Chapter 502

I was going to have one busy week when I returned to Washington; Tuesday was the first of the many Senate hearings that I needed to testify to. The email had an attachment with prospective questions. That was something I had never been sent before testifying.

That was only one of the three Congressional hearings for the week where I needed to appear and testify. There were three more the following week.

Balthazar Khamini was still among the missing but the noose was closing. There had been several more sightings in the area. He had been back to the Gas and Go twice more, like it was a normal stop in his travels. He had paid cash each time. The email stated that the FBI had installed all new high quality cameras and they were being closely watched.

Vicky scheduled the new staff for the South Korean embassy. Ching Lee, Jason and Jake were going to make trip with her. The first swap was going to keep the staffing at current levels, while additional housing was acquired for the planned expansion of the security group there.

The employees there were not going to be told they were coming back to the main office for a month until after Vicky was there. According to their personnel records there were no wives, concubines or other women in Korea with them as spouses.

They were going to be interviewed in depth, go through the weapons training and given updates on all the new procedures. Then they would get a couple weeks off before shipping back with the additional men, if the housing problem had been corrected

Jake and Jason were going to help deal with location and the fiasco that was called the Korean real estate system. On the return trip they were going to stop over in Tokyo; Ching Lee and Vicky wanted to do some sightseeing and Jake needed to meet with officials there to finalize the final payments on the nuclear power plant meltdown cleanup.

Another email that was sent to both Vicky and me from Frank and Victor detailed the woes of Baines. Hammond Baines had been brought back to Washington in handcuffs. The things he had been printing off before his forays into the Seoul night life were highly classified.

Of course he was given a lawyer immediately. The agencies would be ten years and still not know everything he had given away to our potential enemies or who his contact people were. Over the last few months alone he had printed out thousands of pages. It was unknown how much more was loaded on thumb drives.

Every comment he made would be in exchange for a better sentencing deal. Then there would be the point at which he started lying to gain a better deal. One thing was for sure, he would not be making any trips to Camp Smith.

Clayton Albright had lost all of his clearances, and upon his release from the hospital was going to answer a lot of questions. Someone with real rank was going to decide if he was going to be able to quietly retire with benefits or go to jail with none of the above.

Another meeting that was flagged as important and mandatory was with the NIA (National Intelligence Agency) at the White House on Monday morning. The big dogs were wanting to know what I knew about Korea; the how and when.

They were already headhunting to find a scapegoat to cover high level asses for the Hammond Baines affair. It sounded almost like a possible movie title to me.

By the time I had finished looking at just the important things, we were in the landing pattern at Morton Field. It was back to the heavy security again. There had been another threat called in while we were gone; it came in from another burn phone.

“If you think all that heavy security will save you from Allah’s fury you are mistaken. Your days of living are numbered, bend over and kiss your ass goodbye. It’s coming sooner than you think.”

The context was different and there was none of the factual information that was contained in the other group of messages. The tower pings indicated that the call came from one of the big liberal California universities with thousands of international students. It was generally considered to be a hoax copycat call.

I departed the G5 to step into the heavy vest, even though federal officials considered the call a hoax; Ed and Bill were taking no chances. In public I would be wearing the heavy vest if JBG was supplying the security.

The good thing was it was freaking cold on the tarmac at Morton after four days in the mid eighties in Florida and that wraparound vest was warm.