Law of Honor

by Michael Newton

  Chapter 9

  Bronx Zoo: April 26, 1992

  Meeting at the zoo, lost in a Sunday crowd of gawkers milling over 265 acres, had been Colonel Bobrik's idea. Stephen Barnes had narrowed their rendezvous point to the World of Reptiles, a long hall lined with terrariums of varied sizes that had been among the first things finished when the zoo opened for business in November 1899.

  Barnes liked the snakes particularly, for their stillness and incredible variety of colors, ranging from the beige of desert sand to brilliant rings and stripes in every hue of the rainbow. And of the many serpents on display, his favorite was the king cobra: more than twelve feet long and relatively drab beside its neighbors, with pale bands against an olive background, it fed primarily on other snakes. Aggressive when threatened, it had every reason to be confident. Its venom, ranked among the world's most deadly, could dispatch an elephant.

  Caspian cobras, on the other hand—the species found most often in Afghanistan and Pakistan—were smaller, three to four feet long on average, but still deadly, killing three-quarters of their human victims. Call them the mujahideen of the animal kingdom.

  Reports out of Afghanistan signaled the onset of another civil war, sparked between three guerilla armies when members of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hezb-e-Islami movement, backed by Pakistan's ISI, refused to form a coalition government with other mujahideen groups and tried to conquer Kabul for themselves. Russia had cut off aid to President Mohammad Najibullah's regime in January, forcing his resignation on April 14th in the face of mujahideen advances.

  Muslim extremists including Hekmatyar and Osama bin Laden had proclaimed a policy of "Jihad and the rifle alone; no negotiations, no conferences, and no dialogues," insisting that Islam's struggle for "liberation" would end only with reconquest of formerly-Muslim lands including Palestine, Lebanon, Chad, Eritrea, Somalia, the Philippines, Burma, South Yemen, Tashkent, Andalusia, and Bukhara in Uzbekistan. Osama claimed that credit for the USSR's dissolution "goes to God and the mujahideen in Afghanistan," while his erstwhile American sponsors had "no mentionable role."

  And religious mayhem was certainly spreading. Bosnia's war between Muslims and Christians had begun in March, after a chaotic referendum prompted claims of independence from Yugoslavia, leading to creation of a shaky "Bosnia Task Force USA," supported by Pakistani-born imam Abdul Malik Mujahi and ex-convict Rap Brown, known these days as Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin. Salafi jihadist Afghan Arabs battled against Serb and Croat militias, with atrocities recorded on all sides.

  Algeria was another incipient war zone, still proud of its bloody rebellion against French colonial masters between 1958 and '62. Renewed civil war was raging there as well, involving Al-Qaeda, the Armed Islamic Group led by Mohammed Allal (aka "Moh Leveilley"), and Egyptian veterans of the Afghan war mobilized as Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman's Islamic Group, already killing hundreds of civilians. Abdel-Rahman's people were also active in Egypt, striving without success so far to topple the government of ex-Vice President Hosni Mubarak, promoted following the 1981 assassination of Anwar Sadat by jihadists within his own army.

  Pakistan, or course, was still in turmoil, native Muslim extremists and exiled Afghani mujahideen seething with rage against first female prime minister Benazir Bhutto. She was out of power at the moment, since ISI spooks had rigged 1990's election for the conservative Islamic Democratic Alliance, but as Leader of the Opposition Bhutto clearly had her sights on reelection next year. At Al-Qaeda's Pakistani headquarters, Osama bin Laden staunchly denied any ties to America—dubbed "the Great Satan"—and vowed unending war against the West. Langley's PR flacks continued painting tales of past support for Al-Qaeda as "sheer fantasy" and "simply a folk myth," but no one in the know was buying it.

  Turning from the cobra's placid stare, Barnes gazed along the building's central corridor and saw Bobrik approaching, idly snacking from a bag of popcorn. There was time for Barnes to make one final sweep, checking for likely spies and finding none, before he moved off on an intersecting course.

