Mortal Allies

CHAPTER 16

The red message light was blinking incessantly when I returned to my room. I punched in the code and Edwin Gilderstone’s voice angrily shrieked to call him right away.

It was after midnight in New York, but Gilderstone sounded way too alert and poised to have been sleeping. I said, “Hi, Ed, it’s Drummond.”

He instantly screamed, “You lying bastard!”

“That’s me,” I admitted, though I was sure my parents would’ve sternly objected to my conceding that second point.

“You promised this was just between us.”

“And so it is, Ed. I haven’t said a word to anyone, not even my co-counsels. What’s the problem?”

“The problem? What’s the damned problem? I’m being followed.”

“Followed by who?”

“I don’t know. When people are trailing you, they don’t walk up and say,‘Hi, I’m John Smith from CID and I’ll be following you the next few days,’ do they?”

“So you think it’s CID?” I asked.

“I just told you I don’t know who they are. Aren’t you listening?”

“I’m listening, Ed. I’m just trying to sort through this. What makes you think you’re being followed?”

There was a brief pause and I could hear him draw in a deep breath, like he was trying to compose himself. “This morning, I went to the Post Exchange to buy toiletries, and as I left the academic hall a gray sedan pulled in behind me. It followed me the whole way to the PX. Later, when I went out for lunch, the same gray sedan followed me again.”

“Ed, I don’t mean to be argumentative, but couldn’t it just be a coincidence? West Point’s not New York City. It’s a small community, right? It really wouldn’t be odd to have the same car going to the same place you’re going to twice in the same day.”

“Drummond,” he said.

“Yes?”

“I warned you before, don’t condescend to me. Of course I considered that. Except the same gray sedan is parked halfway down the block right now. It’s one o’clock in the morning. I see two heads silhouetted every time another car passes.”

I supposed he had a point. “So you’re being followed. What makes you think I’ve got something to do with it?”

“Come on, Drummond. Yesterday you called to talk about Whitehall.”

“Look, I told you I wouldn’t say anything. I haven’t. I have no idea why you’re being followed. Maybe you brought it on yourself. Maybe it’s some guy you had an affair with and he’s still pining for you.”

That brought on a nasty chuckle. “Fuck off, Drummond.”

“Okay,” I conceded. “But I haven’t uttered a peep to anybody.”

We chatted a moment longer, him still accusing, and me maintaining my innocence. We finally hung up on each other.

Of course I had something to do with his being followed. My mind turned to that snarling son of a bitch with the colonel’s leaves named Menkle, from the registrar’s office. He knew I’d spoken with Gilderstone. Maybe he sicced somebody on him.

But what was the point of trailing Gilderstone? And if the followers were pros, they would never have been sloppy enough to get spotted, especially by a rank amateur. Unless they were either bungling amateurs themselves, or they were pros who meant to be seen. Assuming they were pros, why would they do that? To harass him, of course. But why harass some old gay who was on the verge of retirement anyway? Spite? Or were they trying to muzzle him?

I rolled that one around the noggin for a while and had a sudden impulse. I pulled my pocketknife from my pocket and pried open the ear and mouthpiece on my telephone. It was the only other possibility I could think of.

I was in such a hurry, I trashed the hotel’s phone so badly I was going to have to add it to my room bill.

I wasn’t worried about that, though. What I was really worried about was the little tiny black thing, hardly bigger than a ladybug, that was stuck inside the earpiece.

During my time with the outfit, I’d had instruction on electronic listening and tracking devices. I wasn’t an expert by any means, and the technology had changed radically the past seven or eight years, what with miniaturization and digitization and whatnot, but I still recognized a listening device when I saw one.

I sat and fingered it and felt angry and befuddled. That son of a bitch Mercer and his whiz-girl Carol Kim.

I went to the window and peeked out at the parking lot. It was filled with cars, but I knew which one to look for, and sure as hell, there was a gray Aries four-door sedan parked near the back of the lot.

