Sweepers

What a deal. She looked at her watch. It was just past eleven.

“Harry, get in here,” she called.

As she turned back toward the front door, she heard the sound of -a car going by out on Beach Mill Road. It seemed to slow as it went by her front gates, its headlights creating a strobe effect through the double row of tree trunks parading along the driveway. The dog stopped for a moment, as if to listen to the car, but then reluctantly came in. It’s not him, Harry, she thought. But thanks for looking.

FRIDAY Early Friday morning, Karen had decided on an abbreviated workout, and she was coming back toward the Pentagon athletic club’s building from a two-mile run when she saw a small knot of runners clustered around a grassy knoll, about two hundred yards from the athletic club’s entrance.

She finished her cooldown exercises and then jogged over to where the small crowd was gathered. She was surprised to see that they were watching Train von Rensel, who stood like a stubby oak tree, alone in a space about fifteen feet square. He was wearing a martial arts outfit consisting of a white short-sleeved cotton jacket, white cotton trousers, and canvas tennis shoes. He had-a narrow red-and-white cloth wrapped around his forehead and, with both eyes closed, was gripping a thick curved wooden stick shaped to look like a Japanese sword. The stick was about four feet long, three inches thick, and made of what looked like rosewood.

As she came up on the small group of watchers, Train was executing a carefully choreographed set of maneuvers with the wooden sword, moving almost in slow motion, while stamping out a metronomic rhythm with his feet, first one foot, then the other. He resembled one of those sumo fighters in the way he moved, a careful exertion of great physical mass, but without all the fat rolls. With every other stamp, he pronounced a low grunt in whit sounded to Karen like Japanese, while simultaneously executing the next move. Train’s concentration appeared to be complete, and he gave no sign that he had seen Karen or was even aware that people were watching. Finally, he gave a huge shout and whirled around in a complete circle while holding the stick straight, out at waist level with both hands. Even though it was just a stick, everyone watching instinctively moved back a few more feet as the huge man began to execute a swift series of what were obviously fighting moves, vertical and horizontal slashes, each followed by a defensive posture against an imaginary attacker, then another thrust, a jump, a slash, a crouch, a lunge, another defensive position, then a running attack, each move punctuated by an unintelligible cry. He continued this drill for about three minutes, at the end of which his close cropped head and face were pouring with sweat and his chest heaving under the straining jacket.

With a final shout, he jumped into a two-handed position, arms and knees bent, legs spread, the stick held vertically in front of him and his eyes focused directly on it. Then, eyes closing, he began some breathing exercises, after which he extended his arms straight out and lowered the point of the stick. With arms fully extended now, he began a turn, the point of the heavy, thick staff describing . a menacing eye-level cirrle through the crowd. Karen’s shoulders ached in sympathetic pain as he did it, because he was no longer gripping the stick with his fingers, but, rather, holding the butt end extended between his flat palms, which were pressed together, a position that obviously took great strength. At the end of the circle, and with his eyes still closed, he growled and then did something with his hands that made the stick jump, spinning first around one forearm and then the other, like a drum majorette’s baton.

Moving ever faster, Train flicked it around his shoulders, along his forearms, behind his head, the thick staff making a wicked hissing sound in the still air, his massive hands a blur as he spun it, stopped it, balanced it, and then chopped it into a different motion or direction with almost casual flat-handed strikes. This exercise went on for almost sixty seconds, to the utter fascination of the crowd, and then ended abruptly with the stick held once again motionless, vertically in front of him. He raised his right leg and stomped the ground like a pile driver and shouted out a single word. Then he bowed to his imaginary opponent, put the stick down on a rectangular piece of canvas on the ground, and, still ignoring the people watching, reached for his towel as if he had been doing nothing more unusual than a few casual jumping jacks on the lawn.

Karen sensed that the people around her didn’t know whether to applaud or simply to exhale. As people drifted away, Karen pushed her way forward.

“Morning, Counselor,” he said through his towel.

“Didn’t know you worked out so early.”

“Every day,” she said. “And what, pray tell, was all that?”

“Just a stick drill,” he replied. “I use it to unwind after working the weights.”

“That’s some stick. May I see it?”

“‘Help yourself,” he said, reaching down and picking it up. He offered it to her butt-first. She. was surprised to feel how heavy it was. “It’s heavier than it looks,” she said.

“Why the sword shape? I thought kendo used a plain staff?”

He grinned as he began to gather up his gear. “That’s not kendo. Kendo is stick drill. This is just my version of kenjutsu, which is sword drill. Nothing mystical-just exercise. And the stick is shaped like a sword because of this.”

He took the heavy stick back from her hands, held one end, twisted it slightly, and withdrew a glistening full-sized Japanese fighting sword.

She blinked in surprise. A Marine standing nearby exclaimed when he saw the sword.

“Would you hold this, please?” he said, handing it to her. She grasped the handle with both hands. The sword was beautifully balanced, and the steel surface of the blade appeared to be marbled in various colors.

Train fished an oily rag out of his gear bag, took the sword from her hands, and proceeded to wipe down the entire weapon.

“How’d you finish it up with Sherman?” he asked. “He reveal any more about this Galantz problem?”

“We went down to a local restaurant and had dinner. He told me some of his personal background. Look, I’m going to cramp up if we just stand here. And-“

“Right,” he said, understanding. There were too many people around, some still gawking at his unusual athletic getup. H gathered his gear and the sword, then indicated they should walk toward the small tidal channel on the other side of North Parking.

Karen told him about the syringe. That got his attention.

“In your car? In your locked car? And then the patrol car just shows up as you’re standing there?”

“I know,” she said. “It means we were being watched.”

“And tracked. From his house down to the restaurant.

Damn, Karen, this changes everything, I think.”

“You think?”

“Well, technically speaking, Sherman could still be making this all up.

I mean, the logical explanation of how that thing got in your car without a breakin was that somebody with recent access put it there-namely, him. Was there some interval of time during which he could have called in that patrol car? Some time between the end of dinner and going out to the car?”

“No,” she said. Then she hesitated. “Wait. Yes.

He said he was going to use the bathroom. I waited out by the front door. But-“

“But what, Karen? That’s as plausible an explanation as some mysterious stalker.”

She shook her head in exasperation. “Why are you so anxious to pin this stuff on him?” she demanded.

“Why are you so ready to believe everything he says?”

Train retorted. “Just because he’s an admiral?”

“No, damn it!” she said, glaring at him. But then she frowned. “Oh, I don’t know. I just wish you could have heard him tell the story of what happened to his marriage.

I just can’t find any motivation on his part to make all this up, or to do something to Elizabeth Walsh. I’m beginning to think he’s being set up somehow.”

Train didn’t answer, just turned around, steering them back toward the POAC building. He stopped when they were about to go through the door, stepping aside to let people go by.

“I’m going to pull the string on this Galantz guy with some contacts at the FBI. And elsewhere,” he said. “I have a bad feeling about a guy who’s supposedly an MIA but who isn’t missing. That syringe was a nasty touch. I’ll see you up in the office.”

He left before she had time to answer. He seemed either angry or concerned, and she couldn’t tell which.

Train fumed at himself as he tied his tie for the second time in front of the foggy mirror of the locker room. He should not have said that out there, that bit where he asked her why she was so anxious to defend this guy. Besides, he knew the answer. She was Navy, he was an admiral, and a Studly Dudley one at that. Plus, she was not a trained investigator.

He was willing to bet that she was simply failing under this charmer’s spell. As o posed to your charming personality? -P It has nothing to do with that. Not at all. Hahi It didn’t help that she looked positively ravishing in that damp tank top.

But after this syringe business, the SEAL story had some more legs, and he had not been kidding about a bad feeling.

He gathered up his gear bag and the sword case, closed the temporary locker, and headed downstairs. Suppose what Sherman was saying was the truth, that some badass had come back from the grave to get revenge. Was the syringe a warning? Or the next step? Have to talk to Mchale Johnson at the FBI, he reminded himself as he crossed the wide pedestrian overpass between North Parking and the Pentagon building.

As soon as Karen got back to her desk, she called the front office to get an appointment with Admiral Carpenter.

Twenty minutes, later, Captain Mccarty called back and asked why she s, she asked only that the front office confirm that she could call on Mr. von Rensel and the NIS regarding the Sherman case. Mccarty was obviously perplexed, and he asked why she was asking. As he remembered it, the JAG had already assigned the new guy from NIS to the Sherman case. Mentally holding her breath, she explained only that the police might need help in tracking down an exenlisted man in connection with the Sherman matter. She was careful not to allude to Navy Special Forces or to Vietnam. She left it at that, hoping that the EA would be sufficiently distracted by the press of business not to probe further. She knew she was taking something of a chance, but if and when the business with Galantz got out, she wanted to be able to say that she had asked about involving the NIS, especially if her bosses raised hell about not being informed right away. Mccarty said impatiently that he would look into it and get back to her. She hung up, hoping that it would stop with the EA.

She might sneak one past Mccarty, but Carpenter missed nothing.

She finished off her morning coffee, still feeling a bit nervous about the bureaucratic games she was playing with this case. She also wanted to talk to Train von Rensel some more, but she was a little bit miffed with him over his persisting suspicions about Sherman. And what had he meant by that crack about her readiness to defend Sherman? But five minutes later, Train came through the door, smiled and waved at her, and went to his own cubicle, carrying his gear bag and that big stick under his arm like a toy gun. His suit was obviously’t “or-made, but there was no disguising the fact that he was about the biggest man she had been around in a long time. Despite herself, she smiled back. Then her phone rang.

“Navy JAG, Commander Lawrence speaking, sir.”

“Commander. This is Detective Mcnair with the Fairfax Police Department.”

“Good morning, Detective.” This was fortuitous. She had been about to call him to see if he had been given the syringe. She looked to see if she could get Train on an extension, but he was already on another line.

“Not very, actually,” Mcnair was saying, which got her immediate attention. She could hear the sound of other voices in the background.

“I’m at the home of a retired Navy admiral in Mclean. Guy named Galen Schmidt. Name ring a bell?”

It certainly did. The old gentleman at the memorial service. Sherman’s sea daddy. “Yes, it does. What’s happened?”

“Sony to inform you, but he’s no longer with us. Looks like a heart attack. Housekeeper found him this morning.

She says he had a bad heart condition. His doctor’s here, along with a rep from the county medical examiner’s office.

Like I said, apparent heart attack, although they’re not done yet. “

“Oh dear. I’m sorry to hear that. But-“

“Why am I calling you? Well, see, we found a pad of paper on his desk with Admiral Sherman’s name on it. And Elizabeth Walsh’s. Something about a memorial service.

The word SEAL, with a circle around it. And a question: TELL THE CNO?

Looks like notes, maybe taken during a conversation, or afterward. Any thoughts?”

Karen thought for a moment. “I believe Admiral Schmidt was Sherman’s professional mentor before Sherman made flag. And he was at the memorial service for Elizabeth Walsh Wednesday night. From what I saw, they were very close. Damn, does Admiral Sherman know about this?”

“I hope not,”

Mcnair said pointedly.

Karen was taken aback by the detective’s inference. “I see,” she said, groping for words. “Okay, I guess I can be the bearer of bad tidings.”

She hesitated. “Detective, tell me something. Are there any indications, uh…”

Mcnair picked right up on it. “That this is anything other than a heart attack? No. We’re not doing a crime scene or anything, unless one of the docs comes up with something hinky. Any particular reason for asking?”

“I don’t know. It’s just this syringe business last night.”

There was a moment of silence on the phone. “And what syringe business is that, Commander?”

He didn’t know? “The police were supposed to forward some kind of incident report to you. You haven’t gotten it?”

“I’m drawing a blank, Commander. I am the police, remember? What’re you talking about?” Karen told him about the events of the previous night, following their meeting at Sherman’s house. Mcnair was silent for a moment.

“Okay, Commander,” he said at last. “That’s all very interesting. I’ll make sure I retrieve that incident report. Will you see if you can find out when Admiral Sherman was here last? At Schmidt’s house? The housekeeper confirms that they were close friends. But we’d like a precise time.”

“Yes, I will. I’ll go see him right now. Has the Navy been informed officially?”

“Not by us. Like I said, right now it’s a heart attack.

Housekeeper says there’s no immediate family.” He paused for a moment, and she heard pages in his notebook ruffling.

“Let’s see, wife died of cancer ten years ago. They had one son, who was lost in a submarine accident in the early sixties. It looks like there’s no family, so maybe Admiral Sherman is the next-closest person. I’m assuming Schmidt had a lawyer, so we’ll track him down and find out.”

“Well, you should probably notify the Bureau of Naval Personnel. Hang on a moment.” She grabbed a DOD phone book and looked up the number of the Casualty Assistance Calls Office and gave it to him. “He was prominent enough that the CNO and other people at that level are going to want to know. Especially if-“

“If what, Commander?”

She realized she had made a mistake.

“Nothing. They should just be informed. I can do it if-, I %

Mcnair interrupted her. “Especially if what, Commander?”

She hesitated. “I’m not sure. It’s just that this is the second person tied in some way to Admiral Sherman to die in a week’s time. I’m worried about what’s going on. Things happening out there in the fog.”

“So are we, Commander,” Mcnair said gently. “But this one does look pretty much like an old geezer with a heart condition fulfilling his destiny to flop and twitch in the night. We’ll hang around until his physician pronounces, and then we’ll be back in the office. Maybe that syringe report’ll be there by then.”

“Okay, I’ll go inform Admiral Sherman. Thanks for the heads-up, Detective. “

She hung up and sat back in her chair. “Flop and twitch.”

These cops! She kicked herself mentally for bringing up Sherman’s name in connection with her suggestion to inform the Navy. Right now, the admiral was supposedly operating in full-cooperation mode with the police. On the other hand, given Train von Rensel’s -lingering suspicions, she was beginning to wonder about what the hell she was dealing with here. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to be keeping things from Captain Mccarty and Admiral Carpenter. Then she remembered that she had promised to go tell Sherman about the admiral’s heart attack. She looked at her watch. It was going on 9:30. She put a call into OP-32’s front office and waved to Train, who was off the phone, to come over to her cubicle. He got his coffee mug and ambled over. He smiled at her.

Almost without thinking, she smiled back.

“Admiral’s at the athletic club, Commander,” the yeoman said when she got through. Karen thanked him, hung up, and told Train about Admiral Schmidt. Train’s good humor evaporated. “And he said heart attack? No more of those forensic ambiguities?”

“That “s what he said. Admiral Schmidt’s own doctor is there. I saw the admiral at the service Wednesday night.

Classic heart-condition appearance.”

Train nodded thoughtfully. “Want some company on your mission of bad news?”

“Let me call CHINFO first,” she said. “They’ll alert the the flags here in the building.”

Fifteen minutes later, they found the admiral coming out of the weight room, which, at midmorning, was not crowded. He must have been really pushing it, she thought.

His face was taut and shiny with perspiration, and there were red splotches on his cheeks and throat. His gym clothes were also soaked, and he was rubbing his upper chest and face with a towel when he caught sight of them.

“Gonna be a sweaty workout in those street clothes,” he said with a weary grin. Karen and Train were conspicuous in their office attire.

“Good morning, Admiral,” she said. “We need to talk for a minute.”

“Fire away,” he said, wiping himself down again. He took a deep breath and whooshed it out while bending over.

He had the physique of a man in his mid-thirties and was in prime condition. If Train looked like an oak tree in his Japanese jacket, the admiral looked more like a professional tri athlete.

“Okay,” he said, straightening up. “Got both lungs back in synch. But now I need to walk that session off. Mr. von Rensel, good morning.”

“Yes, sir,” Train said as they fell in with the admiral, who headed down the main hallway of the club. Train was glancing at Karen, as if to say, When are we going to tell him? They reached the back exit door and stepped outside into the.warm-up area. Karen stepped to one side so as not to obstruct the people coming and going from the building.

Sherman, still needing to walk, frowned, but then he looked at her face.

“So what’s the matter?” he asked.

“I got a call from the police this morning,” she began.

“Ah. That syringe business?”

“No, sir. It was Detective Mcnair, and he was at Vice Admiral Schmidt’s home in Ntclean.”

“Galen?” he said, staring hard at her. “Galen Schmidt?

What’s happened?”

She took a deep breath. “I’m afraid he’s had a heart at tack. He … he didn’t survive it. His housekeeper found him this morning and called nine-one-one.”

“No!” he exclaimed. “Damn and blast. He was just-I mean, Wednesday night. At the memorial service. He was fine. He’s-are you sure he’s gone? Mrs. Murray couldn’t revive him? She was trained for that. The housekeeper, I mean.” He looked from her face to Train’s, as if hoping one of them would say this wasn’t true.

She shook her head. “I’m afraid not. I’m guessing it happened after she went home. The reason Detective Mcnair called me was because he found a notepad or piece of paper that had your name on it. And Elizabeth Walsh’s. And something about a SEAL.”

“Right. Sure,” Sherman said.

“That’s what I went over to talk to him about. Tuesday night. God, this is like losing my father again. Just a great guy, Karen. Damned heart just gave out. He’d been a heavy smoker.

Goddamn it! I better get out there. Mrs. Murray will be a wreck.” He had begun walking around in a little circle, his body demanding a cooldown but his mind obviously hurtling elsewhere. For a moment, she thought she saw the makings of tears in his eye.

“I’m very sorry, Admiral,” she said softly. Train was staring down at the concrete.

“Yeah. Damn. Not a good week here. First Elizabeth, now Galen Schmidt.

Not a good week at all. And damn that cop. Making you come tell me.”

“I volunteered,” Karen said, looking at Train. See, she wanted to say, is this the reaction of a murderer?

Sherman was staring down at the ground when he thought of something. “So why were the homicide cops there?”

“Apparently for the same reason they showed up at Elizabeth’s: unexplained death. Standard procedure. But they weren’t doing a crime scene or anything like that.”

