Official Privilege Read online

  Englehardt was shaking his head. “I cannot agree to that,” he began.

  “Easy fix,” murmured Captain Summerfield.

  “Sir?” said Englehardt, his voice strained.

  “The Vice Chief of Naval Operation’s office is twenty feet from here.

  He’s a classmate of mine. I’m sure I can get us on his calendar at fairly short notice. Let’s go see him, tell him about your problems. He can call Admiral Keeler, your boss’s boss, and maybe help clarify the issue.

  The vice chief is really swell at clarifying things.”

  Englehardt pursed his lips. Dan thought he saw Snow shake her head fractionally while staring hard at Englehardt.

  The young black man spoke up.

  “Mr. Englehardt. This sounds workable. I’m gonna be the dude at NIS workin’ all this tasking. It’s a nice clean line of communication, and you and Mr. Ames can get a copy of everything and anything. That’d be copacetic with you, right, Commander?”

  “How you respond internally to tasking is NIS business, Mr. Booker. I don’t want to try to deal with all the various branches of the NIS—I’ll be looking to Ms. Snow.”

  “That’s cool,” said Booker. “She easy to look at.”

  In the moment of embarrassed silence that followed this remark, Englehardt tried one last time. “Commander, this case is a probable homicide. There are established procedures for dealing with a homicide, with a crime scene, with evidentiary control. You know nothing-“

  “But do,” interrupted Snow. Dan suddenly understood that there were more bureaucratic currents at play here than he had realized. Englehardt looked exasperated.p>

  Dan decided to step back in.

  “Look, Mr. Englehardt. That’s precisely right. I’m a line officer. I know how to run a Navy JAGMAN investigation.

  Presumably Miss. Snow knows the NIS procedural drill. Mr. Booker here is the designated action officer at NIS. There’s no reason we can’t all work together at whatever the hell this is all about. But if the rice-bowl issue is going to be that big a stumbling block, then let’s stop right now and do as Captin Summerfield suggests—go see the man across the hall. I understand he’s nothing if not decisive.”

  Englehardt folded. “I will accept these arrangements on a pro tern basis, subject to the approval of the superiors.

  I—” Dan cut him off. “Great,” he said. “We have about thirty minutes left. How about your briefer giving us a down-and-dirty on the NIS’s capabilities, and then we can get this thing under way. I—excuse me, we—have an early start tomorrow morning.”

  Grace Snow pulled her coat tighter around her shoulders as the NIS group stood on the steps of the south parking entrance to the Pentagon after the meeting.

  Englehardt had pulled her aside while the others kept their eye out for the Navy Yard shuttle bus.

  “You sure you know what you’re doing here, Grace?” he asked.

  Grace looked out over the sea of cars in south parking.

  It was just after 5:00 p. m., and the lot was still full.

  “I think so, Doug. This assignment is crucial for me, and I think I also know what the game is here. But it’s also obvious these people are serious.”

  “Their bosses are serious. I think the commander is switched in, but this JAGMAN investigation is just another temporary duty for him. When it’s over, he goes back to his day job. But if it’s true that the vice chief, Admiral Torrance, is behind this, we’ll have to be very careful.

  He’s slated to be the next CNO, and Ames is scared shitless that when this vice takes over, he might try to do away with NTS entirely.”

  “Ames is always scared,” she said. “That’s part of our problem at NTS—a big part.”

  Englehardt looked around to make sure the other two could not overhear them. “Your views are well known, Grace. Please remember that you’re not in Career Services right now, due to your vast personnel experience.”

  “And I’ve been detailed to his little farce precisely because I’m in personnel, right, Doug? A little slap at the blue-suiters: You want a deputy, we’ll give you a lawyer turned clerk?”

  “So surprise them.”

  “Oh, I think I will, Doug. Trust me on this one.”

  Englehardt laughed. “Ames is a silly bastard who has no idea of what he’s unleashed,” he said. “But how about Collins? Can you handle this guy? I was hoping for some straight-stick line commander. Or better yet, an aviator. But this guy’s had some Washington time.

