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“Which is?” Torine asked, smiling as he beckoned to a waiter.
“I’m still working on that,” Castillo said. “Little problems keep popping up.”
“You managed to talk Pevsner out of whacking everybody in sight and letting God sort it out,” Leverette asked, incredulously, “without having a Plan B?”
“I was impressed,” Tom Barlow said. “That’s just what he did. I didn’t think he was going to get away with it.”
Castillo smiled at Svetlana, and said, “Pay attention to your big brother, Sweaty.”
“What makes either of you think you really got away with it?” Sweaty replied.
“No plans at all, Charley?” Leverette asked.
“More questions than plans,” Castillo said.
He pointed at the laptop in front of Bradley.
“Lester, show Uncle Remus, Uncle Jake, and Gimpy the letter that the President wants President Martinez to send to him.”
The three bent over the laptop and read the letter.
“Where’d you get this?” Torine asked.
“What is it?” Miller asked.
“That’s the letter the President ordered Natalie Cohen to give to Ambassador McCann, so that McCann can go to President Martinez with it, and have Martinez send it back. She sent it to Lammelle, and he sent it to me.”
“So?” Torine said. “He wants to swap the guy doing time in Florence for Ferris. We knew that.”
“Uncle Remus has that pained look on his face that shows he’s thinking,” Castillo said. “That, or he smells a rat.”
“Both,” Leverette said.
“Go on.”
“The President wrote this himself?” Leverette asked.
“The President told Natalie that Clemens McCarthy wrote it,” Castillo said. “He told Natalie he thought it was brilliant.”
“‘. . . your Marshals would transport him to the Oaxaca State Prison, where they would turn him over to prison authorities,’” Leverette quoted.
“I, too, found that interesting.”
“I don’t understand,” Torine said.
Castillo nodded, then said: “Question one: Why would the President be specific about where Abrego was to go to be exchanged? Question two: Why the Oaxaca State Prison? It’s way south, not near the U.S. border. There must be a state prison near our border.”
“Oaxaca is closer to Venezuela?” Uncle Remus asked.
“That may—probably does—have something to do with it. I have no idea what, but there is a reason.”
“You just said McCarthy wrote the letter,” Miller said.
“Same questions,” Castillo said.
“Where are you going with this?”
“I don’t know; I just started thinking about it,” Castillo said. “Okay, here goes. A lot of people are beginning to realize that Clendennen is losing, or has lost, his marbles. That’s what everybody—including me—thought when we heard his paranoid suspicions that we were staging a coup d’état to get him out of the Oval Office, and Montvale in.
