Official Privilege

by P. T. Deutermann

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Okay, and so am I. Do you think they would like my investigation to fail in some way?”

  “I … I don’t know. Bureaucratically, I suppose they would. But I’ve seen no evidence that someone’s waiting to sabotage it, if that’s what you mean.” He was being very direct.

  “Right. Okay. So let’s make a deal: Let’s strive to keep the integrity of the investigation intact, and we take care of our respective bureaucracies on our own time. If there’s a conflict between those two tasks, we talk about it, okay?”

  “That sounds fair.” This might be easier than I expected, she thought.

  “Well, it’s practical, because there probably will be conflicts. I think the way to look at this situation is that you and I are both sort of pawns in the larger rice-bowl game. Whatever the bigs are up to, on your side or mine, is above our pay grade, so if we play it straight, we give the elephants no excuse to trample us, if I can mix my metaphors. Ah, here’s the Beltway. Shields up, everybody.”

  For the next hour, they talked only sporadically as Dan concentrated on surviving a trip around the Capital Beltway. She relaxed after awhile; he was easy to talk to, and he did not seem to have many pretensions.

  She told him about her years with SEC in Washington and New York, and the fact that she had been married to a stockbroker in New York and gotten divorced just before taking the appointment at Justice.

  “So why NIS? Get run out of Justice by the new administration?”

  “Yes, along with everyone else. I should have known better than to take a late-term appointment.”

  “Yeah. I guess that goes with the territory of political appointments.

  What does one do in Investigations Policy at NIS?”

  Grace thought fast. Tell him, or play along? What if he already knows?

  Play it.

  “I imagine it’s like the Opnav Plans and Policy that you work in,” she said. “We’re supposed to develop organizational strategy, and we handle the Services’s interdepartmental relations. NIS has an important counterintelligence role, and, of course, there are lots of people in that game in this town.”

  “Amen, and all equally incompetent, apparently. The Navy had the Walker case, and now CIA has Brother Ames. We do much the same thing in Opnav, except we don’t work counterspy, counterintelligence stuff. We do Navy strategy and long-range plans, budget support, and the staff work on a whole host of international treaties and agreements. The Navy does business around the world, so Opnav tends to do more of that than the other services. I’d call it quasi-important paper pushing.” She asked him where he lived, and he described his eighteenth-century house on Prince Street in Old Town, two blocks up the hill from the river.

  “Prince is one of the streets with the original cobblestones.

  I thought they were really quaint when my folks passed it on to me, but my ankles know better now. But for a Navy guy, the price was very right.”

  She laughed. “My street has cobblestones and trolley tracks,” she said.

  “My parents bought me the house when I went off to Georgetown Law.

  Father just assumed that the law school was on the campus, so I’m two blocks from there.”

  “It isn’t?”

  “No. Never has been. It’s downtown. I didn’t have the heart to tell him.”

  “I love it. I went to Gonzaga High School—supposedly a prep for Georgetown. But my parents were schoolteachers, and we couldn’t afford Georgetown, so I went ROTC at GW instead.” He told her that he had grown up in the Washington, D. C., area. Born in 1957, the only child of two Fairfax County schoolteachers, he had lived in various suburbs of northern Virginia as his parents moved around in the school system. He had enjoyed a gentle upbringing, making his way through childhood with an easygoing, affable demeanor that allowed him to get along with just about anybody and to fit into whatever group seemed handy. Given his parents’ profession—they were both history teachers—he developed a taste for learning, if not necessarily for achievement. He attended public schools up through junior high school, but by the time he reached the eighth grade, his laid back, rather laissez-faire attitude about grades had prompted his parents, both attendant Catholics, to hand him over to the tender mercies of the Jesuits at the Gonzaga College High School in downtown Washington.

