Secret sanction

Chapter 17

The fellow waiting for me back at my office looked like a spook. Maybe it was all those James Bond movies. Or maybe it was all those spymaster novels that were the rage during the cold war, but sunglasses and trench coats had become the shibboleths for anybody connected with intelligence collection. Now just how an NSA guy expected to be perceived as a daring spy was beyond me. I mean, give me a break. NSA guys and gals don’t do secret missions or any of that crap. Hollywood sometimes portrays them as furtive skulduggers, but that just goes to show what happens when you give guys like Oliver Stone a camera and a license to interpret the universe. The NSA folks are terrestrial gazers. They rely on satellites and fancy airplanes with lots of odd gizmos to do all their work. Still, I guess you can’t fault them for wanting to exploit that spurious image Hollywood has created for them. I mean, it’s a cheap way to have a little sex appeal.

At any rate, this guy was sitting in a chair beside my office door, trench coat slung across his lap, Washington Post splayed open, just trying his damnedest to look like some nonchalant, hotshot, dashing operative. Actually, he pulled it off pretty well. He was a handsome guy with slicked-back blond hair, grayed nicely at the temples, and by his build I’d say he and the NSA gymnasium were fairly well acquainted. Most NSA folks look like clerks with wide, flat asses. That’s what comes from sitting all day and peering at the world through a satellite aperture.

“Hi,” I said as I walked past him.

The newspaper was instantly closed, he popped out of his chair and followed me. “You’re Major Drummond?”

“Last time I checked,” I said.

He trailed me into my lair, where I got myself situated behind my desk, and he got his self situated in front of my desk. Digging his wallet out of his trench coat, he flung it open to show me some kind of ID. He tried to do this swiftly, the way some cops do, but I caught a glimpse of the letters NSA before he slammed it shut with a quick, violent swinging motion. I wondered if this guy was on steroids.

I said, “I guess you got my request.”

“The home office back in Maryland got it. They asked me to make contact with you.”

“Good. You’ve done your job well. We’re now in contact.”

My wiseass manners were lost on this guy. He said, “I always do my job well. And you’re in luck, Major. We did have a satellite focused on Zone Three during the period in question.”

“Great. When can I have the pictures?”

“Well, I’m afraid that’s going to take a while. Zone Three is a large area. In fact, nearly two hundred square miles. There’s a great deal of human activity inside that sector. We’ve requested Tenth Group to provide us the coordinates of the base camp, and the exact location of the ambush. Once we have those, our analysts should be able to do the cutouts. You want film or stills?”

“Both. I’d like to look at everything you’ve got and see what I can tell myself.”

“Suit yourself.”

“Do your people know I’m in a hurry?”

He said in a very condescending way, “Of course they know. Everybody wants our stuff in a hurry. In case you hadn’t noticed, there’s a war going on just north of here.”

There was something about this guy I didn’t like. I didn’t like his eyes, which reminded me of a couple of pale blue marbles stuffed inside a pair of narrow sockets. There was no life in those eyes, only color, like they were artificial. But there was something else. I couldn’t put my finger on it. There just was something.

I said, “I didn’t know you guys were directly supporting Tenth Group.”

“Sure.”

“And you’ve got a facility here at Tuzla?”

“Located right beside the Air Force’s C3I facility. It’s just a small setup, but it’s a secure facility. You can view the shots there.”

“What if I want to take pictures out?”

He broke into a knavish smile. “Uh-uh. That’s not gonna happen.”

“Why not?”

“Because they’re too highly classified.”

“Look, Mr… uh, I didn’t really catch your name.”

The smile changed to a half-assed smirk. “That’s because you weren’t meant to. Just call me Mr. Jones.”

I said, “Damn, that’s real original.”

He said, “Yeah, I’m a real clever guy. Ask anyone.”

Now I knew what I didn’t like about this guy. My office was pretty tiny. There was barely enough oxygen for one pushy wiseass, which meant he was crowding my airspace.

