«It’s called bullshit, ensuring my own self-destruction! Now answer my question: Why am I responsible—no, wait a minute—What am I responsible for? How can I be responsible for whatever dumb thing you’ve done when we haven’t spoken to each other in years?»
«Again, in fairness,» Pinkus broke in, gently but firmly. «General Hawkins stated that you were responsible only in the sense that you were the spirit behind the project, said spiritual influence subject to the widest possible interpretation or misinterpretation thus limiting or conceivably eliminating any liability or even association with the endeavor.»
«Stop playing lawyer with this overgrown mutant, Aaron. The only law he knows makes jungle justice look like high tea in an English rose garden. He’s pure savage without one iota of redeeming morality!»
«You ought to have your blood pressure checked, son.»
«You ought to have your head checked into a taxidermy shop! Now what the hell have you done, and why me?»
«Please,» Pinkus intruded once again, shrugging apologetically at the Hawk, his brows now arched. «Permit me to attempt an explanation, General. As one attorney might to another, is that acceptable?»
«We of command know best how to handle our own personnel, sir,» replied MacKenzie. «Truthfully speaking, I cousined the hope that you might clear your flanks and march to my drummer in that direction. Frankly, it’s why I showed you the core of the operation—not the tactics or my rules of engagement, naturally, but the down-range objective, as it were. Such basic intelligence is rarely a secret between such men as ourselves.»
«Excellent initial strategy, General. I commend you.»
«Commend him?» shouted Devereaux. «What the hell is he doing, marching on Rome?»
«We did that, Sam,» said the Hawk quietly. «Remember, son?»
«That is one topic you will never refer to in my presence, General Hawkins,» insisted Aaron coldly.
«I figured you knew—»
«You think Samuel would tell me?»
«Hell, no. You could order him to a kamikaze squadron and he’d short out the spark plugs. No stomach.»
«Then how?»
«The Irish gunny described your covert surgical strike into Sam’s quarters. Gunnies usually try to impress command with their contributions.»
«So?»
«Well, you mentioned that the sergeant had tied the boy up and that told me you had dismissed the gunny before talking to Sam, which you admitted.»
«And?»
«Why tie him up unless he was hysterical like he is now? And why would such a cool officer of the court—a side of Sam I haven’t seen a whole hell of a lot of—be hysterical unless this incursion of yours produced something about him that he never wanted anyone, especially you, to know about?»
«Based on certain obvious premises, your deductive reasoning is acute.»
«That and the fact that when Sam slammed the phone down on me, he missed. I heard another voice over the line—one that didn’t have much more control than Sambo’s—and when we met in the parking lot, I knew it was you, Commander Pinkus. You yelled a fair amount yourself that afternoon. Especially about a certain operation of ours that concerned the Vatican.»
«So much for a priori deduction,» said Aaron, now shrugging in defeat.
«So much for lizardshit!» roared Devereaux. «I’m here! I exist! If you prick me, do I not bleed—»
«Hardly appropriate, Samuel.»
«What’s inappropriate? I’m listening to a couple of refugees from a Prussian time warp! My future, my career, my life itself—all are about to shatter into a thousand pieces of broken mirrors—»
«Very nice, son,» broke in the Hawk. «Like the imagery.»
«He stole it from a French playwright named Anouilh,» added the venerated Boston lawyer. «Samuel’s full of surprises, General.»
«Stop it!» screamed Devereaux. «I demand to be heard!»
«Hell, boy, they can hear you down in Washington, right to the Army G-Two data banks, where they keep all those intelligence files.»
«I have the right to remain silent,» mumbled Sam, barely audible and collapsing back into the chair, pouting.
«Then perhaps I may be allowed to break the silence, since you’ve restricted it to yourself?» asked Pinkus.
«Mmmfff,» came the tight-lipped reply.
«Thank you… The point of your question, Samuel, focused on the material provided me by General Hawkins. Granted, there hasn’t been time to read it thoroughly, but from what I can glean with a fairly practiced eye that’s been perusing such documents for nearly fifty years, it’s incredible. Rarely have I ever read a more convincing brief. The legal historian who compiled this had the patience and imagination to perceive suspended or broken lines of legislative debate knowing that somewhere there had to be buried additional records that formed contiguous data spelling out the missing pieces. If this all stands up, the conclusions would appear to be indisputable, supported by copies of the original, authentic papers! Where did your source ever find them, General?»
«It’s only rumor, of course,» answered the Hawk, frowning quizzically, «but I’ve heard that they could only have been unearthed from the sealed historical archives at the Bureau of Indian Affairs.»
«The sealed archives …?» Aaron Pinkus looked harshly at the general, then sat down quickly in the chair and picked up several pages, bringing each close to his eyes, studying them not for content but for something else. «Dear Abraham,» he whispered, «I know these watermarks … they were picked up by an extremely sensitive copier, a state-of-the-art machine.»
«Only the best, Commander.» Hawkins abruptly stopped; it was instantly apparent that he regretted the statement. He glanced over at Sam, who was staring at him, then cleared his throat. «I guess those pointy-heads—those scholarly types—get the best equipment.»
«Almost never,» uttered Devereaux in a low, accusing monotone.
«Regardless, General,» Pinkus continued, «a number of these papers—I refer to the ones concerning the historical documents—are actually reproductions of the original photostats—photographs of photographs!»
«I beg your pardon?» The Hawk began mutilating the cigar in his mouth.
«In the days before copiers, when you couldn’t simply flatten out aged or rotted parchment, or piece fragments together, and run a beam of light over the whole for an accurate facsimile, photographs, then later photostats, were made to be entered into the archives replacing the disintegrating originals.»
«Commander, I’m not really interested in that technical crap—»
«You should be, General,» interrupted Aaron. «Your unnamed legal source may well have come upon a decades-old conspiracy, but his discovery may conceivably be based on stolen evidence long since consigned to the sealed vaults of the government’s archives for reasons of the gravest national concern.»
«What?» mumbled Hawkins numbly, aware that Sam Devereaux was now glaring at him.
«The watermarks on these archival photostats indicate a rare, steel filamentous paper designed to withstand the ravages of time and the environmental conditions of the vaults. Actually, I believe Thomas Edison invented it around the turn of the century, and it was ordered into limited archival use in 1910 or 1911.»
«Limited use …?» asked Devereaux hesitantly, his teeth clenched as he continued to stare at the Hawk.
«Everything’s relative, Samuel. In those days deficit spending, when it existed, was restricted to no more than several hundred thousand dollars, and even those figures could freeze the Potomac. The steel-threaded pages in these photographs were enormously expensive, and to convert thousands upon thousands of historical documents into them would have broken the treasury. Therefore, only a limited number were chosen.»