The Kingmaker sd-3

by Brian Haig

  Katrina and I raised eyebrows at each other, undoubtedly thinking the same thing. Yurichenko was a piece of work. Norman Rockwell would drool at the sight of him. It wasn’t hard to see why he’d succeeded in the KGB and then been picked by Yeltsin to head the SVR. He was lovably crafty.

  Alexi walked out of the bedroom a moment later, shaking his head. “Have you gotten what you wanted, Sean?”

  “Yes and no. I obviously didn’t help my client, but I just met a most remarkable man.”

  He looked suddenly embarrassed. “Viktor is a, uh, he is very special to me, yes? Like father… you understand?”

  “I can see why. I’m sorry for disturbing you… I had to try.”

  “Of course.”

  Then Alexi walked us both to the door. He looked at Katrina. “Were you liking Viktor?”

  “Who couldn’t like him? I was enchanted.”

  He smiled like a little schoolboy. “Then I am bigly delighted you two have met.”

  Bigly delighted? Well, here we were again, me trying to save my client as these two treat this like an opportunity to meet the prospective in-laws. Alexi swiftly bent forward and gave Katrina a kiss. A simple handshake was fine with me.

  Then we were out the door, collecting the two police officers and heading back to the lobby. I’d given it my best try, and I’d failed. I drove home in a severe funk.

  Brian Haig

  The Kingmaker

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  When I entered the office at 7:00 A.M., another of those ubiquitous vans was parked outside, and a man was hefting more boxes inside. At the entry stood destiny in the form of Fast Eddie himself, leaned up against the doorjamb, emitting a smug, ever-confident glow. The fiddler had come to collect his bill.

  I walked up. “Here to see how the other half lives?”

  “Something like that. You got a coffeemaker in this slum?”

  “Yeah,” I said, and we walked inside. Katrina was already there and had brewed up a fresh pot. I saw no more than six or seven boxes.

  I poured two cups and handed one to Eddie, who was gazing with great amusement at the wall safes. It no longer looked like an office; it looked like a refrigerator store stuffed with ferociously ugly appliances.

  “I filled all these?” he asked, proud of his handiwork.

  “And two warehouses on the other side of the post. You outdid yourself.”

  “I wanted to be sure you had everything,” he said, smiling wickedly. “The government can’t afford to be accused of withholding key evidence in such an important trial, can it?”

  I gave him a frosty sneer. “We have yet to see a single thing that’s even remotely damning on the charges of treason or murder.”

  “Oh well then, let’s see if we can rectify that,” he said, moving immediately toward a box marked with the number 6. “Let me tell you what’s inside this box,” he announced, mimicking one of those hyper-obnoxious game show hosts. “In here are copies of highly classified documents that were turned over to us by what our CIA calls a Russian asset. A court order seals that asset’s name. However, the source’s identity and employment have been confirmed by the director of the CIA and a military judge.”

  Not liking the sound of this one bit, I asked, “And what’s so special about those documents?”

  “As you’ll see when you go through them, some are briefing papers and talking points provided to the President and Secretary of State for their discussions with the Russians. Some are NSC internal policy papers. There’s more… but I won’t spoil the suspense. Just say it’s my favorite box.”

  I frankly didn’t see how anything he told me was going to spoil the suspense. After all, everything he’d just said had already been given to the press.

  “Okay, so there’s a bunch of important papers in the box.”

  Eddie tried to look serious, but he just couldn’t pull it off. He broke into a big, jubilant smile and announced, “Each of the originals has Morrison’s fingerprints on them. The papers were acquired from a special vault in Moscow where Russian intelligence stored them for historical purposes. Some go back as far as 1992. You’ll note at the top of each page there’s a stamp in Russian Cyrillic. Those are the log-in dates when they were received in Moscow. Do I need to spell this out for you?”

  “Sure, Eddie, spell it out for me,” I said, trying to look unruffled as I swallowed the bile coming up in my throat.