I said, “So what happens if I decide I have to include some of your satellite shots in my investigation packet?”

“That’s your problem. They’re not leaving my facility.”

“Am I gonna have to push this up the line?”

“Push as far up as you like, buddy. These shots were taken by a brand-new experimental satellite, with capabilities I’m not about to describe to someone like you. The President himself couldn’t order me to release those pictures.”

I brooded over that a moment. “How do I get hold of you?” I finally asked.

“You don’t. I’ll get hold of you when we’re ready.”

“You’re stationed here?”

“Yep. They called me from home station this morning and told me to assist you. Just be a good boy, and we’ll make this as painless as possible for both of us.”

“Gee, thanks. I’m really looking forward to working with you,” I said as he walked out the door.

This guy really bothered me. His eyes bothered me. His manners bothered me. You know what bothered me more than anything, though? The Washington Post tucked under his arm. And that silly trench coat. It hadn’t rained in Tuzla in days. The sun was out and was baking everything in sight. I walked out and found Imelda, who was busily reviewing the transcripts we had taken back at Aviano.

“Hey, Imelda, do me a favor.”

“I don’t do favors,” she grumbled. “I only follow orders.”

“Right. Then do me an order. Call Washington and find out what the weather’s been like the past twenty-four hours.”

“How come? You planning on takin’ a trip yesterday?” She cackled, and I had to admit it was one of the funnier things I’d ever heard her say. I guess part of me was starting to rub off on her. Unfortunately, it was the bad joke part.

“Actually, my car’s parked at Andrews Air Force Base,” I told her, “and I just remembered I left the window open. Oh… one other thing.”

“What’s that?”

“Where are you storing our case materials at night?”

“Those cabinets over there,” she said, pointing at three large gray military-issue file cabinets.

“Requisition a safe immediately. You, or one of your assistants, sleep next to those cabinets till it gets here.”

Her eyebrows went up a notch or two, but she was a smart lady. She didn’t ask.

I went back into my office and called my big new buddy Wolky. I very nicely told him I was hereby requisitioning the services of two of his strapping military policemen to stand guard outside my building’s doorway every night.

A moment later, Imelda came in to inform me it had been raining torrentially in Washington the past twenty-four hours. Reagan National Airport was closed. Dulles International was closed to everything but emergency flights. The rain, however, had miraculously missed Andrews Air Force Base, so my car was safe. She frowned deeply when she reported this. In Imelda’s world, any idiot stupid enough to leave his car windows open deserved ruined electronics and mildewed seats.

The truth was, though, my car wasn’t really parked at Andrews. I was just wondering how Mr. Jones got here so promptly. That smug, deceitful little liar. He didn’t walk down the street; he took off from Andrews.

But why did he fly all this way? And why was he so secretive about his name? And why that spurious lie about being stationed here? People who make their living gathering and peddling secrets eventually become secretive by nature, but Mr. Jones was stretching things a little.

I pondered this until there was a knock on the door, and I looked up to see my two CID buddies, Martie and David, anxiously waiting to be invited in.

“Please,” I said, standing up and walking over to shake hands.

Martie said, “Hi, Major. Hope we’re not bothering you.”

“No, no bother at all.”

“Good. David and I thought we’d stop by and maybe discuss a few more things with you.”

“Sure.”

They threw themselves into a pair of seats and spent a moment getting organized. Martie’s face was kind of cold and detached, while David looked like he had a couple of big hemorrhoids that were bothering him terribly. These are what professional crimebusters call clues. Their moods had changed since this morning.

Martie said, “Have you seen copies of the two articles published on the front page of this morning’s Herald?”

I admitted I hadn’t, so he handed me a couple of pages that had obviously been faxed to him. The first was a headline banner about Jeremy Berkowitz and his murder. It was a nice piece, exalting him as one of the nation’s foremost military experts, a courageous, dedicated journalist, and an all-around saint of a guy. It was the kind of puffy eulogy journalists always write about one another, ending with a long, tear-jerking paragraph about everything Jeremy did for the world, and how much that world was now going to miss him. That kind of stuff. Somehow, I managed not to break into sniffles.

