The President's Henchman (11 page)

“That’s exactly what I’m saying, Lieutenant.”

Welborn looked at the other man, but all he could see was his profile. Not the best angle to determine someone’s sincerity … which might have been what the captain had in mind when he proposed they go for a run.

“Why would she do that, sir?” Welborn asked.

“Because she understood me.”

“Sir?”

“We both wanted the same things: sex with each other and stars on our shoulders. She understood that reconciling with my wife would help my military career. Put a better face on my image. She said, in my place, she’d do the same thing. That was after she got over being angry about being lied to, of course. By then she realized the reason for my confession: I was falling in love with her.”

“She didn’t think, maybe, you had simply confessed because you’d already gotten what you wanted.”

“I wanted more of it. I wanted it all the time.” Cowan turned his head to look at Welborn. “Come on, Lieutenant. You’ve met Carina. Is it so hard to believe I’d fall in love with her? Want to be honest with her?”

Cowan turned his gaze back to the trail ahead. For which Welborn was glad. He didn’t see Welborn turn red once more. It wasn’t hard to for Welborn to imagine how he would feel about the colonel had he actually slept with her.

He tried to think of something else, and was surprised when Kira Fahey popped into his head. Then he cleared his mind of all thoughts of carnality and got back to business.

“If you love Colonel Linberg, sir, why did you admit to your affair with her? Why didn’t you deny it? Lie to protect her?”

Cowan sighed. “My wife had the goods. A note from Carina about an upcoming tryst. I’d left it in my uniform when I took it to the dry cleaner. Mr. Lo, my very conscientious laundryman, found the note before he cleaned the uniform. He pinned it to the plastic bag covering my uniform. My wife picked up the cleaning that day.”

“Your wife turned you in?”

“Not directly. She swears she never went to my C.O. Instead, she complained to a group of other officers’ wives. That’s all it took. The Pentagon has a broadband grapevine, Lieutenant.”

Which would also explain how the other officers knew, the ones Colonel Linberg had mentioned looking at her like gleeful adolescents.

“You know, Captain, that what you’ve told me today is likely to —”

“Put an end to my military ambitions? Yeah, I’ve thought about that. But the shit would only get deeper if I lied. So far I’ve only fudged the truth a little. And if the Navy has no further use for me…” He shrugged. “Maybe it’s time to rethink my future, anyway.”

“Why is it you’re not being court-martialed, sir? Colonel Linberg wasn’t the only party to the adultery.”

“I’m the prosecution’s witness, Lieutenant. Without me there’s no case.”

“Colonel Linberg’s note. What about that?”

“A joke. A prank from a colleague at work.”

Welborn thought for a moment. “You could have gotten away with it, the two of you.”

“If we’d both been sure the other wouldn’t talk.”

“So you love the colonel, but you don’t trust her.”

Captain Cowan found that one harder to answer. When he did, his voice was quiet. “I was afraid she was too much like me. And look what I’ve done. Will that be all, Lieutenant?”

“One last thing, sir: Have you been reassigned to new duties; does anyone have you hand-copying the UCMJ?”

“No.” The captain hadn’t liked that question at all. “I’ve been loafing along so far, Lieutenant. I’m going to run at my normal pace now.”

“Yes, sir,” Welborn said, keeping up even as the captain increased his speed.

The race was on, but it wasn’t competitive for long. Cowan had the longer stride, but Welborn was just as fit and fifteen years younger, and when it came to running, youth prevailed.

So much for letting yourself be underestimated, Welborn thought.

He got back to the parking lot a good quarter mile ahead of the captain and, being male and a professional snoop, he had to take a peek inside the Viper. It wasn’t the car’s interior that caught his attention, however. It was a note on the passenger seat. An appointment for later that morning. Captain Cowan was going to see someone named Merriman.

Merriman. The same name General Altman had made a note of in his office. Welborn got into his Civic and headed home to shower and change before going to his office at the White House.

As he made his way back to Washington, Captain Cowan roared past in his Viper.

There’d be no outrunning him this time.

Chana Lochlan had a two-story redbrick town house off Wisconsin Avenue, just above Georgetown University. McGill had learned enough about Washington real estate prices to infer the kind of money his client must be earning to live there: substantial. She ran up the steps to her front door, key in one hand, cell phone in the other. She was talking with her producer, telling him she’d be late to work, but not so late as to cause any problems.

Chana threw open the door and ran inside. Deke went in next. He never let McGill be the first one through a strange door; he was like Sweetie in that regard. Chana didn’t count. If she plunged headfirst into trouble, that was her worry not Deke’s.

McGill stopped at the front door. He looked for scratches on the surface of the lock, signs that it had been picked. The lock was a Medeco dead bolt, a serious means of keeping a door barred. There were no scratches on it.

Deke appeared from within the town house. “All clear.”

“And Ms. Lochlan?”

“She closed herself in her office.”

McGill nodded and went inside.

His first impression was that he’d stepped into a contemporary art gallery: white walls, abstract paintings, and track lighting. Everything but price tags and signs indicating which pieces had already been sold.

The furniture was all clean lines and sharp angles. Scandinavian with maybe an Italian accent here and there. Area rugs in white, pewter, and charcoal provided visual texture and a measure of relief from all the unyielding hard surfaces.

The most striking feature of Chana Lochlan’s home, however, was how damn
clean
it was. There was not a speck of dust to be seen anywhere. Not even a mote dancing in the sunlight that flooded through crystalline windows.

Deke had also noticed how immaculate their surroundings were. “You could fabricate microchips in here.”

