The Program

by Stephen White

  And sometimes not her.

  “I’ll think about it. I promise,” I said, pocketing the receipt with his phone number, and then I slid past him toward the bricks of the Mall. I was tempted to turn my head and offer a parting smile, but I told myself I shouldn’t, and I didn’t.

  8

  Ron Kriciak phoned Dr. Gregory a few minutes after eight on Saturday morning. Alan was already up and his wife, Lauren, was already out the door. She was someplace in town doing yoga with their neighbor Adrienne.

  Ron didn’t even bother with the banality of feigning concern that he might have woken Alan by calling so early on a weekend morning. They covered the how-are-you niceties in record time. Then Ron asked, “You planning to ride today?”

  Alan was, but he wasn’t looking for company. Most of the time he preferred riding alone. “I hadn’t thought about it, Ron. But probably. On days as pretty as this one looks like it’s going to be, I usually do.”

  “They say that the winds are going to come up this afternoon. They were over seventy miles an hour at Wondervu yesterday. I was thinking this morning would be better.”

  “Were you? Are you inviting me to go for a ride, Ron?”

  “I guess. I’ve been thinking we should talk a little bit more about your new clients. Thought a bike ride might be a good idea, a nice way for us to get to know each other. Is there a route you like to do from your house? I’m thinking a hard ninety minutes or two hours.”

  “You want to climb?”

  “No. Not today. Something flat.”

  Alan was already beginning to wonder what Ron wanted to discuss about his new WITSEC clients. “The releases they signed only permit me to share basic information with you Ron, not the details of what they might be talking about.”

  He was dismissive. “I know that. You have an idea where we could go?”

  “Sure, there’re some places we could go from my house. Do you know where I live?”

  “I’m guessing Boulder.”

  “County, not the city. It’s actually a little east, near the scenic overlook on 36.”

  “Morgul Bismarck neighborhood. I’ll throw my bike in the back of my truck. Give me directions.”

  Alan did.

  Ron said, “I can be there by nine.”

  “Then I guess that I’ll see you then.”

  Alan couldn’t recall the last time that he’d had a telephone conversation that conveyed less warmth with someone who wasn’t in the process of goading him to change his long-distance carrier.

  KRICIAK ARRIVED TEN minutes early. As Alan scurried around trying to get ready to ride, Ron kept saying, “Don’t worry, no hurry,” while he stole glances at his fancy watch. Alan was tempted to tell him to screw the ride but recalled Teri’s caution about how essential the inspector’s role was in the work that she did for WITSEC.

  Ron’s bike was an almost new Serotta Legend titanium road bike. Ron had customized his with components that probably brought its cost to slightly less than that of a good used car. A very good used car. Alan complimented him on it, and Ron replied by looking at Alan’s three-year-old Specialized and saying, “Yeah. Yours is okay, too. I used to have one of those.”

  Alan led Ron away from the house on a northern and western route over country roads that climbed the undulating prairie and pasture of eastern Boulder County. Five years earlier, they might have had to slow for a farm tractor or even wait as a dairyman moved his herd of Holsteins across a road from one grazing pasture to another. Not anymore. Now, Chevrolet Suburbans and Ford Expeditions filled the narrow lanes from shoulder to shoulder, shuttling young soccer or lacrosse players from Boulder’s suburbs to their Saturday morning games against the kids from the city.

  Ron stayed right on Alan’s tail until they were well past Niwot and had started to skirt the farmland-gobbling developments around Longmont. At a point where it seemed they might have the road to themselves, Ron materialized next to Alan and said, “You been thinking any more about the material I let you review about our friend?”

  “Which friend?” He’d given Alan plenty to think about regarding both Peyton Francis and Carl Luppo.

  “What’s-her-name, Peyton.”

  “Yes, I have.”

  “So how far are we going?”

  “Thought we’d turn around near Hygiene. Is that okay?”

  “I’ve never heard of it. Are we close?”

  “A few more miles. It’s before you get to Lyons.”

