The Kingmaker

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Within moments after Alexi left, Katrina knocked on my door and asked if I wanted to accompany her to the embassy. I recommended that we first stroll around the block so I could tell her what Arbatov and I had discussed. The new and improved Sean Drummond would hold nothing back from the freshly restyled Miss Mazorski. Never mess with a woman who’d stick a man’s dick in a garbage disposal, that’s my motto. I did her a favor, though, and gave her the abbreviated version.

Odd as this may sound, she didn’t seem all that interested. I had the impression she was going through the motions of politely hearing me out, while she was preoccupied with something else. Multitasking is a very useful and admirable skill, but it pisses me off when it’s happening to me.

I said, “Am I detecting a listening problem here? And by the way, why are we going to the embassy?”

“There’s someone we need to talk to… Morrison’s secretary.” She paused for a moment, then added, “When you were in the bathroom the other day, Mel mentioned to me that we might want to have a word with her.”

“About what?”

She began walking back toward the hotel. “He said she might have a few interesting insights.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know, and it’s obviously too late to ask him.”

“Right.”

She walked a few more paces, then asked, “Do you notice how I’m sharing this with you?”

“Yes, and it’s very commendable.”

“And you just had another meeting with Arbatov and didn’t include me?”

“Recall that I didn’t plan the meeting. He snuck into my room and woke me up.”

“The circumstances don’t concern me.”

“No, I don’t expect they do.”

“You’ve put my life at risk.”

“Yes, I know. I also said I’m sorry.”

She rubbed her temples and was on the verge of saying something nasty, but settled for, “Don’t exclude me again.”

“Right.” We arrived at the embassy twenty minutes later and went upstairs to the fourth floor, where the attache’s office is located. We walked into the reception area, and wouldn’t you know?

Parked at a desk directly in front of the office door that read MILITARY ATTACHE sat one of the most perversely fetching women I ever laid eyes on. She had a face you wouldn’t necessarily call attractive. Sinful, decadent, cruel-these were the words that popped into my mind. She was what we men call an “oh God girl,” meaning the type who’d be digging your flesh out of her fingernails after the two of you did the big nasty. “Oh God” is what you say the second time she asks you out.

She had jet black hair that hung past her waist, dark, sultry eyes surrounded by purple makeup, and a downward pout on her cherry red lips that let you know she demanded to be spoiled. Upon close inspection, it struck me that she looked remarkably like the woman who’d been performing the virtuoso with the triumvirate on my TV, although I’d gotten only the most fleeting glimpse of that woman. Really.

Katrina awarded me a knowing look. No wonder Mel sicced us on Miss Nasty. Never underestimate a man who has a death wish on his former boss.

Katrina marched right up to the desk and announced, “I’m Katrina Mazorski, and this is Major Drummond. We’re Morrison’s attorneys.”

The woman studied us through a pair of wicked irises that seemed to bore right through your clothes and replied, “And how can I help you?”

“You were his secretary?”

“That’s right.”

“We’re interviewing people who worked with him. We’d like to start with you.”

She gave us a curiously indifferent look, like, What the hell, I’m bored, so why not?

I said, “Do you have a conference room… somewhere we could speak in private?”

For an answer she stood up and walked toward a door as if we should know we were expected to follow. I never took my eyes off her, since you never know where you might pick up your next vital clue; maybe hidden somewhere in her miniskirt, her dark net stockings, her high heels, or inside that top that seemed to be pasted to her skin.

For her part, Katrina was rolling her eyes as if she couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Truly, it took a stone-cold idiot to park this girl directly outside his office. Why hadn’t the stupid bastard stuck with a chubby little grandmother, like any responsible philanderer would do?

We ended up inside a small, cramped office that appeared lived-in. A plaque on the wall from some Army training course drew my eye, and it was made out to Captain Melvin Torianski. Miss Nasty said, “He won’t care if we use it.”

It’s always touching to see grief-stricken coworkers mourn the loss of a friend. Katrina slid over another chair, and the two of them eyed each other like a pair of hungry lionesses. I sat behind the desk, pulled out the tape recorder, and retrieved a yellow notepad from my briefcase, to sort of dramatize the atmosphere.

