Official Privilege

by P. T. Deutermann

  Maybe some chiefs in the Supply Department.

  “That’s going to be a big telephone drill,” he said.

  “We need a home.”

  “I can probably get us an office down in the Washington Navy Yard.”

  Dan shook his head. “My bosses won’t allow that.”

  “Too close to the enemy, hunh?”

  “Yup. NIS subversives would bombard my poor brain with super-secret Q-waves and turn me into a double agent. Opnav would be betrayed and all would be lost.”

  She laughed. “No Q-waves in Opnav?”

  “Hell no. Opnav just got electricity a few years back.

  Before that, it was whale-oil lamps, hemp rigging, bells, signal flags, and lots of ship pictures. It’s rumored that they have a computer trapped in a room up on the fifth floor. Most of the admirals feel that if they don’t feed it, maybe it’ll just die. No, an Opnav office is perfect.

  We’ll hang out in OP-Six-fourteen and you can get to see firsthand how little NIS or anybody else has to fear from Opnav.”

  They arrived in the Washington area at 2:30, coming onto the 1-495 Beltway from the north. They were able to travel exactly one mile before all traffic southbound began to congeal. Dan managed to maneuver to an off ramp, where he went up an dover, heading back westbound around the Beltway in the counterclockwise direction toward Virginia. With rush hour impending, he suggested to Grace that he simply take her home.

  “There’s no point in your trying to get down to the Navy Yard at this time of day,” he said. “I can drop you off, go by the Pentagon and get us set up for Monday, and then get down to Old Town before the serious traffic begins.”

  They agreed to meet at the south parking entrance to the Pentagon on Monday morning at 8:30. He drove her into Georgetown, made sure that she got safely into her house, and then zipped across the Key Bridge to Rosslyn, from where he took 110 down to the Pentagon and found a parking place close to the building, in north parking.

  grace watched the big Suburban thread its way carefully through the two lines of parked cars crowded t along P Street and then went to her study. The brick town house had a fairly simple floor plan: a small front hall that led to stairs on one side and a living room to the right. There were four rooms on the ground floor: living room, powder room, dining room, and a spacious eat-in kitchen. Upstairs were two bedrooms and two baths, as well as a room the Realtor had quaintly referred to as a “sewing room,” which Grace used for storage. The master bedroom door was at the top of the stairs, with the second bedroom down a hall, and a guest bathroom separating the two. The sewing room was on the street side of the house.

  Grace had converted the dining room to her home study, since it had a beautiful view through a bay window of the back walled garden. The previous owners had added a small pantry combined with an enclosed back stoop off the kitchen, which meant that Grace tended to live in the kitchen and study area, going upstairs at night when she was ready for bed. The guest bedroom was kept ready for company—which never came.

  There was a basement, but it was damp and moldy, with old earth showing between some of the foundation bricks. The furnace, hot-water heater, and a central air conditioner were down there, but Grace, suspecting monsters, avoided going down there, and she even had a small bookshelf placed in front of the basement door in the kitchen. She had a maid in every other week, and an ancient gardener who took excellent care of all the patio gardens in that block, albeit on a somewhat random schedule.

  When her parents had died, Grace had selected a few pieces of furniture from the large house in Beacon Hill to bring down to Georgetown, including a Queen Anne cherry dining room table that now served as her desk, not that one could see it under all the clutter. She made some space in front of one of the armchairs and checked her answering machine—one indignant message from the maid, whom she’d forgotten to tell that she would be going to Philadelphia. Who’s working for whom?

  she wondered absently. Silly question. The second message was from Englehardt. It was short and of the E.T. variety: “Grace please call my office in the NIS headquarters downtown in the Washington Navy Yard.”

  She got up, picked up the phone, and moved to the huge high-backed leather chair her father had brought back from Harrod’s and dialed the number.

  “Mr. Englehardt’s office.”

  “This is Grace Snow. Returning his call.”

