This Enemy Town

by Marcia Talley

  We had given the guy at Security Jack’s room number when we registered, so it was still fresh in my mind. “So if your office is in room 3E844,” I said, “that would be the third floor of the far outside ring, roughly in the middle of the eighth corridor.”

  Jack smiled. “Exactly. There are seventeen and a half miles of corridor in this building,” he commented as he led us down one of them. “And they say it takes only seven minutes to get from any one point to another.” He punched the button to call the elevator. “Tell that to me when I’m juggling coffee and a doughnut.”

  We rode up to the third floor, disembarking in a hallway that reminded me of a fine old hotel. Elegant dark wood paneling covered the walls beneath a chair rail, above which hung oil paintings of former Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the colors of the artwork vibrant in contrast to the creamy walls. On both sides of the hallway, dark paneled doors—some open, some closed—led to offices whose occupants, all high-level political appointees, were indicated by brass plaques bearing titles such as Secretary of Defense, Under Secretary of Defense for This and Under Secretary of Defense for That. Framed photographs of the incumbents and flags hung about everywhere.

  As we strolled along the corridor, the large-scale oils gradually gave way to smaller works. Jack paused in front of one of them, an unassuming but competent landscape. “And this delightful little watercolor was painted by Dwight David Eisenhower,” he told us.

  Ah, yes, I thought, as I studied the pleasant fall scene and wondered if it was in Pennsylvania, where Ike had retired with Mamie. Eisenhower, like his friend, Winston Churchill, had enjoyed painting watercolors in his spare time.

  We all need a hobby, I thought. Mine was knitting. Would they let me have knitting needles in jail? If not, I might never get back to that cable-knit sweater I’d started for Paul last Christmas.

  Still worrying about the unfinished sweater, I hurried to catch up with the guys, who were standing in front of a massive wooden door, waiting for me. “This is where I hang out,” Jack was saying to Paul when I approached.

  The minute we entered the office, two well-trained secretaries leapt to their feet. Secretaries in the traditional sense—small s—they came out from behind their desks, greeted us warmly, took our coats and asked if we’d like coffee, which we politely declined.

  Jack’s office adjoined the Secretary’s, capital S. It was smaller than I would have expected for a Navy captain, certainly small by Naval Academy standards, but large enough to accommodate his desk, a round conference table piled high with file folders, and several upholstered chairs, which we promptly settled into.

  What is it they say? Location, location, location. Jack’s office had it in spades. Prime real estate on the E-ring, with a window overlooking the Potomac.

  “Paul told me over the phone what you’re interested in,” Jack was saying just as I was getting comfortable, “and I’m only too happy to oblige. You asked about Lieutenant Jennifer Goodall. She was stationed here for two years before being assigned to the Naval Academy. The last year she worked here, Goodall was Admiral Ted Hart’s assistant.”

  “What would that entail?” I inquired.

  “Well, she would keep his calendar, check his e-mail, take his calls, sit in on all his meetings. In short, there wouldn’t be anything she wouldn’t know about the guy.”

  “It’s my understanding,” said Paul, “that Admiral Hart is still here, in charge of Weapons Acquisition and Management for the Navy.”

  “That’s right. His office is just around the corner from us, in the tenth corridor.”

  “Hart’s wife is convinced the two were having an affair,” I cut in, “but I’m not so sure about that. When Goodall was at the Academy, she tried to hang an affair around Paul’s neck, too.” I caught Paul looking at me and smiled. “But she lied about that. At least she admitted that to me before she died.”

  Jack leaned forward, resting his forearms on his knees. “I remember reading about her accusations in Navy Times,” he said, “but no one who really knew Professor Ives ever believed a word of it.”

  “That’s gratifying,” Paul said with a thin, grim smile.

  “I did ask around as casually as I could about Goodall’s sex life,” Jack continued, “but there doesn’t seem to be any scuttlebutt about that. If Goodall and Hart were an item, they played their cards very close to their chests.”

  “What about the possibility that Goodall was blackmailing Hart?” Murray asked, breaking what was, for him, an uncharacteristically long silence. “If not about sex, how about something else? Something job-related, for example.”