  Midtown Manhattan: July 12, 1992

  Erin O'Hara sat with shopping bags between her feet, enjoying a pastrami sandwich at the food court in Manhattan Mall and thinking about JFK. The mall was relatively new—opened three years ago, a half-block from the Empire State Building on West 33rd Street—and nothing in its décor spoke of martyred presidents, but Erin's history inclined her toward that train of thought.

  She'd absorbed stories of the assassination from her grandfather and father as she came of age. More recently, in January, the New York Post had run an interview with longtime Mob lawyer Frank Ragano, presently working on an autobiography with veteran Times reporter Selwyn Raab, that included details of Ragano's dealings with Jimmy Hoffa and two top mafiosi, Carlos Marcello and Santo Trafficante Jr. All three were dead and gone now, settling any quibbles about lawyer-client confidentiality, and Ragano was spilling all he knew or claimed to know about events in Dallas back in 1963.

  According to the Post, Hoffa had sent Ragano as an emissary to the Mafia, meeting both leaders at the Royal Orleans Hotel, soliciting their help to kill the president. More to the point, both mobsters "gave the impression" of willingness to comply. By now, it was old news that Marcello had copped to the murder while he lay delirious in a prison infirmary, and now Ragano claimed he was one of four men who'd heard Trafficante's deathbed confession to the slaying in March 1987, Santo complaining that Marcello had gone off half-cocked and killed the wrong Kennedy brother. Jim Garrison, dying of cancer in New Orleans, chimed in with fresh accusations against CIA man Clay Shaw, himself deceased for eighteen years.

  All proving…what, exactly? Nothing that would ever find its way to court.

  The Bureau, meanwhile, had sustained another loss. In March, Agent Stanley Ronquest Jr., a twenty-one-year veteran, had been shot in Kansas City while gathering documents for a probe of links between Teamsters and organized crime. Despite that circumstance, witnesses claimed the shooting seemed to be a random act by two muggers who'd demanded Ronquest's wallet, then killed him in a scuffle and fled with his service pistol. In early July, G-men had arrested half-brothers Richard Primm and Robert Pearson, holding them on capital charges after they confessed in custody.

  At Bureau headquarters, the same day Ronquest died, Director Sessions had appointed longtime veteran G. Norman Christensen as the first Assistant Director of the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services Division, created in February to consolidate existing methods of dispensing rap sheets, fingerprints and crime reports to state and local law enforcement agencies. Equally helpful, created only days ago, a new ballistics database called "DRUGFIRE" went online, initially meant to link firearms used in multiple drug-related shootings, but broadly applicable to any shootings where the guns were not retrieved from crime scenes.

  Finishing her lunch, O'Hara wadded up its paper wrapping, grabbed her shopping bags, and dropped her trash into a plastic depository the size of an oil drum. Turning from the mall's second-story balcony, she glimpsed something below and stopped to take a closer look.

  Although he wasn't facing her direction, Erin recognized her colleague from the office, Agent Stephen Barnes, just paying for a beverage at the Orange Julius stand downstairs. As he received his change, Barnes half-turned, saying something to a man who stood beside him, and O'Hara heard a small alarm sound in her mind.

  She knew that other face—but how? From where? He could be someone she'd brushed past on one of Gotham's streets, or maybe she had seen him on a subway car. But, no. That faint alarm was telling her that where she'd seen him previously was a photograph, tucked somewhere in a Bureau file to which she couldn't add a name.

  Not from a personnel file, she decided. She'd have had no cause to be perusing those.

  What, then?

  Before she could decide, the two men started moving off along the mall's ground floor with drinks in hand. Erin kept pace with them along the second-story walkway, ready to retreat at once if Barnes turned back to ca
tch her.

  But unless he did, O'Hara meant to follow them.

  What else did she have going on a lazy Saturday?

  Ruby Ridge, Idaho: August 31, 1992

  Agent Wyman Gantt hadn't believed in celebrating birthdays since his father and his uncle died, but if a party had been forced on him when he turned forty-five, he wouldn't have attended it in rural Idaho, waiting for people to get killed.

