Mortal Allies (47 page)

“This is Michael Bales,” Mercer continued. “If he tries to take a plane or ship out of Korea, I want him stopped. He’s a smart boy. He’s also a trained cop. He might be wearing a disguise and he might have a false passport, so have your guys alter this photo to show what he’d look like with a beard or mustache, or dressed as a woman, or with glasses and his hair dyed blond. I know all us White folks look alike to you Koreans, so make sure you distribute composites of what he’d look like if he took precautions. This is a no-fuck-it-up, Kim. Don’t let me down.”

Kim nodded. “No problem.” He picked up his stacks of folders and prepared to leave.

Mercer said, “One other thing. Can your people put a watch on Choi?”

Kim smiled graciously. “Consider it done, Buzz.”

“Good. If we break this thing, I’ll make sure my boss back in Langley tells your boss here you were the man who broke it. I was mystified by some funny things going on, so I went to you for help, and you figured it all out.”

Kim smiled even more broadly. “That would be very kind of you, Buzz.”

Then the two of them shook hands and Kim left. I had to give Mercer credit. As embarrassing as it would be for the Koreans to discover this spy ring working right under their noses, it would be doubly humiliating if the credit went to the Americans. This way, the Koreans could save some face. And this way, Kim had a strong personal incentive to help us in every way he could.

I
stopped by the judge’s front office to pick up the list of potential court-martial board members. Then I went to the hair parlor for a brief visit so Katherine wouldn’t think I’d been kidnapped, or maybe murdered and buried in some grove of woods. That’s probably what she was hoping happened, so why not show my face and disappoint her?

The place was a hive of wild activity. The trial was set to start in less than twenty hours, and Katherine, Allie, Imelda, and all her worthy assistants were going through the last-minute frantic sweats any well-oiled law office goes through before the big show.

A stack of neatly typed motions lay on a table, and I shook my head as I stopped and riffled through them. Katherine obviously planned on filing them with the judge at 1559 hours, one minute before closing time. It didn’t matter that Carruthers had warned her — Katherine was intent on pissing him off with a juggernaut of last-second requests for judgments. She couldn’t resist. Eight years of legal habit wasn’t going to be washed away just because some judge threatened to rip off her head and “poop” down the cavity.

When I stuck my head in her office she was chattering with somebody on the phone. She looked anxious but lovely. She glanced up and shot me the bird. It wasn’t a casual gesture. She meant it.

I then went over to Allie’s side office. I said, “How’s things?”

She gave me a surprisingly cold look. “Where have you been? We’re up to our ass and could use help.”

I grinned. “I’ve been running around checking some last-minute details.”

“Like what?”

“I spent the better part of the morning waiting at the judge’s office for the list of potential board members.”

“Did you get it?”

I nodded. “Longest damn list I ever saw. There are nearly eighty officers on it. They’re obviously planning on losing a lot of members to voir dire challenges. They’re probably right. Considering the nature of the crimes, a lot of these guys are going to admit they’re so emotionally repulsed they can’t make detached judgments.”

Allie said, “But out of eighty officers, we should at least be able to find ten fair men and women.”

“The problem is I never saw a list packed with so many infantry officers.”

She said, “So?” in a tone that betrayed her naiveté about the Army. See, all Army officers aren’t exactly interchangeable parts.

I said, “Look, the Army has some twenty-six different branches. There’s lawyers like me, doctors, supply guys, maintenance guys, finance guys, and on and on. The more the job sounds like a normal civilian job, the higher your chance the guy holding it thinks like a civilian. The only difference between them and some guy you’ll find on the street is they have to wear funny clothes to work every day.”

“But infantry guys are different?”

“Very different. They’re the Jesuits of the Army. They love discipline and they love to impose it. We JAG officers usually try to purge as many of them off a board as we can.”

Allie said, “So we’ll challenge them all off.”

And I said, “Of the first thirty names on the list, two thirds are infantry. They’ve stacked it. We’d be lucky to whittle them down to half the board.”

I felt a presence behind me. I turned around and Katherine was standing there.

