I let out a heavy sigh and scratched my head a few times. Finally, I reluctantly said, “If it’s absolutely necessary, then okay.”
I felt pretty smug when Berkowitz walked out the door. It isn’t often when you get two vindictive retaliations for the price of one. Berkowitz would print his story, make a big splash, bask in his fifteen minutes of glory, then as soon as I proved that Sanchez and his team had cold-bloodedly murdered the Serbs, he’d look like a worldwide horse’s ass.
The White House and Clapper would have no reason to suspect me of being the leaker. I had pooh-poohed myself in the story. Pretty slick that. Now Delbert or Morrow or whoever was leaking on me was going to be suspected of leaking to the press also.
About a minute after Berkowitz departed, the door flew open and in marched Imelda. She shut the door behind her, then plopped into a seat in front of my desk.
She snorted once or twice, then said, “That a reporter?”
“Yep.”
“That the same reporter that wrote that shitty article?”
“One and the same, Imelda.”
She seemed to consider that a moment. She played with her hair and fiddled with the rim on her glasses. Then she gave me this stern, disapproving glare, which, given that this was Imelda Pepperfield, could burn paint off walls.
“You sure you know what you’re doing?”
“No, I’m not.”
“Reporters are nothing but low-life trash. Don’t you let him come suckin’ up here again, stinkin’ up my building. Got that?”
“Sure, Imelda. And thanks.”
She pushed herself out of her chair, grunted something brief that sounded either like, “You’re really very welcome, sir, and I admire the hell out of you,” or “Frigamugit,” then shuffled back out.
In her inimitable way, she was warning me that the surest way to get caught leaking to the press was to allow Berkowitz to show his face here again. What a woman.
Chapter 14
Henry Kissinger once said that just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they really aren’t trying to get you. Suddenly I was beginning to think it was true, he was right, and he’d been talking about me.
Someone inside my organization was leaking things to somebody who worked for the President of the United States, who, for some inexplicable reason, spent his early mornings listening to someone talking about me. One, or maybe both, of my co-investigators was spilling their guts about how incompetent I am to the chief of the Army’s JAG Corps. A ruthlessly ambitious reporter knew something very dangerous about my background, and to top everything off, the very same general who got me this assignment had suddenly developed a severe case of character deficiency.
That’s a fairly long list of crappy things to discover in only one day. The problem was, like most paranoids, I wanted someone to lash out at. But who?
There were Delbert and Morrow, neither of whom I knew anything about. That is, aside from what I’d read in their legal and personnel files. Of course, those files came from Clapper’s office, and I suddenly found myself wondering if they were authentic. As Mssr. Berkowitz had discovered, not all Army files are what they purport to be. Then there was Imelda’s chorus of four legal assistants, any of whom could be passing information along.
I kind of wanted the mole to be Delbert, since I didn’t like him all that much. He struck me as an uptight pretty boy who would put a shiv in his own mother to get ahead. I was praying it wasn’t Morrow. She was gorgeous and had those sympathetic eyes, and I really wanted to see if the body underneath those running pants matched the fervid extremes of my imagination. I’d already built myself this nice little scenario where I cracked the case, got the pretty girl, and rode off into the sunset. I love Imelda, but she was a little too old and gnarly to be climbing up on the back of my horse. It had to be Morrow or nobody. The problem was that Morrow was every bit as scheming and ambitious as Delbert, and as I’d already discovered, she could run circles around him in the sly and devious categories. Sly and devious just happened to be the traits of whoever was ratting me out.
Then just as I’m about to nod off, a new hallucination slowly interrupted my progress. If these guys in Washington were going to all this trouble, they must know something. Something really awful. Like maybe this was one of those White House conspiracies they always make such great movies about, the ones where all these guys in Brooks Brothers power suits get together and start manipulating the organs of government in sinister ways to…
This was when I decided that I was going way too far. The problem with paranoia is that it sneaks up on you. You start by wondering why the guy next door didn’t invite you to his barbecue. Then you’re convinced the whole neighborhood’s in on the conspiracy. Then you’re passing out literature about the Trilateral Commission. Then before you know it there’s a high-powered rifle in your hands, and you’re on a rooftop, and there’s a bunch of angry cops scurrying around who really are trying to get you.
Maybe Clapper just guessed that I was getting bogged down in details. Maybe he really was concerned about my unique background and how that might make me inquisitive about all sorts of innocuous little things that really have nothing to do with guilt or innocence. And now that I thought about it, he never actually came out and asked me to give Sanchez and his crew a clean slate. He just hinted how convenient that would be. What the hell? That was nothing more than a harmless restatement of the obvious. And how did Jeremy Berkowitz know what the President did every morning? Hell, the President’s own wife didn’t know all the things he was doing in that round office.
I awoke the next morning feeling game and fresh. I actually sang while I showered, until the guy two stalls down hurled a bar of soap at me. By the time I reached our little office building, I was actually thinking about being nice to Delbert for a change, which only goes to show you how awfully guilty I felt about all those dark thoughts I’d had the night before.
I noticed when I walked in that everybody was sitting quietly and somberly at their desks. Somberly, like something was terribly wrong. Somberly, like something very distressing was going down. Quietly, like nobody was talking because nobody knew what to say.
I also noticed two big, burly military policemen sipping coffee and lounging by the entrance to my office.
“Excuse me, Major Drummond?” the bigger of the two asked, shoving himself off the wall. He wore captain’s bars, and his nametag read Wolkowitz.
I said, “How can I help you, Captain?”
“We need to talk to you.” He glanced around the office and his face acquired a very portentous cloud. “Alone, if you don’t mind.”
We walked into my office and I politely offered him and his sergeant seats, which they both too brusquely declined. The sergeant pulled a small notebook out of his pocket, poised his pencil, and stared at me like I was the Boston Strangler. I knew this routine.
I sat behind my desk and tried to look relaxed.
Captain Wolkowitz said, “Could you tell us where you were between 2400 and 0500 hours this morning?”
“No, I cannot tell you where I was. I mean, I could, but you haven’t given me any reason.”
He gave me one of those “Oh brother, what have I done to deserve another smart-assed lawyer” kind of looks. All cops, even military cops, learn to master that look fairly early in their careers.
“Do you know a man named Jeremy Berkowitz?” he asked.
“Again, Captain, why are you asking?”
“I’m asking because Berkowitz was murdered last night.”
I stared at him, and he stared at me.
Then he said, “Now, I’ll ask you again. Did you know Mr. Berkowitz?”
“I met him here yesterday.”
“And where were you last night?”
“I was on my cot, in my tent, trying to fall asleep.”
“You share that tent with anyone?”