NORTHERN VIRGINIA
Saturday 1 May
Katie Cochran lived in a part of Virginia everyone called the Hunt Country though hardly anyone rode with hounds anymore. It also felt farther away, the clone town homes stretching farther out from the city than Rena remembered. Then around a single curve they vanished and the road became a country highway. The dense forests rushing past the open window of the old Camaro whispered to Rena of the battles fought nearby to hold the angry country together: Grant’s bloody chase of Lee in the Wilderness, Stonewall Jackson at Bull Run, Lee’s surrender south near Richmond. Rena used to walk the battlefields on weekends, retracing the steps of the infantry soldiers.
He and Katie had been living not far from here ten years ago when Billy Judupp walked into his office at Quantico and it began. Peter recalled that day as he drove. Major William Judupp appropriated a chair, hoisted his pristine combat boots onto Peter’s desk, and celebrated his surprise landing with a reptilian grin.
“Got a special one for you, Sherlock. Right from the top,” Judupp announced.
Billy had been a third-year at West Point during Peter’s first, and they’d been through enough together in the fourteen years since that most people considered them friends. But it was a dry, thin alliance. They’d overlapped in Afghanistan and Iraq, young officers on the rise in wartime. Now rotated home, they were both thriving, freshly minted majors in their early thirties. Billy was assigned to O-ring, the Pentagon’s fifth floor, where decisions were made. Rena was at the Criminal Investigation Division, the super cops of the army. If all went according to plan, in seven to ten years they’d be colonels, and by fifty or sooner, one stars. Billy, with his lifeguard good looks and his jigsaw puzzler’s mind, was intent on making it happen.
“The fifth floor has chosen someone new to lead CentCom—finally,” Judupp said. “So it doesn’t take a computer to know they don’t want any more problems.”
CentCom was Central Command, the U.S. operational command responsible for the Middle East theater. The current commander, General Philip Myers, was being pushed out for talking too candidly to a magazine reporter. His predecessor, Seth Dreyer, had been fired for handing over classified documents to a biographer with whom he was also having an affair.
“The fifth floor doesn’t want any more cockups. You’ve been given the job because you don’t cock things up. This one needs a clean bill of health.”
“You got paper for me?” Rena asked, meaning written orders.
“You’ll get ’em in a day or two. I came down to give you context.”
What Judupp called “context,” most soldiers called politics.
“Two weeks. Then wrap it up. Something serious. Not a whitewash. But don’t kill yourself.”
“Katie and I were supposed to go on leave,” Rena said.
“Give her the bad news. Take your leave after.”
Rena didn’t want to share with Billy anything more about his marriage than necessary, but he was afraid Katie couldn’t take any more “bad news.” She had been sick and heartbroken to have lost three different pregnancies in a row. Rena had been working like crazy, maybe harder because things at home were tense. He knew he was making a hash of it there but he wasn’t sure how to fix it; getting away from everything together was supposed to be a start.
“Get this done here, Peter, and you can have extra leave.”
Billy was like an irritating brother-in-law who everyone else thought was just great and you couldn’t bring yourself to like.
“I’ll wait for the file,” Rena said.
Judupp’s feet came down off the desk, and a lazy salute to the brim of his cap.
“You’ve got a great reputation, Peter, but you can also be a dog with a bone. We’re not looking for any bones.”
The next day Judupp’s aide came with the orders and the file.
WOULD HE HAVE HANDLED IT DIFFERENTLY IF JUDUPP HADN’T been an asshole? Maybe. Peter didn’t know. He resented being told to do less than his best. He needed, at that moment in his life, to do something well.
Two days later, buried deep enough no one was supposed to notice, he found references in General James Stanhope’s file to items that weren’t there. They’d been removed or sent to appendices no longer appended. Something had been tidied up.
So be it. The United States Army kept copies of everything. You just had to know where to look. From the fragments he could find, all the complaints in Stanhope’s file appeared to be from women; Rena could surmise the rest. General James Birdsong Stanhope had, in the grotesque language of another era, taken “liberties” with women in his command. On more than one occasion he had almost certainly made sexual advances toward inferior officers, particularly on long deployments overseas. Such conduct was immoral. It was also a violation of military code—even if the advances were welcome. At least some of the women must have registered complaints; there was never a court-martial. All that remained were traces in the record, like dust particles left behind from a broken glass after the shards were swept up.
Aside from the ghost trail of questions Rena had found, however, James Stanhope was an extraordinary soldier. His talents had fully emerged in the decade of war that followed 9/11, most of which he’d spent in harm’s way. Even in theaters where U.S. troops struggled, Stanhope excelled.
His biggest contribution was organizational. At Harvard earning an MBA, Stanhope adapted business innovation theories to the military’s traditional approach to making battlefield decisions. The old command-and-control-from-above approach, so ingrained in army thinking, was ill-suited, Stanhope reasoned, to win a war against loosely connected cells of fighters who operated as fast-moving networks. The old way left U.S. commanders hesitant and cautious.
U.S. and allied fighters needed to create smaller teams of decision makers, not unlike terrorist cells, and authorize these teams to act on their own if traditional and timely command-and-control approval was impossible. The army agreed and the differences were palpable. Within a year, Stanhope had revolutionized the future of U.S. battlefield decision-making—particularly for special operations, the military’s name for classified warfare.