  “But wait a minute.” I held up a hand. “If Hart were doing something dishonest, immoral, or illegal, wouldn’t he try to hide it from his staff, just in case any of them were the whistle-blowing type?”

  Jack raised a hand, the stone in his Naval Academy ring a flash of blue in the bright light streaming through the window. “Consider this scenario. As Hart’s assistant, Goodall would normally sit in on all meetings. What if, all of a sudden, people started showing up who weren’t on his calendar? What if she were excluded from certain meetings? She might get suspicious, put two and two together, start nosing around.”

  “My experience is mostly with the corporate world,” Murray said, “so can you educate me a little? What sort of mischief could an admiral like Hart get into?”

  Jack took a deep breath. “This is pure speculation, you understand, and completely off the record …” He paused. When Murray nodded in agreement, Jack leaned forward in his chair and continued. “Hart may be looking ahead to retirement, angling for a job at one of the biggies like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon, or Northrup/Grumman. It’s possible he’s steering business their way, in some sort of you-scratch-my-back-and-I’ll-scratch-yours kind of scheme.” Jack gazed at the ceiling, his green eyes completely innocent. “But you didn’t hear that from me.”

  “Kickbacks?” I asked.

  “Could be, but not necessarily. With that kind of arrangement, no money actually needs to exchange hands.”

  “That’s drawing a pretty fine line,” Murray snorted.

  “But wouldn’t there be safeguards in place to keep that from happening?” Paul wondered.

  “Usually, yes, through a tightly controlled government contracting process,” Jack continued. “But there’s a war on in Iraq, and things need to get rushed through in the name of expedience, sometimes without the usual oversight. We call it fast-tracking.”

  I couldn’t wait to put in my two cents worth. “Easier to explain why you let a government contract go to a crony than to explain to a grieving mother that her son died because he didn’t have a bulletproof vest, right?”

  “Right. And troops have to be fed and supplied from day one,” Jack continued. “You simply can’t afford to wait around for the usual contract procedures to run their course.”

  I’d dealt with government contracts before while working at Whitworth and Sullivan—writing a statement of work, advertising it in Commerce Business Daily, sending it out to perspective bidders, evaluating bids, awarding the contract, dealing with challenges from losing bidders who think they’ve been unfairly excluded. It could take years before the actual product showed up on your loading dock.

  “But aren’t the fast-track vendors prequalified in some way,” I wondered, “like the blanket purchase order agreements I remember from back in the old days?”

  “Many are, particularly for goods and services that we anticipated a need for, but now we’re dealing with companies capable of providing expertise to quickly gear up and handle critical large-scale public works projects like water, sewer, electricity, housing, transportation. It’s a whole new ball game.”

  “But still, even with fast-tracking,” I said, “surely there are safeguards to keep DOD employees from playing fast and loose with the contract regulations?”

  “Of course there are, but it’s ridiculously easy for things to slip through t
he cracks. Governmentwide, we’re still dealing with largely a paper system. It’s stunning how much time we waste faxing paperwork back and forth and making phone calls.”

  As if it knew we were talking about it, the telephone on Jack’s desk warbled once. Jack ignored it. “Besides, a lot of the fast-track contracts are set up for projects that fall under a certain amount, say fifty thousand dollars. Nobody really looks too hard at them.”

  “Are there a lot of contracts in that category?” Murray asked.

  “Thousands upon thousands.”

  “It could add up,” Paul commented dryly.

  “It could.”

  One of the secretaries to whom we had been introduced earlier rapped once on the door frame and stuck her head into the room. “You asked to be reminded when it was time for lunch.”

  “Thanks, Sue. We’ll just be a minute.” Jack smiled and turned to me. “Now, about that other name you asked me about, Chris Donovan?”

  “Yes?”

  “I checked for you. She’s a civilian, working in Personnel.”

  “She?” Paul and I said it at the same time.

  Jack shrugged. “Short for Christine, I suppose, but she always goes by Chris. I thought you knew.”

