Sweepers (21 page)

He began some tai chi exercises. If Galantz had indeed survived the Rung Sat experience and made it back to the States, then he was not working at Burger King. He’d made the threatening appearance in Sherman’s house in 1972-over twenty years ago. Where had he been for all those years?

What had he been? Must get to Mchale Johnson, sooner rather than later.

Sherman called Karen later Sunday afternoon. “Oh, good,” she said.

“Have you spoken to Detective Mcnair?”

“Yes, I have,” he said, sounding annoyed. “it seems the police have been very busy. They’ve taken Galen Schmidt’s body in for an autopsy, and I’ve just had a second call from Mcnair.”

“He called me earlier. Looking for you. Did they-” He sighed. “I’m afraid so. The remains had been embalmed, and apparently, that makes a chemical analysis almost impossible. But he confirmed that at least the blood type is a match with the. residue in the syringe.”

“Oh dear. And was there potassium chloride?”

“There’s a problem with that. Apparently when someone dies, the body’s own cells release quite a bit of potassium into the bloodstream, enough to mask the quantity needed to stop a heart. Their toxicology people are going to try. I think they called it some kind of differential analysis, but it

“II take some fairly sophisticated tissue studies. Unofficially, the ME told Mcnair it would be a waste of time.”

W,Karen ‘didn’t know what to say. Now Galen Schmidt’s death was forensically ambiguous, just like Elizabeth Walsh’s. “Does this mean Galen was Uled?” she asked.

Sherman’s voice betrayed his anxiety. “The blood type matches. Now they’ll have to do DNA matching to see if it’s actually his blood. I have to tell you, Karen, this is beginning to get to me.”

She could certainly sympathize. “What about the funeral?” she asked.

“Will they get the remains back to the funeral home in time?”

“Yes. That’s all back on track. But this other business..

Karen felt the urge to fill the sudden silence. “Mcnair wants to meet as soon as possible after the funeral, Admiral,” she said. “May I suggest Monday evening?”

“I suppose,” he said. “Oh, and he asked about NIS. I told them what you said Carpenter said-that NIS was coming in.”

“Yes, sir. I talked to Mr. von Rensel earlier this afternoon. He’ll be there in Annapolis.”

“Good,” he said distractedly. Karen wasn’t sure he had even registered what she had just told him. Poor man. He paused for a moment. “Because if the higher-ups try to squelch this investigation, I’m gonna take it public.”

“Well, yes, I understand that, Admiral. But wouldn’t that do you even more damage, politically, I mean?”

“I suppose it would, Karen,” he said. “But if this guy killed Galen Schmidt-not to mention Elizabeth Walshjust to get at me, then to hell with it, okay? I’m -ready to get this bastard before he does another one. Especially given his probable motive for doing it.”

She was startled by the sudden ferocity in his voice. This was a side of him she had not heard before. “You can’t blame yourself for what’s happened, Admiral,” she said.

“Thanks, Karen,” he said. “Maybe I’ll call Admiral Car penter and reinforce that notion. Maybe first thing tomorrow.

That’s not a good idea, Karen thought quickly. Carpenter was already conscious of the ripples spreading among the flag community in Washington over this matter, starting with the cinder block Vice Admiral Kensington had pitched in the political pond. “Why don’t you let me work that problem, Admiral? I think if you called him you might, uh …” She wasn’t sure how to phrase it. He did it for her.

“Might show some desperation, huh? And then he might decide just to pull the plug and let me sink or swim by myself. Did you tell him about our little sdance with Kensington?”

“He’d already heard about it, Admiral.”

Sherman laughed, making a harsh sound. “Why am I not surprised?”

“Admiral, I think Admiral Carpenter has his heart in the right place here. He’s going to move on this matter, not sit on it.”

You’re probably fight. Well, I think I’m going out and do a ten-mile run somewhere. I need to think.”

“Yes, sir,” she said. “What time will you leave for Annapolis?”

“I’ve got a car laid on for thirteen hundred. Why don’t you meet me at the Mall entrance? Maybe we’ll have some developments by then.”

She agreed and hung up. She thought about calling Train back, then decided against it. That pregnant silence after she had mentioned the Army-Navy Club had made her angry.