I began, “For the record, what’s your name?”

“Tina Allison.”

We established that she was a U.S. citizen, a GS-9 employee of the State Department, twice divorced, no children, and lived in embassy housing. I then asked, “And how long have you known General Morrison?”

“Eighteen months.”

“How did you end up working for him?”

“The attache’s office was looking for a new secretary, they sent a request back to Washington, I was interviewed, and I was hired.”

Katrina swiftly asked, “Who interviewed you?”

“Morrison. He was on a trip back to D.C. and the interview was arranged.”

Well, no surprise there. I said, “How well did you know him?”

“Well enough.”

“Would you describe your relationship as professional, as friendly, as…?” Katrina asked, allowing that thought to drift off so Tina could fill in the blank however she wanted.

Her lips curled up the tiniest bit. “He was my boss. We saw each other every day.”

Katrina said, “Did you know his wife?”

“I saw her around.”

“Were you friends?”

“I’m a secretary. We were in different social circles.”

I asked, “Did you ever see General Morrison do anything you considered suspect?”

“No.”

And Katrina jumped in with, “Did you socialize with him?”

“Define ‘socialize,’ ” she replied, again with that taunting tilt to her lips. A Mensa invitation definitely wasn’t lurking in her future, but she was obviously picking up on the thread here.

Katrina asked, “Did you go over to his quarters for dinner, go out for a movie together, any contact outside the office?”

“No. Never.”

Then, very calmly, “Were you screwing him?”

I thought she’d howl, but instead she leaned back into her chair and with surprising calmness replied, “No.”

“You’re sure?”

This apparently struck her as hilarious. “There’s some way you can not be sure on something like that? Oh, don’t get me wrong-I could’ve had him anytime I wanted.”

“Really?” Katrina replied. “Why didn’t you?”

“Not my type.”

“Why wasn’t he your type?”

“He’s a horny, married jerk. I prefer my jerks horny and unmarried.”

For clarity’s sake, I asked, “But you never had an affair with him?”

She looked at me. “Nope.”

I was just beginning to feel relieved when Katrina asked, “Did anyone else?”

She suddenly looked hesitant, so Katrina bent toward her and said, “There’s a harder way to do this. We’ll ask a judge to issue a subpoena and ask you this same question in an interrogation room back in the States.”

Her indecision seemed to evaporate. “He had some girlfriends, yeah.”

“Some? As in more than one?”

“He belonged to a Russian escort service that provided him with girls. He went out with a few Russian girls on the side, too.”

A heavy silence hung for a few moments as Katrina and I exchanged glances, tried to maintain our composure, and generally sought not to appear as shitty and dismayed as we felt. The issue was motive for treason, and this sounded like it. A senior intelligence officer screwing his way through Moscow, of all places, was an invitation to blackmail.

Katrina asked her, “Did his wife know about them?”

“No.”

“How do you know that?” I asked.

“Because I never told her.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“She was a nice lady. I figured, what she didn’t know, didn’t hurt her.”

Katrina said, “How did you find out?”

“I get the phone bills for the office, and Russian phone companies charge for local calls. When I don’t recognize a number, I track them down. That’s how I learned about Siberian Nights Escorts, and the girls he’d call. But I never told anyone. At least not until the investigators brought it up.”

The important point here being that Russia’s intelligence agencies also had access to those phone records. And the shocking point being that Eddie apparently knew also.

To be clear on that last point, I asked, “They already knew?”

“Oh, they knew.”

“How?”

“How would I know? Ask them.”

On that note, Katrina shot me another of those knowing looks as she asked, “Did Morrison have any good friends here… anybody we should talk to?”

She replied, “Colonel Jack Branson, the deputy attache. They did a lot of work together.”

“And how do we get hold of him?”

“You walk into his office. It’s right next to Morrison’s.”

Branson was Air Force, mid-forties, balding, thin-faced, very tall, and quite skinny, with a nondescript face, but intelligent eyes, and at the moment we walked into his office he was hunched over his desk, studying something with a magnifying glass. He looked up and took whatever it was off his desktop and stuffed it in a drawer. Intell guys are such a riot.

