Mortal Allies sd-2

by Brian Haig

  “True,” I admitted.

  “And if he did exploit that knowledge – if I even suspected he was exploiting that knowledge – I would have to declare a mistrial and seek to have him disbarred.”

  I miserably said, “I’ll have my letter on your desk before noon.”

  “Good. That would be the proper thing to do. And I am hereby announcing a judge’s restraining order that under no conditions are you to have any further contact with Miss Carlson and her team. If I find out you’ve been within a hundred yards of each other, I’ll be forced to declare a mistrial, and I’ll personally appoint the new counsel for Whitehall. Is that clear?”

  I said, “Yes, Your Honor. Could you please notify Carlson?”

  He nodded.

  “And can you tell her I recommend Captain Kip Goins as my substitute?”

  I stood up and started to make my way to the door.

  “Drummond,” Carruthers said.

  I looked over my shoulder. “Yes sir.”

  “I’m sorry it turned out this way. I truly am. I was actually looking forward to having you in my court. I don’t know why, but I had the sense it was going to be very entertaining.”

  “Well, some other day, maybe.”

  He nodded and I left. I couldn’t remember feeling more downtrodden or frustrated. I had a client I knew was innocent, a co-counsel whose affection and trust I’d lost, and I’d just spent two of the hardest, most painful weeks of my life for nothing.

  CHAPTER 43

  It took three minutes to type the letter. All it said was “I, Major Sean Drummond, request to be recused from the case of Captain Thomas Whitehall.”

  Nothing dramatic or elegant because, frankly, the law frowns on anything that smacks of passion or lavishness. I scrawled my signature at the bottom, and then called Imelda and had her send up one of her assistants to deliver it. The moment she was gone, I fell into bed.

  It’s amazing how quickly I was out. You’d think I’d roil around on the sheets and agonize over my situation, but I was too exhausted. I was in a coma about thirty seconds after my head hit the pillow. And I slept like a log.

  At least, until the phone rang. This was at 6:00 P.M., maybe seven hours after I went out. I lifted it up and heard the voice of Major General Clapper, the chief of the JAG Corps.

  “Drummond, that you?” he asked.

  “Hello, General, it’s me,” I replied, of course recognizing his voice.

  “I just got word that you were recused.”

  “Uh… yeah,” I mumbled, still hazy.

  “Do you want to tell me about it?”

  “No, General. It’ll have to wait till I get back to Washington. That or we’ll have to talk on a secure line.”

  “Okay, we’ll wait. When can you get back here?”

  “As soon as you tell me to be there, although a day or two of grace would be sorely appreciated. I, uh, I got a little beat-up, and shot, too, and I haven’t gotten much sleep the past four or five days.”

  He said, “Hell, it’s Friday anyway. Can you be out of there Sunday night?”

  “I’ll make the reservation tonight.”

  There was a long pause, then, “Sean?”

  “Yes sir?”

  “I got a long message about you from General Spears.”

  This was the last thing I needed. On top of everything, now the theater commander was sending hate mail to my boss. I saw what was left of my career flash by. Let me tell you, it was a very brief flash.

  Clapper said, “He said you performed brilliantly, and that the nation owes you a huge debt. I don’t know what you did out there, but you should feel proud.”

  If I could only have gotten my breath back, I’d have said, “Ah shucks, it was nothing, really.”

  But Clapper didn’t wait to hear anything. He said he’d see me Monday in his office and hung up.

  I got up and called room service and told them send up a rare steak, some potatoes, and a bottle of wine. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d treated myself to an evening of quiet relaxation, and in my wallowing self-pity, I was convinced I deserved it.

  I took a long, hot shower and shaved, and when I walked out, the room service kid was knocking on the door. I took my tray, paid him, and settled down in front of the TV set.

  I flipped it on, ate, watched CNN spill through its thirty-minute roundup, watched it do its thirty-minute roundup again, and realized that nothing dramatic had changed in the world in the past hour. For want of anything else to watch, I flipped to a Korean channel.

