Official Privilege

by P. T. Deutermann

  “It’s a damned good thing you did, too. Now tell me why you did.”

  “I guess it’s because it sounded like a flag officer might be involved in a potentially embarrassing situation.

  And with all the media interest in the brother’s murder, I thought perhaps it was a good idea to prevent the flag officer or the Navy from being blindsided.”

  “And which flag officer might that be, Commander?”

  Randall asked softly.

  Careful, careful, Dan thought. “I have no idea, sir. I assumed that, like the Hardin investigation, that issue is above my pay grade.”

  Randall stared at him for a long moment, then swiveled around in the armchair to look out the window, where it was getting dark. Manning was studying the pictures of sailing ships on the wall, waiting to follow Randall’s lead. Dan wondered if either of them had talked to the D.C.

  police and knew anything about the second tip. He decided that this was no time to volunteer anything. Randall swung back around to face him.

  “Very well, Commander.” Commander, not Collins, Dan thought. Randall seemed to be a lot less excited.

  “If the D.C. police have anything more to say to you, you make sure that Captain Summerfield is informed.

  He will make sure that I am informed. I hereby reiterate my instructions to you, which are to steer clear of this Hardin matter. By the way, what role does this Miss. Snow play in all this? I understand from Captain Rennselaer at NIS that she no longer works there.”

  “Again, nothing direct, Captain,” Dan said. “Captain Vann of the D.C.

  police called her when he called me.

  She was the one who initially interviewed him about Elizabeth Hardin’s accident.”

  “This Captain Vann understands that neither of you is officially empowered anymore in the Hardin case?”

  “Yes, sir.” Dan said. “He also knows that the NIS has the case for action. My guess is that we’re done with it, now that he has an official point of contact to deal with.”

  “See to it that you are, Commander,” Randall said.

  “If there is some kind of scandal lurking in the background of the Hardin case that involves a flag officer, the vice chief has sole jurisdiction. It’s his official privilege to take care of problems like that, assuming they exist. Commanders who stick their noses into an issue at this level do so at their great personal and professional peril. I think I’ve said this before.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And the fact that you are personally involved with this Miss. Snow, while none of our business, had better not lead you back into the Hardin case, assuming that she persists in involving herself.”

  Dan saw red. “You’re absolutely right, sir,” he said in a clipped voice.

  “I beg your pardon, Commander?”

  “My personal relationship with Miss. Snow is none of your business.”

  Manning let out a theatrical sigh while Randall’s face settled into a blank, cold mask. He stood up.

  “If Miss. Snow interferes in an official U.S. Navy homicide investigation, Commander Collins, you had better be several thousand yards away from it, or I will see to it that the obstruction of justice charges brought against her include you. Now get out of here before I lose my temper.”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” Dan said through tight lips, then headed for the door.

  Manning was looking at him as if he were a dog that had made a mess on the carpet. Dan paused for a fraction of a second as he walked by, and shot Manning a look that made the EA blink. Dan went on through the door and closed it forcefully. He stomped down the passageway towards OP-614, his heart pounding. Those sons of bitches, who the hell do they think they are? Rear admiral-sefec. A select-grade asshole. Goddamnit, he had done the right thing in telling Summerfield. And Summerfield had done the right thing by transmitting a warning to the flag network, and now they responded by threatening him, and Grace. He could suddenly understand how Pearl Harbor had happened.

  He steamed down the polished E-ring corridor, nearly bowling over two yeomen who were coming the other way. But at the intersection of the fifth corridor and the E-ring, he stopped. A sudden, chilling thought had just struck him. Jesus H. Christ, do you suppose those god damned EAs already know who it is? He suddenly felt like an ocean swimmer who has just discovered that the beach, all by itself, is getting farther away.

