by Mike Lawson
Now this was starting to make sense. Hathaway didn’t trust his nephew and if he launched an official investigation based on a tip from a relative and the relative turned out to be wrong, Hathaway would be doubly embarrassed.
“I see,” DeMarco said.
“So just check this out quietly. Okay?” Hathaway said. “Go talk to my nephew and see what he says. Interview these guys he’s complaining about. If it turns out that there’s something to what he’s saying, I’ll have facts from an independent source— Congress— and then I’ll have it officially investigated.”
“Okay,” DeMarco said, not that he really had a choice.
On the sixth hole, Mahoney’s and DeMarco’s balls were both in the rough, approximately twenty yards apart. Farris was on the other side of the fairway looking for his ball and Hathaway, as usual, was in the center of the fairway.
Mahoney looked down at his ball— it was behind a small tree— then he looked over to where Farris was standing. “C’mere a minute,” Mahoney said to DeMarco. DeMarco figured Mahoney wanted to know what he and Hathaway had been talking about.
As DeMarco approached Mahoney, he heard Farris yell, “Hey, Mahoney! What the hell are you doing over there, Mahoney?”
DeMarco looked over at Farris, and when he turned back toward Mahoney, Mahoney’s ball was no longer behind the tree. Mahoney had used DeMarco to block Farris’s view.
On the putting green, Farris said, “DeMarco, what did Mahoney do back there? Did he kick his ball out?”
“No, sir,” DeMarco said.
“Don’t you dare lie to me, DeMarco. I’m a United States senator and that fat son of a bitch is only a congressman. Now tell me the truth, son. Did he move his ball?”
“Come on, come on, let’s get goin’ here,” Mahoney said. “And as usual, you’re away, Farris.”
Farris’s ball was about six feet from the cup. As Farris took his putter from his bag, Mahoney said to Hathaway, “Frank, I’ll betcha a beer Farris two-putts this hole. Just like when he choked on that free throw in the playoffs in Chicago.”
DeMarco saw the senator’s face flush crimson but he didn’t say anything. Farris took his position over his ball, adjusted his feet, took in a breath, and stroked the ball. He hit the ball on line, but too hard, and it hit the back of the cup, popped up, and came to rest two feet from the hole. Farris’s lips moved in a silent curse and he glared at Mahoney. Mahoney smiled and cleaned off the head of his putter with a grass-stained towel.
When they arrived at the clubhouse after the ninth hole, DeMarco took his rumpled suit jacket out of the golf cart basket. His shirt was soaked through with sweat, there were grass stains on the cuffs of his pants, and his new shoes were scuffed and filled with sand.
“I’ll give you a call as soon as I know something, Mr. Secretary,” DeMarco said to Hathaway as he tried to smooth the wrinkles out of his jacket.
“Yeah, sure,” Hathaway said. He wasn’t listening; he was adding up his score. DeMarco could tell that Hathaway wasn’t really all that concerned about fraudulent activities taking place at some shipyard. What he had wanted was a way to get his sister off his back, and now, thanks to Mahoney, he had one: Joe DeMarco, hotshot investigator from Congress.
Mahoney, his tongue sticking out the side of his mouth, was also adding up his and Farris’s score on the front nine. “You shot a forty-one, Farris,” Mahoney said. He paused a minute then said, “I got forty.”
“You lemme see that damn card, Mahoney,” Farris said.
2
Emma and Christine were sitting in white wicker chairs on Emma’s patio drinking mimosas and reading the morning papers. They were a portrait of domestic contentment. Beyond the patio was Emma’s English garden. DeMarco knew it was an English garden because Emma had told him so, and an English garden, as far as he could tell, was one in which the gardener planted a thousand long-stemmed flowers in no discernible pattern, all clustered together.
Emma was wearing white linen pants and a blouse that DeMarco thought of as Mexican— an off-the-shoulder number embroidered with small red-and-orange flowers. Christine, a thirty-something blonde who played cello for the National Symphony, wore a tank top and shorts. Christine had the most beautiful legs that DeMarco had ever seen, but since Christine was Emma’s lover he made a point of not staring at them. In fact, his eyeballs were getting cramps from the strain of not staring.
Emma was tall and slim. She had regal features and short hair that was either gray or blond, depending on the light. She was at least ten years older than DeMarco but in much better condition. She looked over the top of her newspaper as DeMarco approached. Her eyes were the color of the water in a Norwegian fjord— and usually just as warm. “Well, you’re a mess, Joseph,” she said when she saw the condition of his clothes. “What on earth have you been doing?”
“Golfing with the leaders of the free world,” DeMarco said.
“Yes, that makes sense,” Emma said. “Would you like something to drink? Mimosa, perhaps?”
“Orange juice would be great. No bubbly.”
DeMarco took a seat next to Emma at the patio table, a seat where Emma blocked his view of Christine’s legs. He thought this seating arrangement most prudent. He and Christine exchanged how-are-yous, then Christine went back to reading her paper, ignoring DeMarco as she usually did. Maybe if he played an oboe she’d find him more interesting.
