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Roscoe believed, however, that Mr. Hoboken couldn’t help but be carrying the weight of an odd family. What kind of people would name an innocent baby boy Robin? That was even worse than Mr. Cash trying to hang “Sue” on his son Johnny.
Roscoe went to the front of the room and patiently waited for his turn at the ear of Mr. Hoboken. Finally, it came:
“Is that all you’ve got for me on this ‘out of the box’ thinking the President mentioned?”
“I’m not sure I understand the question, Mr. Danton.”
“Did the leader of the free world give you anything else about his out-of-the-box thinking about his unrelenting wars against the drug trade and piracy, to be slipped to me when no one else was looking?”
“Of course not!” Robin Hoboken said. “Anything else, Mr. Danton?”
“Does the term ‘dinosaur’ have any meaning for you?”
Robin thought it over, then shook his head and said, “No. It doesn’t. Should it?”
“I heard a story that some dinosaurs are still alive,” Roscoe said.
“I don’t think that’s possible.”
“Check into it for me, will you, and send me an e-mail?”
“All right.”
You and I both know, Robin, that you’re going to “forget to do that” the moment you leave this room.
Pity. If you asked around you might have learned that within the intelligence community, dinosaurs are those politically incorrect clandestine service old-timers who believe that the only good Communist is a dead Communist.
That would have given you something to worry about: “Why did that pissant Danton ask me about dinosaurs?”
“Thanks, Robin.”
Then they went their separate ways, which in the case of Mr. Danton meant that he walked back to the Old Ebbitt Grill, checked to make sure Miss Dillworth was no longer there, and then went in for his breakfast Bloody Mary.
[TWO]
The Cabinet Room
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.
Washington, D.C.
1330 5 June 2007
The Cabinet Room, which is off the Oval Office, looked practically deserted when the President, following Supervisory Secret Service Agent Robert J. Mulligan, walked in. Everyone in it could have easily been seated comfortably in the Oval Office.
President Clendennen preferred to hold meetings of the type he was about to convene in the Cabinet Room, even if there were just a few—say, four or five—people involved.
This afternoon, there were nine senior officers sitting at the long mahogany table—a gift of former President Richard Nixon, although this was rarely mentioned—waiting for the President. They were Secretary of State Natalie Cohen, who was in a chair to the right of the President’s chair. The chair on the right of that was empty. Vice President Charles W. Montvale sat next to the empty chair, which most of the people at the table thought of as “Belinda-Sue’s throne.”
Sitting across the table from them were Frederick P. Palmer, United States attorney general, Director of National Intelligence Truman C. Ellsworth, CIA Director A. Franklin Lammelle, Secretary of Defense Frederick K. Beiderman, FBI Director Mark Schmidt, and General Allan B. Naylor, commander in chief of the U.S. Central Command.
They were a diverse group of very intelligent—one might even say brilliant—and powerful people who really agreed on only one thing vis-à-vis President Joshua Ezekiel Clendennen.
Secretary Cohen—she was of course a diplomat—had admitted in a very private conversation with the CIA director that she had been forced to the conclusion that the President had “some mental problems.” CIA Director Lammelle, who was not a diplomat, had replied that he had concluded, based on the same criteria, that the Commander in Chief was “absolutely bonkers, as mad as the legendary March hare.”
The opinions of the others were somewhere between these two extremes, but all were agreed the President’s mental health was a serious problem.
