Rule of Capture

by Christopher Brown

  “You know that. We worked on one together. Petroleos CPG.”

  “So after they get this election business sorted out, they’re going to renegotiate the Accords.”

  “Even I could get behind that,” said Donny. “But how do you think they’ll pull that off?”

  “With boldness,” said Lou. “Fidelity to our independence. He spelled it all out in the campaign, and they’re already interviewing for the team. You’d probably spend most of the next two years out of the country.”

  “Now I get it,” said Donny. “You want to save me by getting rid of me.”

  Lou shrugged. “Better than watching them get rid of you.” You could see the truth in his body language. “And maybe I’d like to have my own contact on that team. One who can keep me up to date on how things are going. If I call Bob, I’ll give him your pitch, which actually has some merit. But you also are going to let me tell him that if they work with you on this, you agree this is your last case representing their enemies. You have a long leash, from the work you did for our people during the trials. Don’t run so far from home that you get flattened by a truck. And think hard before you turn down a chance for a fresh passport, because the old ones are all about to expire, and the new ones are only going to the people who deserve them.”

  Donny processed that. Lou kept talking, switching to pledge captain mode.

  “We care about you, Donny. We’re your friends. Your brothers. And we want you back on the team with us.”

  There was a reason Donny had never joined a fraternity, and not just because none of them would have him, though that was also true. Maybe one reason was because his mode of lying was different from theirs.

  “I’m open to it,” he said.

  “Don’t poke the dragon, Donny.”

  “Keep talking like your Chinese clients and you’ll be next on the list, Lou.”

  “That’s not a Chinese saying, dumbass, and I fired all my Chinese clients a year ago. I’ll do you this favor, and you will return it the way I tell you. There’s only one side when this game is over.”

  Donny stared at the mirror behind the bar and wondered how much longer he could get away without having a side.

  10

  When his old firm put Donny on the pro bono cases, it wasn’t entirely an insult. Many of the cases were matters the senior partners had brought in, the outcome of which they believed would impact the future of the entire nation.

  “It’s about saving heroes and patriots,” said Mrs. Goodman, one of the retired partners who still came into work every day and ran the pro bono workload.

  When the war with China ended, the international trials began about what had happened in the war that came before, the one that was really a series of wars with our neighbors to the south—several of whom were allied with China.

  The idea that an American official could be tried as a war criminal was a risk they thought had been successfully buried under Pentagon-sized piles of paper. Everything the government did during the long war was reviewed by the lawyers, usually in advance. They memorialized the ways in which the actions complied with their interpretations of U.S. and international law. Sometimes the memos were made public, especially when the action produced a strong public response. Like the napalming of the eastern borderzone between Honduras and Nicaragua, the rounding up and resettlement of indigenous Guatemalans into “Integration Camps,” the rendition of suspected liberationists into the arms of the Argentine and Chilean militaries, or the design and implementation of the new interrogation procedures to be used on the captives too valuable to outsource.

  Donny read the memos when they were declassified. The first ones he read because they were assigned by law school professors who wanted to interrogate the idea of interrogation. Later he got one of the new professors who wanted to take soft-minded students and teach them to police reflexive sentiment in favor of a penal strain of reason. He taught them one of the formulas the economists had made for the judges to be able to assign a value in dollars to each human life, based on education level, projected labor value, and life expectancy. They threw in a little extra for what one of the footnotes called “hedonic enjoyment,” but not much. Donny was happy not to be called on the day the professor went through an example of how a plantation could be worth more than the lives of the villagers who worked it.

  The memos had long been filed away by the time the cease-fire was declared and the one-sided negotiation of the Accords began. The U.S. government was reluctant to accede to the idea of the trials, which was a submission of its sovereignty in some ways worse than the military and economic treaty concessions it was going to have to make, especially for the defendants. But the Chinese, with the enthusiastic backing of the Indians, Mexicans, Nicaraguans, Malaysians, Peruvians, Indonesians, and Greeks, and the reluctant backing of the French, Italians, Japanese, and Dutch, insisted, with the force of precedent behind them—all the similar proceedings the Americans had imposed on others in the century preceding.

  And so Donny, as a junior associate, found himself defending war criminals as his employer’s idea of charity.

  The first one was for Major Kovacs, a friend of the head of the Dallas office of B&E. Major Kovacs was a former Army intelligence officer charged with a half dozen war crimes related to his interrogation of foreign civilians in U.S.-occupied territory. Donny was technically second chair on the case, with the Dallas partner running it and signing all the pleadings, but the reality was he did most of the work. Including the client interviews.

  The first time they met was at Major Kovacs’s corner suite out in the Silicon Prairie of exurban Dallas where most of the interactive TV start-ups and VCs had their offices. The richest suburb in America seemed like a weird place to meet a war criminal, sitting in modular chairs across a glass desk tidily cluttered with trophies. The name of the Major’s company was Behavioral Outcomes Limited, one of the many businesses that had been started by military personnel who found themselves out of uniform and off Uncle Sam’s payroll after the big muster out. Many of the start-ups had paramilitary business models, things like security, logistics, and communications. But Major Kovacs was fuzzy when Donny asked him what Behavioral Outcomes did. “Data-optimized predictive analytics,” he said, with major global brands, including some political brands, as the lead customers. When Donny asked him if the case was impacting his business, Major Kovacs told him that’s a stupid question. But then later when he was answering another question, he noted that, actually, with some of our customers, me fighting the charges helps.

