Murder at the Pentagon Read Online Free PDF Page B

you’re so exhausted,” Margit said to Jeff as she drove to his apartment in Crystal City, an area in Virginia just across the Potomac that owed its rapid growth to its easy proximity to Washington and to the presence of the Pentagon, with all its related activity and personnel.
    “Goes with the game, I guess,” he said sullenly.
    “Nice evening,” she said. “They are a terrific couple.”
    “Yes, they are, only I wish the professor didn’t have a need to probe as though you were on a witness stand.”
    Margit laughed. “I don’t think he does that. He’s just an intensely interested man who picks up on what people say and who wants to know more.”
    “Maybe. Anyway, the food was good.”
    They sat in silence in front of his apartment building before she said, “I hope we can find more time together, Jeff. Even though I’m back in Washington, our lives seem to drift further apart.”
    “We’ll have to work on it,” he said. “Look, Margit, I’m a noncontributory to any further conversation. Damn, I’m beat. Hate to end the evening, but I have to.”
    “I understand,” she said. She leaned over and kissed him lightly on the lips. For a second she thought he was about to leave it at that, but then he shifted in the passenger seat and put his arms around her. This round of affection was conducted with considerably more fervor, and went further and lasted longer.
    As she watched him enter his building, she realized how much he meant to her. Did she mean as much to him? She liked to think she did, and with that thought she headed for Bolling and a good night’s sleep.

4
    The twenty-eight-passenger blue air-force bus that traveled Route 15B every thirty minutes between Bolling AFB and the Pentagon was almost full when Margit boarded it in front of Building 1300. She’d driven her red Honda Prelude to work the first few weeks, but decided that the bus was a better bet. Her rank entitled her to a Pentagon parking space roughly in the middle of the sixty-four acres designated for such use, which meant she had a quarter-mile walk from her car. Those of lower rank faced a half-mile hike each morning. The parking, coupled with a chaotic traffic situation (though in a capital city of high tech, not a traffic light is to be seen within the Pentagon’s grounds) caused her to leave her car at the base most mornings, unless she had evening plans that called for its use. Of course, she could have joined the “Bolling Blasters,” a club of runners who jogged to the Pentagon each morning. But that sort of sweaty start to the workday didn’t appeal.
    As she joined a long line of men and women flashing badges at security guards, she felt a familiar exhilaration atentering the building. Military and civilians alike seemed to share a sense of urgency that, Margit reasoned, had nothing to do with whether their daily tasks were urgent. It was the pace of the Pentagon that caught you up, a briskness, the crisp uniforms and close haircuts, the sheer numbers of people, many of them extraordinarily intelligent and dedicated, aside from the predictable corps of pay-promotion-pension types, the knowledge that the security of the country rested in your hands (sort of), all of which generated a cadence that even the slowest-moving found impossible to deny—except, perhaps, for the cleaning crew, who seemed to find a more deliberate gait to be more appropriate.
    The offices of SecDef’s general counsel were located off corridor 9, on the third floor of the D ring. Margit’s office was 3D964; a visitor could find her if he knew that the
3
designated the floor, that
D
designated the ring, and that the first numeral specified the corridor off which her office was located.
    “Five” seemed to have been the rule for the designers of the building back in 1941, when fifteen thousand workers went about the task of constructing a center to house America’s military establishment—fragmented into fiefdoms under what was then called