Mortal Allies (10 page)

By this time, both of us were yelling and our faces were snarled with anger. Everybody else sat rigid and upright in their chairs, staring at us. I glanced at their stricken visages and felt this sudden burst of nauseating nostalgia, like we were back at Georgetown Law, making the other students restless and uncomfortable.

I just couldn’t stop myself. I yelled, “You’re wrong!”

She yelled back, “I don’t care what you think! Or what the evidence shows! From now on, our client was framed. Someone else killed that kid and made it look like Thomas did it.”

I kept shaking my head. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “Have you discussed this with our client?”

“No. I don’t intend to, either. Not yet, anyway. And don’t any of you reveal this to him. I’ll have your ass if you do.”

“You don’t think that presents a slight ethics problem?”

“Drummond, he’s withholding from us. Why should we have any problem withholding from him?”

Unless we dove at each other and got our hands wrapped firmly around each other’s throats, our conversation had reached a typically inelegant conclusion. But rather than commit murder in the presence of so many witnesses, I angrily stormed out and headed off to dinner. I went back to my room, picked up the phone, and barked at room service to send up a rare steak and an overcooked potato. I was in the mood for a red-blooded, manly meal. I consumed it alone, so I could stew in solitary self-pity. I chewed every bite like I had a grudge against it.

Carlson was wrong. Worse, though, I had a terrible premonition I knew why. The woman wasn’t stupid, right? Nor was she professionally incompetent, right?

What I figured was this: Whitehall was now a symbol for all those antigay activists trying to overturn “don’t ask, don’t tell.” If he got off on a technicality or because the prosecutor was too inept to prove his case “beyond a reasonable doubt,” then Whitehall would go free, but that would only whip the antigay factions into an even more frothful fury. They’d portray it as a hideous injustice piled on top of an even more hideous crime.

Carlson’s first loyalty wasn’t to her client; it was to the movement that hired her, that made her famous, that signed her paycheck. Plus she was a fanatic. As Keith had quoted, sometimes you just have to break a few eggs to make an omelet. Carlson or the folks who hired her had obviously decided Whitehall was a breakable egg. The only way to get their money’s worth was to go for broke. To undo the damage done by this case they had to prove Whitehall was innocent. It was all or nothing. Any other outcome and Whitehall would be turned into the eternal poster child for why gays have no place in the military.

There was one tiny insurmountable problem with that, though. It didn’t look like he was the least bit innocent. And if we lost, Whitehall was facing the death sentence.

Apparently, from Carlson’s point of view this was a reconcilable technicality. Not from mine.

T
he South Koreans made their call at ten o’clock that evening. They waived jurisdiction. Not pretrial confinement, only jurisdiction. Whitehall was to be transferred from the Yongsan Holding Facility to the Seoul High Security Prison at ten o’clock the next morning.

And when it came to the matter of punishment, if I guessed right, what the Koreans intended was to wait and see how the sentence came out. If Whitehall got death, they’d probably be shrewdly generous and allow us to yank the electric switch and fry him. If he got life, he’d spend the rest of his pitiful days and years in a South Korean prison.

Janson called to inform me of this. He didn’t call Katherine, or Keith, or any of the rest of the covey. Just me. There was a subtle message there — I just didn’t know what it was.

However, I immediately called Katherine to inform her of our extreme good fortune. A woman’s voice answered. I had no idea who she was, and I asked to speak with Katherine. She said “okay,” then I heard the two of them giggling. It sounded like that flirty kind of giggle you hear when two folks get interrupted in the midst of some heavy petting.

Katherine coldly acknowledged the news and hung up. No “Gee thanks, Sean, I can’t begin to tell you what a great job you did in the minister’s office.” Not even the most grudging acknowledgment that I’d saved her bacon — just “okay,” click. She was either as mad at me as I was at her, or she couldn’t wait to get back to her girlfriend.

I was getting undressed when there was a knock at the door. I expected to see the maid coming to turn down my sheets and place a couple of those little chocolate tasties by my bedside. It wasn’t a maid, though: not unless maids are late-middle-aged Caucasian males wearing trench coats who are in the habit of peeking searchingly down both sides of the hallway before they shoulder past you.

