Sparks was shaking his head even more emphatically. “No, Dave,” he said.
“Putting aside the physic bullshit, this is all supposition. I can’t have you roaring off into the night raising hell about a problem that doesn’t officially exist. Don’t you understand that this is the sort of shit that got you sent down here in the first place?”
Stafford sat back in the seat and took a deep breath.
Sparks grabbed Dave’s right forearm and then let go when he remembered.
“Look at me, Dave. Listen to me. Besides the colonel, I’m probably the only friend in the business you’ve got right now. This assignment down here is your last chance, okay? The colonel made that very clear, at least to me. And to you, I think. You come yelling out of the fucking woods with your hair on fire about something like this and they’re gonna terminate your ass. It’s not like you have legions of defenders up there in D. C., right? An office full of people ready to go to the mat for you?
Do you? Do you?” Stafford said nothing but shook his head slowly. Sparks nodded. “You know I’m fucking right. Now tell me something: Do you have any admissible evidence that this guy Carson is running some kind of theft scam at the DRMO?”
“Nothing but the pattern we detected in D.C.” “But that was at another DRMO, right? Not this one?” Stafford nodded, staring straight out the window. Disaster, he was thinking. Again.
“Then I suggest you put your head down and see if you can develop some admissible evidence, Dave. Not from psychics, not from peeping into the back of Army trucks doing some kind of out-there exercise, and not about an emergency that does not exist. Work your brief, and nothing but your brief, because if you don’t, you’re going to be an unemployed civilian.
Hey, you didn’t go bracing Carson up on this by any chance, did you?” Stafford said nothing, but his silence spoke volumes. Unmitigated disaster. I should have known.
“Aw shit, Dave. Goddamn it.” Sparks sighed and slumped in his seat.
“Okay, I’m not sure I can help you anymore. If Carson goes crying to his bosses in DLA, and they go to DCIS, this may be out of my hands. I think you better come up to Smyrna in the morning. Do not go back to that DRMO. You understand me? I want you in my office in the morning before the shit hits the fan.”
“And you will not even try to believe me?”
Sparks gave him what appeared to be a pitying look.
“On the word of a mute psychic teenager, Dave? Can’t we go for at least a mutant Ninja Turtle?”
“And on the word of a trained child psychologist who’s run that school for many years? Who does not want that kid involved in this?”
“I don’t know that and you don’t know that. For all I know, she wants to be a star on America’s Most Wanted. Is she a psychic, too, Dave? Look, I think you’re just overwrought. Go get some sleep. Then come into the office in the morning. Maybe if we can piss on this fire early enough, we can put it out, okay? Lemme make some calls, head this thing off.
I’ll tell ‘em you were whacked-out on your meds or something.”
Sparks slipped out of the car but held the door open. “Remember who your friends are, Dave,” he said.
“Yeah, right,” Dave said. “Both of them.”
“Bingo. So get some sleep. Forget about goddamn psychics. That’s an order.”
22
Brig. Gen. Lee Carrothers rejoined his wife, Sue, out on their patio, where she was having coffee and reading the Washington Post. It was a glorious spring day along the Potomac, with the cherry blossoms and dogwoods competing with one another to set the woods ablaze in pink and white. Only the constant muted thunder of jets from National Airport marred the otherwise-pristine air along the river. He was decked out in shorts and a sweatshirt, having just mown their backyard.
“So what did Himself want?” she asked. “You don’t have to go in, do you?”
He sat down in a deck chair next to hers and took her hand. “You know that flap I’ve been dealing with all week? What I called the ‘Anniston problem’?”
“Yes?”
“Let me run something by you.” He then proceeded to tell her the story of the missing cylinder, ending with what the team had reported to the Security Working Group and what the group had concluded in its report to General Waddell. She was silent for a minute when he was finished.
“So,” she said finally, “they’re going to assume that thing was destroyed when the containers went into the— what’d you call it? The demil process?”
“Right.”
“And what if it didn’t? What if somebody heisted it?”
He nodded silently, looking out over the freshly mowed grass. They could hear the susurrations of Saturday morning traffic out on the G.W.
Parkway behind their backyard fence. His dear wife, Sue, was absolute hell on getting right to the heart of the matter, which was why he often consulted her, security or no security. Besides, she could keep her mouth shut.
“I asked that very question, early on, when we decided to send in a monitoring team to the DRMO at Fort Gillem, disguised as an exercise.
Got a ‘Who farted in church?’ reaction. Himself sort of made it clear that the right answer was going to be found there, at Fort Gillem, one way or the other. Either they’d find the containers, and the cylinder in one of them, or the containers would have been demiled, and we’d have to assume the missing cylinder was destroyed right along with them.”
“In other words, there were no other thinkable alternatives.”
“Right. Losing a cylinder of this stuff was simply ‘not possible.”
Himself was calling to reiterate that sentiment this morning.”
“Why? Did you object to the group’s findings?”
“Just to Fuller, that biological weapons guy from Die trick. I think maybe he had a word with Waddell. That maybe I needed my loyalty calibrated.”;
She put the paper down. “Biological weapons guy? I thought we were talking CW here.”
“Oh, we are. As if that’s not bad enough. Ambrose Fuller’s an old pal of Waddell and keeps him apprised of what’s going on out at USAMRIID. He used to work the BW program before 1968. He’s a veterinarian. They used [vets back then, and now, for all I know, to work the infectious disease vaccine programs there.”
“So why was Fuller pulled into this problem?” Carrothers had been thinking about that. Good question. “Because Waddell wanted him to chair the Security Working Group.”
“Lee?”
I “Yeah, right. Why a biological guy? Shit.”
I “What exactly was the good Herr General conveying this morning?” she asked. “That maybe your future as, crown prince of the Chemical Corps was dependent on manifestations of right attitudes? Like he wants to see Chairman Hillary’s little red book prominently displayed in your breast pocket?”
(Carrothers laughed out loud. Sue knew how things worked. “Nothing quite so subtle,” he said. “This is Myer Waddell we’re talking about. He said to go along with the report, and to keep any doubts I might have until such Jl time as I was head of the Chemical Corps, at which time ‘ j I would be free to open fire on either one or both of my I feet as I saw fit.”
“Uh-huh. And meanwhile?”
“Meanwhile? Well, hell, they might be right. The Working Group, that is.
It is logical that the missing cylinder was left in a container. It’s also logical that all the (containers went unopened into the demil process. Who the hell would go opening up a CW container?”