Deadly Waters

by Theodore Judson

  “What? Who is this?” he asked, immediately thinking of the man he had met in the Blue Horn bar in November, a man he thought he might have told too much already. “Is this you again?” asked Taylor.

  “Mondragon is going to kill you,” repeated Bob Mathers. “He fears you will break under pressure. You’re not a killer like he is.”

  “We know who you are!” yelled Taylor into the phone. “Your name is Robert Mitchell or something like that. Erin told me.”

  “You’re close,” said Bob.

  “You’re a deputy sheriff somewhere in Arizona,” added Taylor.

  “I was,” said Bob.

  “You live in Phoenix now. You’re a security guard. Something like that,” said Taylor, straining to remember the things Mondragon had told him. “You had better leave me alone.”

  John Taylor rose to an upright position in his bed and searched for the nightgown he always placed over the second pillow since the night his wife left him.

  “My family is in a safe place,” Bob told him. “Mondragon won’t find them or me. It won’t do any good to threaten me.”

  “Why are you...” began Taylor, and then remembered that the man had every reason to pursue him.

  “Never forget,” said Bob when Taylor failed to reply, “he is going to kill you. He’ll do it because he can, and because the only one he trusts is himself.”

  Like Mondragon before him, Bob Mathers was gone without warning, leaving Taylor with dozens of questions he wanted to ask.

  John imagined himself lying in the snow, covered by a blanket so deep spring never came and the world forgot where he was buried or that there ever was a John Taylor. He wanted to close his eyes and see darkness that never ended. In the darkness that came before sleep he saw the face of the dead Navaho, and when he drifted into dreams he saw the snowy field and himself holding the metallic sign and shivering from cold. He still felt cold when he awoke, and to warm himself up Taylor had to tear open his new case of Glenlivet and gulp down a quart bottle in less than a minute so that his mind could at last dive below the blessed snow into the land of forgetting.

  When he came to he was in a hospital bed and men in blue suits were gathered in his small room.

  “He’s opening his eyes,” said one of the strangers.

  “Ask him before—” said another, but John went back to sleep before the man could finish.

  Upon awakening from his stupor a second time, he beheld a different group of men in blue suits, plus the grey Armani suit of Aaron Becker, one of Mondragon’s attorneys.

  “Mr. John Taylor,” said one of the blue suit men, “you are under arrest for violating the Antiterrorist Act of 2002 and for conspiring to murder Andrew Feller, Marsha Cloves, and Benjamin Gonzoles and 84,104 other American citizens,” and he laid a warrant on Taylor’s chest. “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney—”

  “OK, Eliot Ness,” said attorney Becker, shoving the federal agent aside. “My client chooses not to speak to you about anything.”

  “One hand...” murmured Jack, “...the other...”

  “What did he say?” asked the agent.

  “He says he wants you to leave him alone,” said Becker.

  “Your client is in the custody of the United States of America,” said the agent in charge, reluctant to concede an inch to a lawyer.

  “I’m not finished Mirandizing him,” said the agent who had spoken to Taylor first.

  “Well, chief,” said Becker, “do what you have to do, then I get to speak to Mr. Taylor, alone.”

  “You have the right to an attorney. The court will provide you with one if you are unable to procure one of your own,” the agent read from a card in a sing-song voice.

  Taylor for some reason thought this was overwhelmingly funny and laughed at the recitation he had previously heard only on television.

  “Why is he laughing?” asked the agent. “Are we sure he can understand?” he asked the agent in charge.

  “Mr. Taylor is a sick man,” said attorney Becker, positioning himself between his client and the federal men.

  “He’s a drunk,” said one of the blue suits.

  “Thank you for that expert diagnosis, Doctor,” said Becker sarcastically. “Could I have your name, sir? I’m sure the judge will be happy to hear you were verbally abusing my client.”

  “You’ve lived a long time for a man with your mouth,” said the agent in charge.