  The Major had a notebook ready for Donny, a black binder with the paper trail showing the legal authorities and military orders supporting his conduct in Suriname during the occupation. One of the memos was an analysis of each of nine proposed “interrogation enhancements” to be used on high-value suspects. The techniques were listed by their code names, and then by their clinical descriptions. Cigar Store Indian was the forced standing position for an extended period of time. The Mary Lou was hanging by wrist restraints from the ceiling with toes just touching the floor. Hockey Boards was what it sounded like. Midnight Express was a gratuitous rectal probe. Growler was the use of dogs. Dr. Strange Please Call Surgery was the one where the captive was locked in a small lightless box, sometimes with an insect. Jacques Cousteau was simulated drowning. The Major’s favorite was Mary Lou. He even laughed when Donny said the name. He asked Donny if he was old enough to know who Mary Lou Retton was. He was not.

  When Donny didn’t laugh with him, Major Kovacs told him about some of the things the people he had interrogated had done. He told him what the scene looked like in Paramaribo after the bombing of the Méridien. A kid with a hole in her head big enough that you could palm her brain like a volleyball. Picking up the fingers of a Marine younger than Donny. A lady journalist screaming as they tried to pull off the reinforced concrete support column that had crushed her hips.

  When Donny didn’t blink and asked him if he thought what he did had wo
rked, Major Kovacs said the only question you need to worry about is whether it was legal.

  Donny convinced him he needed to be ready for tougher questions than that. Major Kovacs asked Donny if he was ready to help take the country back from the weaklings who have sold it out to foreigners, taken our tax money to support parasites who have no place on our land, installed as their supposed leader a man who desecrates the People’s house with pagan love-ins, and made the flag we served one the rest of the world laughs at. Donny said I’m happy to have a job, and the Major laughed, like that was okay, and maybe he had been too serious.

  Donny got him a deal. The partner loved it, and got Major Kovacs to love it as best he could. Two years of climate cleanup labor at the Chinese territorial prison on the Big Island, a former Hawaii state correctional facility repurposed as hoosegow for the war criminals who had lost it, with an opportunity for commutation after the first year.

  Even with the deal, they made the Major take the stand for the sentencing. When they gave him his chance to make a statement, he disregarded Donny and the partner’s advice and went off on a rant. Like the one he had given Donny in private, but longer and better, richer. Cinematic, full of feeling, delivered in crisp language that evidently foreigners found easier to follow than typical American accents. So cinematic and global in its clarity that it went viral, in a piece of footage with Donny briefly visible sitting there next to his client. Donny’s friends who thought the trials were a good thing, or at least real justice that made up for our own failure to prosecute such crimes, gave him a ton of shit when they saw him. He took it, because the work was interesting and the pay was good. And because he foresaw that such associations could serve as nice insurance to have if and when the pendulum swung back, as it always did.

  Lately he was wondering what policy limitations that insurance had.

  They locked up twenty-seven Americans and executed three. None of them were the lawyers who wrote the memos that green-lighted the torture.

  And while the international authorities permanently banned use of the special interrogation techniques, they couldn’t ban their domestic use. Or maybe they just didn’t want to bother, figuring whatever the Americans did to each other could only help hasten the collapse that would really open things up for redevelopment. So, like so much of the innovation that had been created to fight faraway wars, the techniques of psychiatrically designed and legally vetted “human information collection” came home. For a while after Donny started his solo practice, he would get calls from guys defending civil suits about prisoner abuse. His reputation preceded him. Now that the precedents were clearly established, he spent most of his time defending the people who still wouldn’t talk. Them, and a few weird operators who mediated the zone in between, just like him.

  11

  Donny’s office was in an abandoned branch of the Texas Commerce Bank on a stretch of Bissonnet that was now dominated by payday lenders, used car salesmen, and martial arts studios. The branch had been constructed in 1976, the year of the American Bicentennial, eleven hundred square feet of corner lot brutalism that used concrete forms to hide the bankers from the sunlight. When the bank failed, the branch sat idle for a decade, and then housed a series of random businesses including an insurance agency, a camera repair shop, and a holistic healer. Sometimes when he worked late Donny thought he could sense the ghost of the healer, Dr. Birdsong, who had died in the clinic. Maybe that was why the rent was so cheap. But it was not an adequate excuse for the fact that Donny was a month behind.

  When he finally pulled into the lot after fighting his way through the remains of rush hour, Ward Walker was standing there waiting by the front door. Ward was one of Donny’s oldest clients, and definitely the guiltiest. And where most of Donny’s clients were only really guilty of pissing off the government, Ward was the real deal. At least if you believed that selling designer drugs to the rich was a bad thing.

