“Cool off, Rob.” Ryan popped open a can of beer for Robby and one for himself.
“Jack, we’re friends, and ain’t nothing gonna change that. I know you’d never do anything this dumb, but—”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t fucking know, okay? I was in Belgium last week and I told them I didn’t know. I was in Chicago Friday morning with that Fowler guy, and I told him and his aide that I don’t know. And I’m telling you that I don’t know.”
Jackson was quiet for a moment. “You know, anybody else, I’d call him a liar. I know what your new job is, Jack. You’re telling me that you’re serious? Honest to God, Jack, this here is important.”
“Word of honor, Captain, I don’t know dick.”
Robby drained his beer and crushed the can flat. “Ain’t that the way it always is?” he said. “We got people out there killing, maybe getting hurt, too, and nobody knows anything. God, I love being a fucking pawn. You know, I don’t mind taking my chances, but it’s nice to know why.”
“I’ll do my best to find out.”
“Good idea. They really haven’t told you what’s happening, eh?”
“They haven’t told me shit, but I’m going to damned well find out. You might want to drop a hint on your boss,” Jack added.
“What’s that?”
“Tell him to keep a low profile until I get back to you.”
Whatever doubt the Patterson brothers had about what they should do ended that Sunday afternoon. The Grayson sisters came for visitors’ day, sitting across from their men—neither pair had trouble distinguishing who was who—and proclaiming their undying love for the men who’d liberated them from their pimp. It was no longer just a question of getting out of jail. The final decision was made on the way back to their cell.
Henry and Harvey were in the same cell, mainly for security reasons. Had they been separated, then by the simple expedient of changing shirts, they could have swapped cells and somehow—the jailers knew that the Pattersons were clever bastards—done something to screw things up for everybody. The additional advantage was that the brothers didn’t fight each other, as was hardly uncommon with the rest of the jail population, and the fact that they were quiet and untroublesome allowed them to work in undisturbed peace.
Jails are necessarily buildings designed to take abuse. The floors are of bare reinforced concrete, since carpets or tile would just be ripped up to start a fire or some other mischief. The resulting hard, smooth concrete floor made a good grinding surface. Each brother had a simple length of heavy metal wire taken from the bedstead. No one has yet designed a prison bed that doesn’t require metal, and metal makes good weapons. In prison such weapons are called shanks, an ugly word completely suitable to their ugly purpose. Law requires that jails and prisons cannot be mere cages for housing prisoners like animals in a zoo, and this jail, like others, had a crafts shop. An idle mind, judges have ruled for decades, is the devil’s workshop. The fact that the devil is already a resident in the criminal mind simply means that the craft shops provide tools and material for making shanks more effective. In this case, each brother had a small, grooved piece of wood doweling and some electrician’s tape. Henry and Harvey took turns, one rubbing his shank on the concrete to get a needlelike point while the other stood guard for an approaching uniform. It was high-quality wire, and the sharpening process took some hours, but people in jail have lots of idle time. Finished, each wire was inserted in the groove in the dowel—miraculously enough, the groove, cut by a craft-shop router, was exactly the right size and length. The electrician’s tape secured the wire in place, and now each brother had a six-inch shank, capable of inflicting a deep, penetrating trauma upon a human body.
They hid their weapons—prison inmates are very effective at it—and discussed tactics. Any graduate of a guerrilla or terrorist school would have been impressed. Though the language was coarse and the discussion lacking in the technical jargon preferred by trained professionals in the field of urban warfare, the Patterson brothers had a clear understanding of the idea of Mission. They understood covert approach, the importance of maneuver and diversion, and they knew about clearing the area after the mission was successfully executed. In this they expected the tacit assistance of their cellmates, but jails and prisons, though violent and evil places, remain communities of men, and the pirates were decidedly unpopular, whereas the Pattersons were fairly high in the hierarchical chain as tough, “honest” hoods. Besides, everyone knew that they were not people to cross, which encouraged cooperation and discouraged informants.
Jails are also places with hygienic rules. Since criminals are frequently the type to defer bathing, and brushing and flossing their teeth, and since such behavior lends itself to epidemic, showers are part of an unbending routine. The Patterson brothers were counting on it.
“What do you mean?” the man with a Spanish accent asked Mr. Stuart.
“I mean they’ll be out in eight years. Considering they murdered a family of four and got caught red-handed with a large supply of cocaine, it’s one hell of a good deal,” the attorney replied. He didn’t like doing business on Sunday, and especially didn’t like doing business with this man in the den of his home with his family in the backyard, but he had chosen to do business with drug types. He told himself at least ten times with every single case that he’d been a fool to have taken the first one—and gotten him off, of course, because the DEA agents had screwed up their warrant, tainting all the evidence and tossing the case on a classic “legal technicality.” That success, which had earned him fifty thousand dollars for four days’ work, had given him a “name” within the drug community, which had money to burn—or to hire good criminal lawyers. You couldn’t easily say no to such people. They were genuinely frightening. They had killed lawyers who displeased them. And they paid so well, well enough that he could take time to apply his considerable talents to indigent clients who couldn’t pay. At least that was one of the arguments he used on sleepless nights to justify dealing with the animals. “Look, these guys were looking at a seat in the electric chair—life at minimum—and I knocked that down to twenty years and out in eight. For Christ’s sake, that’s a goddamned good deal.”