He had no fight to judge her-about anything. So why do you care? He’s just a civilian, and an odd-looking one at that.

She went out to the front porch to enjoy the late-afternoon sun. Two things were bothering her. Train’s abrupt demeanor on the phone hinted at professional disapproval. If she was working for Carpenter, what the hell was she doing going places with this guy? But over and above that, -she still sensed that Train was interested in her, and, somewhat to her surprise, she felt herself responding to this interest.

And if that was true, then maybe some of his antipathy toward the admiral was not entirely professional. She smiled to herself as she saw Sally’s car turning into the drive for the afternoon feeding. Train might even be jealous of Sherman, which was a bad joke: That poor man had bigger problems on his plate. She headed down to the barn to help Sally with the horses.

Karen was surprised at how small the Naval Academy cemetery was as she waited behind and slightly below the main ceremonial group surrounding the canopied grave. The cemetery was located on a gentle hillside across a wide creek from the main campus, occupying five wooded acres on the Sevem River. Fortunately, it was not raining, because the crowd was far too large to fit under the two temporary blue-and-gold canopies that had been erected facing the grave site. Several three-and two-star officers had shown up for the service in the Naval Academy chapel. She wondered idly if their attendance was because they knew Galen Schmidt or if it was because the Chief of Naval Operations himself was attending.

She shifted her feet on the cold grass, trying to keep her heels from sinking into the spongy lawn. She found it fascinating that Sherman, who was probably the human being closest to Galen Schmidt, had been relegated to a back row of the flag officers’ section by virtue of the fact that he was just a frocked one-star. The same thing had happened in the chapel. It must be strange, she thought, to have nearly every facet of your professional life dictated by your lineal number in the Naval Register.

Now the Navy band was assembled on one side of the grassy hillside, playing appropriately funereal music while the admirals and retired admirals stirred uncomfortably on their folding chairs. The rest of the funeral audience, nearly two hundred officers and even some enlisted men, remained standing. The grave itself had been bordered with sections of incongruously green Astroturf, and the casket was perched on a chrome-plated frame above the hole in the ground. Up higher on the hill, there was a smaller crowd of onlookers, comprised mostly of tourists who happened to ‘ be visiting the Academy and a few dozen midshipmen. There were some civilian youngsters standing to one side who looked like military dependents, attracted by all the stars and big black cars.

That morning, she had tried to check in with Mcnair, but he had not been available. Train had come in at 8:30, and she’d filled him in on the itinerary for the afternoon. He took it all aboard and then got on the phone to Admiral Sherman’s office to assure the admiral that NIS was moving on the case. He then made a copy of the Galantz personnel file and transmitted that to the NIS database administrator.

Throughout the morning, he treated her with almost exaggerated civility, which she found a bit frustrating. This tension between us is going to have to stop, sho-thought.

And somehow she knew she would have to make the first move.

Karen got a surprise at midmorning: The archived investigation report on the Rung Sat incident was locked out. She had called Train over when she saw the banner on her screen.

“What’s that mean? Unavailable?” Train asked, looking over her shoulder.

“I don’t know,” Karen said. “But there was an index listing. Damn thing has to be somewhere.”

“It may be a security problem,” Train had said. “Given what these guys purportedly were doing, I suspect any records related to SEALS are long gone.”

“What exactly were they doing?”

He thought about that for a moment, then shook his head.

“I can’t tell you,” he replied. “But it wasn’t social work.

Anyway, does it matter? We’ve established Galantz was a real guy and that he did go MIA. That corroborates at least part of Sherman’s story.”

“How will that help to find him?”

“It won’t.”

The band stopped playing, and there was a long silence as the chaplain mounted a platform and approached the lectern to begin the traditional interment ceremony. The day was partly cloudy, and it was cooler than she had anticipated. Her uniform shoes did little to keep out the damp cold of the cemetery grass. The chaplain said something, and everyone stood, removed their uniform hats, and bowed their heads. She searched for Sherman again in the sea of dark blue uniforms, feeling a pang of sympathy for him. His usually outgoing expression was now a cold mask, devoid of any visible emotion. He appeared to be staring at a headstone monument to his right, as if unwilling to watch the bronze casket be lowered forever into the cold ground.