  “Over the years, your client turned these documents over to his Russian contact. They create a trail of espionage that dates back a decade. There are no other fingerprints on these pages, only Morrison’s, and that’s confirmed by the FBI crime lab.”

  I tried to look unimpressed, because that’s how we crafty defense attorneys are supposed to appear in moments such as this. I couldn’t. I stared at the box like it contained the plague, too dumbstruck to speak.

  Finally I said, “And you expect me to accept the fact you won’t give me the name of the man who provided them?”

  “Did I say it was a man?”

  “I’ll submit a challenge the minute the trial opens.”

  “Go ahead. Waste your time. It’s sealed by court order. This kind of thing gets challenged in espionage and mob trials all the time and goes nowhere. Besides, our source isn’t a witness. Our source was just a courier.”

  He was right, of course, and I asked, “And what’s in the other boxes?”

  “Open them and see for yourself.”

  I began cracking open more boxes. He leaned against a wall, sipped his coffee, and observed with all too evident glee, like a little boy watching a porno flick. The first couple boxes contained hundreds of memorandums written by Morrison from his days at State and the NSC. I only had time to glance at the headings, but they were largely policy positions or recommended responses to Russian actions. I assumed these were papers meant to prove how Morrison perverted the American decision-making process in favor of his Moscow overlords.

  The fifth box contained technical drawings and blueprints, apparently the designs pilfered from the export control office. I lifted a few out of the box as Eddie said, “There’s no fingerprints on those, but they came from the same Russian storage facility as the fingerprinted ones and were filed under the same source title. Oh, and don’t overlook the receiving stamps in the upper corners. Compare them with the fingerprinted documents-most of the dates correspond. Call it circumstantial if you want, but any reasonable board is going to conclude they were handed over at the same time.”

  The next box contained statements from people Morrison had worked with over the years. While I only had time to glance at them, the words “brutally ambitious” and “amorally selfish,” or variations of the same, appeared again and again.

  The last box was long and rectangular. I opened it. Inside was an autographed baseball bat.

  Katrina observed all this from a distance, her eyes shifting from Eddie to me. Eddie shoved himself off the wall and walked to a position about two feet from me. “So it’s time to talk a deal.”

  I was staring at the baseball bat. I dreamed of swinging it at his face. Eddie had played it perfectly. He’d withheld the most damning evidence until this meeting, knowing that whatever optimism I walked in with would be eviscerated by the materials in these boxes.

  I took a few deep breaths. “Okay, what’s your deal, Eddie?”

  In a clinically chilling tone he said, “Very simple. Plead to everything and Morrison gets life. In return we get as much time with Morrison as we need to get the full details of his treachery. We reserve the right to employ lie detectors during the interrogations. If we don’t trust him, or we think he’s holding back, the deal’s off. If we don’t like his attitude, the deal’s off. You have forty-eight hours to get a response from your client.” He looked at his watch. “That gives you till 7:31 A.M., day after tomorrow.”

  As smug as he was trying to act, this was his first offer. No sensible attorney takes the first offer. It just isn’t done. Even Eddie would be dis
appointed if I didn’t try to up the ante.

  “Not good enough,” I staunchly insisted. “We both know our government doesn’t want this going to trial. What with our warming relations with Russia, and this joint effort in counterterrorism, and the nuclear reduction pact, a down-and-dirty trial’s the last thing anyone wants. And I assure you, Eddie, I intend to drag the trial through the scummiest sewers you can imagine. I’ll turn everybody’s dirty underwear inside out. Besides which, the sum of Morrison’s knowledge is worth more than just a death sentence you probably won’t get anyway.”

  Eddie stood there chewing on his lip. I was bluffing, but it looked like it was working. He must’ve just realized that he’d underestimated me. The overconfident bastard must’ve thought I’d just lie down and take whatever he had to offer.

  He shuffled his feet, and I knew I had him. He said, “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure. Thirty years with a chance of parole for good behavior is the minimum. Morrison was a great soldier, and that has to count for something. And who knows how much of this evidence I’ll be able to get thrown out, or to explain. Come on, Eddie, I need something I can take to my client. Give me something I can work with here.”

