House on Fire

17

Seven years ago

I was still recovering from a gunshot wound I’d gotten in Afghanistan, working on Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling in southwest DC for a covert unit of the Defense Intelligence Agency, when I got an email with an order to report to something called DCIS, the Defense Criminal Investigative Service. No explanation, of course. DCIS was based not in the Pentagon but in a generic office building in Alexandria. They uncovered fraud and corruption within the Pentagon and in the defense procurement system. That sounded cool to me.

Anyway, I went where I was told. When I got there, I went to a conference room, where I was met by a very stern-faced woman around my age who acted a lot older. Major Margret C. Benson looked over my service jacket for a while before launching into a no-bullshit briefing on the operation I was joining. She was running it. The target was a civilian procurement officer in the Pentagon named Harkins who was rumored to be corrupt. Harkins was meeting someone for dinner at the Capital Grille who he believed worked for a big defense contractor. The whole dinner was being choreographed, audiotaped and videotaped, and I was to be one of the lowly techs who sat in a white panel van during dinner, making sure the feed was good, standing by to replace any defective component if need be.

Major Benson was small and lithe, almost wiry. Her uniform always seemed a size too big. She was cute but serious as all hell, never cracked a smile. She thanked the DIA for providing much-needed manpower. Then she drilled us on how the op was going to proceed.

When she was finished, I made an attempt to get out of tech duty. I suggested that I could, instead, play the defense contractor executive. After all, I’d just served a couple of combat deployments, yet no one knew who I was. I could talk armaments knowledgeably. It was a ballsy suggestion, for a neophyte, and she cut me right off. “I got dibs on that, Sergeant Heller,” she said with a slight smile. I reminded her I was no longer “sergeant,” since I was now a civilian, but that didn’t stop her from calling me Sergeant Heller.

A few hours later, I was sitting in the van watching our target, Harkins, the greedy procurement officer, sip his water and gnaw at his bread, waiting. The broadcast quality was excellent.

Then a big, blowsy woman came up to the table, all big hair and French manicure and copious makeup. She spoke in a strong Texan twang, ordered a Cosmo, and soon they were laughing and drinking and making deals. He was drinking bourbon, and she was inhaling Cosmos. Her accent dripped sugar syrup. I wondered about this woman. Either she really was Marjorie Cairns of Irving, Texas, or she was Meryl Streep.

“Who the hell is that?” I asked one of the other techs in the van.

“You don’t know? That’s Major Benson.”

“That’s Maggie Benson? Underneath the big shoulders and all that hair?”

“Yeah.”

“Man, she’s good,” I said.

“Oh, you have no idea.”