Against All Enemies (32 page)

When his turn came to cross-examine, David Sinclair tried his usual question. "Did anything on these coins indicate they belonged to Lieutenant Pullman?"

"Not directly," the NCIS agent replied smoothly, "but comparative analysis of the written contents with material known to have been written by Lieutenant Pullman produced a match with a statistical certainty of ninety-eight percent."

David Sinclair gave Commander Carr a very brief but intense glower as he returned to the defense counsel's table. He knew she'd left that item undiscussed during the agent's testimony so he'd be fooled into bringing it out during the defense's cross-examination.

"This court-martial is closed," Judge Campbell announced. "It will reopen at thirteen hundred in this courtroom."

Paul stayed standing after the judge and members had left the room, once again trying to study Brad Pullman. The physical evidence presented this morning seemed both damning and conclusive, yet Pullman didn't reflect concern.
What has he got up his sleeve? What defense evidence or witness or argument is so potent that Pullman doesn't seem much worried even after being caught with all this Spying For Idiots guidebook stuff
?

"Going anywhere for lunch?"

Paul turned in surprise, seeing Jen standing beside him. "I didn't expect to see you here."

Jen shrugged. "I don't particularly enjoy visiting courtrooms anymore, but I figured you could use a break."

Commander Carr turned as well, halting when she saw Jen. "Lieutenant Shen."

"Commander."

Apparently having finished their conversation, Carr and Jen turned away from each other. Paul resisted a sudden urge to bonk their heads together, reflecting that if the two women had been a little less alike then Jen might actually have liked Commander Carr.

Jen insisted on their hiking to Fogarty's. "You haven't been eating well enough."

"How do you know that?"

"I have my own sources and methods. Order a decent meal and eat it."

"Okay, okay." Paul ate, knowing she was right, but didn't say much for a while, thoughts tumbling through his head as he tried to process everything he'd seen and heard at the court-martial.

Jen canted her head to one side and studied him. "You're awful quiet. What's bugging you?"

"I don't know." Paul frowned, then nodded. "Yeah. That's exactly it. There's all this evidence that Brad Pullman did commit espionage. Hard, physical evidence. It seems plenty convincing to me. But I keep asking myself
why
he would've done that. There's no indication at all that Pullman supports the South Asian Alliance, no indication he dislikes our government or our country or our policies on Earth or in space. No one's claiming he secretly hates the Navy. He doesn't seem to have any strong political beliefs. All we have is money showing up in bank accounts traceable to Pullman, but we're not talking mega-bucks. Not even remotely. Nice to have money, maybe, but not even as much as he's earning as a junior officer."

"Does he look guilty? I'd expect you to know the difference between scared and guilty."

"He doesn't even look worried!" Paul clenched his fists in frustration. "No matter how much evidence I see that Pullman is guilty, some part of me keeps wondering what his motivation could've been. His real motivation. If I can't figure out
why
he'd do it, I have trouble accepting that he did it."

"Maybe he's an idiot," Jen suggested.

"That doesn't seem to be the case. He's very smart. He could handle his job on the
Michaelson
without breaking much of a sweat."

"Hmmm." Jen pondered the question as she ate. "I see your point. There's a disconnect. People don't go to all the trouble Pullman apparently did just for a little extra pocket change. Smart ones don't, anyway. Maybe he's just irrational deep down."

"Wouldn't that show up in other actions? How could he confine irrationality to just committing espionage?" Paul twisted his mouth. "Besides, if there was the remotest chance of coping an insanity plea I'm sure David would've run with it."

"Let it go, Paul."

"What? Let what go?"

"The sibling rivalry. Your brother doesn't seem nearly as hung up on it as you are."

He felt heat on his face as anger rose. "Jen, you didn't grow up with a guy who made you feel like nothing you ever did could measure up to him."

"No," she stated sarcastically, "I just grew up with a father who expected me to sprout wings and fly if the job called for it. Look, I can't claim to be an expert on you and your brother, but it's past. Let it go."

