Official Privilege

by P. T. Deutermann

  “Copy to JAG?” Dan asked.

  “Copies to no one. This office will handle the distribution of your preliminary report.”

  No copy to JAG? That meant that the heavies were going to massage this one themselves. “So they’re just going to drop it?” he asked. “Kill off the investigation because of the media interest?”

  Manning pretended surprise. “Drop it? Kill it off?

  Absolutely not. The investigation is being remanded to the NIS with instructions to bring the person or persons responsible to justice. We are absolutely not going to drop it. Any further questions, Commander?”

  Dan had about a hundred, but he decided that talking to Manning was futile, a decision visibly encouraged by Manning’s expression.

  “No, sir,” Dan said. “I’ll get the paperwork going.

  What do I do with Miss. Snow?”

  “She should probably call home. I’m fairly sure that NIS will find a prominent role in the continuing investigation for her, don’t you think?” Manning’s smirk made it obvious that he believed no such thing.

  “Right, Captain. I’ll get on it.”

  “You do that, Commander. Oh, and Captain Randall sends his regards. He’s apparently looking forward to serving with you in an operational environment one day. Or so he says.”

  Dan managed a weak smile and left the front office.

  With his luck, he would get a ship in soon-to-be Rear Admiral Randall’s destroyer group, thereby ensuring a positively wonderful command tour.

  Summerfield had been half-right, he reflected, as he walked back to the office. When he got back to 614, he realized it was almost one o’clock and that he was hungry.

  He found Grace busy making notes in her PC when he entered the back room.

  “Want to go grab a sandwich?” he asked. “One last time.”

  She stopped typing and looked up at him. “It’s official?”

  “Yup. We’re to wrap this thing up and hand over all the paperwork to Oh-six B, the flag officer who appointed me. From there, it’s purportedly going back to NIS, as are you.”

  Grace shook her head. “They won,” she said.

  “They’re going to kill it.”

  “Oh, no, on the contrary, the EA promised me that NIS is going to pursue the matter most vigorously, until all the bad guys are caught and—get this—brought to justice—his words. He even forecast a prominent role for you in the new and improved investigation.”

  Grace laughed, but it was not a pretty sound. “What they’re really going to do,” she said, “is call a press conference, announce that they are expanding the investigation, adding more resources, and centralizing the investigation effort at the NIS precisely because of the increased emphasis being placed on it by the highest levels of the Navy Department.”

  “So they’re not going to kill it?”

  “Oh yes. They’ll fragment the whole effort into a dozen different shops, making sure everybody gets a piece of it, and that way, the bureaucracy can quietly envelop it. The press will get tired, and life will move on.

  That’s how it’s done.”

  Dan sat down.

  “I’ve gotta tell you,” he said, “I don’t know whether to feel bad or good about that. I haven’t really been too comfortable about this game since it started. I don’t have your insider’s knowledge about the NIS, but personally, I felt pretty uneasy about my role as a homicide investigator, even with you along. A collision, a grounding, a fire at sea—these are calamities within my professional competence. Murder belongs to the cops, and for better or for worser, NIS is the cops.”

  Grace shook her head. “That’s not the point,” she said. “The point is that one person has been murdered, and another one has died in mysterious circumstances.

  Brother and sister, both Navy, and the Navy brass is opting to let some nebulous political and bureaucratic factors drive what it does with the investigation. I smell a rat.”

  Dan sat back in his chair. “I guess I can’t help you with that, Grace.

  The Navy is a bureaucracy, just like every other government agency in this town. It’s a fact of life that bureaucratic factors in Washington are extraordinarily important. I mean, Six-fourteen is in the political division of the Navy staff, and bureaucratic factors drive everything we do. All I can surmise is that the bosses, the flags, have their reasons.

  They had their reasons when they first pulled NIS’s chain, and now they have their reasons for patting NIS on the head. I don’t know what those reasons are, but I guarantee they aren’t going to tell me. We gave it a fair shot, and now—”

  “And now it’s going to atrophy behind a smoke screen of sincere publicity. Shame on us. Hell, even Vann saw it coming.”

  Dan didn’t know what else to say. “So, how’s about lunch?” he said weakly.

  Despite the surrounding beauty of the center-court arboretum on a spring day, it was a dismal lunch. The heaviest part of the noontime crowd had thinned out by 1:30, leaving them a wide choice of benches and their very own flock of mendicant pigeons. Dan tried to put the best face on what had happened, but Grace was not having any of that. She was visibly angry. “Shame on us,” she had said, and he could understand that sentiment.

  He finally asked if she was going to go back over to NIS headquarters in the Navy Yard that afternoon.

  “I’ll have to call them first,” she said, folding her unfinished sandwich into a tight little ball in the wax paper that came with it.

  The pigeons looked pffended. “I’m not sure if I should go back over there today. I think I’d B make something of a scene.”

  “Grace, you’re taking this thing too personally,” he replied. “I mean, you think that they’ll tank the investiigation, but you don’t know that.

  And the flags have every right to direct how this thing goes. It belonged in NIS in the first place.”