  Ron reached down and grabbed his water bottle and started sucking at the nipple. When he was finished taking a drink, he said, “We’ll take a break and talk then.” His bike trailed back behind Alan’s so he could catch the slipstream.

  Alan wasn’t convinced Ron was a team player. He muttered, “Aye aye, Captain.” So far, he wasn’t having a good time.

  THE MATERIAL RON was referring to had been in the two files that he’d permitted Alan to read before the meeting they’d had with Teri Grady to introduce him to his role with WITSEC.

  The material about Peyton had been interesting to Alan, not so much because of the novelty—he knew the broad outlines of her story already—but because of the point of view that a retrospective look affords. It turned out that the initial threat made against Peyton Francis, then Kirsten Lord, had been small news. The news media had paid only passing attention to the little open-court soliloquy by Ernesto Castro that had so clearly threatened Kirsten Lord and her family. The entire coverage consisted of a brief article in the New Orleans paper and a short piece that had been run by AP The only people who’d paid close attention had been other prosecutors.

  Most of the media attention on Kirsten Lord came earlier and came later.

  The earlier coverage focused on her eloquent diatribes against the U.S. Marshals Service and its management of the WITSEC program. Long before the arrest of Ernesto Castro for the elevator rape of the wheelchair-bound legal secretary, Kirsten Lord had been a vocal critic of WITSEC policies in regard to the handling of felons with records of violent crimes. Ms. Lord’s pointed criticisms of WITSEC propelled her from the local news section of the New Orleans Times-Picayune to a guest column on the editorial page of the New York Times, a panelist’s chair on Larry King Live, and to a remote hookup with Matt Lauer on the Today show.

  The Time magazine profile followed soon after, as did a capsule biography in People that was accompanied by a photo of Kirsten holding a little white dog.

  The bulk of the coverage that came after the infamous day in court when Kirsten was threatened by Ernesto Castro focused on the murder of Robert Lord, Kirsten’s husband. Subsequent articles, mostly in the Times-Picayune, examined the public spat that developed between the district attorney in New Orleans, on one hand, and the local U.S. attorney and the regional WITSEC administrators, on the other hand. The local and national authorities were arguing who was best equipped to protect Kirsten and her daughter from further reprisals from whomever Castro had enlisted to carry out his threats.

  ALAN PULLED OFF the road at a Diamond Shamrock station near Hygiene. He had to pee and asked Ron if he’d watch his bike while he went into the restroom.

  “Let me go first,” Ron said. “I’m about to explode.”

  He was off his bike before Alan had a chance to complain.

  AFTER ALAN’S TURN in the bathroom, he walked back outside, the cleats on his bicycle shoes clacking on the concrete pad. Ron was at the compressed air machine, checking his tire pressure. Alan waited for him to finish.

  “You see the news yesterday?” Ron asked as he walked back.

  “Yes,” Alan said, but he had no idea what in the news Ron was referring to. Maybe he wanted to talk about the Rockies current road trip or the Broncos annual sojourn to Greeley.

  “The story from New York? LCN? La Cosa Nostra? The guilty plea in the RICO trial? You pay any particular attention to that?”

  “Can’t say that I did.”

  “The reason that they got the guilty plea was because of our boy, Carl.
That was his doing.”

  “I thought Carl was in … I thought he was someplace else.” Alan had almost slipped and revealed confidential information from his session with Carl Luppo. Keeping the privilege intact with Ron Kriciak felt odd to him since he couldn’t imagine that Ron didn’t know where Carl had gone to testify the previous week, but he told himself that the cautionary reflex was healthy.

  “Where did Carl tell you he was? These guys lie.” Ron laughed and waited to see if Alan was planning to answer. After a moment of silence, he said, “But what are you going to do?”

  Alan shrugged. He didn’t know what he was going to do.

  “His testimony just aced this guy in New York. That’s why they got the guilty plea out of him. Before, I told you that Carl is hot? Well, if Carl was hot before, Carl is sizzling right now.”

  Alan’s impression was that Ron was proud of Carl Luppo.

