“So, what happened at the door?” the President asked.
“We identified ourselves, and asked if we could come in. Yung said not without a search warrant. He also said that if they did let us in, it would constitute a waiver of the owner’s rights against unlawful search, and they weren’t going to do that.”
“It has to be Yung,” the attorney general thought aloud. “An FBI agent, lawyer or not, would know about that decision of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals.”
“So you didn’t get in. Then what?” the President said.
“We got in, sir,” Andrews said. “After I promised that I understood we were being admitted only as a compassionate gesture on the part of Mrs. Darby to get us out of the snow and the cold, and that she had not waived any of her rights vis-à-vis unlawful search and seizure. And they filmed us acknowledging that, sir.”
“They filmed you?” the President asked incredulously.
“Yes, sir. There was another man there with what looked to me like a professional movie camera.”
“And then ? Jesus Christ, cut to the goddamned chase!”
“Mr. Darby was in the kitchen, sir,” Andrews said.
“And did you ask him if he knew where Colonel Castillo and the two Russians are, and if you did, what did he say?”
“He was evasive, sir. And the lawyer said that if Mr. Darby found himself being interrogated by a federal officer, he would advise him, as his lawyer, not to answer any questions the answers to which might tend to either incriminate him, or cause him to violate the CIA secrecy laws which forbid him to ever disclose anything he learned while he was an officer of the Clandestine Service.”
“Mr. President, I’m afraid we’re not going to learn much from Mr. Darby,” the attorney general said.
“I was beginning to suspect that,” the President said, thickly sarcastic.
“There is one thing we can do, Mr. President,” Andrews said.
“What’s that?”
“We can squeeze Mrs. Darby. When she told McGuire her husband was in Ushuaia with his girlfriend, information on which Ambassador Montvale based his decision to go to Ushuaia, she had invited McGuire into her home. She had waived her rights when she did so. Giving false information to a federal officer is a felony.”
The President considered that a long moment.
Then he picked up his telephone and said, “Come in here.”
A secretary and a Secret Service agent appeared almost immediately.
“Are we in touch with Ambassador Montvale?”
“Yes, sir,” the Secret Service agent said. “He’s in Ushuaia, Argentina. There’s a communications radio in his Gulfstream III.”
“Send the ambassador a message, please,” the President said. “‘Mr. Darby is in Alexandria, Virginia. You can come home now, repeat, now.’”
“Yes, sir,” the secretary said. “Is that all of it, Mr. President?”
“That’s all of it. Get that right out, please.”
“Yes, Mr. President,” the Secret Service agent said.
When they had left, closing the door behind them, the President turned to Mason Andrews.
“You heard that, Andrews?”
“Yes, sir.”
“If you think, when the ambassador gets back here, that Wolf News is going to take a picture of him in a courtroom, with his hand on a Bible, swearing before God and the world that he—my director of National Intelligence—went halfway around the world on my orders as commander in chief on the word of a housewife having her little joke at our expense, you’re even more incredibly stupid than you showed you were this morning, Andrews.
“Now get the fuck out of the goddamned Oval Office and never come back!”