The Kingmaker

by Brian Haig

  “Not really. Just think greed, larceny, jealousy.” I smiled and added, “And since we’re delving into my personal life, what about yours?”

  “What about it?”

  “You’re what—twenty-nine and still single?”

  “And you’re what—thirty-nine and still single?”

  “In the event you’re not aware of it, age is irrelevant with guys.”

  For some reason, this struck her as hilarious. She slapped the pillow and nearly choked to death. “You’re a piece of work.”

  My smile widened. “I just want to know who I’m working with.” Okay, I know. It sounded lame even to me.

  She smirked and said, “Then let me help. Do I have a boyfriend? No. Have I ever? A few. Am I desperately seeking? Not. Did I miss anything?”

  Like I needed this. “No. That’s fine, thank you.”

  “Maybe you want a description of what I’m looking for?”

  “Fine. What are you looking for?”

  “Definitely not some chest-thumping meathead who spends his weekends knocking down six-packs and screaming obnoxious things at the football jocks on his TV. Masculine, but the right kind of masculine—the kind that knows the difference between a flute and a piccolo.”

  This sounded more like a dickless canary than a man to me, although I do know the difference between a flute and piccolo: Spelling.

  She continued, “Good-looking . . . but the right sort. California beach boys are a turnoff. Back hair is a turnoff. I’m inclined toward the dark-haired, worldly, charming types.”

  Now she was talking. Mouton Cadet, ’67, anybody?

  I suggested, “And now I suppose you want to know what I’m looking for?”

  “I already know.” She glanced in the direction of the fireplace and said, “Our client’s wife.”

  That didn’t even dignify a reply, but I gave her a finger in the air anyway.

  We moved on to researching the cases of the Walkers, Ames, and Hanssen. The ever-resourceful Imelda had found a trove of material that covered everything from the trial procedures to some well-written synopses of the strategies used by the prosecutors and the defense. In separate folders were materials on the Wen Ho Lee case, which were vastly more hopeful, from our perspective, since the defense slipped the willie to the prosecutor for the whole world to see. But then, there were distinct differences between the Lee case and ours—like our defendant was white and couldn’t accuse anybody of racial discrimination; he didn’t have a charming daughter to run around and hold free-my-daddy rallies; and in Lee’s case, when forced to put up or shut up, the government suddenly coughed a few times, looked mortified, and admitted it had caught a fairly severe case of evidence deprivation. If O’Neil and Golden were to be believed, the government’s dilemma regarding our case wasn’t an evidence shortfall but a swamp so vast and murky that an army of attorneys could barely slog through it.

  By midnight, drool was spilling out my lips. I stretched and mumbled, “I’ve got to get some sleep.”

  Katrina’s beaded nose was stuffed in a big folder. The girl had endurance, having been in the office at six that morning and she was still going like a choo-choo eighteen hours later, while my gas gauge bounced off empty.

  In my bedroom I slipped out of my clothes and was asleep almost immediately. I’m a light sleeper, however. The problem with old Army quarters is creaky stairs, as well as a complete absence of modern insulation and noise abatement buffers. At three-thirty, I heard her footsteps on the stairs. I alternately cursed and prayed she’d move her skinny ass a little faster and then rush through her ablutions and let me get on with my sleep.

  Then I swore I heard cabinets opening and shutting downstairs. I quietly slipped out of bed and tiptoed to the door. I paused to briefly consider my quandary. Definitely there were at least two different sets of noises out there, possibly three. I needed to see why, althoughsneaking quietly down those stairs was out of the question.

  I chose the other way and plunged down so fast that I nearly tripped over my own feet. And at the base of the stairs, that was exactly what happened. Sort of. I flew through the air and crashed face first into a wall. Except I hadn’t tripped. Something had shoved my back and helped me along.

  I recovered my senses and spun around just in time to get a hard, booted kick in the center of my chest. I made a loud “ooof” sound and sank to my ass on the floor. The lights were out but I saw a large figure looming over me.

