This Enemy Town

CHAPTER 18

Paul is one of those professors former students go out of their way to visit whenever they return to Annapolis. It’s the rare individual who can take a subject like advanced mathematics and make it interesting, let alone comprehensible, yet Paul manages to do it, year after year. His students have gone on to win Rhodes scholarships, reading “maths” at Oxford, where they dig into such fascinating topics as recursive Bayesian estimation or topological manifolds, none of which makes the least bit of sense to me, but then, I majored in French.

Paul’s students are so grateful, some enormously so, that they donate money to the Academy in his name. One former student, now a honcho at Dell, endowed the Ives Prize in Mathematics, given to the graduate each year who makes the most significant use of computing in his or her work.

And there are name plates in Paul’s honor, two affixed to chairs in Alumni Hall and one on a seat in the “Club Level” section of the refurbished Naval Academy stadium. Some grateful grad with a sense of humor even shelled out $1,000 to name a locker after Paul in the Roger Staubach Locker Room at Rickett’s Hall. Paul, ever modest, takes it in stride. When I tease him about his memorial locker, he smiles. “In my honor, Hannah, in my honor. When they start giving money in my memory, that’s when you start to worry.”

Captain Jack Turley, it turned out, was one of these grateful students. Two decades ago, Paul had coached him to a solid A in Double E-Electrical Engineering-and there was nothing Turley wouldn’t do for Paul, including inviting me to tour the Pentagon and allowing me to pick his brain, on short notice, too. Incredibly, we were on for Saturday, the following day. Naturally, Paul would be coming along, too. (Naturally.) And how about lunch? (How very kind.)

Since the senseless terrorist acts of September 11, parking at the Pentagon, always a problem, had become ill-advised, so we piled into the Volvo and drove to New Carrollton, where we planned to catch the Orange Line train into Washington, D.C. As Paul pulled into the long-term parking garage, I caught a flash of green in my side-view mirror. I gasped and squeezed Paul’s arm. “Look! There’s that green Taurus again. I swear he’s been following me.”

Paul glanced into the rearview mirror. “Where?”

I swiveled in my seat, but the Taurus had vanished. All I could see was a lineup of taxis at the Kiss-and-Ride and two Metro buses, spewing exhaust.

Paul rolled down his window, stuck out his arm for the ticket. “Do you know how many Ford Tauruses are being driven in the U.S. right now?”

I shook my head.

“I don’t know, either,” he chuckled as he steered the Volvo up the ramp that led to the second parking level, “but at the end of 2002, Ford celebrated the production of the five millionth Taurus.”

“You’re making that up just to make me feel better.”

“No, I looked it up.” He pulled into a parking space, hauled up on the emergency brake, and turned sideways in his seat to face me. He tapped my nose with the tip of his finger. “I’m not the only Googler around the house, you know, sweetheart.”

As Paul turned off the ignition and released his seat belt, I studied his profile, strong, solid, familiar. I knew he was trying to be reassuring, but if so, the move had backfired. Why had Paul taken the trouble to look up information about Tauruses? I wondered. Had he been seeing phantom Tauri, too?

Inside the station, Paul handed me a five dollar bill. We stood side by side at adjoining ticket machines, waiting while the machines inhaled our money, judged it acceptable, and spit out our fare cards. Neither of us said anything as we joined the line of people climbing the escalator to the platform-D.C. subway riders wouldn’t be caught dead simply standing to the right on the moving stairs-and scooted into seats on the train just as the doors were closing. Although I was sure they’d find it fascinating, I had no intention of sharing my run-in with the law with the other passengers, so Paul and I sat side by side, forearms mashed together, saying little, exchanging sections of the Baltimore Sun to pass the journey.

When the doors opened at L’Enfant Plaza, we hustled to the upper level, where we switched to the Yellow Line train that would head south through the city, briefly rise into the daylight as it crossed the Potomac, then dive back into the tunnel that would take us to the Pentagon.

“Have you ever been to the Pentagon before?” I asked Paul, breaking the silence as our train rolled into the underground Pentagon station.

