He wasn’t alone. Carol was with him. They found two chairs over in the corner and pulled them up against my bed. Then Buzz reached over and shook my hand. Gently, of course, because there were several IVs sticking in my arm.
I said, “I’ll bet your bosses back in Washington are tickled pink with you two.”
Buzz grinned from ear to ear. “Let’s just say I’m pretty sure I’ll make it to retirement. And Carol here has been submitted for the Gold Medal.”
That Gold Medal thing is the secret award they give to spooks when they do real good. Nobody in the public knows about it, which if you think about it, doesn’t make it much of an award. But hey, spooks are a little different from the rest of us.
Also, although Buzz didn’t mention it, it was a reasonable assumption that if his subordinate was getting a Gold Medal, well then, he probably was, too. He was too much the fifties kind of guy to mention it.
With gushing insincerity, I said, “Congratulations to you both. You deserve whatever honors a proud nation can bestow upon you.”
Which was my backhanded way of reminding them they owed me the world. They get the Gold Medal and I get a bullet in the back.
Carol, the poor girl, was taking my phony praise seriously. She was blushing and looking down at the ground with embarrassment. Not Buzz. Like I’ve already mentioned, he doesn’t miss much.
“What can I do for you?” he asked, cutting through the bull.
Well, I always like a man who comes straight to the point. “I’ve got a former client rotting in a Korean prison. He’s innocent, only there’s no way on earth his lawyers are able to prove that.”
Buzz ran a hand across those little bristles of hair on his head. “Drummond, I already told you, I can’t let any of this out.”
“Why not? It’s over, isn’t it?”
“Over? We picked up four more traitors this morning.”
“Four more?” I asked.
“That’s right. And of the first eight, we’ve confirmed that six were working for the North Koreans. Christ, we can’t let this out of the bag. Not now. It would be a disaster.”
“Why? It’ll have to get out eventually. It always does, Buzz. Why not get it out in time to help an innocent man?”
He was stubbornly shaking his head. “First we’ve got to do a damage assessment. That’ll take weeks, maybe months. This was serious shit here, Drummond. These guys may have given away the whole store. The command needs time to make changes to its war plan, write a new aircraft targeting plan, shift some units around, improve port and airfield security. You don’t tell the bad guys you know how much they know until you’ve made the right preparations. That’s counterespionage 101.”
I tried to rise up and lean toward him, but I suddenly discovered my overdrugged body was ignoring my central nervous system. Huffing and puffing with frustration, I said, “Look, damn it, can’t we come to a reasonable accommodation here?”
“I’m willing to listen.”
“What if we can handle this in a closed, classified hearing?”
“Can you do that?”
“It’s up to the judge. Of course I’ll have to tell him what it’s about.”
He stroked his chin. “Can he be trusted?”
“Of course.”
“Would it make a difference?”
“I hope so. He can make rulings based on what we present. Of course, the prosecutor has to be present as well. It’s unorthodox, I guess, but judges pull lawyers into chambers all the time to make off-line rulings on critical issues. And they’re always privy to evidence the jury never sees.”
I wasn’t sure how Mercer was going to come down. He wasn’t committing. He wasn’t saying no. He was pondering.
I said, “So I’ll bet you two end up going to the White House and getting a pat on the back from the man himself. Doesn’t the CIA give monetary awards, too? I’ll bet you get enough that you don’t have to worry about making your rent payments for a few years. You probably have a house in McLean, right, Buzz? I mean, all you Agency guys like to build nests next to the big building, right? I’ll bet it’s killing you having to handle that mortgage while you’re over-”
“God damn it, Drummond, all right. Enough already. We’ll try it.”
“One other thing?”
“What’s that?”
“We’re going to want to hear what Bales’s wife told you when she broke. A videotaped testimony would be fine. Just make sure you’ve got a chain of evidence on it.”
He looked at me from under his eyebrows. “Who said she broke?”
“Buzz, no offense to your professional competence, but how else did you find out there were four more traitors?”
He rolled his eyes. For a minute I could swear he actually liked me. But probably I was only kidding myself. Spooks don’t have feelings.
CHAPTER 47
I felt deeply honored about the way it got set up. On Tuesday morning at eight, the trial kicked off as scheduled. The next two days, Katherine and Eddie fenced back and forth over board members. As voir dire processes go, it was one of the bloodiest skirmishes in military court history.
See, military law doesn’t have the exact same challenge procedures as federal law, but close enough. As long as Katherine could show that a potential board member had an axe to grind against gays, she could get them disqualified. Eddie’s job was harder, because you can’t disqualify a member just because they
As a result, the mayhem was done by Katherine. She was winnowing out the antigay bigots and seeking ten men or women who were either fair-minded or equivocal about homosexuality. The infantry guys on the board got massacred. She knocked off eight that I could count. Three female officers actually made the final list, which was considerably better than how I thought it would turn out. Females, as Imelda had observed, tend to be less judgmental on sexual issues – well, excepting bigamy or adultery. If you’ve got a client accused of either of those offenses, the last thing you want’s a female jurist.
Katherine performed superbly.
How did I know this? Because for once the military opened the trial to the press. There were even TV cameras in the courtroom, and to the best of my knowledge that’s unheard of in military trials. But given the rabid public interest in this case, and that all of Korea was interested in the outcome, a closed court would’ve been a disaster. To preserve the alliance, the Army had to discard its traditional cloaked process.
On the morning of the third day, Eddie got up and made his opening statement. The TV cameras were rolling and he was positively preening. This was the moment he had waited for all his life. He paced back and forth, spoke completely extemporaneously, and went on for exactly thirty minutes. He really did bear an uncanny resemblance to a youthful Robert Redford. And the camera picked that up.
I hated to, but I had to give him credit. He was brilliant. He was brief and he was passionate. He resisted the impulse to hog the limelight and I’m sure it killed him. He emphasized again and again the sheer, disgusting ugliness of the crime. He reminded everybody that the accused was a West Point graduate, an experienced officer, a man who had done his duties in every other way, but was a callous, brutal murderer nonetheless.
This was a sly preemptive strike on his part, since it was evident Katherine was going to emphasize that her
