Dead Man's Rule

by Rick Acker

  “I see,” said Tony. “What would you do differently if you weren’t here to steal?” He paused. “What would you do if you were here to kill?”

  “Thank you, Lord, for all the blessings you give us,” said Ben as he sat with his head bowed at the head of the dining-room table. “Thank you for the food set before us. Thank you for the guests who have joined us for this meal. And thank you especially for being a mighty fortress, protecting your children from evil. Amen.”

  “Amen,” said Noelle, Elena, Sergei, and Will Conklin together. Will was one of two FBI agents guarding the Corbins. Elena had volunteered to fill in for the other agent, who had a family and was grateful to be able to spend Thanksgiving at home. The Corbins had invited Sergei because he was otherwise likely to spend the holiday in his apartment with his FBI detail. He had accepted gladly, and his protectors had been happy to take the day off.

  Sergei had been out of the hospital for over a week and was doing well. Bandages still covered some of the worst burns on his back and legs, but he was fully mobile and had no pain—unless he momentarily forgot his injuries and leaned back in a sofa or chair. He would then be instantly and intensely reminded that he was not completely healed.

  Elena and Noelle—mostly Elena—had put together a respectable turkey dinner on short notice, and Sergei had brought a good bottle of Napa Valley Chardonnay. Soon they were all talking, laughing, and coming as close as they could to putting Variant D and the Vainakh Guard out of their minds. The FBI agents didn’t drink any wine, and one of them was always looking out the front window or strolling through the backyard, but otherwise a casual observer would not have thought this was anything but a group of good friends gathered for an informal Thanksgiving dinner.

  It wouldn’t be Thanksgiving in the Midwest without the traditional Detroit Lions game on TV. They were hosting the Bears this year, and the game actually meant something. After several years in the wilderness, both teams were winning again and the Bears led the NFC North. The Lions’ running game was weak, but they had a strong-armed young quarterback and two playmaking receivers. The Bears had their trademark smashmouth defense and a pounding running game that wore down opposing defenses.

  The game started with a seventy-five-yard touchdown pass for the Lions, delighting Will (who was from Detroit) and drawing groans from Ben and Sergei. After that, the game settled into a bruising defensive struggle, during which the Lions’ quarterback became intimately acquainted with the turf of Ford Field. Bruised and dazed by the third quarter, he threw a pair of wobbly interceptions that led to two touchdowns and a four-point Chicago lead.

  “Stick a fork in them. They’re done,” Sergei crowed during replays of the Bears’ fullback pushing his way into the end zone for the go-ahead score.

  “They’ll come back,” replied Will. “Or they would, anyway, if the zebras would start calling holding on the Bears’ safeties. It’s starting to look like professional wrestling out there.”

  “Wow. The game isn’t even over and already the excuses are starting,” Ben said with a grin.

  Will opened his mouth to continue his defense of the Lions, but before he could say anything, Ben’s cell phone rang. Ben glanced at the caller ID and saw an unfamiliar number.

  That’s odd, he thought. Who would be calling my cell phone on Thanksgiving?

  Tony Simeon sat in his den as Pierre LeGrand went about his work. The Bears-Lions game was on the TV in front of Tony, but he wasn’t really watching. He was thinking about Dan Wood’s funeral.

  Dan’s colleagues and many friends, including Tony, had spoken to the packed church. For once, Tony’s silver tongue had failed him. He’d spoken haltingly and briefly, searching for words and struggling to collect his thoughts.

  After the eulogies, Pastor Johan Wilhelm had given a brief sermon. Tony knew him well through having served with him on several charitable boards of the sort that offered good business-development prospects. One part of the sermon had stuck in his mind: “We mourn today, but we do not mourn for Dan. We mourn our loss of Dan. We are saddened that the light he brought to this world has gone out—but we mourn him no more than a caterpillar mourns a butterfly.”

  After the service, Tony had stopped by Pastor Wilhelm’s office. It was a large, slightly shabby room crammed with books; it would have served equally well as the office of a college professor.

  “Come in, Tony,” the pastor said. “What can I do for you?”

  “I’d like your advice on what I suppose is a spiritual matter. Dan’s death troubled me a great deal.”

  “Yes, I could tell you were overcome with emotion during your eulogy.”

  “I was overcome, but not by grief. It was guilt and fear and . . . Perspective is the best word that occurs to me.”

  Pastor Wilhelm looked at Tony over the tops of his glasses. “What do you mean?”

  Tony took a deep breath. This weight had sat heavily on his chest since the day of Dan’s death. “When I saw that out-of-control cab, my first instinct was to save myself. Perhaps if I’d had a different instinct, I might have saved Dan. That does not speak well of me, and I know it. I know it in the very roots of my being, and I’m afraid of what it means for me.” He paused with the ghost of a smile on his lips. “Not all caterpillars become butterflies.”

  “No, they don’t,” Pastor Wilhelm had said. “But don’t you think you’re being too hard on yourself? At worst, you made one split-second wrong decision that I’m sure you would take back if you could. The fate of your soul is not decided by such things.”

  “So what does decide it?”

