wall. “
The admiral swiveled back around. “So in a sense, we have an answer.
This Galantz must have been spooked up.
The question is, When?”
Mccarty nodded. “On the other hand, Princess Happy may have been stating the bald truth. The Tech Ops people have never heard of the guy.”
“Yeah. Okay. Let me pull the string one time at my level.
Maybe I need to go see my dear friend, the Director of Naval Intelligence, after all. Sometimes spooks will trade secret signs and totems only with other spooks.”
“And what shall we pass on to Karen Lawrence?”
“Nothing. Which, in terms of facts, is what we have. Just some educated cynicism based primarily on our combined sixty years of experience in dealing with those people. We might as well try for the facts one more time before we worry her pretty little head about it.”
“Aye, aye, Admiral,” Mccarty said in a tone that suggested he was not entirely in agreement. Carpenter eyed him over his reading glas ‘ ses.
“Always a safe answer, Dan,” he pronounced.
After Mccarty had left the office, Carpenter picked up the phone to his yeoman. “Get me through to Admiral Kensington,” he said. “On secure, please.”
As the band broke into the Navy hymn, Karen had trouble controlling her eyes. The stately, dolorous, yet hopeful chords carried across the grassy slopes of the cemetery with such power that even the civilian tourists up on the hill stopped taking pictures to listen. So she was startled when she saw Admiral Sherman starting to rise out of his chair.
He appeared to be staring at something up on the hill. -As she strained to see what or who it was, she caught a movement among the grave diggers standing around the backhoe.
Train. He had apparently also seen the admiral’s sudden interest in something or someone up on the hill, and he was moving behind the backhoe, as if to go up the hill. She looked back at Sherman, who was standing now, causing the flag officers seated on either side to look up. Feeling a sudden fist of apprehension grab her heart, she looked back up the hill, half-expecting to see a man with a rifle. But there was just the same small crowd up there, so what on earth was he looking at? There, standing next to a group of midshipmen in uniform: a kid. No, a young man, not a kid.
Scrawny figure. Black motorcycle jacket opened over a white T-shirt. A cigarette hanging from his lip in impudent mockery of the somber proceedings down the hillside. As Karen looked on, the young man apparently made eye contact with Sherman, because he grinned at the admiral. There was no mistaking it: an almost ugly flash of teeth. But then the midshipmen up on the hill moved across her line of sight, and he was gone. She looked back at Sherman, who was now sitting back down.
Baffled, she looked for Train.
He was no longer in sight.
Forty minutes later, Karen and the admiral were heading back into Washington in his official sedan. She was anxious to ask him what it was that had attracted his attention up on the hill. But then she decided that she had better talk to Train first.
“I’m very sorry for your loss, Admiral,” she said. The words sounded trite. She glanced over at the driver, a civilian from the Defense Department motor pool. “But we still have some business with the Fairfax County, um, people.
They do want to meet.”
“Well, not tonight,” he said immediately. “I’m still too upset about losing Galen. How about tomorrow? Although I shouldn’t even say that without looking at my calendar.
Damn it.
She waited for a few minutes. “I’ll talk to them. Perhaps we could meet off-line again, maybe in Great Falls this time,” she proposed. “Perhaps at my house. Same deal as last time, after working hours. That would be better than your having to go to Fairfax.”
“Fine,” he said distractedly.
He was staring out the rightrear window, his mind a thousand miles away.
“I”Il call them this evening, then,” she offered. “Tentatively for tomorrow evening, say nineteen hundred?”
“Fine.”
At 5:30, Rear Admiral Carpenter walked down the C-ring to the offices of the Director of Naval Intelligence, Rear Adm. Kyle St. John Mallory. He smiled as he reached the door and glanced at the name board. What was it about the intel world, he wondered, that seemed to attract these pretentious-sounding names?
“Come in, Thomas,” said Admiral Mallory, who came around his desk to shake hands. He was a tall, slim, and perfectly bald officer, and he was known for affecting British mannerisms and dress, even to the point of insisting on the traditional British pronunciation of his middle name as “Sin-Jin.’ True to form, he was wearing an off-white Royal Navy cardigan sweater that was about two sizes too big for him over his uniform shirt and trousers. He was senior to Carpenter, thus the instant familiarity and first name.
“Kyle,” the JAG responded, shaking hands and then taking a chair as the DNI’s executive assistant withdrew, closing the door behind him. Mallory took the adjacent chair and offered coffee. Carpenter demurred.
“Are your fields Working?” Carpenter asked, glancing up at the odd-shaped black boxes perched in the ceiling comers.
“They’d bloody well better be,” Mallory replied.
“Whose ears might be about to bum?”
“Those people up the fiver.”
“Ah. Just a moment, then, please.” He turned to reach the intercom on his desk. “Full SCIFF, if you please, Petty Officer Martin.” He waited, looking expectantly at the intercom box.
“Full SCIFF, Admiral.”. A low humming sound filled the room, and the panel of floor-to-ceiling windows behind the DNI’s desk went opaque.
“Thank you,” Mallory replied in an almost-singsong voice as he switched off the telephone console and turned back around to face Carpenter.
“Funny you should mention that lot. But by all means, you first.”
Carpenter cocked an eyebrow at him, then proceeded to tell the DNI about his probe regarding an ex-SEAL. He did not reveal the full context of his inquiry, but he did tell Mallory that the case involved homicide and that the ex SEAL was a likely suspect. He also mentioned that the individual supposedly had gone MIA back at the end of the Vietnam War.
Mallory nodded patiently as Carpenter described the Technical Operations Directorate’s initial answer.
“Well, that explains something,” he said when Carpenter was finished.
“The deputy director of the Defense Intelligence Agency rang me up this morning. Seems those people were coming through channels, for a change.
Wanted the Navy, the whole Navy, one presumes, to cease and desist making any further inquiries regarding one”-he got up and went to his desk to retrieve a piece of paper-“one Hospital Corpsman Galantz. That your fellow?”
“That’s him. And that’s very interesting. First, my guy hits the old stone wall. Never heard of this individual, they tell him. Now you say they’re warning us off?”
Mallory said nothing, but just raised his eyebrows expectantly, as if waiting for Carpenter to answer his own question. But the JAG just sat there, ostensibly thinking.
“This may have been as simpld as a mild rebuff for going direct, Thomas,” the DNI prompted finally. “Was there some reason you did not bring the um, inquiry through our office?”
“Yes,” Carpenter said.
“There’s a client privacy problem. This involves another flag officer.”
Almost as an afterthought, he added the fact that the CNO had been apprised.
“All, I see,” Mallory said, his peevish expression revealing that he did not see at all.
Carpenter ignored it. “I need to find this Galantz individual. We have reason to believe he may have survived
