"But there's a larger moral here, isn't there?"

I nodded.

"You're using this story as a parable. Cliff is one of those two guys."

Right again.

She said, "You're telling me he was swept up in something, something bigger than him, something more complicated than he could fathom."

"Eight points. Go for the full ten."

We walked in silence for a few minutes. Eventually Bian understood the real significance, and she asked, "But how did Cliff respond-like Ollie, or like Bud? That's the question, isn't it?"

"Good. There's a big prize for the extra credit."

"From what we now know about Cliff, he was not like Bud. His life suggests Cliff was durable, resilient, a survivor. More Ollie than Bud. Right?"

I nodded.

"So you believe he was murdered."

I asked, "Do you have a firearm?"

"What does that-"

"Do you have a firearm?"

"Yes… in the safe. At work."

"Start carrying it."

CHAPTER TEN

Bian flashed her Department of Defense building pass and got us quickly past the security checkpoint and into the fluorescent bowels of the beast. Every time I enter this building I feel a flutter in my stomach; it's called panic. In civilian life, only two things are certain, death and taxes, whereas the career military officer faces a third, worse certainty: an assignment inside this building. I had so far managed to avoid this fate. So far. Yet, like bullets on the battlefield, I knew that somewhere inside the Pentagon was a desk with my name on it.

"My office is upstairs. Fifth floor," Bian informed me. "Mr. Waterbury asked me to check in before the interview."

"Let's not, and just say we did."

"He'll notice. He's sharper than you think."

"Fooled me."

She chuckled, and we kept walking.

In the eyes of the great American public, the Pentagon is a huge and confusing labyrinth that somehow burns through some four hundred billion dollars of taxpayer cash per year.

The building, however, in nearly every human and architectural sense, is amazing. There actually are tours, and the guides will inform you this is the earth's largest office structure, comprising some 6,636,360 square feet, occupying 29 acres, able to house about 23,000 workers, in varying levels of comfort and discomfort.

In short, it is a gigantic memorial to function over form, and incredibly, the entire thing was constructed in a sixteen-month span of hyper-frantic activity during the heyday of the Second World War, at the amazing price of less than fifty million bucks.

I once cited this remarkable statistic to a defense contractor pal. He laughed and commented, "Morons. We're gettin' ten times that just to refurbish the basement. And we stretch it out for years."

Other interesting esoterica-the building boasts some 284 rest-rooms, the world's largest collection of white porcelain bowls under one roof, over 2,000 freestanding commodes, and half as many wall-mounted urinals. Regarding this inviting statistic, I'll restrict myself to one useful observation: You would be an idiot to buy a home downstream.

In fact, three of the four military services have their headquarters within these walls; the Marine Corps has its own sandbox within walking distance uphill. The underlying spirit behind this shotgun marriage is that proximity will force the services to work together in neighborly harmony. The official term is unification, and it would seem to make sense, because after all, the four military services perform the same basic mission, the same rudimentary purpose-laying waste to nations that piss us off. And why it makes sense is exactly why it doesn't work: We're all vying for the same taxpayer bucks, pool of human talent, and opportunities to strut our stuff.

Bian and I walked past a wall on which were hung, in a neat, orderly line, the official seals of the United States Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps. The message here-all for one, one for all, e pluribus unum.

Maybe the tourists believe this.

My own service, the Army, is the oldest, the largest, the smartest, with obviously the most primo JAG Corps. The Marine Corps are also fairly good guys, primarily because they act and think like the Army, except they're a lot more hormonal, with a truly monumental gift for blowing smoke up your butt.

The Air Force, newest of the services, is like an orphan teenager with a fat trust fund-prematurely arrogant and totally obsessed with all the cool shit it can buy. Nobody likes them, but we all envy them.

Last, our seafaring comrades, an overdressed yachting club whose main contribution to national security seems to be propping up bars and bordellos in strange and exotic ports.

The other services might have a different take on all this-of course, it's a well-known fact that their outlooks are distorted by their small-minded prejudices.

But in fact, how each service does its job does tend to color its culture, traditions, worldview, and strategic perspective.

The Navy, for instance, sees the globe as three-quarters water, with several largely irrelevant landmasses called continents populated by quarrelsome people who somehow become scared shitless the instant an aircraft carrier rolls up off their shore.

For the Air Force the world is this really neat target range, conveniently dotted with cities and towns to drop stuff on-so long as it doesn't interfere with happy hour.

But for the Army, combat is neither a balmy voyage nor a fleeting glimpse from a cockpit window-it's a destination, a commitment, a long, messy affair from which there are only two roads home: victory or retreat, with your shield or on it.

The Marine Corps, as I said because it does essentially the same thing as the Army, thinks like the Army. But because its purse is controlled by the squids, it quacks like a duck. Get a Marine away from his naval overseers, however, put a few free drinks into him or her, and you'll get an earful about the Navy. Message to my aquatic friends: They don't really like you.

The point is, the Pentagon is a large melting pot of pent-up passions, jealousies, and conflicting strategic visions, so to help things along, a joint staff, manned by officers drawn from the four services, are supposed to shelve their loyalties, and their career aspirations, to direct the services to work together cooperatively, rationally, and efficiently. This is like hiring the marriage counselor who's fucking your wife to fix your marriage.

As if there aren't enough staffs, there is one more, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, or OSD, comprised largely of civilian bureaucrats-a mixture of career civil servants and political appointees-with a smattering of uniformed people to fetch the coffee and man the copiers. The purpose of this curious institution is to perform the constitutional function of civilian oversight. Bottom line here: Americans don't want to wake up one morning in a banana republic run by guys in funny suits.

All this aside, however, where it counts, on the battlefield, soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines could care less who's humping who in the Pentagon corridors-they willingly give their lives for one another, and they often do.

Anyway, we had walked up a long stairwell and now we were in a long hallway on the fifth floor, the Pentagon's equivalent of an attic. I mean, you can bet the Secretary of Defense's nephew doesn't work on this floor.

Bian stopped in front a steel-encased door and began punching numbers into an electronic keyboard. A placard beside the door read "Office of Special Investigations"; obviously, this was a skiff, like a large walk-in safe.

There was a click and she shoved open the door. We entered a well-lit, windowless office space, a warren of office cubes where about twenty people were performing various activities, from punching computer keys and chatting on phones to the happier few who were gathering their coats and calling it a day.