The second piece was the final story Berkowitz filed, the one about my investigation. Only it wasn’t even remotely the story he told me he was going to write. This was a very shallow, vague thing about how the investigation was still ongoing, how the investigators were working tirelessly to complete their job, how the facts were slowly unfolding. I tried not to show my surprise.

Martie was now angled back in his chair with this real ambiguous expression. “That the same piece he told you he was going to write?” he inquired, and not in a friendly way, either.

This is one of the problems with CID guys. They have real short memories. This morning I was his best buddy, and by evening I’m being treated like the Boston Strangler.

I calmly said, “He never told me what he was going to write.”

“But you said-”

“I said he seemed very excited. I said he alluded that he had an inside source. How the hell would I know what he was going to write?”

“Your office staff says Berkowitz spent over ten minutes in your office. This morning you gave us the impression that he barely stopped by, only briefly, to confirm a few details.”

“And I stand by that. We also engaged in a little harmless chitchat about things in Washington.”

“Like what?”

“Like how the investigation is being perceived. I believe he mentioned that the White House is very interested.”

“And that was all you talked about?”

“That was all.”

“That took ten minutes, huh?” he said very skeptically, then rearranged himself in the chair, bending forward. “Well, we’ve had the chance to go through his notebook more thoroughly. Your name was mentioned a lot.”

“Mentioned how?”

“Let’s just say a few of the notations are very curious.”

I said, “Curious is an interesting word. Was it curious like ‘I think Major Drummond is going to strangle me with a garrote tonight’? Or was it more like ‘Drummond is in charge of the investigation and he seems like a real swell guy, and I must make it a point to learn more about him’?”

Martie’s face was unreadable. He said, “Somewhere between those two.”

Now Martie had never disclosed his rank to me, but I guessed he and David were probably warrant officers. That’s the rank of nearly all CID field investigators, most of whom are former military policemen who have gone on to better things, sort of like street cops who become detectives.

The moment seemed ripe for me to try to bully him with one of my tantrums, but I somehow thought that would be a very bad idea. Martie, aside from dressing oddly, was no dummy, and he’d chosen the right way to interrogate me: by dropping one disclosure after another so that I could entrap myself. At that POW camp run by the outfit, this was the favored technique of what they called the soft sell. Truthfully, it is a far more successful method than turning a guy’s face into hamburger, because tough guys like I thought I was aren’t necessarily smart guys, and the soft sell is a contest of wits.

Of course, Martie had no way of knowing I had earned a master’s degree in interrogation, so that left him at a bit of a disadvantage. We were at the point now where I was supposed to be getting very jittery. The textbook responses of a guilty man are to deny everything, but also to become desperately curious about how much the interrogator knows. A fencing engagement results; a bit of cross-probing. This is exactly what the interrogator wants. You unwittingly participate in your own destruction.

I got up and walked to the door. I got it open and was already halfway out when Martie said, “Where do you think you’re going?”

“I’m going to find an attorney. I’m sure there are one or two around here somewhere.”

This was not what the textbook told him to expect. “Wait a minute,” he said, trying to put some iron in his voice.

I said, “Sorry, pal, you got your free minute, and you abused it.”

“Hold on, Major,” he asked, this time with a slight quaver in his voice. “You may have perfectly logical explanations for everything.”

“Oh, I’m quite sure I do,” I told him. “In fact, I’m positive I do. But you and I are done speaking.”

He gave me this look of wearied impatience, then said, “I’d advise you to sit down and hash this out.”

And I said, “Fat chance. We both know what’s happening here. Your nuts are in a vise until you come up with a suspect. I’m sorry for your nuts-I truly am-but I don’t want to be your suspect.”

“That has nothing to do with it.”

“Bullshit, Martie. This has everything to do with it.”

Martie turned and looked at David, who now looked like those imaginary hemorrhoids of his were positively killing him.

