The Kingmaker (3 page)

I said to her, “Christ, your genes are greedy cannibals.”

She giggled. “Bill always said I mated with myself.”

Then the hard part. There’s a good reason bachelors aren’t supposed to have children and it’s called competency. I try to come down to their level, to engage them in conversations about things I assume they’re interested in, like say, Tonka trucks and Barbie dolls, and they look back at me like I’m a moron.

I regarded them with my most charming smile. “So, hey, what do you guys think of the Redskins’ chances this year?”

Mary rolled her eyes, while Jamie, who looked to be eleven or twelve, pondered this a moment, then finally replied, “They need a new coach.”

“You think so?”

“A new quarterback, too.”

“A new quarterback, huh?”

“And their defensive backfield stinks. So does their offensive line.”

“I take it you don’t think much of them?”

“My grandpa likes them, so I hate them.”

The timing would be off, but I stared at him and wondered if he was my lovechild. I said, “I predict you’re going to grow up and become a very great man.”

Courtney, who looked to be six or seven, had been retreating swiftly toward the protection of her mother’s legs, that way shy kids do. But she was a girl—tiny and inexperienced—and thus, should still be susceptible to my charms. I flashed her my smarmiest smile. “And what about you, Courtney? Don’t you like football, too?”

She looked terrifically confused as her mother reached down and stroked her hair. “Ignore him, darling. He gets awkward around women.”

Courtney giggled. “You mean he’s a dork?”

“Honey, we never use that word in front of the people we’re talking about,” said Mary, wagging her finger. “Wait till he’s gone.”

Courtney giggled some more. “Girls don’t like football,” she instructed me. “I like Playstation, though. Especially the games where you get to shoot people.”

“Do they show the blood?”

“On the better ones. Some of them, the people just die.”

“Yeah, I could see where that would get boring,” I admitted with a knowing nod.

“I like it better when they bleed.”

“I think I love you. Would you happen to be free on Friday night?”

She hugged Mary’s leg tighter. “He’s strange, Mom.”

“I know, honey. He can’t help it. Don’t make fun of him, though. He’s very sensitive.”

I stuck out my tongue at Courtney and she broke into giggles.

“All right, you two,” ordered Mary. “Back upstairs and stay away from your grandfather. He’s slipped into one of his grumpy moods.”

Their obligation to meet their mother’s friend completed, they scampered off with relief on their faces. I was impressed. It only took those few moments to realize that Mary was a great mother. The chemistry between her and the kids was palpable and affecting.

We sat on the couches and faced off again. I asked, “And is Grandpa ever not grumpy?”

She shook her head and rolled her eyes. “Ignore the stuffy old ass. He thinks we’re idiots for bringing you into this. I told him Bill insisted on you, that he had always said if he got in desperate trouble, he wanted me to call you.”

“Well . . . that’s interesting.”

She wisely ignored this. “Sean, he followed your legal career very closely. He really admires you, you know.”

“Well, desperate trouble calls for desperate action, I suppose.”

She nodded that this was so and asked, “How do you think it’ll go?”

“Frankly, it’s going to be an ordeal for him, for you, and the kids. When it comes to espionage cases, the government leaks everything. It’s like the bureaucrats feel some obnoxious compulsion to tell the American people exactly what kind of disgusting bastard they’ve caught.”

She closed her eyes and looked pained. “I’ve seen it before. I’m trying to prepare myself.”

Truthfully, there was no way to prepare for this, however, I moved on and asked, “What are they telling you at work?”

Regarding this particular question, the day after we graduated, Mary disappeared into that big CIA training facility down by Quantico, Virginia, to begin the career Homer had tried to derail with his fruitless pimping. I never understood why Mary was so intent on becoming Jane Bond, however, she was the kind of model candidate the CIA dreamed of attracting—smart, polished, adaptable—and its recruiters had likely promised her a world of bullshit. Over the years I’d heard she was doing quite well, however, her world was as much smoke and mirrors as mine, so I had not a clue what she did.

She leaned back in her chair and released a big gust of air. “They haven’t told me anything. They can’t. I’m the Moscow station chief whose husband is accused of working for the Russians. It’s a terrible predicament for everybody.”

