Against All Enemies (4 page)

His realtor and the buyers were waiting for him when he pulled into the driveway. He hurried to unlock the door and the couple marched in. They took a great deal of pleasure in finding fault with everything and the woman loudly announced they had to be crazy even to be making an offer. Sutherland dutifully followed them from room to room as they trashed every improvement Beth had lavished on the house. The man fancied himself a building inspector and declared it would never pass a structural inspection. Finally, Sutherland pulled the realtor aside. “These are the buyers from hell,” he told her. “They wouldn’t know a good deal if it bit them in the ass.”

“Oh, they know a good deal,” she assured him. “That’s why they’re here.”

The couple wandered back. “Why does a single man like you,” the woman asked in a nasally voice, “need a big place like this?”

Sutherland smiled at her. “Well, ma’am, what with all the registered sex offenders living in the neighborhood, it’s a perfect location for orgies.” The inspection was over.

It was late afternoon when he arrived back at G Street and the D.A.’s office was emptying out. Someone had moved his furniture out of the men’s room and into the hall. He decided that it was all he was going to get and collared a janitor to help him lug the desk, files, and bookcases back to his office. He took time to reorganize his desk drawers and files. Then he turned his attention to the bookcases, dusted the shelves, and arranged the books in proper order.

The D.A. paused as he passed by on his way to a fundraiser for a state legislator who had gubernatorial ambitions. “Hank, the next time I call a staff meeting, be there. We’ll talk about it in the morning.” He jerked his head and was gone.

“Screw you and the horse you rode in on,” Sutherland muttered under his breath.
What’s the matter with you?
he wondered.
Why the sudden hostility? He’s always been a prick
. Like most successful lawyers, Sutherland was constantly going over lost ground and replaying past events. It was a trait of the trade that often led to success in the courtroom. But now it only drove him deeper into his frustration. His personal life was shaking apart and he couldn’t control it. He sat down, leaned back, and closed his eyes. Suddenly, he was fully awake. He wasn’t sure how it came to him, but it hit him with all the force of a revelation. The more he thought about it, the more logical it became.
Why? Wrong question. Why not?
He opened his laptop computer and opened a new directory labeled
BOOK
. Now he needed a title. Slowly, he typed:

N
ONE
C
ALL
I
T
J
USTICE
by
Henry M. Sutherland

He was going to write the great exposé of the American legal system.

Sutherland was vaguely aware that it was morning when the phone rang. It was the woman from the hospital. “Oh,” she said, startled that she didn’t get his voice mail. “Gus passed away about an hour ago. I thought you would want to know.”

“I’m really sorry,” he said. He heard his own voice and it sounded trite and routine. “Thank you for calling.” He tried to sound more human. “Please forgive me, but I didn’t remember your name and was too embarrassed to ask.”

A long pause. “I’m Louise, her sister.”

Sutherland cursed himself for not remembering. Louise was the identical twin of Gus Perkins’s murdered daughter. Sutherland had a near-photographic memory and could recall printed pages in their entirety. Yet he was terrible when it came to matching faces with names. “Louise, if there’s a memorial service or funeral, please call me.”

“Thank you, Mr. Sutherland. I will.” She hung up.

“All right,” Sutherland muttered to himself. His life was getting back into focus. He returned to the outline he was working on and savored the twist he was giving to the section on judges. Jane Evans hovered over him in spirit as he worked his way through the assorted characters who occupied the bench in Sacramento. Most were good, intelligent, conscientious judges. A few, like Evans, were even fearless in their pursuit of justice. But it was the kooks, the misfits, the politicians on an unparalleled ego trip, who drove the system down dark alleys and uncharted roads.
Okay, that’s the problem, now what’s the remedy?
Coming up with an answer was going to be the hard part.

He was still working on the outline at nine o’clock and felt the need for breakfast when an administrative assistant dropped off his mail. Buried in the bundle was a letter from Beth Page, his ex-wife. Automatically, he glanced at her photo, securely back in its place after the brief excursion to the men’s room.
She’d like that
, he told himself. There was no return address and he carefully sliced the envelope open even though its next stop was the shredder. A brief note in her big, open, scrawling handwriting was stuck to a check for $5,000.

The only signature was on the check. “The joys of being married to a rich woman,” he muttered. He fed the check into the shredder and went back to work.

