The scam had evolved to a specific system. He dealt with only one buyer, Tangent, who had a standing wish list consisting of general military material but who occasionally requested specific items. Carson maintained the wish list, instructing his “eyes” down in the warehouses, Bud Lambry, to be on the lookout for the required items, especially in the high-value area. When something on the wish list showed up, Lambry would notify Carson, who would call the client and confirm his interest.
Then Lambry would ensure that the items of interest were put in selected lots for auction. Carson, as manager of the DRMO, would ensure the items did not appear on the reutilization lists. Then Carson would rig the sealed-bid process so that his client “won” the auction, except that he would hold the winning bid until after the auction, reduce it, and then submit it to the contracts people. The client would pay the new “winning” bid. Carson’s fee was a small percentage of the value of the item, based on how much he had saved the client. From the kickback, Carson paid Lambry, in cash.:f-‘:
The key was to do it infrequently, never actually touch anything himself, and keep the money within reasonable bounds. Most of the fraud cases he read about arose because the perpetrators got too greedy. It had been a very nice, quiet, and unobtrusively profitable scam, one that he had planned to work until his retirement — about twenty thousand a year, in cash. He had it stashed in safe-deposit boxes in banks all around Atlanta. If Maude ever discovered it, he would say that he had been dabbling in the stock market and doing pretty well. Once a year, he would tell her that he had a government trip somewhere, to a conference, say, and then take a week’s leave and go to Vegas for some high living.
By limiting the scale and dealing only in cash and with only one buyer, he’d managed to keep the whole thing off the DLA auditors’ radar screens. He smiled as he thought about it. It was just about a perfect little scam.
Only very rarely had he taken operational military equipment from the demil list, because that had to be done practically on the conveyor belt in front of the Monster. From time to time, he had done this though, because he had been able to arrange for Bud Lambry to be the demil operator anytime there was a requirement for an evening shift in the demil facility. The beauty of that was that once something had been certified by the demil assembly crew as having been destroyed, it was virtually untraceable. The only vulnerability he had ever had was with Bud Lambry, ace spotter, and now that vulnerability was dissolving in the nontoxic hydrocarbon holding tank. Carson quickly banished that image.
Lambry’s supervisor had reported him absent this morning, which was not entirely unusual for a Monday. He would have to explain Lambry’s continued absence somehow. With Lambry gone, the problem now was to keep Inspector Stafford in the mushroom mode while Wendell Carson executed the cylinder deal. Either way, he thought, he needed to tell Tangent about Stafford. He pulled out his phone list and looked up the 800 number and dialed it. He got the machine and left the callback message.
He gave a time of one hour from now, which would allow him time to get home. Tangent wouldn’t be happy about the DCIS development, but Carson was pretty sure they could still pull it off. Stafford wasn’t here about the cylinder, and that’s all that counted right now.
5
In his hotel room, Stafford put his clothes away, raided the minibar for a beer, and took a look out the window. The room cost more than his whole day’s per diem allowance, but at this moment, he didn’t give a damn. The skyline of Atlanta gleamed indifferently back at him. He was surprised at all the high-rise buildings. The place had grown a lot in the ten years since he’d last been here. Careful, he thought. You told Carson this was your first time in the city.
Dave Stafford was forty-three. Born in Norfolk, Virginia, he had lived on the outskirts of the city, near the sprawling Naval Operating Base, where his father worked as a security guard and his mother as a telephone operator. Growing up around the Navy and the base, he had gravitated naturally to the Navy upon graduation from high) school, especially since there was no money for college. He left the Navy after one hitch and joined the Norfolk Police Department, advancing from rookie cop to the detective bureau in five short years. But the cop’s life wore him down, and he began thinking about college. Then one weekend, fae attended a government job fair and learned that the Naval Investigative Service was hiring. He took a job at the NIS, and transferred to the Defense Investigative Service, later the DCIS, in 1988. He’d met Alice that same year, and they had married after a four-month courtship.
Savvy, sexy, ambitious Alice. She had been almost his own age and had never married. She had money in the bank, a good government job as an office manager in the Defense Intelligence Agency, and was as determined as he was to get ahead. For the first two years, he couldn’t believe she was his wife. Now she wasn’t.
He sat down heavily in one of the overstaffed chairs, his right arm hanging straight down, pointing at the floor until he remembered to drape it on the armrest. He had regained almost all of the feeling in his hand and ringers, which the docs said was a good sign, but the big motor muscles were a long way from home. The orthopedist at Walter Reed had said that with proper rehab exercise he should get his arm back to about 50, 60 percent, but so far, it was at about 2 percent. Maybe the docs were just wrong, or maybe they wanted to let him down easy. Either way, the virtual paralysis of his right arm was just the topping on the cake of disasters he’d been through in the past two years.
You knew, he thought. You knew what happens to whistle-blowers. What always happens to whistle-blowers in Washington. You’re just a damn fool, that’s all, Mr. Straight Arrow — by the book, full speed ahead and damn the consequences — David Stafford, ace investigator. Yeah, right.
He’d spent about a year investigating a senior DCIS bureaucrat named Bernstein, who had been selling inside information to a major Defense contractor whom the DCIS had been investigating for contract fraud. When the DCIS upper management dragged its heels on prosecuting Bernstein, Stafford had talked to a reporter, after which life had become interesting. To his utter surprise, the eighteen months following his disclosures about Bernstein had been absolute hell, proving beyond a shadow of a doubt the extent of his naivete. Instead of giving him a commendation for rooting out evil, a wounded bureaucracy had reacted angrily to the exposure of one of its more senior officials. As everyone told him in the corridor, “Sure, Bernstein needed exposing, but, man, did you have to do it quite so publicly?” And did he understand that he was going to pay for it professionally? In fact, his entire division in DCIS had suffered as senior management retaliated under the cover of budget cuts and interference in case assignments. Worse, an FBI agent implicated by Bernstein had been shit-canned, so now the Bureau was after his ass, too. He acquired a new first name when people began saying “Goddamn Stafford”—a lot.
His marital problems predated the Bernstein incident.
He and Alice had been living the comfortable, if somewhat frenetic, lifestyle typical of career Washington bureaucrats with joint incomes.
They had their individual schedules of commuting and working, and if one included their separate car pools, both of theih spent more close time with other people on a day-by-day basis than they did with each other.
Their respective jobs took them away on travel routinely, but with the conceit of husbandly trust, Stafford had assumed she wasn’t playing around just because he never did. But a year before the Bernstein flap erupted, he had begun to suspect that she might be having an affair.