by James Bruno
BRUNO
out. And we got contracts, including from the government."
"But how did you actually pull it off, what with the power the big unions wield, not to mention the bigger established competitors and all the government red tape you mentioned earlier?" Wentworth wanted to know.
Big Al's big brown eyes flitted suspiciously from wall-to-wall as he fell uncharacteristically silent. "Next chapter, Chuckie," he declared as he slapped the young man on the back and gestured toward the open door. "Let me buy you a cup of coffee and then I'll introduce you around."
Chuckie Wentworth and his boss made the rounds.
Gruff, broken-nosed job foremen, urbane smooth-talking accountants, simple laborers, thirtyish divorcée secretaries who cast lascivious glances at Wentworth's behind. While such people were all to be found in South Carolina as well, these were different. Tougher, blunter, shrewder, pushier.
And he found no comparison with government people either, the latter generally ranging from sycophantically ambitious to smarmily officious.
Al tasked Wentworth first with revamping the security guards. Too much equipment and stuff disappearing from warehouses and job sites. Next, look into procurement methods. Seems we're paying higher prices than we should be for supplies. After that, payroll. Does everybody on the books really show up for work?
Wentworth plunged into his work. He uncovered a scam in the guard force: they were ripping off supplies and selling them. Big Al fired the guard force. Wentworth drew on his embassy experience in contracting for a new force with an aggressive, up-and-coming firm. Wentworth personally scrutinized the background of each guard.
Contract terms called for regular training of the guards and recertification. The company was indeed overpaying for PERMANENT INTERESTS
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everything from paper towels to axle grease. Fire the company purchaser, Al ordered, and an accountant while we're at it. Sure enough, payroll and personnel didn't jibe.
Make it jibe by firing the goddamn goldbrickers and their foremen, commanded Big Al.
In their place, Wentworth recruited ex-military NCOs and enlisted men. "Great job, Chuckie, here's two grand as a bonus. Spend it all on broads and a good time."
Wentworth was pleased with his new job and the turn his life was taking. True, his greatest youthful ambition had never been to live in or around New York City. He shared the same biases many rural Americans, northerners and southerners alike, have against New Yorkers. Indeed, they were brash, pushy, shifty. But the more he got to know them, the more he felt kindred to them. Folks back home were more solicitous, mannerly. Yet they spat when telling a good raunchy joke just like New Yorkers did. And once a New Yorker took a liking to you, you had a friend for life; not so different from southerners once you got down to it. He began to realize that most differences were superficial. It was a matter of adjusting to dialect, body language, and temperament.
His thoughts about Al were at once warm and perplexed.
The boss was a big-hearted bear of a man, yet, like a bear, potentially dangerous, Wentworth felt. He was a tempestuous and emotional man; almost like an overindulged child. Thus far, Wentworth only saw his good side. He wondered about the bad, the flip side of character that we all possess in varying intensity. It also struck him that Al may have many things to hide. For example, Wentworth knew next to nothing of his boss's personal life. Was he involved with someone? Did he have kids? Mother? Father? And the way the older man would suddenly screech to a halt when discussing certain 14 JAMES
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subjects that aroused Wentworth's curiosity. Finally, the way he just thrust a two thousand dollar bonus on his new minion after a mere two weeks on the job floored the young man. That was almost a month's net take-home pay when he was working for the government. Working for the government was like Al's description of how it was to work under a union: whether you busted your ass or merely showed up for work comatose, you got paid all the same.
Wentworth liked the private sector.
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CHAPTER TWO
CONFIDENTIAL
TO: SECSTATE NIACT IMMEDIATE
FROM: AMEMBASSY ROME
FOR THE SECRETARY
DEPT PLEASE PASS WHITE HOUSE
SUBJECT: AMBASSADOR MORTIMER MURDERED
REF: BALDWIN-CROFT TELCON 5/21
1. CONFIDENTIAL - ENTIRE TEXT.
2. ROME MUNICIPAL POLICE INFORMED THE
EMBASSY AT 0545 TODAY THAT AMBASSADOR
ROLAND MORTIMER'S BODY WAS FOUND IN AN
ALLEYWAY OFF THE VIA VENETO. POLICE
REPORT THAT THE AMBASSADOR BLED TO
DEATH AS A RESULT OF A DEEP GASH ACROSS
HIS THROAT. BODY WAS MUTILATED. NO
SUSPECTS HAVE YET BEEN APPREHENDED.
