Brian Haig - The Kingmaker

I thought she’d howl, but instead she leaned back into her chair and with surprising calmness replied, “No.”

“You’re sure?”

This apparently struck her as hilarious. “There’s some way you can not be sure on something like that? Oh, don’t get me wrong-I could’ve had him anytime I wanted.”

“Really?” Katrina replied. “Why didn’t you?”

“Not my type.”

“Why wasn’t he your type?”

“He’s a horny, married jerk. I prefer my jerks horny and unmarried.”

For clarity’s sake, I asked, “But you never had an affair with him?”

She looked at me. “Nope.”

I was just beginning to feel relieved when Katrina asked, “Did anyone else?”

She suddenly looked hesitant, so Katrina bent toward her and said, “There’s a harder way to do this. We’ll ask a judge to issue a subpoena and ask you this same question in an interrogation room back in the States.”

Her indecision seemed to evaporate. “He had some girlfriends, yeah.”

“Some? As in more than one?”

“He belonged to a Russian escort service that provided him with girls. He went out with a few Russian girls on the side, too.”

A heavy silence hung for a few moments as Katrina and I exchanged glances, tried to maintain our composure, and generally sought not to appear as shitty and dismayed as we felt. The issue was motive for treason, and this sounded like it. A senior intelligence officer screwing his way through Moscow, of all places, was an invitation to blackmail.

Katrina asked her, “Did his wife know about them?”

“No.”

“How do you know that?” I asked.

“Because I never told her.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“She was a nice lady. I figured, what she didn’t know, didn’t hurt her.”

Katrina said, “How did you find out?”

“I get the phone bills for the office, and Russian phone companies charge for local calls. When I don’t recognize a number, I track them down. That’s how I learned about Siberian Nights Escorts, and the girls he’d call. But I never told anyone. At least not until the investigators brought it up.”

The important point here being that Russia’s intelligence agencies also had access to those phone records. And the shocking point being that Eddie apparently knew also.

To be clear on that last point, I asked, “They already knew?”

“Oh, they knew.”

“How?”

“How would I know? Ask them.”

On that note, Katrina shot me another of those knowing looks as she asked, “Did Morrison have any good friends here… anybody we should talk to?”

She replied, “Colonel Jack Branson, the deputy attache. They did a lot of work together.”

“And how do we get hold of him?”

“You walk into his office. It’s right next to Morrison’s.”

Branson was Air Force, mid-forties, balding, thin-faced, very tall, and quite skinny, with a nondescript face, but intelligent eyes, and at the moment we walked into his office he was hunched over his desk, studying something with a magnifying glass. He looked up and took whatever it was off his desktop and stuffed it in a drawer. Intell guys are such a riot.

“Hi,” he said, trying to look friendly. “Can I help you?”

I made the introductions, and he pointed at a pair of chairs. We chitchatted about him, wife, kids, life in Moscow, and so on.

After we exhausted the phony pleasantries, I said, “So, how long did you know General Morrison?”

“The whole two years he was here. I’ve been here three years, so I was in place when he arrived.”

“Miss Allison said you were friends.”

“Friends? Well, no, we weren’t friends. We worked closely together, we were generally amicable, but we were hardly friends.”

“Did you like him?” I asked.

“I respected him,” he replied.

That’s military doublespeak for “No, he was a miserable asshole to work for.”

“Why did you respect him?” Katrina asked.

“He knew his job and worked damned hard at it. I won’t say he had the best leadership style I’ve seen, but as an intell officer he was as good as any I’ve met.”

Katrina bent forward. “What makes a good intell officer?”

“Good question.” Branson paused and then explained, “In intell, you’re always flooded with information. You’re always getting lots of reports from lots of sources, and frequently those reports and sources conflict. It gets to be a morass. Most intell guys just shove it all upstream and let someone else try to figure it out. Morrison wasn’t like that. He had a nose for what it all meant.”

I said, “He could interpret it?”

“Exactly. He always seemed to know the story behind the story. It was uncanny sometimes. He just figured it out.”

Big mystery there, right? Having the number two guy in the SVR feeding him explanations surely didn’t hurt.

Katrina said, “I hate to pry into sensitive things, but how was his marriage?”

Branson sucked his lower lip into his mouth. Like any military officer, loyalty to his boss was bred into his being, but at the same time he had to be weighing his caution against how much we already knew. Being indiscreet was one thing; it was worse to be caught as a liar.

“Don’t sweat it,” Katrina prodded. “We know he cheated on her.”

The lower lip popped back out, and he began shaking his head. “Well, you know then. That dumbass screwed everything he could get his hands on. Ordinarily I don’t care what other people do… but, look, I like Mary, and I didn’t appreciate it. I felt bad telling her he was at lunch when he was with some whore.”

Katrina nodded and said, “Did you ever talk to him about it?”

“I tried. He’s not a very approachable guy.”

“Did he ever explain his affairs?”

“I don’t think he knew why he did it. There was no good reason. You ever see his wife?” We both nodded. “What sane guy married to Mary would cheat, right?”

Katrina said, “Why didn’t they get divorced? Did he ever talk about it?”

“I suggested it once.”

“And…?”

“He said it would harm the children. I didn’t believe him, though. Do you want to know what I think?”

“Sure.”

“His career. You can’t believe how ambitious he was, and a divorce wouldn’t have looked good. The military frowns on that.”

I asked him, “Did everybody in the office know about his affairs?”

“I don’t know. None of us ever talked about it. What’s funny was, he and his wife worked together real well. They worked everything together.”

So the prosecutors had been saying, but just to be sure I asked, “Then he was seeing everything she was working on?”

He began chuckling. “The other way around, I’d say. Look, there’s a natural competition between the CIA, whom she worked for, and DIA, whom we report back to. We field hands are like little dogs. We please our masters by bringing back bigger bones and we get stroked behind the ears. Mary stole stuff from us all the time. Our sources would tell us about some crooked general over in the Russian Defense Ministry who looked like he could be blinkered into recruitment, and even before we could get a message off, Mary’s people were already flogging the general. Happened all the time.”

We’d heard more than we needed to hear, so Katrina thanked the colonel for his candor, told him we’d be back if we had more questions, and we departed in mutual misery.

On the drive back to the hotel, Katrina said, “You know that adultery charge?”

“I know.” I added, “But let me remind you, you were the one who thought it was possible to prove him innocent.”

She thought about this, then said, “You can’t be sure it led to treason.”