She’d been eavesdropping. Her face was frigid. She said, “Well, you’re the asshole who talked our client out of the deal. Still think it’s such a great idea, Drummond? Still think you gave our client the best legal advice?”

“My two cents had no effect. He never had any intention of taking the deal.”

She stared at me. “That’s not what I asked. Do you still think you gave him the best legal advice?”

“I don’t know if it was the best legal advice, but it was my best advice.”

Her face was cold and hard. She was trying to stare me down, but I wasn’t about to let her humble me. This was what psychologists call transference. She was teed off at her client, and because I’d agreed with him, and I happened to be a handy target, she was spewing her anger at me.

She pointed a finger in my face. “Be in my office at three this afternoon with your strategy for the voir dire. That’s supposed to be your area of expertise. I want a survey of the potential board members and detailed lists of challenges and questions.”

“Okay.”

Her finger was still pointed at my face. “And keep your nose out of everything else. From here on, your duties are confined to advising me on matters of military law. You will no longer converse with our client. You will not meet with the judge. You will no longer participate in our strategy reviews. Take one step outside those boundaries and I’ll have you removed from our team. Is that clear?”

“That’s clear.”

She stomped into her office. I looked at Allie; she refused to meet my eyes. From the look of things, Katherine and her staff had made some decisions about me in my absence. I was no longer a trusted member of the team. Maybe I never had been a trusted member of the team.

I took my board list and limped away. I mean, I could have stayed and argued with Katherine, but what would be the point? Besides, this made things easier. I could dedicate my time to catching Bales without worrying about the trial.

I went straight back to my hotel room and went through the motions of developing a game plan for the voir dire. Having spent eight years screening potential boards, this was a fairly straightforward task. First, circle the names of officers who look like they might be favorable to the defense — in this case, women, minorities, and officers who work in the softer branches, in that exact order. Then put arrows next to the people you want to get thrown off. Target the infantry guys first; go after the higher ranks particularly, because the longer an officer serves, the more likely he or she is to buy into the culture and its hoary little peccadillos.

Then start developing the normal sequence of questions, like, “Have you read any newspaper articles or seen any TV news shows about this case that have left you predisposed or prejudiced in any way?” You’ve got to ask that question even though it can be a two-edged sword. It can eliminate as many sympathetic jurists as hard-nosed ones. Then you get to the questions only an experienced Army attorney would know to ask. “Have you ever punished a soldier for homosexuality?” Because Whitehall was a captain, all the potential board members were at least captains, and in the case of all those infantry officers, that meant they’d all held command positions. A fair number would’ve had troops who committed homosexual infractions they would’ve had to pass judgments on. I doubted many would publicly admit they’d gone soft on them. We’d get rid of a few infantry officers on that one.

I thought up a nice kicker: “Have you ever kissed or fondled another male?” Ask any average guy that question and you’ll get a fairly negative response. Ask a high-testosterone guy — like an Airborne, Ranger, or infantry stud — and you’ll get a nasty snarl, a derisive snort, and a very repugnant denial. In short, an inadvertent display of homophobic prejudice of the type that will wipe some more infantry officers off the board.

I added a few more of these sly stilettos, then considered my job done. I called Mercer and told him I was on my way. The early warning was because of the Korean cops who’d been following me. When I passed through the gate into the other half of Yongsan, where Mercer’s office was located, he had guys in the guardshack to block the cops from following me.

I then hobbled back to the CIA complex. The place was as busy as an ant’s nest. There were more spooks than I could count. Mercer must’ve brought in reinforcements, maybe from other offices around the peninsula, maybe from Japan. The agents seemed to be organized into seven or eight teams. Several of them stood directing pointers at stand-up easels and talking quietly to various groups. The air crackled with seriousness and tension.

I drew a few curious stares. I knocked on Mercer’s door and he yelled for me to enter. He was talking on that souped-up cell phone again, and he automatically dropped his voice to a whisper. Pretty damned silly, if you ask me. I fell into a seat and waited till he finished.

That didn’t take long. “You ready for the big time?” he asked.

“As ready as I’m going to be.”

“Carol’s with Bales’s wife right now.”

