by Gordon Kent
Sarah Berghausen cleared her throat and said, almost whispering, “I heard you went to General Raddick about Perpetual Justice.”
It stunned him. He and Raddick had had a private meeting only yesterday. “How did you hear that?”
She fidgeted. She shrugged. She whispered, “I overheard something.”
“Somebody else saying I’d talked with General Raddick?”
She nodded. He tried to hold her eyes, but she didn’t want to look at him. “That meeting was private and the subject was classified.” She nodded again. He sat back and folded his arms. “Who’d you overhear?”
She shook her head. He lunged forward and said, “Look, Captain, you wanted to talk to me! So talk!”
She licked her lips again. She looked at her hands while microwaved chicken with cashews and three spices was put down in front of him, then a bowl of rice. The Chinese woman poured him another cup of tea. She looked as if she wanted to stay and offer marital counseling, but he thanked her and she backed off.
Sarah Berghausen said, “I’m a financial officer in a classified branch of DIA.”
“Perpetual Justice?”
She picked up her fork and probed the food in front of her, now cold and glistening with a milky sheen. “Not its official name.”
“Okay.”
“The reason I called you—” She tried the food, or at least the sauce. “I can’t do my job. They’re doing stuff without sending it through me. I can’t keep track of the money! If GAO ever came down on us, all hell would break loose and I’d be the first one they’d go after!” GAO was the General Accountability Office, financial watchdog of the government. Classification and priority meant nothing to them. GAO had a reputation for humorlessness and dedication, and “forgive” was not in their vocabulary.
“Why would GAO come down on you?”
“They just do!” She waved her fork, then put it down. “I can’t eat. I can’t sleep anymore. I’m a bean counter, right? Well, the shits I work for don’t let me see the beans.”
“So you came to me because you heard I’d talked to General Raddick. But you must have overheard what I talked about with General Raddick, otherwise how would you know I was the one to come to? And, because I know what I talked to Raddick about, I’m putting two and two together and guessing that you think there’s funny stuff going on with Perpetual Justice. Am I right?”
“I don’t know that it’s funny stuff. It’s just that they don’t go by the book. I’m in the dark. I was ordered to this unit six months ago because I was due for this kind of rotation. I didn’t know anybody when I got there; I didn’t know what to expect. The guy I replaced had everything in a mess. I wouldn’t sign off on some of it. I still haven’t signed off on some of it. I complain to the officer-in-charge, he goes, ‘Don’t sweat the details.’” Her face was like an angry child’s. “My job is the details!”
Alan ate some of the chicken-in-library-paste and forked a lot of rice into the rest and said, “I’m going to run some names past you. Wave when you recognize one.” He mixed the rice into the library paste. “Herman Ritter.”
She jerked. It was a comical reaction, except Alan didn’t dare laugh. She looked like a bad actor playing astonishment. “How do you know that?”
“Alice K. Einhorn.”
She moaned. She gulped cold tea.
“Geoffrey Lee.”
She chewed on her lower lip. Now, she couldn’t seem to unlock her eyes from his. After several seconds, she muttered, “That’s fantastic.”
“Tell me about Herman Ritter.”
“I, uhm, shouldn’t—”
“Yeah, you should. If GAO comes down on you, you’re going to look awfully good for talking to me. But you have to talk.”
“Ritter’s the officer-in-charge of the unit. He’s a civilian, but there’s a light colonel under him.”
“Not unusual. Tell me about Ritter.”
“Well, he’s— He’s pretty snotty, you know the type? He likes to bully people. He blows up, screams at people, gets right in your face. But he’s got a good reputation on the outside, as I understand it—he writes books—”
“What does the unit do?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“Are they cooking the books or are they just sloppy?”
“I don’t think they’re—” She frowned. “It isn’t cooking the books, exactly. It’s like Ritter can’t be bothered with stuff like that. It’s—for all his reputation, the truth is that from where I sit, he’s incompetent. He can’t do things right.”
