Zero Option

5

In his hotel room, Stafford put his clothes away, raided the minibar for a beer, and took a look out the window. The room cost more than his whole day’s per diem allowance, but at this moment, he didn’t give a damn. The skyline of Atlanta gleamed indifferently back at him. He was surprised at all the high-rise buildings. The place had grown a lot in the ten years since he’d last been here. Careful, he thought. You told Carson this was your first time in the city.

Dave Stafford was forty-three. Born in Norfolk, Virginia, he had lived on the outskirts of the city, near the sprawling Naval Operating Base, where his father worked as a security guard and his mother as a telephone operator. Growing up around the Navy and the base, he had gravitated naturally to the Navy upon graduation from high) school, especially since there was no money for college. He left the Navy after one hitch and joined the Norfolk Police Department, advancing from rookie cop to the detective bureau in five short years. But the cop’s life wore him down, and he began thinking about college. Then one weekend, fae attended a government job fair and learned that the Naval Investigative Service was hiring. He took a job at the NIS, and transferred to the Defense Investigative Service, later the DCIS, in 1988. He’d met Alice that same year, and they had married after a four-month courtship.

Savvy, sexy, ambitious Alice. She had been almost his own age and had never married. She had money in the bank, a good government job as an office manager in the Defense Intelligence Agency, and was as determined as he was to get ahead. For the first two years, he couldn’t believe she was his wife. Now she wasn’t.

He sat down heavily in one of the overstaffed chairs, his right arm hanging straight down, pointing at the floor until he remembered to drape it on the armrest. He had regained almost all of the feeling in his hand and ringers, which the docs said was a good sign, but the big motor muscles were a long way from home. The orthopedist at Walter Reed had said that with proper rehab exercise he should get his arm back to about 50, 60 percent, but so far, it was at about 2 percent. Maybe the docs were just wrong, or maybe they wanted to let him down easy. Either way, the virtual paralysis of his right arm was just the topping on the cake of disasters he’d been through in the past two years.

You knew, he thought. You knew what happens to whistle-blowers. What always happens to whistle-blowers in Washington. You’re just a damn fool, that’s all, Mr. Straight Arrow — by the book, full speed ahead and damn the consequences — David Stafford, ace investigator. Yeah, right.

He’d spent about a year investigating a senior DCIS bureaucrat named Bernstein, who had been selling inside information to a major Defense contractor whom the DCIS had been investigating for contract fraud. When the DCIS upper management dragged its heels on prosecuting Bernstein, Stafford had talked to a reporter, after which life had become interesting. To his utter surprise, the eighteen months following his disclosures about Bernstein had been absolute hell, proving beyond a shadow of a doubt the extent of his naivete. Instead of giving him a commendation for rooting out evil, a wounded bureaucracy had reacted angrily to the exposure of one of its more senior officials. As everyone told him in the corridor, “Sure, Bernstein needed exposing, but, man, did you have to do it quite so publicly?” And did he understand that he was going to pay for it professionally? In fact, his entire division in DCIS had suffered as senior management retaliated under the cover of budget cuts and interference in case assignments. Worse, an FBI agent implicated by Bernstein had been shit-canned, so now the Bureau was after his ass, too. He acquired a new first name when people began saying “Goddamn Stafford”—a lot.

His marital problems predated the Bernstein incident.

He and Alice had been living the comfortable, if somewhat frenetic, lifestyle typical of career Washington bureaucrats with joint incomes.

They had their individual schedules of commuting and working, and if one included their separate car pools, both of theih spent more close time with other people on a day-by-day basis than they did with each other.

Their respective jobs took them away on travel routinely, but with the conceit of husbandly trust, Stafford had assumed she wasn’t playing around just because he never did. But a year before the Bernstein flap erupted, he had begun to suspect that she might be having an affair.

With her boss, no less, an Air Force colonel with whom she often traveled on business. It wouldn’t have been that hard to find out, one way or another: He was an investigator, after all. Later, much later, he had realized that he must not really have wanted to know. When she finally announced that she had found someone else, he had been hurt but not totally surprised.

The arm came last, like some sick cosmic joke. His career was on the skids, Alice had kicked him out, and one night, as he waited for change at a gas station, a couple of kids tried a holdup and then panicked.

They pulled out automatics and started blasting everything in sight. The attendant had been killed and Stafford had been shot in the arm.

