Oddly enough, the next thing I saw was the face of a young female medic waving one of those smelly things under my nose, saying, “He’s coming to.”
I heard Imelda say, “That nose look broken.”
I heard the medic reply, “Yes, I think you’re right.”
I noticed that the back of my head seemed to have a big dent in it, and my face hurt, and my chest ached.
The medic squeezed my nose and looked at me with tender eyes. “There, there, Major… you’re going to be fine. Just a few bruises, a little blood, and maybe a broken nose.”
I replied, “Ouch, damn it. Let go of my nose.”
Which she did. And that made me happy. I wedged my way up the wall and got unsteadily to my feet. A stretcher rested by the door, where two more medics were waiting to load me aboard. They looked terrifically relieved to see me standing. Lazy bastards.
“What the hell happened?” I asked.
Imelda adjusted her glasses on her nose and said, “We came down when you got knocked ’round. Heard the door slam and saw two men runnin’ away, only nobody got a good look at them. They was dressed in black and wore hoods.”
“Was anything taken?”
“Didn’t check yet,” Imelda admitted, suddenly sheepish that she’d been so busy attending to me that she’d failed to see what might have been stolen. It wasn’t like her to commit such a breach of duty.
After fibbing to the medics that I’d eventually come over to the dispensary and let a real doctor check me out, I helped Imelda and her two assistants look around. To the best I could tell, nothing had been touched-no open drawers, no ransacked boxes, no sign of burglary at all. Very strange. We all ended up in the living room. I asked, “Did anybody see anything missing?” and instantly felt like an idiot-how do you see something that’s missing?
Heads were shaking all around when I felt this odd flip-flop in my stomach. “Katrina, the tapes. Where are they?”
I had blurted out the question, and the enormity of the possibility hit us simultaneously.
She rushed upstairs and I hobbled after her. She hurried to her purse and flung it open on the bed. Among assorted other female debris, the tape recorder and two tapes spilled out. A common sigh of relief escaped from both of our throats. And, in fact, I was starting to walk out of the room when Katrina said, “Wait.”
She picked up a tape, stuck it in the recorder, and pushed the play button. Nothing. Not a sound, just empty tape. She withdrew that tape and inserted the second one-ditto. She flipped the tape over, fast-forwarded, and reversed. Not a sound. She handed me the recorder, and I stuffed it in my pocket with a loud curse.
Our client was not going to be very happy with us. I was not very happy with us. But Uncle Sam was going to be unhappiest of all, as somebody had just stolen a tape that contained the name of America’s top foreign asset, a name I had very stupidly allowed to be placed on a tape I even more stupidly failed to secure.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The team that descended on our building reminded me why so many American citizens go live in the woods and mumble about black helicopters and paste I LOVE GUNS stickers all over their rusted old pickups.
The FBI agents came up from Kansas City. The CIA folks flew in from Washington, apparently on a very fast jet, because they and their FBI buddies were streaming through the front door some two hours after I called to report the incident. Not that you could tell them apart-they all wore cheap-looking gray and blue suits, complemented by that glum, dour expression that distinguishes a government employee from the rest of humanity.
They went over that house with a fine-toothed comb, took foot molds and fingerprints of my entire team, and inventoried everything we had and a few things we didn’t. They canvassed the neighborhood for witnesses and asked every colonel’s wife who resided on that row if she had happened to be staring out the window at three o’clock that morning. All this was accomplished with Prussian efficiency and New Yorker manners, which is to say the worst of both the old and new worlds.
When all this was done, the head of the team, a CIA guy named Smith-if you couldn’t guess-pulled me into an upstairs room for a come-to-Jesus meeting, as we say in the ranks.
He had a tough-guy look about him, a slouchiness of the face, a well-defined musculature of the body. He stuck a cigarette between his skinny lips, lit it up with a Zippo, then flipped the lighter shut with a harsh jolt of the wrist, badass style. He puffed a few times and fixed me with a withering glare. “So, Major,” he began, “how long you been in?”
“Thirteen years.”
“You’ve been briefed on security procedures before? You’ve signed those little forms that say you understand your duties and obligations?”
“I have.”
“Still, you made a Top Secret tape and left it lying around a room?”
“I did,” I confessed, my lawyer’s instincts screaming I shouldn’t, but my conscience seeing absolutely no way around it, considering the circumstances.
A trail of smoke eked from his nostrils. “That’s a real dumb-shit move, buddy. A first-rate dick-up.”
“I could say I had no idea burglars would break in and steal it. But that doesn’t make any difference, does it?”
“Nope.”
“So what are you going to do?”
He took another drag from the cigarette and seemed to ponder that question. That moment dragged on much too long. Eventually he poked his lit cigarette toward my face. “First, I’m gonna report this to my superiors. I’m sure they’ll then report this to your superiors. I don’t know how they handle these things in the Army, but in the Agency you’d be looking at doing some time.”
I stuck my hands in my pockets and glumly nodded. This is pretty much how the Army handles these things, also. “So I’m in pretty big trouble?”
“The loss of that tape, that’s a fuckin’ catastrophe.”
He had a point, but I wasn’t done trying. “You know, technically, the tape was guarded. I did try to stop them and was overpowered.”
“You had no safe. You weren’t armed. And, uh, you were asleep. I wouldn’t try goin’ that route, I were you.”
I shuffled my feet a few times. “Yes… you’re right… unless… well, there might be one other extenuating circumstance.”
“Yeah?”
“It’s a really odd thing. I hesitate to bring it up.”
“Go ahead,” he said. “Try whatever lawyer bullshit you want.”
“Right.” I scratched my head and replied, “The thing is, who knew we’d made any tapes? Miss Mazorski and I didn’t tell anybody… not even anybody on our own defense team.”
“Yeah, so?”
“So, whoever did the theft knew we’d made them, and even that the tapes were in her purse. Don’t you find that suspicious? I sure do. And they even brought blank ones along to replace them. If I hadn’t walked in on them, we might never have known those tapes were taken. But of course, they were stomping around and making all that noise.”
“So?” He drew another long drag and stared at me with a fathomless expression.
“So who could possibly have known we made those tapes?”
“You tell me.”
“No, you tell me.”
“I haven’t got a clue,” he replied, with all the intense insincerity that response deserved.
“Well, I do. You wired our interrogation room. You listened to everything we said.”
