Chapter 6: The Interrogation in the Kitchen
The kitchen of the Vance home was small, smelling faintly of lemon Pledge and burnt toast from breakfast. Miller sat at the small laminate table where Marcus usually ate his morning cereal, while Arthur stood by the sink, filling a glass with tap water.
"You're making a career-ending error, Miller," Arthur said, taking a slow sip. "The Palmer papers aren't the problem. The problem is that someone in your division didn't properly redact the budget allocations for the 1951 defense research grants. When the congressional committee asks for the unredacted files next Tuesday, you won't have them because they were shredded by mistake during the transition."
Miller didn't look up from the small notebook where he was sketching an architectural diagram of the kitchen’s pantry. "We don't make mistakes like that, Arthur. We have redundancy protocols that go back forty years."
"Redundancy only works if the people reading the ledgers know the difference between a research grant and a contingency fund," Arthur replied. "And your current director came up through public relations. He thinks a contingency fund is a rainy-day account for the cafeteria."
Miller set his pen down with a sharp click. "Where are the physical disks, Arthur?"
"In the freezer, wrapped in frozen peas," Arthur said dryly.
Miller’s eyes narrowed. For a fraction of a second, he looked ready to stand up and kick the refrigerator door open. Then he saw the slight twitch at the corner of Arthur’s mouth and realized he was being played.
"You always did have a dry sense of humor for a bureaucrat," Miller said softly. "Too bad it won't hold up in a federal magistrate's chambers when the charge is obstruction of national security infrastructure."
"Is that what we're calling a missing spreadsheet about fertilizer imports now?" Arthur asked, setting his glass down. "National security infrastructure? We're talking about thirty tons of superphosphate shipped to Kansas in nineteen-forty-nine, Miller. The cows that ate the corn grown with that fertilizer have been leather boots for half a century."
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"It's not about the fertilizer," Miller said, his voice dropping an octave. "It's about the signature on the authorization form at the bottom of page twelve. The signature belongs to a man who allegedly died in a plane crash over the Azores in fifty-two. But the ink used on that signature was manufactured by a company that didn't exist until nineteen-eighty-four."
Arthur went very still. The sound of a car door slamming out on the street drifted through the small kitchen window, followed by the muffled murmur of voices.
