Official Privilege

by P. T. Deutermann

  He got up and sprinted across the street to the corner of the Turret Lathe Building, where he flattened himself against the brick wall. He listened for a minute, trying to hear over the sound of his own breathing, and then he threw himself around the corner and flattened himself against the side of a loading dock. He listened for the sounds of someone above him on the dock, but there was nothing, just the two sirens that were getting a lot closer. He thought he could see flashing blue lights reflecting off the skylight windows of the building across the street. His own breathing sounded very loud in his ears. Maybe’s he’s gone inside. He would have heard the sirens, too, and known that anyone running down the streets of the Navy Yard would be seen.

  Dan crept around to the face of the loading dock and moved to the right-front fender of the pickup truck, which he now could see was parked in a notch between two loading docks. He peered under the truck, looking for feet. Nothing. But he could see that the doors to the factory building were open. Bet my ass he’s in there.

  You’ll bet your ass big time, you go in there, a voice in his head whispered. He’s got the gun, remember? At that instant, a cop car squealed into the intersection, its lights on high beam and its blue lights flashing, but as he was about to stand up and wave, the car made a screeching turn to the left and careened back up the street he had just been on. He could hear the other car somewhere in the maze of industrial buildings but couldn’t see it. Shit! He made his decision.

  Keeping low, he went around the front of the truck, which appeared to be a Metro truck, of all things, and sidled up to the entrance of the factory. He stood flattened against the left-side sliding door, which appeared to be made of steel panels that were thirty feet high and mounted on tracks. There was a large mound of debris and scrap metal piled in the open doorway, but there was a walk space of sorts on one side that he could get around. He chose the other side, figuring the walk space might be targeted. He crept, bent over, across the front of the pile of debris and then bolted up over the right side of the scrap heap, tripping on something and losing his footing at the top, then sprawling down the other side into the darkness of the huge building just as another shot cracked into the pile. He rolled quickly across the floor in the darkness until he came up against a piece of machinery; then he flattened himself on the entrance side of it. He waited, listening, trying to dampen down his own breathing. Outside, the sirens were getting louder again, and this time a cop car came blasting right by the entrance to the factory and hurtled on down the street. Dan could only hope they would figure it out and start looking in the buildings soon.

  Starting with this one, please.

  He thought he heard something move, maybe twenty feet away, and slowly turned his head. There was some light in the building, but it was all up high, and the shadows down here on the factory floor were pretty solid.

  Conscious of that gun, he decided not to stay in any one place for very long. He crawled on his bare hands and the tips of his toes to stay as quiet as possible.

  He came around the edge of the block of machinery, stopped for an instant, and then began to make his way toward the next large dark shadow about twenty feet farther into the building. He became extremely conscious of sounds then—his own breathing, the little rustling noises of rats skittering through the piles of scrap littering the floor, the deep-throated hum of the power plant fans next door, the crazy, distant siren circus going on outside, and the low sounds of the night breeze off the river whistling in the maze of girders way above his head. He reached the next machine, which appeared to be a giant drill press of some kind, and folded himself down against its base. He could see better now, and he was dismayed to realize how clear a target he had been coming through that door. The feel of the cold steel foundation of the drill press was comforting against his neck—until he felt it move.

  “That’s good, Daniel,” a voice said above his head.

  Dan froze, and then he looked up. Captain Summer field, in his dress blues, his jacket open, the gun in his right hand, and what looked like a black box of some kind in his left hand, sat above him on the operator’s chair, the four gold stripes on his sleeve glinting dangerously in the gloom, his face pale but recognizable.

  “I was right,” Dan said. “It was you. Running.”

  “Running, yes. I suppose I’ll have to get used to that now. That wasn’t too bright, your running out in the open against a man with a gun like that.”

  “How the hell did you get here? We left you in the Pentagon and drove right over.”

  Summerfield smiled. “I took your beloved Metro. Fifteen minutes.”

  “Are you going to kill me, too?” Dan asked, trying to keep the fear out of his voice.

