Law of Honor

by Michael Newton

  The FBI had also tried to use their "Brasco" undercover guy against Santo Trafficante Jr. in Tampa, tying him to the Bonanno Family's King's Court Bottle Club in Holiday, Florida, but Santo beat that rap by dying on March 17th.

  That didn't fit with Dom's plans for the future, but with so much going on between Gotham and Florida's "Magic City," who could see what might be coming on?

  Salt Lake City: September 14, 1987

  The Unabomber had begun repeating himself. After his first kill in Sacramento, he had laid low for fourteen months, then returned to Salt Lake City, where he'd mailed a bomb to Michigan Professor Robert Kloppenburg

  back in November 1985. Not only that, but this time he'd repeated the identical technique he's used in Sacramento, disguising his bomb as a piece of scrap lumber studded with nails, left in the parking lot behind CAAMS Inc., a local computer shop. When owner Gary Wright arrived for work, he'd tried to move it, triggering a blast that left him with shrapnel wounds to his face, throat, arms and legs.

  Wright had been lucky to survive. The Bureau had been luckier to have a clear-eyed witness at the scene who'd watched a suspect place the booby trap. He described a man twenty-five to thirty years old, five feet ten to six feet tall, weighing around 165 pounds. The presumed bomber wore a hooded sweatshirt and aviator's sunglasses, his reddish-blond hair, thin mustache, and "ruddy" complexion still visible under the hood. An artist's sketch of the suspect was appearing on media outlets worldwide.

  And that brought Agent Wyman Gantt to Salt Lake City for the second time since he'd begun tracking the bomber whom no one—so far—had been able to identify. Thankfully, some other terrorists weren't as elusive.

  On January 29th, G-men had arrested Weatherman Underground fugitive Silas Bissell in Eugene, Oregon, where a "friend" saw his FBI wanted poster offering a $5,500 reward for the attempted bombing of an ROTC center at the University of Washington seventeen years earlier. Arrested back then, with wife Ruth, he'd posted $50,000 bond and skipped. Now his pal had claimed the reward and Bissell was facing two years for planting a dud.

  Elsewhere, eight United Freedom Front members had been charged with sedition and racketeering, but their trial wouldn't start until sometime next year. In July, DEA agents and LAPD had broken up a coke ring operating in South Central, led by Black Guerrilla Family member Elrader Browning.

  The really big news, though, had broken yesterday, when Lebanese terrorist Fawaz Younis was captured for hijacking Royal Jordanian Flight 402 at Beirut International Airport in June 1985, holding seventy passengers hostage for thirteen hours, then releasing them before Younis and his Amal Movement militia cronies blew up the plane. Since four of the hostages were Americans, that made Younis an FBI target under the a long-titled 1986 statute, the Hostage Taking and Omnibus Diplomatic Security and Antiterrorism Act. The bottom line: G-men could nab foreign terrorists abroad and bring them stateside for trial if they'd attacked U.S. citizens and their "host nation" approved what the Justice Department was calling "rendition"—a fancy word for kidnapping.

  In this case, informers placed Younis on Cyprus, where undercover agents got him drunk, then invited him to a "party" aboard a yacht moored offshore. Agreeing once they'd promised him a lucrative drug deal, Younis was cuffed, then placed aboard the venerable aircraft carrier USS Saratoga. From there, a four-passenger Lockheed S-3 Viking jet designed for antisubmarine warfare delivered him stateside for trial at some unknown future date.

  Call that a solid win for Bureau headquarters and ample precedent for what Hardy imagined would be many more renditions waiting in the years ahead.

  Medellín: October 27, 1987

  Colombians had never heard of Halloween, apparently, but they made do with All Saint's Day, November 1st, and that was close enough. They didn't share Mexico's Dia de los Muertos, but why should they? Every day was rife with death and mayhem nationwide.

  "And when do I get out of here?" Hardy Gantt asked his second bottle of Apóstol beer, hoping the barmaid didn't hear him talking to himself.

  The answer: Not till Langley's goddamned good and ready.

  Headquarters had its hands full with recent changes in leadership, on top of all the planet's other problems. Reagan's DCI, Bill Colby, had retired in January, taking heat for the Iran-Contra scandal, and died on May 6th from brain cancer. Ten days later, Reagan had brought William Webster over from the FBI, one day before Langley's first annual salute to agents killed on duty.