About two hundred feet off to her right, she could see the burial crew clustered at a discreet distance around a bright yellow backhoe. She looked away and then looked back.

Train von Rensel was in their midst, dressed in oversized overalls, just like the rest of the crew. He appeared to be carefully scanning the crowd in and around the cemetery.

As she stared at him, their eyes met briefly across the open ground, but he gave no indication that he had seen or recognized her. The fact that he would not acknowledge her made her feel uneasy.

Just after three o’clock, Captain Mccarty knocked once and let’himself into Admiral Carpenter’s office. The admiral was on the phone, as usual, and he waved Mccarty over to a chair. A minute later, he hung up. “So, what did you learn at Langley?”

“I learned absolutely, positively nothing,” Mccarty replied, opening his notebook. “My contact in their general counsel’s office put me together with a woman-if you can call her that-from the Technical Operations Directorate.

You should have seen her, a dead ringer for Mrs. Khrushchev. A walking, talking, personality-free zone. Came in, sat down across the table from me in some kind of interview room, got her breath back after the effort of walking, and gave me what sounded like a fully rehearsed statement.”

He consulted the shorthand in his notebook again. ““My name is Madeliene Parker-Smith. The Directorate of Technical Operations has no records pertaining to a Navy Hospital Corpsman Galantz. Any interdepartmental association of military personnel with the Directorate would be a matter of record and would involve the concurrence of both the Department of Defense and the individual’s military personnel agency… No record of such concurrence exists.’ We have spoken.”

“Did you get a chance to explain the possible circumstances by which they might have come across Galantz in Saigon?”

“No, sir. She delivered her speech, pushed some kind of a button under the table, and suddenly I had a brace of renta-cops standing next to my chair. I was escorted back to the badge lobby.”

“Well, well, well,” the admiral mused, rotating his chair to face the windows, his fingers laced together behind his head. “They knew you were coming to see them about Galantz, specifically?”

“Yes, sir. I’d given them HM I Galantz’s name and serial number. They knew.”

“And had that answer ready.”

“There stood Madeliene the Immovable, like General Jackson’s Virginians at First Manassas: a veritable stone wall. “

The admiral swiveled back around. “So in a sense, we have an answer.

This Galantz must have been spooked up.

The question is, When?”

Mccarty nodded. “On the other hand, Princess Happy may have been stating the bald truth. The Tech Ops people have never heard of the guy.”

“Yeah. Okay. Let me pull the string one time at my level.

Maybe I need to go see my dear friend, the Director of Naval Intelligence, after all. Sometimes spooks will trade secret signs and totems only with other spooks.”

“And what shall we pass on to Karen Lawrence?”

“Nothing. Which, in terms of facts, is what we have. Just some educated cynicism based primarily on our combined sixty years of experience in dealing with those people. We might as well try for the facts one more time before we worry her pretty little head about it.”

“Aye, aye, Admiral,” Mccarty said in a tone that suggested he was not entirely in agreement. Carpenter eyed him over his reading glas ‘ ses.

“Always a safe answer, Dan,” he pronounced.

After Mccarty had left the office, Carpenter picked up the phone to his yeoman. “Get me through to Admiral Kensington,” he said. “On secure, please.”

As the band broke into the Navy hymn, Karen had trouble controlling her eyes. The stately, dolorous, yet hopeful chords carried across the grassy slopes of the cemetery with such power that even the civilian tourists up on the hill stopped taking pictures to listen. So she was startled when she saw Admiral Sherman starting to rise out of his chair.

He appeared to be staring at something up on the hill. -As she strained to see what or who it was, she caught a movement among the grave diggers standing around the backhoe.

Train. He had apparently also seen the admiral’s sudden interest in something or someone up on the hill, and he was moving behind the backhoe, as if to go up the hill. She looked back at Sherman, who was standing now, causing the flag officers seated on either side to look up. Feeling a sudden fist of apprehension grab her heart, she looked back up the hill, half-expecting to see a man with a rifle. But there was just the same small crowd up there, so what on earth was he looking at? There, standing next to a group of midshipmen in uniform: a kid. No, a young man, not a kid.