“Because we may need at least that much to kill Congo-X.”
“Helium kills Congo-X?”
“Fifteen minutes in a helium bath at minus two-seventy Celsius kills it.”
“So it can be killed! I was really getting worried about that.”
“You were not alone,” Hamilton said. “We don’t know how much the Russians have. I suspect that if the President doesn’t give them Castillo and the Russians very soon, they will deliver more of it to encourage him to do so. My concern is that there will be an accident when they do so. I—”
“I get the picture,” Casey interrupted. “I’ll load what helium I have here . . . maybe three hundred liters, maybe a little more ... on my Gulfstream. As soon as we know where the Russians have sent the new Congo-X, the helium will be there in no more than three hours. And I’ll lay my hands on as much more as I can get as soon as I can.”
“Aloysius, we can’t let those people learn any of this.”
“I’m not as dumb as I look and sometimes act, Jack. I already figured that out.”
“Good man!”
“As soon as we hang up here, I’ll get through to Charley, and tell him both what’s going on and to get the hell off Grandma’s place as soon as he can.”
“Splendid!”
[FIVE]
Apartment 606
The Watergate Apartments
2639 I Street, N.W.
Washington, D.C.
0755 10 February 2007
When Roscoe J. Danton finally found the ringing house telephone in the living room and picked it up, he was not in a very gracious mood.
Mr. Danton had returned to Washington four hours before after a fifteen-hour flight from Ushuaia, Patagonia, Argentina, whence he had traveled—on what, he had concluded, was a wild-goose chase that belonged in The Guinness Book of World Records—with Ambassador Charles M. Montvale and Montvale’s executive assistant—The Honorable Truman Ellsworth—and four CIA spooks to locate Alexander Darby, who allegedly could point him to Lieutenant Colonel C. G. Castillo.
The Gulfstream III twin-engine jet aircraft had been noisy and crowded. What food there had been was damned near inedible. The toilet had stopped up. And because there had been no functioning socket into which to plug his laptop, once its battery had gone dead, he couldn’t do any work.
Mentally, he had composed a blistering piece that would subject Montvale and Ellsworth to the scorn of the world. But even as he’d done that, he knew he would never write it. He not only felt sorry for them, but had come to like them.
He also had spent a good deal of time trying to come up with a version of what had happened to tell Christopher J. Waldron, the managing editor of the Times-Post, something that would not result in Waldron concluding that Roscoe J. Danton had either been drunk or was a moron or both.
He had gotten to bed a few minutes before four.
And now the fucking house phone goes off!
In the five years I’ve lived in the Watergate, I haven’t talked on the goddamn thing five times!
“What?” he snarled into the instrument.
“Mr. Danton, this is Gerry in the garage.”
“And how may I be of assistance, Gerry?”
“There’s something wrong with your car, Mr. Danton. The alarm keeps going off.”
“That happens, Gerry”—As you should know, you fucking cretin. You work in the garage—“when someone bumps into it. It’ll stop blowing the horn and flashing the headlights in three minutes.”