Worst Case Scenario (10 page)

Chapter Thirteen

“Wasn't Pilkington upset about you going to Quentin behind his back?” Marjorie asked when Michaelson joined her at Cavalier Books shortly before noon the next day.

“He was quite cross,” Michaelson acknowledged. “At least he pretended to be. I pointed out that if I'd talked to him ahead of time, he would technically have been collaborating with me. I opined that Quentin would have seen through me instantly and tumbled to my guilty association with Pilkington, to Pilkington's presumed prejudice. At that point he pretended to be mollified.”

“Did he give you the disks?”

“Disk,” Michaelson said, handing a manila envelope to her. “There's only one, and I'm afraid his giving it to me means he's had someone look at it and he doesn't think there's anything significant on it.”

“No sense booting it up and plugging ‘Highways to Indians' into Word Search, then?” Marjorie asked.

“You know,” Michaelson said thoughtfully, “I think that in the two chats I've had with Scott Pilkington since we visited Ms. Bedford's apartment, ‘Highways to Indians' has somehow failed to come up in the conversation. Forgetful of me, but then I'm getting to an age where that kind of thing is apt to happen.”

“I'll give the disk a try, then—even though it's a little hard to believe that I'll stumble onto something that the professionals available to Pilkington and Quentin would miss.”

“Don't sell yourself short. Whatever professionals they're using haven't produced what Quentin's after yet. Partly I think that's because Quentin's not going to let anyone know exactly what he is after until he's holding it in his hand and is ready to use it. That's why he swore to me that he didn't know why General Artemus had been forced into early retirement.”

“You think he was lying about that?” Marjorie asked.

“Not a doubt in my mind. He knows every detail. Sitting where he has been since the last inauguration, he'd have to be brain-dead not to learn that much if he really wanted to find it out.”

“Then why did he favor you with that high-wattage sales job, that luminous bribe about naming your own cabinet position? What does he want from you?”

“He wants me to come up with usable, concrete documentation of what he already knows. He thinks there's at least a chance that I can do that. The catch is that to have a prayer of accomplishing anything like that, either you have to find a road map on the disk that will lead us to the documentation, or I have to find out why Artemus got canned and work backwards from there.”

“But Quentin won't tell you why Artemus got fired, or even admit that he knows himself. So how do you plan to get the information?”

“The only idea I've come up with so far,” Michaelson said without a trace of enthusiasm, “is to ask Artemus.”

Michaelson took his leave and Marjorie prepared to confront the lunch-hour rush at Cavalier Books. At the stroke of two she mentally declared the rush over and hustled the computer disk Michaelson had left with her back to her Spartan desk in the stockroom.

In impatient anticipation she slipped it into her Compaq and summoned its directory onto the screen:

She sighed.

She pulled up the first file:

ARLISS VERSUS HARDACHER

Summary of the Deposition of Steven Arliss

Marjorie stopped reading. She asked Word Search to find “Highways to Indians.” It came up with nothing.

She sighed again. This was shaping up as a long afternoon.

***

A gentle rain was falling by the time Michaelson reached the modest house of ocher-colored brick in McLean, Virginia, where Artemus lived. He found the retired general kneeling at the near border of a flower bed that seemed to occupy a third of the backyard. Squishing through the drizzle-beaded grass, Michaelson introduced himself, shook hands, then pointed at an empty steel bucket a couple of yards away.

“May I?” he asked.

“Be my guest.”

Sissy Artemus, who had let Michaelson into the house and directed him to the backyard, had warned him that her husband might grant an audience but certainly would not allow his gardening to be interrupted. Michaelson turned the bucket upside down and sat on its bottom, grimacing only slightly as accumulated damp seeped through the seat of his pants.

What would most people think a warrior looked like? Michaelson wondered, reflecting on several he had known. Not, surely, like Artemus, with his avuncular face, his thinning red hair plastered across his brown-blotched scalp, his slightly thickened middle bulging a bit over the black leather belt at his waist. Had Artemus lost that special cold fire sometime in the late seventies or early eighties, felt it flicker out late some sleepless night while he thought about brave men and frightened boys under his command who'd been sacrificed a few years before to electoral calculations?

Michaelson thought he could tell if he could see the man's eyes. But he couldn't do that right now.

“Do you know why I've come?” he asked.

“Define ‘know,'” Artemus said as he worked his fingers lovingly through rich loam. “Sorry. Inside joke. You've come because you want to learn something.”

“Actually, I'm here because I want to understand something I've already learned,” Michaelson said. “I know Jeffrey Quentin offered you a return to active duty, a shot at a plum assignment, and
de facto
rehabilitation of your career. I know you turned him down. But I want to understand why.”

“Now, how do you figure you know all that?” Artemus asked the question in a gently joshing tone, without taking his eyes off the viscous soil he was kneading.

“The first part is simply the standard Quentin bribe adapted to your situation. I know he offered that to you because he offered the functional equivalent to me, and you have a lot more to give him in exchange than I do. I know you turned him down because he hasn't delivered and he's the type who knows better than to breach illegitimate contracts.”

