Man in the middle

CHAPTER TEN

Bian flashed her Department of Defense building pass and got us quickly past the security checkpoint and into the fluorescent bowels of the beast. Every time I enter this building I feel a flutter in my stomach; it's called panic. In civilian life, only two things are certain, death and taxes, whereas the career military officer faces a third, worse certainty: an assignment inside this building. I had so far managed to avoid this fate. So far. Yet, like bullets on the battlefield, I knew that somewhere inside the Pentagon was a desk with my name on it.

"My office is upstairs. Fifth floor," Bian informed me. "Mr. Waterbury asked me to check in before the interview."

"Let's not, and just say we did."

"He'll notice. He's sharper than you think."

"Fooled me."

She chuckled, and we kept walking.

In the eyes of the great American public, the Pentagon is a huge and confusing labyrinth that somehow burns through some four hundred billion dollars of taxpayer cash per year.

The building, however, in nearly every human and architectural sense, is amazing. There actually are tours, and the guides will inform you this is the earth's largest office structure, comprising some 6,636,360 square feet, occupying 29 acres, able to house about 23,000 workers, in varying levels of comfort and discomfort.

In short, it is a gigantic memorial to function over form, and incredibly, the entire thing was constructed in a sixteen-month span of hyper-frantic activity during the heyday of the Second World War, at the amazing price of less than fifty million bucks.

I once cited this remarkable statistic to a defense contractor pal. He laughed and commented, "Morons. We're gettin' ten times that just to refurbish the basement. And we stretch it out for years."

Other interesting esoterica-the building boasts some 284 rest-rooms, the world's largest collection of white porcelain bowls under one roof, over 2,000 freestanding commodes, and half as many wall-mounted urinals. Regarding this inviting statistic, I'll restrict myself to one useful observation: You would be an idiot to buy a home downstream.

In fact, three of the four military services have their headquarters within these walls; the Marine Corps has its own sandbox within walking distance uphill. The underlying spirit behind this shotgun marriage is that proximity will force the services to work together in neighborly harmony. The official term is unification, and it would seem to make sense, because after all, the four military services perform the same basic mission, the same rudimentary purpose-laying waste to nations that piss us off. And why it makes sense is exactly why it doesn't work: We're all vying for the same taxpayer bucks, pool of human talent, and opportunities to strut our stuff.

Bian and I walked past a wall on which were hung, in a neat, orderly line, the official seals of the United States Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps. The message here-all for one, one for all, e pluribus unum.

Maybe the tourists believe this.

My own service, the Army, is the oldest, the largest, the smartest, with obviously the most primo JAG Corps. The Marine Corps are also fairly good guys, primarily because they act and think like the Army, except they're a lot more hormonal, with a truly monumental gift for blowing smoke up your butt.

The Air Force, newest of the services, is like an orphan teenager with a fat trust fund-prematurely arrogant and totally obsessed with all the cool shit it can buy. Nobody likes them, but we all envy them.

Last, our seafaring comrades, an overdressed yachting club whose main contribution to national security seems to be propping up bars and bordellos in strange and exotic ports.

The other services might have a different take on all this-of course, it's a well-known fact that their outlooks are distorted by their small-minded prejudices.

But in fact, how each service does its job does tend to color its culture, traditions, worldview, and strategic perspective.

The Navy, for instance, sees the globe as three-quarters water, with several largely irrelevant landmasses called continents populated by quarrelsome people who somehow become scared shitless the instant an aircraft carrier rolls up off their shore.

For the Air Force the world is this really neat target range, conveniently dotted with cities and towns to drop stuff on-so long as it doesn't interfere with happy hour.

But for the Army, combat is neither a balmy voyage nor a fleeting glimpse from a cockpit window-it's a destination, a commitment, a long, messy affair from which there are only two roads home: victory or retreat, with your shield or on it.

The Marine Corps, as I said because it does essentially the same thing as the Army, thinks like the Army. But because its purse is controlled by the squids, it quacks like a duck. Get a Marine away from his naval overseers, however, put a few free drinks into him or her, and you'll get an earful about the Navy. Message to my aquatic friends: They don't really like you.