That sounded to Craik like the people who had sent Ray Spinner to Tel Aviv. He said, “Alice Einhorn?”
“On her door, it says ‘Policy and Tasking,’ but I think she’s into everything. Some of the older guys, the military guys who have been there a while, they complain that they can’t tell what the lines of command are. The truth is, it looks like Ritter and Einhorn run everything from the top down, and the organization chart doesn’t mean squat.”
“What about Lee?”
“He’s a lawyer, I guess. At least he’s listed as ‘Legal Affairs.’ I went to him once to ask about some money that was being authorized—I mean, I thought, Well, if he’s the legal guy, he can tell me if it’s legal. He bullshitted me, and the next day Ritter called me in and screamed at me that I was questioning his judgment. I was asking about things that weren’t my business. I tried to tell him the finances were my business, and I thought he was going to hit me. He’s a big guy, and he loves to intimidate. I got nowhere.”
“Did you take it up with the lieutenant-colonel?”
“Fat chance. He’s tight with Ritter. Worried about his own career.” She had pushed her plate far away and now leaned forward with her elbows on the table. “Why did you go to General Raddick?”
“You know what a task number is?”
“Of course! Is there a question about a tasking? That’s just what I’ve been talking about! Oh, God. When they’ve spent money, the paperwork is like they sprinkled amounts on the task numbers with a salt shaker. The numbers can’t correspond with what actually goes on. I mean, they charge stuff to taskings that were completed a year ago. Two years ago.”
“Ever seen expenditures for a company called Force for Freedom?”
She gave him the bad-actor astonishment again. “How do you know all this?”
“How much money?”
She shook her head. “You wouldn’t believe me. A lot. I mean, a lot. And it’s no-bid. I see the contracts. The amounts are big, but I think they’re slippery—Force for Freedom is billing stuff against one contract when I’m sure as can be that it’s part of another. It’s just a can of worms.”
“Does their money come through a DIA pipe?”
“Well, some of it does. That’s what I’m supposed to be there to monitor. But they spend more than that. There’s money coming from another source. I can’t tell you.”
“DoD?”
She looked irritated.
“Secretary’s office? One of the undersecretaries?”
“It’s got a number and a name but I don’t know what it is, okay? But it’s a lot, so it isn’t somebody’s office coffee money.” As if the talking had made her feel better, she pulled her bowl of cold rice toward her and began to dig into it with her fork. After a mouthful, she grabbed the salt shaker.
Craik asked her if she knew what sort of operations the unit was into, but she said she didn’t. Everything was coded. She knew nothing about the operations themselves except what would be implied by the task number, and they were so general that they didn’t help any more than to tell her that the unit spent a lot of money on antiterrorism and “control and exploitation of enemy combatants.”
“And it’s all called Perpetual Justice?”
“Ritter and his cronies call the unit Perpetual Justice. See, below Einhorn’s level, the unit’s split into two camps, sort of pro-and anti-Ritter. If you’re for Ritter, you call it ‘PJ;’ if you think he’s a shmuck, you use the officia
l name. Which I’m not allowed to tell you.”
He tried to get her to tell him anyway, and he tried to get her to tell him where the unit did its work, but she’d made up her mind by then that she’d said enough. She was clearly feeling better, but as they paid for their dismal lunches and headed out, her nervousness came back and she seemed to sag. She wouldn’t give him a telephone number.
“I really wanted to ask you—what—what you think I should do.” Even now that she had talked, her question was still hesitant.
“You ought to think about going to GAO,” he said. “You’ll be better off to be the whistle-blower than the financial officer who let things get worse.”
“It’d be my career,” she murmured.
“Quit. You have a detailer? You know him?” Craik tried to hold her eye.
She shrugged. “Her. Sure, I know my detailer.”
“Call her today and tell her you want a new job immediately—anywhere. You won’t have to say why. Listen, Captain. I may not be Air Force but I know the system. If you tell her you’ll go anywhere, she’ll know that something is really, really wrong—and she’ll move you.”
