He waited for the reaction he wanted, but didn’t get it. It looked like she wasn’t buying it. He kept talking.
“But no one is going to die. So the easy way out of here is, if you know anyone who’s really up to bad stuff—”
“I’m not going to give them any names. And I’m not going to give them any passwords. You think you’re so smart, and here you are sitting in the belly of the monster and you don’t even see it’s eating you, too.”
Donny sat back. He had plenty of clients who lied to him. He was usually the one telling them the truths they wanted to evade. Not the other way around. He smiled, nodded, and then leaned back in.
“All right, then. You want to fight them? I’ll fight them for you. But I need something to work with. I’ll see if I can get them to let me see these videos, which have all been taken down already. See if I can convince Broyles they are harmless. And then maybe invalidate the arrest and the search.”
“They don’t have all of them, you know.”
“All of what?”
“My videos.”
“Really. Where are those?”
“I bet they’d love to know.”
“What’s on them?”
She looked at him. “What they really want to cover up. The real reason they are locking me up and all my friends. I can’t believe they are getting away with this.”
“Tell me,” said Donny. He hadn’t taken a single note.
A big cry came over her face, and then disappeared, like she had eaten it. Donny extended his hands across the table, palms up. She responded by crossing her arms and looking away.
“You can trust me,” said Donny. “I don’t want to know the password. I want to help you.”
She looked back at him, resolved.
“I was with Gregorio.”
“Gregorio Z? The opposition leader? He’s been missing for three weeks.”
“He’s not missing.” She looked down, as the tears tried harder to get out, propelled by memory of trauma. “They fucking lynched him. I was there.”
“With your camera.”
She nodded.
“Who did it?”
“I don’t know. They weren’t in uniform. But you could tell which side they were on. We took every shot we could that would help us dox them.”
“Why haven’t I seen the footage already?”
“We were too scared,” she said, choking on it. “Mort’s people said it was too hot. Like you said, some content will get you arrested. And then even without us getting it out there, people started disappearing.”
“And now they have it,” said Donny. “If they can crack the files.”
She nodded. “We should have put it out there when we had the chance. But there’s another copy.”
“Where?” said Donny.
She looked at him. And then she told him.
“How do I get in there?” he asked.
She told him how.
“I’ll go there tonight,” he said.
He felt the buzzing in his pocket. She was watching him. He put the phone down on the table, trying his best to look at her instead of looking at the screen.
“What the fuck?” said Xelina.
“Sorry,” he said. And then he looked.
This time, it was the number he expected. He checked the time. Then he put the phone back, but he could see from Xelina’s face that it was too late. She made him wonder if she knew something he was hiding from himself.
“You want to be my lawyer?”
“Yes,” said Donny, meaning it for real for the first time, even as he ran out of time.
“Get the footage. Get it out there. Show the world what they did to Gregorio. I already burned my passport. We all did. Because we’re making a whole ’nother country. And then we’re making a better planet, one where we all help each other. And if you want to help us, you need to prove you’re on our side.”
Donny was going to say something, but the sound of the metal truncheon tapping on the door told him his time really was up. And the truth was, even as he wanted to help Xelina, he wasn’t sure he was on her side. Because he was one of the last ones left who didn’t believe in sides.
4
Donny had seen one of the big passport burnings, the one in D.C. The cops went in to arrest the protesters, because apparently passports are government property on loan to you—kind of like your Bluephone is property of BellNet on loan to you—and destroying them is a federal crime. First the cops made a line of armor, and then they all put on those crazy headphones and rolled in the sonic cannon. LRAD, they called it, and when they turned it on you couldn’t hear it through the TV, but suddenly all these people were screaming and squirming. And like always, there was one guy who could handle it enough or just got mad enough that he got up and jumped on top of some of the other people and then leapt movie action hero–style toward the wall of cops. And they shot him, like hunters taking out a dove. The footage was ready-made for tragic slo-mo, add the cheesy soundtrack of your choice. But it didn’t get a lot of playback. At least not like that.
They did play it back in the Special Committee, as one of the exhibits they rolled out when they passed the Burn Barnes Laws.
Burn Barnes was not the official name of the statute. On the books, it was 18 U.S.C. §799b, and when they passed it in Congress they called it the King-Bergen Act for the Prevention of Public Violence. As one of Donny’s law professors who had worked in Washington once joked, the official title they put on a bill usually proclaimed the opposite of what it would actually do.
Donny had also seen the footage that was the reason they called it Burn Barnes. Everybody had seen that clip. You could play it back in your head every time you heard the name. This middle-aged white guy in a perfectly nice suit and tie kneels down and lights himself on fire in front of the Supreme Court. But instead of sitting there like some Zen priest of black-and-white memory, the guy starts running around screaming the way you would if you were on fire. And then these two cops come to try to deal with the situation and one of them goes to grab the flaming protester, who hugs the cop and takes him with him into the inferno.
