High Crimes

“Oh, man,” Grimes said.

“What is it?” Claire asked. She stared at a tiny black object she’d never seen before.

Devereaux picked it up. It was oblong, no more than an inch long, half an inch wide, trailing a long thin wire.

“Transmitter,” Grimes said, his voice hushed.

“Oh my God,” Claire said in a high-pitched whisper.

“Man oh man,” Grimes said.

Claire suddenly grabbed a ceramic foo dog on the cluttered table next to Grimes’s chair and flung it to the ground. It shattered, another small black transmitter among its shards. “Oh my God,” she repeated.

“Claire,” Grimes called warningly.

She lifted the spherical black lamp from the library table she used as a desk and hurled that, too, to the floor. It split jaggedly in half, revealing another black transmitter.

“Cool it, Claire,” Grimes said. “You’re going to have to pay for all this shit.”

“Enough, Claire,” Devereaux said. “You don’t have to do that. I’ll locate the rest of them.”

“This place is loaded with them!” Claire gasped.

“I told you,” Grimes said, grabbing her arms to restrain her, “I put nothing past them. Now you see what I’m talking about.”

28

The house crawled with FBI agents — crime-scene investigators, fingerprint and forensic people. They’d arrived with astonishing speed after Ray Devereaux, one of their own, had put in the call the following morning. He’d done so after he’d finished his own cursory inspection, which turned up a dozen more miniature transmitters, in the library, in Claire’s bedroom, in the kitchen. And more to come, no doubt. In the ceiling of an empty guest-room closet one floor above the library Devereaux had located a large black box, which he said was used to gather the signals, amplify them, and broadcast them for miles to whoever was listening.

A meeting was scheduled for one o’clock that day with the military judge who’d just been detailed to the Ronald Kubik court-martial. As she drove to Quantico, Grimes said, “Well, your complaint certainly sped things along.” He was referring to the complaint she’d filed with the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, who took things like unlawful surveillance devices and interference with attorney-client privilege with the gravest concern. “That’s one way to get the military judge named — they wanted to have a judge named to deal with the bugging complaint. Problem is, now we’re fucked.”

“Why?” she said, and glanced at him to see whether he was being ironic.

“We’re fucked because our judge is Warren Farrell, who happens to be a Nazi.”

“How so?” Claire asked.

“He’s what you call a real iron colonel.”

“Huh?”

“That’s what you call a full-bird colonel who’s at his terminal rank, meaning he’s not far from retirement and can’t be threatened. So he can be as outrageous as he wants and piss all over us, which he likes to do to defense lawyers, particularly civilians. He certainly doesn’t give a shit about a reversal down the line.”

“I take it you’ve tried cases before him.”

“Never had the pleasure. Heard a lot, though. He don’t much like dark-green army boys like me.” Grimes paused to take a sip of his take-out coffee. “Great circumstances to be meeting the judge for the first time.”

“What are you talking about? It’s great. Puts them on the defensive, makes us look good by contrast.”

“You don’t know Judge Farrell.”

“What, he’s going to be prejudiced against us because we had the misfortune to have our workspace illegally bugged by the government?”

“It wasn’t necessarily the prosecution,” Grimes said.

“Oh? You got any other candidates?”

“Hell, it could be the Pentagon. Defense Intelligence. Defense Humint Service, or one of those creepy military-intelligence groups they keep locked up in the basement of the Pentagon. Might even be some private organization of old Special Forces alumni who don’t want shit like this coming out. Or want to make sure we lose.”

“Maybe some friends of the general’s,” Claire said. “But FBI’s not going to find fingerprints on anything, are they? The culprits aren’t going to be that sloppy.”

Grimes nodded slowly in distracted agreement. “This kind of shit happens all the time.”

“In the military?”

“Oh, yeah. When I was with the Judge Advocates Corps, prosecuting, I heard all the time about how they’d plant bugs on civilian lawyers. Military doesn’t like civilian lawyers playing in their sandlot, I told you.”

“Bullshit, Grimes. Don’t tell me the prosecution used information they picked up from bugs.”

“Oh, they’d launder it first. Always happens. You find an independent source, attribute it to them. You think I’m kidding?”

“No, I don’t. I just don’t want to think you’re right.”

The meeting with the military judge was held in camera, in the high-security subbasement courtroom. Waldron was already seated, fuming, when they arrived. He shuffled papers as Captain Hogan talked to him. A court reporter was placing tapes in the Lanier recording machine and testing her equipment. The jury box was empty. Tom was seated at the end of the defense table in his uniform.