“What do you know about the navy, Emma?” DeMarco asked.
“A lot, most of which I’d just as soon forget,” Emma said.
DeMarco had known this before he asked the question. Although she never discussed it, Emma had worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency and she had worked at a level where the word “classified” didn’t come close to defining the degree of secrecy that had applied to her activities. She claimed to have retired from the agency a few years ago, but DeMarco wasn’t certain that this was really the case. Emma was the most enigmatic person he’d ever encountered— and she delighted in being so.
“How ’bout navy shipyards?” DeMarco asked.
“A little,” Emma said. “Now would you like to tell me why you’re asking silly questions?”
DeMarco told her about Frank Hathaway’s problem and asked her a few questions about shipyards and the people who worked in them.
“I didn’t know the navy had its own shipyards,” DeMarco said.
“The navy operates four major shipyards in this country,” Emma said in her most pedantic tone. “Most of the employees are civil service and their primary function is to overhaul and refuel nuclear-powered warships.”
“Well I’ll be damned,” DeMarco said.
“Most assuredly,” Emma muttered and poured another mimosa for herself and Christine. These girls were going to have a pretty good buzz on by lunchtime, DeMarco was thinking.
“Why’s Mahoney loaning you to Hathaway for this thing anyway?” Emma asked as she handed Christine a glass.
“I dunno,” DeMarco said. “He plays golf with the guy; maybe they’re pals. But more than likely he wants something out of the navy for his district and figures doing Hathaway a favor can’t hurt. With Mahoney, you never know. A man who drinks beer at nine in the morning is hard to predict.”
“Humph,” Emma said, the sound reflecting her opinion of Mahoney. “What shipyard does this engineer work at, by the way? The one in Norfolk?”
“No,” DeMarco said. “One out in someplace called Bremerton, near Seattle.”
When DeMarco said “Seattle,” Christine’s pretty blond head popped up from behind the newspaper she’d been reading. “Seattle,” she said to Emma. There was a twinkle in her eyes and DeMarco could imagine what she had looked like at the age of twelve, tormenting her younger brother.
Emma smiled at her lover then said to DeMarco, “Joe, considering my vast knowledge of all things military and your limited knowledge of all things in general, I believe I should go to Bremerton with you.”
DeMarco met Emma a few years ago b
y saving her life. Luck and timing had more to do with the outcome of the event than any heroics on DeMarco’s part, but since that day she occasionally helped DeMarco with his assignments. She would provide advice, and if needed, access to various illicit experts— hackers, electronic eavesdroppers, and, once, a safecracker— all people connected in some way to the shadow world of the DIA. On rare occasions she’d personally assist him, but DeMarco usually had to grovel a bit before she’d help— and yet here she was volunteering.
“What’s going on?” DeMarco said.
“It just so happens that Christine’s symphony is playing in Seattle for a couple of days, starting the day after tomorrow,” Emma said, patting one of Christine’s perfect thighs.
“Ah,” DeMarco said, understanding immediately. If Emma helped DeMarco, the Speaker’s budget would pick up the tab for her trip to Seattle. Emma was fairly wealthy but she was also a bit of a cheapskate. Maybe that’s why she was wealthy.
3
Carmody was at the rendezvous point at exactly eight p.m. This time the woman had picked a little-used lakeside picnic area fifteen miles from Bremerton. She picked a different place every time they met.
He knew he’d have to wait at least twenty minutes, maybe longer. She was already here, somewhere, but she’d be watching to make sure Carmody hadn’t been followed. Half an hour later he saw her. She materialized out of a small stand of trees on his right-hand side and began to walk toward him. She was dressed in black— black jeans, a long-sleeved black T-shirt, black Nikes— and carried a shoulder bag. She was tall and lithe and she moved quickly but gracefully. When she entered his car, she didn’t greet Carmody. She unzipped the shoulder bag, took out a laptop computer, and turned it on.
The woman’s hair was dark, cut short and spiky, the style as edgy as her personality. Carmody figured she was about forty, though it was hard to be certain. She didn’t have a single wrinkle on her face and the reason for this, Carmody believed, was because she was the most unemotional person he had ever encountered. Her face never changed expression. He had never, ever seen her smile.
The laptop ready, she finally spoke to Carmody. “Give them to me,” she said.
Carmody reached beneath the driver’s seat and took out a flat plastic case holding an unlabeled compact disc. He handed it to her.
“Just one?” she said.
“Yeah.”
She started to say something but checked herself. She put the CD into the laptop’s drive. When the document opened, she scrolled down a few pages, stopped and read the words on the screen, then scrolled down a few more pages. She did this for about ten minutes, never speaking. She didn’t examine the entire document, that would have taken too long, but she looked at enough of it to satisfy herself. She finally shut down the laptop and returned it to her shoulder bag.
“You have to do better than this, Carmody,” she said. “In a month, you’ve only delivered seven items.”
“We have to be careful,” Carmody said. “And sometimes the material you want just isn’t available, somebody else is using it, so we have to wait.”
