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“Oh, yeah. I know who he is.”
“You have been talking to him?”
“No, sir, Mr. Attorney General. I was trying to say I know who he is. Has he been trying to talk to me? I’ve been in the office all afternoon. Is something wrong?”
“What do you know about the transfer of Félix Abrego from Florence ADMAX to the La Tuna facility in Texas?”
“Oh. Now I understand. So there was a mix-up.”
“Excuse me?”
“When that transfer order came in, I thought there was something not quite kosher, transferring someone like Abrego from here to a country club like La Tuna, so I called Director Waters and asked him. He assured me that everything was hunky-dory, that you had personally authorized the transfer, so I told my assistant warden to turn the prisoner over to the U.S. Marshals you sent out here.”
“And when will this prisoner actually be transferred, Warden Leon?”
“He’s on his way to the La Tuna facility as we speak, Mr. Attorney General.”
“Warden Leon, if Mr. Danton or any other journalist calls you out there, don’t be available. Refer them to me. You understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Don’t answer any questions. Don’t say anything at all.”
“Yes, sir, Mr. Attorney General.”
[FIVE]
1635 18 April 2007
The attorney general began his conversation with the director of Central Intelligence with no preliminaries whatsoever.
“Frank, Roscoe J. Danton just called me, and after I was very nice to him—damn near groveled at his feet—he gave me until five minutes to nine to explain why Félix Abrego is being transferred from Florence ADMAX to that country club prison in Texas. Otherwise, at nine tonight he goes on Wolf News—on Andy McClarren’s Straight Scoop—with what he’s got.”
“I wonder how he found out,” the DCI mused.
The attorney general of course had already given that question a good deal of thought. After talking with Warden Leon, he had decided it wasn’t Leon.
Then who?
His suspicions finally settled on the U.S. Marshals he had sent to Florence ADMAX. For one thing, since they were transferring Abrego, they knew about it. For another—the U.S. Marshal Service was the oldest federal law enforcement agency; it had been founded in 1789 and its members had an unfortunate tendency to regard themselves as the Knights Templar of federal law enforcement—they often tattled to the attorney general on what they thought of as less than pure activities of other agencies. Since they couldn’t tattle on the man himself who had ordered Abrego’s very questionable transfer—the attorney general—they had gone to Roscoe J. Danton.
Who would certainly recognize a damn good story when one was dumped in his lap.
“I have no idea,” Stanley Crenshaw said. “All I know is that he knows, and is about to go on Wolf News and tell the world. What do I do?”
“I just had a thought,” Frank Lammelle said. “I’m not supposed to know that Abrego is going to be swapped for Ferris. The President told you and Natalie Cohen, and maybe Schmidt, but I guess he doesn’t think I have the need to know. That raises the question ‘Did he tell Montvale or Truman Ellsworth?’ Keep that it mind when you’re talking to him.”
“Okay, so I’m telling you now. And now that you know, what should I do?”
“Are you sure you want to tell me, Stanley? Clendennen’s liable to consider that a breach of trust.”
The attorney general considered that for a moment.
“Okay, I didn’t tell you. Who did tell you?”
“If I answered that, that would be a breach of trust.”
“Shit,” the attorney general said, and broke the connection.