ROBBERY IS APPARENTLY NOT A MOTIVE SINCE
THE AMBASSADOR'S MONEY, WRISTWATCH, ID, ETC. WERE NOT TAKEN. NO TERRORIST GROUP
HAS CLAIMED RESPONSIBILITY. AMBASSADOR
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WAS NOT -- REPEAT NOT -- WITH SECURITY
DETAIL.
3. BODY CURRENTLY AT POLICLINICO UMBERTO
I HOSPITAL. AS OF 0700 LOCAL, WE HAVE
RECEIVED NO -- REPEAT NO -- PRESS QUERIES, BUT EXPECT NEWS WILL BREAK ANY MOMENT.
4. DCM HAS NOTIFIED MRS. MORTIMER HERE.
RECOMMEND DEPARTMENT CONTACT FAMILY
MEMBERS IN CLEVELAND ASAP.
5. MINISTER OF INTERIOR AMBROLINI HAS
INFORMED DCM IN TELCON THAT HE WILL
PERSONALLY LEAD THE INVESTIGATION. DCM
WILL MEET WITH AMBROLINI AT 0730.
6. WILL REPORT FURTHER DETAILS AS THEY
BECOME AVAILABLE.
BALDWIN
As senior watch officer in the State Department's 24-hour Operations Center, Bob Innes had acquired a finely-tuned sense of what constituted news important enough to bring to the immediate attention of the Secretary of State or, in this case, to wreck his sleep at quarter-to-two in the morning.
Innes had been sitting at his work station waiting for Rome's tragic message to flash on his screen. He had already been informed of the news by Robin Croft, a junior watch officer working the night shift. She had received the PERMANENT INTERESTS
17
call about the ambassador's murder from Joe Baldwin, the Deputy Chief of Mission, now Chargé d’Affaires.
Innes didn't mind phoning the Secretary in the middle of the night -- even to bear bad news -- so much as having to deal with the boss's overprotective and scatter-brained wife.
"Hello, Mrs. Dennison? This is Bob Innes at the Ops Center. I'm terribly sorry to disturb you at this hour but I'm afraid that something has come up that Mr. Dennison really should know about right away.
"Yes, I know this is the second time this week that we've had to disturb the Secretary after hours…. No, it isn't the Middle East again…. Uh, no. I'm afraid that you won't be able to help me on this one…. Well, if we do wait till morning, I'm afraid the press might get wind that the Secretary of State was caught with his pants down on a very important matter."
The one sure way of getting past Mrs. Dennison, Innes had learned, was to imply that public embarrassment would come to her husband if he were not told immediately of a late-breaking development. He stifled a smirk at the thought that Secretary Dennison indeed may literally have his pants down.
Innes gave the Secretary a concise readout on the murder.
"This is tragic. Just tragic…" Secretary Dennison said in his patrician New England voice, barely thickened by the vestiges of sleep. "Was anyone with the ambassador?" he added quickly.
"Apparently
not."
"What about his security detail? Where were they?"
Innes hesitated. "It seems that the ambassador gave them the slip."
"Gave them the slip?!"
"Er, yes. He had a habit of doing so."
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Innes heard an extended sigh from the other end of the line. He pictured Dennison sitting on the edge of his bed, rubbing his brow in despair.
"All right. I'll want a full briefing first thing in the morning. Tell whoever is running things over there at this hour that I will personally handle this with the White House. Got me?"
"Yes, Mr. Secretary."
"One other thing."
Innes readied pen and paper as he cradled the receiver on his shoulder.