  He looked at the bat, and then stared at the ceiling as though searching the heavens for guidance. Finally he dug a hand into a pocket and withdrew two black-and-white photos that he tossed onto the table.

  I studied them-both were pictures of men, who were about early-middle-aged, fit-looking, and smiling pleasantly into the camera.

  Eddie said, “One is Sergei Romanov; the other is Mikhail Sorbontzny. Sergei was married with three children, and Mikhail had two young kids. Both were recalled to Moscow. Mikhail was tortured for weeks and then shot. Sergei was just shot. Morrison’s wife was their controller. She’s been tested with lie detectors and didn’t turn them in. That narrows it down to her husband.”

  I stared at the photos as he disclosed this.

  He continued, his voice deadly frosty, “Don’t take the deal. For one thing, I’ll enjoy kicking your ass just because I don’t like you. For a second thing, your client deserves the death sentence and I want credit for the kill. Ask one more time for better terms and the deal’s off. Now be a good boy and go talk to your client. You have forty-seven hours and fifty-five minutes.”

  With that, Eddie spun around and left, trailing the reek of vanity in his wake. As deal discussions go, I’d never seen it done better. He’d set it up to watch me gape and stutter, because that’s the way Eddie is. And he’d withheld the two photos till the end to add to my humiliation.

  Usually in espionage trials, the best the government can do is posit a circumstantial case. Traitors tend to be crafty fellows who work in shadows and isolation, leaving little evidence and few witnesses. Almost always when the government suspects espionage they therefore attempt an entrapment, hoping their target will walk into the setup and offer them enough evidence to persuade a jury they had the intent to betray.

  If Eddie was telling the truth about what was in box number 6-and he better be or he’d face disbarment-he had the murder weapon with the fingerprints on it.

  I looked over at Katrina, who sipped coffee and observed our exchange. “What do you think?”

  She pointed at box number 6. “In a word, we’re screwed.”

  “Looks that way, doesn’t it?” I said, still reeling and trying to come to grips with all the nasty ramifications.

  She took another sip of coffee and seemed to be thinking hard. “He doesn’t care what we plead, because he believes he has an airtight case. We can’t attack his key evidence because we’re foreclosed from knowing how he got his hands on it. And-”

  The phone interrupted, and I went over to answer. It was Alexi, saying, “I am only having a minute, Sean. Viktor is upstairs preparing for his meetings and I have fabricated an excuse to come down to the lobby.”

  “Well, guess what? The prosecutor just left. He came by to drop off a bunch of Top Secret documents that were stolen out of a vault in Moscow by some unnamed CIA asset. These documents verify every wild claim the prosecutor’s been making. And guess what else? The documents have Morrison’s fingerprints all over them.”

  There was a long pause. He finally said, “This is impossible. Please believe me, if Bill was being controlled by us, I would be knowing.”

  “Then either you’re a liar or wrong. Maybe someone else in your SVR was running him, and you weren’t in the right compartment.”

  “That cannot explain this,” he said, sounding edgy and anxious. “The prosecutor is being certain these papers came from Moscow?”

  “He assures me the director of the CIA and a military judge have verified the source.”

  “It had to be this cabal.”

  “Well, that’s another thing,” I replied, knowing I was probably making a big mistake by bringing this up, but the compulsion was simply irresistible. “Both Mary and Bill said this cabal thing of yours is hogwash. They said they were feeding your paranoia to keep you on the line.”

  There was suddenly another long pause, and I said, “You still there?”

  “Th- they are wrong,” he assured me, sounding both hurt and puzzled. “How are they explaining all the things this cabal has accomplished?”

  “Well, I asked Mary about Yeltsin’s election. She said it was just politics.”

  “And what about Azerbaijan and Armenia? Or Georgia? Or Chechnya?”

  “All hogwash.”

