Secret Sanction (13 page)

“So what will you have?” I asked as she slipped into the chair across from me, trying to act oblivious to the drooling fools who were whistling and catcalling in some strange tongue. I halfway expected her to order an Evian bottle with a twist of lemon or some such obscenely healthful drink.

“Scotch on the rocks,” she said, which nearly threw me off my chair.

I stuck my finger up for the bartender to send over one of the same, then turned back and decided it was time to reappraise Miss Morrow. I sniffed the air once or twice and the odor of lilies filled my nostrils. We were dealing with an oxymoron here. A man can always tell a lot about a woman from her choice of perfumes, and lilies are something I always associate with the wholesome, midwestern variety of her gender. The ones who stay virgins till they’re twenty-one. The ones who call their mothers every week and still send money to their old 4-H clubs. The ones who don’t go near scotch.

“That your normal drink?” I asked.

She sort of smiled. “No. Usually I’d just order an Evian with a twist of lemon, but I wanted to surprise you.”

I guess I blinked once or twice, and she giggled, apparently delighted that she’d beat me at my own game.

“Yeah, I usually drink Evian, too,” I finally said, thinking I was being witty.

“No, you usually drink scotch. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that you’ve never taken a sip from a bottle of Evian in your life.”

“And why would you bet that?”

“Because. Want to play a little truth or consequences?”

If I weren’t such an overconfident guy, I would’ve said no, right then and there. Instead, I stupidly said, “Sure. What’s the stake?”

“Point-by-point loser chugs a shot of scotch. Overall loser pays the tab.”

“All right,” I said, withdrawing a quarter from my pocket and flipping it. “Heads or tails?”

“Heads,” she said, and it came down heads, and I should’ve quit right then and there.

“Okay.” She smiled. “What’s your father do?”

“He’s a hairdresser,” I said.“Lives in San Francisco and works at one of those men’s hair parlors frequented by gays. He’s kinda fruity, too, but he had this one-time fling with a woman, and I was the result.”

“Drink!” she ordered me. “Your father is ridiculously heterosexual. In fact, if I was to guess, I’d say he was career Army.”

I wiped a few drops of scotch off my lips, stuck my hand up for the bartender to send over another, and did my best to hide my shock.“Why’d you guess that?” I finally asked, hating to think I was that easy to read.

“I wasn’t guessing. I was making a reasoned deduction. Sons of strong-willed men often become very rebellious and act like wiseasses. I know. A lot of them end up as my clients.”

“Okay,” I said, wanting an early victory to even the score, “where are you from?”

“Ames, Iowa,” she said.“I grew up on a farm, spent my childhood milking cows, plucking eggs from underneath hens, and praying desperately that I’d get into law school.”

“That’s true,” I declared. “Drink! And don’t forget the part about how you were crowned homecoming queen and almost married the captain of the football team.”

“You drink,” she ordered. “I’ve never been to Ames, Iowa, in my life. I’m from the Northeast, was born and raised in a city, and the closest I’ve ever come to a cow is digging into its broiled carcass on my plate.”

My mouth kind of fell open as I reached down for my shot glass. “Really?” I asked, dumbfounded.

“Really,” she said with a vague smile. “And for your information, I went to an all-girls’ private school. We didn’t have home-coming queens. Or a football team, either.We had a field hockey team, and I didn’t date the captain, because I was the captain.”

I gulped the scotch and considered the proposition that she had schemed on playing this game before she ever came down here. She must have deliberately doused herself in that lily-smelling perfume just to throw me off her scent. No play on words intended.

She still hadn’t touched a drop of her scotch. She grinned, then said, “Okay, why’d you leave the infantry and become a lawyer?”

I stared at the new shot glass that had just appeared and thought about that a moment. Finally, I kind of shrugged and admitted,“I guess I got tired of killing people. I went to war a couple of times and decided I really didn’t like it all that much.”

She studied me a moment, staring deeply into my eyes, and her face suddenly became very soft. Her eyes, which I already mentioned were abundantly sympathetic, acquired a few more notches of compassion. “Drink,” she said, almost remorsefully.