  “He’s out of the office, Miss. Snow. I’ll tell him you called back. Are you home?” Grace said yes, thanked her, and hung up, then went upstairs to take a shower and change into casual clothes. She daydreamed about Dan Collins while she was in the shower, and then she laughingly wondered what significance her mother, the shrink, would have made of that. The phone was ringing by the time she got back downstairs. As per her habit when she was in the house and the phone rang, she let the machine pick up and listened to the caller identify himself. It was Doug Englehardt. She picked up.

  “Hi, Doug. I’m back, as you can see.”

  “Hi, Grace. Ames said you were returning to D.C.

  today. How was Philadelphia?”

  “Pretty awful. W.C. Fields was right. But then, of course, we had this grisly crime to brighten up our stay there.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  Grace hesitated for a moment. “Santini keeping the home front fully informed?”

  “Of course. Ames has him reporting directly to him.

  He’s still pretty annoyed over this Opnav gambit. He badgered Admiral Keeler to go to the Secretary of the Navy with it, but the vice chief had apparently offered Keeler some friendly advice, and nothing came of it.

  For now, anyway, we’ve lost that round. Ames said Keeler didn’t appear to have his heart in it, for some odd reason.”

  “This vice whatever seems to get around.”

  Englehardt laughed. “Admiral Torrance is going to be the next Chief of Naval Operations, and he’s a very powerful and ambitious flag officer.

  The way it works traditionally, the vice chief runs day-to-day Navy policy, while the Chief of Naval Operations spends most of his energy with the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the national policy level. The vice has usually been the man with the hammer, around with whom one does not mess, if I can paraphrase Sir Winston.”

  “I left tasking for Santini. Is that going to be supported?”

  This time, it was Englehardt who seemed to hesitate, and Grace found herself holding her breath.

  “I’m not sure, Grace,” he said. “I think Ames knows that I’m kind of your rabbi here, and he was a little coy about that when I asked the same question. How vital is what you wanted them to do?”

  “It’s part of a homicide investigation, Doug. This young officer was not only murdered; he was also mewed up in the steam drum of a ship’s boiler for something like a week before they flooded the ship with cold nitrogen gas. Basically, the forensic evidence, such as it is, indicates he was alive in there for some time.”

  “Jesus Christ. I hadn’t heard that.”

  “Well, it renders the rice-bowl issues more than a little trivial in my book,” she said. She felt herself getting angry and had to remind herself that this was supposedly her ally she was talking to.

  He must have read her mind. “Calm down, Grace.

  I’m one of the good guys, remember?”

  “I’m sorry, Doug. You are one of the good guys.”

  “How’s this guy Collins? Present for duty?”

  “Yes. Rather self-effacing, actually. Makes mistakes and owns up to them. Pretends not to be very smart but then says things that prove otherwise.”

  “Is he committed to what the Opnav elephants are up to?”

  “I think not. I have the sense that if they took the invesitgation and gave it to someone else, he would take it perfectly in stride. Until then, he’s working it.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “On his way home, I would guess. He was going by the Pentagon to arrange some office space for us next week. He s
aid it wasn’t worth my going into the office by the time we got back. Why do you ask?”

  “He’s right. You two getting along all right?”

  She hesitated for a second or two, then said, “We’ve sort of reached an understanding that he and I will work the investigation aboveboard, without respect to the NIS-Opnav ‘food fight,’ as he called it. I think I can trust him.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. Trust but verify, as Reagan used to say. And now that you’re back in town, keep in touch. I’ll keep my ear to the ground for you.”

  Grace laughed, thanked him, and said goodbye. She suspected that Doug Englehardt was still more than a little smitten with her. He was married and by all appearances reasonably serious about it, and he had never really overstepped the bounds of propriety. She wasn’t so sure about what might happen if she encouraged him, however. If she had any chance of getting back into the policy world, Doug’s help was going to be the key. But his comment about Ames reminded her that he was also a survivor: If he had to choose between supporting Grace and saving his own hide, there was little question in Grace’s mind as to how that would come out. Fortunately, she had Robby Booker to fall back on. He couldn’t do anything for her career, but he got around and could keep her informed. She suddenly realized how few friends she had in this town.