  I “I know that. It’s the admirals and these damned EAs I’m mad at. They brought the investigation over here to the Pentagon for some awfully petty reasons, and it looks to me like they’re dumping it just because the press might make a hot potato out of it.”

  “I guess I’m at a disadvantage here,” Dan said. “On the operational side, we’re trained to follow orders in our business. Our whole system would fall apart if everybody started questioning orders. And, you never know when your boss knows something you don’t know, something that might explain the whole thing.”

  “I think they count on that, some of these glorified file clerks masquerading as senior military officers,” she said. “All that little admiral up in Philadelphia wanted to hear from you was ‘Aye, aye, sir.’ Not because he had some overwhelming reason to exercise a role in the investigation —he was just mad because you failed to kowtow when you came on his turf. Honestly.”

  Dan didn’t know what to say to that; she was uncomfortably accurate about Comnavbase Philadelphia. But he was not as convinced when it came to what was going on with this investigation. In his mind, what was more likely was that the Opnav flags and the EAs had realized how hopeless a case this was and wanted to land it back on NIS’s plate before it became an unequivocal disaster. But he was not quite willing to say that to Grace Snow, who might yet have to work the case. He looked at his watch.

  It was almost two o’clock.

  The shutters on the center-court snack bar were being rolled down, and an old man in a white cook’s outfit had begun to hose down the area around the snack bar.

  “I guess we better go back,” he said. “I’ve got some paperwork to hand in by close of business. And you—”

  “Yes. I have to call home, don’t I.”

  grace felt like an interloper when she returned to the OP-614 offices after lunch. Captain Summerfield and Snapper were both polite, but she had the distinct impression that she was expected to leave now that the investigation had been transferred back to NIS. Dan was being solicitous, acting almost as if she alone had been visited with the bad news about the investigation.
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br />   On the one hand, she was grateful for his concern, but on the other, she was angry with him for giving up the investigation so easily. The problem, she decided, was that she was starting to like him. I’m not mad at him; I’m disappointed in his precious Navy. While he began finalizing his summary report, she sat down and called Doug Englehardt.

  “Mr. Englehardt’s in a meeting,” his secretary, Brenda, said. “Can I take a message?”

  “This is Grace Snow. No message. I—”

  “Oh, he left one for you, in case you called in, Miss. Snow. He said to report back to headquarters first thing tomorrow morning. Said there was no point in coming in this afternoon.”

  “No point?”

  “That’s what he said.”

  “I see. Do you know who will be working the Hardin case now?”

  “I don’t know anything about the case assignments, Miss. Snow. I do know Mr. Englehardt and Mr. Ames are in a meeting with the admiral and the EA, Captain Rennselaer. I think it’s about the body in the battleship —is that the Hardin case?”

  “Yes, it is. Tell me, Brenda, what’s Mr. Englehardt’s calendar look like for first thing in the morning?”

  The secretary put her on hold and then came back.

  “He’s got the policy division staff meeting at eight thirty, then a teleconference with East Coast NISRAs at nine-thirty.”

  “How about penciling me in for eight o’clock, would you? I’d like to talk to him offline before the staff meeting. I need about fifteen minutes.”

  The secretary agreed, with the understanding that there was no appointment until Englehardt confirmed it. Grace gave her the home number in Georgetown, then hung up. Dan, who appeared not to have been listening, was banging away on his keyboard. He looked up when he sensed that she was looking at him.

  “Get through?”

  “Yes, and no,” she said. “My mentor said not to bother coming in this afternoon, that tomorrow would be fine. And he’s attending a meeting with the director of the NIS on the Hardin case.”

  “So they’re getting right on it; that doesn’t sound like they’re going just to tank it.”

  Grace looked out the window at the concrete walls of the D-ring across the air shaft.

  “If they were starting to work it,” she said, “don’t you think they would include the one person from the NIS organization who has been intimately involved with it so far? Or be waiting for a copy of your summary report?

  No, I suspect this is a strategy session, one that they very much do not want me to attend. Englehardt as much as said so: He told the secretary to tell me that there was no point in my coming in this afternoon.”

  He put his pen down. “So they’re going to freeze you out?”

  “I’d guess so. I suspect I’ll be told to get back to my overflowing in-basket down in Career Services.”

  It was Dan’s turn to hesitate. “I don’t know if I should be saying this to you,” he said, “but it sounds to me like there were two messages in that.”

  “Oh, yes. I think there were. We’ll handle the Hardin case. And when are you, Miss. Snow, going to take the hint and exit gracefully?”

  Dan got up and closed the door.

  “Hell,” he said, “if that’s the game, why not make a deal? Tell them you’ll quit the organization without a fuss as long as they make it look good on your resume.

  They obliterate the record of your being shunted down to the personnel office. Then they write a departure evaluation that says you were a valuable member of the policy staff, they sincerely regret your decision to leave, etcetera, etcetera.”

  “You’ve become cynical in your old age, Dan.”

