“We had our reasons,” Murphy said. “But we’re prepared to make a deal with you now.”
I looked down at my watch. In another twenty-seven minutes, Imelda and her crew were going to push a few buttons and unleash an army of hungry reporters on these two. They’d probably guessed what I had in store for them. It was a little like a poker game where they knew I was holding a royal flush, and they wanted me to allow them to take some of their cash out of the pot before I flashed my cards. These guys had balls made of brass.
I chuckled and shook my head. “I’m listening.”
Murphy said, “We’re willing to let you complete your investigation. We won’t hinder you in any way. No more games. We’ll give you the actual logs. We’ll tell you everything we know, and you see if you can find the truth.”
I said, “How kind of you.”
Tretorne ignored my sarcasm and said, “There’s only two conditions.”
“And what are those?” I snarled. I mean, where was this guy coming from? Conditions at this point?
“Hold off on going to the press. When you’re done, come back and talk with us.”
It was a surprising offer, so I took a moment to consider it. Maybe they were just trying to buy time till they could arrange some other diabolical plot against me. If so, they were stupid. They’d just admitted the details of their conspiracy. Okay, maybe it wasn’t a flashback to Operation Phoenix, but running a secret war wasn’t chump change, either. They’d also admitted their orders came from the White House.
But they weren’t stupid men, I reminded myself. God knows, I’d learned that by now. They had to be aware they’d just given me more ammunition to use when I went public and exposed them.
“That it?” I asked.
Tretorne said, “After we talk, if you want to go public, that’ll be your option. We won’t try to stop you.”
I will admit, I was stunned. I had expected that they would look for some last-minute way to shut me up. Maybe this was it. Maybe they were lying their asses off to buy time to find a foolproof solution against Sean Drummond and his goody-two-shoes philosophies. If they were, though, I sure as hell couldn’t see it. I could blow the whistle anytime I liked.
It was my turn to test the waters with a few demands. “No more phone taps? No more bugs in my office? No more following me around?”
Tretorne grinned. “You had all that figured out, huh?”
“Yep.”
“Done,” said Tretorne.
“Oh, and your mole goes,” I said. “Morrow climbs on the next plane.”
Tretorne’s grin became a smile. “You might not want to get rid of her.”
“Oh yeah I would.”
“She’s not working for us.”
I cocked my head a little, and he actually chuckled.
“That little shit Delbert?” I asked.
“Floyd Collins, actually. Floyd’s a real Army lawyer, too. A very ambitious one, although unfortunately, his trial record nowhere near matches the record you were provided in your folder.”
Sometimes you just outsmart yourself. I had thought Delbert, or Floyd, had just seemed too obvious to be the mole.
“Okay, he goes,” I said. “I won’t have you owning anyone’s vote.”
“Done,” Tretorne said.
“And I’ll have to tell Morrow what’s going on. She’ll have to be cleared, too.”
“Okay.”
I got up and started to leave. I made it to the door before Murphy said, “One more thing, Major.”
I turned around and faced him. That big, handsome face was staring up at me.
He said, “Sometimes those principles they teach at West Point about duty and honor and country, sometimes they clash against one another. The world’s not as pristine as West Point makes it out to be. Sometimes you have to decide which of those three is most important. You have to decide which principle you need to sacrifice.”
I stared back at him. I knew he was reciting the rationalization he’d employed to justify his own dishonesty in this affair. And it got me feeling real righteous and uppity.
I said, “I didn’t go to West Point, so I don’t know about all that. I tell you what I do know. I know what makes us different from the Serbs. We don’t coddle our murderers. We don’t lie to the world when our troops commit a massacre. We wash our laundry in the open. That’s duty and honor and country, all in one.”
He shook his head in a condescending way, like I just didn’t get it. Only he was wrong. He was the one who didn’t get it. At least that’s what I thought.
Chapter 28
A good night’s sleep did a lot for my disposition, but I couldn’t say the same for my body. My bruises and broken ribs sort of calcified, and the pain seeped down through another few layers of tissue. I awoke feeling terrifically stiff and sore. I limped to the latrine tent, took a long, hot shower, and tried to coax the warm water into soothing my aches and pains. I ended up with crinkly, wrinkled fingers, but my wounds proved impregnable. I was still sore as hell.
Clapper had not made his normal two o’clock call. I guessed he was too abashed to talk with me. Delbert was gone when I walked into the office. He left a note in my message box: It read “Sorry,” and it was signed Floyd G. Collins, Captain, JAG. Probably it was best that Murphy and Tretorne sneaked him out in the middle of the night. Probably if I’d seen Floyd I would’ve done something stupid, like reposition his nose so it stuck out through the back of his head. He lied to me, screwed me, and trampled all over his oath as an officer and a lawyer. I have this bad habit of taking things too personally. Tretorne and Murphy must’ve figured that out about me.
Morrow was back at her desk, rabidly scribbling something in longhand. She coldly ignored me as I walked by. I went to the coffee urn and began making a cup. I made as much noise as I could, clanging my spoon against the side of my mug, knocking the coffeepot around, then took several real noisy, annoying sips as I tested my mix of sugar and cream. She kept right on giving me the bone-chilling indifference routine. She was good at it, too. Personally, I’ll take the hot, smoldering treatment any day. You can always duck a punch.
I walked over and irritatingly peered across her shoulder at what she was doing. She kept writing. I coughed a few times; loud, obnoxious hacks. She bore down and wrote harder. I clumsily bumped into her chair. She rearranged it and got back to her writing.
I finally said, “Guess you don’t want to know what happened to Delbert. Why he isn’t with us anymore. Or how I got us a five-day extension.”
Then I turned and walked back into my office, closing the door behind me. I stared at my watch. Thirty-six seconds passed before she knocked. Curiosity, it seems, is a far more powerful incentive than anger.
I told her to come in and have a seat, then spent thirty minutes explaining what had really been going on around here while she thought she was innocently trying to get at the truth. Here and there she stopped me to ask a few questions, but mostly she just listened. That gorgeous face of hers traveled through a range of emotions from surprise to hostility, then indignation, then eventually full circle right back to curiosity again.
“Why didn’t you tell me about all this?” she asked.
I was deathly afraid she’d get around to asking that. I stared at my desktop.
“You bastard. You thought I was Tretorne’s stooge, didn’t you?”
“No, I never thought that,” I lied and winced. It didn’t even sound convincing to me. “I mean, I wasn’t sure,” I amended. “Besides, what does it matter? We have a green light now.”
This was an awful lot of disturbing news to learn in a few minutes, and she needed some time to digest it. She was mad as hell, at them and at me for not trusting her. But she was also a lawyer, and thus was trained to keep her emotions in tight rein.
“Why don’t we just hold a press conference and blow the whistle?” she finally asked.
The truth was, there was no good answer to that. If we were smart, that’s exactly what we’d do. I’d made a deal with the devil, and only a damn fool thinks you can do that and walk away smiling. Now that Morrow was part of the deal, she had a vote and she was having second thoughts. Maybe it was first thoughts. Hell, I guess I was
