Free W. E. B. Griffin - Presidential Agent 07 by Covert Warriors

have to wait outside, fuming.
    Roscoe intuited that he was on the reserved-seating list because of Lammelle, not Porky Parker. While he had no problems with Porky, Porky could be expected to hand out reserved seats to the elite of the White House Press Corps, and Roscoe knew that he wasn’t a member of that elite. Close, but no golden ring.
    And he further intuited that it was due to his new status as a member—however uncomfortable—of the Merry Outlaws. At the beginning, Frank Lammelle had headed the CIA delegation of the alphabet agencies looking for Charley Castillo.
    Lammelle even had an air-powered dart gun—
    Straight out of a superhero comic book.
    Jesus, that would have made a great story if I could have written it!
    —with which he planned to tranquilize Castillo so that he would be amenable to being loaded aboard the Moscow-bound Aeroflot plane.
    After Vic D’Alessandro— surprise, surprise!— had shot Lammelle with Lammelle’s own Super Agent Whiz Bang air gun in Cancún—where his pursuit of Castillo had taken him—Lammelle had awakened in the middle of a desert in Mexico, at a secret airfield the Merry Outlaws had dubbed Drug Cartel International.
    There, when he saw what Castillo’s Merry Outlaws were doing, and compared it to what the President was trying to do to Castillo, Lammelle had changed sides. He hadn’t gone to the Venezuelan island but had made a large, maybe even essential, contribution to the operation.
    If I have a CaseyBerry, Roscoe thought, you can bet your ass Castillo gave Lammelle one. And I can hear Castillo calling Lammelle on it, and asking, “Frank, can you get Roscoe into that press conference?”
    And that would neatly tie in with Delchamps and Yung—having easily slipped through the Watergate’s state-of-the-art, absolutely, positively guaranteed 24/7 security system—appearing in my bedroom this morning.
    Why the hell is it important to Castillo that I hear whatever bullshit our beloved Commander in Chief is going to spew today?
    When Roscoe passed through two more security points and finally got into Auditorium Three, a uniformed CIA security officer took a close look at his new presidential press conference credentials and showed him to a seat where he was buried between fellow members of the White House Press Corps. He had half expected to be seated in one of the VIP seats in front. He saw that Andy McClarren of Wolf News and C. Harry Whelan, Jr., had been so honored.
    Roscoe glanced at the open laptop computer of his seat mate, Pierre Schiff, of L’Humanité , and helpfully suggested that for about ten bucks, Schiff could go to Radio Shack and buy a screen that would keep people from seeing what was on his laptop screen.
    Schiff gave him a smile that would have frozen hot chocolate.
    Roscoe looked around the auditorium and saw mostly what he expected to see:
     
     
    There was a narrow stage holding a podium bearing the presidential seal. Against the curtain at the rear of the stage was a sea of American flags, plus the CIA flag, those of the Vice President of the United States, the secretary of State, the director of National Intelligence, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and two red flags, one with four silver stars on it and one with three.
    To the left and right of the stage and in the rear of the auditorium, still and video cameramen—plus half a dozen guys, whatever they were called, manipulating microphone booms—were crowded together, preparing to send the images and sounds of the conference around the world.
    And there was something Roscoe was surprised to see: A detachment of the 3rd Infantry—“the Old Guard”—drum and bugle corps wearing Revolutionary War uniforms. The detachment was lined up, without much room to spare, to the left of the stage, between the stage and the cameramen.
    Roscoe had just enough time to wonder about them—they had never been involved in a presidential press conference that he could remember—when the