In eleven years of war, Stanhope also had spent 3,217 nights away from his family, fewer than 800 nights at home.
His last three years abroad Stanhope’s wife was dying of cancer. He offered to retire; she told him no, she didn’t want her cancer to destroy two lives.
That was the General Jim Stanhope the army wanted to promote.
Rena had found another, less heroic, side of the same man.
At first, Rena had just set out to find what was missing in the file.
But questions have consequences. Once he took the first step, Rena usually took the next—and the one after—until he knew everything he could.
Secrets are hidden for a reason.
It took two weeks to find enough stories, enough women, to know most of it.
When deployed long enough and lonely, Stanhope became infatuated with women in his command. He would make advances. If rebuffed, he backed off. Rena found no evidence Stanhope had ever tried to retaliate against anyone who turned him down. To the contrary, he would apologize for crossing the line—and usually was forgiven. But not always. Rena found no evidence Stanhope had ever forced himself on anyone who refused him, the army definition of rape or sexual assault. But Rena was pretty sure Stanhope had been intimate with at least four women over whom he had power. That itself was a violation of the military criminal code. There was a time when such conduct was viewed as less shocking. Even then, though, these were court-martial offenses.
“What are you going to do?” Katie had asked him. He’d shared with her what he’d been doing, though doing so was also a violation of regulation. He needed his wife’s counsel, given that he had been conducting this investigation alone and largely off the books, knowing the Pentagon would not be thrilled. Katie came from a military family. She was his best friend, and they were struggling now, and he needed something to bring them together, especially since he had forfeited their vacation with the assignment.
“I don’t know,” he’d said.
“It’s wrong, Peter,” she’d said, meaning Stanhope.
Rena then did something else that pushed the edge further. He’d talked to the general’s daughter, Lindsey, herself a soldier, to verify some things and in some way warn her what was coming. A part of him, he thought, wanted her to warn her father. She was shocked, Lindsey said, but not entirely surprised. Her parents did not have a perfect marriage. Her father had been absent for long periods. But she considered him a good man. “Walk him through it,” she said. “He’ll do the right thing.” Then Peter had made a decision he would always regret. He asked Lindsey if she would come with him to see her father. She said yes.
He was off script and acting without approval. He would talk to Stanhope privately, he thought, see what the general said, and then make a decision. A day later he called Stanhope. He was vetting the general, he explained, and had some questions. Stanhope invited Rena to come the next day to the Eastern Shore, where he was renting a friend’s house.
Stanhope was shocked to see Lindsey arrive, too.
They sat in the sunroom. Peter explained that his superiors didn’t know he was there. He said he didn’t know what would happen next. But he wanted the general to know ahead of time what he had learned. Then he went through it, the general’s daughter sitting next to him.
Stanhope said nothing, and when Rena was done the general asked only one question: “Why did you bring Lindsey?”
“Is it true, Dad?” Lindsey asked.
Instead of answering, Stanhope went outside. He was gone twenty minutes or so, walking on the beach alone. When he returned, face silted with sweat, he spoke to them standing up and gave a little speech he must have worked out on his walk.
“You had a tough job, son. You did it. You did it the wrong way, but it’s done. I am going to tell the president I am turning down CentCom. I’ve neglected my family long enough. I have grandchildren to love.”
Then his eyes moved to his daughter. “I wish you hadn’t come here, Lindsey. But I know the reasons. I hope to do better. Major Rena should have known better than to bring you.”
Then to Rena: “This was my sin, not yours, Major. I am grateful for the discretion. But you didn’t need to do this. I am not a rapist.”
Stanhope retired with full honors. The Pentagon picked someone else to head CentCom.
Two months later, it was made abundantly clear to Rena his career in the army was over. After, when Llewelyn Burke offered him a job on his Senate staff, it was the senator’s way of announcing to the small circle of people who knew what had happened that in his eyes Rena had done the right thing. It was also Burke’s way of sending a message to the Pentagon: sexual harassment would not be tolerated. While working for Burke, Rena met a liberal lawyer from Senator Stan Blaylock’s staff, a woman who was just as driven about getting to the bottom of things as Rena was. They worked well together, even if they were from opposing parties. Senator Burke suggested they could do well together offering consulting and problem solving to people in trouble. A private firm like theirs could work as a bridge across parties.
Rena had never told the whole story of Stanhope to anyone. He told his commanding officer what he had found and that Stanhope had decided to retire. He didn’t tell him about the trip to the Eastern Shore. Or about Lindsey.
Rena never spoke to Billy Judupp again.
The closest he came to telling the story fully was to Katie, but even then he left out details. It was Stanhope’s story to tell, he told himself, and those of the women he harassed.
Senator Burke sometimes told a version of the story—without ever naming the general. In it, Rena was a hero. The general had been grateful and the army saved from a scandal.
Now the story was being retold, in shadowed corners online, as a witch hunt by a man who abused his wife and wanted to find a scapegoat to mask his own sins. Rena knew he had made mistakes; he wondered if there were grains of truth in the lies online. Those are the lies that people believe the most.