Paul picked at his food. "It's not that easy."

"Did I say it was easy? Growing up. That's the key phrase. You and I are both old enough that we ought to be able to recognize what wasn't great about our childhoods and accept it as something that was but that doesn't have to drive us for the rest of our lives. Who has a perfect childhood? David had his own pressures to deal with, believe me. Maybe he's oblivious to this day how his attitude grates on you, but so what? Why let him make you crazy?"

He found it hard to come up with an answer and didn't know if that was because it was too complex or if he genuinely didn't have an answer.

Jen touched his hand for just an instant, all the physical contact she could risk while they were in uniform and in public. "If he still wants to lord it over you, letting him get to you just means you're playing along. If he doesn't care about that anymore, then you're just shadowboxing with the past."

"I'll think about it." He saw her skeptical expression. "I said I'd think about it and I will. Because I can't think of anything wrong with what you're saying."

She grinned. "You're going to make a good husband with that attitude."

"It won't apply to every issue, I'm sure. Okay, you're so smart, tell me honestly, do you think Pullman's guilty?"

Jen looked away. "Why does my opinion of this matter?"

"Because you're smart and you know a lot about things."

"Like how it feels to be sitting at that defendant's table wondering if you're going to spend the rest of your life staring at the walls of a small cell?"

"Yeah."

She sat silent for a while and Paul let her think. Finally, she sighed. "I'm torn. I have a very strong and I know to some extent irrational bias against the government because of what happened to me. There are guilty people out there and they need to be caught. I just don't trust the government nearly as much as I used to when it comes to catching the right ones."

Paul nodded in understanding. "I feel some of the same thing. But there's a lot of evidence against Pullman. Not just the circumstantial stuff they tried to get you with, but solid caught-with-his-hands-in-the-cookie-jar stuff."

"I know." Jen played with her food for a moment. "I guess it comes down to my wondering what we don't know. What evidence might be out there that we're not seeing, that might tell another story."

"Jen, even in your case the investigators didn't try to cover up anything."

She surprised him by laughing. "Do you still believe that? All right, I'll admit they didn't actively try to cover up things. But I've been going over those reports in my free time. Don't give me that look. I've got every right to examine something that almost destroyed my life. You think the investigators dug into everything? They didn't. They asked the questions they wanted to ask. They didn't ask things they didn't want to ask. They didn't ask things whose answers they might not want to hear." Jen saw Paul's surprise. "Do you honestly think no one else wondered why that new engineering control system supposedly hadn't had any significant teething troubles? That no one else ever wondered if they ought to check to see if they could find anything contrary to the official 'everything is great' claims about that system?"

"I know your lawyer looked."

"He was a lawyer. A guy who worked hard for me and did what he could, but not someone with the specialized experience or knowledge to smell the right rats and run down the locations of their lairs. I could've done it, but I was safely locked away in pre-trial confinement and under so much stress that I couldn't think straight. Any other people who could've said 'let's question the people who actually developed this system and ask them if everything was really as great as the acquisition people in the Pentagon claim it is' didn't say anything. There were too many people who were willing to go along with what they were told when they were supposed to be investigating. Too many people who avoided looking in the 'wrong' places that might hold answers their bosses didn't want to see."

Paul clenched his fists, remembering the agony he and Jen had gone through during her court-martial. "I'm sorry."

"For what? You've nothing to apologize for. If you'd been an engineer, with the right contacts, you might've found those answers earlier, but I'd be pond scum to complain about that. You asked the questions those other people didn't. For which act of moral courage you're being sent to freeze your butt off on Mars, of course."

"That and a few other acts," Paul noted.

"Yeah. Meanwhile, whoever covered up those problems with that system remains officially unidentified and is probably still fat and happy and going to cocktail parties. All that person did was cause the deaths of lots of sailors and terrible damage to a US Navy warship, but digging that person out and making them pay would embarrass the wrong people."

"And you're afraid that might be happening to Pullman?"

