“Frankly, it’s wildly implausible. You have a client you want to vindicate. Your imagination is in overdrive.”

I looked over at Mercer. “What about you?”

Buzz looked up at his counterpart. “There’s something here, Kim. Might not be as big and dramatic as Drummond thinks, but it’s something.”

Kim gave us both a skeptical shrug. I wondered what he really thought. The thing is, the South Koreans would find it awfully shameful if it turned out one of their police stations was riddled with North Korean termites. Of course, maybe this was my “ overdrive” imagination at work again.

Anyway, Mercer looked at his KCIA ally and said, “Look, we’re gonna try a little bait-and-flush here. What I need your guys to do is lock down the escape hatches.” He handed Kim a photograph of Michael Bales that had been retrieved from Bales’s personnel file earlier that morning.

“This is Michael Bales,” Mercer continued. “If he tries to take a plane or ship out of Korea, I want him stopped. He’s a smart boy. He’s also a trained cop. He might be wearing a disguise and he might have a false passport, so have your guys alter this photo to show what he’d look like with a beard or mustache, or dressed as a woman, or with glasses and his hair dyed blond. I know all us White folks look alike to you Koreans, so make sure you distribute composites of what he’d look like if he took precautions. This is a no-fuck-it-up, Kim. Don’t let me down.”

Kim nodded. “No problem.” He picked up his stacks of folders and prepared to leave.

Mercer said, “One other thing. Can your people put a watch on Choi?”

Kim smiled graciously. “Consider it done, Buzz.”

“Good. If we break this thing, I’ll make sure my boss back in Langley tells your boss here you were the man who broke it. I was mystified by some funny things going on, so I went to you for help, and you figured it all out.”

Kim smiled even more broadly. “That would be very kind of you, Buzz.”

Then the two of them shook hands and Kim left. I had to give Mercer credit. As embarrassing as it would be for the Koreans to discover this spy ring working right under their noses, it would be doubly humiliating if the credit went to the Americans. This way, the Koreans could save some face. And this way, Kim had a strong personal incentive to help us in every way he could.

CHAPTER 35

I stopped by the judge’s front office to pick up the list of potential court-martial board members. Then I went to the hair parlor for a brief visit so Katherine wouldn’t think I’d been kidnapped, or maybe murdered and buried in some grove of woods. That’s probably what she was hoping happened, so why not show my face and disappoint her?

The place was a hive of wild activity. The trial was set to start in less than twenty hours, and Katherine, Allie, Imelda, and all her worthy assistants were going through the last-minute frantic sweats any well-oiled law office goes through before the big show.

A stack of neatly typed motions lay on a table, and I shook my head as I stopped and riffled through them. Katherine obviously planned on filing them with the judge at 1559 hours, one minute before closing time. It didn’t matter that Carruthers had warned her – Katherine was intent on pissing him off with a juggernaut of last-second requests for judgments. She couldn’t resist. Eight years of legal habit wasn’t going to be washed away just because some judge threatened to rip off her head and “poop” down the cavity.

When I stuck my head in her office she was chattering with somebody on the phone. She looked anxious but lovely. She glanced up and shot me the bird. It wasn’t a casual gesture. She meant it.

I then went over to Allie’s side office. I said, “How’s things?”

She gave me a surprisingly cold look. “Where have you been? We’re up to our ass and could use help.”

I grinned. “I’ve been running around checking some last-minute details.”

“Like what?”

“I spent the better part of the morning waiting at the judge’s office for the list of potential board members.”

“Did you get it?”

I nodded. “Longest damn list I ever saw. There are nearly eighty officers on it. They’re obviously planning on losing a lot of members to voir dire challenges. They’re probably right. Considering the nature of the crimes, a lot of these guys are going to admit they’re so emotionally repulsed they can’t make detached judgments.”

Allie said, “But out of eighty officers, we should at least be able to find ten fair men and women.”

“The problem is I never saw a list packed with so many infantry officers.”

She said, “So?” in a tone that betrayed her naivete about the Army. See, all Army officers aren’t exactly interchangeable parts.

I said, “Look, the Army has some twenty-six different branches. There’s lawyers like me, doctors, supply guys, maintenance guys, finance guys, and on and on. The more the job sounds like a normal civilian job, the higher your chance the guy holding it thinks like a civilian. The only difference between them and some guy you’ll find on the street is they have to wear funny clothes to work every day.”

“But infantry guys are different?”

“Very different. They’re the Jesuits of the Army. They love discipline and they love to impose it. We JAG officers usually try to purge as many of them off a board as we can.”

Allie said, “So we’ll challenge them all off.”

And I said, “Of the first thirty names on the list, two thirds are infantry. They’ve stacked it. We’d be lucky to whittle them down to half the board.”

I felt a presence behind me. I turned around and Katherine was standing there.

She’d been eavesdropping. Her face was frigid. She said, “Well, you’re the asshole who talked our client out of the deal. Still think it’s such a great idea, Drummond? Still think you gave our client the best legal advice?”

“My two cents had no effect. He never had any intention of taking the deal.”

She stared at me. “That’s not what I asked. Do you still think you gave him the best legal advice?”

“I don’t know if it was the best legal advice, but it was my best advice.”

Her face was cold and hard. She was trying to stare me down, but I wasn’t about to let her humble me. This was what psychologists call transference. She was teed off at her client, and because I’d agreed with him, and I happened to be a handy target, she was spewing her anger at me.

She pointed a finger in my face. “Be in my office at three this afternoon with your strategy for the voir dire. That’s supposed to be your area of expertise. I want a survey of the potential board members and detailed lists of challenges and questions.”

“Okay.”

Her finger was still pointed at my face. “And keep your nose out of everything else. From here on, your duties are confined to advising me on matters of military law. You will no longer converse with our client. You will not meet with the judge. You will no longer participate in our strategy reviews. Take one step outside those boundaries and I’ll have you removed from our team. Is that clear?”

“That’s clear.”

She stomped into her office. I looked at Allie; she refused to meet my eyes. From the look of things, Katherine and her staff had made some decisions about me in my absence. I was no longer a trusted member of the team. Maybe I never had been a trusted member of the team.

I took my board list and limped away. I mean, I could have stayed and argued with Katherine, but what would be the point? Besides, this made things easier. I could dedicate my time to catching Bales without worrying about the trial.

I went straight back to my hotel room and went through the motions of developing a game plan for the voir dire. Having spent eight years screening potential boards, this was a fairly straightforward task. First, circle the names of officers who look like they might be favorable to the defense – in this case, women, minorities, and officers who work in the softer branches, in that exact order. Then put arrows next to the people you want to get thrown off. Target the infantry guys first; go after the higher ranks particularly, because the longer an officer serves, the more likely he or she is to buy into the culture and its hoary little peccadillos.