  Witness where we did the meeting.”

  Grace looked over at him. ” ‘Handle’? I don’t know if that’s an appropriate word. I think first we do the investigation.

  Look, Doug, I still believe that our best chance to refurbish NIS’s credibility—and perhaps our political lease on life—is by doing as good a job as we can on this investigation, despite its antecedents. We play this one straight, the Opnav admirals have no casus belli.

  We let Ames and the ‘Gang of Two’ play politics, we walk right into the vice’s trap.”

  “In your humble opinion.”

  “Well, now—”

  “Here’s the shuttle, thank God. You drove over, right?”

  “Right. And I have your private fax number.”

  “Yeah. Okay. Take care, Grace Ellen Snow. This might be some serious shit here.”

  “In your—”

  He grinned. “Yeah. In my humble opinion.”

  Grace waved to the group as they boarded the Navy Yard shuttle bus, then walked down to retrieve her white BMW from the guest-parking row at the east end of the Pentagon parking lot. She drove out the south parking entrance and into the stream of traffic going past the Pentagon heliport toward Washington. She crossed the infamous X intersection just east of Memorial Bridge and dropped down onto the GW Parkway.

  She took the parkway along the river as far as the entrance to Roosevelt Island Park before remembering that there was no ramp to Key Bridge going into town from the northbound lanes of the parkway. She would have to go all the way up to Chain Bridge, cross the river, and drive back down into Georgetown.

  “Damn it,” she muttered to herself as she slowed down to creep through Rosslyn with the rest of the herd, once again cursing all the gentry of Georgetown for refusing to let the Metro system have a station there.

  “Well, if one has a driver, my dear, what does one care about the traffic?” Honestly, some of those people.

  Grace Ellen Snow was thirty-five years old, a fact that had begun to intrude more frequently during her moments of personal reflection.

  Inching along under the high arches of the Key Bridge, the familiar assets-and liabilities litany surfaced once again: You’re reasonably good-looking; you have money and a nice town house in Georgetown; you come from a good family, have an economics undergrad degree from Brown, a law degree from Georgetown, an executive-level—correction, more like midlevel, isn’t it?—civil-service job. And on the debit side, counselor? A nose that’s slightly too long, breasts too small, the three-year-old emotional residue of a disastrous marriage, and a career history characterized most prominently by a penchant for irritating your superiors—irritating them to the point where they applied the lateral arabesque for which the civil service is famous, or infamous, depending on whether or not it’s happening to you. From NIS investigations policy as a GS-15 to the Career Services division. Still as a 15, but with zero managerial responsibilities and some fairly clear writing on the wall—and, oh, yes, while we’re on the subject, the social life of a tree.

  She was slowly, very slowly, and very grudgingly getting used to the idea that a traditional marriage, children, a family, and a Labrador in the fenced backyard were all becoming increasingly remote possibilities.

  Her parents had both passed on, so at least she did not have their expectations to deal with. But still, why the hell not me? she thought.

  Maybe it was all those advantages, and the dullards in government she had had to work with. There you go being an e
litist again, still believing your ex-husband’s line about people in government being automatically second-rate.

  In a conversation after the meeting, she had told Col lins she had eight years of field-investigation experience.

  But she had not told him that those eight years were in securities-fraud work for the Securities and Exchange Commission, with the “field” being the financial jungles of Manhattan. After her marriage to Rennie, the broker, had become a nightmare, compared with which, even divorce proceedings looked like a picnic, she had jumped at the offer of a political appointment in the Justice Department toward the end of the Bush administration. And, like many people who jump at things, she discovered that she had been extremely naive. And then after not quite two years had come the arrival of the great unwashed hordes from the “other party,” and suddenly she was just another low-level appointee scrambling to find a job. She had applied at the FBI, but anyone connected to the previous Justice Department had become persona non exista. Grace had just about given up on the idea of staying in government when a friend at Treasury had put her onto an opening at the Naval Investigative Service, in their white-collar-crime division. Since these were the people who chased down crooked military paymasters and inside jobs at the Navy exchanges, her resume from SEC had been a pretty good fit. And, of course, being a female hire, it would help NIS meet the new and improved gender quotas. The NIS had been a comedown from being a principal deputy assistant U.S. attorney general, but, unwilling to admit to herself that she was too independent of mind to make a good bureaucrat, she had jumped at it—again.