  “Your faith. Your surrender of yourself to God. That surrender begins with a decision to follow Jesus Christ, but it doesn’t end there. It is a process, a struggle that lasts your entire life. During that struggle, you will have bad days. But without the power and mercy of God, you’d have nothing but bad days. When you stumble, all you can do is pick yourself up, confess your sin, and pray for forgiveness and the strength to do better in the future.” He looked at Tony compassionately. “And try not to get discouraged.”

  Tony sighed. “The problem isn’t that I had a bad day. The problem is that the more I think about what I did, the more certain I am that I was simply doing what came naturally to me. It wasn’t a mistake; it was an instinct. I chose to save myself instead of Dan because I’m used to choosing myself. What happened on that sidewalk was a test. I failed it, and a good man is dead as a result.”

  Pastor Wilhelm had given Tony a measuring look and smiled. “Congratulations, Tony! You have just discovered that you are a bad man.” Tony had been taken aback and a little offended. “So am I,” continued the minister. “So are all of us. Our hope in Christ is not based on our goodness, but on his. It is the guilty who need a redeemer, not the innocent.”

  As difficult as urban surveillance could be, Ibrahim decided, it was child’s play compared to suburban surveillance. There was no place to hide on these wide, well-kept lawns and quiet streets. Worse, there was no anonymity. No one would notice a carefully nondescript man walking every few hours along the same stretch of busy city sidewalk, for example. But a stranger wandering around a residential neighborhood would be followed by more than one pair of concerned eyes. On the bright side, at least he was able to confirm that there were no FBI agents lurking outside the target’s home.

  Ibrahim finally settled on an old brick grade school about a quarter of a mile from the lawyer’s home. The school was closed for Thanksgiving and was situated on a small rise that offered a good view of the house. He parked his van out of sight between a dumpster and some bushes. Then he cautiously made his way to the rear door of the school that opened onto the playground. The lock was so old and loose that he almost didn’t need to pick it. He was inside in seconds.

  His feet made a soft slap-slap on the linoleum floor tiles as he jogged along the half-lit halls. Brightly colored announcements and artwork han
ging on the walls rustled like autumn leaves as he passed. He looked quickly from side to side as he went, searching for a staircase. There.

  He took the steps two at a time, then stopped when he reached the top. He quickly surveyed the second floor and walked into a north-facing classroom. No good—a pine tree obscured his sight line to the house unless he stood close to the window. The next room had an unobstructed view, and he quickly went to work.

  Twenty small desks were arranged in clusters of four in different parts of the classroom. For his work area, Ibrahim picked a cluster in front of a large bulletin board festooned with construction-paper cutouts of children’s hands decorated to look like turkeys. The cluttered background would break up his silhouette, making him more difficult to see if someone happened to look in through the window.

  He set up his tripod and rifle on one of the desks, which bore a hand-printed sign announcing that it belonged to Anna G. He sat down in Anna’s chair and looked through the rifle’s powerful scope. He trained the crosshairs on the target’s front door, made a slight adjustment for the breeze blowing outside, and waited.

  At the end of their meeting, Pastor Wilhelm had given Tony the standard materials he provided to those he called “seekers”—C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity and a list of key Bible passages. Tony read through them in one weekend, then went through them again more slowly. A week later, he asked Pastor Wilhelm for other recommendations. He suggested Saint Augustine’s Confessions and Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship, which Tony promptly bought and devoured.

  Reading these books made Tony curiously nostalgic. He had never ceased to believe in God, in the same way he had never ceased to believe in chocolate sodas—both had been weekend fixtures during his childhood but had faded from his life as he grew up. Every Sunday morning, his father had packed the family into their well-maintained 1938 Ford Tudor and driven them to Saint Thomas Episcopal Church. They all sat dutifully in hard, dark-varnished pews for an hour and a half. Then they piled back into the car to drive home, where they listened to the Bears game on the radio and Tony’s mother prepared Sunday dinner. That was how respectable middle-class families in the Chicago area spent their Sundays in the 1940s.

  But when Tony went away to college, he soon discovered that his professors and fellow students viewed his childhood faith as old-fashioned and simplistic. And, truth be told, Tony’s childhood faith was simplistic. It amounted to little more than a collection of Bible stories, some bromides about loving his neighbor, and a collection of half-explained prohibitions against cards, tobacco, and alcohol—all staples of life at a state college.

  Tony hadn’t consciously rejected his faith. Rather, he’d simply packed it into a dark corner of his mind and forgotten about it. He had outgrown it in the same way that he had outgrown the suits he used to wear each Sunday to church.

  Now, for the first time, Tony saw Christianity presented by men who backed their faith not with simple Sunday-school axioms but with powerful, clearly reasoned arguments.

  If they could speak even half as well as they could write, Tony thought on more than one occasion, they would have made outstanding lawyers.

  A week later, Tony had met Pastor Wilhelm for lunch at the Metropolitan Club. They’d sat at Tony’s customary table by the ceiling-to-floor window, low clouds wrapping the club in an opaque white fog. The two men made small talk for several minutes, chatting about mutual friends and a recent charity dinner they had both attended. When their salads arrived, Tony broached the topic he had wanted to discuss.

