by Brian Haig
“Is that important?”
“If you want the drink, yeah, it is.”
“I don’t come that cheap, Mr. Morgan.”
Morgan leaned forward and planted his elbows on the table. “I’m not sure I hear what you’re saying.”
“Then listen close, pal. You’re hunting for info on Jack Wiley. I have what you’re looking for. I’m not the charitable type, though.”
“I don’t remember running into you before.”
“You didn’t. A friend gave me your card.”
The drinks arrived and Morgan and his guest sank back into their seats and took their first deep sips together. Well, he was dressed and coiffed like a Wall Street type, but Morgan had a feeling he was a little out of place. Time to get the important detail out of the way. “How much?” he asked, swirling his beer in the air.
“Fifty thousand.”
Morgan nearly spit his beer across the table. His elbows flew off the table, his big head pushed forward. “Who are you kidding?”
“If you knew what I have, you wouldn’t ask such a stupid question.”
“What makes you think anything you have is worth that much?”
“For starters, you gave my friend your card almost three weeks ago. I figure you’ve been here at least that long. Three weeks in a luxury double suite at the Wall Street Inn, frequenting some of our fine city’s most exclusive bars and nightclubs. Somebody’s footing a lot of cash to learn about Jack.”
Morgan neither confirmed nor denied, just sat and tried to hide his astonishment. He was stunned. This guy knew everything: how long he’d been in town, the places he had visited, where he was staying. Morgan had been detected, followed, and apparently watched like a two-bit novice. Mr. Former Spook, a veteran of Moscow and Cairo and Colombia, and this guy across the table had totally outfoxed him.
His guest allowed himself a slight smile. “Also, you’re hired help. No offense, but that cheap off-the-rack suit doesn’t help you fit in. I don’t know how much a private dick costs, but three weeks of your time can’t be cheap.”
Morgan pointed his chin in the air and said, “So what?”
“So it’s not your money, right? Why should you care what it costs?”
“Fifty thousand would have to buy some very good information.”
“What do you have so far?”
“A few interesting tidbits. Some very valuable leads,” Morgan lied and tried his best to make it sound sincere. In truth, he had gained ten pounds, swilled enough booze that his liver was swollen, and learned absolutely nothing remotely interesting about Jack Wiley.
“You got nothing.” The smile widened. “This is Wall Street, buddy. Nobody’s telling some stranger tales out of school. No angle in it.”
“What about you? You’re willing to break the code.”
Morgan detected the first flash of anger—a slight tightening around the eyes, a jaw muscle flexing. Barely perceptible, but it was enough. “Maybe I’ve got reasons,” the man insisted, making an obvious effort to mask his strong dislike of Jack Wiley.
“Like what?”
“It’s personal. It’ll cost you an additional ten grand to find out about that.”
“Give me an idea what we’re talking about.”
“Fair enough. Here’s a hint. Did you ever wonder why Jack bounced in and out of so many firms?”
“Yeah, we thought about that… for about two seconds, ’cause it’s so obvious. Better offers, better pay. Greed. The usual motives. I figure you guys are all whores. It’s all about money.”
The man chuckled and sipped from his drink. “You don’t know much about Wall Street.”
“What part did I get wrong?”
“The only part you got right was about all of us being whores.”
“Now tell me something I don’t know.”
“I can’t believe you guys missed it. It’s right before your eyes. Jack hopped through four firms in twelve years. Four. The Street doesn’t work that way. It’s all about seniority, Morgan, about sticking around to get tenure. That’s where the big money is.”
“Then why did he leave?”
“Leave? Usually, he didn’t; he was shoved.”
“I asked why?”
“That’s the fifty-thousand-dollar question.”
“Come on, give me a little more to go on here.”
“No, you have enough.” The pleasant smile was replaced by a deadpan grin. “Now here’s the rules. Pay attention, because if there’s any mistake, you’ll never see me again. The payment will be in cash. You don’t have that much on you, and anyway, you’re just a flunky. So tell your bosses you think I’m a good investment.”
“Listen, you need—”
“No, I don’t need to do anything. But you definitely do. Call by tomorrow, or don’t bother,” the man said, and he was on his feet. He was holding a card by the edges and he quickly flipped it on the table. “When you have permission, call this number. Ask for Charles.”
“Wait… uh, Charles, I don’t have enough—” but before he could finish that thought the man rushed into the thick crowd and began making tracks for the exit.
It was unexpected and happened so fast, Morgan was caught flat-footed. He quickly recovered his senses, darted out of his seat, and began racing after Charles. He caught sight of a head of glistening black hair, and began dodging left and right, shoving people out of his way. Charles had about a twenty-foot lead, but Morgan was brutally clearing a path and closing fast.
Suddenly a pretty young blonde woman grabbed his arm and started howling at the top of her lungs. Morgan tried to break loose, but her grip only tightened. Her screams began to draw a world of attention. He quickly found himself hemmed in by young men, a mob of nice suits glowering at him, blocking him, and asking the young woman what he’d done to her.
“He grabbed and squeezed my ass,” she roared quite loudly, her arms flailing as if he’d assaulted her.
