struck my desk and split open the back of his head. Kind of like adding insult to injury. It didn’t kill him, but head wounds always cause a fair amount of blood.
That’s about the point where I stopped paying attention. Suddenly there was this sharp pang in my left rib cage, and my face felt like it was on fire. Blood was running down my forehead and out of my nose and mouth. When you’re twenty-two, you can take a beating like the one he just inflicted on me and end up feeling no worse than you would if you’d just been hit by a speeding car. When you’re thirty-nine, you feel like a steam-roller just mashed you into the road. I slumped down on the floor and lapsed into a remarkably deep trench of self-pity.
Martie and Wolky walked in while the MPs were slapping metal cuffs on Sergeant Major Williams. They looked around my office and saw a fair amount of blood dripping down the walls where Williams had used me like a basketball, and puddling on the floor, where Williams and I had both given liberally of our precious liquids. They both were smiling, though.
The confession I’d extracted from Williams might or might not be admissible as evidence. I am an officer of the court, and I hadn’t read him his rights. A real slick defense attorney might be able to construct a plausible argument that I’d illegally entrapped Williams. If it were me, that’s how I’d handle the defense. Williams, however, had assaulted me with the stated intent of murdering me. That much was admissible. I’m a commissioned officer and the Uniform Code of Military Justice takes a dim view of enlisted men trying to murder officers. It also lists another twenty or so different offenses that could be thrown at him, from assault to a few odd zingers like disrespect by apportment, which translates literally as me, a senior officer, saying he had looked at me in a way I didn’t like very much. There really is such an offense. No kidding.
Plus, now that Williams had been apprehended, there was time to search for more evidence to support the charge of murdering Jeremy Berkowitz. Not to mention the flurry of charges related to the church burnings. As it was, the additional charges I’d just earned for Williams offered any able prosecutor a lot of material to trade for a full confession.
That’s why Wolky and Martie were smiling. I got my fanny whupped pretty good to break their case. All they’d had to do was sit back in the building across the street, sipping their coffee and listening to the sounds of me crashing into walls.
Chapter 27
The doctor spent two hours inspecting and repairing the carnage Williams had administered to my body. There were two fractured ribs, not one. And I now sported eighteen stitches, about evenly divided between three different gashes. Williams was being treated in the next room, and the doc jovially told me they had to use a sewing machine on him. I guess he was trying to cheer me up. You know, like one of those “you should see the other guy” things. I didn’t need to be perked up, though. My mood actually was fairly frisky.
While the doctor taped and sewed and X-rayed to his heart’s content, I spent the entire time thinking about how I was going to handle Tretorne, Murphy, and Clapper. These guys were what my grandfather would call Slippery Dicks. Nothing to do with Richard Nixon, I don’t think, because my father and my grandfather both thought Nixon was the second coming. I guessed a Slippery Dick was something like a Pudley, only slimier.
Anyway, I couldn’t afford to underestimate them again. They weren’t as dangerous as I had thought, since they hadn’t murdered Berkowitz. But framing and blackmail and obstructing justice weren’t likely to get them on anybody’s list for sainthood, either. Also, Tretorne had warned me I wasn’t going to get a second chance. He didn’t strike me as the type who wasted idle threats.
The first thing I did when the doc released me was make a call back to that little base in Arlington, Virginia. I talked to that special judge they had there. I explained everything we had on Williams and told him we needed a team dispatched to collect our prisoner. He said they’d have someone here within ten hours. They had this real nifty jet that had been seized by the DEA from a Florida drug lord and subsequently got turned over to the Department of Defense. Then, through a little sleight of hand, the jet disappeared off the inventory and ended up belonging to my secret justice unit.
Then I made sure Williams was locked away in his own cell. He had to walk on crutches because his testicles had swollen up nearly as large as billiard balls. He actually looked pretty funny, with his legs splayed apart, trying to walk without his big thighs rubbing against his groin. One thing was for damn sure. He wasn’t going to run away.
I made sure the guards at the facility knew they were not allowed to even enter his cellblock. I even made them all wear earplugs, on the grounds that it never hurts to be too safe.
Then I went to Imelda’s tent, instructed her on what we were going to do, and we walked together back to our office building. It took nearly three hours before we were done making our preparations.
I left her there and took a walk over to the NSA facility. I went through that same old routine of showing the guards my orders, ringing the buzzer, and staring into the camera. Miss Smith opened the door and greeted me again. I was too sore and swollen to engage in my normal, charmingly obnoxious banter.
She studied the bandages on my head, my black eye, my swollen lips, and the various other bruises and abrasions I’d managed to collect. She didn’t look sympathetic. In fact, she smiled. Not that old wooden smile, either. The real thing.
“I need to see Tretorne,” I said.
“I’m sorry,” she replied, trying to appear clueless. “I don’t know anyone named Tretorne. Are you sure you don’t want Mr. Jones?”
“Look lady, I want to see your boss, Jack Tretorne, or Jack of Serbia or Clyde Smothersmith-Blakely, or whatever stupid alias he’s going by today. By the way, I don’t like your alias, either.”
She spun around and did this huffy heel-stomping thing as she led me back through the facility, then down the stairs. I was in a fairly ornery mood myself. With a dash of petulance, she sliced her card through the slot at the conference room door, then nearly shoved me into the room. Tretorne and General Murphy were seated together, with a bunch of papers tossed around the table.
Miss Smith’s voice came out prudish and high-pitched. “Excuse me, Mr. Jones, General. I’m sorry to bother you. This officer is insisting on meeting with someone named Jack Tretorne. I told him there was no such man here.”
She must’ve thought she was putting me in my place, because a general was here and that was supposed to make me get real shy and timid. Tretorne gave her a swift sideways nod, like get lost. She smirked as she roiled past me, and I became instantly worried for any nation that had people like her in their CIAs.
Tretorne, I noticed, wasn’t wearing his duck-murdering vest. In fact, he looked quite natty in a perfectly tailored dark blue serge suit and a stiffly starched white shirt with French cuffs. A pair of big presidential cuff links were poking out of his sleeves, where they were meant to show. Well, I wasn’t impressed. Well, actually, I was, but I didn’t let on.
I said, “You’re together. Great. Saves me another trip.”
Murphy said, “What do you want, Major?”
There’s a way of enunciating a man’s rank that’s supposed to remind him of his place. The trick is, you put all the emphasis on that first syllable and depress the rest. Like “What do you want, Major?” It’s taught in Lesson 101 at West Point, and Murphy had been a good student.
Only problem was, I was past caring. I felt unfettered and seditious. I said, “A little wrinkle has developed in your plan, guys. CID just arrested Berkowitz’s real killer.”
Tretorne did not look happy to hear this. He toyed with one of those cuff links that had that presidential seal on it, then looked up. “It’s irrelevant, Drummond. You gave your word. There were no conditions.”
“You’re right,” I said, “no conditions. Just like when I took my oath to become an officer. No conditions then, either. Or when I took my oath to become an officer of the court. No conditions that time, either. That’s two unconditional oaths to one. You lose.”
Tretorne said, “Don’t do this, Drummond. Force my hand, and I’ll just come up with something else. You can’t win.”
I’d been waiting for him to say this. I’d rehearsed all kinds of great lines to throw back at him, but in the end I decided on a childhood classic.
