Zero Option

6

SP4c Latonya Mayfield pushed the calculator to one side of her cluttered desk and rubbed her eyes It was almost lunchtime, and she had been running these numbers for the entire morning. The dreaded destruction inventory match audit. It had to be done on every shipment that went out to the Army’s large-scale destruction facility at Tooele, Utah. It was dreaded because it was a three-way line-byline audit: The entire shipping manifest was compared with the receiving manifest report from Tooele, and then those numbers were compared with the inventory of the surplu sed storage containers.

My own damn fault I got tagged with this, she thought wearily. I just had to bring up the fact that the platoon’s Human Relations Council hadn’t met in over two months. The sergeant reacted with a bland smile, and then this lovely little assignment, a task normally done by a Spec3.

Not that she could make a legitimate gripe: She was, after all, a chemical warfare weapons accountability specialist, wasn’t she?

After three and a half hours, all those rows and columns produced by the high-speed line printer were beginning to run together, and if she didn’t have a number mismatch, she would have filed the whole thing with a “no discrepancies” report. She’d never heard of there ever being a discrepancy in the two years she’d been assigned to the control office.

Movement control and security procedures for chemical weapons materials were just about as tight as they were for nuclear weapons materials.

She rubbed her eyes again, and thought about coffee, and then thought about lunch. The other clerks in the office were already shuffling around as they prepared to break for the chow hall, but she knew there was no way she’d be able to stay awake doing this shit after lunch. And, Houston, baby, we do appear to have us a problem here. She pulled the printouts back to the center of her desk, shuffling back through them to find page one of fifty seven. The mismatch was one number. Just a single error, and she couldn’t find it. The grand totals did not add up, but each of the three various reports did add up.

Something had not been shipped, or had been shipped and not received, or there was one more storage container — lovingly called “coffins” in the CW business — than there were chemical cylinders involved. The thought crossed her mind that the last possibility had better be the answer, or the mother of all flaps was going to erupt right here in Toxic Town.

Hell with it, she decided. I’m going to lunch, and then I’m going to look for the discrepancy one more time, and then I’m going to do what I should have done an hour ago — take it to the staff sergeant. So there.

On Tuesday morning, Carson checked in with Stafford to make sure he had everything he needed. Stafford was sitting at the desk, surrounded by open binders, and making notes on a legal pad.

“Coffee mess is two doors down the hall,” he said. “Feel free to help yourself.”

“Thanks. I did,” Stafford replied. “You feeling better today? No more fainting spells?”

“Much. Still don’t know what the hell that was yesterday.”

Stafford nodded, gave him a thin smile, and went back to his paperwork.

But then, as Carson was turning away, Stafford asked another question.

“Do you have any significant personnel problems here?

Anybody who’s a known trouble maker? Anyone who quit on you with no notice recently?”

Carson stopped in the doorway. First the questions about that weird girl. Now what was this! Lambry, maybe? “Not really,” he said, thinking fast. “There are personnel problems from time to time, of course. But they’re mostly my Monday-morning alcoholics, or people fooling around with time sheets or sick leave, or workmen’s comp stuff. But do I have any real bad actors? I’d have to say no.. Why?”

Stafford shrugged. “Standard procedure when we’re chasing possible fraud. Sudden departures sometimes indicate a bad guy who got antsy. Or if there’ve been calls made to the DOD fraud hot line — malcontents sometimes do that just to cause trouble. We check that out as a matter of routine. Oh, I have the personnel roster. Can I have access to your actual personnel files, please?”

“Sure. See Mrs. Johnson in Human Resources. I’ll tell her to get you anything you need. Anything else?”

“Nope. That ought to do it.” Stafford smiled again. “For now.”

For now, Carson thought as he went back to his office. He wondered if Stafford had learned of Lambry’s disappearance. He’d put the word out Monday that Lambry had quit Friday night after getting mad about something. He’d planned to construct the covering paperwork this week, but after Stafford’s question, he’d have to get something down in writing, and quickly. But then he stopped: Based on what he’d just said, Stafford would probably want to follow that up. Oh, shit, maybe he’d even go out to Lambry’s house, snoop around. Who knew what that idiot might have left in his house? He hurried to his office, placed a quick phone call to personnel, and asked for some termination forms. Fifteen minutes later, Mrs. Johnson, a large black lady, brought the forms and last week’s time sheets into Carson’s office.