“I did not,” Morgan bellowed back in a tone filled with indignation. “I swear. Listen, I’ve got a wife and three daughters, for godsakes. I never touched her.”
She stamped a foot and pointed a scornful finger at his face. “Pervert. You sick, disgusting pervert,” she howled.
“I didn’t touch you.”
“Well, somebody did.”
“Not me.”
“I thought it was you.”
“It wasn’t, okay?”
The crowd around him settled down. The situation was harmless. Maybe the old guy did it, maybe he didn’t; so what? Just a harmless squeeze anyway, and who cared if this old lecher indulged in a quick feel? A few of the men backed off and returned to what they were doing. Others began talking among themselves. A few chuckled.
Morgan dodged through an opening that suddenly cleared and raced as fast as his feet could carry him toward the exit. But Charles was gone, disappeared into the night.
All right, so you think you’re smart, Morgan thought; the girl had obviously been a setup, the perfect diversion. He was surprised he had fallen for such a simple trick.
And he was nearly certain that the phone number he was given was connected to a disposable cell phone, probably under a false name. He could easily find out, but knew it would be a waste of time. Based upon what he’d just seen, Charles knew enough tradecraft to avoid such a stupid mistake.
Charles wasn’t as smart as he thought, though.
Morgan raced back to his booth. Charles had left his glass and, by extension, a clean set of fingerprints. By the next day Morgan would know Charles’s real name, where he lived, where he worked, and from there he would uncover his relationship to Jack Wiley.
When he got to the table the glass was gone. In its place was a small note: “Nice try, Morgan.”
13
The appointment was at eleven, and the escorts were standing and waiting at the stately River entrance to the Pentagon, ready to get the ball rolling as the black limo rolled up.
Bellweather emerged first, follow
ed by Alan Haggar, and Jack brought up the rear. The escorts rushed them through security, then up two flights of stairs to the office of Douglas Robinson, the current secretary of defense.
It was the Dan and Alan hour from the opening minute. Bellweather, after a brief moment surveying the office, declared, “Doug, who’s your interior decorator? What an improvement over my time.”
“My wife.”
“Listen, be sure to give her my compliments.”
“I hate it.”
Bellweather laughed and squeezed his arm. “So do I. It’s godawful.”
A crew of waiters bustled in and began setting plates, glasses, and silverware on the large conference table off to the left. The secretary was busy, very busy; not a minute was to be wasted. To underscore that point, a uniformed aide popped his head in and loudly announced they had only fifteen minutes, not a minute more; the secretary apparently was due at a White House briefing of epic importance. Jack was pretty sure this was fabricated—the bureaucrat’s rendition of the bum’s rush. Another man, older, a scholar-looking gent of perhaps sixty, wandered in next and was introduced as Thomas Windal, the undersecretary of defense for procurement.
Jack first shook Windal’s hand, then the secretary’s. Windal’s shake was halfhearted but firm, while Robinson’s grip was limp bordering on flaccid. In truth, the secretary appeared exhausted, almost depleted: Jack thought he had aged considerably from the TV images of only a year before. He had large rings under his eyes, a dark suit that looked loose and baggy as though he had experienced a sudden weight loss, and a pale, resigned smile that suggested this meet-and-eat was at the bottom of his wish list. He’d far rather be taking a nap.
Robinson turned to Haggar, who, for a very brief period, had been his number two. “How you doing, Alan? Getting rich?”
“Working on it. That’s what we’re here to talk about,” Alan said with a wicked smile, making no effort to disguise their purpose. They began shuffling and ambling to the table.
“So what are you guys pitching today?” Robinson asked wearily, as if they were annoying insurance salesmen.
“Would you care to guess?”
“That polymer your blowhard Walters was bragging all over TV about a while ago? Am I right?”
“Yes, and we’ll get to it in a moment,” Bellweather said, falling into the seat directly to the right of Robinson. “So how’s the war going?” he asked, casually flapping open his napkin.
“Which one?” Robinson asked, a little sadly.
“We get a choice?”
“You do, but I don’t. Iraq? Afghanistan? The war on terror?”
“Why don’t we start with Iraq?”
“Just horrible. My in-box is crammed every morning with letters awaiting my signature. Condolence notes to parents about their kids that were killed. I can barely sleep. Do you know what that’s like, Dan?”
Bellweather quietly nodded. He thought it best, though, not to remind Robinson that he’d gotten 160 soldiers killed on that senseless lark to Albania. Truthfully, he couldn’t even remember what that was about. Albania? He must’ve been high or tanked when he ordered that operation.
Then again, he hadn’t sent any letters or even brief notes to the families. Why should he? Death was one of the things their kids were paid for. “Thank God I was spared that fate,” he replied, scrunching his face solemnly, munching on his salad. “How about Afghanistan?”
“More of the same.” A brief pained pause. “Just not as bad, thankfully, at least not yet. But there’s always the future not to look forward to.”
With only twelve minutes left, they weren’t going to waste more time or words commiserating with Robinson. Haggar, always the numbers man, worked up a concerned expression and launched in. “Do you know how many of those soldiers were killed by explosive devices?”
