During the organ prelude (“Durch Adams Fall ist Ganz Verderbt,” by Johann Sebastian Bach) I listened quietly. The Bach was definitely a good sign that the service itself wouldn’t be too happy-clappy or the hymns so “relevant” that the ink was barely dry. As the organist wrapped up the prelude and made a clever little segue into the first hymn, I wondered idly what the Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music would come up with in 2012, the next time the prayer and hymn books were due for revision. Back in 1979 nobody’d had laptops or forty gigabytes of anything, so it wouldn’t surprise me if future prayer books came in the form of customizable PowerPoint programs, designed to be projected on huge screens hanging over the altar.
But I needn’t have worried about St. George’s, at least not that day. The prelude was glorious, the hymns traditional—a little Ralph Vaughan Williams makes my heart soar—the choir small, but excellent, and the sermon inspirational, delivered as an extra bonus by a twinkly priest with a neat, slightly graying beard. I relaxed, even enjoying the inspired goofiness of Eucharistic Prayer C: “At your command all things came to be: the vast expanse of interstellar space, galaxies, suns, the planets in their courses, and this fragile earth, our island home.”
Island home? My mind wandered, I couldn’t help it. Palm trees, gentle ocean breezes, a little Parrot Head music on the steel drums. Now that was symbolism I could live with.
During the Prayers of the People, I offered up a proper prayer for my speedy delivery from whatever evils might be lurking in the cold, hard hearts of the FBI, reiterated my request during the post-Communion prayer, and in the time it took to play the postlude, I sat, head bowed, praying for the wisdom to know what to do.
After the service, everyone streamed in the direction of the parish hall, but Chris had said she’d skip the fellowship hour and meet me on the steps of the church. I waited there, as instructed, leaning against the iron railing of the handicapped ramp, my eyes fastened on the massive wooden doors.
When Chris came out, I recognized her at once: the tall, reed-thin soprano who had been singing in the back row of the choir. The pink suit, which was actually a particularly violent shade of fuchsia, had been covered by her choir robe. Chris’s blond hair tumbled about her ears in a tousled bob that must have cost big bucks to achieve that casual, just-slept-in look. She’d draped a paisley scarf over one shoulder and secured it with a jeweled safety pin. In unrelieved checkerboard, I looked comparatively dowdy, like a black and white movie. Chris, however, was in dazzling Technicolor.
I’d told her I would be carrying a copy of Newsweek magazine, so I held it up. She noticed, caught my eye, smiled and hurried over. “Emily?”
I nodded, feeling like the world’s biggest fraud by answering to my daughter’s name. I hated to con the woman, but other than sending a surrogate, I was running out of options.
“Let’s go someplace quiet where we can talk,” Chris said. “There’s a Starbucks by the Metro station, near the clock tower? Do you know it?”
“Yes, I noticed when I got off.”
“Right. I have some loose ends to clear up here, then I’ll pick up my coat and join you in about ten minutes. I’ll have a regular coffee, black.”
When Chris found me, I was still standing at the Starbucks fixings bar, sprinkling vanilla powder on my cappuccino. “Here’s your coffee,” I said, handing it to her. “Chocolate chip cookie, too,” I said, pointing to the counter where I’d set down a cookie the size of a salad plate, wrapped in waxed paper.
She peeled the lid off her cup and took a sip. “Thanks. Where do you want to sit?”
I shrugged. “Anywhere is fine with me.”
With Chris in the lead, we migrated toward a table in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows. Chris slipped her arms out of her coat and turned the shoulders inside out over the back of her chair. I kept my coat on. In the first place, I felt cold. In the second place, I figured I might need it if I had to blow the joint once she found out who I really was.
“Where did you get my name, Emily?” she asked before I could even make a dent in the foam on top of my coffee.
“Jennifer Goodall,” I said, watching her face carefully for any sign of a reaction.