I said, “What will it be? Will you two leave, or should I go find an attorney?”

Martie pondered that a moment, then he and David got up to leave. Martie shouldn’t have done that. Very amateurish. If he truly believed he had something that implicated me, he would’ve told me to go find myself a whole herd of fast-talking attorneys, and let’s have a showdown. Obviously, whatever Berkowitz had written about me in his little book was either too nebulous or too untainted for Martie to make even a half-assed case. He was grabbing at straws. He was trying to harass everyone in sight to see what turns up. Shaking the trees, they call that. A good technique, unless there happen to be gorillas hanging around, in which case, it’s quite high on the not recommended list.

There was another light knock on the door, and when I looked up, Morrow was standing there looking pensive. Beautiful, but pensive.

She said, “You don’t look like you’re having a good day.”

“Nonsense. They just did the Virginia lottery drawing, and guess what? The winning ticket’s in my wallet. Two hundred and fifty million dollars. I was just sitting here wondering what I’m gonna do with all that money.”

She entered and sat down. “And what did you decide?”

“Every penny’s going to Mother Teresa. Not a penny to anyone else but her.”

“Uh, Major… Mother Teresa’s dead.”

“Yeah? Really?” I said. “Then screw it. I’ll just spend it all on myself.”

“I could see you doing that,” she said.

“Yeah, me too. I’m seeing it real clear. Me, a grand house at the end of the Florida Keys, a big three-masted schooner, a fancy red sports car. And what would you do?”

“Me?” She ran a long, slender hand through that thick luxuriant hair of hers as though she had never dreamed of having that much money. I mean, give me a break. Everybody dreams of having Bill Gates’s money. Just not his looks.

She said, “I guess I’d buy a nice little brownstone in Cambridge, then open up a charitable foundation.”

“Ugh, that’s awful,” I said.

“I beg to differ. It’s a perfectly meaningful way to employ money you didn’t earn.”

“I’m talking about that Cambridge brownstone. Having all those insufferable, lefty Harvard preppies for neighbors. You’d drown in alligator shirts and Weejun loafers.”

“You’re behind the times. Diversity, remember? Harvard even lets Republicans in now. Not in any great numbers, certainly, but the odd token here and there.”

“No kidding? What kind? Real, meat-eating Republicans? Or, that phony, limp-wristed Rockefeller kind?”

“I even had a skinhead in my law school class.”

“A skinhead?”

“Way wacko.” She rolled her eyes. “All he wore were those freaky black T-shirts, camouflage pants, and combat boots. He concentrated on constitutional law. He had this plan to graduate, then spend the rest of his life trying to stuff the Supreme Court docket with challenges to various antidiscrimination statutes. Rambo Esquire, we all called him.”

“Damn, he sure chose the right place. What’s the name of that professor? You know, the one who wrote all those best-selling books and keeps suing the government?”

“Alan Dershowitz?”

“Yeah, that guy.”

“Alan actually liked him,” she said. “He thought Rambo had spunk and chutzpah.”

“You know Dershowitz?”

“Very well, in fact. Alan was my faculty adviser. Also the best lawyer I ever saw. I took both his classes.”

“Gee, and I thought I was the best lawyer you ever saw.”

I nearly smiled. Of course, I was being sly and disingenuous. I was trying to dispel these troubling doubts about Morrow, like maybe she hadn’t really gone to Harvard Law, like maybe she wasn’t really a lawyer, like maybe she was a plant who’d been placed here to report on me and keep me in line. Of course, I had the same doubts about Delbert, but I was fast reaching the point where I needed someone to confide in. Lots of strange things were happening, and I felt like I needed a sounding board.

I said, “Do you mind if I unload a few things on you?”

Her being a beautiful woman and all, I probably should have picked my words a little more carefully. She’d no doubt had dozens of men ask her that same question, then start unburdening about the lousy wife that didn’t understand them, or the sex life that wasn’t working or some such thing. Beautiful women spend a lot of time being confessors to men who want to get into their pants.