“You get Mr. Stafford what he needed?” he asked without preamble. He did not like Mrs. Johnson, and she did not like him.

“Yes, I did,” she said. “Who is that man, anyway? Nobody can figure him out.”

“He’s an auditor from DLA,” Carson said. “It’s nothing special to do with us. DLA’s looking for a pattern on some old fraud cases, apparently. Which files did he want, exactly?”

“He wanted all the personnel files. Well, not actually— he wanted access to all the files. Including yours, by the way.”

Carson kept his expression neutral “That’s fine. There’s nothing here that DLA doesn’t already have on file in Washington. Give him whatever he needs. And bring me Mr. Lambry’s file. He apparently was serious about quitting, so we need to start the termination paperwork on him.”

He looked back down at his own paperwork as she started to leave. Then she stopped in the doorway. “Oh,” she said. “He wanted a map of Georgia.

Ella Mae had one in her car.”

Carson looked up again, perplexed. “He say what for?”

“Nope. That man don’t exactly talk it up, you know what I’m sayin’?”.

“Okay. Close that door on your way out, please.”

After she left, Carson swiveled around in his chair. He thought about the Georgia map in his own desk. She hadn’t said city map. She’d said state map. Hadn’t she? He picked up the phone and called her back.

“Did Mr. Stafford want an Atlanta map or a state map?” he asked.

“State of Georgia. Said he had an Atlanta map. I believe the motor pool provides a city map in all their cars.,” Mrs. Johnson sounded a little hurry.

He hung up without replying. So it was a state map. Now why in the hell would Stafford want a state map?

And what was that bit about the fraud hot line? The more he thought about it, the more uncertain he was about what Stafford was doing here.

The buyer hadn’t been thrilled, either. Tangent had called him from home, using the usual code, but Maude had been across the street visiting a sick neighbor, so Carson didn’t have to go find a pay phone.

He’d told Tangent why Stafford was there, and expressed the opinion that he wouldn’t be there very long. Tangent had requested Stafford’s full name, civil service grade, and home organization.

“Why?” Carson had asked after giving Tangent the information.

“We’ll check him out. See if he’s telling the truth about why he’s there.”

“You can do that?”

“In our business, Carson, we always do that. Lots of people say they’re one thing, turn out to be quite another. It doesn’t take long, which is good, because we don’t have all that much time.”

Carson was alarmed by that last. “Has something happened? Is the Army—”

“No, nothing yet,” Tangent. “But we have to operate on the assumption that they’ll discover it’s missing. If they don’t, great. If they do, a sale might become very tough to pull off. You do understand that, right?” Carson had said that he did, and Tangent said he’d call in the next day or so with a reading on Stafford.

Now Carson thought about his million-dollar prize. This damned Stafford was definitely not a complication he needed right now, especially if he pulled the string on Bud Lambry’s sudden disappearance. Carson knew he should be doing something about that, but he wasn’t at all sure what to do.

Stafford closed the oversized three-ring binder and plopped it back onto the desk. He’d been skimming through the DRMO reference binders for the past hour and a half, doo VJ dling on the blotter pad as he thought about the case. Most of the people who had been caught fiddling the surplus material system had been tripped up by their own runaway greed: GS-us and GS-12s who suddenly sported Cadillacs or second homes on a mid-five-figure salary. Coworkers would always notice, always.

Eventually, someone would call into the Defense Department fraud hot line. The usual pattern was a small scam that got bigger and bigger, until the scammer attracted attention by overreaching..

But headquarters knew that there had to be guys out there who were smart bad guys. Tap the honey pot, but do it infrequently, with lots of cutouts between you and the actual stuff, and make your money after the fact through kickbacks from the people who were getting an unfair bidding advantage, not from stealing or selling stuff directly.

He’d been telling the truth when he told Carson that he’d picked the Atlanta DRMO partly because of its size. But now that he was here, he wasn’t sure about what to do next. Carson was a potentially interesting guy, but that alone didn’t make him a suspect. He shuffled through the personnel folders to find Carson’s file. He went immediately to the DD-398 form, the security personal-history questionnaire, and read it.

