go to Glynco, Georgia— wherever the hell that is—and see how ex-Sergeant Betty Schneider is doing in Secret Service school.
“I understand, Mr. President,” the secretary of Homeland Security said into the red phone. “Consider Charley gone.” He laid the telephone back in the cradle and turned to Castillo.
Matthew Hall was a large man—his Secret Service code name was “Big Boy”—with a full head of hair. While he usually presented the image of a dignified senior government officer with the means to employ a good tailor, right now he looked a little rumpled.
His necktie was pulled down, and his collar button open. His suit needed pressing, and his beard was starting to show.
His appearance was temporary. As soon as the Citation had landed at Andrews Air Force Base, he had come to the Nebraska Complex to check on what was going on before going home. An hour from now, he would be freshly shaven, in a crisply starched white shirt and a freshly pressed suit.
“No go, Charley,” Hall said. “He doesn’t want it to get out that he’s taking a personal interest.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Sir, what about Tony Santini?” Joel Isaacson asked. “He could probably be helpful as hell to Charley. You want me to give him a heads-up?”
Hall had told the President that Isaacson—a tall, slim, forty-year-old very senior Secret Service agent who was head of Hall’s security detail and had once been number two on the presidential detail—had said he had a good friend in Buenos Aires, a Secret Service agent who could probably report on the kidnapping more quickly than Castillo possibly could. The President had been unimpressed.
“Santini?” Hall asked. “That’s your friend’s name?”
Isaacson nodded. “He and I—and Tom—go way, way back. Tony’s down there working funny money.”
Secret Service agent Tom McGuire, a large, red-haired Irishman, had also come from the presidential detail to protect Hall.
“You trust him to keep his mouth shut?”
Isaacson raised his hands in a gesture suggesting “dumb question.”
“Sorry, Joel,” Hall said. “Okay, give him a heads-up. And find out how Charley can quietly get in touch with him.”
“If I’m to do this quietly, sir,” Charley asked, “can I go as Gossinger?”
Hall considered that a moment, too, before replying.
“Your call, Charley.”
Secretary Hall had decided about six months earlier— political correctness be damned—that he needed a male assistant, preferably unmarried. He was constantly on the move all over the country and sometimes outside it. He almost always flew on a Cessna Citation X. The airplane belonged to the Secret Service, which had been transferred from the Treasury Department to Homeland Security after 9/11.
Hall almost always traveled with Joel Isaacson and Tom McGuire. They often left for where they were goingin the wee hours of the morning, and/or came back to Washington at the same ungodly hour.
Both Mrs. Kensington and Mrs. Forbison were married and not thrilled with the idea of flying on half an hour’s notice to, say, Spokane, Washington, at half past five in the morning with no hint of when they’d be coming back to feed their husbands or play with their grandchildren.
Moving down the staff structure, Hall had taken maybe a dozen female administrative types with him on thirty or more trips, women with job titles like “senior administrative assistant.” While all had been initially thrilled with the prospect of personally working for the secretary, none of them had kept at it for long.
Primarily, the ones who weren’t married had boyfriends, and they all had grown accustomed to the federal government’s eight-to-five, Monday-to-Friday workweek, and its generous day-off recognition of holidays. Hall worked a seven-day week, with an exception for, say, Christmas.
Moreover, having some female in the confines of the Citation X cabin posed problems. For one thing, Matt Hall believed with entertainer Ed McMahon that alcohol—especially good scotch—was God’s payment for hard work. With a female in the cabin, that meant he had to drink alone, and he didn’t like that.
Joel Isaacson and Tom McGuire couldn’t drink with him if a senior administrative assistant—or someone of that ilk—was on the plane. Both were fully prepared to lay down their lives for the secretary, both as a professional duty and because they had come to deeply admire Hall. But as a practical matter, once the local security detail had loaded them on the Citation and they’d gotten off the ground and were on their way home, having a belt—or two—with the secretary in no way reduced—in their judgment and the secretary’s—the protection they were sworn to provide.
But what they could not afford was Miss Whateverhername