The admiral shook his head wearily. “Goddamn it! I’d better get over there. I’m going to clear my afternoon calendar.” Then he stopped and shook his head. “No. I can’t.

I’ve got that White House POW/MIA delegation meeting.

Well, I’ll just have to be late.” He looked at them. “Sorry, I’m all over the place. Thanks for bringing me the word.”

He turned around to go back into the club, and they followed. “Mcnair hadn’t heard anything about the syringe business last night,” she said to his back. “I told him about it, and he said he’d chase down the report.”

He nodded over his shoulder. “Okay. I’ve got a couple of hours before my meeting. I’m going to go out to Galen’s house. There’s no surviving family, and I probably ought to take charge, at least for the moment. I know he’s got a cemetery plot down at the Naval Academy. I guess I’d better call his lawyer, Terry Harris, too.”

He gave them a dismissive wave and went back inside the club. Train indicated they should wait outside for a moment to give him time to get ahead of them. They stepped back outside, making way for the procession of runners entering and leaving the building. There were several thousand military personnel working in the Pentagon, all of whom were required to work out. This made the POAC a crowded place.

“Pretty good shape for a flag officer,” Train said. “He looks more like a Marine brigadier than a Navy guy.”

“He looks like he just got hit by a Mack truck,” she replied. Train said nothing.

“You still think he’s hiding something?” she asked, giving Train a challenging look. “I mean, I don’t think that was acting. Besides, first his exgirlfriend, and now his closest personal friend? Both dead in a week’s time? What’re the chances of that being coincidence?”

“Slim to none,” Train agreed. “But we’d better wait for the cops to finish with their investigation out there. What was that about a POW/MIA meeting at the White House?”

“I don’t know. Why?”

“Galantz is supposedly an MIA. Maybe Sherman can get the POW/MIA Task Force records, if he’s in that loop.”

She nodded. “I’ll ask. But not right now, I think.”

“You’re probably right. That cop comment on all this coincidence?”

She turned to walk back into the POAC building. ““That cop’ does not reveal what he’s thinking all that well,” she said. “But I got the impression that he was at least intrigued by the association.”

Train snorted. ““Intrigued by the association’? You’ve been in the JAG Corps too long, Counselor.”

She ignored that remark. They walked up the front stairs and out onto the pedestrian overpass. “I’m going to harass the Bureau of Personnel some more,” she said. “We need to get those Galantz files.”

“How much of this have you passed on to Admiral Carpenter?” he asked.

Karen hesitated. She was not yet sure enough of Train von Rensel’s relationship with the JAG to reveal why she had held back the Vietnam story from the front office. Once more, she wondered if all this evasion was prudent.

“None of it, actually. I’ve asked Captain Mccarty, his EA, to confirm that I can count on your help marshaling NIS assets-to find an exenlisted guy who might have something to do with Sherman.”

“But you held back on the Vietnam river story? And the syringe?”

“Yes.” She looked straight ahead as they entered the cavelike North Parking entrance and went through security.

He stopped just inside the main doors, forcing her to look at him. “I assume you have your reasons, okay? But, that said, I recommend you get to Carpenter and tell him everything. And I’ll want a copy of that Galantz file. I’ll run some traps within NIS. And one more thing.”

“What?”

“You need to start being careful. Very careful.”

“Why? What do you mean?”

“Two people are dead, Karen. One sounds a lot like homicide; the other’s an open question-for now anyway. But both of these people were close to Sherman.”

And?” But then she knew.

And, you’re getting close to Sherman. Now’s maybe not such a good time to be close to Sherman, okay?”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. Oh. Let’s get back to the orifice.”

Karen finally got the call to go see Admiral Carpenter at 3:30. After Train’s warning, she had called the front office again for an appointment. The chief had put her on call for the afternoon.

Apparently, the JAG was handling a flap about a breaking drug scandal down at the Naval Academy.

Wonderful, she thought. The CNO will have been foaming at the mouth, which would put the JAG in a really swell mood.

In the intervening hours, she had mulled over the issue of how much of what she had learned in the meeting with the cops and at dinner she should tell Admiral Carpenter.

But she had promised Sherman not to reveal what he had told her over dinner, and she still could not see any relevance between his failed marriage and his current situation.

Admiral Sherman, at least in her mind, deserved some consideration, assuming that he was the target of a stalker. But what if Train was right and Sherman was involved somehow in the death of Elizabeth Walsh?

What had Train said?

“Sherman could still be making all this up”-that was it.

Well, I know how that three-star was acting. She thought the word shabby just about described it. She and Train had reviewed the case file again after lunch, but there were too many loose ends for any effective brainstorming. Just about when she had decided to ask if he wanted to go with her to see Carpenter, Train had signed out for the Navy Yard and left the office.

She entered the JAG’s office three minutes after getting the call. The admiral was sitting in his desk chair, his back to the door. He, too, was talking on the telephone. Karen wondered irreverently if he was talking to the yeoman on the other side of the door. She made a noise to alert him that he was not alone, and he acknowledged her presence with a wave over his shoulder. A minute later, he hung up and turned around.

“Okay, commander. I can give you ten minutes. Bring me up-to-date on the matter of William Taggart Sherman.”

Karen took a look at the expression on his face and decided to tell him everything. It took twenty minutes, not ten.

She detailed the events of the past week, since the first meeting on Tuesday. She told him about the meeting with the police at Sherman’s house, the session with Admiral Kensington, the mysterious threatening letter from the SEAL, the syringe incident, and now the news of Galen Schmidt’s heart attack. The only part that she deliberately left out was the story behind Galantz and the dinner conversation about Sherman’s marriage. She was halfway hoping that Carpenter would be satisfied to absorb the big picture and not worry about details. But of course the Vietnam story was his first question.

“Why would this individual be after Admiral Sherman?

What is this stuff about an incident back in Vietnam?”

Karen hesitated. “Admiral, he asked me not to reveal that part of it. At least not within the”Navy hierarchy,’ as he calls it. I think he’s afraid that the story might create a scandal if it got out now.”

Carpenter frowned. “He did, did he? The”Navy hierarchy’? And yet you just told me he shared this story with the civilian police?”

Karen colored but did not reply. He looked at her and nodded. “Right. I forgot. He’s a pretty boy. Okay, let’s stop with the games. Sherman is a flag officer, but you work for me, not him. Besides, a basic rule of life applies here: When you’re in trouble, you don’t hold things back from your lawyer. Ever.”

“But are you his lawyer, Admiral?” she asked. And then she caught her breath when she realized how impertinent that question might sound.

Carpenter surprised her with a quick grin. “Good point, Commander. But in a sense, I am. I’m the JAG. I’m the whole uniformed Navy’s lawyer.

Not to be confused with the Secretary of the Navy’s general counsel, who is the Navy Department’s lawyer. But practically speaking, I’m ‘of counsel’ to that flag-officer hierarchy that Sherman’s still so afraid of. Hell, he’s still acting like a captain. If he wasn’t such a brand-new flag officer, he’d have known to come see me a long time ago.

Now, give.”

She recounted the facts of the Vietnam story, and of the night visitation in San Diego. She was surprised when he interrupted her. -

“What was the name again? Galantz?”

“Yes, sir. HMI Marcus Galantz.”

Carpenter was writing down the name. “And he was a SEAL?”

“Yes, sir. That’s one of the reasons I am definitely going to need Mr. von Rensel’s help. I’m waiting for Galantz’s record to come back from the archives. Oh, and Admiral Sherman feels that, given the circumstances, Galantz was probably listed as MIA.”

“He does, does he? Why isn’t von Rensel in here with you right now? Does he know all this?”

“Yes, sir.”

“So, where is he?”

“He’s over at NIS right now, sir. He and I-” She ran out of words.

“You and he what? Disagreed? Let me guess, you think Sherman is being screwed over, and von Rensel thinks he’s guilty of something. Am I right?”

She swallowed and nodded.

“Tell-me something,” he said. “What was his recommendation regarding this bullshit about keeping back information from the Navy hierarchy?”

“He told me that I should tell you everything.”

Carpenter nodded with satisfaction at her answer, but he did not comment out loud. Instead, he went back to Sherman’s situation. “And the good admiral has no proof of the letter, or of that long-ago nocturnal visit from this supposedly MIA SEAL, right?”

“Yes, sir. That’s true.”

The admiral turned in his chair, his face scrunched up again in a frown as he stared out the windows at nothing.

“For what it’s worth, Admiral,” Karen said. “I don’t think Admiral Sherman is making this up. Or that he’s involved in the death of Elizabeth Walsh. Nor do the police, as best I can tell.”

Carpenter wheeled the chair around slowly to face her.

“And this feeling is based on what facts, precisely?”

Karen paused before replying. “Admittedly, just a gut feeling, I guess.

He didn’t have to tell us about the discrepancies he noticed at Elizabeth Walsh’s house. Or, for that matter, the mysterious letter, or the incident back in 1972.”

“Unless he’s a really clever devil. He is a flag officer, after all.”

Karen managed to keep control of her face, but Carpenter caught the effort. “You can think it, Commander,” he said with a frosty grin. “But you’d better not say it.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” was all she could manage, glad to have the tension broken.

“Okay. What I was getting at, of course, is that by offering up some morsels, he could be running a game on the cops-a dangerous game to be sure, but a game nonetheless.”

“But what about the syringe business?”

“It was in your locked car, after you and he had taken a ride to the restaurant. Do you know that he didn’t just plant it, make a quick call to the cops from the restaurant, and then go through some charade with the patrol cops, all in order to make it look like someone was watching the two of you?”

This is just what Train was saying, she thought. “That’s all possible, I suppose,” she said. “I’ve made a note to see if the cops can tell where that call came from. I’m pretty sure they caller-ID all nine-one-one calls as a matter of policy.

“Okay, you do that. Now, tell me precisely what Mr. von Rensel is doing with all this. And why you think you need NIS’s help.”

“Because Galantz is-was-a SEAL. SEALS work in the unconventional warfare area-which has ties to the world of intelligence. Mr. von Rensel used to work for the Office of Naval Intelligence. And with the FBI on foreign counterintelligence cases. I believe NIS is better equipped to translate Galantz’s service record information into a productive search than the cops are. Besides, I think-“

“Yes?” He was giving her that stare again.

“Well, actually, Admiral Sherman thinks that it might be in the Navy’s best interest to have the first look for Galantz.

A Navy SEAL who’s gone off the reservation could be pretty embarrassing—especially if it looks like something’s been covered up.”

Carpenter nodded thoughtfully. “Well, now, in this day and age of Navy scandal du jour, that’s a valid point. The Navy is under siege, Karen.

Admirals who draw lightning go home. I want a copy of that personnel file as soon as it comes in.”

“Yes, sir.” She made a note.

“Now, do you know very much about Mr. von Rensel?”

“Just what’s on his bio. When we talk about this case, he gives me the impression he’s not convinced that Admiral Sherman is… is, um, entirely innocent.”

Carpenter nodded again. “He thinks like a cop. Okay.

Tell him I said that he and NIS are hereby formally tasked.

I’ll make sure their head shed gets the word. And, Karen, listen to him from time to time. His reputation is formidable among the senior NIS people. Now, new subject. You mentioned something about OP-03 himself taking an interest in this little problem.”

“Yes, sir.” She went on to describe in detail the meeting in Admiral Kensington’s office. “I think that’s part of what Admiral Sherman is nervous about.”

“I’ll just bet he is. Vice Admiral Kensington isn’t bashful about making his feelings known. Okay. Let me offer you some more advice. I know you have your papers in and all that, but please take care when you get around the so-called flag-protection circuits, especially in the surface Navy world. If you have any more contacts with Kensington or his executive staff, make damn sure they know you’re working for me and not for Sherman. Admiral Vannoyt didn’t seem to know that.”

“That sounds ominous for Admiral Sherman.”

Carpenter gave her that flat stare again, reminding Karen that flag officers did not take kindly to commanders who presumed to know anything about that world. “Let’s just say, Karen, that this whole situation has taken Admiral Sherman, who is, need I remind you, a frocked captain, a long way out of the politically conventional channel. You don’t even want to be in the same ocean with him if a thunder lizard like Kensington trains the business end of those three stars around on him.

Got it?”

Karen recognized the dismissal. “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir,” she said, getting up, but Carpenter was already back on the phone, making his next call.

Fifteen minutes later, Captain Mccarty let himself into the JAG’s inner office.

“You buzzed, Admiral?”

“Yup. Sit down. Let me tell you a story.”

When Carpenter was finished, Mccarty sat back in his chair, closed his notebook, and rubbed his fingertips together slowly. “I’m damned sorry to hear about Galen Schmidt,” he said finally. “There were a lot of people who had high hopes he would be CNO.”

“I was one of them. But getting back to this mysterious SEAL story-what’s this sound like to you?”

Mccarty thought for a moment. “It sounds like the lumpy-suit crowd up the river.”

“Bingo. Which is why I want you to pull the string with those people whenever Karen Lawrence gets this HMI Galantz’s personnel files in from the archives. I told her to get us a copy of his file. Oh, and give me the cheat sheet on our archive database; I’m going to check something out.”

“We can have somebody do that for you, Admiral.”

“I know, but I can work a computer, and I’m not exactly sure what I’m looking for. Back to Langley-I want you to go over there, back-channel, and ask if they’ve ever heard of this Galantz guy. Maybe get somebody in their general counsel’s office to broker a meeting.”

Mccarty made some notes. “You think they would tell me?”

“Don’t know. Sometimes, with those gomers, it’s what they won’t discuss that tells you what you want to know.

Go see them. See how they react, what their attitude isstonewall, indifference, or even, heaven forbid, some cooperation.”

“That would be a first. And I presume we don’t want to sidebar first with our own DNI?”

“Precisely. The Navy Intelligence wizards would feel obligated to act like they knew the answer; then they’d just go ask Langley themselves.

And Langley, as a matter of professional courtesy, tends to give the military intelligence people diddly-squat. Especially now that they’re being coerced into cooperating with the great unwashed hordes over in the FBI. No. Go direct.”

“Got it. Would it not be wise for you to direct Mr. von Rensel personally on’this matter?”

Carpenter shrugged. “Not initially. Let’s see what he’s made of. See if he has it figured out. If he’s as good as they claim, he ought to know which wires not to grab, unlike Karen Lawrence, who, I’m afraid, has fallen somewhat under the dashing young admiral’s spell.”

Mccarty nodded thoughtfully but did not reply.

“What?” Carpenter said, recognizing the signs that Mccarty was not entirely in agreement.

I’m not sure,” Mccarty said., “I just have this feeling that’t’this one might get away from us. That maybe we ought to pull Karen out and let von Rensel run with it. I mean, we’ve either got an admiral or an ex-SEAL committing murder. Karen’s an admin specialist. She’s never worked anything like that.”

“I think she’s finding this pretty interesting. Remember the objective.”

Captain Mccarty closed his notebook. “Yes, sir, I understand,” he replied. “But I can’t tell if you want Karen Lawrence to succeed and thereby be enticed to stay, or if you’re just testing her.”

“Bit of both, I suppose, EA. We’ll have to promote her to captain if she stays, so I guess I need to know if she can work off-line in a real investigation instead of just second guessing other people’s work.”

“But if this Galantz problem turns out to be spooked up, then will you pull her off this thing?”

Carpenter studied the blotter on his desk for a moment, somewhat annoyed at his EA’s persistence. “Don’t know.

My job is to keep the Navy’s skirts clean, not hers. One step at a time, EA. Get thee to Langley.

Mccarty nodded and stood up. “On my way. But my take is that she’s going to bail, no matter what.”

After Mccarty left the room, Carpenter picked up the phone, but then he put it back down again. HMI Marcus Galantz. He was pretty sure he recognized that name. But what the hell was going on here? An MIA. He made a note to look at that record when it came in. Marcus Galantz. He sighed. This better not be what he thought it was. On the other hand, there was still plenty of time to control this situation. And Mccarty was worrying about nothing. He couldn’t imagine that Karen Lawrence was in any danger.

The Galantz files had arrived while Karen was in with Carpenter. She riffled quickly through the package. There were three folders, one containing his enlisted service record, the second his medical record, and the third, a single card of microfiche, which should contain his leave and pay records.

She stopped to examine his Page Thirteen, the chronological listing of assignments and administrative actions. The final entry caught her attention. Galantz had been officially declared missing in action on I June 1970 by direction of the Chief ‘of Naval Personnel.

An official MIA, she thought. Wait a minute. There should have been an investigation conducted by his parent command, Naval Forces Vietnam, following his disappearance in the Rung Sat zone. It would have been a JAG in vestigation, which meant it should have been forwarded to Navy JAG for final review. To the very office you’re working in, she reminded herself. So their own archives ought to have a copy. She kicked herself mentally for not thinking of this before.

She put a call into OP-32. First, she verified that the admiral had returned to the Pentagon from Admiral Schmidt’s house. Then she left a message with the duty yeoman that she would be in her office until eighteen hundred and that she had the Galantz file, and that it had a picture. Then she made copies of the file for the front office and called one of their yeomen to come down to pick up Admiral Carpenter’s copy. Then she waited. The IR office was empty. Train n Rensel had apparently not returned from the NIS heidvo quarters over in the Navy Yard. Everyone else appeared to have gone for the day.

Thirty minutes later, the OP-32 yeoman called back and asked her to come down to Admiral Sherman’s office. She locked up and hurried down there.

“Appreciate your hanging around, Karen,” Sherman said as his deputy went out and closed the door behind him.

“Actually, if that record isn’t classified, perhaps we could go somewhere else. Otherwise, my staff is going to have to hang around.

They can’t secure the divisional spaces if I’m still here.”

“Yes, sir, of course. The JAG spaces are already secured.

Let me think-“

“How about the Army-Navy Club? It’s fifteen minutes by Metro. We could have a drink and discuss what we’re going to do with this information. I need one after this afternoon.”