The point is, the Pentagon is a large melting pot of pent-up passions, jealousies, and conflicting strategic visions, so to help things along, a joint staff, manned by officers drawn from the four services, are supposed to shelve their loyalties, and their career aspirations, to direct the services to work together cooperatively, rationally, and efficiently. This is like hiring the marriage counselor who's fucking your wife to fix your marriage.

As if there aren't enough staffs, there is one more, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, or OSD, comprised largely of civilian bureaucrats-a mixture of career civil servants and political appointees-with a smattering of uniformed people to fetch the coffee and man the copiers. The purpose of this curious institution is to perform the constitutional function of civilian oversight. Bottom line here: Americans don't want to wake up one morning in a banana republic run by guys in funny suits.

All this aside, however, where it counts, on the battlefield, soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines could care less who's humping who in the Pentagon corridors-they willingly give their lives for one another, and they often do.

Anyway, we had walked up a long stairwell and now we were in a long hallway on the fifth floor, the Pentagon's equivalent of an attic. I mean, you can bet the Secretary of Defense's nephew doesn't work on this floor.

Bian stopped in front a steel-encased door and began punching numbers into an electronic keyboard. A placard beside the door read "Office of Special Investigations"; obviously, this was a skiff, like a large walk-in safe.

There was a click and she shoved open the door. We entered a well-lit, windowless office space, a warren of office cubes where about twenty people were performing various activities, from punching computer keys and chatting on phones to the happier few who were gathering their coats and calling it a day.

A number of people looked up and waved or said hello to Bian; she seemed popular with her workmates, always a good sign. We walked directly to the rear of the skiff, where there was an office door; she knocked, and we entered.

Mr. Waterbury was seated behind his desk, hunched over and scribbling on a form. We stood and waited, and he ignored us, pulling more forms out of an in-box and not looking up.

I have a low threshold for self-important pricks, and after thirty seconds of this nonsense, I said to Bian, "I have better things to do. We're outta here."

His head snapped up and he affected a surprised look. "What do-? Oh… Drummond, Tran… you're here."

"Were you expecting somebody else?"

"I'm a busy man. This is an important office."

"You asked us to drop by. We're here. What do you want?"

He was used to doing the browbeating, so my directness threw him off and he looked confused for a moment.

Anyway, Waterbury's office was physically small, and the room and the top of his desk-like his mind, and like his personality- were neat and barren, devoid of any of the normal signs of human habitation. The lone ornamentation was a photograph of the Secretary of Defense hanging prominently in the middle of the wall. Upon closer examination, I noted that it was neatly autographed with a short inscription that, for all I knew, read, "To the biggest tightass in the building-don't let up." This, of course, is the kind of bureaucratic pornography people normally display to impress guests and underlings. In Waterbury's case, I suspect he did it in the event the Secretary dropped by for a cup of coffee, unlikely as that might be. People who owe their jobs to patronage are always a little insecure; they turn ass-kissing into a high art.

In addition to the desk, I observed three stand-up wall safes with Top Secret magnetic strips on the drawers, and to his rear, a large mahogany bookshelf filled with about a hundred precisely aligned regulations and manuals. George Orwell dreamed of rooms, and of men, like this.

His eyes studied Bian, then me. He said, motioning at the absence of chairs, "I won't offer you seats. I don't believe in them."

"Then how do you get your ass to levitate like that?"

"I meant I don't encourage subordinates to relax in my office."

I knew what he meant. "I can't imagine anybody relaxing in your presence, Mr. Waterbury." I smiled.

He obviously understood the underlying message and did not appreciate it, because he did not smile back. Lest you think I was screwing with Waterbury just for the fun of it, he was speaking to me in this really condescending tone. To borrow a metaphor, he was the lion back in his own hunting ground, informing the interloper who was the king of this jungle. To stretch that metaphor a bit further, I'm like a hyena-I scavenge where I like, am quicker on my feet, and my sound is very annoying. Also, it was fun.

He came to the point and asked us, "Did you learn anything from Mrs. Daniels?"

Bian started to reply, and I cut her off. "Like what?"

"Answer the question, Drummond."