  “Well, that’s very different,” I quipped, quoting Miss Emily Latella of Saturday Night Live fame. What an ignoramus I’d been! Chris was a woman. That could change everything.

  “In her present capacity, Donovan probably wouldn’t have worked with Goodall,” Jack continued. “But before she got out of the Navy, Donovan also worked in Weapons Acquisitions and Management. I’m sure you’ll want to ask her about it.”

  I was absolutely certain of that, too.

  “Donovan’s not here on Saturday,” he added. “I checked. Her office says she’ll be in on Monday. You can call back then.” Jack handed me a slip of paper on which he’d written Chris Donovan’s telephone number. I tucked it into my purse for safekeeping, but I had no intention of waiting until Monday to check back with Chris Donovan at her office. Now that I knew Chris was a business associate of the dead woman and not an ex-boyfriend with murder on his mind, I’d call her on my cell phone using the number I’d filched from Jennifer’s locker.

  With the memory of Marisa Young’s recent tongue-lashing still fresh in my mind, I decided that whatever it took—fibs, fairy tales, flim-flam, or farrago—I’d figure out a way to get Chris Donovan to open up and talk to me.

  “Lunch?” Jack asked, rising from his chair.

  Like hungry little ducklings, we followed.

  Lunch was served in the oh-so-elegant Pentagon Executive Dining Room, where crystal, china, and heavy silverware graced tables covered by thick white linen cloths. In the days since my shattering box lunch experience in Baltimore, every meal had been a treat. Tuna noodle casserole, Triscuit and gouda, even the cheeseburger at the drive-through McDonald’s on I-68 outside of Frostburg on our way back from Deep Creek Lake had been, for me at least, a gourmet delight. So when I sat down and checked the dining room menu, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.

  We ordered Caesar salads all around, and by some sort of silent consensus, possibly engineered by Paul, talked about everything but my awkward situation vis-à-vis the law.

  By the time the waiter brought our apple pie, we’d come to an uneasy agreement over the 2004 elections and the war in Iraq (with a good deal of overlap between the two). Over coffee, we discussed the proper role of the U.N. in world politics, but hadn’t reached a conclusion by the time the waiter brought the check.

  After the waiter bowed and left with his tip, Jack stood, laid down his napkin and said, “Before you go, there’s something else that I want to show you.”

  Five minutes later the four of us were standing silently before a marble memorial on the first floor of E-ring: AMERICA’S HEROES: A GRATEFUL NATION REMEMBERS. On our right, the name of each civilian lost when a terrorist flew American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon had been incised in a marble slab, black and smooth as satin. On an identical slab to the left, the names of the military victims were carved. Stubby pencils and oblongs of tissue paper had been provided for friends and family to trace the names of their loved ones.

  The Naval Academy, I remembered all too well, had lost eleven of its sons in the Pentagon attacks.

  I ran my hand over the cool stone, feeling each letter beneath my fingertips. Chic Burlingame, captain of the ill-fated Boeing 757, had been a Navy Top Gun. He died one day shy of his fifty-second birthday. Gerald DeConto, class of 1979. We’d known him as “Fish.” Pat Dunn, class of ’85, whose wife Stephanie had been two month’s pregnant when the doomed airplane smashed into her husband’s office. At one time or another we’d known them all.

  Behind us, yellow film covered the windows that faced Arlington Cemetery at the exact point where Flight 77 slammed into the building.

  “I’ll leave you here,” Jack whispered after a while. “I’ve got another meeting. You know the way out?”

  We nodded silently.

  To my right a double door opened into a memorial chapel. Signaling to Paul and Murray my intention, I went in and sat down on one of the straight-backed chairs, upholstered in a mottled rose and blue. At the front of the chapel, just behind a small wooden altar, was a brilliant five-sided stained-glass window featuring the head of a bald eagle, the image of the Pentagon, a flowing U.S. flag, and the words UNITED IN MEMORY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2001. The window was fabricated, according to the brochure I’d picked up outside, from five hundred pieces of inch-thick, faceted glass called Dalle de Verre. One hundred eighty-four of them were crimson, arranged in a double ring.