"A bit. I mean, there's no way to independently challenge or verify what the spooks in the intelligence world are telling us. We have to assume they're being honest. But what if they're mistaken? What if their bosses want a conviction and contradictory information is getting swept under the rug so we never even know it exists?"

Paul sat and thought, his food now untouched. Something about Jen's argument about Pullman's court-martial and the events surrounding her court-martial wasn't quite matching up in his mind. But he couldn't figure out what was missing. "I don't know, Jen," he finally said. "I'm going to keep thinking about it."

"Good." She smiled mockingly at him. "What can they do to you? Send you to Mars?"

"There's still Ceres."

"My father's been told that if you get orders to Ceres I'll never speak to him again in this life and whatever comes after, and he knows I mean it."

"Not that he had anything to do with my orders to Mars."

"Oh, no. Of course not." Jen smiled again. "Captain Herdez is also keeping an eye out. She thinks she can block anything but what we've agreed to without tipping off anyone. The next orders you get should be the ones to her ship."

"You talked to Herdez? Willingly?"

"I've done tougher things. Paul Sinclair, if we weren't willing to go to the mat for each other we shouldn't be getting married. True?"

"True." That much, at least, he was certain of.

"When's Pullman going to present his defense?" she asked, switching topics so fast it took Paul a moment to catch up.

"This afternoon, I think. Are you going to watch?"

"No, thanks." Jen didn't quite hide a shudder. "If Pullman's defense is strong, I'm going to be thinking of how weak mine was, and if Pullman's defense is weak, I'm going to be having flashbacks to my own. I'm sure I can trust you to let me know if anything strange happens."

"Right." Paul said it even though he was feeling a bit tired of people trusting him to do things. He couldn't wondering whether or not Brad Pullman was trusting him to do something.

The prosecution turned out to have only one more witness, a pert, young-looking woman named Dr. Vasquez who proved to have an almost disturbing amount of knowledge about falsifying and tampering with station access passes.

Commander Carr held up a card which Paul easily recognized as a station access pass. "Does the witness recognize this?"

The witness blinked. "It's a station access pass."

Carr stepped closer, holding the pass close to the witness. "Can you identify which particular pass this is?"

After peering at it closely, the witness nodded. "That's a pass I examined at the request of NCIS."

"What was the result of your examination?"

"The pass had been tampered with. Very nice work, using some techniques I've seen mainly in foreign intelligence services and some components of foreign origin."

Carr held the pass higher, turning to look at the members' table. "This pass was found in the possession of Lieutenant Pullman when he was arrested. Dr. Vasquez, what was the result of the tampering to which this pass was subjected?"

Vasquez smiled brightly as she recalled her examination of the pass. "It was very nice work, as I said. Didn't I? As you know, a pass reports the presence of a specific individual and in particular reports when that individual has entered certain areas of the station. Well, this pass didn't do that."

"It didn't function?"

"No, no, no! It functioned. It has to function. If station biometrics detect a human presence without a pass they'll sound an alert and locate the person. They can that do that, you know. They have to for life support and station stability compensation and things of that nature. Heat emissions, carbon dioxide emissions, oxygen usage, those things and others reveal when a human is present. A person without a pass creates a sort of bubble in which no one appears to exist even though station systems can track a living presence. It instantly alerts the system that someone is wandering around without their pass. This tampered pass instead generated a series of false identities on request. The default was a sort of generic Joe Station Worker whose presence wouldn't seem unusual at any place in the station."

"The tampered pass allowed the bearer to remain undetected, then?"

"No." Dr. Vasquez seemed puzzled by having to elaborate. "Not undetected. Unremarked is a better word. A person will be detected on the station whether they have a pass or not. I just said that, didn't I? The tampered pass created identities which no one would notice. In the sense that they wouldn't care. Think of it as camouflage, allowing the bearer to blend in so that the automated systems and any human observing the read-outs would pay no attention to the person with the pass because that person would seem totally unremarkable."