Thirty minutes later, they were ensconced at a comer table in the second-floor lounge of the Army-Navy Town Club. Karen showed him the three parts of the personnel record, then let him peruse it for a few minutes.

Sherman extracted the print of the official black-and white photograph from the record and put it down on the table in front of him. He spent some time studying it.”Me picture had been taken of then Hospital Corpsman Third Class Galantz in 1963, which meant he had been advanced quickly to HM I by the time of the incident. It was not a very clear picture, having been printed from a microfilm frame, but a steely determination was evident in the man’s face. He looked almost Eastern European, with closecropped unruly black hair and intensely dark, if not black, eyes.

“Did you see that last entry on the Page Thirteen?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said slowly. “Formally declared MIA.”

“Do you remember precisely when he came to see you that night in San Diego?”

“Yes, I do. It was February 1972.”

Karen nodded. “I’m embarrassed to say I thought of something earlier today,” she said. “His parent organization should have done a command JAG investigation when he first went missing. A copy of that investigation should ultimately have come up to Navy JAG for final review. I did a quick search of the Navy JAG archives index for investigation reports dating back as far as 1970, and, in fact, I have found something, or at least an index listing of something. I can’t get it until Monday, but there’s definitely something on file in our archives.”

“That’s terrific, Karen,” he said, his face lighting up. He looked as if he had seen a ray of hope. She realized that he had probably begun to doubt his own memory of those events long ago. Then she pressed ahead with the first of the two questions she really wanted to ask. “Do you believe now that Elizabeth Walsh’s death was a homicide?”

He sighed again and then nodded.

Karen was silent for a minute. Then she took a deep breath and asked the other question that had been on her mind since talking to Train.

“First Elizabeth,” she said slowly, her voice almost indistinct in the rising background noise of the lounge. “And now Galen Schmidt. Your lady friend, and then your mentor.” She looked over at him, waiting for him to understand.

He frowned and then put his drink down. She thought she saw his hand tremble.

“Galen? Are you suggesting-“

“Admiral, I don’t know what to think,” she said hurriedly. “Other than that’s a lot of coincidence. Two people dying, unattended, within a week, both connected to you in a significant and personal way.”

“Judas Priest!”

She leaned forward. “The police are saying that Admiral Schmidt’s death showed no evidence of being anything but a heart attack. And his own doctor participated in the examination, and he says it was a heart attack. A notunexpected heart attack. It’s just-“

He was nodding slowly. “Yes, I see where you’re going with this. And you’re right, perhaps more than you know.

Galen Schmidt was more than a mentor. I followed him to job from the Bureau. He was my personal pillar of a sea strength when my wife finally hit bottom with the drinking.

He kept me from making all the political mistakes ambitious officers usually make. Even when he had to retire, I kept going back to the well. it’s fair to say that he became the father I lost when I was growing up.”

Karen nodded. “But the question is, if someone did something to Admiral Schmidt in order to hurt you, he would have had to know about this relationship.”

He shrugged. “That wouldn’t be difficult, I guess. It was well known in my professional circles that Galen Schmidt was my sponsor when I went up for flag.” He paused thoughtfully. “You’re right: It’s a reach. I can understand his being able to discover Elizabeth. But I can’t see an exenlisted man knowing about the inner workings and hidden Mechanisms of the flag-selection process.”

She thought about that for a minute. The waiter came by and the admiral raised his eyebrows in her direction, but she shook her head. He did the same and asked for their tab.

“But just suppose,” she said, “just suppose that Admiral Schmidt became a target of opportunity, that Galantz has been planning and plotting for a long time, but that part of the plan was to murder Elizabeth, and then see what you did. And when you went to Galen, especially the night you got the warning letter, the admiral became the next target.”

She watched as he thought this through, but then he surprised her. “If that’s true, you’d better start watching your back,” he said. “And I guess we’d better have another sitdown with the Fairfax cops. I hate to say it, but maybe they better take another look at Galen Schmidt’s heart attack.”

She felt a chill of apprehension as Train’s words of warming echoed in her mind. She had been with Sherman when he visited Elizabeth’s house.

And at the church. And at the restaurant. And someone had made the phone call to bring in the police when the admiral found the syringe. She looked up. He was watching her intently. She tried hard to keep her face composed, but either Sherman was being stalked or he had to be the killer. But why?

She shuffled the service records in front of her. “We have to ask the police where that nine-one-one call came from,” she said, stalling. “The one summoning a cop car to that parking lot.

“Yes indeed.”

“But only if the syringe and what was in it was important, I I she pointed out. “I mean, it wasn’t likely that the cops would have arrested you for doing dope in the parking lot, an admiral in full uniform.”

He considered it for a moment. “So maybe we were not the focal point of that phone call?”

“Right. It may have been the syringe.”

He shook his head in exasperation. “We’re going in circles. I guess we’re just going to have to wait to see what the cops come up with. I think we should try to meet with them again, say Monday. No, not Monday.

Galen’s funeral is Monday afternoon in Annapolis. Tuesday, then.”

“I’ll call Mcnair Monday. I’ll ask about the source of the phone call, and what’s come back on the syringe.”

He nodded, then looked at his watch. “Is von Rensel working this?” he asked, pointing to the records.

“Yes. I spoke to Admiral Carpenter this afternoon.”

A trace of alarm went through his expression. “You spoke to Carpenter?”

Karen wished she had not brought that up. “Yes, sir. I had to in order to get NIS tasked. Officially, that is.”

“I see. And I suppose he wanted to know what’s behind the Galantz story.”

She hesitated, not knowing how much to tell him about the conversation in Carpenter’s office. “Yes, sir. I … I told him that you were concerned about this story getting out the public sensitivity.”

Sherman gave her a long look and then sighed. “Okay, I guess there was no way around that. Thanks for trying.”

“He said he would respect your wishes to keep this closehold,” she said, lying.

The admiral smiled again. “Sure he did. Well, I guess we’ll see. I’m still not used to the idea of Galen’s being gone, which is more important than my professional worries.

Anyhow, the weekend cometh. I don’t suppose the police will be working this over the weekend.”

“Should I call if something comes up?”

“No, I don’t think so. Oh, you can always leave a message. But I’ll be out of town until late Sunday. If you have anything to report, call me at home Sunday, why don’t you?

Otherwise, I’ll be in the Pentagon Monday until about eleven hundred; then I’ll be headed down to the Academy for the service.” He paused. “Do you want to come to the service?”

She was taken off guard. “Well, I-“

“It’s going to be a pretty big deal. The CNO and most of the bigs will be there. Full military honors. CNO’s office is handling the arrangements.” He paused. “It’s just that things seem to be happening when you and I are together.”

She must have assumed a strange expression, because he was suddenly backpedaling. “That didn’t come out right, Commander. Karen. What I meant was-“

It was her turn to smile. “I think I understand, Admiral.

If someone is watching us, we might be able to see who it is if we make the effort to look.”

“Yes. That’s what I meant. If that makes you nervous-“

It seemed to her that he was the one being nervous. “I have a suggestion,” she interrupted. “Let me see if I can get Train von Rensel to come along, too. He keeps reminding me that he’s the trained investigator. He might see something we don’t.”

He stood up. “Good idea. Let him see this record, and that picture. It’s old, but it’s a start.” She stood up as well and gathered her purse. The admiral continued. “Maybe we ought not to tell the cops too much about von Rensel. Let him work the web independently. If he and NIS can ferret out Galantz, perhaps we can take care of this problem inhouse.”

She thought about that as they walked out of the lounge.

“Well, I think that’s a good idea, up to a point. I mean, Mcnair knows he’s in the picture. And we already told them we’d try to get some NIS help. But if Train can get a line on Galantz, then we probably need to let Carpenter decide when to bring in the police.”

“Of course,” he said quickly. “Let me call us a cab back to the Pentagon. Then I’ll walk you to your car.”

SUNDAY Late Sunday morning, Karen was reviewing her tax forms when the light of the beautiful spring day streaming through the study windows overwhelmed all her good intentions and drew her outside. She walked down to the barn and spent a few minutes talking to Sally, but then the extension phone in the tack room started ringing. It was Detective Mcnair.

“Commander, good morning,” he said. “Sorry to bother you on a Sunday, but we need to find Admiral Sherman. No one’s answering at his home, and a patrol car reports his car’s gone. Any ideas?”

“He’s out of town. Let’s see, he told me he’d be away until this evening, I think. I don’t know where, though. Has something happened?”

She almost said had something else happened.

“Well, yes and no. Remember your syringe? The lab report came back on it late Friday. The thing is, we need to get Admiral Schmidt’s body into the ME’s lab. There’s something we need to check out.”

Karen felt her heart sink. “Don’t tell me: There is a connection between that syringe and Admiral Schmidt’s heart attack.

“Whoa, now, Commander. You’re getting way ahead of us. We just need to check some things.”

“Are you talking about doing an autopsy?”

He paused, as if trying to decide how much he could tell her. “Well, a partial one. Normally when the deceased’s own doc pronounces, we don’t do an autopsy. But we need Admiral Schmidt’s blood type, and a sample, if we can get it. There was human blood and a residue of potassium chloride in saline solution in that syringe.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t follow.”

“An injection of the right amount of potassium chloride into a vein can stop a heart. Admiral Schmidt died of a massive heart attack.”

“Oh my God.”

“Yeah, well, we’re still speculating at high speed here.

But someone left a syringe in your car, a syringe that hadn’t been cleaned or rinsed out. Almost as if someone wanted us to make this connection. Potassium chloride, Sherman, and the old man’s heart attack.”

Karen found herself nodding into the telephone handset, at a total loss for words.

“Commander?” Mcnair said at last.

“I’m here. I just don’t know what to say, other than Admiral Sherman and I had a conversation very much like this Friday night. We were trying to figure out why in the hell someone called into nine-one-one to report a Navy guy doing dope in a parking lot. We wondered if it was really about the syringe and not him.”

“Well, we pulled that string, too. Asked the nine-one-one dispatchers to check their logs to see where that call came from.”

“And?”

“No joy in Mudville. The caller-ID function was disabled because the phone company is changing around all the northern Virginia area codes.

They’ve been taking segments of the caller-ID system down after nine P.m.”

Karen was silent again. Damn. So it could have been Sherman making the call himself. Sally stuck her head into the tack room and waved good-bye. She had a folder of show entries under her arm. Karen waved back and then remembered the Galantz records.

“Oh, we have the SEAL’s archived records,” she told Mcnair. “They came in late Friday afternoon. There’s a picture, although it’s many years out-of-date, and taken when he was very young.”

“We’ll want anything you can give us. And I think maybe we need to meet again.”

“Yes, I agree. So does Admiral Sherman. But he wants me to go with him to the service in Annapolis on Monday afternoon.”

“He say why? Or would that be normal?”

Karen hesitated, then explained their reasoning, leaving out the fact that Train would also be going along. It was Mcnair’s turn to hesitate.

Finally, he agreed to the logic, although he seemed to question the prudence of it.

“Look, Commander, this guy’s stawng Sherman. If that was him calling nine-one-one, then he’s seen you. If he’s bent on knocking off people close to Sherman, he may target you next. He seems to have no problem finding out who’s who.

“That thought’s occurred to us, Detective.”

“Yeah, I suppose it has. Well, let me get onto this other problem. If Sherman calls you, can you let him know what’s going on? We’re scaring up a court order to do the partial autopsy. Fortunately, there aren’t any grieving relatives, so we plan just to do it. Hopefully, we’ll beat the embalmer.

Oh, by the way, there is the outside possibility that the Navy may have to do their ceremony around an empty box Monday.

“Oh, wonderful. You get to tell the CNO’s office.”

“Yeah, I know. But we need to schedule that meeting. I don’t like the way this thing’s shaping up. Technically, if Schmidt was iced, this qualifies as a serial kill.”

“On that optimistic note-“

He laughed. “Yeah. Right. We’ll be in touch. Watch your back, Commander.”

Karen hung up and walked out of the tack room and into the empty aisle way, the skin on her back tingling just a little.

Sally had left, and the horses were turned out. She stood for a moment in the shadows of the aisleway, thinking about what Mcnair had said: “Watch your back.” There it was again. The barn was empty, and the concrete aisleway felt cold and threatening in comparison to the bright rectangles of warm sunlight framed by the doorways at either end.

She started to walk back up to the house. Where the hell was Sherman? she wondered. Not that there was anything for him to do at this juncture. The police would have the old man’s body taken to the medical examiner’s lab whether Sherman liked it or not. And what if it turned out that the syringe was indeed an instrument of murder? Then what?

Harry the watchdog was curled up in a black ball by the entrance to the hedge passage, soaking up some sunlight.

He opened one eye as she walked past, the tip of his tail twitching in greeting.

Come on, Harry,” she said. “I need some lunch.” But the old dog didn’t move, apparently preferring to soak up maximum heat from the patch of sunlight. She was surprised: The L word usually took priority over anything else Harry had on his schedule.

“Okay for you, dog,” she said over her shoulder, and then she headed up the path toward the house. She decided to call Train von Rensel.

Train was roughhousing on the front lawn with two of the Dobermans when Hiroshi appeared on the porch with a portable phone.

“Who is it?”

“A Commander Lawrence, Train-sama.”

Train dismissed the dogs, who scampered off across the front lawn, heading toward the river wall. He wiped his face and upper chest with a towel. After an hour of sword drill in the bright April sunlight, he was ready for a shower. He was surprised to be hearing from Karen Lawrence, especially after the chilly tenor of their working relationship at the end of the week.

Counselor,” he said into the phone,’plopping down on the front steps. He wasn’t quite sure how to address her.

First names would have been appropriate after a week in the same office, but they hadn’t really hit it off that well.

On the other hand, he wasn’t going to call her Commander.

“Hi,” she said, neatly stepping around the same problem.

“I’m sorry to bother you on a Sunday, but Mcnair just called.”

“That sounds ominous. Let me guess: The syringe connects to the old man’s death.”

“Definite maybe,” she replied. “Mcnair was being coy.

But they now want to do a partial autopsy. And they want to talk to Admiral Sherman again, but he’s out of town for the weekend. “

“Official trip? Or personal?”

“I don’t know. He told me Friday night he was going to be gone for the weekend.”

“Friday night?”

“Yes. I went by his office late Friday, with the Galantz personnel files. We went over to the Army-Navy Club for a drink and to discuss next steps.” Train didn’t know what to say to that. Drinks at the Army-Navy Club? How cozy.

She must have sensed his disapproval. “It wasn’t a date, for crying out loud,” she said. “It was Friday evening. Nobody in his outer office can leave until he does, so we left.

I don’t know why I’m explaining this to you.”

“You are absolutely right,” he said

“You want to socialize with the admiral, that’s your business.”

“It wasn’t socializing,” she insisted. “We went through Galantz’s record. There’s a picture, an old one, ut at last a picture. The admiral recognized him right away. Oh, and he wants me to go to the funeral for Admiral Schmidt tomorrow. I suggested you also go along, separately. If someone’s watching us, maybe you can spot the watcher.”

The admiral was wasting no time, Train thought. Take the lady to an emotional scene like a funeral, build on that sympathy. Why was he even wasting his time thinking he might-oh, the hell with it.

“That’s probably a good idea,” he replied. “What are the arrangements?”

“I’m not sure yet. The funeral’s tomorrow. I’ll have details in the morning.”

“Okay, thanks for calling. I’ll see you in the office.” He hung up, cutting her off. He went back out into the front yard. Okay, let’s get squared away here. Forget Karen Lawrence, redhead extraordinaire. Focus on this case. The cops wanted to take another look at the old man’s body. So some badness had turned up in the syringe, which logically would imply that Admiral Schmidt had been helped along to the other side. He had to admit that he couldn’t think of a reasonable motive for the boy admiral to kill his girlfriend and his sea daddy. Okay, so let’s assume Galantz is real.

He began some tai chi exercises. If Galantz had indeed survived the Rung Sat experience and made it back to the States, then he was not working at Burger King. He’d made the threatening appearance in Sherman’s house in 1972-over twenty years ago. Where had he been for all those years?

What had he been? Must get to Mchale Johnson, sooner rather than later.

Sherman called Karen later Sunday afternoon. “Oh, good,” she said.

“Have you spoken to Detective Mcnair?”

“Yes, I have,” he said, sounding annoyed. “it seems the police have been very busy. They’ve taken Galen Schmidt’s body in for an autopsy, and I’ve just had a second call from Mcnair.”

“He called me earlier. Looking for you. Did they-” He sighed. “I’m afraid so. The remains had been embalmed, and apparently, that makes a chemical analysis almost impossible. But he confirmed that at least the blood type is a match with the. residue in the syringe.”

“Oh dear. And was there potassium chloride?”

“There’s a problem with that. Apparently when someone dies, the body’s own cells release quite a bit of potassium into the bloodstream, enough to mask the quantity needed to stop a heart. Their toxicology people are going to try. I think they called it some kind of differential analysis, but it

“II take some fairly sophisticated tissue studies. Unofficially, the ME told Mcnair it would be a waste of time.”

W,Karen ‘didn’t know what to say. Now Galen Schmidt’s death was forensically ambiguous, just like Elizabeth Walsh’s. “Does this mean Galen was Uled?” she asked.

Sherman’s voice betrayed his anxiety. “The blood type matches. Now they’ll have to do DNA matching to see if it’s actually his blood. I have to tell you, Karen, this is beginning to get to me.”

She could certainly sympathize. “What about the funeral?” she asked.

“Will they get the remains back to the funeral home in time?”

“Yes. That’s all back on track. But this other business..

Karen felt the urge to fill the sudden silence. “Mcnair wants to meet as soon as possible after the funeral, Admiral,” she said. “May I suggest Monday evening?”

“I suppose,” he said. “Oh, and he asked about NIS. I told them what you said Carpenter said-that NIS was coming in.”