  In retrospect, she realized that the late-term appointment to Justice had been awfully convenient for two senior associate regional directors at SEC’s New York Region offices. She now suspected that her departure had been gracefully engineered by one, if not both, of them. But the debacle of her four-year marriage to Rennie and the ensuing divorce had literally worn her out, making any appointment out of New York seem like a godsend. Poor Rennie. When the Reagan bubble had burst, with the subsequent economic corrections, life with Rennie, who definitely considered himself one of Tom Wolfe’s Masters of the Universe, had turned into an abusive nightmare, complete with girlfriends and finally a dependence on the shiny white powder.

  Leaving Rennie had been easy; owning up to her mistake in marrying him had not been quite so easy.

  And even Justice had started off well, given her own emotional and physical state of exhaustion. But that familiar pattern had emerged during the first year. After only a few months at Justice, the signs had surfaced once again that Washington, like New York, was very much a man’s world and that things were already getting a bit testy among her coworkers and supervisors.

  What had the deputy AG said one day after a two-day offline management seminar? “Bureaucratically speaking, you’re a difficult woman, Grace.

  You were never meant to work in an organization.” He had initially come on like a paternal adviser, telling her how she would make a great litigator or even an independent counsel out there in private practice, but then he had spoiled it by making a remark about her legs. She’d thought she was doing well at SEC—until she was moved out. And the same thing at Justice, although there had not been time for a real test there, once the new administration had begun its purges. And now NIS: A GS-15 job in policy had turned into a nonjob in personnel —correction, Career Services. Her career path was once again looking more and more like a career trajectory.

  After the Spout Run divergence, the traffic finally opened up on the parkway and she drove up to the Chain Bridge exit, cut across the swirling black waters of the Potomac, and turned right to go down Canal Road, back toward the city. When Canal became M Street at the Key Bridge, she turned up into Georgetown proper on 33rd Street. Out of the traffic mess along M and the Key Bridge, she made it home to her town house on P Street in three minutes. For a denizen of Georgetown, she lived in near luxury: She actually had a driveway, although no garage.

  The street parking along the narrow passage of P Street was, as usual, all taken, but at least her driveway wasn’t blocked. She parked the car inside the wrought-iron fence, got out, closed the squealing gate, and went up the iron steps to the front door.

  Fumbling in her purse for her keys, she reflected on the meeting. So now an actual field investigation, a criminal investigation, a homicide even. Right. An investigation to which she had been seconded in order to offer insult to the blue-suiters who thought they ran the Navy. Collins wouldn’t stay fooled for very long—he seemed to be pretty smart.

  “Switched in,” as Doug had said. She was going to ride up to Philly with him tomorrow, that would be the time to tell him. That way, there would still be a chance to make this thing go. Even if her bosses in NIS wanted the Opnav investigation to fall on its face, she needed to make it succeed. It was her only chance to—what? Make a name for herself?

  Make a fool of herself, more likely. She sighed. One of these days, she would have to get a grip, see where all this career stuff was going. It wasn’t as if she had to work. But then, what was the point of even living in Washington if you were not part of government, either in it or on the outside waiting to get back in it?

  commander collins was right on time the next morning.

  He had arranged to pick her up in front of the Pentagon’s south parking entrance at 0600. She had agreed on the Pentagon after finding out that he lived in Old Town Alexandria. Halfway between Georgetown and Alexandria, the Pentagon parking lot turned out to be a good middle ground, an island in the midst of the morning rush-hour traffic. She was waiting in one of the covered bus kiosks when he pulled up in a large blue Chevrolet Suburban and activated the door locks.