  “Thank you for recommending those books, Pastor. I’ve read them and found them quite illuminating.”

  “You’re a fast reader.”

  “Not particularly. One of the advantages of being a senior partner is that junior lawyers are always willing to do anything I don’t want to—and probably do it better. So if something important comes up and I decide that I should spend most of my week reading and thinking, I can do that.”

  “I see. And did something important come up?”

  “Yes. In fact, the most important thing possible came up: God. I suppose he has always been there, but I had never seen him. Or, more accurately, I had never looked. And now . . . now I find that he is much more real and near and alive than I ever imagined. And that changes everything. It’s really quite inconvenient.”

  Pastor Wilhelm laughed. “Change is always hard, particularly for men of our age.”

  “It truly is. I had a terrible time when my doctor told me to quit smoking twenty years ago. I have a feeling this is going to be much worse.”

  “I’m very happy for you, my friend. You have made the most important decision of your life, and you made it right.”

  “Thank you, Johan. It’s good to have a purpose bigger than winning in court, particularly since I’m not likely to be able to do that for much longer.”

  “Have you given any thought to what that purpose might be?”

  “Yes, I have.”

  “Would you like to talk about it?”

  “I’m sorry, but I can’t. At least, not now.”

  “The work is all done, Mr. Simeon,” LeGrand announced. He showed Tony how to operate the new control panels, and they went over what to do in case of an emergency. Then Tony paid LeGrand’s bill and the security expert left.

  Tony locked the door, watched the new sensors until they showed that LeGrand had turned out of the driveway, and armed the system.

  LeGrand had added several new elements to Tony’s previous security system. There were now sensors on the upstairs windows, for example. He had also built a novel security device into Tony’s driveway.

  But the heart of Tony’s security system remained unchanged. A dark-wood ceiling-to-floor bookcase lined one wall of his study, and one section of that bookcase opened to reveal what the previous owner of the house had told Tony was a “rum closet” used to hide liquor during Prohibition. Tony planned to use it to hide himself.

  He knew that his sophisticated alarms and sensors could not protect him. They could do little more than warn him of approaching danger and notify the police. He needed a way to stay alive during the crucial minutes between the time an alarm went off and the time the police arrived. He doubted that he could outfight or outrun an assassin, so that meant hiding in the stuffy, unlit secret chamber until the police came.

  He walked slowly into the study and stood looking absently at the bookshelf. Awards, plaques, and souvenirs from some of his more memorable victories filled several shelves. There was a crystal baseball bat bearing the legend “Heavy Hitter of the Year 1993,” the year he had won high-profile lawsuits for both an alderman and the Chicago Bears. A polished mahogany box held a gold-hilted dagger in a black-velvet sheath—a gift from an appreciative client who knew and admired Tony’s nickname. Next to it sat two plaques—one for “Biggest Plaintiff’s Verdict 1989” for a $100-million award he’d won for one bank against another, and the other for “Biggest Defense Verdict 1993” for his defense of the alderman.

  Tony’s eyes lingered on the 1993 plaque. After a minute, he reached out and turned it facedown. The alderman had been guilty as sin, and Tony had known it. It was a fraud case in which the plaintiff, another alderman and former friend of the defendant, had accused him of lying during the sale of a business. Tony had won the case not by defending his client (who had a somewhat blemished reputation for truthfulness), but by attacking the plaintiff—a strategy that had taken the opposing attorney completely by surprise. Tony relentlessly undermined the plaintiff’s credibility during the trial, turning every mistake or exaggeration into a cunning lie to be exposed to the jury. It had worked, and at the end of the trial the defendant had escaped untouched. The plaintiff, on the other hand, had gone bankrupt from his legal bills and his losses on the business he’d bought.

  It had been a brilliant and celebrated victory, one of many in Tony’s storied career. The
sun had shone long and bright on him, but now its light was fading and he felt the approach of night. He was an old man in a cavernous mansion, alone with his awards and decades-old victories. Nothing. In fact, worse than nothing, because many of them represented the triumph of skill over justice.

  He turned from the bookcase and saw his statuette of Prometheus standing on a granite plinth, in a Plexiglas case. It was twenty-three inches tall, a remarkably detailed bronze of piercing beauty. The muscular Titan stood against a jagged, Scythian rock, bound with heavy, god-forged chains. His belly had been torn open by Zeus’s vengeful eagle, but his bearded face was defiant and proud and his powerful legs held him erect, straining against the torturing bonds.

  “I too was bound,” murmured Tony, “but I forged my own chains.”

  He knew that breaking free of those chains wouldn’t be easy. There would be no “cheap grace,” as Bonhoeffer put it. Soon after his lunch with Pastor Wilhelm, Tony had begun to discover just how expensive grace could be.

  Dmitry Kolesnikov had called him to discuss the Ivanovsky case. Dmitry was concerned about Nikolai Zinoviev, who was at the center of the case. They had put off his deposition for as long as they could, but Ben Corbin was entitled to Nicki’s testimony, and if he filed a motion to compel, he certainly would win, and Tony would look bad in the eyes of the judge.