“Somebody, a month or two ago, showed me a chart. I don’t recall the numbers exactly. I know it’s a lot.”
“Well, you’ve had 3,560 killed as of this morning,” Haggar said casually, as if they were discussing ERA stats in baseball. “Twenty percent due to accidents, disease, friendly fire, the usual cost of business.” A brief pause. “Sixty-eight percent of the total were a direct result of explosives.”
“Is that right?”
“Yeah, well over half. Amazing when you think about it, and ninety percent of those were roadside IEDs. Another ten percent were killed by rockets or roadside ambushes.”
“Higher than I thought.”
Bellweather reached across the table for the ketchup. “That’s why we’re here, Doug,” he explained. “We want to help.”
Laughable as that claim was, nobody so much as smiled.
“And you think this polymer will make a difference?” the secretary asked.
Bellweather was smacking the bottom of the bottle hard, slathering his hamburger and French fries in ketchup. “Jack, tell him about it,” he ordered without looking up.
Jack quickly raced through a description of the polymer, briefly encapsulating the physics behind it, the years spent in research, the difficulty of getting it just right. He was careful to come across as factual rather than boastful. A light dissertation more than a sales pitch.
“You might want to look at this,” suggested Haggar as he handed the secretary a copy of the pictorial results from the live testing done in Iraq. Robinson was barely eating, Jack noted, pushing a fork aimlessly around on his plate. He slid on a pair of reading glasses, opened the book, and began quietly flipping pages while Haggar began to prattle about the miraculous results.
After a quick pictorial tour, he removed his glasses and handed the book to Windal, his undersecretary. “Take a look at these,” he said, obviously impressed. “So what do you want me to do?” he asked, ignoring Haggar and now looking at Bellweather.
“Jesus, Doug,” Bellweather said, as if the question were facetious. “This screams for a fast-track, no-bid approach.”
“That’s a big request, Dan.”
“Is it? Haggar’s statistics show we’re losing eight soldiers a week to bombs. It’s become the insurgents’ weapon of choice. Our kids are sitting ducks. That’s nearly forty soldiers a month, blown apart and butchered while we look for a way to protect them. Now we have it.”
Robinson turned to Windal, whose nose was still buried in the photographs. “What do you think, Tom?”
Windal shoved the book aside, shook his head, and scowled. “Damn it, I know how important this is. The generals have been screaming at me for over a year. We’ve thrown billions into this and it’s about to pay off. There’s a lot of promising programs out there right now. Uparmoring, three or four new bomb-resistant vehicles, even the use of robotics to locate the bombs and disarm them. The best minds have worked this problem and the results are coming in. It’s very competitive.”
“Yeah, and all of those ideas are crap. They take way too much time to make it into the field,” Haggar argued, quickly and vigorously.
“Time is a consideration, but—”
“New vehicles have to be tested, refined, built, then fielded,” Haggar continued, waving his arms for emphasis. “That takes years. And those programs are habitually plagued by big setbacks, maintenance glitches, and unexpected delays. The schedules aren’t worth the paper they’re written on. Uparmoring kits aren’t much better. And when you add the weight of heavy armor on vehicles not designed for it, you pay the price in busted transmissions, collapsing frames, and faulty brake systems. You know that.”
Bellweather, chewing a big bite of his hamburger, said, “He’s right,” as if there was any chance of disagreement.
“Everything takes time,” Windal answered, almost apologetically.
“Not our polymer. Mix it, then paint it on. We could have it in mass production inside a month. Thirty days. How do those other programs stack up against that?”
“A no-bid, single-source contract is out of the question. I’m sorry.”
“Why?”
“You
know why, Alan. The competitors would raise hell. They have billions invested in their alternatives. A lot of their ideas are absolutely ingenious. They won’t let you end-run them this way.”
“Screw ’em. Lives are at stake and that’s all we care about,” Bellweather insisted, failing miserably to make it sound sincere.
“It’s not that simple. If this polymer’s as good as you say, you should be more than willing to expose it to testing and fierce competition.”
“Forty lives a month, Tom. Waste another year, that’s four hundred lives, minimum. Think of all those letters cluttering Doug’s in-box.”
“Look, I’d get raped if I caved in to your request. Your competitors are just as powerful, just as well connected as you fellas. They’ve got deep pockets and plenty of influential friends on the Hill.”
“So that’s it?”
“Yes, I’m afraid that’s it.”
Not looking the least frustrated or even disappointed—Jack thought, in fact, that he looked almost giddy—Bellweather pushed away from the table and got to his feet. Haggar also worked his way out of his chair. Jack had barely taken two bites of his hamburger, but taking the cue, so did he.
“Hey, I appreciate your time,” Bellweather said, sounding quite gracious and sincere.
“I can’t thank you enough for stopping by,” the secretary of defense replied, matching his tone.
A few peremptory handshakes later, they were being hustled back down the hallway and downstairs to their limousine.
Haggar was bent over, mixing a drink from the minibar as they raced over the Memorial Bridge into D.C. proper. He handed Jack a scotch. “What did you think?”
“What am I supposed to say?”
“Anything you like. The truth.”
“All right, I’m badly disappointed. Crushed. The meeting was a disaster.”