  I bowed my head, studying my shoes against the red carpet. Then I closed my eyes and prayed. I prayed for those gone too soon before their time—the victims, my mother, my friends Valerie and Gail—and I even prayed for the troubled soul of Jennifer Goodall.

  And while I was at it, I said a little prayer for myself.

  Then I stood up, squared my shoulders, and went out to face whatever fate might send my way.

  CHAPTER 19

  Late Saturday afternoon when Chris Donovan returned my call, I did what anybody with her fingerprints on file in JABS would do. I lied. Using my daughter’s name, I told Chris that I was a naval officer in imminent danger of being outed by my louse of an ex-husband, and she agreed to see me in Fairfax, Virginia, after church services the following day.

  I briefly considered resurrecting my disguise, but even in this day and age, jogging attire—no matter how upscale—didn’t seem appropriate for Sunday-go-to-meeting, so I decided on a black and white herringbone pantsuit and a black V-neck sweater over a crisp, white, open-collared shirt.

  There was a chance I’d be recognized. The Baltimore paper had unearthed a ghastly old photo from their archives and splashed it above the fold of Thursday’s Anne Arundel section, but the Washington papers had left me mercifully alone. I was betting that Chris didn’t read the Sun and decided to risk it.

  Why anyone chooses to live in the northern Virginia suburbs, paying grossly inflated prices for the privilege, is completely beyond me. Even on weekends the highways are snarled with traffic any normal human being would count as rush hour, and I’ve never driven to Tysons Corner without getting hopelessly lost. To avoid all this, I take the Metro.

  One hundred years ago, when the corner of Oakland and Ninth was probably just a cow pasture, someone—God bless ’em—had the good sense to build St. George’s Episcopal Church practically smack dab on the site of a future Orange Line Metro station. To get to the church where I’d meet Chris Donovan, I didn’t even need to switch trains. I’d timed my journey perfectly, too, emerging into the daylight at the Virginia Square/George Mason University stop at 10:15 A.M.

  Aside from an apartment tower and a number of lofty office buildings, practically the first thing I saw was the church. The Episcopal Church of St. George and San José took up the entire block. On my right, a large brick sanctuary dominated the complex. Center
ed over a pair of tall wooden doors, a stained-glass window of Gothic style and proportions sparkled in the afternoon sun. A modern parish hall extended back to the left, and more modern still, two stakes had been pounded into the lawn and a banner stretched between them announcing St. George’s URL. As if acknowledging the parish’s Spanish heritage, an alternate entrance, much older, was constructed of stone. A single bell was suspended in an open, Spanish mission-style tower over its door.

  Keeping one eye out for Chris Donovan—she told me she’d be wearing a pink suit—I stepped into the nave, smiled at one of the greeters, accepted a church bulletin, and sat down in a pew near the back of the sanctuary, trying as hard as I could to fade into the woodwork.

  I studied the bulletin. The church’s official seal featured St. George jousting with a dragon, but his mount was a bicycle instead of a horse. I smiled, hoping that the service wouldn’t be as laid back as their logo.

  I turned to the program for the morning service, and was disappointed to read that while the Holy Eucharist was taken from the Book of Common Prayer, that morning, at least, they were following the more modern Rite 2. I preferred Rite 1, the version that more or less maintained the majestic beauty of the language of King James. Back in 1979, when the BCP was revised, not even the Lord’s Prayer had escaped the commission’s tinkering, and “lead us not into temptation” became “save us from the time of trial.” I stared at the fur hat sitting lopsidedly on the head of the woman in the pew in front of me and thought: Time of trial. Thanks for reminding me, Lord.

  As the pews around me began to fill, I gazed east toward the altar. A large red cross was mounted over a brass, open-worked altar screen behind which some sort of tapestry had been hung. On the wall above that, near the apex of the roof, a stained-glass window bloomed like a flower: a five-petaled flower. Five petals, like the Pentagon. I closed my eyes. Was the entire world becoming a place of symbols, each one serving to remind me of the late, unlamented Jennifer Goodall?