Chapter 9 - The Costly Mistake
The call to the reporter had gone through at 21:00 the night before.
By 22:00, the reporter had called her editor. By 23:30, the editor had called the paper's lawyer. By 01:15, the lawyer had called a contact at the Pentagon. By 08:00, Captain Sloane had a copy of the email chain. By 09:00, Captain Sloane had a lawyer of his own. By 10:00, NCIS had been notified that a first-class petty officer on the Dunmore was a subject of a potential unauthorized disclosure investigation.
By 11:00, Maya was sitting in a small conference room on the second deck of the Dunmore with a JAG officer she had never met and a NCIS special agent she had never met, and a lieutenant commander from the squadron staff was reading her rights off a card.
It had taken five hours for the whole thing to fall apart.
Aisha Patel was not what Maya had expected. She was a compact woman of thirty-eight with short hair, sharp eyes, and a way of sitting very still that made her look, Maya thought, like a woman who had seen a lot of this before.
"Don't say anything," Aisha said.
"But—"
"Don't say anything." Aisha set her briefcase on the table. "Agent Cho, my client is not going to answer questions today. We will be scheduling a formal interview at a time and place of our choosing, with all relevant documents produced in advance."
The NCIS agent — Special Agent Daniel Cho, a mild-looking man of about fifty with a notebook and a recorder and a very careful face — said, "Commander, we can do this the easy way or the hard way."
"Agent Cho, with respect, there is no easy way. There is only the way that is legal." Aisha opened her briefcase. "My client is prepared to cooperate with any investigation into the alteration of the transcript and the death of Faris Haddad. She is not prepared to be interviewed as a suspect in an unauthorized disclosure case that was filed this morning, in what appears to be direct retaliation for her attempt to report the alteration of the transcript."
Agent Cho's pen stopped moving.
"Commander," he said carefully, "I'm not sure what you're saying."
"I'm saying that my client made a protected disclosure to her chain of command — through me — yesterday morning. I'm saying that the disclosure was processed at the squadron level within two hours and referred to NCIS within three. I'm saying that my client has documentation of the alteration. And I'm saying that if the Navy chooses to pursue a court-martial for unauthorized disclosure while ignoring the death of a U.S. citizen at the hands of a smuggler because a commodore ordered a delay, that decision is going to be reviewed by a great many people."
Aisha closed her briefcase.
"Are we done here?" she asked.
Agent Cho looked at her for a long moment.
Then he closed his notebook.
"For today," he said.
That night, Maya sat in her rack with the curtain closed and her phone on her chest, and she cried.
She had thought she was being smart. She had thought she was being brave. She had called the reporter because she had believed, in the naive and hopeful part of herself that she had not quite managed to kill over seven years in the Navy, that if she just got the story out, the truth would take care of the rest.
She had not understood that the story did not work like that. The story was not a bomb you dropped and then stood back from. The story was a room you walked into, and the room was full of people, and every single one of them had a lawyer.
She had put herself in a position where she could be destroyed. She had put Ben in the same position. She had put Aisha Patel — who had agreed to represent her at 09:00 and had not yet asked for a cent — in a position where her own career was now on the line.
She had gotten it wrong.
She had not gotten it wrong about Sloane. She had gotten it wrong about how to prove it.
She picked up her phone and texted Ben.
I'm sorry.
He texted back within a minute.
Don't be sorry. Get smart. Tomorrow we go to the IG.
Maya looked at the message for a long time.
Then she put the phone down and closed her eyes.
She did not sleep. But she did not cry again either. She lay in the dark and thought about Faris Haddad and about the woman on the radio saying we are being boarded and about the trawler that was gone by the time the helicopter got there.
May you like
And she decided, somewhere around two in the morning, that she was not going to be a story that a commodore could make go away.
She was going to be a problem he could not solve.
