by Brian Haig
“The CIA’s general counsel intimated you had knowledge of her activities. Did you?”
“Of course. She was my wife, and I was cleared to know everything she was doing.”
“So you knew about her efforts to find the mole?”
“Actually, I was part of those efforts.”
My headache lurched toward a ten on the Richter scale. I drew a deep breath and said, “Please describe that.”
“It started with filters to see how many employees had access to the knowledge that had been betrayed. That turned up a large group, hundreds of people. So Mary came up with the idea to try a few entrapments: We laid bait for the mole. We designed a few operations and distributed some classified assessments to see if any were leaked to the other side. And I was the guy pushing the bait through the system.”
“And then what happened?”
“Causes and effects were built into each entrapment. We watched for the effects, but we never saw any.”
“And what came next?”
“After several years, they decided to move Mary. She’d had her chance and come up short, so they moved someone else in.”
I shook my head while he waited for the next question. Frankly, I already had enough to think about. He and his wife had lain in bed at night talking about how to catch the mole the government now believed was him. His increasingly important positions gave him access to the most sensitive secrets imaginable, and because he was an Army officer, he hadn’t been subjected to the lie-detector tests CIA people take on a regular basis.
As much as CIA people hate them, the truth is that years of passing those tests bends the benefit of doubt in their direction. To the best I could see, my client had no counterweights to sway the benefit of doubt even remotely in his direction.
I got up and began packing my papers in my briefcase. I said, “One last question.”
“What’s that?”
“At Golden’s press conference this morning, he added a charge that confused me. Adultery. What can you tell me about that?”
In the Uniform Code of Military Justice, adultery’s still considered a crime. It’s rarely prosecuted unless the act occurs between two members of the same unit, in which case it affects the general climate of order and discipline, which is one reason why it’s on the books. Or for when a general officer sleeps with a subordinate, in which case it’s viewed as an abuse of power. Or when somebody’s being court-martialed for other crimes, and you add it to the list of charges as a way to say “screw you.”
He finally said, “I don’t know what he’s talking about.”
“You’re sure? I’d hate to get broadsided by some nasty little disclosure here.”
He paused to think a moment, then said, “I had a secretary once who claimed I’d had an affair with her. It was horseshit. The whole thing was thoroughly investigated. There was no substantiation. She was lying.”
“And you think they’re just rehashing some old garbage to add to your charges?”
“It’s the only thing I can imagine. It happened five or six years ago. I was vindicated.”
I nodded and said, “Fine.” Then I leaned across the desk. For obvious reasons, I’d been saving this confrontation for the end. “Last point. If you ever involve me in anything that compromises Mary again, you’ll be looking for a new attorney.”
His head reared back. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“When you sent me to ask Mary about Arbatov, you knew damn well the position that put her in. If you weren’t my client I’d knock your ass through that wall.”
He didn’t look at all embarrassed or chagrined. But neither did he try to make any excuses or defend himself. He simply nodded as I walked out.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
My late flight back to Washington arrived at eleven. I rushed straight home, climbed into bed, and stared at the ceiling for two hours.
The reason, in a word, was Eddie. I finally had an inkling of his strategy, and it frightened the hell out of me. He was working diligently to make his six-month advantage decisive. He had the momentum and virtually a one-way street on knowledge. Even in the hands of a perfectly average attorney those would be almost insurmountable advantages. Eddie, however, was the Babe Ruth of Army law.
If I didn’t find a line of defense, and damn quick, I’d be trapped in a fog of ignorance when Eddie called with his deal. Even if Morrison did everything they claimed, I obviously couldn’t admit that to Eddie. I needed something plausible-not necessarily persuasive, just… plausible. So what did I have?
Morrison claimed he was framed, and no matter how overused that line was, or how suspect, it still represented a usable alibi. The problem was, it was a possibility that cut two ways. Framed by someone on our side? Or by someone on Russia’s side? And why? Because Morrison knew something and needed to be taken out? A plain and simple grudge? For sport? No small details, these.
It was even possible that this was a particularly excruciating instance of mistaken identity. The government knew it had a mole; it just pinned the tail on the wrong donkey. How do you prove that?
The last possibility was that Morrison had done some sloppy things that were being blown extravagantly out of proportion. Give or take a little, that’s exactly what happened to Wen Ho Lee. Depending on how incriminating those things were, it could still be a catastrophic problem. Did he just forget to close and lock his safe a few times when he left the office at night? Or did he accidentally leave a bundle of Top Secret documents lying on Boris Yeltsin’s desk?
There could be other possibilities, but these were the three that passed the stink test, which, as a wise old law professor of mine defined it, simply meant they stank less than other theories. When operating on conjecture and instinct, this is what legal theology boils down to.
Katrina was in the office when I arrived the next morning, and pacing in the corner was the inimitable Imelda, blowing bubbles with her lips and inspecting the boxes cluttered all over our office. Imelda is very protective of her domain and, like most career Army sergeants, has a tendency to be maniacally prickly about neatness.