"Oh… well… she smokes Camels. About three packs a day. She has a thing for cheap gin. Her car and face need paint jobs, her house-"

"I don't care about all that. Anything relevant to Daniels's death?"

I stared down at him. "It will be in my report. When I get around to writing one, you can read all about it."

His eyes narrowed. He said to Bian, "Major, you do work for me, right?"

"Yes sir, and-"

"Then answer the question."

After a moment, Bian said, "We learned nothing relevant to Daniels's death. She didn't know why her husband died, or how."

He studied her face, then mine. He informed us, "I think it was suicide."

"It wasn't," I replied.

"That's your view." He added, "I called the Arlington police and had a long conversation with Detective Sergeant Enders. The ballistics results came in. The gun belonged to Daniels."

"We assumed that-"

"And a preliminary match was made between the splatter on the pistol and Daniels's blood type."

"We also assumed that," I informed him. "If you'd be so good, keep your nose out of this investigation."

"This investigation is half mine. I'll involve myself as I see fit."

I looked at him and said, "Major Tran informed me that you're a former military policeman."

"That's right. Twenty-five years' service. Damned good one, if I say so. My commands always led in closure rates."

"Twenty-five years. I'll assume then that you know the basic rule of criminal procedure-let the investigators do their job."

As you might expect, I work with the MPs and CID types a lot. As cops go, they tend to be excellent; for some reason the military concepts of discipline and obedience and the societal concepts of law and order are a marriage made in hell. Also, unlike cops in civilian communities, the military cop does not exist in a world apart, feels no disorienting distance from his community, nor is there a blue wall of silence that pops up whenever the poop hits the fan. Rank is rank in the Army, and the military policeman is well advised to remember it. You can give a speeding ticket to the Secretary of the Army, and I know an MP private who did. But there had better be an up-to-date calibration record at the MP station for the speed gun, which explains why the private was a sergeant when he first became my client before his court-martial.

Occasionally, however, one finds an individual who transcends these boundaries and traditions. I suspected that Waterbury was such a man, and I would bet he wasn't fondly remembered by the military communities he oversaw.

In fact, Waterbury told me, "I weighed into investigations whenever I felt it was necessary. My MPs appreciated it, too."

"Well, I don't."

We stared at each other a moment.

Satisfied that he made his petty point, he informed me, "As I said, Enders and his detectives are leaning toward a ruling of suicide."

"Good. That's exactly what we want them to conclude at this stage."

He looked thoughtful for a moment, then leaned toward me and said, "The position of the Defense Department is that we will subscribe to whatever determination the police-the proper civil authorities-whatever they decide."

"Why do I think you have something to add?"

"You're right, Drummond. You and Tran will confine your investigation to the possibility of a security leak. How Daniels died is neither the purpose of this investigation nor is it your business, nor will you interfere with or duplicate the work the civilian authorities are doing." He finally came to the real point of this dialogue and said, "When you speak with Mr. Tigerman, you'll contain your questions to that realm of inquiry."

"The question of Daniels's death and a security leak are possibly related. You know that."

"That's speculation. In the mind of the investigating detective, we're dealing with a suicide, not homicide. Daniels was certainly a ripe candidate… a broken marriage, a foundering career… Who knows what else was going wrong in his life or his head?"

It appeared that Mr. Waterbury had done a little research and investigation since we last spoke. Or maybe he knew all about Clifford Daniels all along, but he and the boys upstairs-actually, downstairs-had put their heads together and figured out how to handle this thing-and Sean Drummond.

I said, "Why don't I tell you what else? He had an order to testify before a congressional investigating committee."

"Irrelevant. I'll reiterate-this investigation is not about his death."

"Bullshit."

He narrowed his eyes at me. "It also strikes me, Drummond, that I had better remind you that Albert Tigerman is not a suspect. Nor will he be treated like one. He is an important man, a busy man. He has agreed to meet with you out of courtesy." He added, "You will have five minutes."

Bian protested, "Sir, five minutes is-"

"Is more than enough. Choose your questions wisely. In fact, I'm coming with you. Step over the line, and I'll gladly terminate the interview."

I said, "What are you afraid of, Waterbury?"

"Deal with it, Drummond." He stood. "Follow me."