Chris blinked twice, then set her coffee down, using both hands to steady it. “She’s—”
“I know,” I said. “It was a terrible thing.”
Chris stared over my shoulder at something so far away that even the Hubble telescope couldn’t bring it into focus. After a long silence she said, “So, how did you know Jennifer?”
“We met when she came to the Academy.” That was the truth, at least.
“Jen and I were classmates at Annapolis,” Chris volunteered. “After graduation, we went our separate ways, but we met up again at the Pentagon.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “Were you close?”
“At one time, yes, very, but not since she went back to Annapolis.”
“Still, it must have been a shock.”
Chris shuddered. “It’s not something I care to think about.” She stared into her cup for a few seconds, then took a sip. It seemed to fortify her. “So, Emily, tell me. How can I help you?”
“Well, first I need to be honest with you. My name’s not Emily Shemanski. I was afraid if I told you my real name, you wouldn’t agree to see me.”
“In my line of work,” Chris said with a small smile, “I’m used to dealing with people who are reluctant to use their real names. With ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell,’ secrecy is the name of the game. Let me assure you that anything you tell me stays with me, Emily. So, tell me, what’s the problem?”
I took a deep, steadying breath. “My problem is …” I paused, backtracking a little. “First, promise me you’ll hear me out, no matter what.”
“Of course I will. I wouldn’t have agreed to meet you otherwise.”
I studied my thumbs for a minute, then looked up. “After I finish, I will understand perfectly if you want to throw your coffee in my face and walk out, but I don’t know who else to turn to.”
“For heaven’s sake, Emily, relax. I don’t bite.”
Taking her at her word, I squared my shoulders and said, “My real name is Hannah Ives, and my problem is that I’ve been arrested for a murder I didn’t commit.”
Chris studied me with pale, almost translucent blue eyes. “Hannah Ives? My God, you’re the woman—”
I reached out and grabbed her hand, squeezing hard, holding on to keep her from bolting. “I’m sorry for giving you a false name, but I couldn’t take the chance that you’d refuse to see me.”
For what seemed like an eternity, she stared at me, her eyes hard as winter ice. “Okay, then, Hannah.” She slung my name back at me like an epithet. “Tell me why I should give you the freaking time of day.”
“Because I came all the way from Annapolis to see you, hoping you could tell me something, anything, that might help me figure out who really killed your friend and get me off this great big hook.”
“Seems to me that’s your lawyer’s job,” she said, gently extracting her hand from my grasp.
“Of course it’s my lawyer’s job, but he can’t be everywhere at once.”
“Ives … Ives …” Chris laced her fingers together and rested her chin on the tips of her thumbs. “Didn’t Jen claim that your husband—”
I cut her off. “Yes, but that was lies from one end to the other.”
Suddenly Chris was no longer looking at me, but studying a poster on the wall. “I know,” she said in a voice so soft that I almost missed it.
“What do you mean, you know?” Every muscle in my body clenched. “You were at the Academy then. If you knew the truth, how could you have kept silent? My husband’s reputation was on the line! His job was in jeopardy!”
She raised her hands, palms out. “Sorry. So very sorry. I didn’t mean to imply that I knew about it at the time. It was several years after the fact before Jennifer hinted to me—just hinted, mind you—that there might not
have been anything really going on between her and Professor Ives, and by then the charges against your husband had long been dropped. Jen had moved on with her life.”
Moved on. And with absolutely no concern over the boats that got swamped in her wake. The little bitch.
Chris’s face softened, and almost as if she had read my thoughts, she said, “Jen was putting pressure on your husband, wasn’t she?”
“Uh-huh. For a diploma. She was flunking his course.” I shifted awkwardly in my chair. “Look, Chris, I know that Jennifer was your friend, and I don’t mean to imply that she was in the habit of blackmailing people, but—”
Chris didn’t let me finish. “You wouldn’t be talking to me if you didn’t believe that.”