“Buzz Mercer,” he announced, sticking out a hand.

I didn’t feel any particular need to introduce myself, so I said, “Nice to meet you. You sure you’ve got the right room?”

“Oh yeah, Drummond,” he said, with a man-eating grin. “You and I gotta have a short talk.”

“Would you care for a seat?” I asked.

He went over and fell into the chair. He was a nondescript-looking type, with a squarish, unassuming face, a tight butch cut, clear-rimmed glasses, and what I guess you’d call a sardonic grin pasted on his lower face. Not his upper face, though. His eyes were too intense to be anything but somber.

He said, “I’m the station chief.”

“Great,” I remarked. What else do you say to a man who’s just identified himself as the head of the CIA for all of Korea?

“Have a seat,” he ordered, so I did.

“I thought about asking you to come to our facility, but finally decided this’d be better. You and I are probably going to have a few chats over the next few weeks. It would be best for all concerned if nobody knows about it.”

You remember when I warned you I’m a bit impulsive?

I put a steely expression on my face and snarled, “Look, buddy, get this straight right away. You picked me ’cause I’m the only Army guy on the defense team. Not to mention the only hetero. Good thinking, except I’m not going to expose a single damned thing about this case. Not to you . . . not to anybody.”

He seemed halfheartedly amused. “Settle down, Drummond. That’s not what this is about. I’ve discussed this with General Spears. He agrees that this is the right way to handle this.”

“Handle what?” I asked, blinking wildly a few times, since in a matter of a few brief seconds I’d already managed to make a complete horse’s ass out of myself. This wasn’t a novel experience by any means, but humiliation is one of those things that doesn’t go down more smoothly with practice.

“This is classified. Don’t discuss it with anybody. Not even the rest of your defense team . . . no . . . make that
particularly
with the rest of your defense team. Got that?”

“Sure.”

“Okay, here’s how it is. This case is attracting attention in the wrong quarters.”

“You mean in the South Korean government?”

“Right country, wrong prefix. There are folks in Pyongyang who get copies of the
Seoul Herald
within hours after it hits the newsstands. They watch our television news, listen to our radios, even read those half-assed tabloids about Martians in the White House. They know what movie star’s screwin’ what movie star this week, and the latest fad diet that’ll help you lose forty pounds overnight. Kim Jong Il and his boys are well aware of what’s going on down here.”

I nodded right along. Given the rift our case was making in the alliance, of course North Korea was following it attentively. I hadn’t thought about it until that moment, but of course they were.

He bent toward me. “Do you have any idea how many agents North Korea has down here?”

“No.”

“I got news for you. We don’t, either. Nor do the South Koreans. It’s a lot, though. We know, for instance, that they left plenty of sleeper agents here in 1950, when MacArthur and his boys kicked their asses out of the south. And we know they’ve been recruiting more, and adding to them ever since. Some folks believe they might only have ten to twenty thousand agents. Others believe they have a few hundred thousand.”

“That’s a lot of agents,” I said, because sometimes it helps to restate the obvious, if for no other reason than to show you’re a conscientious listener.

“Yeah, it’s a lot.” He nodded, re-restating what I’d just restated, I guess to prove we were both conscientious listeners. “We’ve also noticed a step-up in North Korean infiltrations over the past two weeks. And we pick up the occasional radio intercept from North Korean cells here back to their controllers up north. That traffic’s picked up these past two weeks. Normally that’s a very grim sign that somebody’s planning something.”

“This is obviously not good,” I said.

“We don’t know yet. It’s pretty damned obvious that how this thing goes down might well decide the fate of the alliance. Maybe the South Koreans are just blustering about throwing us Meegooks off the peninsula . . . or maybe they’re not. But if I were a bigwig in North Korean intelligence, I’d sure as hell be sniffing around to see which way it goes. Quite possibly what they’re doing is increasing their reconnaissance, just in the event we get thrown off the peninsula and they decide to attack.”

“So what’s this got to do with me?” I asked, which was the response I was sure he expected.