“I think you could do better,” the man replied with a blank look and in a voice so devoid of emotion as to be mechanistic. And decidedly frightening to a lawyer who had never owned or shot a gun.
That was the other side of the equation. They didn’t merely hire him. Somewhere else was another lawyer, one who gave advice without getting directly involved. It was a simple security provision. It also made perfect professional sense, of course, to get a second opinion of anything. It also meant that in special cases the drug community could make sure that its own attorney wasn’t making some sort of arrangement with the state, as was not entirely unknown in the countries from which they came. And as was the case here, some might say. Stuart could have played his information from the Coasties for all it was worth, gambling to have the whole case thrown out. He estimated a fifty-fifty chance of that. Stuart was good, even brilliant in a courtroom, but so was Davidoff, and there is not a trial lawyer in the world who would have predicted the reaction of a jury—a south Alabama, law-and-order jury—to a case like this one. Whoever was in the shadows giving advice to the man in his den, he was not as good as Stuart in a courtroom. Probably an academic, the trial lawyer thought, maybe a professor supplementing his teaching income with some informal consulting. Whoever he—she?—was, Stuart hated him on instinct.
“If I do what you want me to do, we run the risk of blowing the whole case. They really could end up in the chair.” It also would mean wrecking the careers of Coast Guard sailors who had done wrong, but not nearly so wrong as Stuart’s clients had most certainly done. His ethical duty as a lawyer was to give his clients the best possible defense within the law, within the Standards of Professional Conduct, but most of all, within the scope of his knowledge and experience—instinct, which w
as as real and important as it was impossible to quantify. Exactly how a lawyer balanced his duty on that three-cornered scale was the subject of endless class hours in law school, but the answers arrived at in the theaterlike lecture halls were always clearer than in the real legal world found beyond the green campus lawns.
“They could also go free.”
The man’s thinking reversal on appeal, Stuart realized. It was an academic lawyer giving advice.
“My professional advice to my clients is to accept the deal that I have negotiated.”
“Your clients will decline that advice. Your clients will tell you tomorrow morning to—what is the phrase? Go for broke?” The man smiled like a dangerous machine. “Those are your instructions. Good day, Mr. Stuart. I can find the door.” The machine left.
Stuart stared at his bookcases for a few minutes before making his telephone call. He might as well do it now. No sense making Davidoff wait. No public announcement had yet been made, though the rumors were out on the street. He wondered how the U.S. Attorney would take it. It was easier to predict what he’d say. The outraged I thought we had a deal! would be followed by a resolute Okay, we’ll see what the jury says! Davidoff would muster his considerable talents, and the battle in Federal District Court would be an epic duel. But that was what courts were all about, wasn’t it? It would be a fascinating and exciting technical exercise in the theory of the law, but like most such exercises, it would have little to do with right and wrong, less to do with what had actually happened aboard the good ship Empire Builder, and nothing at all to do with justice.
Murray was in his office. Moving into their townhouse had been a formality. He slept there—most of the time—but he saw far less of it than he’d seen of his official apartment in the Kensington section of London while legal attaché to the embassy on Grosvenor Square. It was hardly fair. For what it had cost him to move back to the D.C. area—the city that provided a home for the United States government denied decent housing to those on government salaries—one would have thought that he’d have gotten some real use from it.
His secretary was not in on Sunday, of course, and that meant Murray had to answer his own phone. This one came in on his direct, private line.
“Yeah, Murray here.”
“Mark Bright. There’s been a development on the Pirates Case that you need to know about. The lawyer for the subjects just called the U.S. Attorney. He’s tossing the deal they made. He’s going to fight it out; he’s going to put those Coasties on the stand and try to blow away the whole case on the basis of that stunt they pulled. Davidoff’s worried.”
“What do you think?” Murray asked.
“Well, he’ll reinstate the whole case: drug-related capital murder. If it means clobbering the Coast Guard, well, that’s the price of justice. His words, not mine,” Bright pointed out. Like many FBI agents, the agent was also a member of the bar. “Going on my experience, not his, I’d say it’s real gray, Dan. Davidoff’s good—I mean, he’s really good in front of a jury—but so’s the defense guy, Stuart. The local DEA hates his guts, but he’s an effective son of a bitch. The law is pretty muddled. What’ll the judge say? Depends on the judge. What’ll the jury say—depends on what the judge says and does. It’s like putting a bet down on the next Super Bowl right now, before the season starts, and that doesn’t even take into account what’ll happen in the U.S. Court of Appeals after the trial’s over in District Court. Whatever happens, the Coasties are going to get raped. Too bad. No matter what, Davidoff is going to tear each of ’em a new asshole for getting him into this mess.”
“Warn ’em,” Murray said. He told himself that it was an impulsive statement, but it wasn’t. Murray believed in law, but he believed in justice more.
“You want to repeat that, sir?”
“They gave us TARPON.”