“Never,” he replied as the doors slid open and we stepped onto the platform. “After all these years, you’d think I’d have made it over here, but no. I’m looking forward to it.”

On our way up the escalator, Paul explained that Captain Jack Turley served as the military assistant to one of several Under Secretaries of Defense whose offices were on the third floor of the labyrinthine building, in a VIP corridor only a few doors down from Donald Rumsfeld.

“But what does he do?” I asked as the escalator spit us out near the Pentagon bus stop.

“You’ll have to ask Jack,” Paul said, “but I imagine that he does whatever the Secretary asks him to.” He looped his arm through mine and led me around to the main entrance, where a line had formed in front of a kiosk. Security personnel sat at tables under an awning, inspecting handbags and briefcases. I was about to hand over my bag when somebody came pounding up behind us. “Sorry I’m late. Couldn’t find a cab.”

It was my lawyer, Murray Simon.

I hauled out my permagrin and arranged it across my face. “Murray, what a surprise.” Then I aimed a scowl at my husband.

“Sorry, Hannah,” Murray panted as he unbuttoned his overcoat. “I can tell from your expression how happy you are to see me, but Paul thought it was important for me to be here. You’re in trouble, in case you’ve forgotten.”

“How could I forget when you’re always popping up to remind me, Murray.”

“Hannah!” Paul hissed. “Murray’s here to help. There’s no need to be surly.”

“Maybe if you told me he was coming,” I hissed back, “I’d have been prepared.” As a child, I’d never liked surprises. As an adult, I still don’t.

After Security cleared my handbag and Murray’s computer case, Paul used his cell phone to call Jack, who arranged to meet us in the lobby on the other side of the Pentagon’s enormous stainless steel doors.

It was late February, so I’d expected service dress blues, but Jack was wearing khakis, the Navy’s year-round working uniform. Ribbons marched in orderly rows across his heart: a Defense Meritorious Service Medal, a Meritorious Service Medal with one gold star, which meant he’d won it twice, and a green and white Navy Commendation Medal with two gold stars. There were others, too, like the blue ribbon with two thin green stripes that told me Jack was an expert shot with a pistol, but I didn’t know what the others were, except one: the red, white, green, and black bar that meant he’d helped to liberate Kuwait. An impressive rack. Jack had certainly paid his dues.

Paul reached his former student in two strides, hand extended. “Jack! Good to see you, man!”

“Good to see you, too, sir.” Jack pumped Paul’s arm, then turned to me. “We met once, Mrs. Ives, at a tailgater one Homecoming game, ten, maybe fifteen years back. You probably don’t remember.”

“Surprisingly, I do,” I said, squeezing his hand. “It’s hard to forget that red hair.”

“Or the freckles.” He blushed, the tips of his ears turning pink. “Mother always swore I’d outgrow them.” He leaned forward. “She lied,” he whispered.

“And this is my attorney, Murray Simon,” I said, sweet as molasses.

Jack beamed. “Pleased to meet you, sir. I followed the Ted Barber case in the Post. Brilliant work, sir, simply brilliant.”

Ted Barber was a northern Virginia real-estate developer accused of murdering his wife, Melanie. Using Luminol, investigators had uncovered evidence of foul play in the stable of their Middleburg farm, but Melanie’s body had never been found. Murray’d gotten Barber off scot free. Keep your mouth shut, Hannah, and keep smiling, and maybe he’ll do the same for you.

Jack escorted us to Security and waited while a uniformed civilian peered at our drivers’ licenses and asked us our business. When we successfully passed that hurdle, we were directed to X-marks-the-spot, where we were photographed and issued yellow plastic ID badges. I was impressed; the whole process took no more than thirty seconds. Good thing, too, as I’d been holding my breath, worried sick that my record in JABS would start alarms whoop-whoop-whooping, and that any second brusque, burly guards would materialize to haul my ass out of there. But either the Pentagon didn’t share data with JABS or the data hadn’t caught up with them yet, because the security guard simply smiled, handed me my photo ID badge and said, “Have a nice day, ma’am.”