I guess I looked pretty pissed off, because the guy wearing sunglasses in the passenger’s seat next to Carol Kim spotted me coming, tapped her hurriedly on the shoulder, and she quickly started the engine. She backed out so hard she rammed into the bumper of the car behind her. There was a hard crunch and red and yellow glass cascaded onto the tarmac, but she didn’t pause or hesitate. She spun the wheel hard to the right and peeled away. All I had a chance to do was kick the side of the car as it sped by.

It was a pretty dumb thing to do. Not only was it infantile, but it hurt like hell and sent me flying back on my ass. I scraped up my hands pretty good, not to mention my butt, and thank God I wore Army jump boots or I probably would’ve broken at least a few toes. I limped and cursed the whole way back to the hotel, back up in the elevator, and into my room.

I went through everything. I took the pictures off the walls, unscrewed the lightbulbs, checked under the bed, searched my clothes in the closet. I found two more bugs, but there could’ve been dozens more.

When had they done it? Had they known from my reservation which room I’d get and planted them before I arrived? Or had they broken in afterward? Maybe one of the maids did the dirty work.

So how much damage was done? Had I said or listened to anything that would harm my client? Nothing overly alarming popped out, but if you put everything together, you could draw some fairly strong conclusions about where I was trying to go with the defense. But then that was different from where Katherine and her crew were trying to go, so maybe it wasn’t all that damaging.

On the other hand, maybe I wasn’t the only member of the defense team being bugged. And if I were the prosecutor and could get inside the head of the defense team, I’d have a field day. A guy with Eddie Golden’s murderous dexterity would do even better.

I wanted to call Katherine and warn her, but the damn phone was trashed on the side table. I raced up to the HOMOS building, walked briskly through the main office, and stuck my head inside Katherine’s office.

For once she wasn’t chatting on the phone, because there were three civilians hunched over her desk. They were studying a big map. They all looked perfectly normal, but the mood in the room seemed conspirational, so I assumed they were from the big contingent of protesters pouring into Seoul.

I politely said, “Excuse me, Katherine, we need to have a word. In private, if you please.”

She shot me an exasperated look that quickly changed to a resigned look, then said to her friends, “Could you all please excuse us a moment?”

To which I replied, “We need to have this talk outside.”

No doubt she anticipated I wanted to either apologize for my earlier transgressions or launch another blistering attack on her. She followed me into the parking lot and over to the big oak tree where she’d so recently given that splendid interview that had done so much to advance my career.

“We’ve got a new problem,” I told her.

She hrummphed once or twice, like she was clearing her throat, although the fact that she was simultaneously rolling her eyes gave it a wholly different implication. “What’s our new problem, Drummond?”

“I found bugs in my telephone and around my room. They’re fairly sophisticated, because they’re real tiny.”

It took her a moment to fully swallow this news. She stared at me. Then she began taking her characteristically small, measured paces.

“Who put them there?”

This was where it was going to get tricky, because I wasn’t supposed to tell her about my secret liaisons with Buzz Mercer and his spooky gang. Were it anybody but her, with her penchant for flying into indignant fits and chatting up every reporter in sight, I might’ve ignored the rules. But this was Miss Blabbermouth.

“I haven’t a clue,” I somewhat lied. “But I’d guess it’s either the South Koreans or our own government.”

“What if we have these electronic devices analyzed? Will that tell us?”

“Probably not. Anyone sophisticated enough to use them makes sure they’re untraceable.”

She stopped pacing and gave me a discerning look. “Have you said anything on the phone that could be a problem?”

“I don’t think so, but you never know.”

“Uh-huh,” she said, resuming her walk as she tried to discern the full context of this new twist.

“Katherine,” I said, interrupting her thinking, “if they’ve done up my room, maybe they’ve done yours and the others as well. They may even have wired the hair parlor.”

This was the point when her composure took a radical turn for the worse, because if the prosecution had access to every conversation we’d ever had, well, then our client was screwed. Picture being in a poker game where you can see through every card on the table; then triple the implications.

She cursed a few times in a real unladylike way and stomped her tiny feet like a pouting child. “Shit, I can’t believe this.”