  She put her single bag on the floor of the backseat and got in on the passenger side. They exchanged brief good mornings and then she let him concentrate on getting onto the George Washington Parkway to retrace his journey through Old Town. It was still dark, and the streets were slick from a persistent all-night drizzle.

  “You’re going to use the Beltway, Commander?” she asked as they slowed down for the speed zone near Washington National Airport.

  “Yeah. And the name’s Dan, by the way. Save the

  “Commander’ bit for meetings. If we can get over the Wilson Bridge in one piece without falling through a pothole, we just follow I-Ninety-five up to just before the Delaware Memorial Bridge, and then up the river and into Philly.”

  “Please call me Grace. The Beltway scares me.”

  “It scares everybody. That’s why I drive this big old hog. But New York Avenue is worse during rush hour, even outbound when everybody is coming in. Washington is hopeless where roads and traffic are concerned, or maybe just plain hopeless.”

  She remained silent as he threaded the big vehicle through the traffic along Old Town’s main thorough fare, Washington Street, wincing only once when they got to the jink in the street around the Confederate soldier statue and he swung the truck almost on top of a Honda in the right lane. He must have seen the wince.

  “Laws of gross tonnage,” he quipped. “Hondas mess with Suburbans at their peril.”

  “I wasn’t sure you saw him.”

  “Oh, I saw him. It’s just that there’s nowhere to go around that damned statue, and he knew it. You get great visibility in one of these things.”

  “We are rather up in the air. But it must be difficult in most Washington traffic.”

  “Yeah, but I’m a rower. You know, crew? I keep a boat at the Potomac Boat Club, over there by Key Bridge. It’s just a single, but I get out on the river each afternoon if I can get out of the Puzzle Palace in time.

  Sometimes I need to pull the boat to other rivers, or down to the Occoquan. This thing has a towing package.”

  “Ah. That must be beautiful,” she said. She had often seen the crew teams practicing on the river below the bluffs when she took her walks in the precincts of Georgetown University. “I went to law school at Georgetown.”

 
“You’re a lawyer?”

  She laughed. The way he had said “lawyer,” he might have substituted the term child molester.

  “Fond of lawyers, are we?” she said.

  It was his turn to laugh. “If I tell a lawyer joke, will it spoil our working relationship?”

  “Only if I’ve heard it. Actually, I’m not too sure what our working relationship is supposed to be.”

  “Oh, that’s easy. Look at that assh—Excuse me. I’m used to driving by myself. The habits of living alone, I’m afraid—I talk to myself.”

  “You’re not married?” she asked, then wondered where that question had come from.

  “No. I was. My wife died several years ago. I’ve never—”

  “I’m sorry,” she said automatically when he didn’t

  finish his sentence. “I didn’t mean to pry. I really meant this business between Opnav and NIS.” She was suddenly anxious for some reason to change the direction of the conversation. To her great relief, he went with it.

  “Oh, that. I’m not entirely sure what’s going on with all that. If this thing in Philadelphia is indeed a homicide, then I’d think it would be entirely in NIS’s jurisdiction.

  But when the elephants dance, we mousies are well advised to just get off the floor, you know?”

  She digested this in silence for a few miles. He was either part of it or he wasn’t, but he was acting as if he wasn’t.

  “My bosses are pretty upset, actually,” she said.

  “That guy Ames certainly was. So what are your marching orders, then, Grace?”

  She was taken somewhat aback by this direct question.

  ” ‘Marching orders’? I guess to act as your liaison with NIS, and to assist in the investigation.”

  “Okay, that’s fair enough,” he said. “Mine are to focus on the JAG Manual investigation. The Navy JAG— that’s judge advocate general, head lawyer for the Navy Department—has some fairly clear guidelines about how a JAGMAN is supposed to be done, and I plan just to walk it down the checklist. I assume you’re required to keep those angry bosses of yours informed as to what’s going on, right?”