The Kingmaker (11 page)

At midnight I told Katrina I’d walk her out to her car. The little guy in the gray suit was seated fastidiously beside the entrance; American tax dollars at work.

I turned to Katrina. “Ain’t this better than pushers and dealers and whores?”

She ignored my question. “What happened to you two?”

“What two?”

“You know exactly what two.”

Oh Christ
. Could I just shoot her and put an end to this crap?
Not with a witness by the door, obviously, so I said, “I never really knew. I swear. Please . . . let that suffice.”

“Never knew? The chick’s a babe, Sean. The perfect woman, the type who gives men messy dreams. And you have no idea?”

So much for that. “I don’t. We dated my last three years in college. Came graduation, we both got busy. I went into intensive training, and she went into intensive training. I went on deployments, and she went on deployments. We saw each other a weekend every two or three months or so. I came back from Panama, and she’d turned into Mrs. Morrison.”

“Did you intend to marry her?”

And how did I know it would lead to this? Guys are not really into this post-affair psychoanalytic crap. Take me—you date a girl, and it works or it doesn’t. One or the other mumbles the marriage word, and the other either says, “Okay, I’ve got nothing better to do” or “actually, I’d rather have a sulfuric acid enema.” Then you either shuffle to the altar or go looking for the next prospect, without any lengthy claustrophobic pauses in between.

I admitted, “Maybe.”

Fortunately, we’d gotten to her car, a beat-up, clapped-out Nissan Sentra that probably had 200,000 miles on it the day she bought it from a used-car dealer. I opened her door and she had to climb in. I watched her drive off.

What did she think about all that? Probably that I’d been an idiot who waited too long. Or maybe that I was one of those intractable bachelors who’re afraid of losing their monopoly on the big-screen TV, letting Mr. Dickie feast wherever he wants, keeping their greedy grips on their own paychecks. Truthfully, I have some of that strain in me.

But that wasn’t it. I had always wondered about Mary.

I
was pulled out of the shower the next morning by a phone call from Katrina telling me to turn on my TV. It was only seven, and Eddie was standing on the front steps of that big office building on 14th Street, flanked by three gimlet-eyed prosecutors, as he read from notes on a lectern:

“. . . investigation that has spanned seven months of intensive work from hundreds of dedicated people from the Army, from the FBI, and from the CIA. We have carefully considered the spectrum of charges we could bring against General William Morrison and settled on the following: two counts of murder in the first degree; treason; conduct unbecoming an officer; adultery; perjury; and lying in an official investigation. These charges have been signed off by Lieutenant General Halter and filed with the military court of the Military District of Washington.”

Eddie looked up and stared right into the camera, somehow avoiding that smarmy smile of his, somehow maintaining that all-American-boy-with-a-toothache expression. “Are there any questions?”

Of course there were questions, hundreds of them, because all you could hear was the stormy sound of journalists howling in that toxic way they do.

“No,” Eddie charmingly replied, “we don’t yet have a hearing date, but we expect expeditious treatment. The court is aware of the high level of public interest in this case. The only thing holding us up right now is the defense, who incidentally have already received a great volume of evidence and been given ample time to consider their case. I certainly hope they don’t stall.”

I screamed, “You rotten bastard!”

“Good point,” Eddie said to another unseen questioner, not to me, and judging from his suddenly broad smile, I guessed the reporter was female and gorgeous, because this was Eddie’s come-sleep-with-me look. “No, we have not offered a deal. That matter is still under contemplation.”

One of the three attorneys on Eddie’s team hastily stepped forward and leaned into a microphone. “I’m very sorry. That’s all the time we have for questions today. Thank you all very much.”

Eddie gave them all a look intended to say, Gee, I really wish I could stand here and do this with you all day, because you’re reporters and I love you very, very much. And I hope you love me, too, except I’m a very busy man, maybe the busiest man in America, since, as you must acknowledge, I have a most important job to perform for the American people, whom I also love more than mere words can convey.

He backed away from the podium and allowed himself to be escorted back up the stairs to his building, his shoulders slightly hunched from the terrible burden he was carrying, his legs moving with the bounce of a man with a purpose. It was a scene straight from
Masterpiece Theatre
.

