Mortal Allies Read Online Free Page B

said?”
    Poor General Spears just got his first whiff of what I had to put up with during three years at Georgetown Law. Only this was just a half dose of what Katherine Carlson had to offer. Maybe a quarter dose. She really was a royal pain in the ass — you
have
to believe me on this point.
    His face got real red, and his fists got tight, because he certainly wasn’t accustomed to being talked to this way. And besides, he was justifiably worried about the safety of the thirty thousand Americans under his command and about maintaining the military alliance, which could possibly get ripped asunder by this case. I sympathized with him terribly.
    My lips were just parting to assure him we’d be good and damned careful, and responsible, too, when Katherine suddenly whirled and faced me.
    “Keep your mouth shut,” she hissed. “Not a word. You’re my co-counsel, but I’m in charge of this defense. You’ll follow my lead or I’ll file a complaint and have you disbarred for malpractice.”
    I felt blood rush to my face and I gulped once or twice. I looked down at General Spears. He was staring back up at me. It was not a pretty look. What his eyes were saying was that I better get control over Katherine Carlson, and I better do it fast, or he’d hang my gonads on his Christmas tree.

CHAPTER 3
     
     
    I sulked the whole way to my room in the Dragon Hill Lodge. The other three people in the hotel elevator even edged away from me, because my eyes were glowing murderously. I sulk in a very nasty way.
    I don’t like being publicly dressed down, especially by a civilian, and even more especially by a civilian woman in the presence of a four-star general. But most especially of all, I don’t like being dressed down by Katherine Carlson. Call me petty, but there it is.
    I was well aware of what she’d been up to the past eight years. For one thing, Georgetown University, despite its Catholic heritage, was inexplicably proud of her. Any number of fawning articles had been written about her in the alumni magazines I got in the mail every quarter. For a second thing, her name frequently got mentioned in
TIME
and
Newsweek
, not to mention every other prominent magazine or newspaper you could name. This happened almost anytime there was a big military case involving a gay soldier, or a soldier accused of being gay.
    See, Katherine Carlson was the legal attack dog of America’s gay culture against the Armed Forces. The “Apostle of Gayness,” she’d been nastily labeled by one right-wing journal that was outraged by her brutal tactics and unswerving persistence. More friendly journals called her “William Kunstler in drag.” She’d handled many dozens of cases, and her trademarks were there for everybody to see. She terrorized the judges and opposing attorneys. She lambasted the military profession. She burned down the courthouses. She didn’t win a lot of cases, because the laws were written against her, so she was a legal Sisyphus, fiercely rolling that big rock up that long hill, again and again. That was okay with her, though. She didn’t really intend to win. She just wanted to make damned sure that every time the military won, it was a bloody, Pyrrhic victory. She was a brilliant theoretician and a canny tactician. She slashed and burned in court, and she tried her cases in the press, and America’s journalistic corps loved her for it.
    To Katherine, this was war. She was a single-issue acolyte. She treated the defense of gays like a religious calling, only you have to think once or twice about the issue she glommed on to. I mean, there’re lots of good, worthy liberal causes a lady with her fiercely anarchic bent could pick from. She could’ve been a tree hugger, or a save-the-whaler, or a defender of the homeless, or even an ASPCA freak. Those are all reputable lefty causes, right? But no; she chose gay rights. Now I hate to draw hasty conclusions, but real, meat-eating heterosexuals just don’t get too