"I want the full police report, autopsy report -- both translated into English -- with photos, and a detailed listing of every item on his person at the time his body was discovered. I want it delivered to my house along with the classified traffic."
Innes winced. Why the Secretary of State would want all the gory details struck him as strange, but his was not to reason why.
"Yes,
sir."
Innes knew that hell would be paid by those responsible for embassy protection, from the embassy security officer right on up to the chief of diplomatic security at the State Department -- who was number two on his list of officials to be notified this early morning.
"Mr. Innes?" Damn. It was her again.
"Yes, Mrs. Dennison?"
"Now, we don't want to receive any more calls from you tonight, you hear? I don't know what it is, but it can wait five more hours, y'understand now?" she drawled in her unapologetic Alabama delivery.
"I'll try not to, ma'am." Click. "Dumb cracker!" he cursed after hanging up.
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Upon being told the news, the only thing that Ralph Torres, the Department's head of diplomatic security, could bring himself to utter was an uninterrupted string of emphatic "Goddamn"-s.
Innes could hear Torres struggling to control his breathing. "How in hell could Kobalski let that…that neophyte out of his sight?" he seethed. Leonard Kobalski was Embassy Rome’s RSO – Regional Security Officer.
"This has gotta be an al-Qaida hit all right. Those friggin'
Italians are worthless against terrorism!"
Innes could see where this was leading to. It was called
"CYA" in bureaucratic parlance: Cover Your Ass. The buck was already passing at lightning speed. Lesson number one in government: Career comes first. And accept accountability only when glory is at stake.
It was this kind of behavior in the senior ranks that caused Innes to be increasingly disillusioned with his career. At 34 and with eleven years in the Foreign Service, Innes had advanced fairly rapidly until he hit a dead stall in the upper end of the middle grades. With a wife and two small kids and no marketable skills for the private sector, Innes had pretty much come to the conclusion that he was a government lifer. On the bureaucratic treadmill, drawing a decent wage and benefits, but going no place fast. At least the Foreign Service, one of the few remaining bastions for the generalist, offered a unique line of rarely boring work, lots of world travel and still a modicum of prestige.
Innes's shift in the Ops Center ended at 8:00 am.
Slouched at his work station, he looked at his watch. Ten minutes left. Innes rubbed the fatigue from his face with the palms of his hands and yawned deeply. He couldn't recall whether he had made love with his wife this month.
A nurse also working shifts, she was always returning home either while he was asleep or on his way to work.
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"Passing ships in the night…" he murmured to himself.
"God, I hate Washington."
"You say something, Bob?" asked Robin. Her curly, flaming red hair accentuated a coed's face that beamed energy and ambition.
"Nah, just going crazy is all," a wan smile creased his boyish face. He wondered if, ten years from now, Robin would join the ranks of the brainy yet barren career spinsters who were now filling the upper ranks in greater numbers.
During the 30-minute drive back to his home in Herndon, Innes recalled Ambassador Roland Mortimer and his reputation in Washington. As was the case with most of his recent predecessors, Mortimer was a wealthy businessman and political activist who had contributed generously to the President's party during the last election, a squeaker which was delivered in no small part due to 200,000 swing votes Mortimer had captured -- some alleged stolen -- in his native Ohio.
Mortimer extolled family virtues, having fathered six children with his wife of thirty years. He was a gregarious, red-faced bear of a man who loved being around people and letting his hair down in posh watering holes after particularly strenuous political fund-raisers or long, boring business meetings. Having worked his way from poverty to wealth in the construction equipment parts distribution business, Mortimer liked to boast to his politician friends that he had spent his life "building America," a slogan that his party adopted during the last general election.
Mortimer never ran for office himself, preferring to back politicians who would be indebted to him once in office.