  Snapper, in a serious mode for a change, had even warned him this morning: “Summerfield is getting concerned about you—you’re starting to-piss off some powerful people.” He continued back to OP-614, walking slower, where he found the office as he had left it. It was now 5:45. He wondered where the hell Summerfield and Snapper were. These were pretty late hours for a Friday, even in Opnav. He scribbled a note to Summerfield on the original telephone message about seeing the VCNO’s EA, left it on the captain’s desk, and then went around securing the office’s desks and safes. The duty officer would be making his rounds at 6:00 p. m., and open safes, even behind an alarmed cipher lock, would be a security violation. Normally, he would have stayed and waited for the branch head to return, but tonight he was suddenly sick of Opnav and all its bullshit.

  He realized he wanted to talk to Grace, needed to talk to Grace. He called her number, got the machine, waited for her to pick up, and when she didn’t, he left a message for her to call him at home. Then he called the OP-61 front office and told the duty officer that he was wrapping up 614 but leaving the lights on, as Summer field and Snapper were still out. The duty officer promised not to write them up for leaving lights on.

  Dan drove home in the Friday-evening rush hour with his mind barely registering the heavily congested traffic. He had long ago learned not to be in any hurry, and he knew how to avoid all the lights on Washington Street once he got into Old Town. The light was blinking on his answering machine when he got in, and he felt a surge of elation.

  “Hi, Dan, this is Grace, playing telephone tag. I’m home; call me back.”

  He picked up the phone and called her. To his surprise, she picked up without waiting for him to identify himself, and for an instant he almost didn’t know what to say.

  “Hey, Grace. You startled me. What are you doing picking up?”

  “Thought it might be you. I don’t get that many calls these days, remember?”

  “Oh, yeah, telephone woes of the unemployed. I might be joining you in those ranks.”

  “Oh my God, what happened?”

  “Can you come over? We’ll catch a bite somewhere and I’ll tell you about it. It was kind of bizarre, actually.”

  “Oh dear, the Hardin mess, right? All right, you find me a parking place and I’ll be there in a little bit.”

  “Take your time. I’ve got to shovel this place out, and the tourists will have all the tables for the next hour or so, anyway.”

  “I’ll call you from the car when I’m about five minutes away.”

  They hung up and Dan scurried around the house, picking up the detritus of his bachelor existence. He slipped a bottle of wine into the refrigerator, examined three blocks of cheese and rejected two for exhibiting excessive hair, and tentatively crunched a cracker.

  When Grace called, he went out front and stood by the Suburban. When she showed up, he pulled it out and waved her into his parking place, then went around the block until he found a spot for the Suburban.

  “The joys of upscale street parking,” he said once they were ensconced in the garden after playing musical cars and trading parking permits.

  “And I thought Georgetown was bad,” she replied.

  “It’s still a nice wine.”

  “I’m almost in the mood for something stronger,” he said, then told her about his session with the EAs. She was shaking her head by the time he was finished.

  “I’m beginning to wonder the same thing you are,” she said. “These guys are awfully worried about this investigation.”

  “Especially Randall.”

  “Captain Vann said to give him
word about any feedback either of us might get,” she reminded him. “This sounds like feedback.”

  “Yup.” He looked over at her, saw how pretty she was, and suddenly didn’t want to deal with the Hardin business anymore. She caught his look and smiled. He had been working up to something, and now he decided to plunge ahead.

  “If you don’t have the weekend all booked up, I was sort of thinking about going to Harpers Ferry tomorrow,” he said. “It’s really pretty in the spring, and there’s a lot of history there. There’s also a great inn overlooking the river. For lunch.”

  She grinned. “Sounds delightful, and, no, my weekend is not booked up.”

  “Super. Let’s finish our vino and go find someplace for dinner, and then I’ll tell you about it. Maybe we can swing through Sharpsburg and I can show you the An tietam battlefield. I’ll call the good Captain Vann Monday about these frigging EAs and their threats. But right now, I want to concentrate on the Grace and Dan show, if that’s okay with you, ma’am. Besides, I think it’s trying to rain.”

