“Miss Allison said you were friends.”
“Friends? Well, no, we weren’t friends. We worked closely together, we were generally amicable, but we were hardly friends.”
“Did you like him?” I asked.
“I respected him,” he replied.
That’s military doublespeak for “No, he was a miserable asshole to work for.”
“Why did you respect him?” Katrina asked.
“He knew his job and worked damned hard at it. I won’t say he had the best leadership style I’ve seen, but as an intell officer he was as good as any I’ve met.”
Katrina bent forward. “What makes a good intell officer?”
“Good question.” Branson paused and then explained, “In intell, you’re always flooded with information. You’re always getting lots of reports from lots of sources, and frequently those reports and sources conflict. It gets to be a morass. Most intell guys just shove it all upstream and let someone else try to figure it out. Morrison wasn’t like that. He had a nose for what it all meant.”
I said, “He could interpret it?”
“Exactly. He always seemed to know the story behind the story. It was uncanny sometimes. He just figured it out.”
Big mystery there, right? Having the number two guy in the SVR feeding him explanations surely didn’t hurt.
Katrina said, “I hate to pry into sensitive things, but how was his marriage?”
Branson sucked his lower lip into his mouth. Like any military officer, loyalty to his boss was bred into his being, but at the same time he had to be weighing his caution against how much we already knew. Being indiscreet was one thing; it was worse to be caught as a liar.
“Don’t sweat it,” Katrina prodded. “We know he cheated on her.”
The lower lip popped back out, and he began shaking his head. “Well, you know then. That dumbass screwed everything he could get his hands on. Ordinarily I don’t care what other people do… but, look, I like Mary, and I didn’t appreciate it. I felt bad telling her he was at lunch when he was with some whore.”
Katrina nodded and said, “Did you ever talk to him about it?”
“I tried. He’s not a very approachable guy.”
“Did he ever explain his affairs?”
“I don’t think he knew why he did it. There was no good reason. You ever see his wife?” We both nodded. “What sane guy married to Mary would cheat, right?”
Katrina said, “Why didn’t they get divorced? Did he ever talk about it?”
“I suggested it once.”
“And…?”
“He said it would harm the children. I didn’t believe him, though. Do you want to know what I think?”
“Sure.”
“His career. You can’t believe how ambitious he was, and a divorce wouldn’t have looked good. The military frowns on that.”
I asked him, “Did everybody in the office know about his affairs?”
“I don’t know. None of us ever talked about it. What’s funny was, he and his wife worked together real well. They worked everything together.”
So the prosecutors had been saying, but just to be sure I asked, “Then he was seeing everything she was working on?”
He began chuckling. “The other way around, I’d say. Look, there’s a natural competition between the CIA, whom she worked for, and DIA, whom we report back to. We field hands are like little dogs. We please our masters by bringing back bigger bones and we get stroked behind the ears. Mary stole stuff from us all the time. Our sources would tell us about some crooked general over in the Russian Defense Ministry who looked like he could be blinkered into recruitment, and even before we could get a message off, Mary’s people were already flogging the general. Happened all the time.”
We’d heard more than we needed to hear, so Katrina thanked the colonel for his candor, told him we’d be back if we had more questions, and we departed in mutual misery.
On the drive back to the hotel, Katrina said, “You know that adultery charge?”
“I know.” I added, “But let me remind you, you were the one who thought it was possible to prove him innocent.”
She thought about this, then said, “You can’t be sure it led to treason.”
“You know the old Army saying about the three Bs?”
“No.”
“ ‘Booze, bucks, and broads will get you every time.’ Usually because they lead to the fourth B- blackmail.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Put two and two together and we had a king-size problem. Those transcripted telephone taps Imelda was slogging through no doubt proved that Bill Morrison had a dick instead of a brain. Nothing else explained how the investigators learned Morrison was a flagrant philanderer. Or why Eddie included the comparatively minor imputation of wife cheating among the litany of other charges.
Motive, motive, motive. Damned hard to prove with traitors, and Eddie now had two golden-oldie classics-the proverbial favorites lust and greed. My client had screwed his way through an opponent’s capital, and there was that fat wad of inheritance passed down from his father, and through his mother, a manner of money laundering that was both cunning and tax free.
I hate to sound like a whiny complainer, but it had been an all-around crappy day: an ambush, a dead American officer, an operation performed by a doctor named Josef Mengele, and now this. I thought it couldn’t get worse until I recognized the guy loitering beside the elevator-the same detective who had unlocked my cuffs back in the police station. And beside him stood a slick-haired putz in a well-cut Western suit, looking smugly self- important.
They marched up to Katrina and me; the putz impudently shoved a business card in my face and announced, “I am Boris Ashinakov of the Foreign Ministry. I must have a word with you. In private.”
We stepped away from the elevator and he led us to a quiet corner of the lobby. He began, “On behalf of my ministry I extend our deepest apologies for the shooting incident this morning. Moscow is a very peaceful city and we find it very distressing. And of course embarrassing.”
Moscow was anything but peaceful, his politeness was phony, and I wondered what this was about. I smiled back, however, and very nicely replied, “Thank you. It’s very kind of you to stop by. And, well, we’d love to stay and chat but we have to get upstairs to pack. A late flight… I’m sure you understand.”
“Actually, Major, there’s no hurry.”
“And why would that be?”
He scratched an eyebrow, pointed at his partner, and said, “Detective Turpekov and his colleagues are continuing their investigation into this terrible incident. There are procedures that must be followed before this case can be closed. You two are the only living witnesses.”
“Fine. I’ll give you the number back in the States where we can be reached.”
He shook his oily head. “I think not. We must request you to remain here.”
“No.”
He was grinning, and really enjoying himself, and it struck me I was becoming tired of power-hungry little bullycrats. He said, “I insist. Our customs officials have already been instructed not to let you out of the country. As long as nothing unexpected turns up, it shouldn’t take longer than forty-eight hours.”
“I don’t have forty-eight hours.”
“You do now.” He smiled and stuck a pudgy finger on my chest. “Moscow is a lovely city filled with wonderful
