“Like what?”
“I spent the better part of the morning waiting at the judge’s office for the list of potential board members.”
“Did you get it?”
I nodded. “Longest damn list I ever saw. There are nearly eighty officers on it. They’re obviously planning on losing a lot of members to voir dire challenges. They’re probably right. Considering the nature of the crimes, a lot of these guys are going to admit they’re so emotionally repulsed they can’t make detached judgments.”
Allie said, “But out of eighty officers, we should at least be able to find ten fair men and women.”
“The problem is I never saw a list packed with so many infantry officers.”
She said, “So?” in a tone that betrayed her naivete about the Army. See, all Army officers aren’t exactly interchangeable parts.
I said, “Look, the Army has some twenty-six different branches. There’s lawyers like me, doctors, supply guys, maintenance guys, finance guys, and on and on. The more the job sounds like a normal civilian job, the higher your chance the guy holding it thinks like a civilian. The only difference between them and some guy you’ll find on the street is they have to wear funny clothes to work every day.”
“But infantry guys are different?”
“Very different. They’re the Jesuits of the Army. They love discipline and they love to impose it. We JAG officers usually try to purge as many of them off a board as we can.”
Allie said, “So we’ll challenge them all off.”
And I said, “Of the first thirty names on the list, two thirds are infantry. They’ve stacked it. We’d be lucky to whittle them down to half the board.”
I felt a presence behind me. I turned around and Katherine was standing there.
She’d been eavesdropping. Her face was frigid. She said, “Well, you’re the asshole who talked our client out of the deal. Still think it’s such a great idea, Drummond? Still think you gave our client the best legal advice?”
“My two cents had no effect. He never had any intention of taking the deal.”
She stared at me. “That’s not what I asked. Do you still think you gave him the best legal advice?”
“I don’t know if it was the best legal advice, but it was my best advice.”
Her face was cold and hard. She was trying to stare me down, but I wasn’t about to let her humble me. This was what psychologists call transference. She was teed off at her client, and because I’d agreed with him, and I happened to be a handy target, she was spewing her anger at me.
She pointed a finger in my face. “Be in my office at three this afternoon with your strategy for the voir dire. That’s supposed to be your area of expertise. I want a survey of the potential board members and detailed lists of challenges and questions.”
“Okay.”
Her finger was still pointed at my face. “And keep your nose out of everything else. From here on, your duties are confined to advising me on matters of military law. You will no longer converse with our client. You will not meet with the judge. You will no longer participate in our strategy reviews. Take one step outside those boundaries and I’ll have you removed from our team. Is that clear?”
“That’s clear.”
She stomped into her office. I looked at Allie; she refused to meet my eyes. From the look of things, Katherine and her staff had made some decisions about me in my absence. I was no longer a trusted member of the team. Maybe I never had been a trusted member of the team.
I took my board list and limped away. I mean, I could have stayed and argued with Katherine, but what would be the point? Besides, this made things easier. I could dedicate my time to catching Bales without worrying about the trial.
I went straight back to my hotel room and went through the motions of developing a game plan for the voir dire. Having spent eight years screening potential boards, this was a fairly straightforward task. First, circle the names of officers who look like they might be favorable to the defense – in this case, women, minorities, and officers who work in the softer branches, in that exact order. Then put arrows next to the people you want to get thrown off. Target the infantry guys first; go after the higher ranks particularly, because the longer an officer serves, the more likely he or she is to buy into the culture and its hoary little peccadillos.
Then start developing the normal sequence of questions, like, “Have you read any newspaper articles or seen any TV news shows about this case that have left you predisposed or prejudiced in any way?” You’ve got to ask that question even though it can be a two-edged sword. It can eliminate as many sympathetic jurists as hard- nosed ones. Then you get to the questions only an experienced Army attorney would know to ask. “Have you ever punished a soldier for homosexuality?” Because Whitehall was a captain, all the potential board members were at least captains, and in the case of all those infantry officers, that meant they’d all held command positions. A fair number would’ve had troops who committed homosexual infractions they would’ve had to pass judgments on. I doubted many would publicly admit they’d gone soft on them. We’d get rid of a few infantry officers on that one.
I thought up a nice kicker:“Have you ever kissed or fondled another male?” Ask any average guy that question and you’ll get a fairly negative response. Ask a high-testosterone guy – like an Airborne, Ranger, or infantry stud – and you’ll get a nasty snarl, a derisive snort, and a very repugnant denial. In short, an inadvertent display of homophobic prejudice of the type that will wipe some more infantry officers off the board.
I added a few more of these sly stilettos, then considered my job done. I called Mercer and told him I was on my way. The early warning was because of the Korean cops who’d been following me. When I passed through the gate into the other half of Yongsan, where Mercer’s office was located, he had guys in the guardshack to block the cops from following me.
I then hobbled back to the CIA complex. The place was as busy as an ant’s nest. There were more spooks than I could count. Mercer must’ve brought in reinforcements, maybe from other offices around the peninsula, maybe from Japan. The agents seemed to be organized into seven or eight teams. Several of them stood directing pointers at stand-up easels and talking quietly to various groups. The air crackled with seriousness and tension.
I drew a few curious stares. I knocked on Mercer’s door and he yelled for me to enter. He was talking on that souped-up cell phone again, and he automatically dropped his voice to a whisper. Pretty damned silly, if you ask me. I fell into a seat and waited till he finished.
That didn’t take long. “You ready for the big time?” he asked.
“As ready as I’m going to be.”
“Carol’s with Bales’s wife right now.”
We’d still been trying to figure out how to lure Bales’s wife out of their Army quarters when I’d left Mercer to go see Katherine. The whole operation depended on Mrs. Bales being gone from their house.
I was curious. “How’d you arrange it?”
“We had the wife of the colonel in charge of the MP brigade invite her to an impromptu luncheon. Carol’s there as a waitress. The luncheon ends at two, so we’ve only got an hour.”
I said I was ready to get to it, so Mercer led me out. The second we got outside the door, he yelled at everybody to go get into their positions, and, as we say in the Army, asses and elbows flew all over the place.
It took me ten minutes to limp over to the MP station. I went right up to the desk sergeant and said I needed to see Chief Bales. He got on the intercom, informed Bales he had a visitor, then pointed at a hallway and told me to go straight to the sixth office on the left. I told him I knew my way, and he went back to doing whatever he was doing.
Bales barely looked up when I entered. He didn’t stand or offer to shake. He merely gave me a distracted, unwelcoming look.
I said, “I need to have a few words with you.”
He pointed at the wooden chair in front of his desk. He leaned back in his seat and stroked his chin and rotated his head, partly annoyed and partly curious. Probably he figured I was making some last-ditch effort to finagle some piece of information about the Whitehall case. Or maybe I was here to bitch about my beating and make a few threats.
I said, “Whitehall’s trial starts tomorrow.”