  Could Webster "reform" the Agency, as he'd done for the Bureau?

  Hardy drained his beer and flagged the waitress for a third, thinking, Don't make me laugh.

  Colombia, for starters, remained an epic killing ground, as Pablo Escobar's cartel kept up its reign of terror against all official opposition. So far this year, gunmen had killed 471 members of the Patriotic Union Party, capped on October 11th with the assassination of party head and presidential candidate Jaime Pardo Leal. Police had four sicarios jailed, awaiting trial, but there were thousands waiting in the country's slums to take their place. No one was laying any bets on life expectancy for Pardo's successor, Bernardo Jaramillo.

  Elsewhere, the U.S. Army's School of the Americas, now tucked away in Georgia, was still distributing CIA torture manuals to Latin American clients through its Special Forces Mobile Training Teams in Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Peru and Venezuela. The Argentine Navy's "Higher School of Mechanics" helped out by sending "advisors" from its super-secret detention center at Núñez, Buenos Aires to spread the gospel among Central American death squads. Amnesty International blamed Guatemala and El Salvador for "some of the most serious violations of human rights found in Central America," noting that "kidnappings and assassinations serve as systematic mechanisms of the government against opposition from the left."

  How would Bill Webster change any of that, when his new Agency was eyebrow-deep in the torture and murder, financed by drug dealing that made it protect the cartels?

  El Salvador was talking "peace," which meant an amnesty for political prisoners and guerillas still at large if they surrendered within fifteen days, plus absolute forgiveness for the government's assassins, sadists, and the semi-private death squads they'd created.

  Some great bargain, Hardy mused. We'll let you out of prison and stop murdering your relatives, as long as you ignore whatever happened in the past. Bygones are bygones, right?

  Chile offered no such "peace" to resident "subversives" while the Pinochet regime was in control. Another of Orlando Letelier's killers, Armando Larios, had fled the country, claiming Pinochet wanted him dead because he wouldn't join the cover-up. Safe in the States, he'd copped a plea as an accessory to murder, whereupon the feds dismissed his charges in exchange for information they most likely had before he squealed.

  And around the time Larios turned himself in, mid-February, Senator Kerry's committee had finally started investigating CIA-supported narcotrafficking from Colombia and Bolivia northward, through the Caribbean to the U.S. It was early days yet, no final verdict expected for two years or so, but leaks were already gushing from Capitol Hill. As the New York Times reported, Kerry's crew had witnesses on tap to document drug rings created by the CIA and National Security Council, swapping cocaine for cash to illegally arm and train the Contras. The White House, FBI and DEA continued to insist that those cartels were wholly unrelated to Reagan's "private aid network" to the Contras—itself a criminal conspiracy—while claiming that reports of Contras dealing drugs were "absolutely without foundation."

  And if you buy that, Hardy thought, I've got a nifty bridge in Brooklyn you can have for pocket change.

  Birmingham, Alabama: November 1, 1987

  Of late, Dave Jordan wondered whether southern history was somehow moving in reverse, dialing back to the bad old days when he'd first come to Alabama, trailing Fee O'Hara and escaping from his Gotham family in search of meaning for his life.

  And how's that working out? he asked himself.

  No pleasing an
swer came to mind.

  The Klan was going through another period of flux. The National Knights, active since 1963, had finally collapsed, unable any longer to deny that its founding "Imperial Wizard" had lost his mind to Alzheimer's disease, and its longtime political ally, the National States Rights Party, had also gone out of business this year. Against those hopeful signs, the Georgia-based Southern White Knights were going strong, introducing themselves to the nation with a series of riots around Forsyth County.

  The county seat at Cumming was notorious for its anti-black pogrom of 1912, sparked by a rape and murder that resulted in every nonwhite county resident being expelled at gunpoint, with whatever they could salvage from their burning homes. A few had filtered back in recent years, but tension reached a new flashpoint in January, when some 15,000 civil rights marchers turned up protesting Forsyth's legendary status as a white's-only bastion. Klansmen rolled out to meet them, hurling rocks and bottles, cheered on by "retired" Klan leader David Duke and his ex-"Grand Dragon" of Alabama, Don Black. As outsiders, both were jailed for "reckless conduct," but the charges went away. Now locals claimed that Duke was only in it for donations to his latest crackpot cause, a National Association for the Advancement of White People. He was allegedly soliciting funds for a "Forsyth County Defense Committee," the money earmarked for a presidential run next year.