“Yes, sir. I talked to Mr. von Rensel earlier this afternoon. He’ll be there in Annapolis.”

“Good,” he said distractedly. Karen wasn’t sure he had even registered what she had just told him. Poor man. He paused for a moment. “Because if the higher-ups try to squelch this investigation, I’m gonna take it public.”

“Well, yes, I understand that, Admiral. But wouldn’t that do you even more damage, politically, I mean?”

“I suppose it would, Karen,” he said. “But if this guy killed Galen Schmidt-not to mention Elizabeth Walshjust to get at me, then to hell with it, okay? I’m -ready to get this bastard before he does another one. Especially given his probable motive for doing it.”

She was startled by the sudden ferocity in his voice. This was a side of him she had not heard before. “You can’t blame yourself for what’s happened, Admiral,” she said.

“Thanks, Karen,” he said. “Maybe I’ll call Admiral Car penter and reinforce that notion. Maybe first thing tomorrow.

That’s not a good idea, Karen thought quickly. Carpenter was already conscious of the ripples spreading among the flag community in Washington over this matter, starting with the cinder block Vice Admiral Kensington had pitched in the political pond. “Why don’t you let me work that problem, Admiral? I think if you called him you might, uh …” She wasn’t sure how to phrase it. He did it for her.

“Might show some desperation, huh? And then he might decide just to pull the plug and let me sink or swim by myself. Did you tell him about our little sdance with Kensington?”

“He’d already heard about it, Admiral.”

Sherman laughed, making a harsh sound. “Why am I not surprised?”

“Admiral, I think Admiral Carpenter has his heart in the right place here. He’s going to move on this matter, not sit on it.”

You’re probably fight. Well, I think I’m going out and do a ten-mile run somewhere. I need to think.”

“Yes, sir,” she said. “What time will you leave for Annapolis?”

“I’ve got a car laid on for thirteen hundred. Why don’t you meet me at the Mall entrance? Maybe we’ll have some developments by then.”

She agreed and hung up. She thought about calling Train back, then decided against it. That pregnant silence after she had mentioned the Army-Navy Club had made her angry.

He had no fight to judge her-about anything. So why do you care? He’s just a civilian, and an odd-looking one at that.

She went out to the front porch to enjoy the late-afternoon sun. Two things were bothering her. Train’s abrupt demeanor on the phone hinted at professional disapproval. If she was working for Carpenter, what the hell was she doing going places with this guy? But over and above that, -she still sensed that Train was interested in her, and, somewhat to her surprise, she felt herself responding to this interest.

And if that was true, then maybe some of his antipathy toward the admiral was not entirely professional. She smiled to herself as she saw Sally’s car turning into the drive for the afternoon feeding. Train might even be jealous of Sherman, which was a bad joke: That poor man had bigger problems on his plate. She headed down to the barn to help Sally with the horses.

Karen was surprised at how small the Naval Academy cemetery was as she waited behind and slightly below the main ceremonial group surrounding the canopied grave. The cemetery was located on a gentle hillside across a wide creek from the main campus, occupying five wooded acres on the Sevem River. Fortunately, it was not raining, because the crowd was far too large to fit under the two temporary blue-and-gold canopies that had been erected facing the grave site. Several three-and two-star officers had shown up for the service in the Naval Academy chapel. She wondered idly if their attendance was because they knew Galen Schmidt or if it was because the Chief of Naval Operations himself was attending.

She shifted her feet on the cold grass, trying to keep her heels from sinking into the spongy lawn. She found it fascinating that Sherman, who was probably the human being closest to Galen Schmidt, had been relegated to a back row of the flag officers’ section by virtue of the fact that he was just a frocked one-star. The same thing had happened in the chapel. It must be strange, she thought, to have nearly every facet of your professional life dictated by your lineal number in the Naval Register.

Now the Navy band was assembled on one side of the grassy hillside, playing appropriately funereal music while the admirals and retired admirals stirred uncomfortably on their folding chairs. The rest of the funeral audience, nearly two hundred officers and even some enlisted men, remained standing. The grave itself had been bordered with sections of incongruously green Astroturf, and the casket was perched on a chrome-plated frame above the hole in the ground. Up higher on the hill, there was a smaller crowd of onlookers, comprised mostly of tourists who happened to ‘ be visiting the Academy and a few dozen midshipmen. There were some civilian youngsters standing to one side who looked like military dependents, attracted by all the stars and big black cars.

That morning, she had tried to check in with Mcnair, but he had not been available. Train had come in at 8:30, and she’d filled him in on the itinerary for the afternoon. He took it all aboard and then got on the phone to Admiral Sherman’s office to assure the admiral that NIS was moving on the case. He then made a copy of the Galantz personnel file and transmitted that to the NIS database administrator.

Throughout the morning, he treated her with almost exaggerated civility, which she found a bit frustrating. This tension between us is going to have to stop, sho-thought.

And somehow she knew she would have to make the first move.

Karen got a surprise at midmorning: The archived investigation report on the Rung Sat incident was locked out. She had called Train over when she saw the banner on her screen.

“What’s that mean? Unavailable?” Train asked, looking over her shoulder.

“I don’t know,” Karen said. “But there was an index listing. Damn thing has to be somewhere.”

“It may be a security problem,” Train had said. “Given what these guys purportedly were doing, I suspect any records related to SEALS are long gone.”

“What exactly were they doing?”

He thought about that for a moment, then shook his head.

“I can’t tell you,” he replied. “But it wasn’t social work.

Anyway, does it matter? We’ve established Galantz was a real guy and that he did go MIA. That corroborates at least part of Sherman’s story.”

“How will that help to find him?”

“It won’t.”

The band stopped playing, and there was a long silence as the chaplain mounted a platform and approached the lectern to begin the traditional interment ceremony. The day was partly cloudy, and it was cooler than she had anticipated. Her uniform shoes did little to keep out the damp cold of the cemetery grass. The chaplain said something, and everyone stood, removed their uniform hats, and bowed their heads. She searched for Sherman again in the sea of dark blue uniforms, feeling a pang of sympathy for him. His usually outgoing expression was now a cold mask, devoid of any visible emotion. He appeared to be staring at a headstone monument to his right, as if unwilling to watch the bronze casket be lowered forever into the cold ground.

About two hundred feet off to her right, she could see the burial crew clustered at a discreet distance around a bright yellow backhoe. She looked away and then looked back.

Train von Rensel was in their midst, dressed in oversized overalls, just like the rest of the crew. He appeared to be carefully scanning the crowd in and around the cemetery.

As she stared at him, their eyes met briefly across the open ground, but he gave no indication that he had seen or recognized her. The fact that he would not acknowledge her made her feel uneasy.

Just after three o’clock, Captain Mccarty knocked once and let’himself into Admiral Carpenter’s office. The admiral was on the phone, as usual, and he waved Mccarty over to a chair. A minute later, he hung up. “So, what did you learn at Langley?”

“I learned absolutely, positively nothing,” Mccarty replied, opening his notebook. “My contact in their general counsel’s office put me together with a woman-if you can call her that-from the Technical Operations Directorate.

You should have seen her, a dead ringer for Mrs. Khrushchev. A walking, talking, personality-free zone. Came in, sat down across the table from me in some kind of interview room, got her breath back after the effort of walking, and gave me what sounded like a fully rehearsed statement.”

He consulted the shorthand in his notebook again. ““My name is Madeliene Parker-Smith. The Directorate of Technical Operations has no records pertaining to a Navy Hospital Corpsman Galantz. Any interdepartmental association of military personnel with the Directorate would be a matter of record and would involve the concurrence of both the Department of Defense and the individual’s military personnel agency… No record of such concurrence exists.’ We have spoken.”

“Did you get a chance to explain the possible circumstances by which they might have come across Galantz in Saigon?”

“No, sir. She delivered her speech, pushed some kind of a button under the table, and suddenly I had a brace of renta-cops standing next to my chair. I was escorted back to the badge lobby.”

“Well, well, well,” the admiral mused, rotating his chair to face the windows, his fingers laced together behind his head. “They knew you were coming to see them about Galantz, specifically?”

“Yes, sir. I’d given them HM I Galantz’s name and serial number. They knew.”

“And had that answer ready.”

“There stood Madeliene the Immovable, like General Jackson’s Virginians at First Manassas: a veritable stone wall. “

The admiral swiveled back around. “So in a sense, we have an answer.

This Galantz must have been spooked up.

The question is, When?”

Mccarty nodded. “On the other hand, Princess Happy may have been stating the bald truth. The Tech Ops people have never heard of the guy.”

“Yeah. Okay. Let me pull the string one time at my level.

Maybe I need to go see my dear friend, the Director of Naval Intelligence, after all. Sometimes spooks will trade secret signs and totems only with other spooks.”

“And what shall we pass on to Karen Lawrence?”

“Nothing. Which, in terms of facts, is what we have. Just some educated cynicism based primarily on our combined sixty years of experience in dealing with those people. We might as well try for the facts one more time before we worry her pretty little head about it.”

“Aye, aye, Admiral,” Mccarty said in a tone that suggested he was not entirely in agreement. Carpenter eyed him over his reading glas ‘ ses.

“Always a safe answer, Dan,” he pronounced.

After Mccarty had left the office, Carpenter picked up the phone to his yeoman. “Get me through to Admiral Kensington,” he said. “On secure, please.”

As the band broke into the Navy hymn, Karen had trouble controlling her eyes. The stately, dolorous, yet hopeful chords carried across the grassy slopes of the cemetery with such power that even the civilian tourists up on the hill stopped taking pictures to listen. So she was startled when she saw Admiral Sherman starting to rise out of his chair.

He appeared to be staring at something up on the hill. -As she strained to see what or who it was, she caught a movement among the grave diggers standing around the backhoe.

Train. He had apparently also seen the admiral’s sudden interest in something or someone up on the hill, and he was moving behind the backhoe, as if to go up the hill. She looked back at Sherman, who was standing now, causing the flag officers seated on either side to look up. Feeling a sudden fist of apprehension grab her heart, she looked back up the hill, half-expecting to see a man with a rifle. But there was just the same small crowd up there, so what on earth was he looking at? There, standing next to a group of midshipmen in uniform: a kid. No, a young man, not a kid.

Scrawny figure. Black motorcycle jacket opened over a white T-shirt. A cigarette hanging from his lip in impudent mockery of the somber proceedings down the hillside. As Karen looked on, the young man apparently made eye contact with Sherman, because he grinned at the admiral. There was no mistaking it: an almost ugly flash of teeth. But then the midshipmen up on the hill moved across her line of sight, and he was gone. She looked back at Sherman, who was now sitting back down.

Baffled, she looked for Train.

He was no longer in sight.

Forty minutes later, Karen and the admiral were heading back into Washington in his official sedan. She was anxious to ask him what it was that had attracted his attention up on the hill. But then she decided that she had better talk to Train first.

“I’m very sorry for your loss, Admiral,” she said. The words sounded trite. She glanced over at the driver, a civilian from the Defense Department motor pool. “But we still have some business with the Fairfax County, um, people.

They do want to meet.”

“Well, not tonight,” he said immediately. “I’m still too upset about losing Galen. How about tomorrow? Although I shouldn’t even say that without looking at my calendar.

Damn it.

She waited for a few minutes. “I’ll talk to them. Perhaps we could meet off-line again, maybe in Great Falls this time,” she proposed. “Perhaps at my house. Same deal as last time, after working hours. That would be better than your having to go to Fairfax.”

“Fine,” he said distractedly.

He was staring out the rightrear window, his mind a thousand miles away.

“I”Il call them this evening, then,” she offered. “Tentatively for tomorrow evening, say nineteen hundred?”

“Fine.”

At 5:30, Rear Admiral Carpenter walked down the C-ring to the offices of the Director of Naval Intelligence, Rear Adm. Kyle St. John Mallory. He smiled as he reached the door and glanced at the name board. What was it about the intel world, he wondered, that seemed to attract these pretentious-sounding names?

“Come in, Thomas,” said Admiral Mallory, who came around his desk to shake hands. He was a tall, slim, and perfectly bald officer, and he was known for affecting British mannerisms and dress, even to the point of insisting on the traditional British pronunciation of his middle name as “Sin-Jin.’ True to form, he was wearing an off-white Royal Navy cardigan sweater that was about two sizes too big for him over his uniform shirt and trousers. He was senior to Carpenter, thus the instant familiarity and first name.

“Kyle,” the JAG responded, shaking hands and then taking a chair as the DNI’s executive assistant withdrew, closing the door behind him. Mallory took the adjacent chair and offered coffee. Carpenter demurred.

“Are your fields Working?” Carpenter asked, glancing up at the odd-shaped black boxes perched in the ceiling comers.

“They’d bloody well better be,” Mallory replied.

“Whose ears might be about to bum?”

“Those people up the fiver.”

“Ah. Just a moment, then, please.” He turned to reach the intercom on his desk. “Full SCIFF, if you please, Petty Officer Martin.” He waited, looking expectantly at the intercom box.

“Full SCIFF, Admiral.”. A low humming sound filled the room, and the panel of floor-to-ceiling windows behind the DNI’s desk went opaque.

“Thank you,” Mallory replied in an almost-singsong voice as he switched off the telephone console and turned back around to face Carpenter.

“Funny you should mention that lot. But by all means, you first.”

Carpenter cocked an eyebrow at him, then proceeded to tell the DNI about his probe regarding an ex-SEAL. He did not reveal the full context of his inquiry, but he did tell Mallory that the case involved homicide and that the ex SEAL was a likely suspect. He also mentioned that the individual supposedly had gone MIA back at the end of the Vietnam War.

Mallory nodded patiently as Carpenter described the Technical Operations Directorate’s initial answer.

“Well, that explains something,” he said when Carpenter was finished.

“The deputy director of the Defense Intelligence Agency rang me up this morning. Seems those people were coming through channels, for a change.

Wanted the Navy, the whole Navy, one presumes, to cease and desist making any further inquiries regarding one”-he got up and went to his desk to retrieve a piece of paper-“one Hospital Corpsman Galantz. That your fellow?”

“That’s him. And that’s very interesting. First, my guy hits the old stone wall. Never heard of this individual, they tell him. Now you say they’re warning us off?”

Mallory said nothing, but just raised his eyebrows expectantly, as if waiting for Carpenter to answer his own question. But the JAG just sat there, ostensibly thinking.

“This may have been as simpld as a mild rebuff for going direct, Thomas,” the DNI prompted finally. “Was there some reason you did not bring the um, inquiry through our office?”

“Yes,” Carpenter said.

“There’s a client privacy problem. This involves another flag officer.”

Almost as an afterthought, he added the fact that the CNO had been apprised.

“All, I see,” Mallory said, his peevish expression revealing that he did not see at all.

Carpenter ignored it. “I need to find this Galantz individual. We have reason to believe he may have survived his MIA status and is now here in the Washington area. Oh, and did I mention that the Fairfax County Police are involved?”

“You said homicide,” the DNI said, resuming his seat.

“What assets have you put on this problem?”

“I have a new NIS operative on my staff. A guy called von Rensel.”

“Ah, yes, we know Mr. von Rensel,” Mallory said.

“He’s not famous in the intelligence community for being a team player,-

I’m led to understand.”

“From what I’ve heard, it was team playing that brought Navy Intelligence the Walker soy ring and that Korean thing,” Carpenter retorted. “Anyway, I plan to turn him loose to see what he can find.

What I came to ask you to do was to pull the string with those people.

Spook to spook.”

Mallory didn’t like the crack about the spying cases. “I rather think their warning preempts any good that I might be able to do,” he said.

“Going spook to spook, as you so quaintly put it.”

Carpenter gave him a level look. “This, matter has the potential to embarrass the Navy flag community, Kyle. I need to find Galantz, or, which I suppose would be equally useful, prove that he does not exist-that he went MIA and stayed that way. I guess what I’m saying is that I need you to tell them that we can do this the easy way or hard way.”

“Oh dear,” Mallory protested. “That sounds like a threat.

Do you know how those people usually react to threats from other government entities?”

I’m not sure I give a damn, Carpenter replied. “Since the Fairfax County cops are involved, I can always just turn the whole thing over to CHINFO, let him invite the Washington press corps in for a chat. That way, those people can exercise their newfound expertise at . doing damage control fight here in River City.”

Mallory, rolled his eyes. “And then I get to explain to the CNO why this thing got loose, is that it, Admiral?”

Carpenter got up. “You’re the official pipe into the cave of the intel bears, Admiral My lawyerly instincts tell me if, Galantz went MIA and then was resurrected somehow, the American version of the Lavender Hill Mob was probably involved. Basically, I’m proposing to give our client one free shot at extricating himself from this tar baby. But my bottom line remains the preservation of the herd. Just make the call, okay, Kyle?”

Mallory frowned and pursed his lips. “Very well, I’ll will make the call.

But there’s something else they said in their call. Do you perchance know what a sweeper is-in their vernacular, that is?”

“Nope. Although I would assume it has to do with cleaning up a mess.”

“Rather more elaborate than that, Thomas. As you know, those people have the need from time to time to take-how shall I put this?-to take extreme measures connected with their line of work.”

“This is news, Kyle?”

“I suppose not. But the people they engage to perform these distasteful functions are not nice people. Not gentlemen, shall we say.”

“Understood. And the point to all this is-“

“The point is, Thomas, that from time to time, these ungentlemanly people themselves require the imposition of disciplinary measures. Think about it. Think about what kind of people would be good at imposing disciplinary measures on the wet-work mechanics. That is the function of the so-called sweepers. Which makes the rest of their message rather important.”

Carpenter stared at him. “And that was?”

“That they don’t acknowledge the existence of this fellow Galantz. But that if he did exist, he might be involved in certain extracurricular activities, and that, because of what he is, they are of the opinion that they are best equipped to look into that problem, not us. One assumes that will happen sooner rather than later, but one never knows with those people.”