  Dan made it up to the fourth floor and OP-614 by 4:45, where he met with Summerfield. The office was otherwise empty. Having to come in at 0600 to sort the diplomatic traffic for the officers, Yeoman Jackson normally went home at four, and Snapper was attending a meeting at State on the Portuguese frigate. Summerfield was having his last cup of coffee for the day and reading a Wall Street Journal expose on the administration’s most recent pecadillo, a daily ritual he truly relished. He eyed his watch as Dan came into the office.

  “The boy investigator is back,” he said. “At sixteen forty-five on a Friday. I thought I trained you better than that, Daniel.”

  “Yes, sir, you did,” Dan said, dropping his briefcase on his desk and eyeing his own bulging in-box. “But I needed to get some stuff set up for Monday.

  Grace Snow and I will need to operate out of Six-fourteen for the next couple of weeks, if that’s okay with you. We have the empty desks here, and the alternative is that I go to the Navy Yard.”

  ” ‘Grace Snow and F—that sounds cozy. Okay, no problem. You’ll have to keep Snapper from drooling at the estimable Ms. Snow, but otherwise that should be workable.”

  Dan nodded. “We can get a bib for Snapper,” he said. “Let me bring you up to speed on where we are with this thing.”

  When he had finished, Summerfield rotated in his armchair and stared out the window for a minute. The windows of the D-ring stared back.

  “Wow,” he said finally, turning around. “I think you’re right to come back to town. With a two-year-old datum, neither you nor NIS will find out anything more of any significance in Philly. Those yardbirds can stonewall better than a tax assessor. Politically, the first thing you need to do is to get on Oh-six B’s calendar Monday and give him a data dump.”

  “I’ve been keeping Manning informed.”

  “Yeah, good. But remember, you’re not allowed to brief the appointing officer on the investigation, per se, but you can go down there and tell him how things are going with NIS. But let him ask the questions. Don’t volunteer, and don’t tell him as much as you’ve told me.

  I suspect his focus will be on his marching orders from the vice chief, whatever those are.”

  “His focus, and the Navy’s, may change,” Dan said.

  “If the national press gets ahold of the buried-alive angle, we’re all going to be fending off offers from Hard Copy around here.”

  “No, the Navy’s Chief of Information will. And that’s an important distinction: the ‘Grace and I’ team should keep a very low profile. I think you’ve got the right plan —talk to people who knew Hardin in Luce. I also think maybe we’d better do some furniture moving in here: You and Ms. Snow take the back room and you control the keys and access.

  Snapper can have your desk. I can’t get you any more phone lines anytime short of Christmas, but we already have four—you guys can have two dedicated to your project. Tell me about Ms. Snow.”

  Dan briefed his boss on Grace’s professional background and their relationship to date in the investigation.

  The telephone in the outer office began to ring, but Summerfield shook his head when Dan reached for it.

  “Too late in the week to answer phones. So she’s not one of these bra-burning, politically correct bitch kitties.”

  “No, sir, I don’t think so. She’s smart—Brown, Georgetown Law, a Wall Street financial-crimes investigator.

  And she’s focused. She seems to be willing to work the investigation in a straightforward manner and let the mandarins handle the rice-bowl issues.”

  Summerfield nodded reflectively. “Where is she now?”

  “I dropped her off at her house in Georgetown. It was too late in the day to try for the Navy Yard.”

  “Georgetown. How nice for her. So in your opinion, she’s playing it straight for now.”

  “Yes, sir, I think so.”

  “That’ll change if you guys begin to home in on a solution.”

  “Yes, sir, that’s what I felt. She does, too, actually.

  We even talked about it. That’s when I expect NIS to start dropping sand in the reduction gears.”