  It can be fun watching a foreign newscaster move his or her lips even when you don’t have a clue what they’re saying. You stare at the picture that flashes up behind them, or at the short news clip, and you try to imagine the narration. It’s like buying cartoons with all the pictures, only there are no captions inside the bubbles. You get to invent those yourself.

  First I watched a story that showed a bunch of babies stuffed in cribs in a big room that was probably an orphanage. In all likelihood the real story was some scandal about mistreated, neglected orphans, but I wasn’t in the mood for that.

  I imagined the newscaster saying, “Today Bill Gates, the American capitalist, announced he is giving an inheritance of one billion dollars to each of these babies. The line of people who’ve rushed to the doors of the orphanage to seek a child to adopt stretches all the way to China. The airports and seaports are crowded with more prospective parents coming from around the world to get their child.”

  That’s a nice story with a happy ending, right?

  Next came a news clip of a bunch of gloomy-looking striking workers wearing white masks over their faces, all sitting down in front of a big, thirty-chimneyed plant. Then it cut to an attractive young female reporter holding a microphone in front of her mouth.

  This one? Probably she was talking about how these workers were struggling to get a dollar-an-hour increase so they could feed their families, and the plant executives were bringing in cops and scabs to teach them a lesson.

  That just wouldn’t do. I imagined her saying, “The chairman of Lipto Motors today agreed with his striking workers that it was shameful he should be making two hundred million dollars a year. He therefore offered to take all his personal wealth, as well as that of all other company executives, and place it in a large pool to be distributed among the workers who actually make the cars.”

  I’m not a socialist, but I liked that ending.

  The next clip was live, and it showed the American Secretary of State walking from a big black car with two U.S. flags flying off the front, through two lines of South Korean soldiers in spanky-looking dress uniforms, and into the side entrance of the South Korean Blue House, which, if you don’t know, is their version of the American White House. And right next to the man himself was my old buddy Arthur Brandewaite, chatting him up and trying to look natty and consequential for the cameras.

  The newscaster started moving his lips, only I wasn’t paying attention. I hadn’t realized the Secretary of State was still here. I thought he’d done the normal butterfly routine of flying in for consultations, then a news conference or two, then off to the next trouble spot. I mean, how long can big diplomats yammer on about some court case or even a massacre? Don’t they run out of things to say? Plus, if you stay in one place for a day or two, pretty soon there’s gonna be a disaster somewhere else in the world that completely eclipses this one, and off you go.

  Next flashed up a picture of an American naval officer with four gold captain’s stripes on his sleeve. There were some Hangul stick figures underneath his picture, probably the dates of his life. I surmised this was Harry Elmore and the media had been fed some phony story about his death, like maybe he was slain in a burglary gone wrong. Harry wasn’t a bad-looking guy. The photo was recent because of his captain’s stripes. There he was, sincere-looking blue eyes, a strong chin, a mouth that looked like it used to smile a lot.

  Who would’ve thought? The poor bastard didn’t even
have an important job. Why would Choi be interested in him? A protocol officer? I’m an expert on the American military, and until Spears mentioned that Elmore sometimes snuck into important briefings, I never would’ve imagined he had access to anything the least bit sensitive or important. Hell, Spears himself didn’t picture it until he was forced to think about it.

  How did Choi know? Did Bales tell him? How in the hell could some lowly warrant officer who worked in CID know that angle, when even Elmore’s own four-star boss didn’t appreciate how much access his man had?

  That’s when it hit me. It was the one thing we’d overlooked.

  I leaned over and dialed the number Buzz Mercer gave me so I wouldn’t have to go through General Spears’s henchman anymore.

  Mercer’s droll voice answered, “Yes?”

  “It’s me, Drummond. I need to see you right away.”

  I could hear him sigh. “Drummond, it’s late and I’m exhausted. Can’t it wait?”