“Mr. Murray”—he wasn’t “Dan” now—“I might have to arrest them. Davidoff just might set up a grand jury on this and—”
“Warn them. That is an order, Mr. Bright. I presume the local cops have a good attorney who represents them. Recommend that attorney to Captain Wegener and his men.”
Bright hesitated before replying. “Sir, what you just told me to do might be seen as—”
“Mark, I’ve been in the Bureau a long time. Maybe too damned long,” Murray’s fatigue—and some other things—said. “But I won’t stand by and watch these men get ambushed for doing something that helped us. They’ll have to take their chances with the law—but by God, they’ll have the same advantages that those fucking pirates have! We owe them that much. Log that one in as my order and carry it out.”
“Yes, sir.” Murray could hear Bright thinking the rest of the answer: Damn!
“On the case, anything else you need from our end that you need help with?”
“No, sir. The forensics are all in. From that side the case is tight as hell. DNA matches on both semen samples to the subjects, DNA blood matches to two of the victims. The wife was a blood donor, and we found a quart of her stuff in a Red Cross freezer; the other one’s to the daughter. Davidoff might just bring this one off on that basis alone.” The new DNA-match technology was rapidly becoming one of the Bureau’s deadliest forensic weapons. Two California men who’d thought themselves to have committed the perfect rape-murder were now contemplating the gas chamber due to the work of two Bureau biochemists and a relatively inexpensive laboratory test.
“Anything else you need, you call me direct. This one is directly tied in with Emil’s murder, and I’ve got all the horsepower I need.”
“Yes, sir. Sorry to bother you on a Sunday.”
“Right.” It was one small thing to chuckle about as he hung up. Murray turned in his swivel chair to stare out the windows onto Pennsylvania Avenue. A pleasant Sunday afternoon, and people were walking up the street of presidents like pilgrims, stopping along the way to purchase ice-creams and T-shirts from vendors. Farther down the street, beyond the Capitol, in the areas that tourists were careful to avoid, there were other places that people entered, also like pilgrims, also stopping to buy things.
“Fucking drugs,” he observed quietly. Just how much more damage would they do?
The Deputy Director (Operations) was also in his office. Three signals from VARIABLE had come in within the space of two hours. Well, it was not entirely unexpected that the opposition would react. They were acting more rapidly and in a more organized way—it appeared—than he had expected, but it wasn’t something that he’d neglected to consider beforehand. The whole point of using the troops he was using, after all, was for their field skills ... and their anonymity. Had he selected Green Berets from the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, or Rangers from Fort Stewart, Georgia, or people from the new Special Operations Command at MacDill—it would have been too many people from too small a community. That would have been noticed. But light-fighters had four nearly complete and widely separated divisions, over forty thousand men spread from New York to Hawaii, with the same field skills as soldiers in higher-profile units; and taking forty people out of forty thousand was a far more concealable exercise. Some would be lost. He’d known that going in and so, he was sure, did the soldiers themselves. They were assets, and assets sometimes get expended. That was harsh, but it was reality. If the infantrymen had wanted a safe life, they would not have chosen to be infantrymen, to have re-enlisted at least once each, and to volunteer for a job that was advertised as being potentially dangerous. These weren’t government clerks tossed into the jungle and told to fend for themselves. They were professional soldiers who knew what the score was.
At least, that’s what Ritter told himself. But, his mind asked him, if you don’t know what the score is, how can they?
The craziest part of all was that the operation was working out exactly as planned—in the field. Clark’s brilliant idea, using a few disconnected violent acts to instigate a gang war within the Cartel, appeared to be happening. How else to expla
in the attempted ambush of Escobedo? He found himself glad that Cortez and his boss had escaped. Now there would be revenge and confusion and turmoil from which the Agency could step back and cover its tracks.
Who, us? the Agency would ask by way of answer to reporters’ questions, which would start the following day, Ritter was certain. He was, in fact, surprised that they hadn’t started already. But the pieces of the puzzle were coming apart now instead of together. The Ranger battle group would sail back north, continuing its Fleet-Ex during the slow trip back to San Diego. The CIA representative was already off the ship and on his way home with the second and final tape cassette. The rest of the “exercise” bombs would be dropped at sea, targeted on discarded life-rafts as normal Drop-Ex’s. The fact that they’d never been officially released from the Navy weapons-testing base in California would never be noticed. If it were? Some paperwork screwup—they happened all the time. No, the only tricky part was with those troops in the field. He could have made immediate arrangements to lift them out. Better to leave them there for a few more days. There might be more work for them to do, and as long as they were careful, they’d be all right. The opposition would not be all that good.
“So?” Colonel Johns asked Zimmer.
“Gotta change engines. This one’s shot. The burner cans are all right, but the compressor failed big-time. Maybe the boys back home can rebuild it. No way we can fix it with what we’ve got here, sir.”
“How long?”
“Six hours, if we start now, Colonel.”
“Okay, Buck.”
They’d brought two spare engines, of course. The hangar that held the Pave Low III helicopter wasn’t big enough for both it and the MC-130 which provided aerial tanking and spare parts, however, and Zimmer waved to another NCO to punch the button to open the door. They needed a special cart and hoist to handle the T-64 turboshaft engines in any case.