Roscoe J. Danton was a member of the Washington Times-Post Writers Syndicate.
“Why?”
“Gut feeling we should. He’s almost one of us. We owe him. And we may need him.”
“Does Danton have a Brick?”
“No Brick,” McNab replied. “A CaseyBerry. Aloysius likes him. Number fourteen.”
“I’ll call him and tell him to call Porky. But all he’ll have, Bruce, is ten or fifteen minutes.”
John David “Porky” Parker was President Joshua Ezekiel Clendennen’s spokesman.
“That’s a long time, sometimes.”
“Bruce, I’m really sorry about this.”
“I know,” McNab said.
The LEDs went out.
McNab put down the CaseyBerry, picked up the black telephone, and pushed one of the buttons on its base.
“Terry,” he announced a moment later, “I need you.”
“On my way, sir,” Major General Terry O’Toole, deputy commander of SPECOPSCOM, replied.
He was in McNab’s office forty-five seconds later. He was trim and ruddy-faced.
McNab pointed to the printout. O’Toole picked it up and read it.
“Shit,” he said. “And I gave Jim Ferris to you.”
“What you did, General,” McNab said, “was comply with my request for the name of your best field-grade trainer. What I did was send him to DEA so they could send him to Mexico. And I sent Danny Salazar with him to cover his back.”
O’Toole looked at him.
McNab went on: “And what you’re going to say now is, ‘Yes, sir, General, that’s the way it went down.’ ”
O’Toole met McNab’s eyes, nodded, and repeated, “Yes, sir, General, that’s the way it went down.”
McNab nodded.
O’Toole said: “What happens now?”
“Do you know Colonel Ferris’s religious persuasion?”
“Episcopalian.”
“Al,” General McNab ordered, “get on the horn to the Eighteenth Airborne Corps chaplain. Tell him I want the senior Episcopalian chaplain and the senior Roman Catholic chaplain here in fifteen minutes.”
“Yes, sir,” Captain Walsh said, and went to a telephone on a side table.
“And call my wife,” McNab said. “Same message; here in fifteen.”
“Yes, sir.”
“What about your wife, Terry? Does she know Mrs. Ferris?”