  A Dodge Ram pickup pulled up next to them. Ron looked up at the driver and held his gaze a long time, as though he was considering asking the young woman who was driving for either her license and registration or for a date on Friday night. When Ron was done staring, he pushed his bike to some shade that was spread below a billboard on the side of the lot. Alan followed him.

  “Carl’s a handful. Smarter than most of the protected witnesses we see, oh, I’d say by about a light-year. Conservatively. Some of these wiseguys we get, let me tell you, they’re not the brightest bulb in the scoreboard. But Carl? He’s something else. Even though he spent most of his time as a high-ranking soldier, the man’s got a mind of his own.”

  Alan thought that Ron wanted a comment, so he said, “Is that so?”

  “Not a lot of formal education. I actually doubt he finished high school, but wise, nonetheless. Street-smart, yes. That’s a given. But smart-smart, too. You’d be better off with him if you remember that.”

  Alan wanted to encourage Ron to keep talking, so he said, “I imagine having that level of intelligence would help Carl adjust to the challenges of being in the witness program.”

  “You imagine wrong.” Ron cleared his throat and spit something disgusting up at the billboard. It stuck, making it twice or three times as disgusting. “The protected witnesses who do best are the ones who let their inspectors do most of the thinking, especially at first. That’s not Carl’s style. He does things his way. His fear never overrides his will. That’s the exact opposite of most of our witnesses. For most of them, their will never overrides their fear. Carl’s fearlessness and his willfulness makes him a tough handle.”

  Once again, Alan thought Ron wanted a comment from him. He was thinking of saying that the same trait probably helped Carl succeed in his earlier career. Instead he said, “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  “Her, too. Peyton. She’s way too smart. She knows she’s smart, and what looks like it’s even more of a problem for us is that she doesn’t trust us. It makes it double hard for us to do our job.”

  Alan considered the possibility that Ron was grouping himself with Alan. Were they the “us”? he wondered. Alan asked, “She doesn’t trust whom?”

  “WITSEC. The marshals. Me, specifically.”

  Alan recalled the history. “There’s a tough history between her and WITSEC, isn’t there? A lot of suspicion to overcome. One of your other witnesses is responsible for killing her husband. Then attempting to kidnap her daughter. Now forcing them both into hiding.”

  “We’re not a perfect organization. We supervise our protectees real well, but we’re not perfect. And our witnesses are far, far, far from perfect people. Still, do you realize that fewer than ten percent of our witnesses are ever picked up for a serious crime while they’re under our protection?”

  It sounded like a lot of potential lawbreakers to Alan, but Ron’s tone told him that he considered it a good number. Alan made a neutral face and kept the editorial opinions to himself.

  “You know,” Ron said, “be nice if you could help her overcome it, her distrust.” Ron looked up at the mountains as he spoke these words. Alan felt that the diversion he was witnessing almost underscored the importance of the message Ron was sending his way.

  The message? Ron was trying to interfere with Peyton’s therapy. A yellow caution flag descended into Alan’s awareness. He wanted Ron to continue talking. “Really?” Alan said. “Me?”

  “No joke.”

  “How would I do that?”

  Ron laughed and tapped Alan on the shoulder, like they were good buddies. “How do you guys do whatever you do? I don’t know and that’s not my problem. What is my problem is that she’s not depending on me the way she should, not looking to me for guidance. Usually, at the beginning, the protected witnesses treat me as though I’m only slightly less fallible than the Pope. Not Peyton. I think she’s holding back. I’m afraid that if there are signs of danger around her, she won’t let me see them. That leaves me in a difficult place. It’s a trust thing, I think. Some residue from her earlier concerns.”

  Alan was struggling to read Ron’s subtext. He asked, “Are you suggesting Peyton’s afraid that there are people inside WITSEC—I guess I mean the marshals—who are more interested in harming her than protecting her?”

  Ron straddled his bike and buckled his helmet strap. “She’s pissed off a lot of people. She was our most vocal critic outside of Congress. People lost jobs. Careers were destroyed. A lot of people in the organization feel that she unnecessarily jeopardized their work.”

