when we have something.” Then a question occurred to her. “Admiral, you’re on leave right now?”
“Sort of,” he laughed, but without much humor. “I’m actually up at the Bureau, heading up a selective earlyretirement board for senior chief petty officers. That’s not for publication until the board reports out, by the way.
Which is why my office is saying I’m on leave.”
Karen wanted to ask how long this little temporary additional-duty assignment had been scheduled, but she held back. The Navy went to great lengths to keep selectionboard membership confidential, so the sudden assignment was plausible. But it was also a very convenient way of putting the admiral on ice while the Galantz thing played out. He must have read her thoughts.
“Convenient, huh? I suspect Kensington instigated this to lower my visibility in Opnav while this current mess gets sorted out.
“So this had not been in the works for some appreciable time?”
“Would you believe as of eighteen hundred last night?
The board’s been scheduled for a while, of course., But the president’s slot was supposed to be filled by another flag officer, who was suddenly unavailable. So, yes, now I’m officially incommunicado for the next three days. Any developments on Galantz?”
Karen hesitated. She wanted to tell him about what Train had found out from his FBI contact. And about the visit she had received. But Jack’s last words on the tarmac had thrown them both for a loop.
“Not yet, Admiral,” she said. “But Mr. von Renset has been talking to some people.”
“I hope he’s getting somewhere.”
“Yes, sir,” she replied, at a loss as to where to go from there. He seemed to sense that the conversation was over.
“Okay, Karen. And, again, thanks for everything you’re doing. I thought when I made admiral, I’d be the guy in control. These past days, I’ve begun to feel like a wood chip in the rapids.”
“that’s just what this guy’s trying to accomplish, Admiral,” she said.
“But I think having Train von Rensel working it is going to help-a lot.”
Sherman agreed, thanked her again, and hung up. Slightly embarrassed, she put the phone down and patted Gutter’s head. She thought about Jack Sherman, his overtly insolent demeanor and the brazen way he had looked at her. His father had probably seen a lot of that sneer before the divorce. She dreaded the thought of finally sitting down with Sherman senior and telling him that his son was still a slimeball, or worse.
She gave up on the paperwork and got up to turn off the lights. She had told Train she would be in the office to morrow, where they were going to have to make some important decisions. She realized as she locked up downstairs that she was only beginning to appreciate the box Galantz had fashioned for the admiral.
WEDNESDAY Eady the next morning, Karen called into the office and left a message that she would be late but that she was coming in. She had actually overslept, courtesy of the secure feeling of having that big Dobe in the house. She checked her voice mail. There was one message, from Sally, who had not been able to feed the horses this morning because she had to take her father to the doctor’s office. She asked if Karen could please feed them.
Karen groaned. Murphy’s Law, she thought. She deleted the message and looked at her watch. It was almost 8:30.
The horses would be standing indignantly by their gates, an hour overdue for feeding. Okay, get the horses fed and turned out, then come back in, change into uniform, grab a cup of coffee, and jump into traffic to get down to the Pentagon. Wait, better call Train and tell him she’d be late. She punched in the office number, but it came up busy. Now what?
What had happened to the office voice mail? Then she remembered Harry.
She’d have to get Harry into the house before letting the Dobe out, or they might fight.
She groaned out loud. Arranging both dogs was too hard.
She told Gutter to stay, patting him on the head, then slipped out the front door. Harry whimpered at her from under a porch chair, but he did not join her. She could hear Gutter complaining as she walked down off the front porch and headed for the barn. She was amazed at how quiet it was as she headed into the hedge passage. If she stood still, she could almost hear the sweep of the Potomac River through the woods beyond the big pasture. Even the hedge passage which on Monday night hadposed such a terror for her: looked entirely benign in the April sunshine, its crocus borders smiling at each other across the bricks. Duchess whinnied from the barn enclosure. “Oh, all right,” she said out loud, and walked down toward the barn and her starving charges.
Train went to the athletic club early, then arrived in the office at about 8:15. He opened up his LAN mail to retrieve the full text of the database report on Jack Sherman. He grabbed a cup of coffee while the report was downloading into his computer, and he asked the yeoman if he had any messages. The yeoman told him the voice mail was down but that there had been no calls for him. “Oh, and Commander Lawrence will be coming in this morning, but late,” the yeoman said.
Train went back to his cubicle, wondering how late was late. They had two immediate problems to work. whether or not to tell the cops about Jack, and finding out why the warning from the DNI had been shortstopped, and by whom.
The first item would provoke an argument. He was leaning toward full disclosure, having had too many bad experiences in multiparty investigations wherein information was held back for political or bureaucratic reasons. Karen, in her zeal to protect Admiral Sherman, would not agree, but it was going to be tough getting around the matter of what Jack Sherman had said about working for his father. That didn’t make any sense at all, unless they had missed the whole point of what was going on. The warning that Galantz might be a sweeper, they would have to take up with the JAG himself.
Karen opened up the feed room, found three feed bowls, and measured out three rations. It had been so long that she had to consult the feed board to see what they were getting these days.
“It has been a while, girls,” she said to her three interested observers, who were clustered in the comers of their paddocks near the barn, watching her through the feed room’s door and occasionally pinning their ears and making threatening faces at one another. She finished the rations, then carried the flum bowls out to the feeding buckets, which were hung on the fences. She watched with satisfaction as everybody piled into their buckets, feet stamping and with in occasional white eye peeled over the rim of their buckets to stare at one another, just in case.
Karen watched for a minute, then went down the aisle to the door of the hay room. Most of the hay was stored in square bales on the second floor of the barn. One room on the ground floor had been designed as the hay service room, with a trapdoor between the upper floor and the ground floor so that hay could be dropped down into the service room periodically. She unlatched the door and stepped into the semidarkness.
There were ten bales stacked on the concrete floor. The trapdoor in the ceiling was closed, as it should be. She cut the strings on one bede and carried out six pats of hay to a waiting garden cart. She rolled the cart back down the aisle to the area of the feed buckets, then gave each horse two solid pats of hay on the ground near their buckets.
She rolled the cart back down the aisle, past all the empty stalls.
Sally kept a trim and clean barn, she thought. All the tools were hung up neatly, and the cabinets with vet supplies and tack-cleaning stores were a closed. She was lucky to have her, and only too happy to do the feeding chores from time to dw if that’s what it took to keep Sally. She opened the hay service room to put the cart inside, and suddenly there was a black-gloved fist in her face, a snapping sound, and a very bright Purple flash that seemed to make her eyes ring and her’brain stall, and then, without so much as a squeak, she was falling backward into a fathomless black canyon.
By nine o’clock, Train decided to call Karen’s house, but there was no answer. Maybe she was stuck in traffic. He asked the yeoman for the number for her car phone, but the yeoman did not have it. He sat at his desk and scanned the database report again, his mind uneasy. He called her again at 9:15, and then he realized that calling was a waste of time. Something told him to go out there. But that would be dumb if she was on the way in. They’d simply pass each other out on the road.
He got up and paced around the office, making the yeoman nervous. He asked two of the other officers in IR if they had the number for Karen’s car phone, but they looked at him as if he was slightly nuts, although they were polite about it. He went back to his cubicle and thought about going to see Carpenter. No, he decided, not without
