Wisely, she decided on a different tack. “I was under the impression you guys promoted capable people to such high ranks. Don’t tell me Hollywood had it right all along?”
“I never said Morrison isn’t capable. I worked with him once, back when I was in the infantry. Back before he met Mary, even.”
She leaned against the door and said, “Tell me about that.”
“I was a team leader of a unit that was ordered to take out a terrorist cell that was planning to murder some American diplomats in Israel. Only our intelligence agencies intercepted a few of their messages and somebody decided to preempt it. Morrison was the liaison officer from the intelligence community. I had no complaints there. He knows his job.”
“What part did you have complaints about?”
“Him. He was bossy and abusive to my people. He started telling us how to prepare for the mission, how to plan it, how to cut eggs. I told him to back off, and he rudely reminded me he was a lieutenant colonel and I was a lieutenant. He started angling to come along. I said no, he wasn’t part of the team, wasn’t screened, wasn’t trained. It was dangerous for him, and dangerous for us.”
It wasn’t hard to guess where this was going. “But he went anyway?”
“Some general who was a buddy of his pulled strings. He ended up on the plane.”
“And did it cause a problem?”
“I suppose that depends whose side of the story you listen to.”
“I believe I’m stuck with your side.”
“We landed on the coast twenty miles north of Beirut, then worked our way by foot down to the Shiite quarter of the city. We were all dressed up like Arabs, our hair and mustaches dyed black, our skin tinted. Morrison kept bossing my team around. We exchanged words a few times, and he got testy, so I got testy back. I couldn’t figure out what his game was. I assumed he was just a guy who wanted to have a war story to tell his grandkids. I underestimated him.”
“How so?”
“The target turned out to be different. Wasn’t anybody’s fault, it just was. We used our night-vision goggles to stake it out and saw nearly twenty guys, instead of the six we’d been told to expect. The whole mission had been rehearsed down to the minutest detail, and I had only eight men. Morrison insisted we had to call it off. I said we’d just replan it on the fly. The terrorist attack was scheduled for four days away, so it was then or never. He kept insisting, and that’s when I figured out his game. He was a plant. The intell folks were scared about what would happen if their information turned out to be wrong and the mission got bollixed. He was their bureaucratic stopgap.”
She nodded like that made sense. “And…?”
“We gagged and hog-tied him, took down the target, and picked him up on our way out.”
“And you have hard feelings? Have I missed something here?”
“Indeed so. We went back to Bragg and he went back to his intelligence unit in Maryland. A few months passed and my team was ordered to attend some ceremony. On the appointed day Morrison arrived with his general officer buddy, then some guy was reading the citation for Morrison’s Silver Star for gallantry in action. He got credit for the whole operation-planning it, leading it, even courage under fire during the takedown.”
“I see.” She stared out the windshield while I spent the rest of the drive to Golden’s office wondering how I was going to compartmentalize my feelings toward the lousy prick I was defending.
The address I’d been given turned out to be a big, modern office building on 14th Street, a few blocks from the White House. We took the elevator to the twelfth floor, the doors slid open, and there stood two fierce-looking badasses with Uzi submachine guns pointed at our chests. Eddie has a real sense for how to orchestrate a warm welcome.
I grinned somewhat awkwardly. “I’m Major Drummond, and this is Miss Mazorski. We have an appointment to see Major Golden.”
The one on the right whispered something into his lapel, and another guard instantly appeared, only this guy wasn’t carrying an Uzi, just a big black pistol in a shoulder holster even an unpracticed eye could detect, since he had his jacket off so you’d be sure not to miss it.
“Damn, guys, nobody told me this was a gun party. I would’ve brought mine and we could all whip them out and play who’s-got-the-biggest-gat.”
Nobody smiled. Katrina said, “Don’t antagonize them. I’m not sure they’ve been fed yet.” Which was much funnier than what I said, but then, in certain situations, I don’t mind being upstaged by my underlings.
The new guy hooked a finger and led us through a series of corridors, past a number of offices droning with quiet activity. Whatever agency this was, it obviously owned the full top floor of this building. Eddie had to be in heaven. He was all ego anyway, but blow a little fairy dust into it, like his own armed guards and dozens of special assistants, and he’d become Dumbo the Flying Elephant. I was seriously not looking forward to this meeting.
We were eventually deposited in a big empty conference room and ordered to wait. So we waited. And more of the same.
Our appointment was for eleven, and at twenty after, the door blew open and he entered, followed by ten or eleven fawning assistants. They just kept coming and coming, and the only one I recognized was Karen Zbrovnia, who wore her Army uniform, unlike Eddie, who sported an exquisitely tailored blue wool suit.
So. A bit more about Eddie: Picture Robert Redford before he got old, wrinkled, and splotchy, toss in more persuasive bullshit than William Webster, and then add the generosity, grace, and selflessness of Jack the Ripper.
Eddie is all this, and so much more. He is to Army law what Babe Ruth is to baseball, the holder of more records and awards than there ever was. At least that’s what someone once said about Eddie, and to show he believed every word of it, he made it a practice ever after to send autographed baseball bats to everybody he beat in court. Lots of us have those bats-I have two of them-and we all privately dream about someday bashing Eddie’s beautiful head in with them.
He rounded the table and approached, squinting and offhandedly saying, “Drummond, isn’t it? Haven’t we met before?”
This was Eddie’s trademark greeting to all opposing attorneys, his lousy way of saying, Hey, you’re so insignificant I barely recall we ever met.
“Yeah. And who are you? I’m supposed to meet with some asshole named Eddie Golden. He here yet?”
It was a very stupid thing to say, and Eddie immediately chuckled like this was just so damned amateurish, so adolescent, but he’s so magnanimous he’d just take it in stride instead of stuffing it down my throat with some snappy comeback. Which, really, was a snappy comeback.
Admiring chortles erupted from his fleet of admirers. I swiftly said, “Uh, this is my co-counsel, Katrina Mazorski.”
“Jesus Christ, Drummond. Where’d you find this one?” He laughed, igniting another broadside of yuck-yucks from the gallery.
Katrina calmly weathered this, folding her arms and waiting patiently for the laughter to subside to giggles. She grinned. “You’re very funny, Eddie.”
“I know.”
“ ‘Where’d you find this one?’ That’s what you said, right?”
“That’s what I said.”
Her grin disappeared. “The implication being what, Eddie?”
“Choose your own implication,” he replied, ever the cocky prick.
“I can’t. Help me out here. ‘Where’d you find this one?’ What’s the implication? Why did everybody laugh?”
The background chortling died. It suddenly struck Eddie what everybody else just realized. “There were no hidden implications.”
“There had to be, Eddie. I hope it wasn’t sex discrimination. What? Where’d you find this skank? What gutter did she crawl out of? What?”
“I just meant… like, where’d she come from? Virginia? New York?”
She put a hand to her chin. “And that’s funny?”
“To some folks… apparently.”
She gave him a threatening look. “I don’t think it’s funny. Do you think it’s funny?”