“Forgive me, Kyle, but I still don’t get it. If Galantz is one of their wet-work mechanics, as you call them, and he’s gone wrong, why don “t they get one of those-what’d you call ‘em, sweepers? Why don’t they put one of those guys onto the problem?”

“Well, nobody over there is speaking in declarative sentences, Thomas.

But you may have I touched on the heart of the problem. My guess is that this fellow Galantz is a sweeper.

Karen was not surprised to find Train waiting in the otherwise-empty office when she got back to the Pentagon at 5:30. He was now dressed in his regular office clothes.

The rest of the JAG offices along the C-ring halfway were dark, except for the workaholic Appellate Defense Division, where they always worked late.

“Counselor,” Train pronounced when she came through the door.

“Well if it isn’t Igor, the grave diggers’ assistant,” she replied brightly. She was secretly glad to see him, if only because the empty corridors of the Pentagon after working hours were a mildly spooky place. She slung her purse over the back of the yeoman’s chair and sat down. “So what was Admiral Sherman jumping up about toward the end of the ceremony? I saw you take off.”

“Some kid on a motorcycle. He was standing up there on the hill among all the tourists and midshipmen. It looked to me like Sherman recognized him, which is why he stood up. By the time I got up the hill, the kid was jumping on a big Kawasaki two-seater and hauling ass. Never really saw his face. Any ideas?”

Karen shook her head. Something was playing at the edges of her memory, but she couldn’t surface it. “No ideas,” she replied. “I was going to ask Admiral Sherman about it, but he was really down about the old man’s death.”

She dialed into the voice-mail system, and there was one message, from Detective Mcnair, requesting a meeting as soon as possible-like tonight.

She told Train about the message and that Sherman wanted to put it off a day.

“Homicide cops don’t like to wait,” Train said. “Better call Sherman.”

She put a call in to OP-32. The admiral was in conference, having left orders not to be disturbed. Karen hesitated, then told the yeoman to tell the admiral that the Fairfax business meeting had to be tonight.

She said she would remain in her office until he was able to return her call.

Train slouched down in a chair by the office door. Karen thought he looked like a big old bear trying to balance on a rock. A treacherous part ‘of her brain began to speculate on what a hug might be like from such a bear. He killed her thoughts with the observation that he wasn’t surprised that Sherman wanted to duck the cops.

“Oh, c’mon, Train. You don’t still think he had anything to do with killing those two people, do you?”

Train looked away for a moment. “I’m still bothered by the fact that all the current information on this mysterious Galantz comes from Sherman. I want some external corroboration.

“But how about the syringe? I mean, I saw that thing, and the look on his face when he saw it.”

We’ve been over this: He had an opportunity to put that thing in your car.”

She shook her head in exasperation. “But why? The syringe had blood in it that matched the old man’s blood type, as well as traces of a substance that could’ve killed him.

Why on earth-“

“Because he could be playing a game,” Train interrupted. “A dangerous game, but still a game. Those cops have to be wondering, too. I know,” he said, seeing the look on her face, “motive. That’s where I’m stuck.

I can’t figure the motive.”

The phone rang before Karen could reply.

“Navy JAG, Commander Lawrence speaking, sir.” She mouthed the name Sherman at Train.

“Tonight, huh?” Sherman was saying.

I’ll m afraid so, sir. Althouah I haven’t called him back.” There was a pause. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll be done here in about thirty minutes. At this hour, thirty minutes to get home.”

“Let me give you directions to my house,” she said, ignoring the sardonic expression spreading over Train’s face.

“It’s about twenty minutes beyond where you live, but a lot closer for him, coming from Fairfax.”

He agreed, wrote down directions, and hung up. She called Mcnair and made the necessary arrangements. She told him that Sherman had wanted to put it off a day, hoping she could find out why they wanted the meeting so urgently.

“Two people are dead, Commander-in a week’s time. i As I think I mentioned, some people here are starting to’t view this as a situation involving a serial killer. By the rules, we’re supposed to bring the FBI into it, sooner rather than later. We want to talk to Sherman again because he’s the common’thread. Plus…” He hesitated.

“Plus?” 11 I I m going to ask that you not tell him this, Commander. need to see his reaction when I ask the question. Deal?”

“Yes, of course, Detective. I can keep a secret.” Train was watching her when she said that, his eyebrows rising.

“Well, I contacted Admiral Schmidt’s lawyer today.

Asked him our standard questions about contacts, possible business or tax problems, etcetera. Tried not to highlight the fact that I was a homicide: guy, if you follow my drift.”

“Yes. Go on.”

“Lawyer said he was the executor. There was no other family. The old man left a bequest of a year’s salary to the housekeeper. The rest of his estate-worth something just north of a million bucks, a lot of that in the Mclean house and five acres bordering on that park-goes to guess who?”

“Oh my,” she whispered.

“Yeah, job my.’ Looking at things in an objective fashion, the good admiral has had his net worth bumped up about a million three in one week. So one of the things we have to do at this meeting is to inform him that we need to look hard at his finances-with his full cooperation, hopefully. And I guess this is the time to inform you that we might be migrating to different sides of the fence.”

“I see,” she said. “Formally?”

He hesitated. “No, not yet. We don’t have a consensus here. And it depends on a couple of things-what we find when we pull the strings on Citizen Sherman and what you guys come up with on this Galantz guy.”

She nodded to herself. “Let me ask you something. Put aside the circumstantial issues for a moment. Do you, personally, believe Admiral Sherman is a killer?”

Train whistled softly from his chair and then got up and started pacing around. This time, there was a longer silence on the phone. Karen found herself holding her breath.

“Actually, my gut feel is no. The lieutenant keeps writing the facts up on a case board and underlining the common thread, which is Sherman. Our lieutenant is hell on facts, which is probably why he’s the lieutenant.

I’ll say this: If Sherman is the guy, he is one cold and calculating bastard, and a damned good actor. Both Mrs. Klein and the old admiral’s housekeeper swear that he’s a prince of a guy.”

I t was Karen’s turn to be silent. Stalling for time to think, she asked another question. “Was there a DNA match on the blood in the syringe?”

“Much too soon. DNA matching takes time. But on gross markers, yes. The ME couldn’t find an injection point, but then again, that was a very fine-gauge needle on that syringe.”

“What about potassium?”

“Total bust. The chief toxicologist wouldn’t even try.

They said that there was no way to detect a toxic level of potassium in the tissues, especially after embalming. So, see you at seven-thirty.”

He was cutting off the questions. She reviewed the directions and he said he and his lieutenant would be there. “My lieutenant wants to meet the admiral. See you there, Commander.”

Karen hung up the phone and recapped the conversation for Train, who whistled again.

“I should be there,” he said when she was finished.

She looked at him for a moment. Given Sherman’s reluctance to share information, Train’s presence might be awkward for Admiral Sherman. On the other hand, Mcnair’s latest information had unsettled her. Once again, she was beginning to wonder about Admiral Sherman.

Train saw her working it out and grinifed at her. Then he skewed his face, hunched his back, and dangled one arm lower than the other. “Igor may have been fight, -distress.

Igor might be good troll to know if you’re going to hang around with bad guys, mistress. Maybe let the bad guy know mistress has Igor on call.”

“Oh, quit,” she protested, but without rancor. “I’ll admit I’m a little more worried than I was. But yes, you should be there.

He straightened up, his face becoming serious. “But not for the reason you’re thinking,” he said. “I should be out there because of that lockout banner on your computer screen this morning.”

“I don’t understand,” she said.

:, I promise to explain” was all he said as he reached for his coat.

Out on the GW Parkway, Karen checked her mirror to see if Train’s car was still behind her. She had been trying to figure out his cryptic comment about the security lockout on the Galantz investigation file.

But she had been too proud simply to come out and ask him. Maybe he was trying to show her that he was thinking ahead of her. Baffled, she refocused her mind on the problems posed by the news about Galen Schmidt’s bequest. She could see the cops’ point of view. Alibis aside, the only other explanation on the table depended entirely on Sherman’s version of something that happened more than twenty years ago, involving a man who had, according to government records, officially disappeared in the swamps of Vietnam. On the other hand, if Galantz did exist, and if he was bent on setting Sherman up to take a fall, he was doing a pretty good job of it.

Mcnair’s use of the term serial killer would do nothing to soothe the Navy flag community’s uneasiness about this whole situation. Maybe after this meeting it would be propitious to review the bidding with Admiral Carpenter. Remember your tasking, she thought. The big guys want to avoid surprises. On the other hand, if Sherman was innocent the fundamental unfairness of what was going on was starting to gall.

“Not bad for a commander, USN,” Train said, looking around the expansive living room.

“Not bad for an oil-industry lobbyist who’d been in the ‘bidness’ for twenty-six years,” Karen replied as she turned on more lights in the room. “Frank was pretty good at what he did.”

He wandered around the living room, looking at pictures of Frank with name-brand senators and with two Presidents.

“I don’t suppose you ever get over the loss of a spouse,” he said carefully.

She sighed. “At some point, I guess I was able to start getting on with life. But there are days, Train … there are definitely days.”

“And nights, I imagine,” he said. She nodded almost without thinking, and then she flushed. But there was no sexual innuendo in his eyes, only genuine sympathy. It was a side of him she hadn’t expected. They were interrupted by headlights in the drive. Karen looked out the porch windows and recognized the admiral’s car. Another car came up the drive behind him.

“Show time,” Train said.

Karen took a deep breath and went to the door to let Sherman and the two policemen in. Once inside, Mcnair introduced his boss.

“This is Lieutenant Bettino. Admiral Sherman, Commander Lawrence. And Mr. von Rensel of the Naval Investigative Service.”

Bettino offered his hand tentatively to Train, as if not sure he was going to get it back. Next to Train, Karen thought, Bettino looked like a college kid, with modish blond hair, bright blue eyes, and a very youthful face. She noticed that he did not say anything, but he also did not appear to be upset to have a fed present.

Sherman unbuttoned his uniform jacket and dropped into a chair. “I hope we can make this short, gentlemen,” he said. “I buried a dear friend today. Mr. von Rensel, I assume you are going to expedite the NIS effort to find Galantz?”

“Yes, sir,” Train said.

“If I may, Admiral,” Mcnair interjected. “I apologize for calling this meeting so soon after Admiral Schmidt’s funeral. But we’re concerned that there have been what appear to be two homicides in one week, homicides that have a common thread.”

“Two homicides? You’ve established that, Detective?

Galen was killed by something in that syringe?”

“It’s ambiguous at this time, Admiral,” Mcnair admitted. “Just like the Walsh case.”

“And the common thread,” Sherman said. “I suppose that’s still me?”

“Yes, sir, it is,” Bettino said, speaking for the first time.

His voice was smooth, almost silky. There was an abrupt hush in the room. Sherman’s face tightened perceptibly.

Mcnair moved to fill the suddenly awkward silence.

“Admiral Sherman, are you aware of the provisions of Admiral Schmidt’s estate?”

Sherman blinked. “Estate? You mean his will? No. We were personal and professional friends. Since 1977. He has a lawyer. His name is-“

“We talked to him today, Admiral,” Mcnair interrupted.

“He informs us that you are the sole beneficiary of Admiral Schmidt’s estate. With the exception of a stipend for his housekeeper, everything he had is now yours. That house and the acreage in Mclean, everything.”

Train was watching Sherman, who was starting to nod his head. He looked first at Mcnair, then at the lieutenant. “I I was going to say that I’m surprised. But I guess I’m not surprised after all. He was like a father to me. His own family is gone-his wife, his son. No, I didn’t know about this, but …” He ran out of words.

The lieutenant leaned forward. “Admiral, as of now you are not a suspect in this investigation. But as you are aware, we had a strange forensic situation in the Walsh house, in that we didn’t find a normal forensic background. In the admiral, s house, on the other hand, we have found evidence that you had been there.”

“A fact which I told you earlier,”

Sherman pointed out.

“On Wednesday night-last week. No, on Tuesday. On Wednesday, I went to Elizabeth’s memorial service. Galen was there.” He looked around the room as if to make sure that everyone had noted that point.

“Yes, sir,” Mcnair said, picking it up, almost as if they had rehearsed this. “Admiral Schmidt died sometime Thursday night. You were with Commander Lawrence until what time, around eleven?”

“Yes, something like that, We left the restaurant. And then found that syringe. Called you people.”

“You called us, Admiral?” the lieutenant asked.

“No. I meant someone called. I guess what I’m saying is that your patrol officer can vouch for the fact that I was with Commander Lawrence.” He looked around the room again, then realized how he was sounding. “Look, I was surprised by the . fact that Elizabeth had named me in an insurance policy. The situation with Galen … well, that’s a little less surprising. But I still think I’m being set up.”

“By this Galantz individual?” Mcnair asked.

“Yes. I’ve told you all this, Detective.”

Mcnair sat back in his chair. “That’s right, sir, you have.

But as of now, we have no way of corroborating the existence of the threatening letter or even the existence of Galantz. Or, for that matter, the incident that supposedly set him off after all these years.

All the Navy has produced is a closed-out personnel file.”

“Which proves that he certainly did exist,” Karen interrupted.

“Yes, Commander,” the lieutenant said. “But did exist isn’t the same as does exist. Admiral Sherman, we need two things: We need to find this guy, or at least to establish that he didn’t die out there in Vietnam.

And secon(fly, we would like to ask your cooperation in allowing us to examine your personal situation.”

““Personal situation,’ ” Sherman repeated. “As in-“

“As in personal finances. Whether or not you are overextended or have a big tax problem. Or if there’s a pattern in your bank accounts that would indicate that you’re a big time gambler, or you’re being blackmailed, or you have other personal habits requiring more money than you make in the Navy. Stuff like that.”

” ‘ Stuff like that,’ ” Sherman repeated slowly, his face darkening. “I see. All of which you could do with a court order. If I werea suspect, that is.”

“That’s right, Admiral,” the lieutenant said smoothly

“But since you’re not, we’re asking nicely. If you have’ nothing to hide, your cooperation and the absence of any of these indicators would bolster your credibility. I’m sure an officer of your seniority and experience will understand where we’re coming from with this, right, sir? You know, sort of an easy way/hard way situation?”

Sherman and the lieutenant stared at each other, but then the admiral composed his face and sat back in his chair.

“Anything you want, Lieutenant,” he said in an icy tone.

“I am none of those things you mentioned. I’m not a closet gambler, I don’t have any debts other than my mortgage, I’m not being blackmailed, and I don’t have a drug habitalthough you’ll have to take the Bureau of Medicine’s word for that, as we’re all drug-tested in the Navy-but, yes, I’ll open the books for you. I’ll instruct my accountant to provide full disclosure and my last five years of tax returns.

You can even have a look inside my house if you wish, as long as you agree not to tear it up. How’s that sound?’; “Like the full cooperation of someone who is eager to help us solve two homicides,” the lieutenant replied, ignoring Sherman’s tone of voice.

“Okay. But I’d like to ask a favor in return.”

“Which is?”

“That you inform the Navy JAG-that’s Commander Lawrence’s boss, Admiral Carpenter-that I’m not a suspect.

Mcnair and the lieutenant looked at each other for a moment, but then the lieutenant nodded. “We can do that, Admiral,” Bettino said. Mcnair nodded his agreement.

Sherman stood up. “Then I think we’re done here,” he announced. “If you don’t mind, I want to go home and have a drink and try to wash this mess out of my mind’for a couple of hours.”

The two policemen stood up, as well. “We’ll call you to make those arrangements, Admiral,” Mcnair said. “Tomorrow morning okay?”

“I’ll call you, if that’s all right, Defective. I’m trying to keep this problem from becoming public knowledge in my office.”

“We understand, sir,” Mcnair said quickly, extracting his card case and handing him a card. “I’ll be in the office by eight o’clock. Commander Lawrence, thanks for letting us meet here.”

Karen nodded and escorted the two policemen to the front door. Train was still perched in his spot by the fireplace when she came back. Sherman was buttoning his uniform jacket when Karen asked him to stay for a few minutes. She needed to find out something, but she had not wanted to bring it up with Lieutenant Bettino there, showing teeth.

“I can offer you a drink,” she said. “In fact, I think I’ll join you.”

Sherman looked over at Train for a moment, then nodded.

“Oka . Scotch, if you have it.” They went out to the kitchen. Karen brought the admiral his scotch, Train a beer, and fixed herself a glass of white wine.

“That was a definite change of tone,” she said.

Sherman nodded. He looked dejected. “And that’s with me not a suspect,” he said. “I’d hate to see how they treat their suspects.

“Well, for one thing, you’d be meeting them on their turf, not out here on yours,” Train said. It was only the second time he had spoken all evening, and Sherman looked over at him. The admiral was getting that cornered look again., “Tell me, Mr. von Rensel, what do you think about the possibility that Galantz survived the Rung Sat, a Chinese jail in Saigon, and was able to make it back to the States?”

Train shrugged. “It’s possible, Admiral. gut notwithout some help, especially in Saigon.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that there is a government agency that did some recruiting in that manner during the Vietnam War.

Think about it: A guy’s officially MIA, which is the same as dead in most people’s minds. He’s trained in the disciplines and techniques of Special Forces warfare. He’s field experienced. And if he survived the Rung Sat, he’s one tenacious sumbitch. Those are pretty formidable qualifications for the clandestine intelligence services.”

Sherman sipped his scotch, absorbing what Train had just said. One of the horses whickered from a back pasture, and another answered.

“I think I’m dead meat,” Sherman announced abruptly.

Karen remembered Train’s first reply when she told him that there was a SEAL after Sherman. The admiral’s face was grim. “A guy who doesn’t exist, and who is probably some kind of-what, assassination specialist or something? I might as well paint a target on my jacket and sit out on the front porch.

Train smiled then. “Think on the bright side, Admiral.

Guy like that, he could have done you a hundred times by now. He apparently wants to play with you first. That gives us time to find him.”