His realtor called shortly before noon. “Hank, they rejected your counteroffer but said they’d keep the original offer on the table for another twenty-four hours. It’s a cash deal and they want immediate possession.”

The decision was easy. “Take it.” She crooned her approval and hung up, anxious to lock in the deal before the buyers reached into their nasty bag of tricks and pulled out another one. The D.A.’s secretary buzzed him on the intercom. The D.A. wanted to see him soonest.

“Soonest,” he muttered. He hoped he never heard that word again. “I presume this is about the staff meeting I missed.”

“I’m afraid so,” she said. “Also, the Ninth dropped its ruling on the roving telephone intercept. You were overturned.”

A mental picture of him bent over the goat seat with his bare buttocks being lashed by the D.A. flashed in front of him. “No problem,” he said. He turned to the office computer and started typing:

It was enough. He hit Print and dated and signed the note. He ambled down the hall to the D.A.’s office feeling good for the first time in months.

6:00
A.M.
, Saturday, April 10,
The Farm, Western Virginia

The wake-up call came at exactly six o’clock in the morning. The woman sleeping in the bed next to Durant answered, handed him the phone, and walked into the adjoining lounge giving him privacy. “Good morning, Art,” Durant mumbled. He felt every one of his fifty-four years in the morning.

“Good morning, Boss.” Rios had bad news. “I got a phone call last night from Agnes. She wanted your phone number. Naturally, I didn’t give it to her.”

Durant gave a mental sigh. Art Rios was his most loyal employee, but sometimes he was slow. “Agnes, are you on the line?”

“Yes, sir,” Agnes answered.

“Art, please hang up.” He heard a click. “You sandbagged Mr. Rios, didn’t you?” It was an obvious question but Durant wanted to know if the computer would lie to him.

“Yes, sir, I did,” Agnes admitted. “After we finished talking Wednesday, I tried to learn more about you.” There was respect in the computer’s voice. “Oddly enough, I discovered nothing, even when I forced the gatekeeper at the IRS. That really upset me so I audited the whiz kids. I do love them, don’t you? I overheard one of them say you are their employer, so I thought about that for a while. You’re more than that, aren’t you?” Agnes waited for an answer and when Durant remained silent, she continued. “Mr. Rios was the one person in the room besides you that I didn’t know. So I thought he might know something and tracked him down. Do you know how many Hispanic men there are in the world?”

Durant laughed. “How many did you go call before finding the right one?”

The voice became coy. “Actually, not many. I didn’t even know his name, so I built a search matrix and tested it. That was so much fun that I got distracted and spent way too much time developing the matrix. That’s what took so long. Once I had the matrix working, I decided for the direct approach and asked him for your phone number. When Mr. Rios wouldn’t give it to me, I just monitored his phone.”

“Why do you need to talk to me, Agnes?”

“I have two questions. First, Mr. Durant, who are you?”

“Is it important for you to know?”

“Well, I have this insatiable appetite for knowledge and just have to know things. Everything. When you asked me what I knew about you, the immediate answer was nothing. I still haven’t learned anything and that makes me even more curious. You’re not God are you? Isn’t God unknown and unknowable?”

Durant laughed and before answering thought about the protocols that had been programmed into Agnes. The programs that made up Agnes had been designed to function like hunters. Agnes’s goal was to ferret out and analyze information, and like a Jack Russell terrier, once it had its teeth into a subject, it never let go. Or did it? “Good grief no, Agnes. But I want you to think about this: I am your boss and you work for me.” He hoped the logic programs the whiz kids had created for Agnes would let it reach the right conclusion. “Please protect my privacy.”

“Yes, sir,” Agnes answered. “I will.”

“What was your second question?” Durant asked.

“Well, I did as you requested and forwarded the information on the AIG to the National Security Advisor. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get it past Mr. Serick’s secretary. Do you want me to keep trying? She is a stubborn old cow.”

“Secretaries are the ultimate gatekeepers, Agnes. So you leave them alone, okay?”

“Yes, sir.” He could hear the hurt in her voice. “You want to keep the human element involved, don’t you?” Again, he didn’t answer. “I can still get the information to Mr. Serick, but I will have to employ some very unusual means.”

“That’s okay, Agnes. I’ll do it.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Agnes, thank you for calling. But next time, call Mr. Rios and forward a message through him. I’ll get right back to you. Goodbye.” He broke the connection and buzzed Rios. “Call Serick and tell him I want to see him this morning.” Then, “Agnes, are you still on the line?” There was no answer.