“Maybe nothing. Then again, maybe a lot.”

“Have we been mentioned in some of this radio traffic?”

“There’ve been a few mentions, but we’re not certain what they mean. See, the North Koreans know we listen in, and they’re well aware of our sophistication at code-breaking, so they take precautions. They develop all kinds of ridiculous code names and circular puzzles to throw us off.”

“But you must’ve developed some kind of opinion, or theory, or you wouldn’t be here.”

“Not really,” he said. “But ever since that September 11 thing, we always play it safe better than sorry. Maybe your defense team’s completely in the clear, maybe not. But if we come up with anything, we’d like to use you as our conduit. Of course, we’d like you to treat the information with the sensitivity it deserves. We sure as hell can’t approach Carlson and her freak show directly.”

He was right about that. The intelligence he was referring to was probably gathered through the most sensitive means available, and Katherine hadn’t shown herself to be someone the U.S. government should entrust with such deep dark secrets.

He stood up and started walking for the door. “Anything more comes up, I’ll keep you informed.”

“Anything specific you expect me to do at this point?” I asked.

He had the door open and was just walking out. “Nope.” Then the door shut behind him.

It was, all in all, a completely dopey conversation. He’d said something, and he’d said nothing. If I was the really suspicious sort, I might think he was probing to see if I was amenable to becoming his stooge, and I’d scared him off, so he’d resorted to that little cover story about North Koreans. That might sound fairly paranoid to most folks, but most folks haven’t spent as much time around spooks as I have. They lie to their own mothers just for practice.

If nothing else, this little tête-à-tête had made me suddenly aware of the importance the U.S. government was placing on our efforts to defend Whitehall. Face it, they’d be stupid to be complacent. Carlson was a ruthless fanatic, and fate had just handed her the power to take a meat cleaver to the alliance. Those folks back in Washington probably wanted her watched like a hawk.

I got a lousy night’s sleep. I kept trying to recall my Swedish stewardess with the Bronx twang and Italian name, but time and distance were rapidly diffusing her into a foggy ghost. Instead, a smallish woman with long, dark hair, an angelic face, and emerald-like eyes kept mulishly butting her way into my head. I knew I wasn’t having desirous thoughts, because I’ve never been a sucker for unrequited lust. I like my fantasies reciprocated.

When I awoke in the morning I felt grizzly and raw. I opened the blinds to explore the day.

Back when I was in law school, there was this professor named Maladroit who taught legal ethics. I’m not making this up, either. His name was Harold Maladroit III; a great name for a barrister, if you think about it. Anyway, poor old Maladroit didn’t put a whole lot of Sturm und Drang into his teachings, if you know what I mean. He normally arrived fifteen minutes late, shuffling into the classroom like it was the last place on earth he wanted to be. But he was actually a very brilliant and accomplished jurist.

He’d occasionally present us with case studies that were so waterlogged with ambivalence they made your head ache. I stared out the window at the skyline of downtown Seoul and got to thinking about one particular case.

The way Maladroit presented it, a private attorney had gotten a call from a man accused of murdering and then eating twelve people. He went and interviewed the accused, and to his vast surprise discovered a handsome young man, well-dressed, well-groomed, apparently well-educated, cultured, and almost impossibly likable. The attorney was astonished. He was also cautious. They spent five hours talking, because it took that long for the attorney to convince himself he was chatting with somebody far too sane and morally anchored to have committed such outlandishly heinous crimes. The attorney of course agreed to represent him.

The trial date was set for six months hence, and the attorney and his client used every minute of it to build their defense. They worked doggedly, becoming very close, achieving, if not a father-to-son relationship, then something not far from it. The most damning evidence against the accused man was a collection of tiny shards of bones that had been found in the old coal furnace in his cellar. The accused man swore the bones were those of Jackie, his beloved beagle, who’d died about two months before the police came. He’d considered taking the corpse to a pet cemetery, but in an effort to be thrifty decided he’d simply cremate the remains himself. This was before DNA testing, and successive medical tests ended up deadlocked: The bones could’ve been human, or they could’ve been a dog’s.