I walked out of my office and nodded at Imelda. She left her desk and followed me out into the street. I looked around a few times, then indicated for her to walk with me a while.
“What do you want?” she asked.
“I’d like you to go to my tent and get one of my uniforms. Remove all the patches and sew on sergeant’s stripes. Then get a nametag from one of your assistants and sew that on.”
Imelda said, “What’s this about?”
I said, “Imelda, I’m over my head. I need your help.”
Her tiny brown eyes got tinier, and I laid it all out. I didn’t like dragging her into this, but I couldn’t see that I had any other choice. For one thing I couldn’t sew. For another, I was going to need a great deal of assistance and a worthy co-conspirator. She listened attentively, nodded occasionally, blew bubbles with her lips a few times, but did not seem the least surprised.
“One of those two legal aces has been rattin’ on you, huh?”
“At least one. Maybe one or two of your girls as well. Every move I’ve made has been watched and reported from the second I got off the plane. I’d guess our phones are bugged. Maybe the office also.”
She considered that a moment. “I can get that checked.”
“Please don’t. Let whoever’s listening think everything’s normal. They have to believe they won.”
She agreed in her characteristic way, mumbling something under her breath, which could have been “Great idea. You’re really one hell of a smart guy” or “Friggin’ A.” Whichever.
I went to the mess hall for a belated lunch. Any long-serving veteran will tell you there’s a trick to eating in Army mess halls. You have to be very, very imaginative.
The mess hall was a long, narrow wooden building, jammed with blocklike wooden tables and chairs. The extent of interior decoration was a few plastic plants someone had sprinkled around and a bunch of Army recruiting posters on the walls. The recruiting posters mystified me. I mean, who exactly did they expect to recruit in an Army mess hall in Tuzla? At any rate, this would not work at all. I decided the recruiting posters were actually Rembrandts and a few Degas, because the mess sergeant-I mean the Paris-trained chef-was a man of eclectic tastes. The plastic plants became towering tropical ferns that wound their way along the walls, with long, winding 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.