Full Dress Gray

by Lucian K. Truscott

  “What if I don’t find a witness?”

  “We’ve still got him, because we’ve got Patterson. He saw him following you. If Rose tries to say he was anywhere but the fourth floor of Building 606, he’s fried. We’ll have the Chairman of the Honor Committee caught in a lie. If that doesn’t shake some leaves out of the trees, nothing will.”

  “Listen, I just thought of something. You know there were three other guys at the party.”

  “Reade, Prudhomme, and Lessard. What about them?”

  “Are you going to question them, too?”

  “I hadn’t intended to. The three I’m interested in are the ones who had sex with Dorothy.”

  “I think you should question Ash Prudhomme. He’s helping me—”

  “You’re sure you can trust him?” Kerry interrupted.

  “We dated for two years. I know him better than my roommate. He was at the party, but he didn’t have anything to do with Dorothy. I believe him.”

  “That’s not what I’m talking about. He’s on the Honor Committee. If he was at that party, he’s got to be close to Rose and the others. How do you know he’s not doubling on you and telling them everything you tell him?”

  Jacey looked out the window of the car at the shuttered swim club across the parking lot. She and Ash had spent many afternoons lying in the sun next to the pond, getting up every once in a while to cool off in its icy spring-fed waters. How could she explain to Agent Kerry that even though Ash had told Rose about Dorothy’s E-mail disks, she couldn’t bring herself to mistrust him after all the time they had spent together? He would write her off as sentimental and warn her that nobody on the Honor Committee could be trusted. Unless . . .

  “He’s taking me into the Honor Committee office this weekend. He’s got the keys. We’re going to go through the Honor files together. He knows how the system works. If Rose and the rest of them are monkeying around with the Honor Code, it will turn up in those files.”

  “How can you be sure they haven’t sanitized the files? It could be a setup to get you off their trail.”

  “I guess we’ll know by next week, won’t we?”

  “You seem pretty certain he’s okay.”

  “I am. And it’s not just because I’ve been in love with him. There are some guys here at West Point who are . . . different. He’s one of them. It’s hard to explain. You haven’t been a cadet . . .”

  “No, but I’ve been a soldier. I think I know what you’re talking about. I’ll take your word for it. Besides, when we start shaking the tree, if he’s thrown his lot in with Rose, he’ll fall out. One way or another, we’ll know whether or not your instincts were right.”

  “I know they’re right, Agent Kerry. It was Ash who suggested you call him in for questioning along with Lessard and Reade. He wants to make sure Rose sees that he’s being treated just like everyone else. If Rose figures out that Ash is helping me, it’s all over. They’ll close ranks and hide behind the cadet code of silence.”

  “I hadn’t intended to question the others, but I see his point. Tell you what I’ll do. I’ll call all three of them down together, but then question them one by one, so the others are sitting out in the hall, waiting their turn. That’ll make it look even-handed.”

  “Thanks.”

  Agent Kerry started the car and drove out of the parking lot. “Where do you want me to let you off?”

  “Up there by the pumping station behind the chapel. There’s a little road . . .”

  “I know the one.”

  “You know what gets me about this whole thing, Agent Kerry? We’re talking about the West Point Honor Committee. We’re talking about how one of the guys on the committee probably stole the disks from my room, how they’re lying. If they’ll lie to cover for each other, if they’ll steal to make sure Dorothy didn’t rat them out, then they’ve really got something big to hide.”

  Kerry turned down the road behind the chapel and stopped next to the pumping station. “What do you think it is?”

  “I think Dorothy knew something, and they killed her to shut her up.”

  CHAPTER 35

  * * *

  GENERAL GIBSON had returned to his office from his latest confrontation with the Superintendent and immediately picked up the phone and called Cecil Avery down in Washington. He wanted a meeting with Congressman Thrunstone, and he wanted it yesterday. Avery asked for the morning to work on it, and sure enough, he had called back that afternoon with the news that Thrunstone would see him the next day at one P.M. Gibson had called in his secretary and told her to cancel his meetings for the following day. He told her he had to go to Washington on family business. His brother was going into the hospital for some tests and he wanted to be with him.

  The next day he parked his car in the covered lot at La Guardia and hopped the D.C. shuttle. It wasn’t crowded, and he managed to find a seat by himself next to a window in the back of the plane. As he settled back for the hourlong flight, he thought of the years he had spent climbing the proverbial ladder of Army success. He had had a single ambition since the first day he walked through the gates of West Point as an eighteen-year-old civilian on the first day of Beast Barracks: One day he would be Army Chief of Staff. The arc of his career had been established early. In fact, he remembered the day he knew he was on his way.

  As a newly promoted captain, he was “snowbirding,” waiting for the next class of the Advanced Course to begin at the Infantry School down at Fort Benning. Because he had just transferred from a duty station overseas, he was early. He had been on a division staff over in Germany and had achieved something of a reputation as a briefer, so with a month and a half to wait for his slot at the Advanced Course, the Army sent him up to the Pentagon, where a briefing slot needed to be filled temporarily because a female captain was on pregnancy leave.