Katrina was still on the phone and I heard her say, “Well?”

“What an asshole.”

“Any other thoughts?”

“They’ve loaded the docket.”

“To be expected. What about that deal mumbo-jumbo?”

“Exactly right,” I said.

And we both knew what this meant. Eddie’s hedged ambivalence meant he
was
going to offer us a deal. And
I
knew why, and
he
knew
I
knew why, if you can follow that convoluted trail. Since the CIA was desperate to know everything Morrison supposedly gave away, and as blackmailing had been tried and failed, a deal was their only resort. The moment Harold Johnson got off the phone with me, he must have called Eddie and twisted his arm right out of the socket.

And Eddie being Eddie, he therefore chose to air the full slate of charges in a public forum, trying to harden his eventual negotiating position. The way the protocols work, when the
only
folks who know the full panoply of charges are the prosecution and defense teams, backroom deals are made in a painless vacuum. The prosecutor can trade away charges and reductions, and nobody’s the wiser. But once the public knows, the prosecutor’s hamstrung. The public has visibility into the hand he was dealt, and if the defense walks off with too big a pot, they get pissed. Thus Eddie was putting us on notice. He had deliberately given away his free hand, a slick way of pressuring us not to ask for too much.

So this was another of those good news/bad news things, the good part being that Eddie had still lost a lot of leverage. We now knew that the CIA wanted him to get a deal, and that’s a pretty big gun to have stuck at the back of his head. The bad news was that any day, Eddie was going to call for a meeting, knowing damn well that Katrina and I were caught on that proverbial horn of an excruciating dilemma. We didn’t know whether our client was guilty or innocent. We didn’t know how strong Eddie’s case was, or how weak our options were.

All we knew for sure was that Eddie would walk into the room and say, “Here’s the deal—take it or leave it.” If we said leave it, Eddie would march into Harold Johnson’s office and say, “Gee, I tried my best to get a deal, and they told me to stuff it. Sorry, Chief, their call.” Which was exactly what Eddie wanted,
because only by going to court could he become the most famous lawyer in Army history. And did I fail to mention that Eddie is a very ambitious prick?

The sum of which meant that we were now at his beck and call. The hourglass had just been turned upside down, only we didn’t know how many grains of sand it contained. When he did call, we’d better know a hell of a lot more about our options than we did at that moment.

By the time Katrina and I arrived at my office another delivery truck was idling beside our door and three guys were hauling out more boxes. Eddie has impeccable timing.

Herbert, in his now-wrinkled gray suit, was still seated by the door, looking severely depressed and exhausted. As it was, I could barely get into my office, so many containers were strewn around.

Katrina was holding two large cups of Starbucks and two slices of crumbcake. She frowned as she handed me a cup and a slice of cake. “Look at this. We’re going to need more attorneys.”

“Two is more than enough.” Perverse as this sounds, I have an aversion to lawyers. They can be okay in ones and twos, but in flocks they get to be insufferable.

Her eyes wandered across all the cardboard and she said, “Think again. They told me a different crew is loading another truck right now.”

“Then we’ll bring Imelda back from Kansas.”

“You’d do this to her?”

It could take three weeks to wade through this mess, and as was already stated, more was coming.

“She can handle it,” I replied.

Katrina gave me a disapproving frown and asked, “What’s the plan for the day?”

“Back to Leavenworth. The plane leaves in an hour.”

“Go solo. I’m going to start wading through this.”

“Wrong. You have a calming influence on our client.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Why?” Not for the first time was I noticing that Katrina had both a stubborn and an independent streak—a very noxious combination.

“You’re big boys. Handle it.”

She was right, of course. I should be able to converse civilly with my own client. I still said something that sounded like “up yours” as I went into my office and called Clapper. I bitched and moaned and explained my predicament. He joyfully chuckled, because Eddie was his fair-haired boy, his legal Adonis, his most lethal hired gun. Clapper loved it when Eddie pulled one of his stunts, and he particularly loved hearing about it from whining complainers like me. I swore I’d someday walk into Clapper’s office with Eddie’s ass on a platter.