  Oddly enough, the next thing I saw was the face of a young female medic waving one of those smelly things under my nose, saying, “He’s coming to.”

  I heard Imelda say, “That nose look broken.”

  I heard the medic reply, “Yes, I think you’re right.”

  I noticed that the back of my head seemed to have a big dent in it, and my face hurt, and my chest ached.

  The medic squeezed my nose and looked at me with tender eyes. “There, there, Major . . . you’re going to be fine. Just a few bruises, a little blood, and maybe a broken nose.”

  I replied, “Ouch, damn it. Let go of my nose.”

  Which she did. And that made me happy. I wedged my way up the wall and got unsteadily to my feet. A stretcher rested by the door, where two more medics were waiting to load me aboard. They looked terrifically relieved to see me standing. Lazy bastards.

  “What the hell happened?” I asked.

  Imelda adjusted her glasses on her nose and said, “We came down when you got knocked ’round. Heard the door slam and saw two men runnin’ away, only nobody got a good look at them. They was dressed in black and wore hoods.”

  “Was anything taken?”

  “Didn’t check yet,” Imelda admitted, suddenly sheepish that she’d been so busy attending to me that she’d failed to see what might have been stolen. It wasn’t like her to commit such a breach of duty.

  After fibbing to the medics that I’d eventually come over to the dispensary and let a real doctor check me out, I helped Imelda and her two assistants look around. To the best I could tell, nothing had been touched—no open drawers, no ransacked boxes, no sign of burglary at all. Very strange. We all ended up in the living room. I asked, “Did anybody see anything missing?” and instantly felt like an idiot—how do you see something that’s missing?

  Heads were shaking all around when I felt this odd flip-flop in my stomach. “Katrina, the tapes. Where are they?”

  I had blurted out the question, and the enormity of the possibility hit us simultaneously.

  She rushed upstairs and I hobbled after her. She hurried to her purse and flung it open on the bed. Among assorted other female debris, the tape recorder and two tapes spilled out. A common sigh of relief escaped from both of our throats. And, in fact, I was starting to walk out of the room when Katrina said, “Wait.”

  She picked up a tape, stuck it in the recorder, and pushed the play button. Nothing. Not a sound, just empty tape. She withdrew that tape and inserted the second one—ditto. She flipped the tape over, fast-forwarded, and reversed. Not a sound. She handed me the recorder, and I stuffed it in my pocket with a loud curse.

  Our client was not going to be very happy with us. I was not very happy with us. But Uncle Sam was going to be unhappiest of all, as somebody had just stolen a tape that contained the name of America’s top foreign asset, a name I had very stupidly allowed to be placed on a tape I even more stupidly failed to secure.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE TEAM THATdescended on our building reminded me why so many American citizens go live in the woods and mumble about black helicopters and pasteI LOVE GUNS stickers all over their rusted old pickups.

  The FBI agents came up from Kansas City. The CIA folks flew in from Washington, apparently on a very fast jet, because they and their FBI buddies were streaming through the front door some two hours after I called to report the incident. Not that you could tell them apart—they all wore cheap-looking gray and blue suits, complemented by that glum, dour expression that distinguishes a government
employee from the rest of humanity.

  They went over that house with a fine-toothed comb, took foot molds and fingerprints of my entire team, and inventoried everything we had and a few things we didn’t. They canvassed the neighborhood for witnesses and asked every colonel’s wife who resided on that row if she had happened to be staring out the window at three o’clock that morning. All this was accomplished with Prussian efficiency and New Yorker manners, which is to say the worst of both the old and new worlds.

  When all this was done, the head of the team, a CIA guy named Smith—if you couldn’t guess—pulled me into an upstairs room for a come-to-Jesus meeting, as we say in the ranks.

  He had a tough-guy look about him, a slouchiness of the face, a well-defined musculature of the body. He stuck a cigarette between his skinny lips, lit it up with a Zippo, then flipped the lighter shut with a harsh jolt of the wrist, badass style. He puffed a few times and fixed me with a withering glare. “So, Major,” he began, “how long you been in?”