Oh my. Trying to hide my stupefaction, I asked, “The station chief?”

She nodded as I tried to absorb this news. Needless to say, this presented a whole new array of potential problems. I settled for, “So you haven’t been canned or anything?”

“Not yet. I’ve been reassigned to a management job here in Langley without access to anything even remotely sensitive. They’ll keep me packed in mothballs until this thing is resolved, then they’ll quietly pinkslip me.”

She explained this matter-of-factly, as though it was just the way things worked, and why worry about it. Actually, it left a great deal to be worried about. In reply to my stare, she said, “I know . . . it’s going to be the bombshell when it gets out. I’m not looking forward to it.”

I pondered this a moment, then asked, “Did you have any inkling it was going down?”

“I’m his wife, Sean. I was the last person they’d say anything to.”

That obviously made sense. I asked, “Did the two of you . . . uh. . .”

“Share things?”

“Exactly.”

“He had a Top Secret, SCI clearance. He was the military attaché, which is an intelligence job, and I was the station chief. Leads, sources, discoveries, you name it—I held nothing back.”

“Mary, I advise you to get a lawyer.”

“I know. I’ll be interviewing several over the next few days.”

“Have you been interrogated?”

“Formally, no. I’ve had a few sly queries from my boss, the deputy director for intelligence, but nobody has yet sat me down for a rigorous grilling. They’ll get around to it, though.”

Indeed, they would. “Don’t say anything. As his wife you’re protected from testifying against him. Not to mention, you need to keep as much distance from this as you can.”

“I’m not sure I can sell them on that. He’s my husband. I’m in this up to my eyeballs.”

“Legal distance, Mary. There are all kinds of possible avenues of culpability in this. Get that lawyer quickly, and if they try to question you in between, politely refuse to answer anything.”

She nodded, but with an amused expression, I suppose
because it’s a bit awkward to get legal advice from a former lover. I recalled the warning about mixing business with pleasure, however, this was old pleasure mixed with new business so perhaps it did not apply.

I asked, “Are you mad at him?”

“Truthfully, I’m furious. I can’t believe this happened. Maybe it’s not his fault, and I keep trying not to blame him . . . I can’t stop myself. I need someone to be mad at.”

“It’s natural, and you’ll get past it. Say he actually did it, got any idea why?”

“Not one, Sean. Everything was going so well. We had a good life . . . we both loved our work. Did you know Bill was on the two-star list that’s about to come out?”

I didn’t know. “Was” would be the operative verb, however, as some guy was probably at that very moment seated in a back room putting a match to that list. The Army tends to be very grouchy about these things.

I walked across to where she was seated, bent over, pecked her cheek, and said, “I have to go. You’ll be hearing from me soon, okay?”

I thought her expression looked bleak and abysmally lonely and I didn’t really want to leave. What I really wanted to do, I won’t go into. I asked, “You sure you should be staying here? With him?” I pointed a finger at the ceiling to show I meant you-know-who.

She gave me a forced smile and replied, “It’s the best place for us. He believes in protecting his brood, and that’s what the kids and I most need.”

Wrong. What she and the kids needed most was to turn back the clock a dozen years, a different husband, a different father, and so on.

But, this being America, when fate deals you a crappy hand, there is one other thing you need—a lawyer. And so, here we were.

G
iven that Eddie had a several month head start, speed was going to count for everything at this stage. I pulled over at the first gas station and used a pay phone to call my legal assistant, whose name, title, and all that crap is Sergeant First Class Imelda Pepperfield. She answered on the first ring, as that’s her way with everything, prompt to the point of preemptive.

I said, “Hey, Imelda, me. You know that Morrison case that’s splashed all over the news?”

“I heard of it.”

“It’s ours. Morrison asked for me, and his wife is a, uh, an old chum and she, uh, she sort of, well . . . twisted my arm.”

Imelda’s about five foot one, 160 pounds, a fiftyish black woman with a pudgy face, frumpy build, gold-rimmed glasses, and slightly graying hair. People who observe her only from a distance immediately lump her into that harmless grandmotherly category, one of those late-middle-aged women who use their spare time to knit mufflers and sweaters for their nephews
and make chicken soup for sickly friends. One could more safely confuse an atomic bomb with a firecracker.