  “Hey, Donny, I’ve been trying to reach you all day,” he said, fidgeting there in the shadows.

  “I’ve been kind of busy, Ward, and still am.”

  “I just need a minute.”

  Ward was a skinny white guy, maybe a couple years older than Donny, balding and with the sort of moustache that made him look more like a carny than a pharmaceutical sales rep gone to seed. It was hard to see his eyes, because he was wearing those yellow-tinted aviators he always had on, even at night. The dim fluorescence of the vintage door lamp didn’t help. But you could tell he was going to be hard to brush off. Donny checked his watch, making sure Ward could see it.

  “You can come in, Ward, but you’re going to wait until I’m ready, okay? I’m staring down two deadlines and it may take an hour.”

  “I can wait,” said Ward.

  “And I’m not looking to buy anything tonight,” added Donny.

  “I know,” said Ward, hands up. “I’m not selling, either. Just need some quick advice about this pinch I seem to be in.”

  “I bet,” said Donny, unlocking the door.

  Percy was inside, working in the office next to Donny’s.

  “I told him to go away,” said Percy, looking up from her desk and glancing at Ward. “The doctor is out.”

  “It’s okay,” said Donny. “Any progress on that new case we talked about?”

  She held out her hand, reminding Donny of their deal.

  Donny told Ward to wait for him in his office, and then shelled out the bills for Percy.

  “This is short,” she said, as she counted it herself.

  “I know,” said Donny. “I had some unanticipated expenses.”

  “I bet,” she said. “He cut in line ahead of me.”

  “Not him, and not even like that,” said Donny. “Cost me more than I expected to file the petition. Check it out.” He handed her the copy Lou had declined.

  “Wow,” she said, scanning it over. “Another reason why I am quitting.”

  “You can’t quit.”

  “Hell I can’t. I got a new job.”

  “You haven’t even taken the bar yet.”

  “Real law firms hire you while you’re still in school. Help cover your expenses while you take the bar.”

  “What part of that am I not doing?”

  “The part about the six-figure salary and the sweet bonus program.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re selling out.”

  “Powell & Shah, the people’s lawyers.”

  That hurt. But Donny knew it was good for Percy.

  “In that case, you have my full support, even though you are seriously screwing up my situation. Miles is the best lawyer I know, and a good friend. And old Milton isn’t too bad, either. You can learn a lot from those guys.”

  “Thanks, Donny. I appreciate that.”

  “Got anything for me on Gregorio and co.?”

  “Not much. Pulled some of her chats. Reverse engineered the true names of a couple of her associates, but no luck reaching any of them. Found a few videos they haven’t taken down. A few as in two. Nothing on Gregorio. Not even stories about him being missing, even though I swear I read about it a week ago. Can’t even find many stories about the occupation, which I feel like was big news for a while. It’s like they’re jamming it.”

  “Burn Barnes takedowns,” said Donny.

  “Feels like more than that to me. I put what I found on your desk. Red folder.”

  “Can you stay until I see what Ward needs?”

  “I can’t, Donny. I have a street law clinic tonight, and I’m late.”

  “You’re already a better lawyer than me.”

  She was standing now, with her bag packed and ready to go.

  “One more week,” said Donny. “I really need the help.”

  She looked at him with the determination of a protégée about to lap her mentor, and shook her head. “Call me when you have the rest of my money, and we can grab lunch.”

  “Come on,” said Ward, leaning out from Donny’s office.

  “Oh, one other
thing,” said Percy, halfway out the door now. “You had a call, someone at the Justice Department. Wouldn’t tell me what it was about. I put the message on your desk, on top of the file.”

  Donny hurried to his desk to look. It was in the bank’s old vault, which was the coolest thing about the building. It wasn’t a big vault, which made it a tiny office, but the thick walls kept out the snoops. Or so Donny liked to believe.

  “How can you work in this mess?” said Ward, surveying Donny’s setup.

  “Like I told you, I’m busy,” said Donny, picking up the message and noting the name and time. That’s when he noticed the blinking light on the phone, indicating he had eleven new messages. “And my filing system is unstoppable.”

  Ward pulled out a cigarette and went to light it.

  “You can’t smoke in here,” said Donny.

  “Got any coffee?”

  “It’s after seven at night. If there’s any coffee left, you don’t want it. And who the hell still smokes cigarettes?”

  “People who can see that the world is ending,” said Ward. “And that it’s time to take some risks.”

  “You sound like my other clients.”

  “They do it for politics. I do it for money.”

  “They do it for a better future for all of us,” said Donny.

  “Excuse the fuck out of me, Senator.”

  “And I am busy helping two of them right now,” said Donny. “People who are each better than the both of us combined, and are counting on me to keep their worlds from ending. One tonight, and the other in the morning. So make it quick. You can light up when you leave.”

  “Sure, Donny.” He looked back at the door. “Is your assistant gone?”

  “For good. I think you scared her off.”

  “Just as well. You’d be better off with someone more plugged in.”

  “That woman is smarter than any lawyer I know.”

  “I just mean somebody like you, with clearance, some inside access.”