Sweepers (27 page)

After five seconds, Train gave another command and the dog stopped.

“That’s bark. Here’s growl.”

Another command, and the front yard was filled with a menacing rumbling growl as the Dobe leaned forward on his haunches, looking at nothing in particular. The growl was punctuated with an occasional lip-lifting grimace that revealed what looked like at least a yard of glistening canine ivory. Another command and the dog was silent again.

“I’m not sure I can handle all this-” she said, looking at the dog’ who was still watching Train expectantly, waiting for the next command. The phone began to ring in the house.

“You’ll do fine. I’ve written all this down. Mostly, he’s just going to be here. You better get that.”

She slipped into the living room, followed by Gutter, who pushed his nose between the screen door I as she went through. Her neighbor Ken Parsons, of the perpetual lawn mower, was on the phone. She reassured him that everything was fine.

She smiled as she hung up. “I think I might be able to get used to Gutter,” she said, reaching down to pet the dog.

Gutter looked up at her approvingly. Train then told her to take the dog on a tour of the inside of the house, room by room. “Let him in your closet, and let him get a good scent of shoes. The laundry hamper, too.

I want him to know your scent, okay?”

She was almost blushing when they finished taking the dog around on his grand tour. They were back in the kitchen in ten minutes. Karen sat down in a kitchen chair,. and the dog parked himself between her feet.

“Okay,” Train said. “Remember that he wants to be next to you, as you can see, or at least in the same room with you. Or anywhere you go. Make eye contact often, and show affection. He’s worth it.”

“Did you raise him?”

“Yes. My family’s had Dobes for years. My father used to breed and show them. Gutter is four, and I’ve done most of his training. He even likes the water, which is unusual.

You should see him go fishing in the river.”

“The river is not quite a half mile that way,” she said. “maybe I’ll take him fishing.”

“He’d love it.” Train paused. “I need you to tell me about last night again. And then I have to get down to Fort Fumble.”

“Why9 What’s happened?” she asked as she fixed two cups of coffee.

“Checked my voice mail on the -way over here. Ms Legalness the JAG commands my unworthy civilian posterior into his presence first thing this morning. What’s the commute from here at this hour9”

“Forty-five minutes if you get out by six-forty. I’ll send you the back way.”

“Bad night, yes?” he asked.

She nodded, still feeling a slight tremble in her hands.

“Yes, bad night. Not much sleep.” She told him again what had happened.

The Dobe sat attentively on the kitchen floor between them. She rubbed the back of the dog’s neck absently.

“One question,” he said when she was done. “The voice-is there any chance it could have been Sherman?”

She looked at him and then closed her eyes, trying to remember the voice. “it was mechanical,” she replied. “There was an odd volume to it, as if there was some kind of obstruction. And what sounded like a precursor breath before he spoke.” She shivered. “It was really spooky.

But, no, I don’t think it was-Sherman. On the other hand-“

“On the other hand, it was artificial, wasn’t it?”

She nodded. “It could have been anyone, then,” she said.

“You’re still suspicious of him, aren’t you?”

He twisted his coffee cup around in his hands. “I still go back and forth. Listening to the cops last night, I found myself agreeing with their a-ain of thought. These Fairfax guys are pretty professional, and the pros tend to go with the Occam’s razor approach: The simplest solution is usually the solution. Then I would look at Sherman, see the distress in his face, and my heart would say, No way. This guy isn’t a killer.”

“So why are you still suspicious?”

“Well, you never saw anyone, except for the silhouette of those shoes through the crack under the garage door. He could have left the meeting, doubled back, parked the car out on Beach Mill Road somewhere, and walked back into the Property to terrorize you. Emphasis on the could have.”

“And then accused himself of two murders?”

“Arrgh,” Train said. “I hate it when you start getting logical.”

“So, shouldn’t we call Mcnair?” she asked.

“Let’s see what the JAG wants first. I want to go after Galantz, especially after this crap. But we need to be sure of our tasking. And I want to know why you were locked out of that file. II She shifted in her chair, looked at her coffee, then thought better of it. “But why wait to tell Mcnair?” she asked.

