Murder at the Pentagon Read online

  More praise for MURDER AT THE PENTAGON

  “FASCINATING … Truman treats her fans to an interesting, informative tour of the Pentagon while spinning a tale that seems to have been torn from the pages of a not-too-distant newspaper story. Her fans will love every page and MURDER AT THE PENTAGON should win her a host of new readers.”

  —Marlboro Enterprise/Hudson Daily Sun

  “Margaret Truman writes about murder in the corridors of federal power with the knowledge of a Washington insider.”

  —The Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “Truman uses her intimate knowledge of the Washington D.C. venue to create another exciting tale.… A beautiful and refreshing new heroine.”

  —Mostly Murder

  “An engaging heroine.”

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  A Fawcett Crest Book

  Published by The Ballantine Publishing Group

  Copyright © 1992 by Margaret Truman

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by The Ballantine Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Fawcett is a registered trademark and Fawcett Crest and the Fawcett colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  www.randomhouse.com/

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 91-51023

  ISBN 0-449-21940-2

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-8041-5284-6

  This edition published by arrangement with Random House, Inc.

  First Ballantine Books Edition: July 1993

  v3.1

  “The Constitution is like the Bible; it ought to be read again and again.”

  —PRESIDENT FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT

  “Everybody knows that corruption thrives in secret places, and avoids public places, and we believe it is a fair presumption that secrecy means impropriety.”

  —PRESIDENT WOODROW WILSON

  “They’re stealing our country right out from under us. They’re our own people, and every last one of them is a traitor.”

  —SENATOR HENRY “HANK” WISHENGRAD

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Dedication

  Other Books by This Author

  1

  The upper quadrant of a sun that would scorch the desert blossomed on the horizon, livid red and rising fast into an inky sky. Black-browed, graceful bedouin in kaffiyehs and burnooses who had not received the warning—or who had chosen to ignore it—fed their feisty camels and prepared to serve the Prophet for yet another day.

  In a bunker dug into the sand, men waited and watched, their attention focused on a steel skeleton six miles away that jutted up into the now-brightening sky. They wore special dark glasses, and powerful field glasses dangled on leather straps from (heir necks. A bank of electronic equipment was in front of them, LEDs fluttering, row upon row of red, green, and yellow lights blinking. A stocky man in a military uniform the color of earth counted down, his concentration on a digital clock that advanced silently—and incessantly. Other men aimed video cameras at the skinny metal aberration in the middle of the vast desert.

  “Minus two,” the clock-watcher said.

  “Standby.”

  “Minus one,” the keeper of the clock said, precisely one minute later.

  “Cameras.”

  “Rolling.”

  “Glasses on.”

  “Thirty … twenty-nine … twenty-eight.”

  The bunker was pungent with anticipation. And fear.

  “Three … two … one.”

  It started slowly, a barely discernible rumbling of the earth. Then a brilliant white light erupted from atop the metal stand, its intensity reaching those in the bunkers slightly ahead of the sound. And in a second, no more than two, the awesome potency of energy equivalent to twenty thousand tons of TNT drove down and up and out—sending smoke and fire and acres of the desert itself into the heavens, its courier and its cap a mushroom cloud of devastation.

  The video cameras captured every perverse second of the sequence—from the rumble to the fulgent light to the grimly familiar mushroom. Monitoring stations around the globe registered it on their sensitive meters. The meters and accompanying apparatus told a striking story. The Russians immediately knew the first fact. A weapon with the approximate power of America’s first atomic test had been detonated somewhere in the Middle East. Others knew, too. The Danes, the Japanese, the French … and several select groups of Americans, who converged like smaller clouds.

  In the Hybla Valley Federal Building on Telegraph Road, south of Alexandria, Virginia, members of the Defense Nuclear Agency’s Operations Division gathered for an emergency meeting.

  In the Pentagon the Joint Chiefs of Staff huddled in a closely guarded conference room within the National Military Command Center, across the hall on the E ring’s third floor from the offices of the SecDef, the secretary of defense, who, at that moment, was in the White House conferring with his president, David Beardsley, and a dour Cabinet. The hastily drawn report by DOD’s nuclear-monitoring section had been read to them in somber, flat tones.

  “Then he’s got it,” Beardsley said.

  “It appears that way.” Secretary of State Warren Smith’s face was expressionless.

  “Jesus,” said Vice President Joe Fletcher.

  President Beardsley took in the other faces of his Cabinet. Then, in an uncharacteristic display, he slammed his fist on the table. “He’s got it. That madman has got the bomb.”