“Oh, that’s just wonderful,” Sherman said, but then he smiled himself “Sorry,” he said, “it’s just that I’m getting this boxed-in feeling.”

“Admiral,” Karen said after a moment. “Who was the young man up on the hill? At the cemetery in Annapolis?

Remember, you stood up right as the service was ending?”

Sherman’s smile vanished. He looked first at Train and then back at Karen. Which is when she remembered the kid on the motorcycle at Elizabeth Walsh’s service and realized that was where she had seen him before.

“Okay,” Sherman said, getting up and finishing his drink. “Okay. I think that was my son, Jack.”

Train raised his eyebrows at Karen, who was trying to comprehend what the admiral had just revealed.

“Your son?”

Sherman stuck his hands in his uniform jacket pockets and walked over to the nearest window, keeping his back to both of them. He looked out into the dark yard for a minute before replying. “Yes. My son, Jack, whom I haven’t seen in years, as I think I told you Thursday night.

Except twice in the past week-once at Elizabeth’s memorial service, then again at Galen’s funeral. It’s as if he’s come out of nowhere-to gloat over these two deaths.”

“Are you sure that’s who he is, Admiral?” Train asked.

“I was down there at Annapolis, hanging out in the crowd.

I saw him, but at a distance, and I never did see his face.”

“I’M pretty sure,” Sherman said, sitting back down.

“Very sure about the first time; pretty sure about the second time.

“Have you detected any other surveillance?.” Train asked. “Cars following you, people in the neighborhood who aren’t normally there?

Noises on the phone?”

Sherman laughed. “Since that letter? Hell yes. Everywhere I go. I see bad guys behind every parked car, under every bush.” Sherman’s mouth was compressed into a flat line. “Karen, I told you something about my marriage, and that my only son was … problematical, I guess I can say.”

“Yes, sir,” Karen said, remembering the conversation in the’restaurant.

“You indicated you two were estranged.”

“Yes, basically since the divorce. But I didn’t tell you the whole story. I told you we were divorced back in 1981.

My wife got custody, naturally, because I was in the Navy and perpetually on the move. But I didn’t tell you what happened after that.

The bare bones of it is that Beth hit bottom three years afterward with the drinking. She lost custody of Jack. He ended up in foster care.”

“What finally happened to your ex-wife, Admiral?” Train asked gently. He had moved into a chair closer to Sherman.

The admiral rattled the remaining ice cubes in his glass for a moment.

“She shot herself,” he declared finally.

Karen blinked. “She shot herselp My God, that’s-that’s terrible.

Sherman gave her another bleak look, then looked away.

“Yes. That was terrible. And, of course, Jack never forgave me. As you might imagine, he felt it was all my fault.

Elizabeth told me many times that Jack was being unreasonable and just lashing out at me. Because by divorcing my wife, I had rejected him.” He was silent for a moment.

“I can rationalize a lot of it, but I can’t really blame him for how he feels. Anyway, he wrote me a letter after she shot herself. Told me in no uncertain terms how he felt about the whole thing. Never wanted to see me again. Said that one day he’d find a way to repay me.” Sherman got up again and went back to the window. He stood there for a minute, his back to them, rubbing the sides of his face with his hands.

“Admiral,” Train said. “Was there anything on or in the note YOU got last week that would positively link it to Galantz?”

Sherman turned around and thought for a moment. “He told me-that night back in San Diego-that he’d be back when I had something of value to lose,” he replied. “He said he would give me one warning. The note said Walsh was the first. So I just Assumed Galantz. But to answer your question, no, there was no discreet identifier. Either way.”

“Postmark?”

“I didn’t notice. I read the note, read it again, and then called Galen Schmidt. Went over there. Talked to him about it. Came back, did some paperwork, looked for the note and the envelope, and both were gone.”

“Paper quality? Was it stationery, or a notepad?”

“Cheap stuff-something you’d buy in a Seven-Eleven if you were in a real hurry. Lined. Five by seven.”

Train nodded. “Was there a stamp?”

“A stamp.” Sherman wrinkled his brow. “You know, now that you mention it, I don’t think so. I’ve been trying to conjure up an image of the postmark since you asked, but now I think. there was no postmark, because there was no stamp.” He looked up. “Which means he just put it through the slot.”

“Back to your son, Jack,” Train prompted. “You said you’d had no contact with him for several years. Longer if you discount that last letter. Did you know where he was during that time?”

“Jack’s last letter came from Quantico, you know, South of here. I assumed that’s where he landed when he was thrown out of the Marines, but I have no idea if he stayed there or moved elsewhere.”

“Was his letter addressed here-I mean, to your house in Mclean?”

“No. It came to my office in Bupers, during my second tour there.”

Train nodded again. “My point is that he either knew or found out where you were stationed. He was keeping track of where you were, even if you didn’t know where he was.”

Sherman began pacing around the edges of the counters, nodding to himself. “I guess that’s right,” he said. “I mean, if you don’t suspect you’re a target, and take no precautions, somebody could know just about everything about you.”

He stopped as the implication of that reasoning penetrated.

Karen could see him visibly slump.

She got up and went to him. “Admiral, we’re ranging pretty far afield here. I think where Train’s going with this is that finding Galantz might be next to impossible, especially if he is a professional operative. But maybe we should go find your son instead. Find out what he was doing at those two funerals.”

Sherman stood there, his eyes staring down at nothing.

“He was there to gloat. He was grinning at me down in Annapolis. That’s what made me stand up. He was grinning-there isn’t any other word for it.”

Train stood up.’ “That doesn’t mean he’s a murderer. He may have been secretly keeping track of you constantly for all these years. Sons who’ve become disaffected from their fathers often do that. He may well have taken some pleasure in your loss-“

“Losses.”

“Well, yes, Sir, losses. I think we need to find your son, talk to him.”

“Does ‘we’ have to include the cops?”

Train looked at Karen, who shook her head imperceptibly.

Implicating Sherman’s son would compound the whole mess in the eyes of the Navy hierarchy.

“No, sir, not yet, anyway,” Train replied, taking her lead.

“Let the cops work Galantz. I will, too, and we’ll feed them what we get. Meanwhile, I’ll try to track down Jack and talk to him, see what the hell this is all about. What is-his full name, Admiral?”

“John Lee Sherman. Supposedly there are Virginia Lees in my ex-wife’s family.” He paused. “And what will you do if you get thesense that he is involved in these killings?”

“Then we will have to tell the cops. Actually, an argument could be made for doing that right now. You do understand where they’re focusing at the moment?”

“Yes indeed,” the admiral said. “And you’re suggesting that we give them my son’s possible involvement, thereby taking some of the heat off me?”

Train started to reply but thought better of it. Sherman was shaking his head, “I’m boxed,” he said. “Someone’s killed my ex-lover and my oldest friend and implicated me.

The powers that be in the Navy are starting to circle the wagons. The police are saying I’m not a suspect but that they want to execute a search of my life, and one of the ways out is to accuse my son of being involved in the homicides, the kid I neglected for most of his childhood? C’mon, guys! ” if

“Admiral, wait a minute,” Karen said.

“Think about it.

you’re in a box with no apparent way out, someone had to set this up. I mean, it’s just not likely that all of this just happened. And the police aren’t stupid: They’ll see that, tw.”

Train concurred. “A week ago, you were ops normal.

Now two people tied to you are suddenly dead, under suspicious circumstances. You are under suspicion, by both the cops and the Navy flag community. Your son, whom you haven’t seen for years, makes two appearances. Karen’s right. This mess didn’t just come out of the blue.

Somebody has set it motion.”

“Wonderful.”

“Then “s more, Admiral. We should expect something else to happen. I don’t know what, but somebody’s stepping through a plan. The momentum is with him right now. He’s not just goingto stop. You need to become vigilant. Be aware of your surroundings, your exposure. Be careful. Do you own a gun?”

The admiral stared at him. “Yes, I do. But-“

“Carry it-in your briefcase, in your car. I’m serious.”

“But I don’t have a permit, or anything like that.”

“Think of it this way, Admiral. You don’t want to be facing this guy in a dark parking lot and wishing you had put the god damned gun in your pocket that morning. Now, we could kick this thing around al . I night.

But I recommend you go home, and Karen. and I -will start in on finding Jack tomorrow. We’ll make sure the cops continue to receive everything we get on Galantz, and I’ve pulled some strings in the intelligence world to see if there is a connection there.

You concentrate on being vigilant. Let us work the problem.”

Sherman nodded slowly. Karen could see that he was struggling to keep his equanimity, but she thought Train had it right. Sherman was in the box. Someone outside the box would have to get him out. He straightened his uniform jacket, thanked her for the drink, and nodded good night to Train.

She . accompanied him to his car. He paused by the driver’s side door.

“I feel like I should be a whole lot angrier about this than I am,” he said. “But I feel more resigned than anything else. I guess it’s because I do own a big piece of what’s behind this. What happened to Galantz back there in Vietnam-leaving a guy behind in a combat situation is a major wrong.”

“But certainly you had operational justification-” she began, but-he was shaking his head. “we’re talking about an almost-sacrosanct law of the bat refield. You don’t leave your wounded; hell, you don’t even leave your dead. Men will fight on even in the most hopeless situations as long as they believe that. We did the wrong thing out there. And as for Jack … well, look ^at happened to his mother.”

“Whoever’s doing this is counting on your feeling that way, Admiral,”

Karen replied, sidesteppingthe immediate truth of what he had said.

“Train’s right: You need to focus right now on situational awareness.

You have little maneuvering room. We still do.”

“Unless Carpenter gets some direction from higher up and recalls you and von Rensel.”

She hadn’t thought about that. He saw her look and smiled, but his eyes were filled with sadness. “Even paranoids can have enemies, right? Good night, and . thank you for your help. I guess-I’m in your hands right now.”

She resisted a strong urge to comfort him somehow.

“We’ll figure it out, Admiral. Good night.”

He backed his car around and drove off down the driveway. Train came out onto the front porch and watched him go. The night was clear, but there was no moon up yet, leaving the grounds and fields around the house in dee shadow. Karen wondered where Harry, the Lab, was.

“Poor bastard,” Train was saying. “Assuming he is innocent, someone’s working quite a campaign on him. Tell me, is there somewhere to get a bite around here?”

They drove in separate cars to the shopping center in Great Falls and went into the Irish pub. They ordered drinks and made some quick decisions about the menu.

“Have you become a believer now?” she asked once the waitress had left.

Train reflected for a moment. “Yeah, I think so. There are still some bothersome inconsistencies, but -his overall situation points toward a setup. His wife shot herself. God, there’s the ultimate”I’ll show you.’ She shivered. “That son definitely sounds like -somebody we need to talk to.

Train nodded. “I’ll start beating the bushes tomorrow.

Then maybe we both go talk to him.”

“But do you think he would talk to us?”

“Ve Germans haff our methods, madame,” Train intoned. She smiled. He returned the smile. It was the first truly personal smile she had seen, and she suddenly wanted to talk about something besides this baffling Sherman case.

“So, do you live in Virginia?” she asked. He told her a little of his background, then briefly described his home on the Potomac, near.Aquia.

She became increasin ly intrigued as he described the household setup, beginning to wonder why someone with obvious financial security and a law degree would be working for the NIS. He sensed her question.

“I know it sounds a bit anomalous. But I think I’m making a contribution, and that’s been a big part of our family’s ethic over the generations. Can’t escape our Prussian heritage, I guess, although every time I’ve pulled the genealogical string, things get a little vague about exactly where the von came from in von Rensel. It may have been appropriated on the way over with von Steuben.”

She stiffed her Chardonnay with a fingernail. “And why no family? Is that part of the master plan?”

He looked discomfited, and she realized he was basically a very shy man.

“Not my master plan,” he said quietly.

“But, hell, look at me. Man Mountain Dean. Women find me-what’s the word? Exotic, I guess. I usually see two reactions from the ladies: downright fright at the thou4t of being with such a big guy, or salacious interest, for the same reason. I guess nobody ever wanted to take me home to meet the folks.”

She smiled at that. “When I was younger, it seemed like lots of Navy guys wanted to take me home to meet the folks,” she said. “But as a Navy lawyer, I saw too many mamages like the admiral’s: women left alone to cope with tight budgets, disaffected kids who thought that their daddies went away because they’d done something wrong, or the fallout from the randy sailor types who had to have a woman in every port; sometimes including home port.”

“Were there no civilians?”

“Not really. You know, when you’re in the Navy, you tend to socialize Navy. You were in the Marines; you didn’t associate with civilians, did you?”

“Nope,” he acknowledged. “Civilians were all hapless dolts who desperately needed the protection of the few, the strong, and the brave.”

She hummed a few bars of the Marine Corps hymn and he laughed. “Stop, or I’ll have to stand up and salute,” he said. Their eyes met for a momenl “This is much better, Mr. Man Mountain,” she said. “I think we’re going to do okay.” He raised his beer mug in a grave salute as the evening’s entertainment, a two-man band accompanied by a twenty-piece orchestra in a computer, lit off in the comer and ended any Pope of further conversation.

After dinner, they walked slowly out to the parking lot.

She was wondering how he would tie off the evening.

“I’m glad we did this,” he said when they reached their cars. He looked as if he wanted to say more but was too shy to come out with it.

“So am I,” she replied. “However this Sherman mess comes out.”

He smiled, and she almost invited him back to the house for a nightcap4 But the moment passed and he became all business again.

“Are there any other signs that the JAG’s having second thouihts about our investigation?” he asked as he unlocked his car.

“Other signs?”

“Who else-but Carpenter would have the power to lock you out of a JAG archives file? That’s what I was talking about earlier. “

“Oh. I never thought-you think he did that?”

“He did or someone did on his orders. I was th4iking: Maybe tomorrow would be a good, day to call in sick. In case he’s waiting to call you up to the front office and tell you to go back to reviewing investigations. I don’t know, but I suddenly have this feeling that we’ve been switched off the main line here.”

“Well, I suppose I could.” Once again, he had taken her by surprise.

Carpenter?

He opened his car door. “Look,” he said, “like I told Sherman, you need to be vigilant, too. Remember what’s been ha pening to people close to Sherman. Right now, I p from an outsider’s perspective, you qualify.”

There it was, that big-brother attitude of his again, she thought. But this time, she did not resent it. She decided to flirt a little. “But I have you to protect me, Mr. Man Mountain, right?”

He gave her a wary eye. “You want me to stay with you tonight?” he asked, keeping it light by giving her a barely visible grin.

She felt a tingle of excitement, and she batted her eyes.

“How The neighbors would talk.”

“What neighbors are those, specifically?” he asked. But then, as if sensing this was getting a little too personal, he backed off. “Look, whoever’s doing this is pretty good at it. Something strikes you as being out of whack, call me.”

He fished out a card and wrote something on the back of it.

“Here’s the number for my car phone, and my home phone and fax numbers down in Aquia. False alarms are acceptable.

She thanked him and then watched him drive out of the parking lot. She drove home, speculating on things and feelings long dormant, too long dormant. Once home, she started to lock up the house, then remembered the dog. She went back out onto the front porch and called. Nothing. The barn-the last place she had seen Harry. He had been trotting down toward his favorite sunning spot. I’ll bet he’s sound asleep. She walked across the front of the house and down toward the aisle of hedge between the yard and the barn. The night was cooler now, with clear skies and a sprinkling of stars. The loom of Washington’s lights permeated the southeastern horizon. She automatically searched for and found Polaris; Frank had made a fetish of fixing the North Star every time he went outside at night. She could hear small rustlings in the hedge as she passed down the shadowy aisle, taking care not to hang up a heel on a crack in the mossy bricks. A car went by out on Beach Mill Road, but the sound was dampened by the dense hedge.

She came out into the barn enclosure and looked around.

The horses were not visible, but there was a night-light on in the aisle. She called the dog again, but nothing happened.

Funny. Normally, he would have been bounding out of the barn by now. She walked forward, into the isleway. The familiar smells of hay, straw, and leather reeking of One Step cleaner met her as she crossed the threshold. She looked down the aisle in the dim light and saw Harry, lying on his saddle pad against the door of the tack room.

“Hey, beast, let’s go. It’s time to go in the house.” Harry didn’t move.

Alarmed, she went over to him. The dog was not in his customary furry ball. He was lying against the door, breathing, but more crumpled than curled. “Harry?”

she called, kneeling. The dog didn’t move. His breathing sounded ragged, shallow. Then she smelled something medicinal, like alcohol, but not exactly. Sweeter, almost sickly sweet. She remembered that smell. What the hell was it?

Ether! That’s what it was, ether. She bent closer to the dog’s muzzle, and the smell was stronger. Some bastard had There was a loud crash as something hit the tin roof of the barn, something hard and sharp that rattled down the slope of the metal roof and fell with a small thud into the paddock outside. She nearly jumped out of her skin and stood up, flattening herself against the door, her breath frozen in her throat.

Silence. The dog groaned softly at her feet,, his rear legs twitching.

There was another noise, this time at the far end of the barn, like weeds or bushes scrabbling against the retracted aisleway doors—coming toward the doorway. She panicked and ran out of the barn, across the barn enclosure and up toward the house. But when she got to the hedge passage, she stopped abruptly, grabbing the post of the grape arbor to stop herself. The walkway between the hedges, which was nearly fifty feet long, was in deep shadow. She looked over her shoulder at the barn, but there was nothing coming or moving-yet.

She looked back into the gloom of the hedge passage and back at the barn. There were fences on either side of the hedge passage. She was in her uniform skirt and low heels.

That fence would slow her down-a lot. The hedge passage was a direct shot to the house-unless there was someone in there, someone who could reach through the hedge and grab her. A night breeze swept gently through the tree branches over her head. The barn remained silent.

She made her decision: Get to the house; get to a phone.

She took off again, straight through the hedge passage, staying low, bent over as she ran, grateful for every day of-her workouts, her right arm held up, her hand balled in a fist.