“Nah, you drink!” I shot back. “I had a great time at war. In fact, I nearly cried when they were over.”

Which actually was true. And which actually was why I became a lawyer. I developed this huge phobia that I would end up like my father, in love with combat. And maybe I’d end up just like him in another regard, too, with an arrow stuck in my rear end. Metaphorically speaking, of course.

“All right,” I asked, relishing my victory,“were you ever married?”

“That’s too personal.”

“No limits to this game, lady. This is a blood sport. Answer the question.”

“Okay, I was. My husband was also an Army lawyer,” she said and seemed suddenly very sad.“One day I came home early from a trip, and there he was, in bed with a twenty-year-old paralegal.”

“How long were you married?” I asked. Although the game has a one-question rule, I was taking advantage of the most supreme rule: to wit, that higher rank doth make its own rules.

Her eyes seemed fixated on something inside her tiny shot glass.“Three years.We met in my second year of law school and got married right after it was over. I guess I blame myself. I’ve always worked too hard and I...well...I, uh, I guess he felt neglected.”

“Drink!” I barked.

She looked at me in shock. “What?”

“You heard me! Drink!”

She gulped it down, then gave me this really cute, really spiteful look. “How did you know?”

“You said too much.You’re the type who likes to keep everything private.”

“All right. Were you ever married?” she asked. “No.”

“Were you ever in love?”

“One question to a turn.”

“You asked two the last time.”

“Okay. I was in love once.”

“And why didn’t you marry her?”

“You’re over your limit.”

She gave me a pleading look.“I’ll drink the scotch and cede the round. Please. Just answer.”

“Drink first,” I insisted, and she did.“Because you can’t marry your dog, no matter how much you love her,” I said, giving her a perfectly evil smile.

She frowned. “That sucked.”

“So did the lily perfume,” I said, which nearly made her fall off her chair, she laughed so hard. “By the way,” I added, “it’s three to two, my favor. You pay for the drinks.”

She stuck two fingers up, the bartender grinned, and two more drinks instantly appeared. The bartender was Italian, and he obviously thought I was trying to get her drunk as hell before I took her upstairs and screwed her lights out. In America, that’s considered caddish behavior, bordering on rape. But this was Italy, where the rules are different. Here it’s considered delightfully good form, since nearly anything that results in a roll in the hay is probably good form. He gave me this fawning, jealous smile as he brought the drinks, and I gave him a manly nod of acknowledgment.

“What did you think of Sanchez?” she asked.

“Seemed a nice enough fella,” I admitted.

“I thought so, too.”

“Was he what you expected?” I asked.

“No. Not at all what I expected.”

“What did you expect?”

“I don’t know. I’ve defended a number of killers. He didn’t strike me as the type. Too soft maybe. Not aggressive enough.”

“He might not be a killer.”

“How do you get that?”

I sipped from my fourth glass of scotch in only twenty minutes and felt it starting to do fuzzy things to my brain.“I’d guess that something very strange happened out there among those nine men.”

“Strange like what?”

“Well, you need to understand something. This wasn’t combat like in Vietnam or Korea or World War Two, where whole units sometimes snapped and went into some kind of killing frenzy. Sanchez and his guys were under a very different type of strain.”

“So you don’t think it happened the way the newspapers are reporting?”

“No, I don’t. I don’t think it was anywhere near that un-complicated.”

“Why?”

“Because they didn’t kill the Serbs right away. Because they waited two days after Akhan’s guys were killed, which was enough time for their emotions to cool. Because there were nine men in that team, and nine men don’t universally decide to do a rotten thing. Because when things like this happen, there’s nearly always circumstances lurking underneath that are damned hard to fathom if you weren’t there.”

“So what do you think happened?”

“I really don’t know.”

She paused for a moment and took a large sip from her scotch. “You were in combat. Did you ever feel the urge?”

I thought about that a moment. “Once, I guess.”

“What caused it?”

“It was a few days after the Gulf War ended. Saddam’s Guards had escaped the net and started slaughtering the Kurds and Shiites, whom our government had encouraged to rise up against the regime after we’d promised we were going to destroy Saddam’s military. It turned out we lied.”