“Hi,” he said, trying to look friendly. “Can I help you?”

I made the introductions, and he pointed at a pair of chairs. We chitchatted about him, wife, kids, life in Moscow, and so on.

After we exhausted the phony pleasantries, I said, “So, how long did you know General Morrison?”

“The whole two years he was here. I’ve been here three years, so I was in place when he arrived.”

“Miss Allison said you were friends.”

“Friends? Well, no, we weren’t friends. We worked closely together, we were generally amicable, but we were hardly friends.”

“Did you like him?” I asked.

“I respected him,” he replied.

That’s military doublespeak for “No, he was a miserable asshole to work for.”

“Why did you respect him?” Katrina asked.

“He knew his job and worked damned hard at it. I won’t say he had the best leadership style I’ve seen, but as an intell officer he was as good as any I’ve met.”

Katrina bent forward. “What makes a good intell officer?”

“Good question.” Branson paused and then explained, “In intell, you’re always flooded with information. You’re always getting lots of reports from lots of sources, and frequently those reports and sources conflict. It gets to be a morass. Most intell guys just shove it all upstream and let someone else try to figure it out. Morrison wasn’t like that. He had a nose for what it all meant.”

I said, “He could interpret it?”

“Exactly. He always seemed to know the story behind the story. It was uncanny sometimes. He just figured it out.”

Big mystery there, right? Having the number two guy in the SVR feeding him explanations surely didn’t hurt.

Katrina said, “I hate to pry into sensitive things, but how was his marriage?”

Branson sucked his lower lip into his mouth. Like any military officer, loyalty to his boss was bred into his being, but at the same time he had to be weighing his caution against how much we already knew. Being indiscreet was one thing; it was worse to be caught as a liar.

“Don’t sweat it,” Katrina prodded. “We know he cheated on her.”

The lower lip popped back out, and he began shaking his head. “Well, you know then. That dumbass screwed everything he could get his hands on. Ordinarily I don’t care what other people do… but, look, I like Mary, and I didn’t appreciate it. I felt bad telling her he was at lunch when he was with some whore.”

Katrina nodded and said, “Did you ever talk to him about it?”

“I tried. He’s not a very approachable guy.”

“Did he ever explain his affairs?”

“I don’t think he knew why he did it. There was no good reason. You ever see his wife?” We both nodded. “What sane guy married to Mary would cheat, right?”

Katrina said, “Why didn’t they get divorced? Did he ever talk about it?”

“I suggested it once.”

“And…?”

“He said it would harm the children. I didn’t believe him, though. Do you want to know what I think?”

“Sure.”

“His career. You can’t believe how ambitious he was, and a divorce wouldn’t have looked good. The military frowns on that.”

I asked him, “Did everybody in the office know about his affairs?”

“I don’t know. None of us ever talked about it. What’s funny was, he and his wife worked together real well. They worked everything together.”

So the prosecutors had been saying, but just to be sure I asked, “Then he was seeing everything she was working on?”

He began chuckling. “The other way around, I’d say. Look, there’s a natural competition between the CIA, whom she worked for, and DIA, whom we report back to. We field hands are like little dogs. We please our masters by bringing back bigger bones and we get stroked behind the ears. Mary stole stuff from us all the time. Our sources would tell us about some crooked general over in the Russian Defense Ministry who looked like he could be blinkered into recruitment, and even before we could get a message off, Mary’s people were already flogging the general. Happened all the time.”

We’d heard more than we needed to hear, so Katrina thanked the colonel for his candor, told him we’d be back if we had more questions, and we departed in mutual misery.

On the drive back to the hotel, Katrina said, “You know that adultery charge?”

“I know.” I added, “But let me remind you, you were the one who thought it was possible to prove him innocent.”

She thought about this, then said, “You can’t be sure it led to treason.”

“You know the old Army saying about the three Bs?”

“No.”

“ ‘Booze, bucks, and broads will get you every time.’ Usually because they lead to the fourth B-blackmail.”