“Protest is dangerous to public safety.” Or can be. That was the basic idea behind the law, which passed easily—most Americans hated protesters, except when they were the protesters. And the statute only proscribed certain kinds of protest, namely the kind that a judge determined presented a “substantial likelihood of provocation to violence, riot, or injury.” Given the number of demonstrations in recent years that had led to fights between opposing camps, it was an easy standard to meet. And the other thing was, the law had both criminal and civil elements. A prosecutor could file the motion, but so could a private party, and they did. Especially corporations, political operatives, public relations hacks, and activists looking to silence the other side. Further, the remedy was injunctive, meaning you could compel a law enforcement officer to shut down the protest or publication, usually before it even happened.
Pretty quickly, there were all sorts of standing orders for broad categories of public demonstrations and “inflammatory content.” It had worked well to keep things quiet. Or at least keep things out of the news. Which was just as good for the people in power. People like Miles had been trying to get the courts to do something about this restriction on the supposedly sacred right of political speech, but they hadn’t had any luck. Especially with a Supreme Court cowed by the impeachment of Justice Harrison the year before over trumped-up questions of his own loyalty.
To pass it, they tacked on a meaty package of enhancements to the existing treason, sedition, and citizenship laws, enabling them to shut down so-called conspiracies in which the violent statements of one person were imputed to all their friends. And to pass that, they added the denaturalization provisions, saying it was a more humane remedy for that species of rebellion.
America: love it or leave it.
They hadn’t yet figured out a way to silence the few remaining politicians who we
re unafraid to spout messages a judge might otherwise ban. At least not the ones who held elective office, because they were immune from the prohibitions of Burn Barnes. Gregorio was one of those. Just a Houston City Council member, but one whose district included one of the big refugee camps and a wide swath of the industrial neighborhoods that had been evacuated after the storms. He was one of those next-generation greens who married urban egalitarianism with radical environmentalism. Someone who figured out how to give voice to a generation of people like Xelina who were convinced the planet was dying and there was no future left for them. He even convinced some of them that by participating in the political system, they could change the future.
Donny had met Gregorio once, at one of those rubber chicken networking luncheons Donny almost never attended. Miles had invited him to fill an empty seat at a table he had bought for the Harris County Criminal Defense Lawyers Association, along with Miles’s half-retired dad, Milton, some toxic torts defense lawyer from Sikorski Walker, and County Criminal Court Judge Orzo and her husband, Harold, a divorce lawyer. This was before Gregorio had started to get attention from the international press, right after he got elected and was beta-testing the message that made him a target of much more powerful officeholders in Austin and Washington. Donny went to the event as a favor to Miles, and as an opportunity to hang out with the judge. He hadn’t heard much about Gregorio. The lunch, where Gregorio was the keynote speaker, fixed that.
Gregorio was about fifteen minutes into his speech when the judge excused herself, dragging her confused spouse with her. The words Gregorio used to describe the Governor were not the kind you normally heard at the sort of events they hold in downtown ballrooms for a thousand bucks a table. A few of the lines were things that would be illegal to say on television, but somehow the way Gregorio wove them into his eloquent riffs on history, law, current policy, radical geography, and gubernatorial scatology made them sound like beats of erudite verse. By the time he was done, almost half the people had left the room, and two-thirds of the other half were hollering affirmation and already mentally occupying the Edenic post-racial eco-Texatopia Gregorio had managed to conjure. Donny, who was normally too cynical to be moved by the words of politicians of any stripe, joined in with a spontaneous hoot, caught up in the ballsiness of Gregorio’s emancipatory proclamations and the way they co-opted the other side’s core doctrine like a chop shop reworking some country clubber’s Cadillac, even as he knew what an incendiary recipe it was. Only to see Milton, the dean of the local civil rights bar, scowling at him with probationary admonition and just a suggestion of a wink.
It’s how it was back then. Donny cooled it. But he still went to shake Gregorio’s hand. When he looked you in the eye, you could almost see the place he wanted to take you.
Follow the yellow brick road, y’all.
Of course they had to kill him.
Donny was no Rover, but he would do everything he could to expose what they had done. And save Xelina in the process.
But first he had to call a lady about another leader they had slated to die.
5
The third time he tried, Janice finally picked up the phone.
“Tell me you have some news,” said Donny.
“What if it’s bad news?” said Janice.
“Then we will figure out another way.”
“Donny, I think we’re out of options. I was about to call you. We just got the order. The Supreme Court denied our petition. The Chief Justice himself.”
The news made Donny immediately nauseated. As long as the odds were, he had convinced himself they had a good shot at a short stay of execution at least.
“That heartless old bastard. Why can’t he die?”
“Probably because he takes so much pleasure in making sure our clients die. And the prospective nominees on the short list are worse than him. If Miles is successful, that’ll change when the election gets called, but that doesn’t do us any good tonight.”
“The election results,” said Donny, scheming another angle at relief. “That’s what we go for. Executive clemency. It’s a perfect moment for him to show some mercy, garner a little goodwill.”