  “I can handle that,” she said, smiling at him again over the rim of her wineglass. “I can definitely handle that.”

  by 8:00 p.m. friday night, Malachi was ready to go.

  The pickup truck was loaded with two suitcases, all of his telephone equipment, and four large plastic boxes of papers and records, all covered with a brown plastic tarp against a light rain that had developed. He had been through the house several times, executing room by-room searches, looking in and under the furniture, into every drawer, in the basement and in the attic, trying to see what a cop would see, looking especially for any evidence that might tie him to the Hardin case. He left one unprogrammed telephone in the house but took his answering machine and the synthesizer. He cleared the memory in the fax machine and then turned it off. He had thought about disassembling and taking the computer but then decided that was too hard. He packed his backup tapes, dumped the data files, and then locked out the hard drive.

  He wanted to leave enough stuff in the house to make it look like he might come back. He did not want them to think he had fled the country, just that he wasn’t there, although the absence of any household paperwork might give it away.

  The doorway connecting his house with the duplex next door was concealed in the downstairs coat closet, behind what looked like a floor-to-ceiling ventilation re circulation screen. If they seriously tossed the house, they would find it, but it wouldn’t prove anything: The duplex was seventy years old. He had stashed ten thousand dollars in cash in a hidden floor safe next door, along with a Browning .380 automatic. There were no records or papers of any kind next door, although it was otherwise ready for occupancy. Let them try to figure out what that was all about, or where the owner was. As a final measure, he had loaded up two miniature voice activated tape recorders, concealing one in the living room air-conditioning duct of each house.

  Cops searching a supposedly empty house tended to talk about what they were doing and why; the tapes might reveal how much they knew or suspected. He would physically have to get back into one or the other of the houses to lift the tapes, but that was doable, especially if they didn’t realize he had access to both houses.

  He locked up the house, turning out all the lights, and headed for the garage. He got into the truck and then hesitated. Maybe one more surveillance sweep, just to make sure he wasn’t about to drive into their loving arms with all his stuff in the truck. Right. He got out, fished behind the seat for a lightweight trench coat and hat, and then let himself out into the alley. With the dripping overcast, the only light came from an alley streetlight positioned right in the middle of the block; each end of the alley was conveniently in the shadows.

  The mizzle formed a cone of precipitation around the streetlights. He walked quickly to East Capitol Street, turned left, away from his own street, and went around the block, walking rapidly. People who walked these streets slowly after dark were usually morally challenged individuals looking for someone to rob; the potential victims tended to move right along. He ignored the domestic scenes visible through lighted windows of the houses and kept his eyes open for shapes and figures among the rows of parked cars. It occurred to him that he should have brought a piece with him. After walking one more block parallel to his own street, he started back, taking two left turns and crossing his own street once again to be on the side opposite his own house. He stopped on the corner in a shadow of a large tree and stared down his block, carefully scanning each parked can and van. Van. Well, now. There was a van, parked on the same side of the street he was on, five doors down from his house. He smiled in the darkness.

  There were no people with vans living on this block.

  He moved slightly around the tree so that he had a good look at the sidewalk side of the van and waited.

  The sounds of traffic up on Second were muffled by the wet trees along the crowded blocks of houses. He saw a couple walking hand in hand across the street at the other end of the block, two fleeting figures appearing in a cone of streetlight and then disappearing again.

  Someone opened a kitchen door and called in a dog or a cat—he couldn’t tell which. One of the houses had a radio going with a heavy, thumping rock beat. Over all these sounds of urban domesticity came the whir of tree frogs and the rustling and cheeping of small birds settling in for the night in the row of trees. Drops of rain collecting on the new leaves spatted occasionally onto the sidewalk around him. There. The flare of a lighter glinted for a second in the rain-streaked, right side mirror of the van. All right, he thought. All fucking right.