“Because the cops will immediately think Sherman. First thing they’ll do is pun him in and question him as to where he went last night after the meeting here. And my guess is he went home, maybe via a fast-food restaurant’somewhere along the way. Which means he would have no alibi.”

She nodded. “He doesn’t need that.,, “Tell me, can archived JAG investigation files be altered?”

“NO. The investigations are official records. The system’s m up specifically to prohibit alterations.”

Train thought about that. “Well, if that’s true, there’s something in that investigation file someone doesn’t want you to see. to see. I’m ( going to ask the good admiral about that. Then I hope to get through to my FBI contact. See what he can tell me about Galantz. The more meat we can put on the SEAL story, the less the cops will bother Sherman.”

She nodded, suddenly too tired to argue. This great big dog did seem very comforting. Train was getting up.

“I’ll hit the road now. I’ll come back and do Gutter’s outside perimeter training this afternoon. Stay in the house and keep Gutter with you. If you do go outside, say to the barn, keep Gutter with you. Just tell him to heel. If he needs to go to a tree, he’ll let you know, but then tell him to heel.”

He bent down to pet the dog one more time. Then he put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed gently. “Now,” he said briskly, “what’s the best way down to the Pentagon from here?”

She gave him directions and he left. She watched him go, surprised to find herself wishing he hadn’t gone. It would be very easy to get used to having him around.

Ninety minutes later, -Admiral Carpenter’s yeoman announced that Mr. von Rensel was out in the front office, as requested.

“Give me five minutes and then bring him in,” the admiral replied. “And don’t disturb us.” He hung up the intercom phone and called Captain Mccarty on the secure phone.

“Yes, Admiral.”

“I’m about to talk to Mr. von Rensel. I want to get his take on the Sherman business. The last update I had was from Karen Lawrence on Friday, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Right. Okay. Based on what the DNI told me, I think I’m going to tell him to lay off the SEAL angle. But I’m not going to tell him that we’ve been asked to lay off. Basically, I want to see what he does.”

“You mean you really want him to run free to see what the hell’s really going on here?”

“Basically, yes.”

Mccarty was silent for a moment. “If von Rensel actually flushes this guy,” he asked, “are we going to get across the breakers with the DNI and/or other interested parties?”

Carpenter thought for a moment before answering. “I’m not sure. I don’t think so. I don’t particularly sweat the Office of Naval Intelligence; they’re pretty far down the food chain in the intel world. Besides, the way I’m going to frame my instructions to von Rensel, I can always claim later that he was freelancing. The lifer spooks think he’s a loose cannon anyway. And if it starts to get wormy, I can always pull Karen out of it and let von Rensel and the spooks sort it all out in some dark alley.”

“Suppose it gets wormy before you find out about it?

The last thing spooks do is tell somebody when one of their operations goes off the rails.”

“I’ll think of something. But first I want to get an independent assessment from von Rensel.”

“Independent of Karen Lawrence?”

“Yeah. He’s an experienced investigator. She isn’t.”

There was a pause on the line. “Whatever you say, Admiral,” Mccarty said finally, his tone of voice implying that he wasn’t thrilled with the idea of using Train to check on Karen Lawrence.

Carpenter frowned to himself. “Just so,” he said, and hung up abruptly.

He resumed scribbling continents on an appeal letter while. waiting for the five minutes to elapse.

Finally, the yeoman brought in Train.

“Mr. von Rensel, come in. Have a seat.”

“Good morning, Admiral,” Train said, sitting down on the sofa. The admiral remained at his desk.

“You getting all settled in here in the puzzle palace?”

“Yes, sir.. I spent some time in ONI a few years back; not much has changed.”

“In ONI or the Pentagon?”

“Neither, Admiral. One’s a pile. of old concrete; the other’s a pile of … well.

Carpenter smiled. “Yes, precisely my view, Mr. von Rensel. Our so-called intelligence community is like an onion.

CIA, NSA, DIA, ONI, all that damned alphabet soup, and all rolled up in a tight little ball that makes you cry whenever you try to get into it.

What’s going on in the Sherman matter?”

