“Hello.” It was a woman’s voice.
“Ruthola, this is Sammy.”
Silence. At that instant Harrison Ronald Ford knew he was a dead man. A chill surged through him. Then her voice came in a hiss. “Why’d you call? You promised you wouldn’t!”
“Hey, babe, I won’t be able to make it next week. Gonna be out of town. Just wanted you to know.”
“Oh, honey, don’t call me when he’s home!” The words just poured out. “You promised! Call me tomorrow at ten, lover.” She hung up.
Harrison Ronald cradled the phone. He felt a powerful urge to urinate.
Freeman snickered once. He rubbed his fingers through his hair while everyone in the room watched. “She a nice piece?” he said, finally, the corners of his lips twitching perceptibly.
Harrison tried to shrug nonchalantly. The shrug was more of a nervous jerk.
“Where’s her ol’ man work?”
Ford’s stomach was threatening to heave. This, he decided, would be a good place for the truth. He got it out: “He’s FBI.”
They stared at him with their mouths open, frozen. Harrison tried another grin, which came out, he thought, like a clown leering.
“You stupid—” Ike roared from behind him. “Of all the—”
Freeman giggled. Then he laughed. The others began laughing. The laughter rose to a roar. Freeman McNally held his sides and pounded his thigh.
Harrison turned slowly. Even Ike was laughing. Harrison Ronald joined in. The relief was so great he felt a twinge of hysteria. The tears rolled down his cheeks as his diaphragm flapped uncontrollably.
Eight months ago, when Hooper had told him that someday he might need an alibi and introduced him to Ruthola, he hadn’t anticipated it would be like this, hadn’t understood that he would be so taut he almost twanged.
Ruthola Barnes, wife of Special Agent Ziggy Barnes, she had known. “I’ve done this before,” she told him then. “Trust me. Just say you’re Sammy and talk to me like we just got out of bed, like we’re both still naked and standing in the kitchen making coffee. I’ll do the rest.”
That was eight months ago. He hadn’t seen her since. Yet when he needed her, she was there.
Ah, Ziggy Barnes, you are a lucky, lucky man.
The key to success for a trial lawyer lies in preparation, and no one did it better than Thanos Liarakos. Thursday morning he began to submerge himself in the reams and reams of witness interrogation transcripts that were spewing from the prosecutor’s office just as fast as the folks over there could run an industrial-size copy machine.
There were going to be a lot of transcripts, tens of thousands of pages, the prosecutor had told the judge. The people answering the questions were drug dealers, wholesalers, smugglers—pilots, guards, boat crewmen, drivers, lookouts, and so on—people from every nook and cranny of the drug business. At some point in their interrogation by police or FBI or DEA they were asked where they got the drug, when, how much, and of course, from whom.
Liarakos’ associates had spent the last two days going over this pile and placing small squares of yellow sticky paper at every passage that they thought might be of interest. The difficulty, of course, was that at this stage of trial preparation the prosecutor still had not decided on a list of witnesses. So a lot of the material being read by the defense attorneys would be superfluous, unless Liarakos wanted to try to subpoena a witness himself and introduce testimony he hoped would be exculpatory.
Exculpatory, a nifty little word that meant confuse the hell out of the jurors.
Confusion and deceit were at the very heart of the trial process. The theory that comfortable law professors and appellate judges liked to cite stated that in the thrust and parry of adversarial combat—somehow, for reasons only a psychiatrist would find of interest, these legal thinkers still believed in medieval trial by combat—the truth would be revealed. Revealed to whom was a question never addressed. Perhaps it was best for everyone that the philosophical questions were left to mystics and the tactics and ethics to the trial lawyers. “The American legal system isn’t going to be reformed anytime soon, so we’re stuck with it”—Thanos Liarakos had made this remark on several occasions to young associates appalled at their first journey into the morass.
The meat of the defense lawyer’s job was to ensure that the truth revealed in the courtroom melodrama was in the best interests of his client. Thanos Liarakos was very good at that.