What the public didn't know about Roland Mortimer --
apart from the fact that he was a diplomatic neophyte who didn't know the difference between a démarche and a PERMANENT INTERESTS
21
declaration of war, who called hide-bound European prime ministers by their first names, and who slapped monarchs on the back as he would business cronies -- was that he was a hard-drinking, loudmouthed lout whose faux pas and lecherous escapades caused the Department no end of embarrassment. The professionals were constantly having to cover up his indiscretions. Two weeks after arriving in Italy, he had been detained briefly by hotel security guards in Milan after having chased a 16-year old girl from an official reception to her room where he tried to break in the door. The Italian prime minister personally intervened with the publisher of a major Rome newspaper which was preparing to report that the American ambassador regularly had prostitutes delivered to the embassy guest house.
When asked at a press conference about policy differences between Italy and the United States over aid to the former Soviet republics, Mortimer blurted, "Fuck 'em! The Russians lived by communism. Let 'em die by communism!" The latter statement was followed by a quick retraction and "clarification" from the embassy. And feeling forever constrained by security restrictions, Mortimer often eluded his protective detail for unescorted walks in shopping areas or drives to the countryside in his red Fiat Spider.
The Italians knew the score. They were the inventors of modern statecraft. The U.S. embassy was merely bypassed whenever important policy issues arose. The Italian ambassador in Washington was an urbane diplomatic professional with close ties to White House and congressional figures. The American and Italian leaderships alike either picked up the phone or used Italy’s Ambassador Orlani whenever they had anything serious to say to one another. The American embassy in Rome was good at issuing visas and attending to incarcerated or 22 JAMES
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deceased Americans, but not much more. Like a gargoyle on a lesser cathedral, Mortimer was shown respect but was otherwise paid little attention.
As he drove with his windshield wipers at full speed through a cascading spring rain storm, the thought crossed Innes's mind that perhaps, just perhaps, our bungling boor of an ambassador had brought foul play upon himself in a very direct way. Considering some of the sleazy denizens he associated with and his penchant for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, anything was possible. That moron may cause us as much trouble in death as he did alive, Innes thought.
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CHAPTER THREE
The flight to Rome made Bob Innes nauseous. Air travel never agreed with him. Flying government-mandated economy class with its insipid food, knee-capping seat proximity and concentration camp congestedness merely ensured he would vomit if the trip was longer than six hours.
"You all right Bob?" asked Innes's fellow traveler to his left. "You're looking green around the gills, boy."
"I don't know if it'
s the flight or my magic elixir of Pepto-Bismol and dramamine that's doing me in," Innes replied to the diplomatic security man, part of the fourteen-person delegation being dispatched to investigate Mortimer's murder.
Bob hated the meal, stale salad and rubber chicken. He hated the movie selection, some airhead comedies and a B-grade flick about dancers in New York. He hated most of all traveling with delegations. The government had to do everything by committee. No wonder so little ever got done. This was the worst kind of delegation, however; a mish-mash one comprised partly of bureaucrats from domestic agencies like the FBI and Justice, novices to international travel who required babying the whole time.
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The rest of the group, from CIA, Defense, and State, looked to Innes like the pasty-faced, per diem-gouging, anal retentive types that typically populated traveling government committees.
He fought not to be included in the team, but lost out on three counts: he worked in the office of the Secretary, he spoke fluent Italian, and he was available.
Innes's job was to provide all-round support to the head of the team, the self-important legal advisor brought into the Department a crusty Boston law firm. He was to coordinate arrangements with the embassy, act as notetaker at meetings with Italian officials, write cables and interact with host country authorities.
Whisked through immigration and customs at Rome's Fiumicino Airport just after sun-up, the group was taken directly to the embassy where it was briefed by Baldwin, Kobalski and CIA station chief Hempstead and sent on its way directly to the first meeting, with the Interior Minister.
Hotel check-in would have to wait, usual for such travel.
Great, thought Innes to himself. No food, no shower, no rest. Vomiting appeared to be a distinct possibility.
Renowned
Italian
hospitality averted catastrophe,
however. In the high-ceilinged baroque meeting room of the former palazzo that housed the Italian Interior Ministry, rich strong espresso and assorted biscotti were served to the delegation. Wafts of the coffee's aromatic vapors enticed the senses, its ingestion shot life back into weary limbs and foggy minds.