  I said, “Yeah, sure, I guess it could. If you’re willing to let Choi and his goons kill the Secretary of State right here in your backyard.”

  CHAPTER 44

  The problem was, we didn’t know who or what we were looking for. We didn’t really even know if he, or she, or they, would be there. Worse, I was the only one even remotely confident anybody would be there.

  I think Mercer and Carol Kim were simply humoring me because I’d been so forceful and insistent. Or maybe they figured I’d been right on too many other things to ignore. When your horse wins the first two of the trifecta, you have a tendency to bet on it again.

  So there we were with five of Buzz’s spook buddies, wandering through the crowd outside the Blue House, trying hopelessly to see if we could detect anybody who didn’t look like he or she should be there.

  The problem was that nobody looked like they should be there. Or everybody looked like they should be there. Take your pick.

  Some of them were Korean government bureaucrats who were there because the Korean president’s staff ordered them to come and make the Secretary of State feel like he was so damned popular people would stay out on the streets late at night to catch sight of him. And there were gazillions of reporters. Since the Whitehall trial was postponed, most of them were there to convince their networks or newspapers or magazines they were still finding honest ways to earn their pay. Then there were the genuinely curious idiots whose lives were so dull they’d go anywhere and wait forever to catch a fleeting glimpse of a real-life celebrity.

  One of those curious idiots was about six foot three and had spiky hair, which you couldn’t miss because she towered over most of the crowd. I was surprised to see Allie mixed in with the rest of them, because she’d never struck me as the stargazing type. Maybe she’d just been passing by and decided to see what the commotion was about.

  The Secretary of State was inside having dinner with the president of South Korea because the Secretary was scheduled to depart Korea the next morning. According to what Buzz had found out, they were supposed to finish their dinner at 9:15, then the Secretary of State was supposed to be driven by motorcade to the house of Minister of Defense Lee Jung Kim. There he would express condolences and apologies on behalf of the President of the United States, and all the American people, over the tragic death of Lee’s son.

  None of this was particularly difficult information to come by, since his final day’s schedule had been published in the South Korean newspapers. See, the Secretary of State wanted the South Korean people to know what he was doing. He wanted cameras and newspeople cluttered at his every stop. He wanted the world to see the third highest official in the executive branch dining amicably with the South Korean president on his final day, as though a serious breach in relations had been miraculously healed. He wanted the South Korean people to see him make the very Asian gesture of stopping by to apologize and pay respects to the bereaved mother and father.

  The only problem was that when he and his security detail had planned and publicized that schedule, they were unaware the alliance’s protocol officer was owned by North Korea.

  That, I’d finally concluded, was why Choi wanted Harry Elmore in his stable. Elmore had access to the plans that involved VIP visits. He knew what the security arrangements were. He was one of the two or three guys who controlled access to VIPs. His office printed the passes, and took the requests, and decided who would and who wouldn’t get within spitting distance of the high and mighty. Even if the event was controlled by the State Department, all Harry had to do was call his counterpart, the protocol officer at the embassy, and tell him he needed two dozen passes. I’m sure they talked all the time. They probably horse-traded back and forth like Belgian gem merchants.

  “Hey, Harry, I hear the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders are coming over for a military morale visit. Think you could slide me thirty tickets under the table?”“Hey, no problem, Bill, but listen, I’ve got twenty Korean buddies climbing all over my ass because they want to be seen in the proximity of the American Secretary of State. How about passes for that?”

  Buzz had several guys sitting in a room right now combing over the lists of those who’d gotten passes to be inside the ropes. We knew it was hopeless. Whoever Choi sent to do the dirty deed would either use a false name or a name we wouldn’t recognize anyway.

  Thus, we were reduced to what we were doing. Mercer had one of his guys inform the head of the Secretary’s security detail what we suspected, and the rest of us were combing through the crowd, looking for familiar faces or suspicious activities.