“Not really his style,” said Janice. “And I don’t think our board would let me do that.”
“What do you mean, your board won’t let you do that? We have a duty to exhaust every avenue!”
Janice was the Texas Deputy Director of the Capital Project, a group of lawyers who specialized in death penalty appeals.
“We talked about it at the outset of this case. We can’t risk jeopardizing the chances of our non-political clients by taking that step. Jerome is a traitor, after all.”
“He’s not a traitor. He’s a performing artist. And a political opponent of the President.”
“He was convicted of a conspiracy to assassinate the President, Donny.”
“All he did was teach some refugee kids how to hunt. He gave them those rifles to shoot deer, not dictators. If he were white they would be giving him awards.”
She sighed. “We already exhausted those arguments, Donny.”
“And you won’t petition the President for clemency?”
“We view it as a conflict.”
“You fucking cowards.”
“Don’t give me that shit, Donny. We have hundreds of hours on this file. And there’s no way the President is going to give Jerome a walk. The President is the one who told DOJ to seek the death penalty, and his people helped them find the forum where they would get it. Asking him for it will only invite attention to the one who asks, guaranteeing prejudice in future matters, and a drying up of the funding to pursue them. I don’t want Jerome to die, but I don’t have any more options. I’m sorry, but we’re done.”
“Fine, I’ll do it myself. Send me the form.”
“There’s no form for clemency, Donny. There are some precedents, but they wouldn’t be useful, because they’re all conventional criminal cases, mostly murders. Maybe the Rosenbergs would be close, but we know how that turned out.”
“Well, those people were guilty,” said Donny.
“This isn’t about guilt or innocence, and you know it. It’s about mitigating equitable factors, and Jerome doesn’t have a chance. I wish you wouldn’t do it.”
“And I wish you weren’t so chickenshit. I’m not an idiot—I understand the case is political. But so is the resolution. We just need to play it right.”
“You’re going to compel us to terminate our engagement, Donny.”
“Knock yourself out.”
The way she hung up the phone, it sounded like she wanted to knock him out.
Donny looked at his watch.
And then he wondered how he would pull this off.
He was standing in the so-called park across from the courthouse, the place he liked to go to make calls he didn’t want to be listened in on. Turner was the one who told him it was a safe spot, because the way they had dug the memorial into the ground made it hard for the listening gear to penetrate. So that’s right where Donny was standing, at the lowest point in the recessed corner of the block, close enough to the black marble walls of the Ares Memorial that he could read the engraved names of the three military astronauts who were killed in the first orbital conflict with the Chinese, the one that lost the satellites that lost the war that lost Hawaii. No wonder they hid it like this, hemmed in by a bus interchange, a freeway ramp, and one of those ugly-ass colored glass skyscrapers they had built back when they still built skyscrapers. Having conference calls among the dead usually felt like a violation, but today it felt right.
First, he sent Miles a message, asking him to call him when he was on his way back from Austin.
Next, he sent a message to his friend Lou, the only one of his former colleagues who was still at their old firm, Barker & Eames.
“5:15, the usual place? Urgent, not optional, will explain in person. My tab.”
Then he figured out where he could go to get his filing done before
he met Lou.
Then he called Percy, his legal assistant.
Thankfully, she answered.
“Where are you?” she said.
“The satellite office,” he answered, looking at the orbital arcs engraved in the black marble.
“That’s such a sick joke,” said Percy, who knew just what he meant, because he had taught her to use the same trick when she was making courthouse runs on his behalf.
“Yeah, well, I’m learning the hard way just why they call it gallows humor. But it doesn’t have me laughing yet.”
“Jerome?”
“Supremes won’t take the case.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s not over yet. I have a plan. I need you to pull some clemency applications for me.”
“You’re crazy, they’ll—”
“Don’t you start with that.”
“Don’t you start dragging me into your suicide mission, Donny. I don’t think I want to work on that.”
“You need to work on what I tell you. I’m the one writing your paycheck.”
“Not according to my bank.”
“Listen, I’m sorry about that. We had some unexpectedly large client expenses to advance this month.”
“Uh-huh,” said Percy. “You mean you had some unexpectedly expensive ‘study aids’ you decided to eat this month.”
Donny blanched, but there was no one there to see. Percy had the best bullshit detectors of anyone he had worked with, the by-product of training a seriously great brain in a seriously shitty neighborhood.
“I’m sorry, Percy,” said Donny. “You’re right. I’ve been letting the job get to me. That’s going to change. I just need to get through this week. And to do that, I need your help. I have your pay. I just picked up my check from the court, fees for last month, so we’re all good.”
“Then when are you gonna get your butt back to the office and give it to me?”
“I can’t get down there until tonight. It’s almost 1:30 now, I need to file this thing by five Eastern, I have a very important meeting downtown at five local, and the traffic is already code red and only getting worse. I hear the checkpoint to get on 59 is running an hour plus. No way I can get there and back in time.”
Rule of Capture Page 4