The woman’s eyes locked on to Carmody’s. Her eyes were black and they were the coldest, most lifeless eyes that Carmody had ever seen in either a man or a woman, eyes completely devoid of warmth and humor and humanity. Carmody doubted that she had been born with eyes like that; something in her life had caused them to be that way.
“Carmody, do you understand what’s at stake here?” she said.
That wasn’t really a question— it was a threat.
“Yeah, I understand,” Carmody said. His big hands were gripping the steering wheel so tightly his knuckles were white. And she noticed.
Carmody watched as she walked across the grass and disappeared once again into the trees, back into the night she had come from.
4
Emma caught her flight to Seattle out of Dulles International Airport. She chose this airport not only so she could fly with Christine and the orchestra but also because from Dulles you could get a nonstop flight to Seattle. DeMarco didn’t like flying out of Dulles because the airport was thirty miles from his house. Reagan National, on the other hand, was just a ten-minute cab ride away. He would have to change planes in Chicago and his flight would take an hour longer than Emma’s, but if you added up total travel time, door-to-door travel time, his arithmetic said he was making the wiser choice.
He didn’t.
His flight boarded right on schedule at nine a.m. then sat on the runway for two hours awaiting the installation of some malfunctioning part. DeMarco didn’t know anything about airplanes but when the pilot explained the purpose of the part, it didn’t sound terribly significant— like it was the redundant backup gizmo to the backup gizmo, the aeronautical equivalent of the seat belt indicator in your car not working.
Naturally, since his flight left Washington two hours behind schedule, he missed his connecting flight in Chicago and arrived in Seattle at three a.m. instead of five that evening as originally planned. He then had to drive another hour to reach Bremerton. Consequently he was tired and not in the best of moods the next day as he and Emma waited for Dave Whitfield, Frank Hathaway’s nephew.
Whitfield had agreed to meet them in the bar of the motel where DeMarco was staying, a place that overlooked a quiet, tree-lined inlet called Oyster Bay. Emma was staying in a much more expensive establishment in Seattle with Christine. While they waited for Whitfield, Emma informed DeMarco that her trip from the East Coast had been delightful: an upgrade to first class, a good movie, and nothing but tailwinds all the way. Emma annoyed him.
Dave Whitfield entered the bar as Emma was talking. Frank Hathaway had referred to his nephew as a “kid” but Whitfield appeared to be in his late thirties, a kid only from Hathaway’s perspective. He was a tall, loose-jointed man; his hair was wispy blond and already fleeing his head; and he wore wire-rim glasses with square frames over intense brown eyes.
Whitfield was impressed with DeMarco’s congressional identification. He was impressed— but he wasn’t happy. “Man, I can’t believe you’re talking to me,” he said. “I mean I didn’t want this to happen. I just thought my uncle would, you know, call a few people.”
“Your uncle is the Secretary of the Navy,” DeMarco said.
“Yeah, I know, but sheesh. I could get in trouble for this. You guys should be talking to shipyard management, not me.”
“Relax, Dave,” Emma said. “We just want a little background information from you so that when we do talk to management we’ll have something specific to ask. We won’t even mention your name.” Before Whitfield could say anything else, Emma said, “Would you like a beer?”
“Yeah, sure, I guess,” Whitfield said, surprised that a government investigator would offer him a drink.
After Whitfield had gotten his beer, Emma eased him along by saying, “Why don’t you tell us what you do. Let’s start there.”
“I’m an instructor,” Whitfield said. “I—”
“Your uncle said you were an engineer,” DeMarco said.
“I am. I’m a nuclear engineer. And I’m an instructor. Basically what I do is teach the new engineers how the reactor plants in the ships work.”
“That’s good,” Emma said. “So now why don’t you tell us about these concerns you have.” Emma kept speaking to Whitfield in this low, soothing voice, as if he was some skittish, balding horse. DeMarco found her talking this way unnatural; Emma rarely tried to soothe.
“Okay,” Whitfield said, “because somebody needs to look into this thing. Nobody at the shipyard believes me.”
“So what’s the problem?” DeMarco said impatiently.
“It’s these two guys I used to work with. They worked at the shipyard about twenty-five years and then took an early out— meaning they retired when they were fifty-two or fifty-three instead of fifty-five. People don’t normally do that because they lose a percentage of their retirement pay. Anyway, as soon as they retired, they were hired by this
company to do a study on how we train our engineers. For some jobs, the training takes about two years.”
“Two years!” DeMarco said.
“We’re talking about reactor plants,” Whitfield said, glaring at DeMarco. “We don’t let some kid right out of college run around a nuclear submarine unless he knows what he’s doing. Anyway, the company these guys went to work for told the navy— I don’t know who— that they could figure out a way to complete the training in half the time for half the cost. Sounds like total bullshit to me, but somebody bought their story.”
In other words, DeMarco was thinking, this company had been hired to figure out a way to do Whitfield’s job better than he was doing it, meaning Whitfield was probably more than a little biased.
“But the thing is,” Whitfield said, “these two guys are a couple of losers.”