  “Now you’re threatening me, huh?” queried Becker. “I could have quite a civil suit going here. And your names are?” he asked again, this time getting a note pad from his briefcase and wetting a pencil point with his tongue. “Did you know I once got five million bucks from a Fortune 500 company when one of their CEOs took a swing at me? God knows what I could get from the federal government.”

  The agents grumbled, and seconds later moved en masse out of the room.

  “That’s better. Go buy each other a doughnut,” brayed Becker to the retreating G-men. As soon as the door shut behind them he knelt beside Taylor’s bed and whispered into his client’s ear: “Don’t worry, Mr. Taylor. We’ve already got an in with the judge. We’ll have you out of here in a couple hours.”

  Those couple of hours became a couple of days in the hospital ward while Taylor recuperated in his bed. Then he went into a cell in a federal facility in suburban Los Angeles. Legions of men dressed in FBI and ATF windbreakers and armed with automatic weapons prowled the hallway outside his cell door and in the courtyard beyond his window. Although there was no one there other than the agents and Taylor, the armed men cautioned Jack every day that he should speak to no one other than Becker, who came to the facility every morning at nine.

  Taylor did not go to court until the day after Christmas. The legions of federal men put him into a van and drove him to a downtown courthouse where a gauntlet of

  television cameras and flashing light bulbs held by screaming journalists greeted him. None of them were anyone Taylor knew, yet they all called out to him as though they were intimate acquaintances of long standing.

  “Why did you do it, John?” they shouted at him.

  “Was it because you lost the family business?” others demanded.

  Both frightened and bemused, John Taylor stared hard into the bright lights in hopes of seeing something beyond them, and he spoke a few incoherent words pertaining to his hands.

  The inside of the courthouse was an island of calm amidst the media cacophony outside. Everyone is so polite here, thought John. Even the federal prosecutors who argued that bail should not be set were civil and went so far as to declare that they were concerned for Taylor’s safety. They did mention the deaths of more than 84,000 people and the destruction of billions of dollars of property, but John did not hold that against them.

  “If we can give bail to Mr. Taylor and his associate,” (He was referring to Mondragon, although Taylor could see Erin nowhere in the courthouse.) “then there are thousands and thousands of individuals sitting in the Los Angeles County Jail--few of them charged with more than one murder--who rightfully should have bail set for them,” argued the lead federal prosecutor.

  But attorney Becker was a legal dynamo ready to spring Taylor by any means necessary. He pointed out that only the testimony of the forty Colombians, men sitting on death row, could be presented against his client. There was not a shred of physical evidence, not a fingerprint, not a drop of blood, not a single frame of video tape.

  “Your honor,” said Becker, drawing himself to the full height his tiptoes offered him, “we in the legal profession know how the prison grape vine works. First one prisoner sees a written report in the media dealing with a crime. He tells someone else what he knows, and that confidant tells another man. Soon, the entire prison, and eventually the entire prison system knows the tale. Within days of this dissemination of knowledge, someone is going to a guard, a prosecutor, to anyone of authorit
y, and telling them this story as if they had a familiarity with events only someone involved in the crime could have.

  “A simple Internet search I conducted the other day uncovered nine such cases where a false ‘witness’ came forwards, and these were in this year alone,” he said and held up a fistful of printed pages for emphasis. “Who knows how this particular cock-and-bull story that has entangled Mr. Taylor came to be? I expect one of the convicted Colombian terrorists somehow got hold of one of these irresponsible tabloids and hatched a plot to shift some of the blame for what he and his comrades did onto someone else. These men have had nearly two long years to get their stories straight. Two long years to scheme and plot and to decide upon one particular version of the story, the one that is going, in due course, your honor, to be presented here. I know, your honor, bail is not usually set in a capital case, but here there is no case.”

  The judge had already rolled his eyes several times while Becker spoke. He now interrupted the monologue. “Mr. Becker, I am pleased to hear you have gotten back to the question of bail. We are not trying the case today, or burying Caesar. Please make your point so we can get on with the proceeding.”