  At least the Michael Donald lynching from Mobile, now six years in the past, was having some results. Killer Frank Cox had seen his first indictment dismissed on dubious grounds, but a new one from August charged him with murder, which had no statute of limitations. His trial wouldn't occur until next year sometime, but just this morning a federal jury had ruled against the Klan that murdered Donald, ordering its leadership to pay the victim's mother $7 million on her claim of wrongful death. The group was virtually bankrupt, but as recompense, the court awarded Beulah Donald ownership of it's Tuscaloosa headquarters. Judge Alex Howard had fixed a ninety-day deadline for charting the Klan's other assets and picking them clean. "Imperial Wizard" Robert Shelton, once a force to reckon with statewide, told journalists, "The Klan is my belief, my religion. But it won't work anymore. The Klan is gone. Forever."

  Too bad that isn't true, Dave thought. In fact, more than a dozen groups still clung to life nationwide, some with chapters in multiple states, and Klans were outnumbered by affiliated neo-Nazi groups and racist "skinhead" gangs of youths intent on mayhem against Jews, nonwhites and gays.

  At least George Wallace had kept his promise, quitting politics when his gubernatorial term expired on January 19th. Two weeks later, he'd divorced third wife Lisa—a mortal sin for "born-again" Christians, but since the split was her idea, Dave guessed that made it fine and dandy. George's only son told journalists the breakup took him by surprise, but he was keeping busy as state treasurer, laying the groundwork for a 1990 congressional race. The elder George, meanwhile, had taken a PR job at Troy State University in Pike County, fifty-odd miles south of Montgomery.

  Dave couldn't bring himself to think of Wallace as a winner: crippled by a would-be killer's bullets fifteen years ago, he'd managed to recoup some of his losses, but he also spent a fair amount of time apologizing for his racist tirades and campaigns of days gone by. Whether a bigot of such notoriety could be forgiven—whether anybody could, including Jordan's murdered mafioso father back in Gotham—was beyond his range of expertise.

  With forty years of legal practice, could he make a decent case on Judgment Day, assuming such a thing ever occurred?

  Unlikely, Dave surmised. But maybe he could hope for a mistrial.

  FBI Field Office, Manhattan: November 2, 1987

  The Bureau had been going through another round of changes at headquarters, which were bound to have an impact on the Gotham office and on Agent Erin O'Hara. Would it mean another transfer, or was she secure as long as foreign spies kept making headlines for the Counterintelligence Division?

  President Reagan had taken the high road for once, moving Director William Webster over to the scandal-ridden swamp at Langley, theoretically to clean it up. His stand-in, while the White House sought a permanent replacement, had been John Otto, a Minnesota native, ex-marine, and former sheriff's deputy who'd doubled as a teacher in St. Paul before he'd joined the Bureau in 1964. He'd served as SAC of Minneapolis and Chicago before shifting to headquarters as Executive Assistant Director of Law Enforcement Services in 1981. He'd lasted five months as Acting Director, before the Senate approved replacement William Steele Sessions on November 2nd, then retired.

  Sessions hailed from Arkansas, a preacher's son and Distinguished Eagle Scout who'd spent three years as an Air Force radar instructor, discharged as a captain in 1955. Three years later he'd earned an LL.B. from Baylor Law School and joined the Justice Department's Criminal Division appointed as U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Texas in '71. Three years later, President Ford had appointed him a federal judge for the same district, advancing to Chief Judge in 1980 and holding that post until he was tapped as FBI Director.

  The down side: Sessions hadn't spent a day with any law enforcement agency, unless you counted Justice, where it could be difficult to draw a line between the politics and prosecutions. As to how he'd manage in his new job, that was anybody'd guess.

  The good news: if he didn't come on too strong, meddling in affairs he barely understood, the Bureau might continue on the course Director Webster had established in his eight years on the job. Like Sessions, Webster never wore a badge before he was assigned to lead the FBI, so maybe it would be all right.