  “Only if I have to. I really haven’t killed anyone— that was all that idiot Malachi, your night visitor.”

  “But you instigated it.”

  “I guess in a way I did. Although like too many things in this town, what happened was not at all what was intended. Believe it or not, the killings were screwups— both of them.”

  Dan started to crawl out from under the machine to get a better look at Summerfield, but he stopped moving when the little gun came up like a snake’s head.

  Outside, it sounded as if there were more cop cars getting into the act.

  “And it wasn’t the vice, was it?” Dan said. “It was NIS. Keeler. Walker T. Keeler. W.T. But the vice, Ran dall, Rennselaer—they were all in it, weren’t they?” Summerfield sighed and began to climb down from the operator’s chair. “Rennselaer went to Randall with it, once the girl started to become a problem. That was two years ago, right after I had to leave my EA job with the previous vice chief. Randall was new, and he came to me because I had some assets left over from my OLA days that could take care of problems like that He didn’t tell the vice; Admiral Torrance would have sent Keeler home if he’d found out about the affair.

  Retired him in thirty days flat. But Keeler was his protege, so the EA did what EAs do: He tried to protect both his own boss and the flag officer with the short circuit between his brain and his crank.”

  “By killing her?”

  They both stopped as the sirens got closer again.

  Then the sirens began to wind down, leaving a galaxy of blue strobe lights flickering through the skylight windows.

  “No. Ward was a contractor I had used from time to time to take care of problems when I was up in legislative liaison. He’d been recommended by a Hill staffer I knew. Keeler thought the girl was about to make a rude noise, so Ward was supposed to drop around and scare her off. That was all. Instead, she got mad and pulled a knife and apparently cut him up.

  He ran her over with a truck the next morning—the one parked out front, I imagine.”

  “Lovely. And her brother?”

  “Almost the same thing, really.” Summerfield sighed.

  He appeared to be listening for the sounds of cops out front. “The brother somehow found out about the affair, unfortunately right before the girl met her … accident. Came down from Philly and demanded a meeting with Rear Admiral Keeler. Rennselaer panicked and asked me to handle the meeting. The girl’s death was being reported as an accident, but Rennselaer suspected that somehow it might not have been.

  Since my man had been sent to hush her up, it fell on me to see if we could shut the boy up, or at least divert him. We stalled him at a meeting in the Army Navy Town Club, and, once again, Ward was told to intimidate him into silence. He turned it over to some people in Philly.

  They mishandled it, and the boy ended up getting killed.”

  “Jesus. All this to protect one officer from the scandal of a senior officer-junior officer love affair?”

  “A comedy of errors—or tragedy. But then there was nothing to be done, and for two years, we thought the whole thing had blown over—that is, until the kid’s body was found in the Wisconsin. Keeler had to have known that two deaths were beyond coincidence, but there was nothing he could do about it. It was Rennselaer and R
andall who cooked up the gambit of Opnav taking the investigation.”

  “So that part was all a prearranged little dance.”

  “To begin with. But once you and Miss. Snow brought it back to town, the vice chief began asking questions.

  And once it looked to Randall that the vice might actually find out what had happened, it fell to me to eliminate the one guy who could pin this tail on all us donkeys, Malachi Ward. I took certain measures to expose him to the police, trying to make him run for it. It would have worked, too, except that you and the indomitable Miss. Snow wouldn’t leave it alone.”

  “But he implicated the vice the night he came after us! He talked about the vice’s flunky.”

  “When it all started, I was the vice’s EA, wasn’t I?

  He just assumed I still was. Which brings me to business, Daniel. I can’t be here when the Keystone Kops out there finally figure out which building to look in.

  But I need some insurance, so you’re going with me.

  Get up.”

  Dan became aware that there were sounds of people outside now, the chunking of car doors, and more blue lights flickering across the ceiling—except that they were not at the front entrance. Summerfield looked over at the doors and laughed harshly.

  “Rent-a-cops. They’re surrounding the wrong damn building. I love it.

