bank accounts traceable to Pullman, but we're not talking mega-bucks. Not even remotely. Nice to have money, maybe, but not even as much as he's earning as a junior officer.'
'Does he look guilty? I'd expect you to know the difference between scared and guilty.'
'He doesn't even look worried!' Paul clenched his fists in frustration. 'No matter how much evidence I see that Pullman is guilty, some part of me keeps wondering what his motivation could've been. His real motivation. If I can't figure out why he'd do it, I have trouble accepting that he did it.'
'Maybe he's an idiot,' Jen suggested.
'That doesn't seem to be the case. He's very smart. He could handle his job on the Michaelson without breaking much of a sweat.'
'Hmmm.' Jen pondered the question as she ate. 'I see your point. There's a disconnect. People don't go to all the trouble Pullman apparently did just for a little extra pocket change. Smart ones don't, anyway. Maybe he's just irrational deep down.'
'Wouldn't that show up in other actions? How could he confine irrationality to just committing espionage?' Paul twisted his mouth. 'Besides, if there was the remotest chance of coping an insanity plea I'm sure David would've run with it.'
'Let it go, Paul.'
'What? Let what go?'
'The sibling rivalry. Your brother doesn't seem nearly as hung up on it as you are.'
He felt heat on his face as anger rose. 'Jen, you didn't grow up with a guy who made you feel like nothing you ever did could measure up to him.'
'No,' she stated sarcastically, 'I just grew up with a father who expected me to sprout wings and fly if the job called for it. Look, I can't claim to be an expert on you and your brother, but it's past. Let it go.'
Paul picked at his food. 'It's not that easy.'
'Did I say it was easy? Growing up. That's the key phrase. You and I are both old enough that we ought to be able to recognize what wasn't great about our childhoods and accept it as something that was but that doesn't have to drive us for the rest of our lives. Who has a perfect childhood? David had his own pressures to deal with, believe me. Maybe he's oblivious to this day how his attitude grates on you, but so what? Why let him make you crazy?'
He found it hard to come up with an answer and didn't know if that was because it was too complex or if he genuinely didn't have an answer.
Jen touched his hand for just an instant, all the physical contact she could risk while they were in uniform and in public. 'If he still wants to lord it over you, letting him get to you just means you're playing along. If he doesn't care about that anymore, then you're just shadowboxing with the past.'
'I'll think about it.' He saw her skeptical expression. 'I said I'd think about it and I will. Because I can't think of anything wrong with what you're saying.'
She grinned. 'You're going to make a good husband with that attitude.'
'It won't apply to every issue, I'm sure. Okay, you're so smart, tell me honestly, do you think Pullman's guilty?'
Jen looked away. 'Why does my opinion of this matter?'
'Because you're smart and you know a lot about things.'
'Like how it feels to be sitting at that defendant's table wondering if you're going to spend the rest of your life staring at the walls of a small cell?'
'Yeah.'
She sat silent for a while and Paul let her think. Finally, she sighed. 'I'm torn. I have a very strong and I know to some extent irrational bias against the government because of what happened to me. There are guilty people out there and they need to be caught. I just don't trust the government nearly as much as I used to when it comes to catching the right ones.'
Paul nodded in understanding. 'I feel some of the same thing. But there's a lot of evidence against Pullman. Not just the circumstantial stuff they tried to get you with, but solid caught-with-his-hands-in-the-cookie-jar stuff.'
'I know.' Jen played with her food for a moment. 'I guess it comes down to my wondering what we don't know. What evidence might be out there that we're not seeing, that might tell another story.'
'Jen, even in your case the investigators didn't try to cover up anything.'
She surprised him by laughing. 'Do you still believe that? All right, I'll admit they didn't actively try to cover up things. But I've been going over those reports in my free time. Don't give me that look. I've got every right to examine something that almost destroyed my life. You think the investigators dug into everything? They didn't. They asked the questions they wanted to ask. They didn't ask things they didn't want to ask. They didn't ask things whose answers they might not want to hear.' Jen saw Paul's surprise. 'Do you honestly think no one else wondered why that new engineering control system supposedly hadn't had any significant teething troubles? That no one else ever wondered if they ought to check to see if they could find anything contrary to the official 'everything is great' claims about that system?'
'I know your lawyer looked.'
'He was a lawyer. A guy who worked hard for me and did what he could, but not someone with the specialized experience or knowledge to smell the right rats and run down the locations of their lairs. I could've done it, but I was safely locked away in pre-trial confinement and under so much stress that I couldn't think straight. Any other people who could've said 'let's question the people who actually developed this system and ask them if everything was really as great as the acquisition people in the Pentagon claim it is' didn't say anything. There were too many people who were willing to go along with what they were told when they were supposed to be investigating. Too many people who avoided looking in the 'wrong' places that might hold answers their bosses didn't want to see.'
Paul clenched his fists, remembering the agony he and Jen had gone through during her court-martial. 'I'm sorry.'
'For what? You've nothing to apologize for. If you'd been an engineer, with the right contacts, you might've found those answers earlier, but I'd be pond scum to complain about that. You asked the questions those other people didn't. For which act of moral courage you're being sent to freeze your butt off on Mars, of course.'
'That and a few other acts,' Paul noted.
'Yeah. Meanwhile, whoever covered up those problems with that system remains officially unidentified and is probably still fat and happy and going to cocktail parties. All that person did was cause the deaths of lots of sailors and terrible damage to a US Navy warship, but digging that person out and making them pay would embarrass the wrong people.'
'And you're afraid that might be happening to Pullman?'
'A bit. I mean, there's no way to independently challenge or verify what the spooks in the intelligence world are telling us. We have to assume they're being honest. But what if they're mistaken? What if their bosses want a conviction and contradictory information is getting swept under the rug so we never even know it exists?'
Paul sat and thought, his food now untouched. Something about Jen's argument about Pullman's court- martial and the events surrounding her court-martial wasn't quite matching up in his mind. But he couldn't figure out what was missing. 'I don't know, Jen,' he finally said. 'I'm going to keep thinking about it.'
'Good.' She smiled mockingly at him. 'What can they do to you? Send you to Mars?'
'There's still Ceres.'
'My father's been told that if you get orders to Ceres I'll never speak to him again in this life and whatever comes after, and he knows I mean it.'
'Not that he had anything to do with my orders to Mars.'
'Oh, no. Of course not.' Jen smiled again. 'Captain Herdez is also keeping an eye out. She thinks she can block anything but what we've agreed to without tipping off anyone. The next orders you get should be the ones to her ship.'
'You talked to Herdez? Willingly?'
'I've done tougher things. Paul Sinclair, if we weren't willing to go to the mat for each other we shouldn't be getting married. True?'
'True.' That much, at least, he was certain of.