“Thanks so much for taking time to see us, Jack,” I said as I clipped the badge onto the lapel of my jacket.

“My pleasure,” he said.

Jack led us quickly through a maze of velvet ropes that in happier times had been used to control the tourists who flocked to the Pentagon like visitors to Disney World. There were plenty of military personnel and men in suits hanging around that morning, but I hadn’t noticed anybody in sweats with cameras slung around their necks. Maybe February was a slow month. Either that or tour buses were taking those visitors to other Washington landmarks where security, especially for foreign visitors, was not nearly so tight.

As we followed Jack past the visitors’ center and the nearly deserted gift shop toward the escalators, I was thinking about 9/11, feeling slightly queasy and desperately sad that just a short walk from where we were standing, terrorists had flown an airplane into the building and 184 people had died.

And then I saw it, completely covering the wall to my right, stretching so high that I had to throw my head back to see the top: a spectacular 9/11 quilt. From across the lobby it had looked like the American flag, but when we got closer, I could see that the flag was composed of thousands of four-by-four-inch squares, one for each individual who had perished in the nearly simultaneous terrorist attacks on New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C., that terrifying September day. Men and women, young and old, their faces smiled out at us. Christine Hanson of Groton, Massachusetts, who would never see her third birthday. Robert Grant Norton of Lubec, Maine, eighty-five, the oldest victim. White, black, Hispanic, Asian, Muslim, Jew-a cross section of America, land of the free, where their promising lives had been snuffed out in an instant. And for what? It broke my heart.

“Amazing, isn’t it? Three thousand thirty-one squares altogether,” Jack commented as he directed us to the turnstiles and showed us how to scan the bar codes printed on our badges. “The quilt was put together by quilters from more than forty states, honchoed by the Memorial Quilts group out in California. They toured it for a while, but I think it’s home for good now.” He clasped his hands behind his back and rocked back on his heels. “Frankly, I hope it stays forever. Not that anyone working here needs any reminding.”

As we rode the escalator to the next level, I glanced up. A military guard dressed in camouflage gear stood on the landing, cradling a machine gun. In the corridor behind him was a shopping mall; I watched Pentagon workers scurrying from a dry cleaner to a card store, from a chocolate shop to one of several fast food stalls. “Expecting trouble at Burger King?” I asked with an uneasy eye on the cop in cammies with the gun.

“Regrettable, but necessary, I’m afraid. This is the main entrance,” Jack explained. “If someone should barge in and jump the turnstiles…” His voice trailed off.

He didn’t need to finish the sentence; I could see clearly what would happen. From his vantage point on the landing, that single guard controlled the entire lobby. Anyone attempting to charge up the escalator would be shot, easy as plugging a rat in a drainpipe.

“There’s a river entrance, too.” Jack waved a hand vaguely in the direction of the Potomac River just to the north. “But it’s for the bigwigs.”

Walking briskly, Jack led us up a gradual rampway into the Pentagon proper, past a more luxurious food court-KFC, Manchu Wok, Pizza Hut, Subway-with a common seating area furnished, to my surprise, with wooden tables and chairs and upholstered furniture that wouldn’t look out of place in my own dining room.

Just past the ATM and the Navy Federal Credit Union, Jack paused before a glass case that housed a wooden model of the Pentagon. “You probably remember the structure of the building from the newspaper accounts of the crash,” he said, “but this scale model shows it graphically. There are five levels to the complex.” He tapped the glass with his finger, pointing out each feature of the building as he explained it to us. “Five levels, five sides and five rings. The A-ring is the inside ring, as you can see. The E-ring is the most desirable because it has windows that look out rather than looking in at other windows.”

We had given the guy at Security Jack’s room number when we registered, so it was still fresh in my mind. “So if your office is in room 3E844,” I said, “that would be the third floor of the far outside ring, roughly in the middle of the eighth corridor.”