  “Thirteen years.”

  “You’ve been briefed on security procedures before? You’ve signed those little forms that say you understand your duties and obligations?”

  “I have.”

  “Still, you made a Top Secret tape and left it lying around a room?”

  “I did,” I confessed, my lawyer’s instincts screaming I shouldn’t, but my conscience seeing absolutely no way around it, considering the circumstances.

  A trail of smoke eked from his nostrils. “That’s a real dumb-shit move, buddy. A first-rate dick-up.”

  “I could say I had no idea burglars would break in and steal it. But that doesn’t make any difference, does it?”

  “Nope.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  He took another drag from the cigarette and seemed to ponder that question. That moment dragged on much too long. Eventually he poked his lit cigarette toward my face. “First, I’m gonna report this to my superiors. I’m sure they’ll then report this to your superiors. I don’t know how they handle these things in the Army, but in the Agency you’d be looking at doing some time.”

  I stuck my hands in my pockets and glumly nodded. This is pretty much how the Army handles these things, also. “So I’m in pretty big trouble?”

  “The loss of that tape, that’s a fuckin’ catastrophe.”

  He had a point, but I wasn’t done trying. “You know, technically, the tape was guarded. I did try to stop them and was overpowered.”

  “You had no safe. You weren’t armed. And, uh, you were asleep. I wouldn’t try goin’ that route, I were you.”

  I shuffled my feet a few times. “Yes . . . you’re right . . . unless. . . well, there might be one other extenuating circumstance.”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s a really odd thing. I hesitate to bring it up.”

  “Go ahead,” he said. “Try whatever lawyer bullshit you want.”

  “Right.” I scratched my head and replied, “The thing is, who knew we’d made any tapes? Miss Mazorski and I didn’t tell anybody . . . not even anybody on our own defense team.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “So, whoever did the theft knew we’d made them, and even that the tapes were in her purse. Don’t you find that suspicious? I sure do. And they even brought blank ones along to replace them. If I hadn’t walked in on them, we might never have known those tapes were taken. But of course, they were stomping around and making all that noise.”

  “So?” He drew another long drag and stared at me with a fathomless expression.

  “So who could possibly have known we made those tapes?”

  “You tell me.”

  “No, you tell me.”

  “I haven’t got a clue,” he replied, with all the intense insincerity that response deserved.

  “Well, I do. You wired our interrogation room. You listened to everything we said.”

  He coolly looked around for an ashtray, didn’t see any, so he walked over and opened the window. He flipped his burnt-down butt outside, faced me, and said, “That’s a serious charge, Drummond. Can you prove it?”

  “It’s circumstantially obvious.”

  “To you, maybe.”

  “And to any reporter I tell the story to, maybe.”

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out another cigarette. Otherwise he appeared as cool as a brick of ice. He said, “Drummond, you got a coupla problems here. You and your client, you been discussing things way outside your security sphere.”

  “And how would you know that?”

  “I hear these things. And as to whether anybody wired your interrogation room, I’d be willing to bet that if you were to go over there right now, you wouldn’t find any trace of wire.”

  “And how do you knowthat ?”

  “Call it good gut instincts.”

  “I see. What do you intend to do?”

  “Like I said, report your very serious security violation to my superiors. What they do with it’s up to them.”

  “Very fine,” I said. “Then I’m sure you won’t mind if I make a few calls to theNew York Times and theWall Street Journal .”

  “Actually, I do. That’d be a real stupid idea,” he said, struggling to appear unimpressed.

  “Stupid from where you stand . . . from where I stand, it’s brilliant.”

  “No, really, Drummond . . . do that, and God knows what might happen to you.”

  “Oh, goodness. Did I just hear a threat?”

  “Just say I got good intuition, too. But listen here, pal, there might be a way around this makes everybody happy.”

  “And what might that be?”