  Start walking—that way.”

  grace had snatched the old guard’s gun without a second thought and run down the stairs before any of them could even start yelling. She raced through the front door of the Forge Building, turned right, in the direction that Dan had disappeared, ran down in front of the Forge Building until she came to the chapel, and then stopped. Her heart was pounding from the sudden exertion. Who the hell was Dan chasing? It had to be that Ward character. She had been stunned to see Rennselaer coming down the hall: Robby said he had gone to a late meeting, and they both had assumed— except, at the edges of her mind, she thought the man running through the gun park had been in a Navy uniform.

  A crack of gunfire echoed up the street a block in front of her, and she flinched when the bullet made a spanging noise off a brick wall. She hefted the pistol in her right hand and examined it for the first time.

  It was huge. She would need two hands just to point it. She walked rapidly down the remaining part of the block to the corner of the Forge Building, then stopped. Now what? Stick her head around the corner?

  Suddenly, that seemed an unattractive idea. Except that Dan was down there, somewhere, and Dan did not have a gun, and the person he was chasing obviously did. Her decision was made for her when the front doors to the Forge Building burst open a block behind her and the two security guards ran down the steps. The large woman saw Grace and yelled at her to stop. Grace turned and looked back, which allowed the guards to see the pistol. The large woman hauled her weapon out and yelled for Grace to drop it. Grace hesitated, then stepped around the corner into the streetlight.

  The light. She was standing under a streetlight. She had to move. She started running again, down the street, away from the Forge Building and the cops, and across the street parallel to the Turret Lathe Building.

  She slipped sideways into the next street, which separated the Forge and the Quadrangle buildings. She never thought she would appreciate the absence of streetlights, but she exhaled forcefully when she reached the shadows between the two buildings and flattened herself against a wall.

  The Turret Lathe Building loomed in front of her, its ten-story-high windowless brick walls rising into a penumbra of river mist backlit by the power plant’s floodlights behind it. Where the hell were they?

  Now she could hear sirens in the distance. She wanted to call out to Dan but was afraid to. She was still holding the big pistol in both hands, and suddenly her arms were getting tired. Great. Can’t even hold the damn gun up, she thought. She tried to remember her NIS indoctrination.

  Don’t stand still when the other guy has a gun. She started moving again, trying to make herself small, proceeding down the block along the back end of the Quadrangle Building until she reached the T-intersection between the street she was on and the one that ran in front of the Turret Lathe Building— which is where she saw the white pickup truck.

  It was Ward. He had followed her in a white pickup truck.

  Except this one had a yellow flasher unit on the roof.

  She edged down a few more yards until she could see the front of the Turret Lathe Building; she spotted the open doors. They’re in there, she thought. The sirens were getting louder. Wait for the cops; point them in the right direction.

  A cop car came down the street between the Forge Building and the Quadrangle Building, its lights blazing and the siren going full blast.

  It slowed as it reached the intersection, and Grace started waving at them, but then the idiots turned left, away from her. Goddamn it, this way, she almost yelled, but she held back, not wanting to expose her presence, in case Ward was just inside that darkened doorway across the street. With Dan. At gunpoint? Oh God, did he have Dan? A second cop car came down the street on the other side of the Quadrangle Building, sound-and-light show going full blast, screeched through the intersection, and went right on past the open doors of the Turret Lathe Building. Jesus Christ, she thought, cops everywhere, and here she was, standing on the sidewalk with a gun in her hand, waving at them, and they didn’t see her?

  She ran across the street and crouched down by the right door of the pickup truck, which was stuck between the two loading docks. The open doors were only | twenty feet away. They were big doors, rising three stories into the entrance frames. She stood up slowly and looked into the pickup truck. The keys were in it, along with some small duffel bags; the butt of an automatic pistol sticking out of a side pocket of one of the bags.

  Ward. He had had a pistol like that in Georgetown. She was sure of it.

  Crouching, she crept around the front of the truck, running her left hand over the heavy steel grating, and walked very slowly over to the left side of the Turret Lathe Building entrance, the guard’s cannon held out in front of her, her hands trembling with its weight. The entrance was pitch-black, with only a pile of scrap iron and cables fully illuminated in the streetlight.