She kind of winced. “Okay, Major, if you must.”

“First, let’s drop that major thing, okay? Sean will do just fine.”

From the dubious look on her face, this seemed to confirm her worst fears. “Okay, Sean, fine.”

“What I need from you is a sanity check.”

This confused her for a moment, since it was obviously not what she’d expected to hear. Unless, that is, by sanity check I was leading up to her playing doctor, and when boys and girls play doctor, then, well…

She nodded, and I continued. “Look, I’m feeling very weird about what’s happening around here. Yesterday that reporter, Berkowitz, stopped by and asked me a few questions about the investigation. Then, this morning, he’s dead. It had all the earmarks of a professional hit, the kind of thing a Mafia pro might do, or maybe a Special Forces guy who’s been trained to use exotic weapons.”

Lisa was nodding along. “And you think there’s some kind of link?” she asked, very cool, very detached.

She sounded just like a therapist. Not that I’ve ever been to a therapist, mind you. Well all right, when I left the oufit, they had me spend a few sessions with a head shaker. They did that to everybody, though. Honest.

I finally said, “Actually, yes, I do think there’s a link. But let me cover some other ground first. This afternoon I had another session with that big ape, General Murphy. I asked him what happened when Sanchez’s team missed their daily sitreps. He said nothing. That didn’t make sense to me, because one of the purposes of those routine sitreps is to confirm to your headquarters that you’re still alive. So I asked him why no red flags went up.”

“And he said?”

“That the ops center usually waits twelve hours until the next sitrep period. Only if the team misses that second report is there a response.”

“I could see where that would make sense,” she said.

“Actually, it doesn’t. You have to understand the urgency of timely sitreps. Especially when you’re talking about units operating behind enemy lines. But anyway, I then went to the ops center, just to see what I could find out. I asked the ops sergeant if he remembered any cases when teams failed to make their sitreps. He said KLA teams occasionally missed, but no American team had ever missed. Then I asked him what he would do if he lost contact with a team. He said they would immediately push every panic button in sight.”

“So we have a difference of opinion between a sergeant and a general.”

“Or we have a liar.”

“Which is a large leap to a dangerous conclusion.”

“Maybe. However, the same ops sergeant warned me that somebody put out the word not to cooperate with our investigating team.”

This news at last got something other than an argumentative reaction. “Why would he tell you that?” she asked.

“One of those odd coincidences. He remembered me from when I was stationed at Bragg years ago. I guess it was one of those auld lang syne things.”

“And you believe him?”

“I watched a full colonel take him apart just because he talked to me.”

“There could be a lot of explanations for that.”

“There could, but I can’t think of any. Now odd incident number three. An NSA guy showed up here a few minutes ago. He stopped by to tell me we’re in luck, that one of their satellites was over Zone Three. He told me he was stationed here but refused to give his real name. Only thing was, he was carrying a Washington Post and a trench coat. By the way, it’s been raining cats and dogs in Washington the past twenty-four hours. I hope you remembered to close your car windows.”

She pulled on her lip for a while and seemed to weigh everything I’d just said. Then she stared down at the floor, then up at the ceiling. She put a pencil eraser against her lip, and I don’t know why, I just found that sexy as hell.

Finally, she said, “I’m really sorry. I just don’t see any connection between all these things.”

“Time and place, Morrow. A journalist gets murdered, a general lies, a unit obstructs justice, and a strange man arrives from Washington. All inside twelve hours. All here in tiny Tuzla.”

“Taken individually, any of those things has a variety of possible explanations.”

“Or maybe they’re like those noxious weeds with a common root, with those long underground stems that make them bloom in different places.”

“If you have a fertile imagination.”

“Maybe you’re right,” I admitted. “Maybe I’m just paranoid.”

“Do you have some reason to be paranoid?”

“None I can put my finger on. But sometimes in battle, you look at a hill and just know there’s something lurking on the other side, something dangerous.”

“This isn’t a battle, though.”

“Tell Jeremy Berkowitz that.”