  “They are wrong,” he said, sounding suddenly bitter. “Arms thefts… wars… assassinations, I have been warning Bill and Mary for a decade. I have told them where to look… what to look for. I do not make this up.”

  I suddenly felt sorry for Alexi. I liked him. He seemed to be a genuinely decent guy, but who knows what devils and visions lurk in some folks’ brains? He was frustrated and angry and hurt, but I had my own problems.

  “Look, Alexi, all I know is I’ve got a client I’ve got to defend and I-”

  “Sean, please,” he interrupted. “You must be keeping open mind about this. Bill is no traitor. I would be dead if he was traitor. My name would have been handed over, and I would be dead. You see this, yes?”

  “No, I don’t. Mary said he never turned you in because it would’ve pointed a finger straight at himself. Plus, you were his ticket to bigger and bigger jobs.”

  I could hear him sigh. Then I heard another voice in the background and Alexi suddenly hung up. I turned and looked at Katrina’s face, and a happy face it was not.

  Her hands were balled into fists as she said, “You bastard. You didn’t need to say that to him.”

  “Yeah, I did. In case you’re not paying attention, the prosecutor just dropped off enough evidence to hang our client. We don’t have time to waste with Alexi and his nightmares anymore.”

  “You’re wrong. If Alexi’s right, it explains why somebody went to the trouble to frame Morrison. You know that. It’s-”

  I held up a hand to cut her off. “I’m busy. I’ve got work to do. Forget about it.”

  Her eyes narrowed to pinpoints, and she spun around and walked out.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  I was actually glad she was gone, because I needed privacy to consider my options. Having all of Eddie’s evidence gave me the chance to piece together how he’d approach this case. And I badly needed to get my arms around it before I flew out to see Morrison about the deal, to tell him whether he was signing his own death sentence or not. More likely the former, from what I’d heard, but I needed to be clear about the odds.

  Here’s how I figured it. Eddie would start by painting a scandalous picture of my client and trying to establish motive. The Dorian Gray attack seemed most likely. He’d point at Morrison seated at the defense table in his brigadier general’s uniform, handsome, impressive, a man blessed by nature, genes, and birthright to succeed. He’d make a big thing about how he was born into a wealthy, successful family, attended the most elite private schools, entere
d the very best army, been treated to every opportunity America has to offer. He’d been diligent, hardworking, and thoroughly disliked by any and all who served under him. He’d clawed his way up, but to him up was never high enough, because Bill Morrison was vain, arrogant, and endlessly ambitious. No accomplishment or title or measure of success was ever enough.

  He had money-a great deal of money-but not enough. He wanted more, and if the price was betrayal, so be it. He was married to a ravishingly beautiful woman who gave him wonderful children, a stable home, social prestige, and stature. It wasn’t enough. Morrison needed more women the way rich people need newer, bigger, more expensive cars. He needed the never-ending sexual conquests to assure himself, no matter how fleetingly, of his own eminence and physical attractiveness. The Army gave him awards and rank-still this wasn’t enough. Bill Morrison needed even more professional approval than the Army with all its medals and pins could provide, and he’d sought it secretly in the arms of Russia’s spymasters.

  This, Eddie would claim, was Morrison’s motive. He had betrayed his country for no other reason than his gluttonous ego. Eddie would promise a long line of witnesses who’d testify to that endless hunger, the trite selfishness, the succession of sexual trysts, the relentless and pitiless ambition. Nor would there be a dearth of those witnesses, because their statements filled two whole wall safes, an oral travelogue to a man whose need for approval-professionally, personally, and romantically-was bottomless.

  Then Eddie would promise a long procession of evidence, from the phone and house taps to the fingerprinted documents taken from a Moscow vault.

  But the more I thought about it, the more I realized Eddie was missing something. There was a hole-not a big hole, maybe only a tiny one, but a hole’s a hole. The case was compelling, but circumstantial. I couldn’t defend Morrison’s character, because, frankly, he was a selfishly philandering jerk and too many people knew it, would swear to it, and would explain why in endless detail. And the phone taps would wash away whatever doubts remained.