  “Yeah, okay. We’ll handle that problem when and if it comes on the screen. You get to tell Snapper he has to move.”

  “Wonderful,” Dan said.

  “I’ve got to leave,” Summerfield said. “I’ve got a meeting of my gun club.”

  “Going shooting this weekend?”

  “No, just our weekly get-together to look at the new toys. We’re collectors. We like to show off.”

  “Gun collectors are becoming an endangered species in America.”

  “All the more reason to be armed, don’t you think?” Summerfield asked with a wicked smile.

  at 8:30 on monday morning, Dan met Grace in the small anteroom just inside the doors of the Pentagon’s south parking lot entrance. She was dressed in a two piece charcoal gray suit with a closed collar and low heeled shoes. She carried a black leather purse over one shoulder and a Compaq portable computer in a black fabric carrying case. He shepherded her through the metal detectors and package scanners, then took her down to the concourse to get her a temporary building pass. Enroute, he stopped at a building map to give her a brief explanation of the Pentagon layout.

  “I’ll escort you out this evening or whenever you leave,” he said.

  “Is that really necessary? Now that I have my own pass?”

  “Yup. This is still the largest office building in the world, in terms of miles of corridors. Seventeen miles, to be exact. Five concentric buildings—or rings, as they’re called—five floors above ground, two or maybe more below ground, depending on the color of your badge, and about twenty-three thousand inmates during the working day. You have to know the layout to get around this place.”

  “It seems logical enough,” she said, looking at one of the framed building diagrams.

  “Yeah, but you’ll notice that there’s one of these diagrams every fifty feet. Basically, think of the building as a spoked wheel. Each office has a number, like four-Efoureight-seven.

  First number is the floor, the letter is the ring, and the final number is the number on the door. The quickest way to get to any office is to go down a spoke to the hub, go up or down stairs to the appropriate floor, then walk around the hub—that’s the A-ring—to the appropriate corridor—that’s another spoke—and’ back out that corridor to the ring where your objective lives and around that segment of the ring to find it.”

  “Clear as mud,” she observed, looking around at the steady stream of people walking by, all of whom looked like they knew where they were going.

  “That room number I gave you is OP-Six-fourteen.
r />   Want to try it?” Fifteen minutes later, she admitted defeat, and then Dan, by now carrying the computer case, snowed her the system.

  “It really is pretty logical,” he said lightly as they walked down the E-ring toward OP-614. She gave him a sideways look but said nothing.

  In the office, Dan introduced her to the 614 crew.

  The resident Marine was a model of decorum and politeness.

  Snapper had not reacted well to Summerfield’s comments about a bib that morning, and he had given Dan a meaningful look that foretold unspeakable acts of retaliation. Dan was rescued when Grace said how much she admired the Marine Corps. They set to work creating the investigation’s base camp, and by lunchtime they had Snapper moved and their command cell up and running.

  At lunchtime, Dan took her down to the center-court snack bar for a hamburger. The center court was actually a beautiful botanical garden planted in the hollow five-sided center of the building, encompassing about five acres of grounds. He pointed out a quaint tradition held over from the Cold War, which was that the snack bar in the center of the courtyard was known to the Pengaton inhabitants as

  “Ground Zero.”

  “Just to remind you that, while the Pentagon is an architecturally interesting office building, it’s also the nerve center for the most powerful military machine on the planet, for better or for ‘worser.’ “

  “I’m kind of amazed at how dilapidated it is. I mean, this garden is beautiful, but the offices are—”

  “Grungy. Yeah. This building was literally poured into a five-sided mold in about sixteen months during World War Two. It’s built on the remains of an old airfield, which itself was built on landfill—basically, a swamp. The building foundations are all on pilings.

  Forty-one thousand pilings, if I remember my tour book. In the basement offices, you can tell the state of the tide in the Potomac—the walls sweat at high tide.

  The flag and general officers’ offices are nice, and the major command centers are pretty high-tech. The rest of it is a dump.”