Sweepers by P. T. Deutermann Page B

first, he needed to be convinced that this wasn’t some kind of smoke-blowing exercise on the admiral’s part. He was a little bit surprised that Karen Lawrence would be so ready to believe such a story.
    On the other hand, she was a commander and Sherman was a flag officer.
    He had long since learned never to underestimate the capacity of naval officers to put the star-wearing elect of the military congregation up on exceedingly high pedestals.
    Train stared out at the stalled river of evening commuters.
    Being that he considered himself a Washington-area native, he should be used to this. Born in 1949, he had been the only child of Gregor von Rensel and his wife, Constance.
    He had grown up on the family’s riverside home near Aquia, Virginia, which was about thirty-five miles south of Washington.
    His father, a Washington attorney, had been on Macarthur’s staff during World War 11. He had followed Macarthur to Tokyo when the war ended, and he’d spent two years on the Tokyo Occupation Staff. Despite being part of the hated army of occupation in that devastated city, Gregor found himself quite taken with the Japanese approach to life.
    When he came home to the Washington area in 1947, he met and subsequently married the daughter of an American banker, Hiram Worthfield, of the San Francisco Worthfields, who had himself taken a Japanese wife long before the war.
    Wolfgang had been born two years later, growing up on the family estate at Aquia until his ninth year, when his mother contracted breast cancer and then died a year later.
    The Worthfield family,- conscious of Gregor’s old-world attitudes about raising their only grandchild, prevailed upon him to accept two young Japanese retainers from their own San Francisco household, Hiroshi and Kyoko Yamada.
    Kyoko had quietly become Train’s surrogate mother, while her husband, Hiroshi, took over as groundskeeper, chauffeur, and general factotum.
    Hiroshi had generally ignored young Wolfgang until the child’s twelfth year, at which point Gregor von Rensel, aware of impending puberty, had had a quiet word.
    With patience and quiet persistence, Hiroshi had infiltrated Wolfgang’s nonschool hours, skillfully bringing the prepubescent boy into his orbit and teaching him the essential arts of manhood. To the young Wolfgang’s eyes, Hiroshi was an aloof, taciturn, stoical man of little apparent humor who was inexplicably starting to take up a lot of his time.
    But over the next three years, the rapidly growing teenager was exposed to the best concepts of the Japanese upperclass traditions: a strong sense of honor, an -awareness that there was such a thing as duty, and the iinpoilance of personal integrity. Hiroshi had come from a military family and had received extensive military -training in anticipation of -the impending U.S. invasion of the home islands. When the time came to instruct his new master’s son in the duties of manhood, he imparted a high regard for personal selfsufficiency, including extensive and daily instruction in the martial arts.
    Content with Hiroshi’s work, Train’s father insisted on boarding school as the next step, then prelaw at the University of Virginia. It had been Train’s . idea to try military service, and he served for thirteen years in the Marine Corps, first as an infantry officer, and then, after time out for law school from 1975 to 1978, as a Marine Corps JAG officer until 1983.
    Two factors drove him to resign his commission in the Marines: the increasingly complex demands of managing his financial affairs after his father’s death in 1982, and the fact that he had developed a passion for the art of investigation, following an assignment to prosecute a widespread contracting-fraud ring with foreign government industrialespionage overtones in 1980. He put away his major’s uniform in late W83, and he split the next eleven years between the Office of Naval Intelligence and, later, the Naval Investigative Service. He operated