“Very close to godliness,” McGill agreed.

At the moment, he didn’t hold out much hope of finding any physical evidence left by the intruder. Then Chana slid open two pocket doors to what McGill had assumed was the dining room but was in fact her office.

McGill asked, “Everything present and accounted for?”

“Yes. Thank God.”

“Nothing there that shouldn’t be?” The question sparked a thought for McGill. He decided to keep it to himself for the moment.

“No. Did you think I’d find something?”

McGill shrugged. “Let’s go see where you found the thong.”

Being reminded of that brought back the realization that she had let relative strangers into her home, but she firmed her shoulders and led McGill upstairs. On the second floor were two bedrooms opposite each other at the front of the house. Chana opened the door to hers and waved McGill in.

Ms. Lochlan slept on a sleek platform bed. The rest of the room continued the modern minimalist theme. Except for the wall of bookshelves opposite the bed. It all but groaned under the weight of the volumes it held. Politics, journalism, and … recovering from grief.

McGill checked each shelf closely.

Then he turned, and said, “The dresser where the thong was left?”

Chana opened the door to a walk-in closet next to the bed.

The space was larger than the bedroom McGill had slept in as a boy. Smelled better, too. And like everything else he’d seen in Chana Lochlan’s home, except for the glimpse he’d gotten of her office, it was spotless.

The dresser had been built into one side of the closet.

“Which drawer?” he asked.

“The top.”

“Do you mind if I look?”

“I’ll be downstairs in my office.”

“Fine.” He waited for her to leave and gave it a few more seconds. Tried to feel if there was any residue of illicit excitement in the air. Peeking through someone’s intimate garments was intrusive enough, but planting such an item, one designed to fire the imagination … McGill thought Chana had every reason to be scared.

The intruder, he was sure, already felt he had a relationship with Chana.

McGill looked at the drawer closely, but he didn’t see the slightest blur in its polished surface that might have been a fingerprint. Still, he opened the drawer from the lower left hand corner, using a handkerchief so he wouldn’t leave his own prints behind.

The drawer held an assortment of panties, brassieres, and unopened packages of hosiery. Each type of garment had its own neat row; each matched up by color and style with the corresponding items in the other two rows. Some of the panties and bras were fairly utilitarian, others were racier. But there were no thongs. No peekaboo bras. No fishnet stockings. Nothing that would have embarrassed Ms. Lochlan should she have to be rushed to the hospital.

Being careful not to disturb either the precise arrangements of the undergarments or his client’s sensibilities, McGill checked for store labels and sizes. It occurred to him that the intruder might also have done so. Perhaps even before he’d bought the thong he left for Chana. That way he’d get the size right, and he’d have the thrill of knowing he’d shopped where she did.

It was a place to start.

When he finished, he went downstairs to Chana’s office, found her sitting at her desk, and closed the sliding doors.

McGill took the comfortably worn leather reading chair that Chana directed him to; she sat on a black, upholstered, ergonomically correct secretary’s chair in front of her workstation. A late-model Wintel computer sat on the desktop behind her. A ceramic mustachioed bandito pointed his
pistola
at the machine. Appended to the bandito’s sombrero was a homemade dialogue bubble.
Crash even once, and I keel you!

On the wall over her work area were four framed photos. A gray-haired man whose intelligent eyes and engaging smile showed a clear resemblance to his daughter. Two portraits of toddlers, maybe eighteen months old. At first McGill thought they were both of Chana, but then he realized the child on the left had blue eyes. A fraternal, near-identical twin? Last was a team picture, the UCLA women’s softball squad. A banner placed before the smiling group of athletes said NCAA National Champions.

“What position did you play?” McGill asked.

“I pitched, played first when my arm needed a rest.”

McGill nodded, looked around again.

“You don’t give dinner parties?”

“Hardly even go to any.”

McGill could identify with that.

He smiled, and told her, “We’ve had only one state dinner at the White House since the president took office. If the next one’s not for a long time, that’s fine with me.”

“But you’d never let the president host one without you.”

McGill shook his head. “That’s covered by the ‘For Better or Worse’ clause of our vows.”

Chana picked up a pen and pad of paper from her desk and scribbled a note.

“Something I should know,” McGill asked, “or just an item on your grocery list?”

“Idea for a project some years from now: Ask you and the president how you made it through your White House years. Looking back. After politics are no longer a consideration.”

“That’s the kind of thing you want to do?”

“What I want, just between us, is to be Bill Moyers. And by the time the president leaves office, especially if it’s two terms, it’s what I’ll need to do.”

“Why?”

She looked at him like he was pulling her leg. “You really don’t know?”

McGill shook his head.

“Because the next ‘Most Fabulous Face on TV’ is in journalism school right now,” Chana said. “Or high school. And I’ll be over the line by then.”

“What line is that?”

“The ‘Gray-and-Gone’ line. As in, if you’re gray, you’re gone.”

McGill thought about it. He couldn’t recall seeing a single female broadcaster, at least on a national level, who appeared on camera with gray hair. Men, sure. Lots of them. Women, not a one. But the thought of Chana’s being in front of a camera turned his thoughts back to the intruder.

It was a delicate subject to raise, the idea that had occurred to him earlier, but he did his best. “When I asked you before if you’d found anything in this room that didn’t belong here, I’d thought of an alternative theory of how someone might know of your private life.”

“My sex life, you mean.”

“Yes. The idea’s fairly disturbing, but it’ll have to be checked out.”

She folded her arms across her chest. “What is it?”