Chapter 3 - After the Room
They took the recorder to the ship.
Maya and Ben walked down the pier in silence — the Dunmore was moored at berth 12, and the briefing room was in the squadron building two hundred yards away — and the harbor wind was cold and the gray water slapped against the pilings and the deck of the Dunmore rose up over them like a wall.
They went up the brow. The Officer of the Deck, a young ensign who had clearly already heard something, let them aboard without a word.
Ben led Maya down to the ship's cryptologic spaces. He unlocked the door, turned on the lights, and set the recorder on the table in the middle of the room.
"Sit down," he said.
Maya sat.
Ben sat across from her.
For a while neither of them spoke.
"Chief," Maya said finally. "What did I just do?"
"You just made an enemy of a commodore."
"I already had an enemy of a commodore."
"Now you have one with a reason." Ben shook his head. "You didn't do anything wrong, Chen. But you need to understand something. In about four hours, somebody from the squadron staff is going to knock on your door and tell you that you're being reassigned. And in about four days, somebody from NCIS is going to call you and tell you that you're a subject of an investigation. And in about four weeks, your clearance is going to be pulled, and you're going to be sitting in a room in Norfolk with a lawyer you didn't pick, explaining why you accused a commodore of altering a classified document in front of witnesses."
"I didn't accuse him of altering it. I asked him who did."
"You asked him who ordered it. In front of his own staff. After his own voice came out of a recorder." Ben's mouth twitched. "Chen, that's the same thing."
Maya looked at the recorder.
"Where did you get it?"
"It came off the ship's network at the end of the deployment. It was supposed to be transferred to the squadron. Somebody in the admin office marked the transfer as complete two days after we pulled in. It wasn't complete. The drive was still in the ship's safe."
"Who marked it complete?"
"I don't know yet. But whoever marked it complete is the person who wanted the recording to disappear."
Maya sat back in her chair.
"So we have the recording," she said. "And we have the transcript. And we have Sloane's voice on the recording saying 'Raven Six, hold position, do not engage.'"
"Which is the order that killed Haddad."
Maya closed her eyes.
Faris Haddad had been forty-three years old. He had been a Jordanian-born American citizen who had been working as a confidential informant for the U.S. government for three years, providing information on a smuggling network that moved weapons and cash through the Gulf of Oman. He had been on the trawler when it was attacked. He had died in the water.
His name had not been in the transcript Maya had produced. It had not been in the transcript in front of Sloane. It had not been in the brief the commodore had given the squadron the day after the trawler sank, in which he had described the incident as "a tragic misunderstanding involving an unidentified civilian vessel that turned out to be operating outside the bounds of the law."
Maya had known it was a lie the moment she heard it.
She had not known, until this afternoon, that Sloane had known it was a lie too.
"Chief," she said. "Why are you doing this?"
Ben looked at the recorder.
"Because a long time ago," he said, "a chief I respected let a good officer take a fall for something she didn't do. And I watched it happen and I didn't say anything, because I was twenty-six and I was scared and I thought it wasn't my place. And then ten years later I saw that officer at a retirement ceremony in Norfolk and she was working at a car dealership and she had a daughter she couldn't afford to send to college because she'd lost her pension. And she looked at me and she said, 'Ben, you look good.' And I went home and I sat in my kitchen and I promised myself I would never do that again."
May you like
He looked up at Maya.
"You're not going to end up at a car dealership, Chen," he said. "Not on my watch."