She turned away, fiddled with her purse, and then got up. “I’m afraid to leave. Afraid that I can’t pass my accounts.”
Craik stood up with her. “I know it is easy to say, but stop being afraid. Don’t do wrong just because you are afraid of the consequences of doing right.” Even as Craik said the words, he realized that they were for him. And that his career, his hunt for flag rank, was over. Maybe to himself, and maybe to her, he said, “All the people at Abu Ghraib—who were afraid to speak up—they’ll go to jail, too. And have to live with what they were part of.”
She shook her head without any other last word and headed for a silver Hyundai in the middle of the mall’s scruffy parking lot. Craik headed for his own car but kept an eye on her. He saw her repairing her lipstick with the help of her rearview mirror, and by the time he was behind the wheel of his own Toyota she had her backup lights on. He waited until she was ready to exit to the highway and then pulled slowly out of his parking spot.
He let her get well ahead of him. He risked being wrong about where she was going and took the ramp to the Beltway heading west. Within a mile, he saw the silver Hyundai ahead, and he pulled in several cars behind her and waited for her to take an exit ramp. She got off at Silver Spring, and he followed her down to Georgia Avenue, then toward Bethesda. When she turned into a parking garage, he cut into a side street, couldn’t find a place to park, went on around the block, and came out in time to see her go into an office building that might have been put up in the seventies by somebody short on money.
He went into the same parking garage and stowed the car, then walked to her building. The street side stood on massive pillars with aluminum facings, ugly as could be. Craik went in through the glass doors and found a one-storey lobby with two elevators. No security desk. A building directory that took up part of one wall told him that the Office of Geophysical Excellence occupied one of the building’s seven storeys. A couple of dozen other enterprises were scattered through the upper three floors. He guessed that a lot of the building’s space had no tenants—just the kind of place the government looked for. He studied the names, rejecting any that were clearly things like law firms or one-man shows. That still left more than a dozen, most with made-up names like Gotrex and ExcelHunt, or old-fashioned, iron-assed names like Spalding Machine Imports and Fawcett Human Services Management. He leaned toward the made-up names but thought that a classified DIA operation might disguise itself as something like a human services firm, although it would be embarrassing if somebody came in looking for career counseling. In the end, he scribbled the room numbers and the names of all fourteen in his notebook and headed for the elevators.
The corridors had the look of all unclassy buildings—floors with too much polish slopped on the baseboards; flotsam lines of dirt that had hardened into the old wax; lettering styles that had missed the last twenty years. Still, he was able to reject most of the offices on his list—some had unlocked doors; some were obviously too small; some were too well maintained. In the end, he settled on three— Gotrex, on five; Franzen Acoustics, also on five; and something called Elastomer Engineering Limited, on six.
Back in his own office at Bolling, he looked the three firms up in the civilian telephone directory. Gotrex and Franzen were there. Elastomer Engineering wasn’t.
Score one for low-tech investigation.
Craik stayed late to write a one-page report on the meeting with Sarah Berghausen for his security officer. He was specific and factual. He included what she’d said about Ritter and the others from OIA, and what she’d said about financing. He mentioned his following her and the building’s address. He said that she’d “heard” about his own meeting with Raddick and suggested that there had been a violation of security, because he and Raddick had discussed classified matters. He didn’t say that only Raddick could have committed the security violation.
He printed out two hard copies of the report. One went into a file called Perpetual Justice. The other went into inter-office mail for the security officer, but it wouldn’t reach her until at least noon tomorrow, and by then it wouldn’t matter if she went to somebody with it and the shit hit the fan.
The after-effects of the Mombasa trip were to stay with them, although Piat didn’t see that it would be that way. When they got together for the first time after they returned, he thought that there was new tension. It might be Irene’s guilt about having drunk too much during dinner with the prince; some of it might be Hackbutt’s irritation with her because of the drinking. But under it all was something new: the prince’s offer to buy Hackbutt’s sea eagle. The offer—actually a demand—had come during that dinner. The prince had made it quite clear that it was the only reason that any relationship between him and Hackbutt could continue. He had as much as said that he didn’t like Americans and he didn’t like Western men whose wives got drunk and pushy. It was going to be Bella or nothing. Sell the bird or abort.
