stems that had wrapped themselves around the nonexistent mahogany ceiling beams. We were doing tropical paradise restaurants today.
Three shifts of hungry soldiers had already tromped through, so the pickings were slim. I slid my tray along a metal railing and took a dried-out salad with brown edges, a carton of lukewarm milk, and a slab of some kind of meat that looked like mottled liver. A cook wearing a dirty white apron lazily watched, and I chose not to ask about the meat. I decided to call it grilled pepper steak, to go with my lobster salad, and the milk would be an exotic coconut cocktail the local natives devised.
I found a table and sat down to eat. I took the first bite of that meat. It had the texture of overcooked leather, and this was when my imagination faltered. I suddenly found myself wondering where my law school classmates were eating. About a year before, I had gone to lunch with a guy I hung around with named Phil Bezzuto, who was already a partner in one of those big D.C. firms. He took me to one of those glitzy power restaurants on Wisconsin Avenue, where rich and famous people were sprinkled about at various tables, feeling oh so superior because they could all afford hundred-dollar lunches that they tried not to spill on their thousand-dollar suits and hundred-dollar neckties. No imagination required at that place. All the tables had white linen tablecloths, crystal glassware, and the kind of super-fancy plates that actually break when you drop them. Phil was rubbing it in real good. When it came time to pay the bill, he flashed his firm’s card and told the waiter to put it all on the expense account. Not that he couldn’t afford to pay it himself. He told me he was pulling down 300K a year with an almost guaranteed 30 percent bonus. I was making just short of 50K and the Army has this thing against bonuses. Expense accounts, too. He was doing real estate law, and the things he feared most in life were paper cuts or running into some road-raged driver on the beltway. Then again, for all I knew, Phil’s gleaming new Mercedes 300SL was bulletproofed.
This was the kind of self-pitying, self-indulgent, wistful melancholia I wallowed in as I ate my mystery meat and sipped warm milk from my carton. There weren’t many soldiers left in the mess hall, but the few remaining stalwarts occasionally glanced over at me and then mumbled quietly among themselves. I didn’t feel very welcome.
I plopped half a bottle of greasy Italian dressing on my brown-edged salad and began thinking about marble- eyed Mr. Jones and the lovely Miss Smith. The Army teaches that before you go into battle, you must know your enemy. Right now, the enemy knew me, whereas I knew next to nothing about them. Well, I knew their lousy aliases. And I knew that they supposedly worked for NSA. I knew Jones was a cocksure wiseass. I knew he was a ladies’ man, and shame on Morrow for not seeing through him right away. I knew Miss Smith had startling blue eyes, pouty lips, long legs that tapered into slim ankles, big boobs-about double D cups was my guess-wore nice clothes, and smelled like an expensive French perfume. When it comes to females, my skills of observation are uncannily sharp.
As things stood at that moment, those two were my best leads. If I could find out who they were, then maybe I could find out who sent them and exactly what the hell was going on here. I finished my salad and walked back over to the dessert section of the serving line.
The only dessert left on display was something that, from a distance, resembled brown pudding. I studied it more closely and decided it looked even more like something squishy and moist that came out of a dirty diaper. Even a fertile imagination like mine couldn’t turn it into chocolate mousse. I decided I’d had enough culinary treats this day and went back to work.
Chapter 21
At six o’clock, I was in position across the road from the NSA facility. I was hiding behind another wooden building and watching the entrance. Miss Smith, now more fully known to be Alice Smith, walked out and smiled brightly at the two guards, both of whom smiled back right nicely, then followed her with their eyes as she moseyed down the street. She had a very nice mosey. One hip this way, one hip that way, and this very encouraging jiggle up top.
Staying behind the row of wooden buildings, I set off in her direction. I caught glimpses of her between the buildings as she continued her journey.
At the end of the dusty street she went left. So did I. She kept walking past another seven or eight buildings, then turned and walked through the entry of a small, one-floored wooden building. A printed sign over the entryway read NO MALES. I deduced this to be some kind of women’s dormitory or barracks. I made a date inside my mind to maybe pay her a visit later, then sprinted back to my hiding place across from the NSA building.
Only about five minutes had passed, so I hoped Mr. Jones was still at his desk or conference table or whatever. Lots of bosses work later than their employees, and I assumed by the way they had treated each other that morning that he outranked Miss Smith. Another forty-five minutes passed. I paced back and forth. I daydreamed about Miss Smith’s walk. Mosey, mosey, jiggle, jiggle. Finally, about a minute before seven, Jones emerged. He ignored the guards and headed off in the opposite direction from the way Miss Smith had taken. He had a jaunty walk, almost a swagger. We walked about five minutes before he also hooked a left into a wooden building. God bless the Army for marking everything in sight. This one had a big sign, written in large, bold letters that read VISITING GENERAL OFFICERS’ QUARTERS.
If our Mr. Jones was a government employee, he was a hefty one, since Army general officers are very finicky about who they allow as neighbors. Why this is, I don’t know. Maybe they all like to get together at night and dance around naked. I waited around for three minutes and watched to see if I could tell which lights went on inside which room. I saw nothing. Jones’s room had to be on the back side of the building.
Among the many useful skills we were taught in the outfit was breaking and entering. They even brought in some ex-cons to put us through the paces. I ended up working with a guy named Harry G. No last name, just Harry G.
Harry was what my grandfather would call a grand piece of work. He was short and squat, much like a fireplug, bald as a billiard ball, and had this pair of sparkling little black eyes. When he laughed, he sounded just like a horse with a hernia. He’d only been caught once, he informed me, even though he had burgled thousands of places. The government knew he had managed to steal a fortune and threatened to do an IRS audit to add to his legal woes, then prosecute him for tax fraud on top of burglary, unless he agreed to cooperate. Since Harry always worked alone, he figured they couldn’t make him rat out anybody. Any kind of ratting, in Harry G’s book, was a capital offense. But since he had no partners to turn in, he therefore agreed.
The deal was this. In exchange for agreeing to train government agents in his skills, he was allowed to stay free. Oh, and he had to promise to stop stealing. Harry said, hey, what the hell, he was already worth millions, so why not? It would give him something to balance out the ledger when he met The Maker, as he put it. Maybe give a little back to the country that had given him so much. He had about ten more of these worthy justifications, and I thought they were hilarious at the time.
I spent a month with Harry. Two days on disabling burglar alarms, three days on picking locks, five days on safecracking, et cetera, et cetera. When Harry was done with me, I could break into and hot-wire a car in one minute flat. I could do a reasonable second-story job on a well-protected home, and get past most any safe manufactured before 1985. That was the year the government had forced Harry out of business, and he ruefully admitted that he hadn’t kept up with the new technologies.
I went back to my tent and lay down for a nap. I set my alarm for one o’clock, then fell asleep. When the alarm went off, I dressed in running shoes and a pair of Army sweats, which were as innocuous as green berets around here. I grabbed my black gloves, a knife, a poncho, and cut eyeholes in my Army-issued black ski cap, then tucked those in my waistband.
It was dark, and very few people were out and about. I jogged as though I were a late-night fitness addict. Since this was an Army base and lots of folks pulled night shifts, late-night runners were a common sight. Nobody paid me any attention. I got to the Visiting General Officers’ Quarters and did three swift laps around the building. I saw nobody, and nobody saw me.
I quietly went through the front entrance and into a hallway. There were four doors, two on the left and two on the right. I immediately ruled out the two nearest doors, because both had windows that faced the front of the building, and I hadn’t seen any lights go on when Jones entered his room. This left the last two. I had a 50 percent
