less.
“I see you’ve gifted Bryn Mawr’s Library fund rather generously,” he said, raising one eyebrow.
“Yes.” O’Brien nodded.
“You’re an alumna of Denbigh Hall, if I recall correctly.”
“You do, sir. So I know how much they need the money.”
Kolhammer handed her the flexipad, deleting the read-once file as he did so. “Be careful with the political donations, Ms. O’Brien. Hoover’s men are all over Congress. They’ll pick up any whiff of us playing favorites.”
“They won’t, Admiral. I know my job.”
“I believe you do,” said Kolhammer, handing her back the flexipad with a new read-once file, a list of trust funds, individuals, and organizations he wanted her to fund. O’Brien took a few minutes’ pace around the bare room, committing the list to memory before she deleted it.
“So,” he said when she had circled back to a spot in front of him. “How’s civilian life treating you?”
O’Brien relaxed a little. She was no longer in the corps, but old habits died hard. “I don’t have to get up early. That’s pretty cool,” she said. “And, you know, I’m actually loving the work. Not just for you, but for my clients. It’s exciting . . .” She seemed to falter at something.
“But?”
“But,” she said with the air of someone about to make a confession. “It’s really hard here, sir. The rednecks and the assholes I can handle, if you’ll pardon my French. A guy like Slim Jim, he’s a pussycat. But I’ll tell you what hurts. It’s the way women resent me, and everything I stand for. The way they look at me when I enter a room, or walk down the street. Like I’m some sort of five-dollar whore turning tricks at their bake-off.”
“Not all of them, surely.”
“No. But enough.” Tears began to well up in her eyes. “There isn’t a day I don’t wish I could just go home,” she said as her voice cracked.
Kolhammer passed her a handkerchief. “You leave anyone special behind?”
O’Brien dabbed her eyes and pulled herself together. “No husband or kids, if that’s what you mean. But I was very close to my sister.”
“I’m sorry, Maria. Have you been in contact with your family here? Grandparents, or anything?”
She shook her head. “I . . . I don’t know how they’d react to me. I don’t—”
Kolhammer stood up and gripped her shoulder. “Why don’t you find out?”
O’Brien sniffed. “Thank you, sir. I might. I have traced some people on my mother’s side. I’m sorry, I don’t normally blubber. Marines aren’t allowed to.”
“You’re not a marine anymore. Blubber away. That’s an order.”
They began to walk toward the door. Kolhammer gave her a fatherly pat on the back of her exquisitely cut suit. “You go get ’em, tiger. I’m sure they’ll be proud of you.”
“They’ll probably hit me up for a loan,” she half laughed, half sobbed.
“You can afford it.”
They shook hands, and she left. Kolhammer checked his watch. He had another meeting in his office in ten minutes. He turned out the lights and left, walking out of the building into a night so cold and clear, it seemed as if you could see to the end of time out there in the stars.
As he walked back, he tried to keep a whole world in his head. Everything from the planning of the assault to retake Hawaii, to the names of the FBI agents who tried to use Davidson as a pawn. A frost had formed on the turf laid out between the campus buildings. It crunched underfoot as he cut across a section that had been laid just that afternoon. The strips of grass shifted under his feet.
He wondered what he was going to find when Ivanov sent his scheduled data burst from Siberia tomorrow. Assuming he sent anything at all. He wondered if Wild Bill Donovan had made contact with Ho Chi Minh yet, with a promise to supply all the arms the Viet Minh would need to make the Japanese occupation of Indochina a grinding nightmare. He wondered if Roosevelt would accept his argument that rather than fighting the Communist north after the war, they should bury them in aid and consumer goods. As he climbed the steps of the building that housed his office, he thought about the latest reports of out of the Middle East, about the Baath Party uprising in Syria and the Wahabi Intifada in Egypt.
He wondered if his uncle has been sent to the death camps yet and whether another round of horror stories in the broadsheet press might shame Churchill and Roosevelt into assigning more assets to bombing the rail links into Poland. He made a note to ask Dan Black to speak to Julia Duffy about that. She’d been more than helpful that way in the past.
As he saluted the guards at the entry foyer and marched down the corridor to his office, thoughts of Duffy led naturally to the horrible footage of that Natoli girl being murdered. A slow burn began in his gut, and he felt his gorge rising with his anger. He returned the salutes of the three men waiting for him.
Hidaka, the Japanese “governor” of Hawaii, had lied. He’d said that the Allied prisoners, both military and civilian, were being well treated. But the evidence on the flatscreen in Kolhammer’s office said differently.
Nobody spoke as they watched the video of the executions. Kolhammer had seen it five times now, and counted 123 victims, all of them beheaded. Even though he’d lost count of the number of times he’d seen people die like this, there was still something about it that froze the soul.
He thumbed the remote to freeze the footage before they had to watch the gruesome scene of Bill Halsey’s death again.
“So who is this asshole?” he rumbled.
“Commander Jisaku Hidaka, Admiral. Interim military governor—”
“I know that, Chief. He told me that himself, on the vid, just before he capped that poor girl. I want to know more. You open a file, in the Room. And we’ll close it when the protocols are carried out.”
“Sanction Four, sir?”
“No,” said Kolhammer. “I don’t think so. Do you?”
Chief Petty Officer Vincente Rogas shook his head. “I guess not.”
Kolhammer regarded the image on the screen with a cold, flat lack of feeling. “Sanction Five,” he said.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Australian author JOHN BIRMINGHAM, whose book
www.birmo.journalspace.com