  “Well, you got a client that did a lot of damage to this country and don’t exactly deserve your loyalty or sympathy. You’re a soldier, right? We need to know what your client gave away. Lives . . . our country’s security could depend on this. All we want is your guarantee that if he was to tell you something he disclosed to the Russkis, you’ll let us know. It’ll be quarantined from this little game you lawyers are about to play. Strict fire-walls between us and the prosecuting team, I swear.”

  Well, goodness gracious. What was I was hearing? The theft was an attempt to blackmail me into becoming their stooge. And the noise and fracas was a trigger to make sure I knew. And the ass-kicking? That was just the fun part, I guess—for them, anyway.

  “All I have to do is tell you whatever he discloses to me?”

  “Simple as that.”

  “Or you’ll report the security violation to my bosses?”

  “Right again.”

  “Sounds fair . . . just one problem.”

  He took another puff off his cigarette. “And that would be?”

  “This.” I withdrew Katrina’s tape recorder from my pocket and held it up to show it had been running.

  The thing with smartasses like him—they can’t believe anybody can out-smartass them, until the evidence is jammed right under their noses. Looking quite annoyed, he said, “Drummond, you lousy bastard, give me that tape.”

  “Well, that would be stupid, wouldn’t it?” Actually, regarding stupidity, I wondered for just the merest fraction of a second if Mr. Smith had been authorized by his bosses to use deadly force in pursuit of this blackmail. If so, the easiest thing for him to do at this instant was yank out his gun, blow a hole in my head, and walk off with that tape. From his bewildered expression I supposed he was wondering the same thing.

  “Drummond, you can’t do that,” he finally blurted.

  “Well, yeah, I can. Military judges don’t take kindly to government agents who mug an Army lawyer and attempt blackmail. I’m an attorney, Mr. Smith. Trust me on this. I have very good intuition. I have good gut instincts.”

  Smith and I did not share the same sense of humor. “Listen up, asshole, Morrison’s a worthless fucking traitor. Give me that tape.”

  “No.”

  Mr. Smith could’ve benefited from a few more gallons of brainjuice, but the realization
suddenly struck him that I wouldn’t be tossing threats back and forth if a solution to this quandary wasn’t possible. He broke into a smug grin and said, “What do ya want? What can I do?”

  “Get your bosses on the phone.”

  “Don’t go there, Drummond. You got no idea who you’re fuckin’ with here. These guys, they don’t like to be bothered by pipsqueaks.”

  We played eye tag for a moment until he came to the right conclusion, which was this: I could and would screw him into a wall.

  He angrily yanked out a cell phone, stalked out to the hallway, and punched in a number. I heard him whisper furtively into the mouthpiece. I looked out the window and politely let him make his explanations in privacy. I thus had to imagine what his bosses were saying when they found out the thug they sent out to blackmail me was now being blackmailed himself.

  He eventually walked back in with a very sour expression and handed me the cell phone. In my most wiseass tone, I said, “And to whom am I speaking?”

  An older voice replied, “Major, this is Harold Johnson.”

  This was not good. “I’ve heard of you before,” I said, which was true, because Johnson was the deputy director for intelligence, the number three guy in the Agency, and something of a legend in the secret agency community.

  “I don’t know what that asshole Smith did, but I apologize nonetheless. Trust me when I tell you he’s something of a wild card. He sometimes approaches his job with too much . . . shall we say, enthusiasm?”

  Idly rubbing the big lump on the back of my head, I replied, “No kidding.”

  “Now what’s this problem he’s caused?”

  “I’m not sure what problem you’re referring to, sir. Where he wired the interrogation room where I met with my client? Breaking and entering into my legal offices? Stealing legally protected tapes? Maliciously mugging an officer of the United States Army? Or the attempted blackmail? Which one’s your favorite? It’s the mugging that really pisses me off.”

  “Jesus, what was that asshole thinking?”

  “And do you believe headmitted all that on tape? Hard to find good help these days, isn’t it?”