She erupted from the other side of the passage and sprinted the remaining hundred feet to the front porch in about six seconds. She hurtled through the front door, spun around, slammed and locked it. She leaned back against the door as she recovered her breath. Phone. Get on the phone. Call the cops . No. Call Train. Where was that card? In her pocket.

Call his car phone. Get him to turn around and get back here.

Then she realized the house was dark. There was enough starlight coming in to see the furniture and the walls but not much else. Turn on the lights, hunny.

They had been on when she left.

She held her breath as she slowly moved her hand over to feel the bank of switches by the front door. Three of the four were up, in the “on” position.

The power. The power’s out. Someone’s cut the power She swallowed hard and moved sideways into the living room, feeling her way through the familiar shapes of furniture. She stopped when she reached the phone at the far end of the couch, then listened carefully. She thought she Sensed a foreign presence in the house, then wondered if it was just her imagination. Her mouth dry, she settled into the couch and put her hand on the telephone.

If he’d cut the lights, he might have cut the phone, too.

Please, please let it be working.

With Train’s card in one hand, she lifted the handset. But she couldn’t see the numbers in the darkened living room.

This was no time to mess around. She couldn’t bear to see if there was a that tone or not. She took a deep breath and punched 911. Then she put the handset to her right ear and held her breath. Her heart sank when she did not hear a ringing sound.

Commander Lawrence, a voice whispered.

She nearly dropped the phone. Someone was on the line, and it sure as hell wasn’t the 911 operator.

I know you’re there, Commander.

The voice seemed disembodied, a hoarse, machinelike whisper with a faint echo, but it was unm istakably right there, right in her ear. Where the hell was he? Oh my God, the phone didn’t ring: He’s here; he’s in the house. She fought back another surge of panic, the overwhelming urge to bolt back out of the house.

“Who is this? What do you want?” she said, her voice coming out in a dry croak.

That’s not your normal voice, Commander. Funny how adrenaline can do that. Are you a fraid?

She looked around the darkened room and swallowed again. If she just put the phone down and kept very quiet she could make it to the front door.

Depending on where he was. There were extension phones in the study, the kitchen, and the upstairs bedrooms. Get out of the house. Get to one of the cars, and a car phone.

Pay attention, Commander. Stop trying to figure out where I am or how to get help. I’m not here to hurt you. If I wanted to hurt you, I would have put a razor wire about neck-high between those hedges. I didn’t hurt your old dog, did I? I could have snapped his neck. But I used ether, right? So sit still. And pay attention. This is important.

“Who are you?” she asked, her voice a little stronger.

She eyed the front hall, gathering herself, and then thought about getting the door locks open, and about the distance to the garage.

I think you know who I am. The voice definitely sounded as if it was machine-generated, not human.

“Galantz?”

That’s not my name anymore. Marcus Galantz is dead, remember? But here’s the deal: You’re beginning to interfere in something that doesn’t concern you. You and your friend Lurch there.

She swallowed but said nothing.

I want you to back out. Go back to being a professional second-guesser in room 4C646 in the Pentagon. There’s a future in that. There’s nofuture in what you’ve been doing lately. None at all. Do you understand me?

Did you kill them?” she asked. “Elizabeth Walsh? Admiral Schmidt?”

No. He did. Your precious pretty boy with the golden sleeves.

“I don’t believe that,” she said. “He’s not a killer.”

Oh yes he is. You have no idea, Commander. He kills people, especially people who depend on him. He kills people who are close to him. And you are getting close to him.

Dangerous place to be, Commander. Very dangerous, in my recent experience. Others would-agree-if only they could That silenced her. She tried to think, but that whispering voice was starting to mesmerize her-the repetitive phraseology, the short chantlike bursts of speech.

The urge to bolt was diminishing. Instead, she found herself wanting to talk to him, to pay attention to the whispering sound in her ear.

You don’t believe me, do you, Karen-n-n-n?

Suddenly, the whisper was much louder as he let the final syllable of her name linger in the earpiece, the echoing voice like a prolonged hiss from a large snake. Using her name now. Focus: He’s using a machine to do this.

I do believe you. But she was thinking it, not saying it.

Karen-n-n-n. Here I come. Karen-n-n-n.

She realized then that she had stopped breathing and that she was holding the earpiece against the side of her head hard enough to hurt.

No. Don’t come. I believe you. But she was still thinking it, not saying it.

Karen-n-n-n. The volume was diminishing.

Please. Don’t come. I believe you.

He said her name again, the volume very low now, as if he had put down the phone.

And was coming. I She dropped the phone and lunged across the living room, I knocking over a table and then a lamp, caroming off an I upholstered chair before reaching the front vestibule, her hands clawing at the dead-bolt handle, the door handle, and then she was out on the front porch and flying across the driveway to the garage, its right-side door still open, thank God, to the first car, any car, and then she was inside the Mercedes, batting at the switches for the door locks.

Keys. Oh God, I don’t have my keys!

She whirled around in the seat and looked back at the open garage door.

The door transmitter was mounted to the dash. Close it? Or leave it open?

Close it and be in total darkness. Open it and he gets in, if he wants to.”Men she remembered the car phone.

She smashed down on the remote transmitter button and the big garage door started to lower behind her. She stabbed the power switch on the car phone. There was a tone, and the little screen lit up. Locked, it read, as if mocking her.

She yelled and slammed her hand on the steering wheel, then remembered how to unlock it. The garage door settled to the concrete floor behind her with a thump as she punched in the last three digits of the phone’s number. An instant of silence, and then there was another tone, and then the blessed dashed lines of a full signal. She picked up the handset and then dropped it when the phone rang.

She let it lie there on the seat, afraid to touch it. It rang again, then a third time. Him. It had to be him. Finally, her hand trembling, she reached down and hit the Send button,

then picked it up.

Karen-n-n-n.

She closed her eyes but didn’t reply. Just held the phone to her ear.

Get clear of this. Get your largefriend clear of this. Don’t be there when I come for him I won’t warn you again.

She squeezed her eyes shut to make him go away.

I’m going now.

The whisper grew weaker, overlaid with reverberations.

I’m going now, Karen. Don’t make me come back Then there was nothing except the hiss of static in her ear. She hit the Clear button and let the phone drop into her lap as she slumped back against the seat of the car. Her stomach felt weak and fluttery. Her hands and even her legs were still trembling.

She picked up the phone again to make a call, then stopped. A call to whom? The cops? And tell them what?

That she was sitting in her garage, locked in her Mercedes, because there was some guy talking to her on a phone? She could just hear the cops’ response: Yeah, right, lady, we’ll be hustling right along.

Another Great Falls Yuppie princess who’s overdone her meds.

But for some reason, she felt that he was indeed gone.

She reached for the remote transmitter button, then hesitated. What if he wasn’t? She turned around slowly in the seat and looked out at the side mirror. She could barely make out the inside surface of the garage door, but there was a thin line of dim light along the garage floor. She turned back around and unlocked the doors, wincing at the suddenly loud noise. She opened the door and slid out of the driver’s seat. Opening the door turned on the car’s interior light. Feeling exposed, she pushed the door shut, trying to make no noise.

Standing by the door, she had to hang on to the door handle because her legs were trembling so badly. She stared hard at the bottom of the garage door. But now she could clearly see the crack of dim light visible along the bottom.

She crept back to the leftrear fender, then slowly sank down to one knee to look under the door. She froze.

There were two dim shapes that looked very much like shoes standing right by the door.

She held her breath and closed her eyes. You’re imagining things. Look again. I don’t want to look again. Do it.

She looked again. Nothing. She bent farther down, scanning the entire crack. Nothing. Taking care to make not a sound, she straightened up and leaned back on the fender. A mouse scuttled in some leaves in a comer of the garage, but there were no other sounds, inside or out.

Call Train. Yes, call Train. But not on this phone. Use the other phone, the Explorer’s. She went over to the Ford, looked inside, and got in.

She turned on the car phone, then hesitated. If he had a scanner, he could listen to any car phone. He had the Mercedes’s number, why not the Explorer’s? The phone in the house was no good, either, as he had tellingly demonstrated. Suddenly, all the familiar, secure appurtenances of her LIFE were turning on her. Get to a pay phone. Drive to the village of Great Falls and use a pay phone to call Train.

She locked the doors of the Explorer and reached for the garage door’s transmitter before she remembered that she still had no keys. Damn. I have to go into the house. She sighed, unlocked the doors, and got out of the car. She knelt down to look under the garage door again, feeling her right stocking pop a run. Nothing. She reached’back into the car and hit the remote transmitter switch. With much groaning and rattling, the left-side door rose up from the cement floor.

Even though it was dark outside, there was suddenly much more light in the garage. She looked around and saw the handle of the wood-splitting maul Frank had broken and never replaced. She picked it up; then, holding it in both hands, she walked out of the garage and headed for the house. 71be first thing she noticed was that all the house lights were back on. She stopped in front of the house and scanned the windows.

Nothing out of the ordinary. The front door was still open. She looked around the front yard, then climbed the front porch steps as quietly as she could and peered through the living room windows. The fiirnimm she had collided with in her dash for the garage was still overturned on the floor. Hell with it, she thought. I’m going in.

She went through the opened front door, the maul handle ready. She walked quickly through all the rooms on the first floor, through the dining room kitchen, Frank’s study, turning on lights wherever she went and opening closet doors.

She stopped when she got back into the living room. The house felt empty, for whatever that was worth. She reached for the phone, which was on the floor. There was no dial tone. She hung it up and waited a minute, then picked it up again. Dial tone. The numbers-where was the damn card?

There was some scratching and whining at the door, and she went to let Harry in. The dog was a bit wobbly and displaying total embarrassment, his head down and tail plastered between his hind legs.

“It’s okay, Harry. It’s not your fault,” she said, rubbing his head.

“You’re no match for ether.” She locked the front door again and went into the kitchen, the dog glued to her heels. She dropped the maul handle on the kitchen counter and found Train’s card crumpled in her skirt pocket. She reached for the phone again but then thought about it.

Was it tapped? Could he be listening right now? And which number should she call?

She looked at her watch. It was II: 15. From Great Falls to the Beltway was almost ten miles. Another ten around the Beltway to I-95. Aquia was at least twenty miles beyond that. He might not even be home yet. She looked at the numbers. Phone, car phone, and fax.

Fax.

Frank had a fax in the study, on the second house line.

She could send Train a fax, and there was no way he could listen in to that. She hurried to the study.

Train faxed back twenty minutes later: Did she want him to come back and had she called the cops?

I She replied, scribbling furiously with a ballpoint, the maul handle two feet away from her. Said she was pretty sure he was gone, and that no, she had not called the cops.

“Do you have a dog?”

“Yes, but old. Found him unconscious in the barn when it all started.

Ether. He’s back in the house now.”

“If dog can operate, take him through the house to make sure you are alone. Then lock up. I’ll be out there at first light. Don’t call cops unless you think he’s come back. This contact must go direct to Mcnair, not patrol cops. In emergency, use the phone, but assume it’s bugged.

Got a gun?”

Frank kept that huge government-model Colt .45 auto in the safe. She was pretty sure it was still there. But she hadn’t fired one since OCS.

“Yes.” she scribbled back to him. It was slow going, but hopefully secure. She never wanted to pick up a phone and hear that whisper again.

“Get it out. Keep it close. Keep dog close. Barricade bedroom door. I’ll contact Mcnair in the morning.”

She nodded to herself Keeping the dog close would not be a problem.

Harry was lying across her feet, trembling, his fur still reeking of ether.

“Okay. See you in the morning.”

“Hang in there. He was there-to warn you, not hurt you.

You are not the target,” Train replied, and then the fax machine went silent.

Not the target, she thought. Not yet, anyway. She crumpled all the flimsy paper into a trash can and opened up the safe. The big automatic was at the back. There was a full clip in the butt. She racked the slide back with some difficulty and chambered a round, then let the hammer down very carefully. It had been a long time since OCS and her small-arms training, but she still knew how to chamber a round. Firing it would be something else again. Probably take down a wall if she tried it. Gun in hand, she went around the house again with Harry, but he seemed much more interested in sticking to her than in sniffing out bad guys in the closets. When she was satisfied that no one was in the house, she checked locks and lights, then went upstairs to bed.

TUESOAY She gave up trying to get back to sleep a little after five.

Her night had been fitful, disturbed by dreams of whispering objects, and she had started awake with every night sound.

Harry looked at her accusingly when she finally turned on a light and got up, but he dutifully followed her downstairs after she had washed her face and combed her hair. She brought the big automatic with her, putting it down on the counter next to the coffeepot. It looked very much out of place.

It was still dark outside, but there were signs of light visible on the eastern horizon. First light, she thought, then realized she was still in her nightgown. She hurried upstairs and threw on some jeans and a sweater. She got back downstairs just in time to see the headlights of Train’s car rolling up into her driveway.

She went outside as Train got out. He waved to her when she said good morning. Then he went around to the back of the car, where he opened the two rear doors and called softly. An enormous Doberman hopped out onto the driveway, looked around briefly, saw Karen, and trotted right over to the porch steps. She was about to flee back into the house when Train gave a command and the dog stopped in its tracks at the top of the steps and sat down.

“What is that?” she asked.

Train laughed as he came over. “That is Gutter. He’s your new-and-improved security system.”

“Gutter?”

“You have to admit, the name lends a certain style,” he said, patting the dog’s sleek black head. “His real name is Gbtterddmmerung, but”Gutter’ works as a metaphor for everyday mayhem.”

“Will he eat Harry?” she asked as she headed back inside.

“Not if he’s submissive.”

She had to go get a leash before she could drag Harry out to the front porch. Harry adopted a disgustingly submissive posture in front of the statuelike Dobe, who looked down at Harry briefly before resuming his inspection of the morning sky. Karen took off Harry’s leash, and the old dog slunk down the porch steps and out of sight around the comer.

I”Okay, that’s all we need,” Train said. “There won’t be any trouble between those two. Now you.”

“Me what?” she said, eyeing Gutter.

“Sit down on the top step, right next to him. Do what I say. Do precisely what I say. Have you showered yet this morning?”

“I beg your pardon?” she said as she nervously sat down next to the dog, whose head was slightly higher than hers.

“Scent is all-important,” he replied. The dog looked at Train and waited. Train came up on the steps and sat down on the other side of the dog. He reached across the dog’s back and took Karen’s hand. Karen felt as if she was putting her hand in a big warm vise. He held her hand alongside the dog’s muzzle and bent down next to the dog’s face, speaking in German as he did so.

The dog looked first at Train and then back over his shoulder at Karen.

Then he wiggled like an eel and was all over her, nuzzling, sniffing, making happy whimpering sounds like a big puppy. He ended up with his head in her on top of their joined hands, his big -brown eyes watching her face carefully. She was suddenly very aware of Train’s hand on the tops of her thighs.

“Okay, now you,” Train ordered, letting go of her hand.

“Pet him; tell him he’s a good boy. Love it up a little. We’re telling him that he’s to be as loyal to you as he is to me.

We’ll do it a couple more times while I teach you some basic commands and his rules of engagement.”

She swallowed and complied, amazed at the transformation in the dog’s demeanor. Every Doberman she had ever seen looked underfed and keenly interested in rectifying that problem. This one was acting as if he wanted some warm Milk.

“Rules of engagement. That sounds like weapons talk,” she said.

“This is a weapon; it’s just in standby at the moment.

Gutter’s going to live in your house for a while. You ‘ re going to show him around inside; then later, when I get back, I’m going to show him around outside to define the perimeter. It’s actually an exercise in scent, and touching.

Dobes are really into touching. They’re extremely intelligent, and the good news is that they readily accept human females as dominant. When we’re all done, you’re going to be safe from creeps who come around here uninvited.”

“What would he do to an intruder?” she asked, continuing to pet the dog.

His shiny black hide felt like-she always imagined a seal would feel.

“If he was outside, he would bark and run the guy off, staying just behind him but out of the range of hand weapons until the bad guy leaves the defined perimeter. Inside, he wouldn’t make a sound until the creep was well past any escape routes. Dobes like to do that, too. Let people in but not out. After which, he would nail the guy to the floor by his throat until someone told him to let go or to eat him.

Pat him one more time and then get up. I’m going to demonstrate the bark.”

She smoothed her hands over the dog’s head one last time and got up.

Train also got up and gave a command. The dog sprang up into a standing position. Train gave another command and the dog broke out into a burst of the loudest barking Karen had ever heard. She clapped her hands over her ears in fright, and Harry left a visible piddle trail as he decamped across the front walk, heading toward the barn.

After five seconds, Train gave another command and the dog stopped.

“That’s bark. Here’s growl.”

Another command, and the front yard was filled with a menacing rumbling growl as the Dobe leaned forward on his haunches, looking at nothing in particular. The growl was punctuated with an occasional lip-lifting grimace that revealed what looked like at least a yard of glistening canine ivory. Another command and the dog was silent again.

“I’m not sure I can handle all this-” she said, looking at the dog’ who was still watching Train expectantly, waiting for the next command. The phone began to ring in the house.

“You’ll do fine. I’ve written all this down. Mostly, he’s just going to be here. You better get that.”

She slipped into the living room, followed by Gutter, who pushed his nose between the screen door I as she went through. Her neighbor Ken Parsons, of the perpetual lawn mower, was on the phone. She reassured him that everything was fine.

She smiled as she hung up. “I think I might be able to get used to Gutter,” she said, reaching down to pet the dog.

Gutter looked up at her approvingly. Train then told her to take the dog on a tour of the inside of the house, room by room. “Let him in your closet, and let him get a good scent of shoes. The laundry hamper, too.

I want him to know your scent, okay?”

She was almost blushing when they finished taking the dog around on his grand tour. They were back in the kitchen in ten minutes. Karen sat down in a kitchen chair,. and the dog parked himself between her feet.