Train paused to gather his thoughts. He wondered why Carpenter was asking him this question instead of Karen Lawrence, who was nominally in charge of the Sherman problem. Was Carpenter checking up on her? Or had the admiral perhaps detected her sympathy for Sherman? He launched into it.. He took fifteen minutes to bring the admiral up-to-date, including the events of the preceding night.

When he had finished, Carpenter was no longer smiling.

“Is Karen, Lawrence safe?” he asked.

Train told him about taking one of his Dobes out to her house. “But if there’s a rogue SEAL on ‘ the loose, no one is safe,” he concluded. “The good news is that Karen is not his target. Sherman is. The bad news is that someone’s been knocking off everyone who’s close to Sherman.”

“Are Karen Lawrence and Sherman ‘close’?”

Train hesitated for a fraction of a second. Good question, that one.

“Not in a personal sense, not that I know of. But she’s been with him at the Walsh apartment, the Walsh memorial service, the funeral, and two meetings with the cops, one in his house, one in her house. And somebody sure as hell knew where to find her last night.”

“Did she actually see this guy?”

“No, sir.”

“So nobody has ever seen this guy, right?”

“Correct. Nobody except Admiral Sherman, and that was twenty-some years ago. But I don’t think Karen imagined all this. She was really scared.

She put on a good front this morning, but whoever did this knew how.”

“So you think this Galantz guy is for real? I mean, all the records say he was lost in Vietnam. He’s even on the MIA list.”

Train hesitated. “It’s possible,” he hedged. “As you know, that MIA classification covers everything from someone who was actually observed being blown to little bits to guys who simply went out and never came back.”

“So he could be alive?”

“Admiral Sherman says he is, or at least was back in 1972. The only other possibility is that Sherman is doing it.

He’s had opportunity in at least a couple of these incidents.

Even last night, for instance. But what’s his motive?”

“So you’re coming down in favor of HMI Galantz,” Carpenter persisted, ignoring Train’s question.

Train wasn’t quite sure where this was going. “Possibly,” he said. “Or someone calling himself that. Oh, did I mention Sherman’s son?”

Carpenter shook his head patiently. Train told him about Jack, and the fact that, after many years of estrangement, Sherman had seen him twice recently, both times in circumstances that suggested the son knew something about what was going on.

“Curiouser and curiouser,” the admiral muttered. “Okay.

We’ve got two problems with this Sherman situation’ The first is that, given the Navy’s intense sensitivity to bad PR, Admiral Sherman is becoming a political liability.”

“The big guys are ready to just drop him over the side?”

Carpenter gave a small shrug. “There is an unlimited supply of eager-beaver flag-material captains in the surface warfare community who do not bring baggage of this sort along with them.” Train nodded. “Karen told me about their little sdance with Admiral Kensington. I take it he’s a heavyweight here in Opnav?”

“Heavy enough. Especially when the problem concerns a surface guy, and Sherman is surface Navy.”

Train nodded. “And the second problem: Might that involve a certain government agency?”

Carpenter gave him a speculative look. “It might,” he said.

Train stared down at the carpet. The picture was getting a little clearer, and he now understood why Carpenter was talking to him and not Karen. He laced his hands together and cracked his knuckles, then looked back at Carpenter, who was watching hirh intently.

“Are you telling me not to try to find Galantz?”

Carpenter got up from his desk and came around to sit in one of the chairs. “Not exactly, Train. I am going to order you to stay away from anybody’s efforts to find this Galantz individual. I am going to tell you not to hunt down Galantz yourself.”

““Going to’? As in orders that will be forthcoming soon?”

“Very soon.”

“And in the meantime?”

“In the meantime, I do order you to keep Karen Lawrence safe.”

Train nodded slowly. “And if that involves-“

The JAG raised his hands. “Use your best judgment on how to execute your tasking, Train. You need not bother me with details. In fact, I’d prefer you did not. But that’s your tasking: Keep Karen safe while she makes a determination that Admiral Sherman is either the victim of a setup or one diabolically clever villain. And your time is limited.

Remember what I am going to tell you-soon.”

Train nodded again and got up. “Got it. And I appreciate the latitude, Admiral. I think. I suppose if this thing goes off the tracks, I can expect to be chastised?”

“Most severely, although ultimately I’ll get over it.”