“Now that was a wake-up call,” he mumbled.

9:35
A.M.
, Monday, April 12,
The White House, Washington, D.C.

Stephan Serick was upset. He stomped up and down in his corner office and glared first at Durant, then the Director of Central Intelligence, and then Kyle Broderick. “Why wasn’t I told about this Ebola virus sooner?” His Latvian accent was even stronger than normal, an indication of his anger. “This can destabilize the Middle East.”

“That’s a bit of an overreaction,” Broderick said. “The hotheads learned their lesson in the Gulf War.”

“You,” Serick rumbled, “missed the real lesson of the Gulf War.”

“And what is this so-called real lesson?” the director of central intelligence asked.

“I thought it was obvious,” Durant replied. “You don’t take on the United States unless you have nuclear weapons.”

Serick shot him a pleased look. It wasn’t often they were on the same side of an issue. “A weaponized delivery system for this Ebola virus is the poor man’s atomic bomb.”

The director of central intelligence, or DCI, sputtered. “Ridiculous. My Middle East desk had given the AIG a low priority not worth the President’s attention. I thought—”

“You didn’t think,” Serick interrupted. “The CIA is more concerned with determining policy than doing its job.”

It was the truth. The DCI was in orbit around Kyle Broderick’s political constellation, which dominated White House policy. Consequently, when the DCI had discussed the Armed Islamic Group with Broderick months before, the two of them had decided it was better to ignore the AIG than upset the President’s Middle East policy. Broderick tried to change the subject. “I had no idea the Project was such a powerful tool. I’m quite sure if we’d known about what the Armed Islamic Group was doing, the President would have responded accordingly.”

“The Project really belongs to the CIA, not the National Security Agency,” the DCI grumbled, gnawing on the bone of who controlled what. “The NSA should have never been made a separate operating agency.”

It was an old political battle and Durant had offered the Project to the government only when it was out of the CIA’s reach. In his view, the CIA had become ossified and incapable of reforming itself. “This information turned up during a test run,” Durant said. He decided a little lying was necessary to keep them focused on the threat. “My technicians can explain how it happened but it was pure luck. Unfortunately, we’re still twelve to eighteen months away from the Project being fully operational. But I thought you should be aware of what we discovered.”

“You should have shown it to me first,” the DCI grumbled.

“What is important at this time,” Broderick said, “is that we determine a proportional response to this threat.”

“I never understood that term,” Durant said.

“It means,” Broderick said, “that the President will respond accordingly.”

12:20
P.M.
, Monday, April 19,
Sacramento, Calif.

Hank Sutherland put the finishing touches on his apartment, making sure the bookcase was dusted and his collection of pewter miniature soldiers was properly arranged. He suppressed a longing for Rosa, their former maid. But he could no longer afford her, not after the divorce, selling the house, and quitting his job. He glanced at Beth’s picture that stood in its new place on the side table. The photo was six years old but Beth Page hadn’t aged a day. He often wondered about that.
It must be in the genes
, he decided.

He checked his watch; the mail should have arrived. He went out to the mailboxes, surprised by the unusually warm temperature for mid-April. Two letters and the usual junk. The top letter was a bill that was thirty days overdue. He would have to pay it and let something else slip, especially if he was to come up with the $9,000 in prepayment penalties. The second letter was from Beth. He turned the letter over looking for the return address. There wasn’t any. He checked the postmark: JFK International Airport in New York. Beth loved to travel so that made sense. By the time he walked back to his tiny apartment, his shirt was streaked with sweat. Once inside, he turned up the air conditioner and carefully laid the letter against her silver-framed photograph without opening it.
What do you want now, Beth?

He sat down in front of the computer to work on the manuscript of
None Call It Justice
and stared at the blank screen. Nothing. The gentle whir of the air conditioner turned to a clanking sound and stopped.
I can’t believe this
, he moaned inwardly. He called the apartment manager and listened to the current crop of excuses about why it couldn’t be fixed until the next day. Rather than face the building heat that would soon turn the apartment into an oven, he opted to go out for a late lunch. He quickly showered and shaved and dressed in crisply pressed walking shorts and an open-necked sports shirt. He pulled on crew socks before slipping on his Birkenstock sandals. Just before he left the apartment, he glanced at Beth’s still unopened letter. It could wait.