  Maybe…

  Ongoing cases were still making news. In Operation GREYLORD, Illinois Circuit Court Judge Raymond Sodini had pled guilty to bribery in January, sentenced to eight years in May. Before that, in March, Judge Aubrey Robinson Jr. ruled that spy Jonathan Pollard had breached various conditions of his plea agreement with Justice, scrapping the original sentence in favor of lifetime confinement. Pollard's first move was from FCC Petersburg, Virginia, to a federal prison hospital in Missouri, facing a battery of psychiatric tests.

  And then, there was the one who got away. CIA traitor Edward Lee Howard had gone on the lam in 1985, surfacing in Helsinki, where he'd holed up in the Soviet embassy. In August of this year, Moscow had granted him political asylum, while Howard still proclaimed his innocence, claiming he was an Agency "scapegoat" and had not divulged "anything of real importance" in exchange for his dacha and Russian citizenship. The whole truth, he declared, would be revealed in a forthcoming memoir.

  If nothing else, O'Hara hoped Justice could use the "Son of Sam Law" to freeze any stateside profits Howard might earn from his book, assuming that it ever went to press. In the meantime, she could only hope that he found Russian life as captivating as Lee Oswald had, during his short-lived defection back in 1959 to '61.

  Central Park, Manhattan: December 10, 1987

  FBI Agent Stephen Barnes entered the park via West 86th Street and made his way to the Ramble, checking all along the way for anyone who seemed to be observing him, however nonchalantly. Spotting no one, he moved on to Ramble Arch and dawdled there, eyeing The Lake, until he saw Lieutenant-Colonel Alexander Bobrik of the KGB approaching from the north, hands in the pockets of his overcoat, eyes hidden behind mirrored sunglasses.

  Bobrik no longer asked Barnes whether he'd been followed. Their collaboration spanning years had taught the Russian officer to trust his field agent, at least to the extent he'd ever trusted anyone. Their meetings seemed coincidental, fleeting, just a handshake for the pass of microfilm from Barnes to his controller, then they separated, moving off in opposite directions, still on high alert for any danger warning signs.

  Payment to Barnes would come as always, to the mail drop he'd established early in his dealings with the KGB. One thousand dollars in new hundred-dollar bills, which he could spend or salt away in the account he kept under an alias at Bank of America Financial Center on West 42nd. Then again, he might just hang on to the cash, since read
ing in the Times that Gotham's major banks were suffering their worst year since the Great Depression, earnings down 40 percent overall since last year, down 92 percent for J. P. Morgan.

  Still, it could have been much worse, if he'd been stuck inside Afghanistan, where mujahideen bombardments of government facilities had topped 23,000. Foreign views on the guerillas were divided. American journalist Rob Schultheis rhapsodized over the "hopelessly brave warriors I walked with, still not free," who "were truly the people of God." On the flip side, Irish-American author Alexander Cockburn deemed Afghanistan "an unspeakable country filled with unspeakable people, sheepshaggers and smugglers, who have furnished in their leisure hours some of the worst arts and crafts ever to penetrate the occidental world. I yield to none in my sympathy to those prostrate beneath the Russian jackboot, but if ever a country deserved rape it's Afghanistan."

  Some of the mujahideen's biggest fans resided in Washington, at the Reagan White House, and at Langley, where funding for Operation Cyclone had reached $630 million in 1987. From Moscow, Mikhail Gorbachev had announced troop withdrawals beginning in July, without ruling out further offensives to support an Interim Islamic State led by Muslim scholar Sibghatullah Mojaddedi. Alas, voters had chosen Najibullah Ahmadzai, former chief of the Afghan secret police, as their president in November 1986, and he showed no inclination to resign. Wielding his former agency like a battle axe, Ahmadzai had retaliated for Pakistan's support of the mujahideen in his country, staging 127 "incidents" so far this year, killing 234 Pakistanis. Meanwhile, UN Special Rapporteur Felix Ermacora said ongoing combat had killed 14,000 Afghan civilians this year, while guerilla rocket attacks on Kabul had claimed another 4,000. Kandahar's population had withered from 200,000 to 25,000, after a months-long campaign of carpet bombing and bulldozing by Red Army troops and Afghan communist soldiers.