  She nearly screamed when a dark furry shape scuttled across the loading dock, right in front of her.

  Then she heard more cop cars, which sounded as if they were converging on the Quadrangle Building across the street. Had they found them? Was this a false trail? She edged closer to the door, crouched down, and peered around the corner into the cavernous darkness inside.

  Were they in there? There was a lot of activity going on one block over.

  She flattened herself against the damp steel door and decided to call out Dan’s name.

  dan straightened up, turned around, and started walking, trying to see back over his shoulder, but his neck was too stiff. “You can’t get clear of this, Captain,” he said. “Even if you get out of the Navy Yard, there’re gonna be cops all over Keeler and Rennselaer.

  And there’s Ward.”

  “Ward has been, shall we say, neutralized. Without him, everyone can speculate, but if Randall and Rennselaer can hold their tongues, there will be no evidence.

  Now, I think this thing has about two rounds in it. It’s a twenty-five-caliber Italian number. Zero stopping power. So if you get cute, I’ll put one in your brain, because I don’t have ammunition to throw away. I don’t want to shoot you. When I’m clear, you’ll be free to go.

  But right now, I may need you to get through those clowns out there.”

  Dan tripped over some debris on the floor but regained his balance. He could not tell exactly where Summerfield was, but he knew that the captain was probably not making idle threats. Summerfield, the gun collector, the expert shot, who could probably have hit him out there on the street, even with a small-caliber pistol. He tried again to reason with the captain.

  “You think if you let me go, I won’t talk?” he
said.

  “I don’t care if you do. I might be wrong, but after your little grandstand tonight in the vice’s office, who’ll believe you when you lash out at yet another flag officer with some preposterous, unprovable accusations? And don’t count on the District cops: They’re going to be behind you all the way—way behind you. You heard Vann. Go that way—toward the power plant side. Vann was freelancing, I take it. Why?”

  “Wesley Hardin was his son.”

  Summerfield grunted but did not reply. He marched Dan carefully through the piles of debris, toward the long wall on the right side, deeper into the building, farther into the shadows. Dan started looking for a door along the shadowy wall, but there wasn’t one. A chilling realization hit him: Maybe Summerfield was going to shoot him. Then Grace’s voice called from up in the front of the building.

  “Dan? Dan, are you in here? Dan, answer me!”

  Dan turned toward her voice, saw her figure clearly silhoutted in the doorway seventy-five feet away, but then Summerfield moved to stand between him and the front door, the gun held in his right hand, his right hand cupped in his left hand, his body in professional shooter’s stance. Dan could not see his face, but he was shaking his head from side to side, as if to warn Dan to keep silent.

  “Dan!” she called again. “The police are here. Captain Vann’s on his way. The security people heard shooting. Answer me!”

  Two bullets left, Dan thought frantically. If he yelled now and dropped, Summerfield might fire and miss.

  Then he would have one round. Grace was a long way away, and one round was better than two.

  “Grace, get down!” Dan yelled. As he dropped and rolled, then kept rolling, the searing heat of a .25-caliber bullet grazed his left ear as Summerfield whirled and fired. Dan rolled and scrambled, his neckbones screaming, hoping to all hell that Grace had heeded his warning. When he collided in the darkness with the base of a large machine, he froze, and listened. Now there was another cop car speeding down a street outside, then the sounds of a tire-screeching turn and brakes out front, and suddenly the car’s headlights were pointed into the factory, sending a dusty beam of bright light right down the middle of the shop floor, transfixing Dan. He sat up, momentarily blinded, but then he froze, when he saw Summerfield standing to one side, not ten feet away, backlighted by the headlights. Dan started to roll, but then something hit him with the power of a locomotive and flung him back against the machine’s pedestal. The hell that thing doesn’t have stopping power, he thought wonderingly as his mind went over the edge of a wide, smooth black waterfall, the diminishing sound of gunfire echoing in the distance.