I warned Clapper that if I got a bunch more shipments I’d need another lawyer. He chuckled some more. It just made his day when his pet peacock terrorized the opposition.

I caught the flight to Kansas City, made it to the prison shortly after noon, Kansas time, and Morrison was already shackled to his table when I walked in.

He looked surprisingly chipper as he said, “Good afternoon, Major.”

“You got your TV and books?” I guessed.

“And a satellite dish. Drummond, you might be a decent lawyer after all.”

Well, we all know the old saying about how easy it is to make a starving man believe he’s in the midst of a feast. I fell into the chair across from him, withdrew the tape recorder that had so recently salvaged my career, lovingly caressed it, flipped it to record, and said, “Go back to 1990. The last time we spoke you were chasing assessments in the Caucasus. What came next?”

He withdrew a few sheets of notepaper, and I was pleased to see my contribution wasn’t limited to providing entertainment for him. “In late 1990, I was shifted to the Policy Planning Bureau at State.”

I said, “I’m not familiar with it.”

“It’s the internal think tank of State. I was working with a few other Sovietologists to help manage the changes.”

“And still handling Arbatov?”

“Some of the time. I’d gotten busy and that was the year he asked me to use Mary as my surrogate.”

“Busy with what?”

“To start with, separatist riots in Georgia were threatening Gorbachev’s grip on power. The conservatives in his government were furious with him, believing his perestroika policies had incited the unrest. Gorbachev tried to mollify the hard-liners and sent the KGB in to handle the protests.”

“I recall something about some massacres, right?”

“Correct.” He looked up from his notes and said, “It was a regrettable move, because it incited more riots and protests. It also undermined Gorbachev’s image as a great reformer. It was the beginning of the end for him. Boris Yeltsin was rabble-rousing in the streets about how it was time for real change.”

“And what position did you take?”

“I wrote a few memorandums predicting Gorbachev was through. I recommended we open channels with Yeltsin.”

“And how was this perceived?”

“Like I shit in the swimming pool. The Bush people had crafted their whole Soviet policy around Gorbachev. They were focused on unifying Germany and were convinced they needed Gorbachev’s support to accomplish that.”

“So . . . what? How did that impact you?”

“Suddenly a lot less actions were flowing into my in-box, and people stopped inviting me to meetings, the usual bureaucratic signs of a fall from grace. You know the funny thing? It served me in pretty good stead when Bush lost the election.”

“How come?”

“Because the new team read my memorandums and liked what I’d written. They also felt Bush had blown it. By cozying up to Gorbachev, he’d poisoned the well with Yeltsin. Like the Chicken Kiev speech.”

“And what was the Chicken Kiev speech?”

Morrison frowned, put out that he had to explain this. “In the midst of all the upheaval, Bush actually flew to Kiev and gave a public address urging the Soviet peoples to rally around Gorbachev and stay within the Soviet Union.”

“Tell me this is not so. George Bush?”

“Ironic, isn’t it? On the cusp of winning the cold war, our President is in Ukraine beseeching the enslaved to stay in their chains. I was outraged. I sent up several stiffly worded memorandums.”

I said, “And what happened when the new team came in?”

“By a stroke of good fortune, somebody found my memorandums and showed them to the President’s old college roommate, an academician who’d written several books on the Soviet Union and the cold war. He was made an Assistant Secretary of State, and as things later turned out, the White House turned over all the former Soviet states to him.”

My eyebrows shot up. “Are we talking Milton Martin?”

“Yeah, Milt. He brought me in and interviewed me. I made a good impression and he offered me a position.”

“And what position was that?”

“His special assistant.”

“You were Martin’s special assistant?”

“That’s what I said.”

“Right. That’s what you said.” I very curiously asked, “And what did that involve?”

“Well, Milt’s problem was he hadn’t spent any time in government. He was vulnerable. Since I had considerable Washington experience, the idea was that I’d represent him and his views in Washington, which freed him up to travel as much as he needed.”