Jack smiled. “Exactly. There are seventeen and a half miles of corridor in this building,” he commented as he led us down one of them. “And they say it takes only seven minutes to get from any one point to another.” He punched the button to call the elevator. “Tell that to me when I’m juggling coffee and a doughnut.”

We rode up to the third floor, disembarking in a hallway that reminded me of a fine old hotel. Elegant dark wood paneling covered the walls beneath a chair rail, above which hung oil paintings of former Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the colors of the artwork vibrant in contrast to the creamy walls. On both sides of the hallway, dark paneled doors-some open, some closed-led to offices whose occupants, all high-level political appointees, were indicated by brass plaques bearing titles such as Secretary of Defense, Under Secretary of Defense for This and Under Secretary of Defense for That. Framed photographs of the incumbents and flags hung about everywhere.

As we strolled along the corridor, the large-scale oils gradually gave way to smaller works. Jack paused in front of one of them, an unassuming but competent landscape. “And this delightful little watercolor was painted by Dwight David Eisenhower,” he told us.

Ah, yes, I thought, as I studied the pleasant fall scene and wondered if it was in Pennsylvania, where Ike had retired with Mamie. Eisenhower, like his friend, Winston Churchill, had enjoyed painting watercolors in his spare time.

We all need a hobby, I thought. Mine was knitting. Would they let me have knitting needles in jail? If not, I might never get back to that cable-knit sweater I’d started for Paul last Christmas.

Still worrying about the unfinished sweater, I hurried to catch up with the guys, who were standing in front of a massive wooden door, waiting for me. “This is where I hang out,” Jack was saying to Paul when I approached.

The minute we entered the office, two well-trained secretaries leapt to their feet. Secretaries in the traditional sense-small s-they came out from behind their desks, greeted us warmly, took our coats and asked if we’d like coffee, which we politely declined.

Jack’s office adjoined the Secretary’s, capital S. It was smaller than I would have expected for a Navy captain, certainly small by Naval Academy standards, but large enough to accommodate his desk, a round conference table piled high with file folders, and several upholstered chairs, which we promptly settled into.

What is it they say? Location, location, location. Jack’s office had it in spades. Prime real estate on the E-ring, with a window overlooking the Potomac.

“Paul told me over the phone what you’re interested in,” Jack was saying just as I was getting comfortable, “and I’m only too happy to oblige. You asked about Lieutenant Jennifer Goodall. She was stationed here for two years before being assigned to the Naval Academy. The last year she worked here, Goodall was Admiral Ted Hart’s assistant.”

“What would that entail?” I inquired.

“Well, she would keep his calendar, check his e-mail, take his calls, sit in on all his meetings. In short, there wouldn’t be anything she wouldn’t know about the guy.”

“It’s my understanding,” said Paul, “that Admiral Hart is still here, in charge of Weapons Acquisition and Management for the Navy.”

“That’s right. His office is just around the corner from us, in the tenth corridor.”

“Hart’s wife is convinced the two were having an affair,” I cut in, “but I’m not so sure about that. When Goodall was at the Academy, she tried to hang an affair around Paul’s neck, too.” I caught Paul looking at me and smiled. “But she lied about that. At least she admitted that to me before she died.”

Jack leaned forward, resting his forearms on his knees. “I remember reading about her accusations in Navy Times,” he said, “but no one who really knew Professor Ives ever believed a word of it.”

“That’s gratifying,” Paul said with a thin, grim smile.

“I did ask around as casually as I could about Goodall’s sex life,” Jack continued, “but there doesn’t seem to be any scuttlebutt about that. If Goodall and Hart were an item, they played their cards very close to their chests.”

“What about the possibility that Goodall was blackmailing Hart?” Murray asked, breaking what was, for him, an uncharacteristically long silence. “If not about sex, how about something else? Something job-related, for example.”

“But wait a minute.” I held up a hand. “If Hart were doing something dishonest, immoral, or illegal, wouldn’t he try to hide it from his staff, just in case any of them were the whistle-blowing type?”

