Just after three o’clock, Captain Mccarty knocked once and let’himself into Admiral Carpenter’s office. The admiral was on the phone, as usual, and he waved Mccarty over to a chair. A minute later, he hung up. “So, what did you learn at Langley?”
“I learned absolutely, positively nothing,” Mccarty replied, opening his notebook. “My contact in their general counsel’s office put me together with a woman-if you can call her that-from the Technical Operations Directorate.
You should have seen her, a dead ringer for Mrs. Khrushchev. A walking, talking, personality-free zone. Came in, sat down across the table from me in some kind of interview room, got her breath back after the effort of walking, and gave me what sounded like a fully rehearsed statement.”
He consulted the shorthand in his notebook again. ““My name is Madeliene Parker-Smith. The Directorate of Technical Operations has no records pertaining to a Navy Hospital Corpsman Galantz. Any interdepartmental association of military personnel with the Directorate would be a matter of record and would involve the concurrence of both the Department of Defense and the individual’s military personnel agency… No record of such concurrence exists.’ We have spoken.”
“Did you get a chance to explain the possible circumstances by which they might have come across Galantz in Saigon?”
“No, sir. She delivered her speech, pushed some kind of a button under the table, and suddenly I had a brace of renta-cops standing next to my chair. I was escorted back to the badge lobby.”
“Well, well, well,” the admiral mused, rotating his chair to face the windows, his fingers laced together behind his head. “They knew you were coming to see them about Galantz, specifically?”
“Yes, sir. I’d given them HM I Galantz’s name and serial number. They knew.”
“And had that answer ready.”
“There stood Madeliene the Immovable, like General Jackson’s Virginians at First Manassas: a veritable stone wall. “
The admiral swiveled back around. “So in a sense, we have an answer.
This Galantz must have been spooked up.
The question is, When?”
Mccarty nodded. “On the other hand, Princess Happy may have been stating the bald truth. The Tech Ops people have never heard of the guy.”
“Yeah. Okay. Let me pull the string one time at my level.
Maybe I need to go see my dear friend, the Director of Naval Intelligence, after all. Sometimes spooks will trade secret signs and totems only with other spooks.”
“And what shall we pass on to Karen Lawrence?”
“Nothing. Which, in terms of facts, is what we have. Just some educated cynicism based primarily on our combined sixty years of experience in dealing with those people. We might as well try for the facts one more time before we worry her pretty little head about it.”
“Aye, aye, Admiral,” Mccarty said in a tone that suggested he was not entirely in agreement. Carpenter eyed him over his reading glas ‘ ses.
“Always a safe answer, Dan,” he pronounced.
After Mccarty had left the office, Carpenter picked up the phone to his yeoman. “Get me through to Admiral Kensington,” he said. “On secure, please.”
As the band broke into the Navy hymn, Karen had trouble controlling her eyes. The stately, dolorous, yet hopeful chords carried across the grassy slopes of the cemetery with such power that even the civilian tourists up on the hill stopped taking pictures to listen. So she was startled when she saw Admiral Sherman starting to rise out of his chair.
He appeared to be staring at something up on the hill. -As she strained to see what or who it was, she caught a movement among the grave diggers standing around the backhoe.
Train. He had apparently also seen the admiral’s sudden interest in something or someone up on the hill, and he was moving behind the backhoe, as if to go up the hill. She looked back at Sherman, who was standing now, causing the flag officers seated on either side to look up. Feeling a sudden fist of apprehension grab her heart, she looked back up the hill, half-expecting to see a man with a rifle. But there was just the same small crowd up there, so what on earth was he looking at? There, standing next to a group of midshipmen in uniform: a kid. No, a young man, not a kid.
Scrawny figure. Black motorcycle jacket opened over a white T-shirt. A cigarette hanging from his lip in impudent mockery of the somber proceedings down the hillside. As Karen looked on, the young man apparently made eye contact with Sherman, because he grinned at the admiral. There was no mistaking it: an almost ugly flash of teeth. But then the midshipmen up on the hill moved across her line of sight, and he was gone. She looked back at Sherman, who was now sitting back down.
Baffled, she looked for Train.
He was no longer in sight.
Forty minutes later, Karen and the admiral were heading back into Washington in his official sedan. She was anxious to ask him what it was that had attracted his attention up on the hill. But then she decided that she had better talk to Train first.
“I’m very sorry for your loss, Admiral,” she said. The words sounded trite. She glanced over at the driver, a civilian from the Defense Department motor pool. “But we still have some business with the Fairfax County, um, people.
They do want to meet.”
“Well, not tonight,” he said immediately. “I’m still too upset about losing Galen. How about tomorrow? Although I shouldn’t even say that without looking at my calendar.
Damn it.
She waited for a few minutes. “I’ll talk to them. Perhaps we could meet off-line again, maybe in Great Falls this time,” she proposed. “Perhaps at my house. Same deal as last time, after working hours. That would be better than your having to go to Fairfax.”
“Fine,” he said distractedly.
He was staring out the rightrear window, his mind a thousand miles away.
“I”Il call them this evening, then,” she offered. “Tentatively for tomorrow evening, say nineteen hundred?”
“Fine.”
At 5:30, Rear Admiral Carpenter walked down the C-ring to the offices of the Director of Naval Intelligence, Rear Adm. Kyle St. John Mallory. He smiled as he reached the door and glanced at the name board. What was it about the intel world, he wondered, that seemed to attract these pretentious-sounding names?
“Come in, Thomas,” said Admiral Mallory, who came around his desk to shake hands. He was a tall, slim, and perfectly bald officer, and he was known for affecting British mannerisms and dress, even to the point of insisting on the traditional British pronunciation of his middle name as “Sin-Jin.’ True to form, he was wearing an off-white Royal Navy cardigan sweater that was about two sizes too big for him over his uniform shirt and trousers. He was senior to Carpenter, thus the instant familiarity and first name.
“Kyle,” the JAG responded, shaking hands and then taking a chair as the DNI’s executive assistant withdrew, closing the door behind him. Mallory took the adjacent chair and offered coffee. Carpenter demurred.
“Are your fields Working?” Carpenter asked, glancing up at the odd-shaped black boxes perched in the ceiling comers.
“They’d bloody well better be,” Mallory replied.
“Whose ears might be about to bum?”
“Those people up the fiver.”
“Ah. Just a moment, then, please.” He turned to reach the intercom on his desk. “Full SCIFF, if you please, Petty Officer Martin.” He waited, looking expectantly at the intercom box.
“Full SCIFF, Admiral.”. A low humming sound filled the room, and the panel of floor-to-ceiling windows behind the DNI’s desk went opaque.
“Thank you,” Mallory replied in an almost-singsong voice as he switched off the telephone console and turned back around to face Carpenter.