“I think I remember something about that.”

“Yeah, well, it didn’t make big news in America. What happened was, they rose up and suddenly the Revolutionary Guards appeared. They never knew what hit them. Thousands of Kurds and Shiites, lots of women and children, began getting slaughtered. The survivors fled the carnage and headed south, into Kuwait. We set up camps and did the best we could to mend their wounds and care for them, and that only made us feel more miserable.”

“So you wanted to avenge them?”

“Nope.We wanted to appease our guilt. Our government had done a very dishonorable thing and these people were paying for it. Only Uncle Sam wasn’t around, having to look them in the eye.”

“So you think that’s what happened here?”

“Nope. That’s not at all what happened here. See, we wanted to, and God knows we talked about it a lot. But talk was all we ever did.”

She drained the last of her scotch, and she looked a little tipsy, and her lips looked kind of moist. I felt kind of frisky, and our eyes came together and met. Then came this long awkward moment.

Chapter 10

T
he way that look ended was her telling me to get my big shoe off her sandaled foot. She then paid the bill and we parted ways at the elevator, since she wanted to limp the two flights upstairs to her room, while I insisted on ascending in comfort. The last I saw of her, she was careening between the rail and the wall, stumbling occasionally on the steps and trying to appear graceful. Some girls really should stick to Evian water with a twist.

The next morning, my head throbbed ever so lightly on the car ride to the Air Force holding facility, although poor Miss Morrow obviously got the full, vituperative brunt of the scotch. She spent half the ride with her fingers plugged into her ears, trying to protect her addled brain from the raucous roar of six pistons pumping up and down and from Delbert, who seemed in a remarkably chipper and garrulous mood.

This was the day when we would split up and each take different team members to interrogate. If we limited ourselves to two hours with each of the remaining eight team members, then by midafternoon we’d be done. I decided to handle Chief Warrant Officer Mike Persico, Sergeant First Class Andy Caldwell, and Sergeant First Class François Perrite.

Michael Persico was forty-six years old. He was a former staff sergeant who’d applied for warrant officer training and been accepted. Every A-team has a chief warrant officer. They are the technical experts of the teams, the masters of every function of the other members, from weapons to communications to medical. Persico had been with the same team the past eighteen years. He was the “old man” of the team, meaning he was like the living, breathing heritage. He had earned a Bronze Star for valor in Somalia, and a Silver Star for valor in the Gulf.

I’d read the citations and was impressed. In the Gulf War, he had helped lead the team deep into Iraq’s desert for a little Scud-hunting. They found one Scud missile, directed an airstrike that annihilated the missile and its launcher, then lost two team members fighting their way back out. In Somalia, Persico and his team had been committed to help save the Ranger company that got bushwhacked trying to nab Aideed. One of Persico’s team members got wounded and he risked his own life to dodge through a hail of Somali fire to save him. Persico was a brave man, there was no question of that.

I studied him closely when he was led into the room. He was average height and build. He looked leathery and tough, with mostly gray hair and harshly weathered skin that had left deep creases on his face, particularly around his mouth. His eyes were gray, like a wolf’s. He moved confidently, like a man who’d gotten most of what he wanted out of life.

He brought a lawyer into the play, a female captain named Jackie Caruthers, who resembled a middle linebacker, only a little bigger, and with a face that looked like it had been kissed by the bumper of a speeding Mack truck.

“Please have a seat,” I said to both of them, and they sat straight across from me.

“You’ve informed your client of the rules?” I asked Caruthers. “I have,” she said.

“Then if you don’t mind, I’d like to get right into it.”

Persico’s pale gray eyes were taking my measure, like he would a foe on a battlefield.

“Fine with me,” Caruthers answered for him.

I ignored her and looked straight at Persico. “Chief, could you explain the series of events that led to the destruction of the KLA unit you trained?”

He glanced at his lawyer, who nodded.

“All right. The KLA company commander was named Captain Kalid Akhan. He came to us on the afternoon of the thirteenth and said he planned to do a raid on a Serb police compound at dawn the next morning—”