replied, “And how can I help you?”
“You were his secretary?”
“That’s right.”
“We’re interviewing people who worked with him. We’d like to start with you.”
She gave us a curiously indifferent look, like, What the hell, I’m bored, so why not?
I said, “Do you have a conference room… somewhere we could speak in private?”
For an answer she stood up and walked toward a door as if we should know we were expected to follow. I never took my eyes off her, since you never know where you might pick up your next vital clue; maybe hidden somewhere in her miniskirt, her dark net stockings, her high heels, or inside that top that seemed to be pasted to her skin.
For her part, Katrina was rolling her eyes as if she couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Truly, it took a stone-cold idiot to park this girl directly outside his office. Why hadn’t the stupid bastard stuck with a chubby little grandmother, like any responsible philanderer would do?
We ended up inside a small, cramped office that appeared lived-in. A plaque on the wall from some Army training course drew my eye, and it was made out to Captain Melvin Torianski. Miss Nasty said, “He won’t care if we use it.”
It’s always touching to see grief-stricken coworkers mourn the loss of a friend. Katrina slid over another chair, and the two of them eyed each other like a pair of hungry lionesses. I sat behind the desk, pulled out the tape recorder, and retrieved a yellow notepad from my briefcase, to sort of dramatize the atmosphere.
I began, “For the record, what’s your name?”
“Tina Allison.”
We established that she was a U.S. citizen, a GS-9 employee of the State Department, twice divorced, no children, and lived in embassy housing. I then asked, “And how long have you known General Morrison?”
“Eighteen months.”
“How did you end up working for him?”
“The attache’s office was looking for a new secretary, they sent a request back to Washington, I was interviewed, and I was hired.”
Katrina swiftly asked, “Who interviewed you?”
“Morrison. He was on a trip back to D.C. and the interview was arranged.”
Well, no surprise there. I said, “How well did you know him?”
“Well enough.”
“Would you describe your relationship as professional, as friendly, as…?” Katrina asked, allowing that thought to drift off so Tina could fill in the blank however she wanted.
Her lips curled up the tiniest bit. “He was my boss. We saw each other every day.”
Katrina said, “Did you know his wife?”
“I saw her around.”
“Were you friends?”
“I’m a secretary. We were in different social circles.”
I asked, “Did you ever see General Morrison do anything you considered suspect?”
“No.”
And Katrina jumped in with, “Did you socialize with him?”
“Define ‘socialize,’ ” she replied, again with that taunting tilt to her lips. A Mensa invitation definitely wasn’t lurking in her future, but she was obviously picking up on the thread here.
Katrina asked, “Did you go over to his quarters for dinner, go out for a movie together, any contact outside the office?”
“No. Never.”
Then, very calmly, “Were you screwing him?”
I thought she’d howl, but instead she leaned back into her chair and with surprising calmness replied, “No.”
“You’re sure?”
This apparently struck her as hilarious. “There’s some way you can not be sure on something like that? Oh, don’t get me wrong-I could’ve had him anytime I wanted.”
“Really?” Katrina replied. “Why didn’t you?”
“Not my type.”
“Why wasn’t he your type?”
“He’s a horny, married jerk. I prefer my jerks horny and unmarried.”
For clarity’s sake, I asked, “But you never had an affair with him?”
She looked at me. “Nope.”
I was just beginning to feel relieved when Katrina asked, “Did anyone else?”
She suddenly looked hesitant, so Katrina bent toward her and said, “There’s a harder way to do this. We’ll ask a judge to issue a subpoena and ask you this same question in an interrogation room back in the States.”
Her indecision seemed to evaporate. “He had some girlfriends, yeah.”
“Some? As in more than one?”
“He belonged to a Russian escort service that provided him with girls. He went out with a few Russian girls on the side, too.”
A heavy silence hung for a few moments as Katrina and I exchanged glances, tried to maintain our composure, and generally sought not to appear as shitty and dismayed as we felt. The issue was motive for treason, and this sounded like it. A senior intelligence officer screwing his way through Moscow, of all places, was an invitation to blackmail.
Katrina asked her, “Did his wife know about them?”
“No.”
“How do you know that?” I asked.
“Because I never told her.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“She was a nice lady. I figured, what she didn’t know, didn’t hurt her.”
Katrina said, “How did you find out?”
“I get the phone bills for the office, and Russian phone companies charge for local calls. When I don’t recognize a number, I track them down. That’s how I learned about Siberian Nights Escorts, and the girls he’d call. But I never told anyone. At least not until the investigators brought it up.”
The important point here being that Russia’s intelligence agencies also had access to those phone records. And the shocking point being that Eddie apparently knew also.
To be clear on that last point, I asked, “They already knew?”
“Oh, they knew.”
“How?”
“How would I know? Ask them.”
On that note, Katrina shot me another of those knowing looks as she asked, “Did Morrison have any good friends here… anybody we should talk to?”
She replied, “Colonel Jack Branson, the deputy attache. They did a lot of work together.”
“And how do we get hold of him?”
“You walk into his office. It’s right next to Morrison’s.”
Branson was Air Force, mid-forties, balding, thin-faced, very tall, and quite skinny, with a nondescript face, but intelligent eyes, and at the moment we walked into his office he was hunched over his desk, studying something with a magnifying glass. He looked up and took whatever it was off his desktop and stuffed it in a drawer. Intell guys are such a riot.
“Hi,” he said, trying to look friendly. “Can I help you?”
I made the introductions, and he pointed at a pair of chairs. We chitchatted about him, wife, kids, life in Moscow, and so on.
After we exhausted the phony pleasantries, I said, “So, how long did you know General Morrison?”
“The whole two years he was here. I’ve been here three years, so I was in place when he arrived.”
