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“Yes, sir, Mr. President.”
Clendennen rose and offered Douglas his hand.
“Welcome aboard, Mark. We all expect great things from you.”
“I will try my best, Mr. President. Thank you, Mr. President.”
“Okay, Mark. You can wait for Mr. Mulligan in the outer office. And while you’re out there, you can tell Mr. Schmidt he can come in.”
“Good afternoon, Mr. President,” FBI Director Mark Schmidt said.
“Did you see those people standing with Colonel Castillo at Arlington?” the President asked without any preliminaries.
“The ones who looked like they just might be Special Forces, maybe even Delta or Gray Fox?” Schmidt replied smiling. “Yes, I did, Mr. President.”
“And did you see them insult their Commander in Chief by getting in their limousines and driving off before I had finished—hell, before I had started to make my remarks?”
“No, sir, I’m afraid I didn’t.”
“Tell him, Clemens,” the President said.
“They got into their limousines and left before the President had a chance to even begin his remarks,” the press secretary said.
“Mr. President, I just don’t think it was an intentional insult. I can’t believe they’d knowingly, much less purposefully . . .”
“There’s a good deal going on here, Mr. Director, that you’d have trouble believing if I told you. They went from the cemetery to the Mayflower, where a couple of minutes ago, they were in suite . . . what did Dumbo say the room number was, Mulligan?”
“Ten-oh-two, Mr. President.”
“What I want you to do, Mr. Director, is get a team of your people over there, right now, with cameras. Movie cameras would be better, but if that can’t be arranged on such short notice, the regular kind will have to do. Try not to be seen of course. I want a picture of every last one of those sonsofbitches. I want each picture to show when and where it was taken in such form that will stand up in court. And of course I want to have each of them identified. Name, rank, serial number, where they’re assigned.”
Schmidt looked at him in disbelief.
“Mr. President, may I respectfully suggest that you may be overreacting?”
“I don’t want to argue with you about this, Mr. Director. What I want you to do is say, ‘Yes, sir,’ then do what I tell you to do.”
“Yes, sir,” Schmidt said.
“And when you have assembled all these photographs and the information, I want you to personally bring them here and give them to Mulligan.”
“I’ll get right on it, Mr. President,” Schmidt said.
“And I don’t want this spread all over the J. Edgar Hoover building. I don’t want anybody who is not directly involved to know anything about it. Got it?”
“Yes, Mr. President,” Schmidt said.
“Now, what have you done about El Paso? Did you place the advertisement those people asked for?”
“The FBI has a very good man in El Paso, Mr. President,” Schmidt said. “The SAC—”
“The what?”
“The special agent in charge, Mr. President. His name is William Johnson. He’s the man who intercepted the second message to General McNab—”
“And instead of sending it to Washington, sent it to McNab. I didn’t see it until the next day. I don’t want that to happen again, Mr. Schmidt.”
There was a brief hesitation before Schmidt went on: “SAC Johnson placed the classified advertisement in El Diario de El Paso, the Spanish language newspaper—”