  2

  The desert test that had awakened the world to the renewed potentials of war had occurred in early July. Now, on a hot, sticky day in late August, air-force major Falk sat on one of many benches in the Pentagon’s center court, a five-acre magnolia-lined park caught within the building’s five walls. The morning sun did to her silken black hair what sunshine always does to such hair—brought out its underlying copper tones. She wore khaki Bermuda shorts, pristine white sneakers, and a pink T-shirt with green lettering on its front that said “I’M A WHIRLYBIRD … AND PROUD OF IT.” Margit Falk, named after her German-born mother who’d died when Margit was five, was usually called Margaret by those to whom she was introduced, and who did not listen carefully. There was a time when she considered changing her name to the American version, but got through that short period of insecurity and proudly, almost compulsively, spelled out Margit to the confused. Naturally, people were prone to call her Peg, or Peggy, but she unfailingly, and pleasantly, shifted them back to the name she preferred.

  She was beautiful, no dissenting votes. Hers was the sort of beauty that warmed the winds of romance for certain men and fueled the fires, the sexual fantasies, of adoles
cent men of any age eagerly awaiting their next copy of Playboy. She was, in living color, what publisher Hugh Hefner had promised would be “the girl next door” and seldom was, unless you lived next door to a … well, never mind. In fact, a Playboy photographer once had visited Lowry Air Force Base intent upon developing a photo feature about military women. When he spotted Margit, he knew he had his centerfold—until, spotting the flash in his eye, she politely told him that once past infancy, she took off her clothes for only a few human beings, most of them doctors or nurses; that her military career meant more than all the money Mr. Hefner had ever possessed or even had lost; and that she found the idea of standing around in the nude rather silly. Besides, she said, her smile an entire sunrise in itself, she had no apple to peddle.

  No pox on the photographer’s artistic judgment, however. Five feet seven inches tall, long-legged and nicely tanned in midyear, naturally melanous in other seasons, Margit Falk was, by strength of character, a more likely candidate for the cover of Prevention. “Tight” was a word sometimes used to describe her figure. “Athletic.” “Healthy.” All those things and more.

  Sometimes, she was mistakenly assumed to be French. In fact, her paternal grandparents were French, and she’d spent much of her youth with them, resulting in a fair working knowledge of the language, at least conversationally. Her father had been a line-maintenance chief in the air force, which made Margit a military brat. She’d enjoyed her childhood despite the frequent moves. Her father worked as hard at raising her as he did at ensuring that the aircraft in his charge were safe for their pilots. He’d lived long enough to guide her into the early innings of her adult life. She missed him, sometimes painfully.

  The large eyes were surprisingly blue for someone with such dusky skin tone, unexpectedly bright, direct eyes that exuded, at once, intelligence along with a natural friendliness.

  She did not dress or walk provocatively, but no matter. Whatever Margit wore—a T-shirt that suggested nicely proportioned bosom and distinctly female hips, dress blues, or a pilot’s fatigues—she turned heads. As she did that morning, swiveling not her hips but the heads of a dozen men who were also there for the Pentagon’s T&E annual picnic. Those men from the Office of Test and Evaluation who weren’t with wives or girlfriends were the most overt in their admiration. Those with short-term or long-running attachments were more furtive evaluating what they’d never test.

  He waited by the purple watercooler in the Pentagon’s subbasement. There are 685 drinking fountains in the Pentagon, but only one is purple. Why? No one knows. He looked at his watch: 11:05 A.M. Five minutes late. Lateness was a form of arrogance. People kept waiting for “the arrival.” A bad trait.

  “Having fun in the sun?”

  A heavyset man plopped his large bulk down beside her on the bench, a pleasant smile on his round, wet face. Tiny drops of perspiration on Margit’s upper lip and brow were her only acknowledgments of business-as-usual summer conditions in the nation’s capital.

  “It’s a beautiful day,” she answered.

  “Too hot for me,” the man said, sweeping his face with an already soggy handkerchief. “I’m Joe Maize. As in corn.” He offered the hand that held the handkerchief, laughed, and switched hands. She shook it. “Margit Falk.”

  “I haven’t seen you around,” Maize said.

  “I haven’t been here very long,” she replied. “I was transferred last month.”

  “T and E?”

  “No,” she said. “SecDef’s general counsel staff.”

  “A lawyer?”

  “Yes, and I haven’t been at that very long, either.”

  “Well, welcome to the Puzzle Palace.”

  “Thank you.” The classic nickname for America’s center of national defense, the Pentagon, was one of several. Fort Fumble, the Fudge Factory, the Five-Sided Wailing Wall, were used less frequently.

  Margit didn’t ask, but Joe Maize offered the information that he was a civilian GS-15 in DCAA, the Defense Contract Audit Agency. An average of fifty thousand contracts are signed each day in the Pentagon. They were kept busy. He said, “That’s my wife over there.” He pointed to a substantially made woman standing with a small group of people near a horseshoe pit created for the picnic.

  Margit nodded. He was sizable, sweaty, married, and not especially interesting. But he seemed nice enough, Midwestern friendly. What was there to say?

  Maize stood. “Well, welcome aboard, Ms. Falk.” He leaned forward to read the lettering on her T-shirt. “A club?” he asked.

  “Not really,” said Margit. “I’m chopper-rated. Some other women pilots and I got together and had these made up.”