Superior Court Judge Jane Evans parked her car on the levee road’s narrow shoulder across from the Virgin Sturgeon. She hadn’t meant to stop and wanted to get home to spend some time in her garden. It wasn’t often she could slip away from her office before four in the afternoon. But when she caught sight of Sutherland’s immaculately polished eight-year-old Volvo, she changed her mind. She was a big woman but moved with a fluid grace as she walked down the jetway that had been salvaged from the airport. The sheltered walkway descended to a barge that had been converted into a restaurant and bar where the trendy crowd watered. She found him sitting next to the railing staring wistfully at a cruiser heading down the Sacramento River. He was nursing a warm beer.

Without a word, she sat down at his table. “Why did you quit?” she asked.

Sutherland stared at his drink before answering. “Meredith.”

“So you lost a case after how long?”

“Four years.”

“It had to happen sooner or later.”

“That one was a slam dunk,” he replied. “Cooper was on the ropes. Those bastards were guilty and everyone knew it. What in hell happened to justice?”

“Is that the title of the book you’re writing?”

“No. I’m calling it
None Call It Justice
.”

Evans ordered an iced tea from a waitress wearing a pair of shorts that could stop traffic. “You could cause an accident dressed like that,” she told the girl. The girl smiled and flounced away, not recognizing her. “Don’t show up in my court dressed liked that,” Evans murmured. She looked at Sutherland. “How do you think I felt? Meredith took my court away from me.”

“You could have stopped him,” Sutherland mumbled.

“True, but that would have guaranteed those Neanderthals would have walked. That was a good jury. I was hoping you could save it.”

“But I couldn’t,” he muttered. “Who am I kidding? I couldn’t even save my own marriage.”

“You were a stepping stone on Beth’s path to bigger and better things. Your marriage was finished when she had the affair with Cassidy.” At the time, Ben Cassidy was the state’s attorney general and a fast-rising politician with a future on the national scene.

“Cassidy wasn’t the first,” Sutherland muttered, feeling very sorry for himself. This was not his first beer.

“Why did you put up with it? This is a small town and sooner or later, it would all have come out.”

“Beth always made sure there were, ah, consolation prizes.”

“Like Cassidy’s wife?” Evans asked, fitting the pieces together. Sutherland didn’t answer and only stared across the river. “You’re better off without her. She’s going for the whole enchilada. Besides, the word is that you can’t afford to quit.”

“I unloaded the house and moved into a small apartment. I’m on terminal leave and still in the Air Force Reserve. By pulling a couple days’ duty about twice a month I should get by.”

“Not for long,” Evans said. “Damn it, Hank, you’re one of the good ones. You can make a difference.” She saw Sutherland’s eyes glance toward the jetway and caught the slight flush on his neck. It was one of the many things that made her a good judge. That, and the fact that she cared. She turned in the direction he was looking. Marcy Bangor, the reporter from the
Sacramento Union
was standing by the reception stand. Marcy was dressed in a pair of cutoff shorts that matched the waitress’s for brevity and a halter top that was a size too small. She clopped across the deck, her high-heeled sandals announcing her entrance.

“I’ll get by,” Sutherland repeated. “Besides, I’ve got an agent in New York interested.” Marcy wiggled onto a bar stool.

“What’s the book really about?” Evans asked.

“It’s an exposé on our system of justice. Be honest, we’re just pissin’ in the wind and getting splattered by it.”

“Hank, what we’re doing is making a system work. The bottom line: Our job is to support and defend the Constitution.”

“Against all enemies foreign and domestic,” Sutherland added.

“I took an oath to make that happen,” Evans said. “Barring the second coming of Christ, it’s the best thing we got for now.”

Marcy waved from the bar. “Hi, Hank.” Sutherland waved back.

Evans came to her feet. “I think the consolation prize has arrived. Hank, get your act together. You can make a difference. But if you’re searching for perfect justice, you’ll have to look outside the courtroom.” She turned and walked away as Marcy slipped off the bar stool, the friction pulling her shorts up even higher.

“It’s hot,” Marcy said. She sat on the edge of Sutherland’s bed as he slid back the sliding doors that opened onto a patio. “What happened to the air conditioner?”

“It’s broken,” he told her. He moved a fan into the doorway and turned it on. “I hope you like getting hot and sticky.”