  For a boy coming out of the public schools of northern Virginia, Dan had found his first year at Gonzaga to be an eye-opening experience, not so much from the point of view of his academic qualifications, but, rather, in terms of emphasis. Qualitatively, Fairfax County schools were above the national average, but for a popular and gregarious kid who was on the verge of puberty and whose focus had been happily coalescing toward those heretofore entirely ignorable aliens called girls, Gonzaga had provided a major course correction.

  There were no girls at Gonzaga, only Jesuits, lots of Jesuits who were seriously into academic and athletic competition, three hours of homework every night, daily Mass, unabashed physical discipline for miscreants, and an academic curriculum crammed with four years of mandatory Latin, mathematics, science, history, and English, all absorbed in a coat-and-tie atmosphere where all the adults were addressed as either Father or Mr. And above all, there was a heavy emphasis on personal achievement: There were daily grades, a First Honors roll, a Second Honors roll, academic and athletic prizes, lists in the hallways, and the constant pressure of the young black-robed Jesuit scholastics, called Mr. instead of Father, who taught most of the classes.

  Dan had not been previously involved in organized sports, so the Jewies drafted him for one of the freshman softball teams, where he surprised everybody, especially himself, by showing a distinct talent for being a pitcher. In the fall semester, the freshmen were organized into intramural teams, which allowed the athletic director a chance to inspect the talent for the coming spring season. Dan’s selection to the spring team was his first major triumph at Gonzaga, as well as the beginning of his acceptance of the Jesuit system.

  On the other end of the motivation spectrum, every classroom had a student beadle who recorded classroom infractions and demerits, and an after-hours detention hall called “jug,” from the Latin jugum, where those individuals who had earned a notation in the beadle’s book would be recalibrated under the supervision of the enormous and ubiquitous prefect of discipline, one Father Shining. Jug would convene at 3:15, immediately after school, and that day’s crop of miscreants would be instructed to write out things like the Nicene Creed one thousand times, after which they were graciously free to go. ;

  The Jesuits’ unalloyed academic zeal transformed Dan’s first year at Gonzaga from just another school year with all his neighborhood buddies into the centerpiece of his existence. At first, the schoolwork at Gonzaga had been pell-mell, then totally unreasonable, then hard, and finally, interesting. The Jesuits taught on the principle of challenging young minds, and since there was a large variety of young minds, there was an equally large variety of challenges. Dan found out that the Jesuits took discipline seriously. Actually, the Jesuits took everything seriously, but this did not become evident to him until about the middle of his first year, when he had his first direct experience with the prefect of discipline. One of the toughest kids in his ninth grade class had been named Marty Murphy, a graduate of Blessed Sacrament up in Chevy Chase and a stalwart of the CYO. Murphy made the grave mistake one day of talking back to one of the Jesuit teachers, to the secret delight of the whole class, although Dan failed to notice that there was a great deal of emphasis on the secret part. Dan went down on the beadle’s pad as one of Murphy’s accomplices—for laughing—and accompanied Murphy to the basement for jug. Upon arrival, Father Shining had come in and without further ceremony grabbed Murphy by the right arm. He took him down the hallway to the front door and out into the school’s tiny front lawn, which faced Eye Street. The other inmates of jug watched through the windows as Father Shining dragged Murphy over to the aging white picket fence protecti
ng the sparse lawn. Never relaxing his grip, the huge priest grabbed a single fence picket and in one nail-screeching movement tore it off the fence.

  Realizing the possibilities, Murphy stopped squirming and concentrated on the picket. Shining took his hand off Murphy’s arm long enough to grab the picket in both hands and split it lengthwise with his bare hands right in front of Murphy’s no-longer-insolent face. At this juncture, the by-now-wide-eyed spectators in jug did a down-periscope act at the windows and scrambled back to their desks, hoping against hope that all they would have to do would be to copy out the New Testament a few hundred times. Dan concluded that these people were indeed serious, and he began to pay attention, both to his studies and to how the game was played in his new school. Murphy never told whether or not Shining had actually used the fence picket, and no one had asked.