“Believe it.”

“This means a mistrial!” she finally declared.

“I don’t think so.”

“I’ve never heard of such a gross violation of legal ethics. You read about this kind of thing in novels, but I’ve never heard of it in real life.”

To which I very intelligently said, “Yes, well…”

“You can’t honestly think we can avoid a mistrial, can you?”

“Well,” I said, in my most conciliatory tone, since it was actually a surprisingly dumb question from someone with her legal acumen.

“Well what, Drummond?”

“How do you get a mistrial for a trial that hasn’t even begun?”

She began ticking off her angry little fingers. “Okay, you get the venue changed. You get the prosecutorial team disqualified. You get their bar licenses revoked. You lodge a motion to have the charges dismissed.”

“And if it turns out it was only my hotel room?”

“You’re a member of the defense team.”

“And if I can’t testify I said anything that compromises our case?”

“I don’t care. The fact they’ve been listening is all we need to file a motion.”

“No, you need evidence that ties the listening devices straight to the prosecution. You got that evidence, Katherine? I didn’t think so. Besides, our odds of getting a change of venue in this case are about zero. So what would we accomplish?”

Since everything I’d said was true, for once Katherine was out of arguments.

I said, “Look, I’ll arrange to get our rooms swept every day. Imelda knows how to handle it.”

“All right. But if she finds any more bugs – and I mean one single bug – I’m blowing the whistle. Have her report directly to me.”

“Okay, fine. There’s one other thing you and I have to talk over.”

“What’s that?”

I put on my most afflicted, woe-is-me expression. “Aren’t I sharing things with you?”

“Yes,” she admitted.

“Aren’t I being helpful and open? Like this little thing?”

“Well, yes,” she said, completely unaware, of course, about the separate investigation I was so diligently conducting.

“I interviewed Bales this morning. He said you interviewed him, too. A week ago. How come I didn’t know about it?”

“Oh that,” she said, with an innocent pout. “I just never mentioned it. There’s just so damned much on my mind. I forgot. Sorry.”

I wasn’t buying it. Carlson has a memory like a computer hard drive. It loses nothing. It overlooks nothing. And it’s immune to viruses, power failures, and assorted other natural and unnatural disasters. She didn’t get to be little Miss Always First in the Class on low brain juice.

“So it was a simple oversight?” I suggested.

“Yes, a simple oversight. That’s all it was.”

“I mean, you’d already studied the autopsy results. You’d already interviewed Bales. Is there anything else you’ve already done I should know about?”

“Like what?”

If it was anybody but her I would’ve taken that question at face value. “Anything?” I said, with a menacing look.

Her expression became suddenly thoughtful, as though she were rummaging through her memory banks for anything worth noting.

“Katherine?” I said, going on a hunch.

“What?”

“Tell me about Keith.”

“What do you want to know about Keith?”

“I’m just wondering why he got picked. Was he a target of opportunity? Or was he doing something that caused him to be targeted?”

Again she went into her contemplative mode. “Off the top of my head, I can’t think of anything.”

“No?”

“No. Nothing.”

“Because if I were to find out you were holding out on me, I’d probably get real pissed off.”

Those green eyes searched my face. “Do you have some reason to doubt me?”

I had a thousand reasons to doubt her. A million reasons. Hell, I couldn’t think of a single reason to trust anything she said. But in the interest of our newfound partnership, I thought it best to confine this discussion to the subject at hand.

“Only that in the embassy Keith claimed his specialty was suing the government. But he accompanied you in your interview with Bales, didn’t he?”

“He was along, yes,” she conceded. “But don’t give it any significance. He has a good legal mind so I wanted him along.”

“But you must admit it’s curious that an attorney whose specialty is civil suits is collecting evidence in a murder investigation.”

She smiled. “My specialty is civil rights narrowed down to homosexual suits. Look what I’m doing.”

And I had to admit she had a very good point. Anyway, I needed to go get some things done, like arrange for Imelda to have all our rooms and offices swept for bugs.