He sighed and looked at his watch. Now that he was finished feeling sorry for himself, maybe he should get back to business. DCIS procedures required that he check in with Ray Sparks, the DCIS supervisor for the southeastern region, upon arrival. Well, arrival had been this morning.

He went over to the desk phone and disconnected the line. He set up the portable PC on the desk, then hooked the phone line into the PC’s X jack. He worked on the beer while the PC booted up. Using the encrypted telephony program, he placed a call to the Atlanta DCIS office out in Smyrna, a suburb north of Atlanta. He appreciated modern technology, but it still felt weird to be talking to I a computer. The office manager got Sparks on the line.

“Ray, this is Dave Stafford. Go secure. I’m encrypted on my portable.”

There was a noise over the line. “I’m secure, Dave. Welcome to Atlanta, I think.”

“Yeah, I suppose I’m persona not so freaking grata just now, huh?”

“Yeah, something like that. We were told you were coming. How’s the broken wing?”

“Still broken.” He and Ray Sparks had been partners 1 on a case some years ago and had become pretty good friends. Sparks was also probably the only regional supervisor who would accept him at the moment. There was a moment of silence on the line.

“So what do you plan to do down here?” Sparks asked. {- “Not your normal ‘throw in a grenade and see what evidence comes back at you’ routine, I hope?”

“Nope. I’ve decided to leave the eternal search for truth and justice to Batman and Robin. Right now I plan to just roll with the punches, keep my head down, try to get my arm back, do this job, whatever it is, and try not to cause you or anyone else any problems. After these past eighteen months, I’m a born-again believer.” I.-7. “Bernstein had it coming,” Sparks said. “He was an I officious prick, as everyone in the whole DOS would be happy to admit. From the safety of the sidelines, of course.”

“Well I know, compadre. Those sidelines got pretty far away there for a while. My first name has been changed to Goddamn, especially after that FBI guy got reprimanded. But, yes, I promised the colonel no grenades.”

“That’s the smart way, Dave. The colonel knows how to work the web.

He’ll get you rehabilitated if anyone can.”

“Isn’t it fascinating that I need rehabilitation after exposing corruption?”

“It’s your career that needs rehabilitation, Dave. You embarrassed DCIS.”

“I would have thought it was Bernstein’s corrupt behavior that embarrassed DCIS, but never mind. I know what you’re saying.”

There was a fractional pause. “Well, good, Dave,” Sparks said. “That’s great. Barb said to invite you out, once you’re settled in. Maybe we’ll burn some beef.”

Stafford could hear the effort in Sparks’s voice, and wondered if that mythical barbecue would ever really happen. They both knew damned well that a DCIS supervisor socialized with a DCIS pariah at his professional peril. But it was nice of him to make the offer.

“I appreciate that, Ray, as well as the friendly reception. But look, you feel you have to shut the door on me to keep your own ass warm and dry, you just do it, okay? I’m told that I smell a lot like ozone these days. I don’t want to take anyone down with me.”

“Screw that noise,” Sparks protested. “Besides, we’re too far from Washington for anyone to care. So what’s with this DRMO thing?”

Stafford gave him a summary of the case file. Another investigator had been working the DRMO auction fraud case for two years, but it had deteriorated into one of those seemingly hopeless muddles. It had begun when a Lebanese arms broker in New York had been caught exporting some surplused Air Force missile-guidance radars. The components had been purchased at auction from a New Jersey DRMO. The Defense Logistics Agency headquarters had called in the DCIS, who promptly asked for the audit records on that particular DRMO. It turned out that serious audits were conducted only every five years, and, naturally, it had been four years since the last one. So of course the DCIS effort was stopped while DLA conducted an audit..

The DCIS investigation had revealed what looked like a perfectly legitimate auction, but there were aspects that smelled wrong. The first was, in fact, clearly wrong: Those components should all have gone through the derail process. The consigning agency had marked them improperly, or the receiving DRMO had screwed up, or someone deliberately knew what he was after and had removed the derail paperwork.

