technique, unless there happen to be gorillas hanging around, in which case, it’s quite high on the not recommended list.
There was another light knock on the door, and when I looked up, Morrow was standing there looking pensive. Beautiful, but pensive.
She said, “You don’t look like you’re having a good day.”
“Nonsense. They just did the Virginia lottery drawing, and guess what? The winning ticket’s in my wallet. Two hundred and fifty million dollars. I was just sitting here wondering what I’m gonna do with all that money.”
She entered and sat down. “And what did you decide?”
“Every penny’s going to Mother Teresa. Not a penny to anyone else but her.”
“Uh, Major… Mother Teresa’s dead.”
“Yeah? Really?” I said. “Then screw it. I’ll just spend it all on myself.”
“I could see you doing that,” she said.
“Yeah, me too. I’m seeing it real clear. Me, a grand house at the end of the Florida Keys, a big three-masted schooner, a fancy red sports car. And what would you do?”
“Me?” She ran a long, slender hand through that thick luxuriant hair of hers as though she had never dreamed of having that much money. I mean, give me a break. Everybody dreams of having Bill Gates’s money. Just not his looks.
She said, “I guess I’d buy a nice little brownstone in Cambridge, then open up a charitable foundation.”
“Ugh, that’s awful,” I said.
“I beg to differ. It’s a perfectly meaningful way to employ money you didn’t earn.”
“I’m talking about that Cambridge brownstone. Having all those insufferable, lefty Harvard preppies for neighbors. You’d drown in alligator shirts and Weejun loafers.”
“You’re behind the times. Diversity, remember? Harvard even lets Republicans in now. Not in any great numbers, certainly, but the odd token here and there.”
“No kidding? What kind? Real, meat-eating Republicans? Or, that phony, limp-wristed Rockefeller kind?”
“I even had a skinhead in my law school class.”
“A skinhead?”
“Way wacko.” She rolled her eyes. “All he wore were those freaky black T-shirts, camouflage pants, and combat boots. He concentrated on constitutional law. He had this plan to graduate, then spend the rest of his life trying to stuff the Supreme Court docket with challenges to various antidiscrimination statutes. Rambo Esquire, we all called him.”
“Damn, he sure chose the right place. What’s the name of that professor? You know, the one who wrote all those best-selling books and keeps suing the government?”
“Alan Dershowitz?”
“Yeah, that guy.”
“Alan actually liked him,” she said. “He thought Rambo had spunk and chutzpah.”
“You know Dershowitz?”
“Very well, in fact. Alan was my faculty adviser. Also the best lawyer I ever saw. I took both his classes.”
“Gee, and I thought I was the best lawyer you ever saw.”
I nearly smiled. Of course, I was being sly and disingenuous. I was trying to dispel these troubling doubts about Morrow, like maybe she hadn’t really gone to Harvard Law, like maybe she wasn’t really a lawyer, like maybe she was a plant who’d been placed here to report on me and keep me in line. Of course, I had the same doubts about Delbert, but I was fast reaching the point where I needed someone to confide in. Lots of strange things were happening, and I felt like I needed a sounding board.
I said, “Do you mind if I unload a few things on you?”
Her being a beautiful woman and all, I probably should have picked my words a little more carefully. She’d no doubt had dozens of men ask her that same question, then start unburdening about the lousy wife that didn’t understand them, or the sex life that wasn’t working or some such thing. Beautiful women spend a lot of time being confessors to men who want to get into their pants.
She kind of winced. “Okay, Major, if you must.”
“First, let’s drop that major thing, okay? Sean will do just fine.”
From the dubious look on her face, this seemed to confirm her worst fears. “Okay, Sean, fine.”
“What I need from you is a sanity check.”
This confused her for a moment, since it was obviously not what she’d expected to hear. Unless, that is, by sanity check I was leading up to her playing doctor, and when boys and girls play doctor, then, well…
She nodded, and I continued. “Look, I’m feeling very weird about what’s happening around here. Yesterday that reporter, Berkowitz, stopped by and asked me a few questions about the investigation. Then, this morning, he’s dead. It had all the earmarks of a professional hit, the kind of thing a Mafia pro might do, or maybe a Special Forces guy who’s been trained to use exotic weapons.”
Lisa was nodding along. “And you think there’s some kind of link?” she asked, very cool, very detached.
She sounded just like a therapist. Not that I’ve ever been to a therapist, mind you. Well all right, when I left the oufit, they had me spend a few sessions with a head shaker. They did that to everybody, though. Honest.
I finally said, “Actually, yes, I do think there’s a link. But let me cover some other ground first. This afternoon I had another session with that big ape, General Murphy. I asked him what happened when Sanchez’s team missed their daily sitreps. He said nothing. That didn’t make sense to me, because one of the purposes of those routine sitreps is to confirm to your headquarters that you’re still alive. So I asked him why no red flags went up.”
“And he said?”
“That the ops center usually waits twelve hours until the next sitrep period. Only if the team misses that second report is there a response.”
“I could see where that would make sense,” she said.
“Actually, it doesn’t. You have to understand the urgency of timely sitreps. Especially when you’re talking about units operating behind enemy lines. But anyway, I then went to the ops center, just to see what I could find out. I asked the ops sergeant if he remembered any cases when teams failed to make their sitreps. He said KLA teams occasionally missed, but no American team had ever missed. Then I asked him what he would do if he lost contact with a team. He said they would immediately push every panic button in sight.”
“So we have a difference of opinion between a sergeant and a general.”
“Or we have a liar.”
“Which is a large leap to a dangerous conclusion.”
“Maybe. However, the same ops sergeant warned me that somebody put out the word not to cooperate with our investigating team.”
This news at last got something other than an argumentative reaction. “Why would he tell you that?” she asked.
“One of those odd coincidences. He remembered me from when I was stationed at Bragg years ago. I guess it was one of those auld lang syne things.”
“And you believe him?”
“I watched a full colonel take him apart just because he talked to me.”
“There could be a lot of explanations for that.”
“There could, but I can’t think of any. Now odd incident number three. An NSA guy showed up here a few minutes ago. He stopped by to tell me we’re in luck, that one of their satellites was over Zone Three. He told me he was stationed here but refused to give his real name. Only thing was, he was carrying a Washington Post and a trench coat. By the way, it’s been raining cats and dogs in Washington the past twenty-four hours. I hope you remembered to close your car windows.”
She pulled on her lip for a while and seemed to weigh everything I’d just said. Then she stared down at the floor, then up at the ceiling. She put a pencil eraser against her lip, and I don’t know why, I just found that sexy as hell.
Finally, she said, “I’m really sorry. I just don’t see any connection between all these things.”
“Time and place, Morrow. A journalist gets murdered, a general lies, a unit obstructs justice, and a strange