If there was an auction scam in place here, Carson would just about have to know about it. If Carson was running something, Stafford’s request for access to the personnel files and that throw-away mention of the DOD fraud hot line should have seemed like opening shots. He thought he’d seen the man’s face tighten up when he’d asked those questions, although it was hard to tell. Carson had perfected one of those civil-servant masks of workday insouciance, an expression of blandness of which dirt would be proud.

He decided to get some early lunch, then spend the rest of the day walking around by himself through the DRMO industrial areas to see what he could learn by getting people to talk to him. Maybe stir up the employees a little bit, see if there were some grudges out there. It wouldn’t be long before that action got back to Carson, and maybe that would shake something loose. He couldn’t think of anything else to do.

He started his walking tour an hour and a half later, beginning in the outside lay-down area. Talking to the employees wasn’t as easy as he had thought it would be, since most of them were driving forklifts in and around the warehouse complex. He did notice that no one seemed interested in challenging him when he went into areas clearly marked with restricted access signs. He finally came upon the employee lunch room in warehouse two and went in for a cup of coffee, but his efforts at conversation with the half a dozen or so people in there were politely rebuffed. He left after a half hour of getting nowhere, then remembered his cover story: He was a DLA auditor. Auditors brought only trouble, so of course the employees weren’t going to invite him to their coffee breaks. They might even be afraid of him.

He wandered through some more of the warehouses, which by this time had all begun to look alike. He ended up in the warehouse immediately adjacent to the demil machine. The Monster apparently was not running.

The feed-assembly area contained both the feed and back loop of the demil machine’s conveyor system, which snaked around this warehouse’s floor, surrounded by a pair of waist-level safety railings that paralleled the course of the belt. The belt-loading area was in the back of the warehouse, where three heavy steel doors admitted forklifts from other warehouses. The belt, carrying the material to be destroyed, exited this warehouse through the connecting wall, entering the demil building through a screen-shielded aperture that was draped with stiff strips of rubber in front of two steel flap doors. There was a normal walk through door with a small window in it just to the right of the interbuilding aperture.

A crew of foifr men was loading the conveyor belt with material as it was brought in by roaring, smoky forklifts. Three of them were black; the fourth, a stupid-looking man of indeterminate age, was white. They would pile the components into plastic cartons on the belt, and then one of them would advance the belt a few feet to make room for the next pile. Stafford walked to the back of the room and watched for a few minutes. The crew ignored him except for the white man. Finally the last forklift backed out and the warehouse was silent. The three black men walked toward the back, where there was a small coffeepot on a table.

The white man ambled over to Stafford.

“Yew the auder fella?”

Auder? “Auditor,” Stafford replied.

“S’what I jist said. You him?” The man was eyeing Stafford with visible suspicion.

“Yup. But I won’t bite.”

His attempt at humor was apparently lost, as the man appeared to consider his chances of being bitten. Finally he nodded as if he’d come to a momentous decision. “Heard about you. Folks here get stirred up, auder’s come aroun’. What you want here?”;, Stafford thought about that question, and how to play it. He could turn on his cop face and bust this guy’s balls a little, or he could play it down. The guy was obviously some kind of serious hick. “Routine checks,” he said. “We go around to the DRMOs to make sure everything’s being done by the book and nobody’s stealing anything. That kind of stuff.” He must be about six feet tall, Stafford thought, but skinny as a rail. It was wonderful what a childhood diet of Twinkies and soda pop could do.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

The tall man peered down his long, bony nose and thought about that for a moment. “Corey,” he replied finally. “Corey Dillard. What’s yours?”

“I’m David Stafford. How long have you worked here, Mr. Dillard?”

“Fifteen years and some.”

“And what do you do here?”

Dillard appeared to be puzzled by the question, as if no one had ever asked him that before. He bent down a little; to talk directly into Stafford’s face exuding an aroma of tobacco and decaying teeth. Stafford blinked, forcing himself not to step back.

“Ah do what Boss Hisley tells me to,” Dillard answered. “Mostly, Ah feed the Monstuh. Load up’n this here belt, then we feed that thing. Looka heunh, you ain’t a cop? I seen auders, and you don’t look like no auder.

Boss Hisley, he’s sayin’ you’s a govmint cop.”