Jack raised a hand, the stone in his Naval Academy ring a flash of blue in the bright light streaming through the window. “Consider this scenario. As Hart’s assistant, Goodall would normally sit in on all meetings. What if, all of a sudden, people started showing up who weren’t on his calendar? What if she were excluded from certain meetings? She might get suspicious, put two and two together, start nosing around.”

“My experience is mostly with the corporate world,” Murray said, “so can you educate me a little? What sort of mischief could an admiral like Hart get into?”

Jack took a deep breath. “This is pure speculation, you understand, and completely off the record…” He paused. When Murray nodded in agreement, Jack leaned forward in his chair and continued. “Hart may be looking ahead to retirement, angling for a job at one of the biggies like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon, or Northrup/Grumman. It’s possible he’s steering business their way, in some sort of you-scratch-my-back-and-I’ll-scratch-yours kind of scheme.” Jack gazed at the ceiling, his green eyes completely innocent. “But you didn’t hear that from me.”

“Kickbacks?” I asked.

“Could be, but not necessarily. With that kind of arrangement, no money actually needs to exchange hands.”

“That’s drawing a pretty fine line,” Murray snorted.

“But wouldn’t there be safeguards in place to keep that from happening?” Paul wondered.

“Usually, yes, through a tightly controlled government contracting process,” Jack continued. “But there’s a war on in Iraq, and things need to get rushed through in the name of expedience, sometimes without the usual oversight. We call it fast-tracking.”

I couldn’t wait to put in my two cents worth. “Easier to explain why you let a government contract go to a crony than to explain to a grieving mother that her son died because he didn’t have a bulletproof vest, right?”

“Right. And troops have to be fed and supplied from day one,” Jack continued. “You simply can’t afford to wait around for the usual contract procedures to run their course.”

I’d dealt with government contracts before while working at Whitworth and Sullivan-writing a statement of work, advertising it in Commerce Business Daily, sending it out to perspective bidders, evaluating bids, awarding the contract, dealing with challenges from losing bidders who think they’ve been unfairly excluded. It could take years before the actual product showed up on your loading dock.

“But aren’t the fast-track vendors prequalified in some way,” I wondered, “like the blanket purchase order agreements I remember from back in the old days?”

“Many are, particularly for goods and services that we anticipated a need for, but now we’re dealing with companies capable of providing expertise to quickly gear up and handle critical large-scale public works projects like water, sewer, electricity, housing, transportation. It’s a whole new ball game.”

“But still, even with fast-tracking,” I said, “surely there are safeguards to keep DOD employees from playing fast and loose with the contract regulations?”

“Of course there are, but it’s ridiculously easy for things to slip through the cracks. Governmentwide, we’re still dealing with largely a paper system. It’s stunning how much time we waste faxing paperwork back and forth and making phone calls.”

As if it knew we were talking about it, the telephone on Jack’s desk warbled once. Jack ignored it. “Besides, a lot of the fast-track contracts are set up for projects that fall under a certain amount, say fifty thousand dollars. Nobody really looks too hard at them.”

“Are there a lot of contracts in that category?” Murray asked.

“Thousands upon thousands.”

“It could add up,” Paul commented dryly.

“It could.”

One of the secretaries to whom we had been introduced earlier rapped once on the door frame and stuck her head into the room. “You asked to be reminded when it was time for lunch.”

“Thanks, Sue. We’ll just be a minute.” Jack smiled and turned to me. “Now, about that other name you asked me about, Chris Donovan?”

“Yes?”

“I checked for you. She’s a civilian, working in Personnel.”

“She?” Paul and I said it at the same time.

Jack shrugged. “Short for Christine, I suppose, but she always goes by Chris. I thought you knew.”

“Well, that’s very different,” I quipped, quoting Miss Emily Latella of Saturday Night Live fame. What an ignoramus I’d been! Chris was a woman. That could change everything.

“In her present capacity, Donovan probably wouldn’t have worked with Goodall,” Jack continued. “But before she got out of the Navy, Donovan also worked in Weapons Acquisitions and Management. I’m sure you’ll want to ask her about it.”

I was absolutely certain of that, too.

