“Don’t say?” he asked, craning his neck forward dubiously.

“Just what I hear,” I replied, glancing at my watch, as though I suddenly remembered I had some drastically important appointment.

He drew his shoulders together a bit, and in a voice loud enough for everyone to hear, said, “Son, ’fore we all dedicated ourselves to this lofty task, we got briefed by some two-star general back in the Pentagon. He went over every last detail about this case. Accordin’ to him, now, that Whitehall boy’s guilty as hell. He says he ain’t got a rat’s chance of gettin’ off. Them’s his words.”

I suddenly tasted a rush of bile slithering up my throat. I swallowed it, though, and struggled to appear normal.

“Ah, well,” I said, “and would you happen to remember that general’s name? I mean, even generals sometimes get these things wrong. And he’d be back in Washington, wouldn’t he? And we’re out here, on the forward frontier of justice, aren’t we? Besides, he ain’t a lawyer, is he? So what’s he know?”

“I can’t recall the man’s name,” Preacher Prick frankly admitted, scratching his head a bit. Then he quickly said, “I mean, there was a whole room full of generals when he was talking. He was a lawyer, though, just like you. ’Ceptin’, he’s like the head lawyer, so I expect he knows what he’s talkin’ about.”

The smile disappeared from my face. Then, since I’d already made a horse’s ass of myself, I glanced down at my watch again and said, “Holy cow, look at the time! I gotta get going.”

Preacher Peach smiled benignly, while Preacher Prick stared at my nametag like it was a name he meant to remember, and maybe even check up on.

I rushed straight to the elevator and up to my room. I was so furious, I could barely see straight. I lifted up the phone and gave the operator the number in Washington. A few seconds passed before Clapper’s administrative assistant, a captain with the silly name of William Jones, answered.

Trying to contain my rage, I choked out, “Drummond here. Let me talk to the general. Put the bastard on right now!”

Somehow or another, Captain Jones detected I was miffed.

“Major Drummond,” he said, in the calmest, most reasonable voice imaginable, “perhaps I should offer you some advice. You really might want to cool down, and call back later.”

To which I replied, “Jones, put me through right away or I swear I’m gonna climb on the next flight out of here and come kill you.”

“Uh, yeah, sure,” he answered, quite wisely deciding that his definition of duty did not require him to get trapped in the middle of whatever was happening here.

A moment later, Clapper, all warm and bubbly, said, “Hello, Sean. What can I do for you?”

“What can you do for me?” I screamed. “Jesus Christ! I just ran into a lynching party made up of cornpone preachers. They claimed the Chief of Staff of the Army invited them over here.”

“Now, settle down, Sean. It’s not like you make it sound.”

“No?” I replied. “Okay, listen closely to this, because I mean it exactly like it sounds. I am formally advising you that I’m considering filing an immediate motion to have this case dismissed. You’d better have a damned good excuse for this.”

He didn’t skip a beat. “The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs thought it might be a good idea if the Army tried to reach out to the southern religious community. While our position with regard to Whitehall is completely neutral, we can’t afford to antagonize the religious right.”

“You’re shittin’ me!”

“Did you know some forty percent of Army recruits come from the South? That’s almost half the Army’s enlisted strength. Hell, forty-five percent of the officer corps are southerners. I’m from Tennessee myself. And we nearly all fit into one profile. We’re nearly all dyed-in-the-wool, corn-fed, red-white-and-blue Baptists and Methodists. Do you have any idea what’ll happen to our recruiting statistics if these preachers take to the lecterns and start speaking out against military service? They very easily could, too. They’ll get up and start talking against the immoral and godless policy of gays serving in the ranks, and before you know it, you’ll swear service in the Army is the same thing as leasing a condo in Sodom and Gomorrah. You know us southern boys, Sean. When our mamas and our preachers talk, we sit up and listen. Christ, there won’t be any Army left to join. Believe me, they’ve got us by the short hairs.”

“How about you briefing them on the particulars of this case? Is that true?”

“It was perfectly aboveboard. They insisted on being briefed before they all climbed on an airplane to spend the next two weeks away from their churches. All I did was assure them the trial would go off as scheduled. I hardly told them anything.”

“Is that right?”

“I simply went over a few things they could as easily have read in the newspapers. I disclosed nothing confidential. I said nothing that isn’t public knowledge.”

“Gee, General, now I’m thoroughly baffled. See, those preachers swore you said Whitehall’s guilty as hell, that he hasn’t got a rat’s chance of getting off. Your words exactly, according to them.”

Now here’s where you have to understand that there’s this list of cosmically dumb things you can do in the Army, and right near the top is catching a two-star general in a full-blown, bald-faced lie. You can suspect a general is lying, you can even know a general is lying, but to actually acknowledge that fact, to his face, falls under the heading of more than stupid: It’s like putting a gun to your own head.

Then again, there are exceptions to every rule – like when you can file a motion to get this case dismissed, and get the general a front-cover picture on TIME magazine that will ruin his career, his life, and his reputation. In instances like that you can say you balled his wife last night and odds are all he’ll do is grin and ask how it was.

And Clapper was no dummy. He knew that, too.

Sounding very legalistic, he said, “As I recall, I was answering a question, off the record. And to the best of my recollection, I caveated that response by clarifying this was only a personal reflection, not my professional opinion.”

When you hear those golden words, “as I recall,” and “to the best of my recollection,” and all the rest of that specious gobbledygook, especially from the lips of a trained lawyer, you know you’ve got a guilty scoundrel by the balls.

I said, “Know what really pisses me off about this?”

“No, Sean, what really pisses you off?” Clapper asked, struggling to sound affable.

“I know the guy probably did it, but I still can’t stomach it being done this way. He deserves every chance of squirming out of it everybody else gets.”

“And he’ll get that, Sean. He’ll have a fair trial in front of an impartial board. You can voir dire anybody off that board you don’t like.”

I hung up on him. I was suddenly sick of listening to him. He and the rest of the Army were stacking the deck against Whitehall, who might even deserve it, only it was wrong, and unethical. I was tired of hearing soldiers tell me they’d been told not to say anything nice about Whitehall; and the State Department trying to trade him like a piece of rotten meat; and learning the Army had handpicked its most viciously successful prosecutor and a military judge who thought he worked for the prosecuting attorney. And now I was tired of preachers telling me the Army had actually flown them over here to publicly pillory my client.

What really fried me was that comment from Katherine about how I had no idea how my side played, and I’d stubbornly insisted she was wrong. Well, she wasn’t wrong. That, I really hated. That, I hated more than anything.

As it was, I now faced one of those head-splitting moral dilemmas Professor Maladroit used to pontificate about. Based on what Preacher Peach and Preacher Prick had told me downstairs, I probably had a shot at getting this case thrown out. I could file a motion and ask the judge to hold an inquest to determine what the chief of the JAG Corps really told those preachers. Then, poof! Thomas Whitehall might walk out a free man.