not been. It all goes to deniability. I can now honestly answer, if someone asks, and someone inevitably will, either as a shot-in-the-dark fishing expedition or because this comes out, what's my relationship to you, that we have none. You don't work for me.
"Similarly, if someone asks the President's chief of staff what he knows about C. G. Castillo or the Office of Organizational Analysis, he can honestly say he doesn't know anything about it. If we get caught-which is a real possibility-we can hide behind the President's finding.