“Are you sure you're as smart as you think you are?” Artemus asked in the same voice as before.

“Not entirely. But the important thing in Washington is to be smarter than other people think you are. I've managed that much for over forty years now.”

“Then why do you need anything Quentin could give you?”

“I don't. I
want
something he could give me, but that's not the same thing.”

Artemus sat back on his heels and laboriously scooted his knees sideways until he was giving Michaelson about a three-quarter profile. He gazed with deeply hooded eyes at the older man.

“Don't bullshit me,” he said jovially. “I know about you. I remembered your name the minute Sissy told me you'd called. You got yourself talked about plenty when I was working at the White House.”

“I'm flattered,” Michaelson said. “When you were at the White House I was either rather old for an area director or rather young for a retired foreign service officer.”

“You retired early from the State Department, but you weren't pushed out. You decided on your own to leave because you wanted to set yourself up for national security adviser or CIA director. Everyone including the tour guides knew that.”

“I'm an ambitious man,” Michaelson conceded mildly. “But a large part of the jobs I want amounts to drawing lines. A national security adviser who's willing to do anything the president wants him to is worse than dangerous—he's useless. There are things I won't do to get those jobs, because there are things I'd have to refuse to do if I got them.”

“That's easy to say from the sidelines.”

“I've had plenty of practice. I've been on the sidelines a long time now.”

“If I were you, I'd take up gardening,” Artemus said.

He grinned bitterly as he said this. With the grin his eyes opened wide, and Michaelson saw the fire: banked, perhaps, but not gone. He realized that it must be killing Artemus to kneel here tending roses instead of planning troop movements or plotting procurement strategy.

“I'm not going to waste your time,” Michaelson said. “You had a choice when Quentin approached you. You made it and in my judgment you made it correctly. You refused to cross the line. What matters right now, though, is
why
you made the choice you did. You're the only one who can answer that question for me. If you're willing to answer it, I'm eager to hear what you have to say. If you're not willing to answer it, I'll go nurse my frustration someplace a little bit drier.”

“Why does it matter?” Artemus asked.

“A woman named Sharon Bedford died young about ten days ago. She shouldn't have. The answer to my question has something to do with her death and therefore with her life. That's why it matters.”

Michaelson felt that he'd passed some kind of a test. Sighing briefly, Artemus gathered up a trowel and a mini-rake.

“I guess I did it because I wanted to face a choice like that and get it right while there was still time,” he said. “Let's go inside.”

***

Whatever paralegals get paid, Marjorie thought fiercely, it's not enough. No amount would be adequate compensation for wading through these dreary, tedious, repetitious exercises in finger-pointing, blame-shifting, evasion, and self-justification—much less for finding the few nuggets of substantive information buried in there and bringing them out. She had stolen more than two precious hours from the limitless demands of Cavalier Books, devoted them to slogging doggedly through deposition summaries prepared by Sharon Bedford, and come up with nothing.

She now knew that the phrase “Highways to Indians” wasn't nestled conveniently within any of the summaries, at least in any obvious way. She knew that the six summaries she had read from beginning to end overflowed with mind-numbing detail about dozens of things that shouldn't have led to the murder of Sharon Bedford or anyone else, except perhaps a couple of lawyers. And she knew that she had to find a better way to do this.

The disk listed the deposition summaries in alphabetical order, by case name. Hoping with a combination of desperation and giddiness that putting them in chronological order might suggest something more promising than she'd come up with so far, she rummaged through piles on her desk until she found the neatly typed invoices Bedford had sent to Hayes & Barthelt for her work. The invoices themselves were dated and each summary charged for on an invoice also bore a date, so it was easy for Marjorie to list the summaries from earliest to latest on a legal pad.

Having done so, she contemplated her handiwork. Nothing.

Calling the disk directory back to her computer screen, she compared her handwritten, chronological list with the electronic, alphabetical list. Nothing.

Except that the handwritten list was shorter. Nuts. She must have missed one. Which? A quick check disclosed
Cucurri v. Gardner a/k/a
as the summary missing from the handwritten list.

She thumbed back through the invoices.
Cucurri v. Gardner a/k/a
wasn't there. Bedford apparently hadn't charged Hayes & Barthelt for summarizing a deposition in that case.

Marjorie retrieved the Cucurri summary and clicked down to the end. END OF DEPOSITION. All caps. So Bedford had finished the summary. But she apparently hadn't billed for it. Why? Whatever the reason might be, the only place Marjorie could think of to look for it was in the summary itself. So that's what she began doing.

***

“Did you know it's possible to have a totally secret court-martial in this country?” Artemus was asking Michaelson about the time Marjorie began reading the Cucurri summary. “I mean absolute star chamber. Locked and guarded courtroom. Sealed evidence. No public notice of charges or outcome. And if anyone goes looking for it later on—brother, it just didn't happen.”