He had already come to the conclusion that the point of his attack had to be on the jury’s perception of Chano Aldana. He had assumed all along that the prosecution had sufficient evidence to convince any twelve men and women that Chano Aldana was imbedded to his eyes in the drug-smuggling business. Yet there was more to it than that. The whole thrust of the government’s case was that Aldana was the kingpin of the entire Medellín cartel, some Latin American ogre who bought men’s souls and terrorized and murdered those he couldn’t buy. Liarakos wanted the jury to believe that the prosecutor, William C. Bader, had to prove that Aldana was the devil incarnate or they could not convict.
Everything Liarakos did or said at trial would be designed to force the jury to the question, Is Chano Aldana the personification of evil? Is this man sitting here with us today Adolf Hitler’s insane bastard? Is this slightly overweight gentleman in the sports coat from Sears the spiritual heir of Ivan the Terrible? If Liarakos could induce the jury to raise the bar high enough, the prosecutor’s evidence would fall short.
Liarakos’ primary asset was Aldana himself. He looked so average, so normal. He would be dressed appropriately. He would smile in the right places and look sad in the right places. And regardless of the testimony of the prosecution’s witnesses, Chano Aldana would continue to look like an underdog. Even the sheer weight and number of the prosecution’s witnesses would be turned against the government—Liarakos would ask, After all these years, after all the money spent and hundreds—nay, thousands—of people questioned, is this all the government has? Is this all?
The difficulty was going to be controlling Aldana. He appeared to be pathologically adverse to taking direction from anyone and he had all the charm of a rabid dog. Yet there must be a way….
He was musing along these lines when Judith Lewis, his chief assistant, brought in another stack of transcripts festooned with yellow stickies.
She put the pile on his credenza, then sat down. When Liarakos looked up, she said, “I don’t think they’ve got it.”
“Explain.”
“If this sample of transcripts is representative of the government’s evidence, they don’t have enough to get a conviction. Most of this stuff is inadmissible hearsay. They might get it into evidence if we were stupid enough to make Aldana’s character an issue, but not otherwise. In this whole pile there is not one possible witness who had direct contact with Aldana.”
“They must have better stuff. They just haven’t given it to us yet.”
“No, sir. I’ll bet you any sum I can raise they don’t have it.” She swallowed hard. “Chano Aldana is going to walk.”
Liarakos examined her face carefully. “That’s our job, Judith. We’re trying to get him acquitted.”
“But he’s guilty!”
“Who says?”
“Oh, don’t give me that crap. He’s guilty as Cain.” She crossed her legs and turned her head toward the window.
“He isn’t guilty until the jury says he is.”
“You can believe that if it makes you feel any better, but I don’t. He’s taken credit for arranging the murders of at least three Colombian presidential candidates. I spent thirty minutes with the man yesterday.” She sat silently for a moment recalling the meeting, then shuddered. “He did it,” she said. “He had them killed, like they were cockroaches.”
“Colombia didn’t choose to try him for murder, Judith. Colombia extradited him to the United States. We’re not defending him from a murder charge.”
“Colombia couldn’t try him. Get serious! In
1985 forty-five leftist guerrillas drove an armored car into the basement of the Colombian Palace of Justice. They held the place for a day and executed all the justices. Aldana hired them. Over a hundred people died—were murdered—that day. Try Aldana in Colombia? My God, wake up! Listen to yourself!”
“Judith, you don’t know he did that! We’re lawyers. Even if he committed a thousand crimes, he isn’t guilty until a jury convicts him.”
“Semantics,” Judith Lewis muttered contemptuously. “I spent my childhood learning the difference between good and bad, and now, all grown up and wearing two-hundred-dollar dresses, with an expensive education, I sit here listening to you argue that evil is all in the label. Bullshit! Fucking bullshit! I know Chano Aldana is guilty as charged on every count in the American indictment, and on probably another two thousand counts that haven’t been charged. He is a dope smuggler, a terrorist, an extortionist, a man killer, a murderer of women and unborn babies. He deserves to roast in the hottest fire in hell.”