I felt my face flush. “Well, it did occur to me that if she’d tried it once, she might try it again. And if she tried it on with the wrong person, they might have wanted her dead.”
“Your husband, for example?”
I shook my head vigorously. “If that were the case, Jennifer would have been dead six years ago.”
I took a sip of coffee before moving on. “No, I was thinking that it had to be somebody she was working with recently. Admiral Hart, for example?”
“Look, Mrs. Ives …” She paused, as if deciding how forthcoming she was prepared to be with someone she had just met. “Jennifer and I got reacquainted when we were both working at the Pentagon.” Chris had pinched off a piece of cookie the size of a silver dollar, but instead of eating it, she laid it on her napkin. “She worked for Admiral Hart and I was in Personnel, so we might never have seen one another. But one day I ran into her in the food court.” She paused. “We became very close.”
There was an awkward silence. “I’m sorry for your loss,” I said.
She stared at me, no trace of emotion on her face. “Thank you.”
“I know you’re very much involved with the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network,” I said, pinching off a bit of cookie for myself. Then I took a giant leap. “Was Jennifer involved in the group, too?”
One platinum eyebrow shot up. “Yes, but not actively. It wouldn’t have been particularly career-enhancing, would it?” Chris smiled grimly. “But Jennifer referred midshipmen to us from time to time.”
“I know. That’s how I really got your name, from one of the mids we were sponsoring.” Another fib. I was turning into a career criminal.
We drank our coffee silently for a few moments. “Do you mind if I ask you a personal question, Chris?”
Chris shrugged. “Go ahead.”
“Why did you get out of the Navy?”
“I think that’s obvious, don’t you?”
“You’re gay?”
“Right.”
I leaned across the table and followed that admission to its logical conclusion. “So, you and Jennifer were lovers,” I whispered. “Weren’t you?”
Chris lowered her cup from her lips and nodded. “Until very recently. I issued an ultimatum.” She smiled miserably. “Never do that unless you’re sure you can live with the outcome.”
“An ultimatum? Do you mind telling me what it was?”
“Two of them, really. First, I wanted her to get out and come out. Jen had put in the five years she owed the Navy for her Academy education, so she could have resigned her commission at any time. But she told me she was committed to her Navy career and didn’t want to give it up, not even for me.” She buried her head in her hands, and I thought she might be crying, but when she looked up again, her eyes were dry. “If it weren’t for that ludicrous Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy, Jen and I could have made a life together. It was either me or the Navy. She made her choice.”
“You said two reasons. What was the other one?”
“As I said, I didn’t approve of what Jennifer was doing vis-à-vis the admiral.” Chris spread her fingers and swiped them through her hair. “Jen told me she’d uncovered evidence that the admiral’s been running his office like a supermarket for weapons manufacturers, soaking up bribes, divvying up multibillion-dollar contracts and diverting work to firms he secretly controls with his partners. Before I left the Navy, I used to work up in WAM, but that was long before Hart took over. I’ve got enough experience with it, though, to see how easily that sort of thing can happen.”
I stared at her for a few moments, collecting my thoughts. If what Chris was saying were true, the situation was far worse than anything Jack Turley had suggested might be going on, hypothetically or otherwise.
“But how is Hart getting away with it? Isn’t there oversight of government contracts anymore?” I remembered my days working at Whitworth and Sullivan, where we kept an archive of all the “blue cover” reports published by the United States Government Accountability Office, the government agency chartered by Congress to track down instances of waste, fraud, and abuse within the government. Congress commissioned some fifteen hundred GAO reports a year, holding up for ridicule such government expenses as $1,118 spent on plastic caps for stool legs or $2,548 for a pair of duckbill pliers. “GAO even looks into things like standards for bottled water,” I ranted. “Surely they must have some idea of what’s going on with the Raytheons and Halliburtons of the world.”
“You would think,” Chris said. “But when the U.S. is at war, all bets are off.”