  “Thank you, your honor,” said Becker, not sounding in any way thankful. “My point is that someone in the Justice Department got wind of this story the Colombians were telling and felt they had to arrest my client. You must set a reasonable bail, your honor, for this case has no merit. If we allow convicted criminals to in effect charge the innocent, what will happen next? Will Charles Manson make a deal with prosecutors because he knows who really committed his crimes? Will the next Tim McVey tell us the real Oklahoma City bomber? Speaking of Oklahoma City, your honor, is this accusation against my client not the same thing as giving credence to the John Doe Number Two Theory? What is there here besides the unsworn words of guilty men?”

  “That will do, Mr. Becker,” said the judge. “I get your point. You can sit down, please.”

  Against the prosecutor’s objections, the judge set a two million dollar bail, for which Taylor wrote a check. By three that afternoon Taylor was again at home sitting on his living room sofa, a bottle in his hand. The events of the previous four days seemed to have been another dream, a play of light and garish colors that had been no more real than his vision of standing in a snowy field and struggling to keep warm.

  XCIII

  12/24/10 10:40 EST

  A few days earlier, on Christmas Eve day, a time when most government employees had already left for their vacations, Ronald Goodman entered Margaret Smythe’s Pentagon office pulling a file cabinet on a dolly. He did not knock or ask to enter; he simply bolted through the door, two bulky workmen bearing boxes full of papers behind him. He set the cabinets down against one of Margaret’s interior walls and stepped back to have a look at it.

  “I’m going to need more room for my rare book collection,” said Ronald, trying to visualize the final results.

  “Excuse me,” thundered Margaret, setting down her laptop. “Have you lost your mind, Ronnie? You’re not even in this hallway anymore! Your office is a little hole on the next floor up!”

  “Oh, I haven’t lost my mind,” said Ronald. “You, however, have lost your job, Maggie.”

  He handed her a letter on official DoD stationary he had carried atop the filing cabinet. The signature of the Secretary of Defense himself was at the bottom of the creamy white page.

  “What...” gasped Margaret, espying the plot against her only when her last chance to act had escaped her.

  “You haven’t seen The Post?” asked Ronald. “Of course you haven’t. I paid the whatsyoumacallhim, the paper lad, not to deliver your paper this morning. Your receptionist was told to keep her mouth shut if she wanted to have a job in the future. Here, I wanted to be the one to bring you the news,” he said and presented her with the day’s paper, also conveniently stashed atop the cabinet.

  On the front page of the capital’s leading newspaper was a headline in two inch high letters proclaiming: “INVESTIGATION OF DAMS MUFFED BY DoD UNDERSECRETARY.” There was a picture of Margaret and a story that began: “The buck stops at the office of Undersecretary of Defense Margaret Smythe, chief of the military’s counter terrorism department. Long rumored in the Pentagon to owe her position to her striking good looks and other personal charms, senior Defense Department staffers point to Ms. Smythe as the party responsible for suppressing the government’s investigation into the 2009 dam bombings in the Colorado River drainage area. Classified documents made available to The Post indicate that Ms. Smythe, an appointee of the previous administration, personally directed federal investigators not to follow leads that would tie the bombings to domestic terrorists but to pursue only evidence against the Colombian suspects already in custody.”

  The ground gave way beneath Margaret, and she could only catch snatches of the rest of the article as she fell into the abyss. “Openly hostile to law enforcement officers and to the present administration,” she read. “...Was it simply incompetence or something else? ...Senator Hasket, when telephoned at his home in the retirement community of Sun City, Arizona, denied that he and Smythe had ever been lovers...confidential sources confirm that Smythe often took credit for work that was not her own... ‘I don’t want to play the political card,’ the Secretary of Defense told our reporter at his Arlington home, ‘but sometimes these operatives from the other party undercut our best efforts’...’treason might not be too strong a word’...inside sources agree: ‘she’s dead meat...’”