“Only if the government can prove it,” Thanos Liarakos pleaded. “Only if the jury says the government proved it.”
“The government hasn’t got it.”
“Then they shouldn’t have indicted him.”
“I quit,” she said simply.
She walked for the door, opened it, and passed through. She left the door standing open.
Liarakos sat for a moment thinking about what she had just said. Then he went after her. She was in her office putting on her coat. “Ms. Lewis, would you come back to my office, please, and discuss this matter further?”
Wearing her coat, she followed him past the secretary’s workstation and, when he stood aside, preceded him into his office. He closed the door and faced her.
“What do you mean you quit?”
“I quit. That’s plain English. It’s exactly what I mean.”
“Do you mean you wish to work on some other case or perhaps for another partner?”
“No. I mean I quit this firm. I quit the legal profession. I quit! I am through trying to be a lawyer. I don’t have the stomach for it.”
She brushed past him. She paused at the door. “You can mail my last check to the Salvation Army. There’s nothing in my office I want to come back for.”
“Take a few days off and think this over. You spent three years in law school and three years in practice. That’s six years of your life.”
“No. I know you’re doing what you think is right. But I don’t think it’s right. I don’t want to think it’s right.”
“Judith—”
“No, Mr. Liarakos. I’m not going to squander another minute of my life arguing about a dope dealer’s constitutional rights. I’m not going to touch another dollar earned by helping a dope dealer escape justice. No.”
This time when she left he didn’t go after her.
He sat in his chair and stared at the transcripts.
A ball glove wrapped around a scruffy baseball lay on the credenza. He pulled on the glove and tossed the ball into it. The impact of the ball meeting the leather made a satisfying “thock” which tingled his hand. The thumb of the glove was sweat stained. He had habitually raked it across his forehead to wipe away the perspiration. He did that now, enjoying the cool smoothness of the leather, then placed the glove back on the polished mahogany.
He kept a bottle of old scotch in the bottom drawer of his desk. He got it out and poured a shot into an empty coffee cup.
He was pouring a second when the phone rang.
“Yes.”
“There’s a lady on the phone calling from California. She won’t give her name. Says it’s a personal matter.”
“My wife?”
“No, sir. I know her voice.”
“I’ll take the call.”
The phone clicked.
“Hello,” he said. “This is Thanos Liarakos.”
“Mr. Liarakos, this is Karen Allison with the California Clinic?”
“Yes.”
“Your wife apparently left the clinic during the night, Mr. Liarakos. We can’t find her on the grounds. She took her suitcase with her.”
“Yes,” he said.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Liarakos. We did what we could.”
“Yes,” he said, and gently cradled the telephone.
On Friday morning Henry Charon drove to Baltimore to find a pay telephone. He parked at a mall and located a bank of three phones near the men’s room. Since he was early, he ate lunch in the food court, lingered over coffee, then strolled the mall from end to end. Finally, with five minutes to go, he walked to the pay phones and waited. A woman was busy explaining to her husband why the new sheets on sale were a bargain. She hung up a minute before the hour and walked away briskly, apparently the winner of the budget battle. She had glanced at Charon once, for no more than a second, and had not looked at him again.
Charon dialed. The number he was calling, according to Tassone, was a pay phone in Pittsburgh. The area code—412—was right, anyway. Charon had checked. When the operator came on the line he fed in quarters from a ten-dollar roll.
Tassone answered on the second ring. “Yes.”
“You got my shipment?”
“Yes. Where and when?”
“Truck stop at Breezewood, Pennsylvania. Tomorrow at three.”
“Got it.” The connection broke.
Charon walked out of the mall and got in the car. Before he started it he carefully studied a map, then folded it neatly and stuck it above the visor.
Four hours later in Philadelphia he bought a ticket for tomorrow’s seven-fourteen bus to Pittsburgh. He ate dinner in a fast-food restaurant, then drove around north Philly until he found a cheap motel, where he paid cash.
He was up at five a.m. He parked the car at a twenty-four-hour garage a half block from the bus station and was in the waiting room thirty minutes early.
