Brian Haig - The Kingmaker

Back at my office, one of Imelda’s assistants was in the process of signing for a huge shipment of boxes. Three uniformed guards stood beside a delivery van, and a fellow in a gray suit blocked my doorway. Either FedEx was becoming very security conscious or I was looking at Eddie’s first evidentiary dump.

I walked up and introduced myself to the guy in the gray suit, who flashed a badge I didn’t recognize, identified himself as Herbert Something-or-other, and then coldly demanded, “Where are these documents going to be secured?”

I regarded the stacks in the back of the van and wondered myself. My office contained only two wall safes, and there were enough boxes to fill at least six. I told him I’d order more safes before we left that night.

“That won’t be satisfactory,” he snarled. “I’m not permitted to leave until I’ve ensured all the proper precautions are in place.”

Given that this guy was sent by the same fellas who’d broken into my office that very morning, this was two feet short of hilarious. I pointed at a chair and said, “Make yourself comfortable.”

Katrina and I then walked in and started cracking open boxes. We yanked out folder after folder after folder. I knew this drill. When Eddie got the call from Johnson to start releasing evidence, he and his legions began stuffing boxes with as many papers as they could lay their hands on. The vast majority of this stuff was meaningless garbage intended to exhaust and frustrate us.

Did I mention yet that Eddie’s a complete prick? Aware it was only me and Katrina on my team, the more of our time he could waste, the better.

Unfortunately, I had no solution to that. Katrina and I therefore dutifully stayed till midnight, speed-reading through folders and struggling to sift the important from the trivial. It was a high-risk game. Eddie’s folks surely kept a log of everything, and the odds were we’d get to court and Eddie would unleash some critical piece of evidence, and we’d scream, “Hey, objection, we never got that”; and Eddie would smile and hold up that log and say, “Yeah, then how come this says it was sent over to you on November 20?”

Someday I’m going to piss on Eddie’s tombstone.

At midnight I told Katrina I’d walk her out to her car. The little guy in the gray suit was seated fastidiously beside the entrance; American tax dollars at work.

I turned to Katrina. “Ain’t this better than pushers and dealers and whores?”

She ignored my question. “What happened to you two?”

“What two?”

“You know exactly what two.”

Oh Christ. Could I just shoot her and put an end to this crap? Not with a witness by the door, obviously, so I said, “I never really knew. I swear. Please… let that suffice.”

“Never knew? The chick’s a babe, Sean. The perfect woman, the type who gives men messy dreams. And you have no idea?”

So much for that. “I don’t. We dated my last three years in college. Came graduation, we both got busy. I went into intensive training, and she went into intensive training. I went on deployments, and she went on deployments. We saw each other a weekend every two or three months or so. I came back from Panama, and she’d turned into Mrs. Morrison.”

“Did you intend to marry her?”

And how did I know it would lead to this? Guys are not really into this post-affair psychoanalytic crap. Take me-you date a girl, and it works or it doesn’t. One or the other mumbles the marriage word, and the other either says, “Okay, I’ve got nothing better to do” or “actually, I’d rather have a sulfuric acid enema.” Then you either shuffle to the altar or go looking for the next prospect, without any lengthy claustrophobic pauses in between.

I admitted, “Maybe.”

Fortunately, we’d gotten to her car, a beat-up, clapped-out Nissan Sentra that probably had 200,000 miles on it the day she bought it from a used-car dealer. I opened her door and she had to climb in. I watched her drive off.

What did she think about all that? Probably that I’d been an idiot who waited too long. Or maybe that I was one of those intractable bachelors who’re afraid of losing their monopoly on the big-screen TV, letting Mr. Dickie feast wherever he wants, keeping their greedy grips on their own paychecks. Truthfully, I have some of that strain in me.

But that wasn’t it. I had always wondered about Mary.

I was pulled out of the shower the next morning by a phone call from Katrina telling me to turn on my TV. It was only seven, and Eddie was standing on the front steps of that big office building on 14th Street, flanked by three gimlet-eyed prosecutors, as he read from notes on a lectern:

“… investigation that has spanned seven months of intensive work from hundreds of dedicated people from the Army, from the FBI, and from the CIA. We have carefully considered the spectrum of charges we could bring against General William Morrison and settled on the following: two counts of murder in the first degree; treason; conduct unbecoming an officer; adultery; perjury; and lying in an official investigation. These charges have been signed off by Lieutenant General Halter and filed with the military court of the Military District of Washington.”

Eddie looked up and stared right into the camera, somehow avoiding that smarmy smile of his, somehow maintaining that all-American-boy-with-a-toothache expression. “Are there any questions?”

Of course there were questions, hundreds of them, because all you could hear was the stormy sound of journalists howling in that toxic way they do.

“No,” Eddie charmingly replied, “we don’t yet have a hearing date, but we expect expeditious treatment. The court is aware of the high level of public interest in this case. The only thing holding us up right now is the defense, who incidentally have already received a great volume of evidence and been given ample time to consider their case. I certainly hope they don’t stall.”

I screamed, “You rotten bastard!”

“Good point,” Eddie said to another unseen questioner, not to me, and judging from his suddenly broad smile, I guessed the reporter was female and gorgeous, because this was Eddie’s come-sleep-with-me look. “No, we have not offered a deal. That matter is still under contemplation.”

One of the three attorneys on Eddie’s team hastily stepped forward and leaned into a microphone. “I’m very sorry. That’s all the time we have for questions today. Thank you all very much.”

Eddie gave them all a look intended to say, Gee, I really wish I could stand here and do this with you all day, because you’re reporters and I love you very, very much. And I hope you love me, too, except I’m a very busy man, maybe the busiest man in America, since, as you must acknowledge, I have a most important job to perform for the American people, whom I also love more than mere words can convey.

He backed away from the podium and allowed himself to be escorted back up the stairs to his building, his shoulders slightly hunched from the terrible burden he was carrying, his legs moving with the bounce of a man with a purpose. It was a scene straight from Masterpiece Theatre.

Katrina was still on the phone and I heard her say, “Well?”

“What an asshole.”

“Any other thoughts?”

“They’ve loaded the docket.”

“To be expected. What about that deal mumbo-jumbo?”

“Exactly right,” I said.

And we both knew what this meant. Eddie’s hedged ambivalence meant he was going to offer us a deal. And I knew why, and he knew I knew why, if you can follow that convoluted trail. Since the CIA was desperate to know everything Morrison supposedly gave away, and as blackmailing had been tried and failed, a deal was their only resort. The moment Harold Johnson got off the phone with me, he must have called Eddie and twisted his arm right out of the socket.