  He gained his footing quickly in the Pentagon. Part of his job was to brief politicians and captains of industry and dignitaries of various sorts who had an interest in defense issues relating to the Army. He had just given a late-afternoon briefing to a small group of governors from states with large defense industries when he was approached by a small man wearing an expensively tailored suit with the kind of featureless face you often saw in Washington. He recognized him as the man who had escorted the governors over to the Pentagon from the White House. Now the governors were off to an embassy party with a new escort from the State Department, and his duties were at an end. He had been very impressed by the briefing Captain Gibson had delivered, and since it was well past the end of the duty day, even at the Pentagon, he wanted to know if Gibson wanted to have dinner at a restaurant in Alexandria.

  Gibson was staying at the Crystal City Marriott, just down Route 1 from the Pentagon, so he figured, why not? The small, rather fastidious man introduced himself as Cecil Avery. He was General Counsel to the National Security Council in the White House. Avery had a White House car waiting outside. They stopped at the Marriott and Gibson changed into civvies before they were driven to an Italian restaurant tucked away on one of Alexandria’s Old Town alleys.

  Cecil Avery turned out to be an impressively well-connected man. Before he was on the NSC, he had run the Washington office of a major West Coast electronics firm with enormous governmental contracts. Before that, he had taught at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, from which he had earlier graduated with honors. Before his Harvard professorship, he had been the chief legislative aide on Capitol Hill for an up-and-coming young congressman from Illinois by the name of Thrunstone, who had secured for himself as a freshman seats on both the Agriculture Committee and the National Security Committee, ripe political plums indeed. Avery explained that when he left the NSC, he was to be assigned as a deputy secretary of state, a position that awaited him when the President was reelected, for it was already obvious that he would be swept into office again by a healthy margin.

  What, Gibson wondered, did Cecil Avery want with an infantry captain on temporary duty from Fort Benning
?

  Not much. He wanted to make friends with a young Army officer in whom he could see great potential. The dinner had ended with Avery picking up the check and dropping Gibson at the Marriott. As Avery drove away into the night in his White House car, Gibson recalled, he had stood there thinking that this had been a first: Every day of his life he had worked his ass off to gain what little advantage he could, and along comes a guy who had had all kinds of advantages, and he was willing to share them.

  The next afternoon the phone rang at his desk in the bowels of the Pentagon. It was Avery calling from the White House, inviting him to a party in Georgetown. There were some people at the party he wanted Gibson to meet. He’d be picked up at the Marriott in two hours.

  So that’s it, he remembered thinking. One of the guys he had known at West Point, a real smart firstie, had once told him that when he got in the Army he should be on the watch for talent spotters. Avery was a talent spotter, and he had just been spotted.

  So Gibson suited up again, went to the party in Georgetown, and found himself in the company of several congressmen, including the gentleman from Illinois, Mr. Thrunstone, as well as a healthy smattering of generals of the one- and two-star variety. About a year later, when he had graduated number one in his Advanced Class at the Infantry School, he found himself invited to Washington by a full colonel who was assigned to the personnel department in the Pentagon for the infantry. The colonel wanted to know where Captain Gibson wanted to be assigned. Gibson didn’t even have to ask why he was being offered a choice of assignments, because he knew the answer: Cecil Avery had a made a phone call. Gibson respectfully asked the colonel if it was possible that he could get a company command in the 101st Airborne Division.

  Done.

  Cecil Avery had not looked over Gibson’s shoulder at every single step of his career, but he had been lurking in the mists of Foggy Bottom when Gibson was picked to attend the School of International Relations at Georgetown, where he had been put into a fast-track program for a master’s degree. And it had been Avery who had pulled the necessary levers in the State Department to arrange for Gibson to depart Georgetown, degree in hand, for an assignment as Deputy Military Attaché at the Embassy in Moscow.

  Later, when the White House changed hands and the Democrats seized power, somehow Avery had yanked some very obscure White House permanent-staff strings to secure an appointment for Gibson to the NSC. With Gibson installed in the Democratic White House, it had been Avery who had made sure that Gibson and Congressman Thrunstone were reintroduced. That Thrunstone was now the senior member of the minority on the House National Security Committee hardly seemed a coincidence.

  But there had always been a question lurking back in the darker regions of Gibson’s mind about Cecil Avery.

  Why?

  A very powerful man in Washington had taken an intimate and attentive interest in his career. Over the years Gibson had learned a few things. One of them was that there were only three motives in Washington: sex, politics, or both. Gibson had realized fairly early on that Cecil Avery was a homosexual, albeit a very discreet one. This had not disturbed Gibson, because the best friend he’d ever had in his life, his cousin, had revealed to him that he was a homosexual. It had surprised Gibson that his cousin’s sexuality hadn’t really changed anything between them. They had still attended Army football games together, and during the summer, they had found the time to go bass fishing down in Alabama where his cousin lived.

  So if it wasn’t sex, it was politics, and if it was politics, what politics were involved, and whose were they? Well, they were Republican politics, because Cecil Avery was a Republican. But no political party was a monolith. The loyalty of men like Cecil Avery to a party with a right wing that was virulently antihomosexual was evidence enough of that.