The second was what the indomitable Colonel Parsons called “a pattern problem.” Parsons maintained that fraud perpetrated by smart bad guys inside the system often manifested itself in patterns as opposed to single, discernible incidents. The supposedly obsolete missile components had been shipped to the DRMO in five different shipment lots, but they had been auctioned off as a single block of components, almost as if someone had arranged that whoever won the bid on that block got all the guidance assemblies. That was where the trail had ended. There was no evidence tying any identifiable persons definitively to the New Jersey DRMO’s auction process. The guy who had caught the New Jersey case reported back to his boss that he’d come up empty. Colonel Parsons had been less than sympathetic, and he had told the guy that if he couldn’t break the specific case, then he should examine the whole system for that specific pattern.

After three months of ploughing through mind-numbing DLA back records of DRMO auctions and audits, they had uncovered another sale manifesting the same pattern as the one in New Jersey, which is when they’d realized that the auction had been a sealed-bid auction, controlled from Washington — within the DLA headquarters. Checking back on the New Jersey case, they’d found it was a sealed bid auction as well. They’d been looking at the wrong target: Whatever was being scammed was being orchestrated in Washington by someone involved in the sealed-bid process. Another three months of going back into prior years had turned up intermittent evidence of the same pattern, going back several years, but in each case, it was impossible to determine precisely how the thing was being done in Washington.

Stafford pointed out to Sparks that the investigation had stalled right about the time the Bernstein corruption flap reached a crescendo, which was why Colonel Parsons, realizing that Stafford was probably not going to survive the political heat, had seized on the DRMO problem as a pretext for getting him out of town. So here he was.

He gave Sparks a debrief of the day’s events, including Carson’s fainting spell at the airport. Sparks was silent for a moment. “That’s medium weird,” he said finally. “Do you suppose Carson and that woman are involved with each other? And maybe the girl resents it or something? Some deal like that?”

“Don’t know. Probably can’t know, at this stage. Carson claims he didn’t even remember seeing them. Said he was feeling woozy, just getting over the flu. Like I said, I don’t know. The girl’s suitcase had a sticker that said graniteville on it. Otherwise, I wouldn’t even know where to start to find them, assuming I ever had to. I did give the woman my card.”

“Which she’ll probably shit-can. You say Graniteville? I think that’s a small burg up in the mountains of north Georgia. Black hats, long beards, moonshine country. Not friendly to federal anything. Although now it’s all marijuana: There’s no money in ‘shine anymore. And you say they were talking?”

“Not exactly. More like looking at each other. Carson and the girl, not the woman. The girl was looking at Carson like she’d seen a snake, and then he fell down.”

“Is there any reason for Carson to suspect you’re after him?”

“Don’t think so. I inherited this case very much on the fly.”

“Maybe just plain old nerves: A senior DCIS guy coming in unannounced would make anybody nervous. What’d you tell him about us local hicks?”

“He did ask, now that you mention it. Gave him some BS about this being a headquarters pattern-of-fraud probe. Told him I didn’t want to stir up the locals. That kind of stuff. He seemed to buy it.”

“Okay. If he pulls the string, we’ll be appropriately ignorant. Our normal posture anyway.”

Stafford laughed. “Okay, Ray, I’ll keep you posted, and I’ll try not to rock any boats.” “That’s the ticket,” Sparks said. “Call us if you need anything.”

They both hung up, and Stafford unhooked the computer and restored the hotel’s phone line. He picked up his beer and went back to the window.

What he wanted right now was to go down to one of the fancy bars he had seen in the lobby and get reacquainted with Mr. Tanqueray’s oblivion potiog, but he’d done enough of that after Alice bailed out and the reality of his disability penetrated. Colonel Parsons, a whipcord, buzz-cut retired Army officer ten years his senior, had cured of him of incipient alcoholism as only he could. He’d invited Stafford to join him for lunch one badly hungover day at the colonel’s downtown athletic club. The dining room had turned out to be a boxing ring, where the colonel proceeded to beat the hangover out of him with sixteen-ounce gloves. The colonel had kept it fair by tying his own right hand behind his back. He still had beaten the shit out of Stafford. Parsons then informed him he could start drinking again just as soon as he could defend himself at the skill level of a Girl Scout. From his supine vantage point on the canvas floor, Stafford had decided that, arm or no arm, agreeing.with the six or so colonels swimming in his bloody vision was probably the best course of action. Since then, he had become a workout convert, having discovered that intense physical exercise was an excellent stress-eater, not to mention his only chance to regain a normal set of wings.

He finished his beer and pitched the can left-handed at the trash can.

And missed, as usual. For $169 a night, he thought, they ought to have bigger trash cans.