He looked tired, too, with lank hair and these big puffy dark things under his bloodshot eyes. He also looked mopey. He thought he had his crime solved, then the Army’s most respected brigadier general shows up to give me an alibi, and now poor Martie was right back where he started. Only a lot more tired.
I didn’t mind one bit, though. I mean, I liked Martie, but not enough to volunteer to stay here and be his culprit.
I went back to my tent, showered, shaved, and put on a fresh uniform. Delbert and Morrow were both back when I walked into the office. Nobody knew I’d been arrested and released. At least nobody acted as if they knew. The mole probably knew but was canny enough to keep it to himself. Or herself. Whichever.
I invited them both into my office. Then we spent an hour or so hashing through the motions of reviewing what they’d accomplished. The folks back at Bragg had told Delbert that a preemptive ambush wasn’t exactly what they’d envisioned when they wrote their rules of engagement. However, they reasoned, the parameters certainly fit as long as you stretched things the right way and as long as the team was under genuine duress. No surprise there.
Morrow had built a lengthy, intricate chronology of events that closely resembled the checkery outfit Martie had worn the day before. She’d produced this twenty-page computer-generated spreadsheet, composed of tiny color-coded blocks for each man in Sanchez’s team. It was an amazing piece of work. You could follow their every action for four straight days. I sarcastically mumbled something about how I couldn’t tell when they went potty in the woods, and she gave me this dead serious look and assured me she had that in an annex but would certainly integrate it in the master chronology if I thought that was necessary. I had no idea if she was kidding.
When we were done, Delbert and Morrow stood up and started to leave. Morrow suddenly paused at the door and asked if she could speak to me. In private, she stressed. I nodded, and she shut the door and returned to her same seat.
She looked deeply troubled. She paused, then said, “I’m having second thoughts.”
“About what?” I asked.
“It’s kind of hard to explain. Just a sense.”
“A sense about what?” I asked again.
“I no longer think they’re innocent.”
I shook my head and cleared my hearing. “You’re kidding, right?”
She looked me dead in the eye. “No. When I was working with them to construct this Chinese puzzle, I just got this impression that it was a little too fabricated. Does that make sense?”
“I wasn’t there,” I said in my most maddeningly ambivalent tone.
She stood up and began pacing. “Look, I make my living dealing with guilty clients. Sometimes, you know, you just get a sense. Well, I got that sense.”
“And just where was this sense last week?”
“Look, I know. I’ve changed my mind.”
She’d picked up a pencil and was holding it against her lip again. I don’t know why, I still found that sexy as hell.
“Look, Morrow, we’ve got two days to get this done. You saw those satellite pictures. You heard those transcripts.”
“I know,” she said, still moving back and forth across the front of my desk like one of those ducks in a carnival shooting gallery.
“Well, then, how in the hell do you explain it?”
“I can’t,” she said. “I just know. All nine of those men were able to perfectly reconstruct the events of those four days.”
I said, “Sure. They not only experienced it together, they also had ample time to discuss it among themselves. Get mad at that chunky Air Force jailer of theirs for letting them get away with that, but it doesn’t make them guilty.”
“Nine men don’t remember events with the kind of coordinated accuracy I heard over the past two days. It’s like they’ve been drilled and rehearsed. Like actors in a Broadway play. They never argued with one another. There were no contradictions.”
I stared at her incredulously.
She stopped pacing. “There’s a clincher, too.”
“And what’s this clincher?”
“Every man now knows exactly how many flares went off. Both before and after they were detected. Don’t you see what’s happening here? Even after you ordered that major to keep them separated, those men were somehow allowed to get back together and compare notes. I couldn’t find a single point of disagreement.”
This really was ironic. Here I’d suspected Sanchez and his men because they’d walked all over one another on the details, and now Morrow thought them guilty as hell because their stories were so mysteriously identical.
That’s when it hit me. That Tretorne. That devious, manipulative bastard. Morrow was the mole. He’d put her up into coming in here with this last-minute change of heart just to flush me out and see if I was going to keep our Faustian pact.
Well, I knew how to handle this. I said, “Look, Morrow, you can’t do this. It’s… well, it’s too late.”
She wheeled around and her eyes got kind of pointy and narrow. “It’s not too late until the packet’s signed.”
I tried my damnedest not to smile. She was such a charming schemer, but I now had her number.
“And how are you going to explain it?” I asked derisively. “You gonna vote for court-martial on the basis of your sixth sense? Or are you gonna try to explain that the witnesses were too good to be believed?”
“I’ll vote whatever my conscience tells me. I’ve got two more days to decide what that is, and I will not be pressured.”
“Hey,” I said, “I’m just trying to save you from embarrassing yourself. Delbert and I believe they’re innocent. I’m totally convinced of it. In fact, they’re heroes. They should all get medals for what they did.”
She scrutinized my face, and I guessed she was trying to decide if I was being genuine. I stared back with this look of fiery conviction, the same look I used to give court-martial boards when I was a defense counsel and my client was guilty as hell. Sometimes it actually worked. Sometimes it didn’t.
Finally, she pounced very angrily from the room. Tretorne and Murphy would’ve been very proud of her. A compelling performance right down to the finish line.
I, on the other hand, now had a vital phone call to make. I walked out and told Imelda I’d be back in an hour. I returned to my tent, put on my Harold Hufnagel disguise, then went back to the supply room. The same private was there, lounging in the back and listening to some rap group chanting about shooting and castrating cops. How would you like to be a cop and hear that tune pounding on the radio? Well, at least they weren’t chanting about lawyers. I asked the private, who was bouncing to the rap, if I could use the phone again. His head was bouncing, too, so I took that as a yes. I dialed Janice Warner’s number.
“Hello,” she answered.
“Hi, Mike Jackson here,” I said, employing my clever password.
“Oh, you,” she replied. “Is my delivery ready?” I could tell by her tone that she was having a little trouble playing along.
“Yeah. Can you come pick it up in fifteen minutes? After that, I’m gonna be tied up for a few hours.”
“All right,” she said. “I’ll be right there.”
I then positioned myself about midway between the mess hall and the Visiting Journalists’ Quarters. After about five minutes, I saw her heading my way, and I walked out and intercepted her. I took her arm and we started walking through the streets again.
She wore khaki trousers, a blue button-down shirt, and the same black leather jacket. In daylight, new observations came into play. She had great skin, very white, almost like alabaster. Her eyes, I now noticed, were nearly black, like her hair. And she had these thinly arched eyebrows, like curved scimitars. Very mysterious and very alluring.
“Hi,” I said.
There was no warmth in her recognition. “Hello, Sergeant Stupnagel.”
“Hufnagel,” I reminded her, “Harold Hufnagel. Harry to you, though.”