  Politics was about connections and friendships. Avery had become his friend. In fact, Gibson and his wife had named Cecil Avery as the godfather of their first son. That’s how deep the friendship was.

  And the friends of Cecil Avery had become his friends. These included Congressman Thrunstone, who was a rock-ribbed supporter of the military, even though he had never served a single day in uniform. And there was Ambassador Joseph Sweeney, whom he had served in Moscow. Sweeney returned from his post in a collapsed Soviet Union to the chairmanship of the company that had made him a very wealthy man, the one down in Alabama that Gibson’s own cousin worked for, which made some kind of new superstable missile propellant that was going to revolutionize the battlefield weaponry of the twenty-first century. Sweeney had been a Republican, of course, because those were the days when the Republicans controlled the White House and all of the goodies that could be dispensed therefrom.

  Gibson himself was a registered Republican. So were most of the officers he knew at West Point. It was almost a given. If you wanted to get ahead, you had opinions that followed close to the grain of the Republican Party. Nobody could ever determine how you voted, but they could sure as hell listen to your opinions, and opinions among military men, especially those of Gibson’s generation, ran about ten-to-one Republican.

  As an officer in the United States Army, General Gibson had long known that he was helping to push the Republican agenda, and what the hell was wrong with that? It was the agenda of a strong national defense. It was the agenda of those who claimed Jesus Christ as their savior. It was the agenda of the party that wanted criminals behind bars, not out on the streets free to commit more crimes. It was the agenda of a free and prosperous America.

  Not even the tiniest grain of doubt had lodged within the soul of this man who was dedicated to his nation and the Army that served it. For hadn’t he played the game the way it should be played? Everybody kissed ass. Everybody covered his own ass. Everybody took advantage wherever he could. Everybody made friends in high places and made sure the friends would come through for him. General Gibson was flying the shuttle to Washington because he had learned how to play the game, and he was good at it.

  ***

  WASSERSTEIN ENTERED Congressman Thrunstone’s private office through an unmarked door. As Chairman of the National Security Committee and a veteran of more than fifteen terms in the House, Thrunstone rated one of the most spacious suites in Congress. It occupied nearly half of one side of the Rayburn Office Building, including the corner that housed the congressman’s official office. But that room, which had a vaulted ceiling and windows on two sides overlooking the Capitol and the Mall, was deemed by the congress-man to be far too accessible to staffers, constituents, and the lobbyists who prowled the halls of congressional office buildings like packs of rabid dogs. Thrunstone delighted in using an old and rather insulting description of the German people to characterize lobbyists: They were either at your throat or at your feet. So most of the time he used the private anteroom behind the unmarked door.

  When Wasserstein walked in, the congressman was sitting in a wing-backed leather armchair going through an updated list of military procurement orders, making notations next to the contractors and subcontractors with facilities in the districts of his committee members. Capitol Hill politics was not often a zero-sum game, where at the end of the day you could add up the columns and determine winners and losers. There was way too much other stuff that got in your way: ideological crap, and blathering about “values.” Thrunstone believed that the real job of the Congress was to pass the laws, and there were only two kinds of laws worth passing: those that taxed, and those that spent. Sitting at the helm of the National Security Committee, Thrunstone got to write one of the biggest spending bills of them all: the budget for national defense, a gigantic pile of line items that exceeded $260 billion at last count.

  To the world outside the corridors of congressional power, Thrunstone appeared at times to be a politician of the old school who used the power of the National Security Committee to slam through bills and bring to heel the generals and admirals who inhabited the armed services. In reality, he was as savvy a politican as had ever ope
rated on either side of the aisle. Like many congressmen of his generation, he had started out as a Democrat and had turned Republican when he saw his party retreating from its commitment to the nation’s defense. He had learned from watching previous chairmen of the National Security Committee that if you wanted the committee firmly under your control, you had to pay for neutrality first and support later. At first, Thrunstone had not understood the value the system placed on neutrality, but it hadn’t taken him long to see how it worked. He learned that you gain control over a committee when those who oppose you and those who back you comprise about two-thirds of the members. Support of the other third, the margin of victory, you pay for in the currency of Washington power.

  The thing about Thrunstone was, as Chairman of the National Security Committee, he had to maintain two kinds of power: The first was power over his committee, and this could be paid for in the conventional Washington manner, with contracts and jobs. But the second kind of power was far more elusive: He had to maintain a firm grasp on both the support and neutrality of military men, but you couldn’t use jobs or contracts for this purpose, because the power of military men lay outside the realm of money. Their loyalties could be won, indeed could be paid for, but only if you used a very different currency. They wanted the same thing Thrunstone and politicians like him wanted: the power to control.

  Generals and committee chairmen were so much alike that distrust was immediate and visceral, thus gaining power over them was a complicated business, indeed. If you couldn’t pay them off, you needed to win their hearts and minds, and in order to do this, you needed agents among them who would represent your agenda. It was just like operating on the Hill. You had to know as much about your enemies as you knew about your friends. Maybe more.