  “Cute,” Maize said. “And pardon me for calling you ‘Ms.’ Military, huh?”

  “Major.”

  “Glad to meet you, Major.”

  “Thank you.” Funny how men like to read our T-shirts so intently, she thought. Maybe we should have had shoulder patches made instead.

  Although Margit had never met Maize, she knew who he was—the lead auditor on a controversial air-force weapons system known as Project Safekeep, based on the X-ray laser and funded by DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency. Safekeep’s technical development had been contracted to Starpath, Inc., a low-profile, high-tech California company. The theory behind the new weapon, as Margit understood it from scuttlebutt, was that small nuclear devices, carried by combat aircraft, could be detonated in the air, their nuclear energy sending out radiation sufficient to destroy enemy missiles. No working model had been field-tested, as far as Margit knew, although Starpath claimed successful laboratory tests. DARPA, and the air-force section of the Pentagon charged with overseeing the new weapons-system project, had recently told Congress that significant progress had been made. Others in the scientific community cast doubts on the testimony, citing their knowledge of the state of the art in X-ray lasers, which, they claimed, was still in its infancy—at best.

  She watched Maize join his wife, the tall, fair, square woman with short blond hair and cheeks flushed with heat. After a time Margit got up and casually strolled in her direction. As she passed, she heard Mrs. Maize say to others in the group, “Saturdays, Sundays, it never stops. Now that’s an agreement the president ought to hammer out with the Russians. One day a week when it’s illegal to even think about national defense.” She laughed lightly, but there was discernible seriousness in her voice.

  Margit didn’t know many people at the picnic. She was the only person there from SecDef’s general counsel. She’d been invited because her first assignment upon reporting to the Pentagon was to act as legal liaison with Test and Evaluation’s Project Safekeep. She’d considered declining the invitation, especially when Jeff had begged off. She and Jeff Foxboro had been law students together at George Washington University, Jeff studying full time, Margit using nights and weekends during a tour at Bolling Air Force Base just outside Washington. Upon graduation, he had taken a job with a highly visible liberal senator from Wisconsin, Henry “Hank” Wishengrad, now in his fourth term in the Senate, and Congress’s leading Pentagon critic.

  Their relationship had blossomed in the classroom under the watchful eye of law professor Mackensie Smith, who, in addition to teaching Margit the law, served as her adviser. Not long after graduation Margit was reassigned to Lowry AFB in Colorado, which put a decided, although not fatal, crimp in her relationship with Foxboro. Her returning to Washington via her new Pentagon assignment was good news on three fronts: first, of course, being closer to Jeff; second, a chance to renew contact with Mac Smith and his wife, Annabel, with whom she’d become friendly beyond ordinary student-professor status; and third, the obvious allure of a Pentagon assignment. A stint at the Starch-and-Salute Factory, her name for it, didn’t guarantee military career success, but a successful tour there couldn’t hurt.

  Even though Jeff Foxboro hadn’t been able to accompany her to the picnic that morning, he’d encouraged her to attend. “Good chance to meet people outs
ide the office,” he’d said. “Knowing people on a personal level, especially in that zoo, will help smooth the way when you’ve got a problem.”

  He was right, of course, and though alone, she was glad she’d come. There, in the tranquillity of trees and grass, surrounded by one of the world’s largest office buildings—83 acres of offices on 175 acres of land—and within whose walls decisions of the gravest consequence were made, one experienced the distinct and pleasant feeling of an old-fashioned family picnic. Children ran and stumbled in three-legged races and tag-team competition. The more competitive of the adults had gone to the Pentagon Officers’ Athletic Club (POAC) to compete in gymnastic and swimming events. The POAC building had been built during World War II as a bomb shelter for FDR. No bombs had fallen on it, but it began to deteriorate of natural causes until athletic-minded officers found the funds to spruce it up.

  Others at the picnic vented their Pentagonesque competitive natures in less strenuous games of horseshoes, volleyball, and badminton. Margit preferred to compete with herself, to stretch her endurance, increase her strength—no need to prove it to someone else—and so she contented herself with observing the competitions, the fun, and enjoying the warm sun on her face.

  He heard footsteps on the hard floor, checked his watch again. Nine minutes late. About time.

  * * *

  “Margit.”

  She’d been on her way across the center court to the kiosk in the middle from which hamburgers, hot dogs, watermelon, soft drinks, and beer were being dispensed. She stopped and turned.

  “Good to see you again.” Bill Monroney. So it wasn’t true that Margit didn’t know anyone at the picnic. She knew Lieutenant Colonel William Monroney from years back, right after she’d completed helicopter training and had been certified to fly the tricky, unwieldy, wonderful aircraft. They’d met in Panama, where Margit—military directives against women in combat be damned—had flown a UH-60 “Blackhawk” on clandestine supply missions from a CIA-funded airstrip in Costa Rica to support the invasion. Monroney was the air-force intelligence officer assigned to their unit.