  Graduating from Gonzaga with First Honors and as captain of the softball team in 1974, Dan had matriculated at George Washington University, again in downtown Washington, with a full Navy ROTC scholarship.

  Given his grades and his athletic ability, he had had a shot at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, but the competition in northern Virginia for political appointments was fierce, and besides, he was tired of being in an all boys school. At GW, he majored in international affairs, which seemed to him an appropriate course of study for a budding naval officer, and graduated with a commission and an appointment into the surface line in 1978.

  His mother and father had been quite proud of him on commissioning day, although they seemed somewhat ill at ease among the many military parents in the audience, as well as with the elaborate military ceremony attending commissioning. The Vietnam War was over, but the social and political bruises created by that conflict were barely healed, and Dan’s parents belonged to a profession that had made no secret of its animosities toward things military. They had swallowed hard when Dan opted for the Navy scholarship, but Dan was simply being practical: the NROTC scholarship had been a forty-thousand-dollar ticket to a college degree, and if he had to serve four years in the Navy afterward, well, it would let him see the world, just like the poster said, a need his parents probably would never understand.

  And, unlike some of his classmates, he had graduated with a job, the chance for a career if things went well, and a ticket out of Washington, D.C.

  He told Grace a little bit about his subsequent career in the Navy, skirting over the dreadful year in Monterey when his wife had died.

  Grace let him ramble, not paying too much attention, while her mind focused on what would happen once they got to Philadelphia. She was especially concerned about how they would be treated by the NIS field office, which was known in Navy parlance as NISRA Philadelphia: NIS Resident Agent Philadelphia. If the headquarters executives were going to throw a wrench into the workings of the Opnav investigation, the resident agent, one Mr. Carl Santini, would be their instrument. That would be a shame, because she really did want to know how on earth a body had come to be discovered in the bowels of a sleeping battleship.

  april 1992

  WASHINGTON, D. O, for the third day in a row, Malachi Ward sat in the darkened Ford, watching the entrance to the apartment building perched above the E Street Expressway viaduct.

  With the viaduct on one side and an apartment complex on the other, the street was deserted. The windshield wipers, set on intermittent, groaned once as they swept away the mizzle that was descending all over Washington. He had watched the woman leave in the morning darkness, at the same time each morning. She was a daily commuter: a creature of habit. She returned home again between quarter to seven and seven each evening. Apparently, she was also dedicated.

  He looked at his watch again: 6:45 p.m. Anytime now.

  The sounds of a diminishing rush hour echoed up from the viaduct, drifting in through the partly lowered window on the passenger side. He heard the voices of two women coming up the sidewalk, their features blurred in his misted-over right-side mirror. Fat, shapeless features.

  Not her. The one he was waiting for was definitely not fat. She was very pretty, in fact; into high leather heels and a snappy, staccato stride.

  She’d worn a stylish tan raincoat when she left that morning at 6:10.

  Out the front door, turning left onto the sidewalk and walking up to 23rd Street, then left again and up 23rd toward the Metro station near George Washington University.

  One quick jaywalk across 23rd to get a paper, a second jaywalk back to the left side of the street, and on to the Metro station. Considering that daylight saving time had just started and it was still dark at that hour, she wasn’t very careful about it. Definitely a type A: out the door at zero-dark-thirty; first one into the office, probably the last one to leave. Go to work in the dark, come home in the dark: the Washington good life.

  Going to get ahead, our girl.

  Heels. He swiveled his head around. Tan coat, fast stride. Here she comes and here we go. He picked up the stubby German binoculars from the seat of the car and focused in on the lobby. He had called her answering machine forty minutes ago, told her about the visit, depositing the message late enough so that she would not have checked it from the office. Special Agent Demarest, FBI. A security matter in the Pentagon, a possible classified-material compromise. He would need only twenty minutes or so. Strictly routine.