The bus left right on the minute. Charon’s luggage consisted only of a backpack, which rested on the seat beside him. There were eleven passengers. Charon sat near the back of the bus where the driver couldn’t see him in his mirror.
Two seats forward, on the other side of the aisle, sat a couple that lit a marijuana cigarette thirty minutes into the trip, just after the bus had reached cruising speed on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. The odor was sickly sweet and heavy. Charon cracked his window and waited for the driver to see the obvious smoke cloud and stop the bus. The bus never stopped. After a second cigarette the man and woman drifted off to sleep.
Henry Charon watched the countryside pass and wondered what it would be like to hunt it.
Four people got off the bus at Harrisburg and three got on. The couple across the aisle lit more marijuana. One of the new passengers cursed, which drew laughter from the smokers. The bus driver ignored the whole affair.
The driver pulled into the bus parking area at the Breezewood truck stop a little after noon. He announced a thirty-minute lunch stop, then darted down the stairs and headed for the restaurant. Most of the passengers trailed after him.
Taking his backpack, Henry Charon went to the men’s room in the truckers’ section of the building. He found a stall, dropped his trousers, and settled in. When he came out an hour later the bus was gone.
Charon bought a newspaper, then went into the restaurant and asked for a menu and a booth by the windows.
Senator Bob Cherry had the reputation of being an old-time politician. Now in his early seventies, he had been a U.S. naval aviator during World War II and had shot down seven Japanese planes. After the war and law school, Bob Cherry had gone into politics. He had served four years in the Florida legislature, four years in the United States House of Representatives, and then run for the Senate. He had been there ever since.
Tall, gaunt, with piercing eyes and a gravel voice, he mastered the rules of the world’s most exclusive gentlemen’s club and set out to make it his own. He had. He had passed up chances to run for majority leader and whip: he preferred to lend his support to othe
rs, more ambitious than he and perhaps less wise, and use his influence to dictate who sat on the various committees that accomplished the work of the Senate. As chairman of the Government Oversight Committee and patron of the party leaders the power he wielded was enormous. Cabinet officers invited him to breakfast, presidents invited him to lunch, and every socialite in Washington invited him to dinner. When Bob Cherry wanted something, he usually got it.
His wife had died ten years ago, and ever since he had had a succession of tall, shapely secretaries. Each lasted about two years. His current helper was approximately twenty-six and was a former Miss Georgia.
Today, at lunch, T. Jefferson Brody had trouble keeping his eyes off her. He wasn’t trying very hard. He knew Bob Cherry well enough to know that the old goat got a kick out of younger men drooling down the cleavage of the sweet piece who was screwing him afternoon and night. So T. Jefferson Brody, diplomat that he was, ogled Miss Tina Jordan appreciatively. When she walked across the dining room on her way to the ladies’, he made a point of admiring her shapely ass as it swayed deliciously from side to side.
Brody sighed wistfully. “She’s something else.”
“That she is,” Bob Cherry agreed with a tight grin. “What’s on your mind, Jefferson?”
Brody took a check from his inside jacket pocket and passed it to the senator. It was for five thousand dollars. “A donation to your voter-registration PAC.”
Cherry stared at the check. “The FM Development Corporation. Never heard of ’em.”
“They’re nationwide. Build shopping centers and stuff all over. They’ve contributed to your PAC before.”
“Oh. Forgot. And they say the memory is the first thing to go.” Cherry folded the check and slipped it into a pocket. “Well, thank you and FM Development. Any donation on behalf of good government is deeply appreciated.”
“What’s the government going to do about foreign aid to Russia?”
Cherry took a sip of his wine, then said, “Probably arrange tax credits for corporations that do joint ventures with the Soviets. Something like that. American business could teach the Russians a lot, provide capital, management expertise, inventory control, and so on. Our companies wouldn’t have to make much of a profit, if any, with tax credits as an incentive. It might work pretty well.” He went on, detailing some of the proposals.
05.Under Siege v5 Page 18