“But if Jennifer knew about it and you know about it, surely someone else does, too?”
“Jennifer talked big,” Chris explained, “but she never shared any of her evidence with me.”
“What about watchdog groups and FOIA?” I continued. “Surely contractors are required to respond to Freedom of Information Act requests.”
“They are and they aren’t,” she said. “Contractors can claim that specific financial data falls under the heading of a trade secret and that making it public would give their competitors unfair advantage. There’s often months and months of legal wrangling before a report finally arrives, and when it does, the cost figures have often been redacted.”
“Good grief.”
“Jen hinted that Hart had always been very clever about keeping his activities under the radar, but she claimed she finally had the goods on the guy and was going to blow the whistle. After separating him from a chunk of his money first, I’m afraid. Seeing all those unaccounted-for millions pass over her desk every day, the temptation must have been enormous.”
“But I still don’t understand. Knowing all this, how come you didn’t turn Admiral Hart in?”
“I loved her.”
Three simple, one-syllable words that explained everything.
“I hated her methods,” Chris continued after a moment of silence, “but I couldn’t stop loving her. I thought I’d talked her around at last. Forget the money, I told her, turn the son of a bitch in.”
“But now that Jennifer’s gone?”
“You must think I’m some sort of monster, sitting on information like this, but I’m not. I don’t have a speck of proof, and working in Personnel, there’s really no way I’d have access to it. But just so you don’t think I’m totally beyond redemption, I can tell you that I made a few phone calls to Arianna Huffington’s office, and to the Center for Public Integrity. They have much better connections than I do.”
“I wouldn’t trust Hart any farther than I could throw him,” I snorted, “which, considering his size, isn’t very far!”
Chris started. “How do you know Hart?”
“His son is a midshipman. The kid has a role in the Glee Club musical, and I was working with his wife helping to build sets. Hart came to the Academy several times, to see his son perform in Sweeney Todd, or so I thought. But Jennifer always seemed to be hanging around at the time. Eventually I put two and two together.”
“I see.” Chris sighed. “Do they still do the musicals in Mahan Hall?”
“Yup.”
“I remember Mahan,” she commented wistfully. “Lots of nooks and crannies where a mid can hide out, far from the prying eyes of Mother B.”
/> Mother B—Mother Bancroft—was the midshipman equivalent of Big Brother.
“Or two mids,” I amended.
She grinned. “That, too.”
“That’s probably why Jennifer arranged to meet Hart there. Anyplace else, even in downtown Annapolis, they were very likely to be noticed.” I paused, staring at the reflection of the overhead light shimmering on the surface of my coffee.
“Did Jen actually get money from the admiral?” I asked. “Do you know?”
“No.” A look of absolute misery stole across her face. “Hart found out about us, you see.”
“I see.” Jennifer and the admiral had reached a stalemate.
Chris twirled her empty coffee cup around on the tabletop. “Jen enjoyed playing with fire, but this was the first time she got burned.”
As I watched the cup go round and round, for the first time in weeks I thought I could see light at the end of the tunnel. “Chris, will you tell my lawyer what you just told me?”
To my surprise, she smiled mischievously. “I’ve not been quite honest with you, either, Hannah. Your lawyer came to see me late last week. Everything you know, he knows.”
Even though I wanted to snatch him bald-headed for not sharing this bit of critical information with me, my rating of Murray went up several notches. “But how did he find you?”
Chris shrugged. “Maybe he learned that I’d already been contacted by NCIS and the Navy I.G.?”
“Oh.” What a blockhead I was! Here I thought I’d been on the bleeding edge, but the foot soldiers for both the prosecution and the defense had gone charging ahead, leaving me to wander in the darkened woods, picking up bread crumbs.
Chris stood and lifted her coat off the back of the chair. “I’ve got to go, but if it means anything, I want you to know that I don’t hold you responsible for Jennifer’s death.”
“Thank you. It means a lot.”
This Enemy Town Page 17