  “There are two--count ‘em, two--betting pools among the peons here in Foggy Bottom,” said an obviously delighted Ronald, so animated by joy that the soles of his

  shoes clicked like typewriter keys on the linoleum floor. “One was taking bets on when you’ll be fired this morning. A couple hundred losers bet you’d hang around until lunchtime. I knew the boss wasn’t going to give you so much as a warning phone call, you see, that’s what I knew; although the secretary wanted just to send you a note in the afternoon mail. The other pool is on whether you’ll be arrested or not and if so, for what? My money says you’ll walk, sweetmeats. In spite of everything, they want you and the rest of the mess to go away. They’ll rub your snout in your own excrement for a while, put on a good show, then they’ll let you go free, Maggie.”

  “I can’t breathe!” Margaret croaked.

  She clutched her throat and made a rasping gurgle that was as sad as the sound the last robin of summer makes when it sends its final plaintive call over the season’s last dying hedgerow. Ronald had never been happier.

  “You need some fresh air, darling,” he suggested. “I’ll get the MPs to show you out. Don’t worry about your documents, your computer files and what not. They’re going to be impounded. Evidence, you know. Oh, and I’ll be sure your last check gets to your condo.”

  He told one of his beefy helpers it was time to go and find a couple of the military policeman he knew were roaming the long concrete hallways outside Margaret’s door. She rushed to Ronald and threw her arms about him, clinging to his chest and shoulders like a shipwreck victim gripping the last overturned lifeboat.

  “I could love you,” she groaned. “I could. Just give me the chance.”

  The two African-American receptionists in Margaret’s outer office, both of whom she had ordered about for the past two years like a Prussian colonel making demands on raw recruits, peeked into the door at the pathetic scene that was unfolding therein. One of them passed a finger across her throat, and they laughed in unison.

  “I could love you too, Maggie,” said Ron, checking his watch while Margaret struggled to hold onto him. “I fear today we don’t even have time for a quickie.”

  “I can’t believe this is happening!” squealed Margaret. “No one will hire me. I couldn’t get a real job back in Des Moines.”

  “Des Moines?” said Ronald, genuinely shocked by the revelation. “You always told me you were from Alexandria. Your father worked for the government
in Iowa, didn’t he? I slept with someone from Des Moines?”

  Margaret was still affixed to Ronald’s side in the instant the MPs entered her once sacrosanct office. She fought for a couple seconds against them, before she suddenly

  went slack and succumbed to their overwhelming force. White-faced and staring into the space before her, Margaret let the men lead her past the snickering receptionists and the equally delighted ladies of the steno pool, who had rushed into the hallway outside her door to watch Margaret get hers, and to take a photograph of the moment on their cell phones.

  “Good-bye, honey!” one of the pink-collar workers gaily called out to the fallen undersecretary. “Remember, when the soap drops in the prison shower, don’t bend over to pick it up!”

  The forty or so assembled on-lookers roared their approval of the last cruel remark. Even the stern MPs had to chuckle despite the grim drama they were participating in. Margaret alone ignored the joke and walked forward as though a gallows awaited her in the parking lot.

  Polls taken after the Christmas Holiday showed the president’s approval ratings had surged, as he had taken swift action as soon as he had learned of how he had been betrayed. The same polls showed growing disdain for the former president, who apparently had attempted to undermine his successor. Margaret Smythe did not go to prison. As Ronald Goodman had predicted, a few months of unrelenting humiliation in the media was sufficient punishment, and thereafter the public was allowed to forget the scandal. In 2012 the television program “Inside Confidential” found her working as a waitress in the Harsh Brothers’ Truck Stop in Kotby, Iowa. She had by then changed her name to Kathy Morrison and had gained forty pounds and dyed her hair black so the customers would not recognize her.

  XCIV

  12/31/10 11:05 PST

  On New Year’s Eve day, in his enormous private office, Erin Mondragon stood across from a man whose real name he did not know. He had told the messenger from his attorneys to wait in the lobby downstairs while he conducted the meeting. The unknown man had entered the Mondragon Building via the parking garage and was dressed in a janitor’s coveralls so that the FBI men Mondragon knew were watching the building from across Market Street would not pay him special attention.