  “I’m not sure I follow. Does that mean that there are people in WITSEC who want to harm her?”

  “Can’t say. I’m sure there are people who wouldn’t shed a tear if something bad happened to her. Or if she screwed up somehow and got herself canned from the program.”

  Alan tried to read Ron’s eyes but couldn’t discern any nuance through the smoky lenses of his sunglasses. “Given what you’re telling me, Ron, it seems possible that Peyton has good reason not to trust the program.”

  “No. The folks who were vocal in their opposition to bringing her in for protection don’t know where she is. She’s on special status in the program. Only a handful of WITSEC staff in the country even know her location. All information on her is tightly restricted. She knows all that, but still she’s cautious. She needs to trust me. You need to trust me. We going to ride or what?”

  He took off to the southeast.

  Alan followed him, thinking we could have done this on the phone.

  chapter

  three

  KHALID

  1

  During the first few days after I’d met him I concluded that my reaction to Carl Luppo had more to do with my feelings about Witness Protection than it had to do with my feelings about his participation in organized crime. My history with organized crime goes back only as far as Mario Puzo and has no more basis in reality than does my history with the Millennium Falcon. But I do have a history with WITSEC that goes back to my early days as a prosecutor in New Orleans.

  IT TOOK ONLY one encounter with federally protected witnesses for me to cement my bias about WITSEC.

  That first run-in had been with a man named Billy Foster.

  Billy Foster’s ticket to WITSEC was typical. In his earlier, pre-WITSEC life, Billy was a clumsy drug dealer named Wayne Simkin who was doing time in Nevada’s state prison system after being busted for offering a commercial quantity of crystal meth to an undercover officer in a sting set up by the Reno Police Department. Once inside the walls, Wayne flipped and offered to inform on some of his fellow inmates in return for protection inside, and later, outside of prison.

  The information that Wayne provided turned out to be valuable enough to the DEA that he earned, as part of the protection-on-the-outside-of-prison part of the deal, a WITSEC ticket to Louisiana and a court-ordered name change to Billy Foster. He found a job as a truck driver with a frozen-food delivery service. Within six months of his arrival in the South, Billy was arrested by the New Orleans police on a sultry August night on the edge
of the French Quarter. Billy had just knifed a local drug dealer named Armando Jones.

  Billy Foster claimed self-defense in the knife attack on Armando Jones. Running Billy Foster’s fingerprints through AFID led the local police straight to Wayne Simkin. Self-defense, it turned out, was the precise claim that Wayne Simkin had used the two previous times he had been arrested for similar knife attacks, once in California, once in Nevada. One conviction, as a juvenile, came from the two arrests. Simkin’s name, of course, led straight to WITSEC.

  I caught the Simkin/Foster file. Although I was a baby DA at the time and didn’t really have the standing to protest the way I did, I made a stink about the whole thing with my boss, the Orleans Parish district attorney. In a general staff meeting, I questioned the policies of a federal program that inserted lowlifes such as Billy Foster into communities like ours with little regard to the well-being of the law-abiding residents who lived there. One of my colleagues argued that Armando Jones was not exactly a law-abiding member of our community. I persisted anyway. After my diatribe I expected to be called naive and shuttled back to my desk. Instead, the DA took advantage of my youthful enthusiasm and moral outrage and quickly collected the files of five other cases of protected witnesses who had been arrested in his jurisdiction over the previous few years. He instructed me to become an expert on the cases, and on WITSEC procedure and strategy, and soon he appointed me to act as the liaison between our office and the local WITSEC representatives from the regional office of the U.S. Marshals Service.

  I took Wayne Simkin/Billy Foster straight to trial, though he believed right until the end that WITSEC would ultimately save him from prosecution for his latest crimes. To their credit, they didn’t. While I was readying my case against Foster, I did a little public prosecuting of WITSEC. I became a pain-in-the-ass to the local WITSEC team. One of the local marshals, a field inspector like Ron Kriciak, actually accused me of making a living chewing on his hemorrhoids.