She stopped pacing and flapped her arms, threateningly. “Who made this friggin’ mess?”
“Eddie. He’s got a couple of hundred lawyers and investigators cramming every piece of paper they can get into boxes. We’ve gotten three truckloads already. We expect more.”
She kicked a box. “Asshole.”
Exactly. I then led her and Katrina into the office, where I briefed them on what our client told me the day before. I articulated the possibilities I’d pondered, and both nodded frequently, interrupted occasionally, and shook their heads dismally when I was done.
Imelda said, “And you got no notion what’s in them boxes?”
Katrina said, “I’ve been going through them for two days.”
“Findin’ what?” Imelda asked.
“They were tapping Morrison’s phones and had bugs in his office. Thousands of hours of recording transcripts are in these boxes. The few I surveyed confused the hell out of me. I don’t know shit about embassies or attache duties.”
This wasn’t good news. “Anything else?” I asked.
“Four or five are stuffed with financial background information, going back two decades, mostly IRS and bank records. The Morrisons filed jointly and used a professional tax preparer. They kept copies of their tax records going back ten years.”
“Anything interesting?”
“Possibly, but it doesn’t fit.”
“What doesn’t?”
“He filled out an insurance form in 1989, the year they were married. His net assets were estimated at around five hundred thousand dollars, including equity in Morrison’s townhouse in Alexandria and what the investigators assumed was a very sizable wedding gift from Homer Steele.”
“That’s a lot of net worth for an Army officer,” I said.
Katrina politely ignored this absolutely useless observation. “They made a spectacularly goo
d investment in a brand-new company called America Online, back in 1992. Ten thousand shares. They sat on it, and that block of stocks, after multiple splits, is now worth nearly two million dollars.”
“And what do the investigators assume to be their total net worth today?”
“Four million, give or take a hundred thousand.”
“Wow,” said I, shaking my head-yet another unremarkable observation.
Katrina said, “There was a questionable addition. In 1997, they supposedly inherited nine hundred thousand dollars from some source. It was listed on their joint tax return.”
“And we don’t know where it came from?”
“I don’t. But you might. Maybe Mary lost a grandparent?”
“If there was a miracle after I dated her. Her grandparents were already dead. Her father was older when he married, and they waited a while to have a child.”
“Morrison’s parents?”
I said, “Maybe.”
She said, “Hopefully.”
I pondered this new input and said, “Even aside from their investments, they probably bring in close to two hundred and fifty thousand a year from their combined paychecks. Eddie’s going to have a bitch of a time proving greed was the motive.”
Imelda said, “ ’Less Morrison had bad habits.”
“Not him,” Katrina corrected. She added, “One whole container is filled with charge card summaries. Mary was the big spender. Some of those bills from upscale women’s clothiers were huge. Your kind of girl, Sean. A regular clotheshorse.”
“Define huge,” said I, not all that nicely.
“Sometimes five thousand dollars.”
“Mary’s a professional woman,” I replied in her defense. “Impressions are important in her line of work.”
“Of course they are,” she responded. Then she said, “The point is, nothing jumped out at me, and I doubt anything jumped out at them.”
I added, “And you have to figure, Mary’s father is sitting on a big pot of gold, and she’s an only child. Instead of all the hassle involved in treason, Bill could’ve just bumped off the old bastard and ended up filthy rich overnight.”
“We should all be so lucky,” Katrina agreed.
“So, let’s not waste more time on money,” I ordered, and they both nodded. This might not sound like any great leap forward, but when you’re facing infinite possibilities, anything that ushers you into the realm of the finite is a huge relief. If Eddie tried to claim Morrison sold his loyalty, I felt fairly confident we’d stick that where the sun never shines.
I looked at Imelda. “Get the evidence and inventory under control, then start wading through it.”
Katrina said, “Some of the tapped phone conversations are in Russian. Dog-ear those and give them to me.”
Imelda blew some bubbles, flapped her elbows, and stomped out to get started. Katrina shot me an anxious look. She said, “That’s a lot of boxes to go through. And there’s more coming.”
“It’ll be a cakewalk for Imelda,” I assured her with the kind of bold self-confidence that comes only when it’s someone else doing the work.
I then shooed her out of my office and called a think tank up in New York City. I made an appointment to be there at three o’clock, and then called and booked two seats on the shuttle.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The Society for International Affairs, or SIA is one of those stodgy old institutions everybody always wants to join as it means you have become part of the Establishment. It was founded back in 1917, according to the shiny brass plaque tacked on the wall beside its entrance, and is a collection of out-of-job diplomats, former power-wielders, and lots of folks with big money who like to make one another’s acquaintance.
The ex-government people like the rich people because they pay the foundation’s bills, allowing the ex-government folks a cushy, prestigious, well-paid nest while they wait for some political patrons to fight their way back into power and give them new important-sounding jobs. The well-heeled bill-payers like the arrangement because it gives them tax writeoffs, and the ex-government types introduce them to people in power overseas, who then help the rich people get richer.
