you’re right, then it’s the Vice-Chief who’s on your side. He
brought you here. He’s the one who’s been protecting you.’
‘Game of chess,’ I said. ‘Tug of war. Good guy, bad guy. The
good guy brought me here, the bad guy sent Garber away.
Harder to move Garber than me, therefore the bad guy
outranks the good guy. And the only person who outranks
the Vice-Chief is the Chief himself. They always rotate, we
know the Vice-Chief is infantry, therefore we know the Chief is
Armored. Therefore we know he has a stake.’
‘The Chief of Staff is the bad guy?’
I nodded.
‘So why demand to see him?’
‘Because we’re in the army, Summer,’ I said. ‘We’re supposed
to confront our enemies, not our friends.’
We got quieter and quieter the closer we got to D.C. I knew my
strengths and my weaknesses and I was young enough and
bold enough and dumb enough to consider myself any man’s
equal. But getting in the Chief of Staff’s face was a whole other
ballgame. It was a superhuman rank. There was nothing above
it. There had been three of them during my years of service and
I had never met any of them. Never even seen any of them, as
far as I could remember. Nor had I ever seen a Vice-Chief, or an
Assistant Secretary, or any other of the smooth breed who
moved in those exalted circles. They were a species apart.
Something made them different from the rest of us.
But they started out the same. I could have been one of them,
theoretically. I had been to West Point, just like they had. But
for decades the Point had been little more than a spit-shined
engineering school. To get on the Staff track, you had to get
sent on somewhere else afterwards. Somewhere better. You
had to go to George Washington University, or Stanford or
Harvard or Yale or MIT or Princeton, or even somewhere
overseas like Oxford or Cambridge in England. You had to get
355
a Rhodes scholarship. You had to get a Master’s or a Ph.D. in
economics or politics or international relations. You had to be a
White House Fellow. That’s where my career path diverged.
Right after West Point. I looked at myself in the mirror and saw
a guy who was better at cracking heads than cracking books.
Other people looked and saw the same thing. Pigeon-holing
starts on day one, in the military. So they went their way and
I went mine. They went to the E-ring and the West Wing, and I
went to dark dim-lit alleys in Seoul and Manila. If they came to
my turf, they’d be crawling on their bellies. How I was going
to do on their turf remained to be seen.
‘I’m going in by myself,’ I said.
‘You are not,’ Summer said.
‘I am,’ I said. ‘You can call it what you like. Advice from a
friend, or a direct order from a superior officer. But you’re
staying in the car. That’s for sure. I’ll handcuff you to the
steering wheel if I have to.’
‘We’re in this together.’
‘But we’re allowed to be intelligent. This isn’t like going to
see Andrea Norton. This is as risky as it gets. No reason for
both of us to go down in flames.’
‘Would you stay in the car? If you were me?’
‘I’d hide underneath it,’! said.
She said nothing. Just drove, as fast as ever. We hit the
Beltway. Started the long clockwise quarter-circle up towards
Arlington.
Pentagon security was a little tighter than usual. Maybe
someone was worried about Noriega’s leftover forces staging a
two-thousand-mile northward penetration. But we got into the
parking lot with no trouble at all. It was almost deserted.
Summer drove a long slow circuit and came to rest near the
main entrance. She killed the motor and jammed the parking
brake on. She did it a little harder than she really needed to. I
guessed she was making a point. I checked my watch. It was
five minutes before midnight.
‘Are we going to argue?’ I said.
She shrugged.
‘Good luck,’ she said. ‘And give him hell.’