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“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.”