And then there was Irene’s “art.” She had been back at work before Piat got to the farm. Hearing the sound of a power tool from the studio, he looked at Hackbutt, got raised eyebrows and a pursed mouth. These were signals; they suggested to him that Hackbutt and Irene had been fighting. It might be about the drinking; it might be about her show; but it was probably, he thought, about the sea eagle. Which side was Irene coming down on, he wondered—sell, or abort? And he was a little amused that Hackbutt had used those signals with him, signals of intimacy and a kind of established code, suggesting that the two men had the sort of intimacy that Piat envied in Hackbutt and Irene. Things had got very complicated.
But they said nothing about the bird that day. Piat knew he had to get the commitment, but he’d have to go at it delicately. And he didn’t want Irene around when he did. He wanted her neutral, at the worst, preferably pro-selling, but he wanted Hackbutt to himself. He spent that day reviewing what had happened at Mombasa, stroking Hackbutt and asking his advice for the next step. Both of them avoided mentioning the bird. They sketched the possibilities for another meeting with the prince. Piat didn’t say that he was sure that the prince was a lost cause and the only point in going on was to get next to Mohamed, his falconer.
When he came back next morning, the sun was shining—a rarity—and the house was bright. To his surprise, the studio door was open. He heard Hackbutt’s voice; he could tell from the tone that he was trying to please Irene.
“Come on in, I won’t bite you.” She was standing by the far wall with Hackbutt. She had on her working clothes but she wasn’t working. The two of them had been looking at a colored drawing that was pinned to the wall. The floor had been cleared, even swept, and what Piat took to be the “installation” was laid out on it.
“It’s finished,” he said.
“That it is.”
“Come look at this, Jack. It’s incredible.”
; Her finished drawing of the piece was done with the skill and precision of an architect’s rendering. It showed the installation as it would be, the perspective perhaps a little exaggerated: the floor with the large, mounded piece somewhere near the center, the other things in an undulating line leading to and away from it; three big rectangles overhead, their planes slightly angled to the floor; ranks of uprights on each side with small rectangles set into them.
Piat looked at the big central mound, which he knew now was really humanoid and incorporated some of the sheep skeleton that Hackbutt had boiled down for her. “Where are the photos?”
“In the standing mounts.” She tapped the uprights along the sides.
“I thought they were going to be attached to the center thing.”
“Oh, that was a lousy idea. I gave that up.”
He turned to look at the real thing. The bloated-looking mound that he had once taken for a mass of jelly was now a glistening pinky-white that looked both lustrous and horrible, like something almost phosphorescent with decay. Seen up close, it showed swirls and cloudy loops almost like writing. Seen from the same vantage point as her drawing, it was a woman’s bloated belly, the spiral core of a seashell set into the navel, the vagina shading into deeper pink and blue, then purple, the labia like fronds, like sea anemones. Two thighs, equally monstrous, quickly shrank before getting to where the knees should have been; one disappeared altogether, as if into the floor; the other shriveled down like dried skin and became a sheep’s thigh bone which, in its turn, seemed to plunge out of sight. At the shape’s other end, BX cable curled to become a kind of spinal cord ringed with the sheep’s vertebrae, leading to the sheep’s skull, the nose pointed skyward, the back flowing into a big piece of driftwood that spread like hair. Beyond the figure were, at intervals, the condoms, a block of diseased-looking styrofoam, other detritus—but all now crafted from fiberglass. Seeming to have emerged from the vagina and leading down the room were a plastic baby doll, the pearls and diamonds she had said her father had given her, a board with rusty nails, shells. Most of the objects, like the legs, seemed to be half buried in the floor. As if in sand.