“Okay,” Train said. “Remember that he wants to be next to you, as you can see, or at least in the same room with you. Or anywhere you go. Make eye contact often, and show affection. He’s worth it.”

“Did you raise him?”

“Yes. My family’s had Dobes for years. My father used to breed and show them. Gutter is four, and I’ve done most of his training. He even likes the water, which is unusual.

You should see him go fishing in the river.”

“The river is not quite a half mile that way,” she said. “maybe I’ll take him fishing.”

“He’d love it.” Train paused. “I need you to tell me about last night again. And then I have to get down to Fort Fumble.”

“Why9 What’s happened?” she asked as she fixed two cups of coffee.

“Checked my voice mail on the -way over here. Ms Legalness the JAG commands my unworthy civilian posterior into his presence first thing this morning. What’s the commute from here at this hour9”

“Forty-five minutes if you get out by six-forty. I’ll send you the back way.”

“Bad night, yes?” he asked.

She nodded, still feeling a slight tremble in her hands.

“Yes, bad night. Not much sleep.” She told him again what had happened.

The Dobe sat attentively on the kitchen floor between them. She rubbed the back of the dog’s neck absently.

“One question,” he said when she was done. “The voice-is there any chance it could have been Sherman?”

She looked at him and then closed her eyes, trying to remember the voice. “it was mechanical,” she replied. “There was an odd volume to it, as if there was some kind of obstruction. And what sounded like a precursor breath before he spoke.” She shivered. “It was really spooky.

But, no, I don’t think it was-Sherman. On the other hand-“

“On the other hand, it was artificial, wasn’t it?”

She nodded. “It could have been anyone, then,” she said.

“You’re still suspicious of him, aren’t you?”

He twisted his coffee cup around in his hands. “I still go back and forth. Listening to the cops last night, I found myself agreeing with their a-ain of thought. These Fairfax guys are pretty professional, and the pros tend to go with the Occam’s razor approach: The simplest solution is usually the solution. Then I would look at Sherman, see the distress in his face, and my heart would say, No way. This guy isn’t a killer.”

“So why are you still suspicious?”

“Well, you never saw anyone, except for the silhouette of those shoes through the crack under the garage door. He could have left the meeting, doubled back, parked the car out on Beach Mill Road somewhere, and walked back into the Property to terrorize you. Emphasis on the could have.”

“And then accused himself of two murders?”

“Arrgh,” Train said. “I hate it when you start getting logical.”

“So, shouldn’t we call Mcnair?” she asked.

“Let’s see what the JAG wants first. I want to go after Galantz, especially after this crap. But we need to be sure of our tasking. And I want to know why you were locked out of that file. II She shifted in her chair, looked at her coffee, then thought better of it. “But why wait to tell Mcnair?” she asked.

“Because the cops will immediately think Sherman. First thing they’ll do is pun him in and question him as to where he went last night after the meeting here. And my guess is he went home, maybe via a fast-food restaurant’somewhere along the way. Which means he would have no alibi.”

She nodded. “He doesn’t need that.,, “Tell me, can archived JAG investigation files be altered?”

“NO. The investigations are official records. The system’s m up specifically to prohibit alterations.”

Train thought about that. “Well, if that’s true, there’s something in that investigation file someone doesn’t want you to see. to see. I’m ( going to ask the good admiral about that. Then I hope to get through to my FBI contact. See what he can tell me about Galantz. The more meat we can put on the SEAL story, the less the cops will bother Sherman.”

She nodded, suddenly too tired to argue. This great big dog did seem very comforting. Train was getting up.

“I’ll hit the road now. I’ll come back and do Gutter’s outside perimeter training this afternoon. Stay in the house and keep Gutter with you. If you do go outside, say to the barn, keep Gutter with you. Just tell him to heel. If he needs to go to a tree, he’ll let you know, but then tell him to heel.”

He bent down to pet the dog one more time. Then he put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed gently. “Now,” he said briskly, “what’s the best way down to the Pentagon from here?”

She gave him directions and he left. She watched him go, surprised to find herself wishing he hadn’t gone. It would be very easy to get used to having him around.

Ninety minutes later, -Admiral Carpenter’s yeoman announced that Mr. von Rensel was out in the front office, as requested.

“Give me five minutes and then bring him in,” the admiral replied. “And don’t disturb us.” He hung up the intercom phone and called Captain Mccarty on the secure phone.

“Yes, Admiral.”

“I’m about to talk to Mr. von Rensel. I want to get his take on the Sherman business. The last update I had was from Karen Lawrence on Friday, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Right. Okay. Based on what the DNI told me, I think I’m going to tell him to lay off the SEAL angle. But I’m not going to tell him that we’ve been asked to lay off. Basically, I want to see what he does.”

“You mean you really want him to run free to see what the hell’s really going on here?”

“Basically, yes.”

Mccarty was silent for a moment. “If von Rensel actually flushes this guy,” he asked, “are we going to get across the breakers with the DNI and/or other interested parties?”

Carpenter thought for a moment before answering. “I’m not sure. I don’t think so. I don’t particularly sweat the Office of Naval Intelligence; they’re pretty far down the food chain in the intel world. Besides, the way I’m going to frame my instructions to von Rensel, I can always claim later that he was freelancing. The lifer spooks think he’s a loose cannon anyway. And if it starts to get wormy, I can always pull Karen out of it and let von Rensel and the spooks sort it all out in some dark alley.”

“Suppose it gets wormy before you find out about it?

The last thing spooks do is tell somebody when one of their operations goes off the rails.”

“I’ll think of something. But first I want to get an independent assessment from von Rensel.”

“Independent of Karen Lawrence?”

“Yeah. He’s an experienced investigator. She isn’t.”

There was a pause on the line. “Whatever you say, Admiral,” Mccarty said finally, his tone of voice implying that he wasn’t thrilled with the idea of using Train to check on Karen Lawrence.

Carpenter frowned to himself. “Just so,” he said, and hung up abruptly.

He resumed scribbling continents on an appeal letter while. waiting for the five minutes to elapse.

Finally, the yeoman brought in Train.

“Mr. von Rensel, come in. Have a seat.”

“Good morning, Admiral,” Train said, sitting down on the sofa. The admiral remained at his desk.

“You getting all settled in here in the puzzle palace?”

“Yes, sir.. I spent some time in ONI a few years back; not much has changed.”

“In ONI or the Pentagon?”

“Neither, Admiral. One’s a pile. of old concrete; the other’s a pile of … well.

Carpenter smiled. “Yes, precisely my view, Mr. von Rensel. Our so-called intelligence community is like an onion.

CIA, NSA, DIA, ONI, all that damned alphabet soup, and all rolled up in a tight little ball that makes you cry whenever you try to get into it.

What’s going on in the Sherman matter?”

Train paused to gather his thoughts. He wondered why Carpenter was asking him this question instead of Karen Lawrence, who was nominally in charge of the Sherman problem. Was Carpenter checking up on her? Or had the admiral perhaps detected her sympathy for Sherman? He launched into it.. He took fifteen minutes to bring the admiral up-to-date, including the events of the preceding night.

When he had finished, Carpenter was no longer smiling.

“Is Karen, Lawrence safe?” he asked.

Train told him about taking one of his Dobes out to her house. “But if there’s a rogue SEAL on ‘ the loose, no one is safe,” he concluded. “The good news is that Karen is not his target. Sherman is. The bad news is that someone’s been knocking off everyone who’s close to Sherman.”

“Are Karen Lawrence and Sherman ‘close’?”

Train hesitated for a fraction of a second. Good question, that one.

“Not in a personal sense, not that I know of. But she’s been with him at the Walsh apartment, the Walsh memorial service, the funeral, and two meetings with the cops, one in his house, one in her house. And somebody sure as hell knew where to find her last night.”

“Did she actually see this guy?”

“No, sir.”

“So nobody has ever seen this guy, right?”

“Correct. Nobody except Admiral Sherman, and that was twenty-some years ago. But I don’t think Karen imagined all this. She was really scared.

She put on a good front this morning, but whoever did this knew how.”

“So you think this Galantz guy is for real? I mean, all the records say he was lost in Vietnam. He’s even on the MIA list.”

Train hesitated. “It’s possible,” he hedged. “As you know, that MIA classification covers everything from someone who was actually observed being blown to little bits to guys who simply went out and never came back.”

“So he could be alive?”

“Admiral Sherman says he is, or at least was back in 1972. The only other possibility is that Sherman is doing it.

He’s had opportunity in at least a couple of these incidents.

Even last night, for instance. But what’s his motive?”

“So you’re coming down in favor of HMI Galantz,” Carpenter persisted, ignoring Train’s question.

Train wasn’t quite sure where this was going. “Possibly,” he said. “Or someone calling himself that. Oh, did I mention Sherman’s son?”

Carpenter shook his head patiently. Train told him about Jack, and the fact that, after many years of estrangement, Sherman had seen him twice recently, both times in circumstances that suggested the son knew something about what was going on.

“Curiouser and curiouser,” the admiral muttered. “Okay.

We’ve got two problems with this Sherman situation’ The first is that, given the Navy’s intense sensitivity to bad PR, Admiral Sherman is becoming a political liability.”

“The big guys are ready to just drop him over the side?”

Carpenter gave a small shrug. “There is an unlimited supply of eager-beaver flag-material captains in the surface warfare community who do not bring baggage of this sort along with them.” Train nodded. “Karen told me about their little sdance with Admiral Kensington. I take it he’s a heavyweight here in Opnav?”

“Heavy enough. Especially when the problem concerns a surface guy, and Sherman is surface Navy.”

Train nodded. “And the second problem: Might that involve a certain government agency?”

Carpenter gave him a speculative look. “It might,” he said.

Train stared down at the carpet. The picture was getting a little clearer, and he now understood why Carpenter was talking to him and not Karen. He laced his hands together and cracked his knuckles, then looked back at Carpenter, who was watching hirh intently.

“Are you telling me not to try to find Galantz?”

Carpenter got up from his desk and came around to sit in one of the chairs. “Not exactly, Train. I am going to order you to stay away from anybody’s efforts to find this Galantz individual. I am going to tell you not to hunt down Galantz yourself.”

““Going to’? As in orders that will be forthcoming soon?”

“Very soon.”

“And in the meantime?”

“In the meantime, I do order you to keep Karen Lawrence safe.”

Train nodded slowly. “And if that involves-“

The JAG raised his hands. “Use your best judgment on how to execute your tasking, Train. You need not bother me with details. In fact, I’d prefer you did not. But that’s your tasking: Keep Karen safe while she makes a determination that Admiral Sherman is either the victim of a setup or one diabolically clever villain. And your time is limited.

Remember what I am going to tell you-soon.”

Train nodded again and got up. “Got it. And I appreciate the latitude, Admiral. I think. I suppose if this thing goes off the tracks, I can expect to be chastised?”

“Most severely, although ultimately I’ll get over it.”

Train nodded. This was a game he recognized.

in probably doing the wrong thing here,” Carpenter said equably. “But it seems to me that Sherman deserves one chance, especially if he’s innocent.”

Carpenter got up walked back around to his desk. He picked up some papers and pretended to study them for a moment before continuing. “By the way, Karen had an archive request in to review the investigation records on the incident in Vietnam,” he said. “I’ve had her request intercepted. That investigation report is highly classified. But from what I saw, Sherman did the right thing in that incident.”

Train had been about to ask. He was glad the admiral had brought it up first. “Galantz may not think so,” he said.

Carpenter looked over at him. “You know that. I know that. That’s why I want you to keep an eye on Karen Lawrence. I have my reasons for having her on this case, but I don’t want her hurt.”

“I understand, Admiral,”

Train said, although he wasn’t sure he did.

“Good,” Carpenter said. “Remember, time is of the essence, especially for Admiral Sherman. That’s all.”

When the door closed, Carpenter sat back in his chair and thought for a moment, then punched the intercom.

“Get me a secure call into Admiral Kensington’s office,” he said. He punched off and waited. Kensington came on the line.

“Admiral Kdnsington.”

“Good morning, Admiral,” Carpenter said. “Further to our last conversation on the Sherman matter, I have a suggestion to make.”

There was a moment of silence. “Is this thing under control, Tom?”

Carpenter thought about the DNI’s little bombshell. “I think so, Admiral,” he said slowly. I

“Because if it isn’t, we need to do something. We’ve had i enough dirty laundry hanging out there lately.

I’m not sure any of us could stand this thing getting loose.”

“I understand. I think we need to take Sherman out of circulation for a few days.”

“I’m all ears.”

Train left the JAG’s office, shaking his head as he walked back to his own cubicle on the fourth floor. Neatly done, Admiral, he thought. You want me to beat the bushes, but you can always say that I was never tasked to find this guy.

If there was to be any trouble, Mrs. von Rensel’s bouncing baby boy, Train, had, in fact, been told to stay away from Galantz.

He reached his cubicle, checked his voice mail, and then called Karen to back-brief her on his meeting with Carpenter. “He wanted an update, soup to nuts, on the whole case.

I gave it to him.”

“You told him about last night?”

“Yup. That upset him. I also got the impression the bigs are stirring.”

“What did he say about that archived file?”

“That he blocked it. That it contains highly classified material. That it shows Sherman did the right thing back there, whfttever that means.

But we’re not going to see that report.

She was silent for a moment. “Any new instructions?” she asked.

It was Train’s turn to hesitate. He did not want to tell her what his tasking had been. She was nervous enough already.

“Not exactly,” he said. “The gist of it was to confirm that I’m to help you in your inquiries. So right now, I’m going to put on my NIS hat and enter some federal databases.”

“So you agree we should concentrate on the son first and not Galantz?”

There was a thread of concern in her voice.

“Galantz is complicated,” Train said. “Let me explain that when we’re not on an unsecured phone. There definitely might be other players in this game, though.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, oh. Hold that thought. Right now, see what you can get from Sherman on Little Boy Blue. If I can get a read on where the son is, maybe we’ll go see him this afternoon. If you’re up to it, that is.”, in up to that.”

“Okay. I’ll get back to you.”

He hung up and sat back in his chair. You really need to talk to Mchale Johnson, von Rensel. He sighed and got out his personal phone book, looked up a number, and then placed a call. Johnson wasn’t in, an anonymous voice said, so he left a call-back message and mentioned the word SEAL. Then he called the NIS database query center over in the Washington Navy Yard, identified himself, and asked them to call him back at the JAG IR division’s secure number. The database administrator got back to him in five minutes and he gave him the name and the few general match points he had regarding Jack Sherman’s military service, approximate age, and a last-known location in the vicimty of Quantico, Virginia. He told them he would have better-defined data and a Social Security number later in the day. He asked for searches within the military and FBI criminal identification and information systems, since Sherman had said the kid had been thrown out of the Marines. He put a priority label on his request and asked for a voice debrief, with a final report to be transmitted electronically into his PC address within the JAG local-area computer network as soon as possible..’ You say you’ll have better definition data this afternoon?” the administrator asked.

Train’s heart sank. Should never have said that.

“Yeah.”

“Then come back in with that data. Then we’ll do the coarse screen, Mr.

Train agreed and hung up. He sighed. He had hoped for a quick look, but the database people weren’t about to do something twice. He then decided to try one of the most sophisticated search tools available-namely, the telephone company’s information operator.

“Northern Virginia information, what city?”

“Woodbfidge, Quantico, Virginia.”

“Go ahead.”

“John Lee Sherman. Address unknown. Might be Triangle, or Dumfries, or just Stafford County.”

“One moment please.”

He waited. About half the time he went looking for someone, the guy was in the damned phone book.

“I have a John L. Sherman.”

“Let’s try that.”

“Hold for the number.”

Bingo, he thought, as he recorded the number. Then he called the database administrator back and luckily got a new voi e. He went through the identification drill again, but this time he gave him the telephone number, asking for an address trace. The database guys could do this on a local PC.

He was put on hold for a minute.

“Your boy’s phone is in the Cherry Hill area, right north of the base at Quantico. The billing address is a Triangle post office box, though. I can get a premises wiring locator from C&P, but it’ll take a day, and you’ll have to come in with a for-rnal coarse screen request. But that phone’s in Cherry Hill. “

“Much grass,” Train replied, and hung up. Do it like the pros, he thought. When in doubt, call goddamn Information.

He decided to check his voice mail again. One call. “For Dr. von Rensel from Dr. Johnson,” the man said. “Lunch at the New Orleans House in Rosslyn, eleven-fifteen. Today.

Dr. Johnson is really glad Mr. von Rensel called.”

Train blinked and looked at his watch. It was 10:45. He just had time to hop the Metro over to Rosslyn. He called Karen, but now there was no answer. He hung up, frowning.

Now where the hell did she go? And she did take the dog, I hope to hell.

Mchale Johnson was a very tall, almost cadaverous-looking man. He had a long, narrow, and very white face with, a prominent forehead, highly arched eyebrows, and a long, bony nose. He wore square-rimmed glasses, which magnified his pale gray eyes. His hair was lanky, disheveled, and going gray, like’the rest of him. He did not get up when Train approached the table, but continued to look around the room as if he was trying to remember something or someone. Train pulled out a chair, tested it for strength, and then replaced it with one from the adjacent table. The two women sitting at that table just looked at each other, declining protest.

“Dr. Johnson, I presume,” Train said. He was pretty sure that Mchale was indeed the man’s first name, but he doubted the Johnson part.

“Dr. von Rensel,” Johnson replied, tilting his head back to examine Train through those huge glasses. “You’ve gotten bigger. That’s almost hard to imagine.”

“Just spreading, probably,” Train replied, looking at the menu. The doctor business was a private joke between them.

Johnson held a doctorate in cybernetics, and he insisted on calling Train Doctor because of his law degree. And probably because it amused him to do so. Train put down his menu.

“Your secretary intimated that my phone call was, um, timely.”

Johnson nodded slowly. “My secretary. I’ll have to tell him that. But considering the subject, it was indeed timely.”