Stafford grinned at him. “Boss Hisley worried about cops, is he? Should I go talk to him, you think?”

Dillard straightened up, a look of alarm flashing across his face. “I ain’t sayin’ nothin’ about Boss Hisley.”

“Okay. I won’t tell him that you did. So what do you want to talk about?”

Dillard looked over his shoulder at the three men standing by the table in the corner of the building. They were well out of earshot, but they were definitely watching him.

“Looka heunh,” he said, bending forward again, “if’n somebody had something’ to tell you, he gonna git hisself in trouble, he tellin’ it?”

Well, well, well, Stafford thought. “I’m not sure what you mean, Mr. Dillard,” he replied wanting to see where this was going.

“I seen it on the TV. Man had something’ to say, them cops done give him ‘munity.”

Better and better, Stafford thought. “Absolutely, Mr. Dillard. Although I’m not a cop, you understand. But I do know that cops offer immunity all the time. For the right kind of information. Long as it’s done right.” “Done right? How’s that?” Dillard asked, his eyes narrowing. He had put his hands in the pockets of his overalls. He was standing in front of Stafford, looking like a nervous stork.

“Two things. First, the man wanting immunity has to tell what he knows before the cops find it out for themselves.

Dillard blinked, then nodded his understanding.

“The second is that if more than one man knows something, the first man to do the telling gets the immunity.

Everybody else takes their chances. Like that.”

Dillard absorbed that and nodded again, and once more he looked over his shoulder before replying. The largest of the men at the coffee table was staring openly at them. That would be Boss Hisley, Stafford thought.

“How long you gonna be heunh?” Dillard asked.

“Don’t know, Mr. Dillard. A little while, probably. Like I said, though, I’m an auditor, not a cop. Is there something you want to talk about?”

Dillard started to say something, but then he shook his head after glancing back over at the big black man. “Reckon not,” he replied.

“Later, mebbe.” With that he started to shuffle back over toward the conveyor belt just as another forklift came bursting through the double doors at the back of the warehouse. Dillard stopped, and, turning his head, said something that Stafford couldn’t hear over the forklift’s engine noise.

“What?” Stafford called, cupping his left ear.

“Lambry,” Dillard shouted, keeping his back to the others. “Y’all need to find Bud Lambry.”

Stafford watched as the loading team went back to work, then he tried the walk-through door connecting the feed-assembly room to the demil building. It was locked, so he went outside. So much for his cover story about being an auditor, he thought. The collective blue-collar antenna had sensed already that something was up and there was a Washington cop of some kind here. Still, now he had something to do: Find some guy named Bud Lambry.

He went into the demil building after finding that door unlocked. There was nobody in the control booth when he entered the demil chamber. The empty conveyor belt led straight to the now-silent shredding bank. There were steel screens up on either side of the injection point, as well as plastic spray shields. With all the piping and other ancillary machinery coiled on either side of the shredding bank, the huge machine looked like a crouching steel dinosaur. The vertical band-saw blades glinted dangerously in the fluorescent light. He jumped when the conveyor belt started arid then stopped, but then he realized the men next door had advanced it to fit the next load.

So maybe there’s something going on here after all, he mused as he stood looking at the Monster. The working stiffs knew he wasn’t a DLA auditor.

The one man who had been williag to get anywhere near him, Dillard, had started talking about immunity. Saw that ‘munity stuff on the TV. I love it. But immunity for what? He couldn’t imagine that rocket scientist being capable of knowing anything really significant. So what was the next step? Ask Carson about this Bud Lambry? Or maybe get back to Dillard, in the cop mode this time, and ask Dillard about Carson? Maybe that’s why everybody here seemed to have a hate-on for the manager.

Maybe they knew he was running a scam of some kind. And — what? Not sharing? Probably.

He decided he would casually drop Lambry’s name the next time he talked to Carson. Say somebody he’d met out in the industrial area had mentioned the man’s name. See if Carson had any particular reaction.

Then he would put a call into the local DCIS office and ask them to run a NCIC check on Lambry. Careful, he reminded himself as he walked across the tarmac to see some more warehouses. You’re not supposed to go stirring things up. Heaven forbid you go do your job and uncover some actual crime here. He rubbed his aching right bicep as he walked back.