  She clacked by his car, oblivious to the big man in the driver’s seat, her head down against the wet mist. Up the steps, into the lobby. He leaned forward to watch her in the yellow light of the lobby. He focused the binoculars on the security door’s keypad, conscious of her blurry image to one side as she busied herself with her mailbox, extracting the day’s take. Closing it. Walking over to the door. Punching the keypad as he focused in: 4-4-7-8. Pushing open the door, and now she was gone. He waited. Give her time to get upstairs, take the coat off, kick off those heels, run the answering machine.

  He waited some more, then picked up the car phone and dialed her number.

  “Hello?”

  “Yes, Miss. Hardin, this is Special Agent Demarest, FBI, calling. I left a message on your machine awhile ago. Did you get it?”

  “Why yes. Yes, I just did. But—”

  “Please don’t be alarmed, Miss. Hardin. This has nothing to do with you directly, but I do need to interview you regarding some classified-material control procedures having to do with an office you work with. And because of the details of the case, I didn’t want to do that in your office. You know, the FBI is here to see you —people talk, right?”

  “Well, yes, but—”

  “Right. So I propose to come by this evening. Fifteen, twenty minutes and we’re done.”

  “I just got home. I—”

  “I understand, Miss. Hardin. Actually, it’s Lieutenant Hardin, isn’t it?

  Look, I’m calling from a car phone. If I have the address right, I’m about five minutes away.

  You are in apartment four-twelve, the Kendall Apartments, correct? Is there parking nearby?”

  “Well, Mr.—Demarest, was it? Parking’s kinda tough.

  You’ll have to use the street. The garage requires a magnetic card.”

  “Don’t they all. I’ll tell you—sometimes the cases are simple compared to finding a parking place in this town. Again, I apologize for the intrusion. I’ll make it as quick as possible; then we can both call it a day.”

  “Okay,” she said with a sigh. “Press the button for four-twelve in the lobby when you get here. I’ll buzz the door open.”

  “Thanks so much, Miss. Hardin. See you in a bit.”

  He hung up the phone and waited some more. Make it ten minutes. Time to get there, find parking. She had a nice voice—educated, but with a brassy overtone. The file said she was a public information officer, so she should be accustomed to dealing with all kinds of people on the phone.

  He sat back in the seat and recalled the phone message that had led to his being here. From the captain, naturally; the principals never called directly. There was
a little problem that needed his special talents.

  Please meet the captain in the Army-Navy Town Club library at eleven o’clock. He had been waiting on the third floor in the magazine reading room when the captain showed up. The captain had looked tired and annoyed; it had apparently been a long day, and it probably wasn’t over.

  They had retired to the back reading room, where the problem had been explained, and it turned out to be a story very familiar to Malachi. It seemed that a certain senior officer had been indulging his tastes for younger women again, this time with a young lady on the Navy headquarters staff.

  “Your ‘great man’ into uniforms now?” Malachi had asked.

  The captain had just looked at him. They both knew the Washington rule about playing around in your own sandbox, but the captain was not there to discuss the right, wrong, or smarts of it. Malachi had waved his hand as if to say, Okay, go on.

  “The young lady in question has decided that she does not want to continue the um, relationship. My principal was not ready to, shall we say, acquiesce in that decision.”

  “He liked it; she didn’t.”

  The captain shrugged. “Whatever. I think she simply got a little scared.

  What had seemed like a good idea at the time and all that. In any event, she said some intemperate things, according to my principal.”

  ” ‘Intemperate.’”

  “His words.”

  Malachi had smiled from the depths of his armchair.

  He loved the way these executive assistant types talked.

  “Like back off or I’ll do an Anita Hill number on you.”

  “Something like that. So now the principal wants the young lady warned off, or, at the very least, convinced to keep her mouth shut.”

  “Until some calls can be made and a suitable assignment can be found, preferably on the distant fringes of the empire.”

  “That does not concern you. What we want from you—”

  “I know what you want from me. You want me to fix it. But what’s so special about this one?”