Imelda was raised in the mountains of North Carolina, where she acquired the affectations of a poorly educated backwoods hick she has long since outgrown, yet milks to this day to persuade suckers like me that there’s some tangible reason she’s supposed to salute and call me sir. What lurks behind that wicked camouflage are a razor-sharp mind, two master’s degrees, and the moral ambiguity of a Mack truck. She’s spent nearly thirty years in the Army, seeing law practiced and malpracticed in all its gritty varieties, and offers her seasoned advice whenever it’s asked for—or not—usually the same way a ballpeen hammer helps a tent peg find its way into the ground.

“This a bad idea,” she finally replied.

“Why?”

“ ’Cause you don’t know diddly-squat ’bout espionage cases. ’Cause you over your head.”

Not many people can say “diddly-squat” and still be taken seriously. But then, I don’t know anybody who doesn’t take Imelda seriously. I take her very seriously. I assured her, “It’s like any other criminal case. Different actors and setting is all.”

“Horseshit. This ’cause of his wife?”

“Imelda, she’s just an old friend. This isn’t personal, it’s professional . . . and please recall that her
husband
asked for me.”

Without replying to that point, she asked, “You heard who the prosecutor is?”

“Golden. So what?”

“You takin’ this case ’cause you hot for the wife of the accused traitor, and you goin’ up against Golden, in something you don’t know shit about. And now you askin’ me so what?”

Imelda has a maddening habit of developing her own opinions, which can be annoying, but then I have my annoying habits, too, so it all balances out. I replied, “I’m not hot for Mary. And regarding Eddie, I’ll blow him out of the courtroom.” Getting back to the business at hand, I added, “I’ll look into hiring
an associate, and I need you to arrange a satellite office at Leavenworth.”

“You better find a damned good one . . . You gonna need it.”

“Thank you for your confidence in my abilities.”

“Didn’t say I was confident in your abilities.”

She was right, however, and I next placed a call to the JAG personnel officer and asked him to run a computer search for all the Army lawyers who spoke Russian.

He called back a few minutes later with two names, one being Captain Karen Zbrovnia, previously committed. And a guy named Jankowski, whose Polish was flawless, but whose Russian was rated just shy of marginal.

This wouldn’t do; I needed someone who could speed-read a Tolstoy novel in Russian without missing a single fractured nuance, assuming the Russians have such things. I therefore called an old law school chum who practiced criminal law in the District of Columbia. Harry Zinster is his name, and he is the Hedda Hopper of Washington law; sadly, what he isn’t, is an even halfway competent lawyer.

He answered himself, as he definitely can’t afford a secretary. I said, “Hey, Harry, Drummond here. I need a favor.”

“Whatever. You got a friend who needs good representation? I’ve got a busy calendar but I’ll see if I can squeeze him in.”

Nice try—Harry hadn’t seen a busy calendar since law school, leave aside that I’d never commit a friend to his feeble hands. I said, “Actually, I’m looking for an attorney who speaks Russian, and speaks it really well. Know any?”

“A few.”

“I also need it to be someone who either has, or can get, a security clearance. Have I just made the problem too hard?”

“Nope. Katrina Mazorski . . . she used to have some kind of government job. She works out of her home in the District, doing criminal stuff mostly.”

“You know her, or
of
her?”

“Know her, Sean, but only vaguely. She hangs out sometimes
at the Fourteenth Street precinct, scrounging scraps off what the night shift drags in. We’ve shared a few late-night cups of coffee.”

One of the things I love about Army law is that my clients fall into my lap off a conveyer belt. Spending all night in police stations begging pimps and whores and muggers for work is a part of the profession law schools don’t advertise. Funny thing, huh?

I asked Harry, “Would you happen to have her number?”

“Somewhere . . .” He began opening and slamming drawers. This lasted awhile, as organizational skills were another of Harry’s weaknesses. “Found it,” he finally mumbled.

I thanked him, jammed in another seventy-five cents, and she answered on the first ring. I said, “Katrina Mazorski?”

“Yeah.”

“My name’s Drummond. Harry Zinster gave me your name.”