Authors: Stephen Coonts
“Try the phone book.” Jake cradled the receiver without saying good-bye. “Jake, that was rude.”
“Oh, Callie!”
“Well, it was.”
“That damned kid calls me at home and asks me to give him classified information? Bullshit! You tell him the next time he’s conjugating some verbs for you that he had better never pull this stunt on me again or I’ll rearrange his nose the next time I meet him.”
“I’m sure he didn’t know the information was classified,” Callie said, but she was talking to herself Her husband was on his way to the bedroom.
Well, she told herself, Jake was right. A reporter should know better. Yocke’s young. He’ll learn. And fast, if he spends much time around Jake.
That evening when Harrison Ronald arrived at Freeman Mcationally’s house for work, Ike Randolph met him at the door.
“Freeman wants to see you.”
Ike grinned. It was more of a sneer, Harrison thought, and he had seen it before, whenever someone was about to lose a pound of flesh. Ike enjoyed the smell of fear.
In spite of himself, Harrison Ronald felt his heart accelerate. For some reason his armpits were instantly wet. Ike patted him down. That was routine, but this evening was more thorough than usual-on purpose, no doubt.
Ike Randolph, convicted armed robber, convicted child rapist-you had to have the milk of human kindness oozing
your pores to like Ike. He had, Harrison knew, grown in the same cesspool that spawned Freeman. Mom ly had fed them both and paid bail when they got arrested for shoplifting and, later, stripping cars. She hadn’t had the money to bail them out when they were caught mugging tourists. Ike had had the gun and taken the felony fall; Freeman had pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor. Yet after his plea Freeman spent ten more days in jail while Ike walked on probation. The two of them still liked to laugh about that when they were drinking.
Several years later a judge decided to let Ike do a little time after a six-year-old girl required surgery on her vagina and uterus following Ike’s attentions. He had had a couple of minor possession convictions since-nothing serious.
This evening Ike gave Harrison a little shove after he finished frisking him. “Hey! “Shut up, motherfuck! Go on. Freeman’s waiting.”
Mcationally was sitting on a sofa in the living room at the back of the house. Both his brothers were there too. Ike closed the door behind them. “Called you this morning,” Freeman said.
Harrison Ronald concentrated on managing his face. Look innocent! “Where were you?”
“Ou. I do that every now and then.”
“I don’t gimme no sass. I don’t take sass from nobody.”
“Hey, Freeman. I just went out to get some tail.”
“What’s her name?” This from the eldest of the brothers, Ruben. He was the accountant.
“You don’t know her.”
Freeman stood up and approached Ford, who was still trying to decide if he should break Mcationally’s arm and use him for a shield when Freeman slapped him. “You weren’t at your pad last Wednesday either. You’re gonna tell me the truth, bro, or I’m gonna unscrew your head and shit in it. What’s her name?”
This appeared to be an excellent time to look smred, and Harrison did so. It was ridiculously easy. The fear was
boding. “Her name’s Ruthola and she’s married. We got this thing going. I sneak over on Wednesday morning when the kid’s at day care. Honest, Freeman, it’s just a piece of
Freeman grunted and examined Ford’s eyes. Ford forced himself to meet his gaze. Mcationafly’s deep brown eyes looked almost black. The urge to attack was almost overpowering:
Harrison flexed his hands as he fought it back.
“Christ, her ol’ man might be home.”
“So this’ll be the end of a good thing. A piece of ass ain’t worth your life, is it?”
“Not to me.
her.
Freeman Mcationally picked up the phone on the table by the couch and motioned to the one on the other side of the room. Ford lifted the indicated instrument from its cradle and dialed.
It rang on the other end. Once. TW-ICE. Three times. Harrison held his breath.
“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. deded, would be a good place for the truth. He got it out: “disHe’s FBI.”
They stared at him with their mouths open, frozen. Harrison tried another grin, which came out, he thought, like a clown leerinv
“You stupid-was Ike roared from behind him. “Of all the Freeman giggled. Then he laughed. The others began laughing. The laughter rose to a roar. Freeman Mcationally 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, look
outs, and so on-people from every nook and cranny of the drug business. At some point in their interrogation by police comor FBI or DEA they were asked where they got the drug, when, how much, and of course, from whom.
Liamkos’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 unless Liarakos wanted to try to subpoena a witness himself and introduce testimony he hoped would be exculpatory.
Exculpatory, a mjity 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 x”…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 lawyees 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 prowmtion had sufficient evidence to convince any twelve men and women that Chano Aidana was imbedded to his eyes in the drugsmuggling business. Yet there was more to it than that. The
ole thrust of the government’s case was that Aldana was the kingpin of the entire Medellin cartel, some Latin can 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 Aidana 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 Aidana 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 their 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 Aidana would continue to look like an underdog. Even the sheer weight and number of the prosecution’s witnesses would be turned against the government comLiarakos 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
Aldanals character an issue, but not otherwise. In this whole pile there is not one possible witness who had direct contact MthMa.”
“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 Aidana is going to walk.”
Liarakos examined her face carefully. “That’s our job, Judith. We’re tying 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 extradicted him to the United States. We’re not defending him from a murder charge.”
“Colombia couldn’t try him. Get serious! In 1985 fortyfive leftist guerrillas drove an armored car into the basement of the Colombian 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 yourseIP”
diseaJudith, 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.” ptuously. .41
“Semantics,” Judith s muttered contem 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 proba
another two thousand counts that haven’t been charged. is a dope smuggler, a terrorist, an extortionist, a man 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.”