  Part of the problem was these were North Koreans we were talking about. The same guys who walk around with poison pellets hidden in their teeth. Professional security people will tell you that any assassin willing to end his or her own life has something like a 90 percent chance of success. It’s generally true, too. Remember Lincoln’s assassination? President Garfield’s? Bobby Kennedy’s? John Lennon’s? Those all involved assassins crazy or willing enough to get close, to trade their chances of escape and survival to get their target.

  Anyway, we finally ran into Carol and found a spot where we could overwatch the crowd and put our heads together.

  Carol’s eyes roamed the crowd. “I’m bothered by something.”

  “What?” her boss asked.

  “Why would the North Koreans kill the American Secretary of State?”

  I said, “Good question. Why would they?”

  Mercer said, “Yeah. It would be too stupid for words. Even if it didn’t cause a war, we’d never pull another soldier off Korean soil until North Korea was a distant memory. That’s the last thing they’d want.”

  Sometimes, even when you’re not trying, you come to a moment of truth. It just hits you in the face.

  The assassin or assassins would have to be somebody you’d never connect to North Korea. But if a South Korean murdered the Secretary of State, the alliance really would be a trashheap.

  And wouldn’t you know, just at that moment a large crowd of protesters came streaming around a street corner, headed our way. They were yelling and hollering and moving fast. They were carrying banners, and most of them were wearing white medical masks the way a lot of Asians do to protect their lungs from smog, or to screen their faces from being ID’ed by cops when they’re ready to rumble.

  It was ten after nine. The dinner was supposed to be over in five minutes. The protesters had obviously planned their arrival to coincide with the Secretary of State’s departure from the Blue House. They wanted all those television cameras and reporters to see that the symbolic, everything’s-been-healed meal was a farce, that the South Korean people were still furiously angry over the death of Lee No Tae and wanted the lawless American troops off their soil.

  On the other hand, it was a known fact that North Korean agents and sympathizers had thoroughly penetrated South Korea’s student and labor movements and could spark a protest or riot pretty much at will.

  I looked at Buzz Mercer and he looked at me,
and we exchanged a telepathic aw-shit. Somewhere in that crowd of protesters were probably one or two people with passes to get past the police lines.

  CHAPTER 45

  The Secretary of State chose that moment to stride purposefully out the entrance of the Blue House and begin walking between the ceremonial files of soldiers toward his car.

  Whoever planned this thing had an exquisite sense of timing, not to mention a thorough knowledge of South Korean crowd-control methods. Because there’d been no application to the city authorities for this protest, only a small contingent of blue-suited crowd-control troops were on hand.

  A platoon, thirty or so men, was loitering by a gray bus. They weren’t expecting trouble, so they didn’t have on their riot gear. Most were hunched over small stoves, cooking rice or noodles and preparing to eat.

  Maybe ten uniformed policemen were present – a token force – because the folks crowded around the Blue House were all supposed to be friendly. Then there was the honor guard whose job it was to make a snazzy cordon for the Secretary of State to pass through on his way to the car. They had rifles, but it was doubtful those had ammunition.

  The thing that became instantly apparent was that nobody had planned for this. There was no central, controlling authority capable of organizing an orderly response to the unfolding situation. I could see the leader of the blue-suited troops screaming at his men to get their riot gear on and get in line, even as he was yelling into a radio, probably calling for reinforcements. It was a hopeless gesture. Nobody could get here in time.

  The army guard did what ceremonial troops normally do. They stayed stiffly in their cordon and held their rifles at the salute position for the distinguished man walking between them.

  Suddenly the crowd of rioters lunged forward and began running pell-mell down the block toward the Blue House. They hurtled straight into the crowd of peaceful gatherers and reporters, shoving people aside and carrying others along with their speed and mass. They were yelling and screaming and waving their placards and protest signs in the air. At the same instant, the small group of kids in blue suits rushed out to meet them. They carried their helmets and shields and batons in their hands, in a breathtakingly valiant effort to throw themselves between the crowd and the diplomatic party.