“Sir, that’s just not going to happen. The Russians don’t have barrels of Congo-X.”
“Excuse me, General,” Frank Lammelle said. “The Russians do have one barrel of Congo-X. It’s dead, but I suppose you could still call it Congo-X. Or maybe I should have said, the Russians have one barrel of Dead Congo-X. I gave it to Mr. Murov, who is going to take it to Moscow later today to show it to Mr. Putin.”
“You’re telling me there is no longer a Congo-X threat?” Clendennen asked, incredulous.
“With the exception of a couple of quarts of live Congo-X in Colonel Hamilton’s laboratory at Fort Detrick,” General Naylor said, “there is no Congo-X anywhere in the world. Colonel Castillo seized all that the Russians had when he staged the raid on La Orchila Island in Venezuela. Colonel Hamilton will continue to experiment with it to see if he can find a better way to kill it.”
“Why wasn’t I told of this?” Clendennen demanded angrily.
“Because no one who knew you trusted you, Mr. President. You had proven you were susceptible to Russian blackmail,” Natalie Cohen said. “I saw it as my sworn duty under the Constitution to thwart your announced intentions and did so.”
“And now, Madam Secretary, you have resigned,” the President said. “What are your intentions now? Are you going to write a book? Go on Wolf News?”
“Frankly, sir, I haven’t made up my mind. But I must tell you, sir, that I do not share Ambassador Montvale’s qualms about embarrassing you personally, or the Office of the President.”
“Madam Secretary,” presidential spokesman Jack Parker said. “Have you—”
“Butt out, Porky,” the President snapped. “You’re supposed to be a goddamned fly on the wall, and that’s all.”
“No, sir. That’s not true. I took the same oath Secretary Cohen did. May I continue, sir? Or would you like my resignation right now?”
After a moment, the President said, “Go on, goddamn it.”
“Madam Secretary, have you considered the public relations aspects of what will happen when word gets out that you have resigned, that General Naylor has resigned, and as I strongly suspect he will, Ambassador Montvale has also resigned?”
“Yes, I have,” she said. “What are you suggesting, that I not resign? Sorry, Jack, I just don’t have the desire to deal anymore with the President.”
“Ambassador Montvale, are you going to resign?” Parker asked.
“Yes. And I’m aware of the collateral damage all of this might cause the country. But I can no longer in good faith serve a man who tried to do what the President would have done had not Colonel Castillo—and others—stood up to him.”
“I’m going to put my two cents in here,” the attorney general said. “I’m a lawyer. We’re trained to compromise. You want it all at once, or in pieces?”
“Go slowly, please,” Montvale said dryly. “I’m known as Ambassador Stupid, you know.”
“My take on this whole thing is that it’s an intelligence failure, Mr. Ambassador,” the attorney general said. “I think that Jack Powell—the CIA—never really met its responsibilities. If they hadn’t insisted that laboratory in the Congo was a fish farm, and if that woman—the Vienna station chief—hadn’t scared those two Russians off with her incompetence, we would have learned about it from them. Instead, we had this Keystone Kop business—and it would be funny, if the circumstances were not so terrifying—of everybody chasing Colonel Castillo—unsuccessfully chasing him—all over the world while he did the Venezuelan operation—in essence the CIA’s work—for them—”
He stopped in midsentence and caught his breath.
“And since I know you well enough, Mr. Ambassador, to refuse to believe that had you known about this—had Jack Powell promptly told you what you were entitled to know—you would have taken the appropriate action, and none of us would be sitting at this table this morning.”
“Now, wait a minute!” Powell protested.
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“So Powell has to go,” the attorney general went on, “to be replaced by Lammelle, who instead of assisting in the President’s plan to arrest Castillo and swap him to the Russians—and the illegality of that boggles the mind—worked with General Naylor and Castillo and solved the problem of Congo-X.”
“I can’t take credit for that—” Lammelle began.
“Shut up, Frank. I’m not finished. If I had to search the world for the two people who most detest Joshua Ezekiel Clendennen and at the same time have an unparalleled knowledge of what he should be doing, I’d come back with Natalie Cohen and Charles M. Montvale.
“So . . . Natalie withdraws her resignation, and the President announces he has chosen Charles M. Montvale as his Vice President.”
“That’s insane!” the President of the United States said.
“Mr. President, if it goes the other way, if Secretary Cohen and General Naylor resign,” Porky Parker said, “and I do and Mr. Lammelle does, and it comes out—and it will—that you were willing to cave in to the Russians, the Congress will be drawing up articles of impeachment within seventy-two hours.”
“And we all remember the last time that happened,” the attorney general said. “It was a disaster for the country.”