  He grinned. “Yeah, but practical. You haven’t done anything that constitutes high crimes and misdemeanors, and somebody has to be whispering in the deputy’s ear that you could, if you wanted to, launch a sexual harassment or equal-opportunity suit that would tie them up in very public knots. Make a deal: They reinstate you temporarily to the policy staff, give you a fancy title, wait sixty days, and you’ll exit quietly, no fuss, no muss, with a glowing letter, top evals, maybe even a nice commendation. That way, you could give them your input on the Hardin case even if you’re not going to work it. Hell, if you’ve got a rabbi, use him.”

  Grace turned to look at the Hardin case boards. Dan was probably right.

  She made about twice as much a year from her trust funds as she did from her GSnfteen government salary: it wasn’t as if the collection agencies would be coming around. She could go full-time on the Ph. D., take a year or so on sabbatical, and then go back into government … if she still felt like it. She was more than a little soured on government service just now. But the Hardin case still rankled.

  “You’re right, I suppose,” she said. “I’m fortunate in that I have more alternatives than most people. It just bothers me about this case. I have no faith that the system is going to press on with it.”

  Dan shrugged. “We can’t know that, as I said before.

  But you have to admit, without Mrs. Hardin’s cooperation, it’s going to be a bear to get much further with this thing.”

  “I think Vann was ready to help,” she said.

  “But conditionally—only if the Navy kept the thing going. Like you said, he saw the potential for the hot potato treatment. And now—”

  “Yes. And now what? There was a pretty heavy-duty subtext in what he had to say: the official white world dealing with just another black homicide.”

  Dan was shaking his head. “I’ll grant you that the big guys may be taking a pass until the media interest cools down, but I don’t subscribe to a racial angle. For one practical reason, if not for an ethical one.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “If they ever got caught, everyone involved would lose their stars and bars. And besides, the Navy is a recruit-dependent organization. It simply can’t afford to discriminate against blacks or any other minorities. We need people to run this outfit, and we have to compete with all the other services and industry for a shrinking national pool of physically and mentally qualified talent.”

  Grace had no answer for that. She had thought before of just giving up on government service, and Dan’s advice about making a deal seemed eminently practical, if a bit distasteful. But maybe that’s why she wanted out: Working for the government was distasteful.

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she said finally.

  “Do you need any help tying off your interim report?”

  “No, I’m about done. We don’t have that much, really, when you start trying to reduce it to the almighty facts and opinions. There are some Privacy Act forms outstanding, but the little we have is all here.”

  “May I have a copy when you’re done?” She surprised herself by asking.

  “Sure,” he said. “I’ll go Xerox what I have now; my instructions are to make no copies once it’s actually completed. The EAs are going to handle distribution.”

  He left to go to the Xerox room. She wondered why the EAs were going to handle distribution. Probably because there wasn’t going to be any distribution. She sat still for a moment, wondering what to do next.

  It’s time to go, she thought then. Time to go. She got her things together and was waiting, PC and coat in hand, when Dan came back.

  “Here’s your copy. I’ll escort you down,” he said, getting his coat.

  “I can probably find my way,” she said. Except that she did want him to walk her to the south parking exit.

  She suddenly realized that she wasn’t ready just to walk away from Dan Collins. But he was all business.

  “I have to,” he said. “We need to turn your badge back in, and you can’t get through security without a pass or an escort. They catch you, they give you orders to a three-year tour here.”

  They walked together, saying nothing. He took her the long way around the E-ring and then down a narrow stairway that miraculously came out one door away from the south parking exit security
area. He walked her through security, depositing her building pass with the guards, and then stopped on the steps outside. She didn’t know what to say.

  “Do you want me to let you know when I find out what they’re doing with this thing?” she asked. She assumed he would want to know.

  “If you’d like,” he said, implying by the way he said it that he didn’t really expect that she would.

  “Very well,” she said. “Then I guess this is goodbye.”

  He seemed to hesitate. “You gave me your home phone number,” he said finally. “Would you mind if I call you sometime?”

  For some reason, she felt suddenly a lot better. She looked directly at him, and he smiled.

  “Please do,” she said. “I’d like that.”

  He smiled again, an almost embarrassed, boyish grin, gave her a mock salute, and went back inside the Pentagon.

  Grace went to find her car.

  at 7:45 on thursday morning, Grace pulled her car into the 3rd Street gate at the Washington Navy Yard in Southeast Washington. The Navy Yard, sometimes also called the Old Gun Factory, was situated on the banks of the Anacostia River. It was the Navy’s oldest shore establishment, having been authorized in 1799. Many of the industrial buildings dated from the 1850s, when the yard had begun to specialize in the design and production of naval ship ordnance, culminating in the production of sixteen-inch guns for the Navy’s battleships, hence the name Gun Factory. When the Navy stopped making battleship guns in the early sixties, the huge foundries and gun works were abandoned and fell into ruin. The largest industrial-works buildings were later stripped of all their equipment and converted into office buildings in the Defense Department’s eternal search for more office space. New office buildings were erected within the hollowed-out brick shells of the nineteenth-century originals. The NIS headquarters was in one of these, called the Forge Building.