At least this is my understanding of how this kind of nonprofit organization works, which does beg the question of why it’s called a nonprofit, because frankly it strikes me that all kinds of people profit wildly from it.
Anyway, it’s housed in a granite-faced mini-mansion on Park and 54th, and the receptionist inside the door asked if we were expected, and, if so, by whom, to which I politely replied that the “whom” was Mr. Milton Martin, former roommate of a guy who no longer wielded power.
He asked us to wait, which we did, till a fairly attractive, mildly buxom young woman in a conservative blue flannel business suit came down to retrieve us. Her name was Nancy, she pertly informed us with a manufactured smile, and wouldn’t we care to follow her up the marbled staircase?
We took a left on the second floor and ended up in a large suite at the end of the hallway, Katrina asking Nancy things like what does SIA do, and how long had she worked for Martin, and our escort was saying, “You’re so lucky to have caught him in today. He’s in such demand. He’s always traveling. He’s so intelligent and accomplished, and he has such great contacts over there.”
The “over there” obviously being the former Soviet states, because after all, Milt Martin spent eight years managing every tiny particle and pinnacle of our relations with that vast foreign group of lands. And Nancy was wasting her sales spiel on us-we couldn’t afford to rent two minutes of this guy’s time.
I mumbled, “Yeah, we’re just damned lucky.”
She nodded that indeed we were. “If you’ll wait a minute, I’ll see if he’s free.”
Which I assumed to be an oxymoron, because what Milt Martin was doing since he was no longer a government employee was renting his thick Rolodex to the highest bidder and reeling in the lucre as fast as he could. The word “free” had slipped out of his vocabulary, dictionary, thesaurus, whatever.
I spent my minute studying the assortment of photographs placed strategically on the walls, showing Martin in a variety of poses with a variety of faces I mostly didn’t recognize, aside from a shot of him and Yeltsin playing tennis. The rest I presumed to be the potentates of the other countries created out of the Big Bang. There were also plenty of brass plates and other trinkets that foreign leaders like to present to one another to show folks back home how internationally esteemed they are.
Why had I flown up here to meet with this guy? Well, he had worked beside Morrison for four of the years he’d supposedly committed treason and might be able to shed some light on that. But principally because the first thing every aspiring defense attorney learns is to test the credibility of his client. The problem with our profession is that their lies become your lies. That can be okay if you know they’re lying. It can be less than okay if you don’t but the prosecutor does.
Adding to that, Morrison’s veracity was all the more crucial to us because Eddie was hogging the important evidence, so all we had to go on were Morrison’s insights.
My clever ulterior motive-the only real lead Morrison had given us thus far, aside from Alexi Arbatov, was Milt Martin. Martin was about to become a barometer to Morrison’s integrity, and along the way we’d twist his arm to become a character witness, since he’d obviously liked Morrison enough to make him special assistant and get him a job in the White House. It never hurts to have a world-famous figure say what a great guy you are.
Nancy came back out and primly ushered us into Martin’s office. Over the years, I had seen plenty of pictures of Martin in the newspapers and watched him doing his thing on the talk show circuit, but that still didn’t prepare me for him in the flesh.
He had the biggest nose I’d ever seen. The rest of his features were fairly tiny and ordinary, making his schnozz seem even more extravagantly gigantic. He wore large-rimmed glasses in an obvious effort to deflect attention from his
nose, but it was futile. It looked like the Eiffel Tower bent over sideways. If the man sneezed, we’d all be dead.
He popped up from his chair with a big frothy smile and stuck his hand out. “It’s a pleasure to meet you both. You’re obviously Major Drummond, and you’re obviously Miss Mazorski. Please, call me Milt.”
Knowing our names and acting effused to meet a pair of complete strangers is one of the oldest diplomat’s tricks in the books. It is meant to impress and I was, as intended, impressed. This guy was best buddies with presidents and an array of foreign muckety-mucks, and to be treated as the high point of his day was seductive.
I said, “Mist-uh, Milt, thank you for agreeing to meet with us on such short notice. General Morrison told me you two were very close.”
He gave me a surprised glance. “Close? I wouldn’t say we were close. No… definitely not close.”
I took a step back. “Well, isn’t that odd? He gave me the impression you were nearly Siamese twins.”
He appeared perplexed, then suddenly relieved, almost amused. He said, “Why don’t we sit? Nancy, perhaps our guests would like something? Coffee? Tea?”
“Thanks, nothing,” I said, and Katrina waved her off also. We ended up around a big glass table. He smiled at Katrina and said to her, “Please don’t take offense, but you don’t look like a conventional attorney.”
“Who’d want to?”
“Good point.” He chuckled and asked, “So what can I do for you?” He was still smiling, although truthfully, it was damned hard to tell because his nose nearly hid his lips.
I tried to stop staring. “We know you’re busy, so we won’t take up much of your time. We only have a few questions.”
“Questions? I’m afraid I’m confused. The investigators have spent hours with me… I told them everything I knew.”
That shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did. Anyway, I said, “Right, but they’re from the other team. They don’t share that knowledge with us.”