We’d still been trying to figure out how to lure Bales’s wife out of their Army quarters when I’d left Mercer to go see Katherine. The whole operation depended on Mrs. Bales being gone from their house.

I was curious. “How’d you arrange it?”

“We had the wife of the colonel in charge of the MP brigade invite her to an impromptu luncheon. Carol’s there as a waitress. The luncheon ends at two, so we’ve only got an hour.”

I said I was ready to get to it, so Mercer led me out. The second we got outside the door, he yelled at everybody to go get into their positions, and, as we say in the Army, asses and elbows flew all over the place.

It took me ten minutes to limp over to the MP station. I went right up to the desk sergeant and said I needed to see Chief Bales. He got on the intercom, informed Bales he had a visitor, then pointed at a hallway and told me to go straight to the sixth office on the left. I told him I knew my way, and he went back to doing whatever he was doing.

Bales barely looked up when I entered. He didn’t stand or offer to shake. He merely gave me a distracted, unwelcoming look.

I said, “I need to have a few words with you.”

He pointed at the wooden chair in front of his desk. He leaned back in his seat and stroked his chin and rotated his head, partly annoyed and partly curious. Probably he figured I was making some last-ditch effort to finagle some piece of information about the Whitehall case. Or maybe I was here to bitch about my beating and make a few threats.

I said, “Whitehall’s trial starts tomorrow.”

“So I hear.”

I glanced down at my watch. The big hand was between 12:04 and 12:05. The telephones in Itaewon were scheduled to be shut down at 12:05 on the dot. Buzz’s friend Kim had arranged it. For thirty minutes, the entire Itaewon telephone grid was going to be disconnected. Like I said earlier, the KCIA could do things the CIA only dreams about.

I looked up and said, “You know the odd thing?”

He smiled. “What’s the odd thing?”

“Well, it’s having all these crimes occur in Itaewon. I mean, there’s Lee’s murder, then the attempted murder of Keith Merritt, then the slaughter outside the gate. And who’s in charge of all those investigations? Choi from the Korean side, and you from the American side.”

“Yeah, well, when you’re the best, you get the tough ones.”

“I guess you do.”

“Comes with the territory,” he said, brushing back his hair, like he really meant it.

“Must keep you pretty busy.”

“I stay up with it.”

“So it seems, Chief. You know, I even went back and reviewed the record of those cases you and Choi handled together. That’s the beauty of computerized records. Just enter a couple of names and the computer does all your work for you. Hell, before this, it would’ve taken three paralegals a month to collect all that data. Isn’t the modern age just wonderful?”

He placed his elbows on his desk, suddenly much more interested in what I had to say.

I continued. “How’s it work? Does Choi call you every time something intriguing happens over there? Christ, for five years, you’ve led the station in case closure rates.”

“I get my assignments from the brass, just like every other CID agent here. I can’t help it if my closure rate’s higher than the other guys. Maybe it’s luck of the draw. Maybe I just work it harder.”

I shook my head. “Come on, Chief, there has to be more to it. Your closure rate’s over eighty percent. Four out of five. I doubt there’s another CID agent in the world who comes anywhere near that. Hell, a CID agent’s considered a golden cow if he gets fifty percent. You’re a regular Sherlock Holmes.”

He smiled impatiently. “What’s the matter, Major? Do you actually have a problem with a detective who solves his cases?”

“Well, that’s the other thing. Nearly eighty percent of your investigations were in Itaewon.”

“What’s so mysterious? I’ve been here five years. I’ve developed good sources, an army of snitches, and I know my way around. I’ve got a great rapport with the Itaewon precinct. The command knows it, so they throw a lot of that stuff my way.”

“What gives you such great rapport with the Itaewon precinct? Is it because you’re married to Choi’s sister?”

“It helps,” he said, still smiling.

“Well, that’s the other odd thing I wanted to ask you about. I ran a background check on Chief Inspector Choi Lee Min also. Born in Chicago in 1954, emigrated back to Korea in 1971, attended Seoul National University, where he graduated at the top of his class. A very impressive guy.”