“Donovan’s not here on Saturday,” he added. “I checked. Her office says she’ll be in on Monday. You can call back then.” Jack handed me a slip of paper on which he’d written Chris Donovan’s telephone number. I tucked it into my purse for safekeeping, but I had no intention of waiting until Monday to check back with Chris Donovan at her office. Now that I knew Chris was a business associate of the dead woman and not an ex-boyfriend with murder on his mind, I’d call her on my cell phone using the number I’d filched from Jennifer’s locker.

With the memory of Marisa Young’s recent tongue-lashing still fresh in my mind, I decided that whatever it took-fibs, fairy tales, flim-flam, or farrago-I’d figure out a way to get Chris Donovan to open up and talk to me.

“Lunch?” Jack asked, rising from his chair.

Like hungry little ducklings, we followed.

Lunch was served in the oh-so-elegant Pentagon Executive Dining Room, where crystal, china, and heavy silverware graced tables covered by thick white linen cloths. In the days since my shattering box lunch experience in Baltimore, every meal had been a treat. Tuna noodle casserole, Triscuit and gouda, even the cheeseburger at the drive-through McDonald’s on I-68 outside of Frostburg on our way back from Deep Creek Lake had been, for me at least, a gourmet delight. So when I sat down and checked the dining room menu, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.

We ordered Caesar salads all around, and by some sort of silent consensus, possibly engineered by Paul, talked about everything but my awkward situation vis-à-vis the law.

By the time the waiter brought our apple pie, we’d come to an uneasy agreement over the 2004 elections and the war in Iraq (with a good deal of overlap between the two). Over coffee, we discussed the proper role of the U.N. in world politics, but hadn’t reached a conclusion by the time the waiter brought the check.

After the waiter bowed and left with his tip, Jack stood, laid down his napkin and said, “Before you go, there’s something else that I want to show you.”

Five minutes later the four of us were standing silently before a marble memorial on the first floor of E-ring: AMERICA’S HEROES: A GRATEFUL NATION REMEMBERS. On our right, the name of each civilian lost when a terrorist flew American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon had been incised in a marble slab, black and smooth as satin. On an identical slab to the left, the names of the military victims were carved. Stubby pencils and oblongs of tissue paper had been provided for friends and family to trace the names of their loved ones.

The Naval Academy, I remembered all too well, had lost eleven of its sons in the Pentagon attacks.

I ran my hand over the cool stone, feeling each letter beneath my fingertips. Chic Burlingame, captain of the ill-fated Boeing 757, had been a Navy Top Gun. He died one day shy of his fifty-second birthday. Gerald DeConto, class of 1979. We’d known him as “Fish.” Pat Dunn, class of ’85, whose wife Stephanie had been two month’s pregnant when the doomed airplane smashed into her husband’s office. At one time or another we’d known them all.

Behind us, yellow film covered the windows that faced Arlington Cemetery at the exact point where Flight 77 slammed into the building.

“I’ll leave you here,” Jack whispered after a while. “I’ve got another meeting. You know the way out?”

We nodded silently.

To my right a double door opened into a memorial chapel. Signaling to Paul and Murray my intention, I went in and sat down on one of the straight-backed chairs, upholstered in a mottled rose and blue. At the front of the chapel, just behind a small wooden altar, was a brilliant five-sided stained-glass window featuring the head of a bald eagle, the image of the Pentagon, a flowing U.S. flag, and the words UNITED IN MEMORY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2001. The window was fabricated, according to the brochure I’d picked up outside, from five hundred pieces of inch-thick, faceted glass called Dalle de Verre. One hundred eighty-four of them were crimson, arranged in a double ring.

I bowed my head, studying my shoes against the red carpet. Then I closed my eyes and prayed. I prayed for those gone too soon before their time-the victims, my mother, my friends Valerie and Gail-and I even prayed for the troubled soul of Jennifer Goodall.

And while I was at it, I said a little prayer for myself.

Then I stood up, squared my shoulders, and went out to face whatever fate might send my way.