  He fought a sudden urge just to walk down there, down the sidewalk, while the guy was still night-blind from lighting his cigarette, and yank the damn door open and pull the bastard out onto the sidewalk.

  Yeah, and then what? His partner shoots your ass while you’re stomping his buddy? He assumed that there had to be somebody in the driver’s seat; maybe not, but that lighter had looked to be very close to the right side window. He examined the van again, looking for an aerial or other signs of police gear, but there was nothing.

  D.C. plates, a standard car radio antenna on the right side forward, no windows except up front and two dirty squares of glass in the back doors. Could be cops; could be anybody.

  He exhaled and stepped back closer to the tree, looking around to make sure no pedestrians were inbound.

  So, somebody was under surveillance. He had to assume it was his house, although in Washington, it could be anybody’s house. For all he knew, the neighbors three doors down from him could be the Serbian Liberation Army, plotting to blow up Congress. Go Serbs, he thought.

  He looked around to make sure there were no cars coming down his street or Constitution, and then, keeping the tree between him and the van, he backed across the intersection to the next corner, turned, and walked rapidly away into the darkness. He circled the next block and then slipped back into his alley. He stopped in the shadows at the entrance to the alley to let his night vision readjust. Depending on how serious they were, they might have the alley staked out, too. Except no one had been there when he had come out. No one he’d seen, anyway. He stood there for ten minutes, getting warm and sweaty in the raincoat, oblivious to the thin mist falling, absorbing the sounds coming from kitchen windows and backyards. He nearly jumped out of his skin when a cat brushed up against his leg, and again he had to fight down a powerful urge to stomp the cat into the cracked concrete. He realized he wanted very badly to lash out at something or someone.

  He had no way of knowing if the captain’s refusal to return his call and the watchers in the van out front were related, but he had to assume they were. The game had changed, and it was no longer Malachi’s game. As he had suspected. It had to be about the Hardin case, but why, why would they finger him? He was the one guy who could finger them! He hadn’t given the cops enough to get a name when he made his call—only a hint that Elizabeth Hardin had had a boyfriend in the Navy. But that had been enough to
send a tremor up the EAs’ web, apparently. But what the hell was the captain doing—and how had the cops made the connection?

  The captain had said that the Hardin investigation was in the someday box. So unless the captain had called the cops himself and given them Malachi’s name, which would be tantamount to suicide, there had to be another reason the cops were in on it. But the Navy had no one working with the cops or even talking to them.

  He closed his eyes and concentrated; there was something he was missing—something from the phone call he had made. Ah, yes they did: the mysterious Miss. Snow—who supposedly no longer worked for the NIS.

  Son of a bitch. Maybe she was an independent. And the captain probably thought that Malachi would never be watching for a woman. Son of a bitch!

  He scanned the alley again but then concluded that there were no cars or other signs of surveillance. He was about to move when there was movement behind the gate right in front of him, and then the gate latch tripped. The gate opened, throwing a wedge of light into the alley from a back porch light. A fat man came out, dressed in shapeless Bermudas and a slack T-shirt and carrying an armload of trash. The man popped the top off a green plastic trash can with his elbow and dumped the garbage into it, totally oblivious to the big man standing in the shadows, not ten feet away, staring at him. Malachi could hear the man’s wheezy breath as he bent down to retrieve the wet lid. The man slapped the lid back on and then went back in through the gate, latching it forcefully before tromping back to his kitchen door. Great situational awareness, man, Malachi thought. Really aware of your surroundings. No wonder so many people got mugged up here on Capitol Hill—they deserved it. He moved out of the shadows and walked down to his garage, suddenly confident that he could get out of there without being seen.

  He went through the fence gate and entered the garage through the backyard door. He cracked open the truck’s driver side door, which turned on the cabin light, and turned the headlight switch to the left, turning on a small white light over the truck bed. He went around and climbed up into the bed of the pickup and unscrewed the garage door’s lightbulb so it would not come on when he activated the electric door opener.