  The world was falling in on Randy Weaver and his family at last. It had been ten days since the U.S. Marshal's Service tried to serve a bullshit warrant on the half-assed Aryan, hoping to bring him in on charges from the ATF that any judge with common sense would likely toss before he even set a trial date. Of course, Weaver hadn't surrendered like a normal perp would do, taking his chances with a lawyer.

  No, the marshals tried to sneak up on him, playing soldier, running into Weaver, his son Samuel, and somebody named Kevin Harris who apparently liked hanging out on Ruby Ridge with Randy's family. From there it went to hell, shots fired, and when the smoke cleared there were three dead: Weaver's boy, the family dog, and a deputy marshal named William Degan. Now the Weavers were holed up inside their compound and the marshals were afraid to rush them—which, of course, required the FBI to intervene, fielding its Hostage Rescue Team.

  Orders had come down from the top at Bureau headquarters, dispatching Wyman on September 1st because he "knew the case," albeit from a distance. What in hell was the Director thinking? Likely, from what other agents had to say, something about his new home renovations on the Bureau's dime.

  Gantt knew he wasn't adding anything to the chaotic circus atmosphere that made the siege a deadly kind of joke. So far, a Bureau sniper acting under orders from the honcho presently in charge had killed Weaver's wife on the family's doorstep, gunned down with a ten-month-old child in her arms, while wounding Harris and Randy Weaver. Still, they weren't surrendering, and who should come along but James "Bo" Gritz, ex-Green Beret turned presidential candidate for the ultra-right Populist Party, founder of a tiny Idaho community he'd labeled "Almost Heaven."

  Wyman didn't know who'd show up next, maybe a clown car packed with Bozo, Pennywise and John Wayne Gacy just for laughs. Gantt wanted out of there and was already planning ways to make damned sure none of the shit would fly in his direction when it hit the Bureau's fan.

  Regrettably, none of the other cases he was following had kept him at his comfy desk in Washington. He flown down to Miami briefly, for the wrap-up of the Yaweh trial in May, arriving just in time to see cult leader Hulon Mitchell Jr. and six of his devoted kooks—all named "Israel"—convicted of conspiracy and racketeering, even though they'd been acquitted of the worst counts: fifteen gruesome murders carried out at Mitchell's bidding, bringing home the severed ears of homeless white people to make "Yahweh ben Yaweh" feel like his lunacy was serving "God." Ex-football star Robert Rozier had been the prosecution's key witness, confessing to seven murders he'd committed at Mitchell's behest, but the gang still wouldn't serve what Wyman considered appropriate time. Instead of life imprisonment, Mitchell got eighteen years, his acolytes fifteen to sixteen years each. Rozier, who'd been dumb enough to cop a murder plea, was in for twenty-two years, if he lasted that long in the world of racist prison gangs.

  Speaking of which, the Black Guerrilla Family was making news again out west, in Oakland. Member Michael "Mutawally" Cooperwood had stabbed a gang associate, then shot a BGF convict's wife whom Cooperwood had promised to "look after" while the husband was locked up. He hadn't managed to kill either one of them, but charges of attempted murder were on tap to put him back inside.

  Fools never learn, Gantt thought. And it was just as well for him. Without radicals bent on tearing down society, how would Wyman have spent his life?

  A shout went up along the Bureau firing line behind him and Gantt turned to hear muted, scattered applause. The call that had alerted him echoed among the mountain's evergreens.

  "Heads up! They're coming out!"

  Harlem: September 14, 1992

  Payton Sawyer finished reading over his retirement papers and the resignation letter that he'd typed again from scratch last night, making damned sure he dotted all the i's and crossed the t's. He didn't want some silly typo or omission foiling his escape from BOSS and NYPD after all the years he had invested in a losing game. Not wasted years, exactly, but he wasn't proud of much that he'd achieved since putting on a badge. At best, he'd spent the better part of forty years sticking his finger in a leaky dyke.

  And what about at worst?

  Some people might've said he'd spent his whole life helping white men hold his people down, and Payton couldn't argue with them when he thought about it. Over time, he'd understood the demons that his father must have grappled with, serving the FBI and then the FBN, reporting on another generation's "radicals" and doing what he could to lock them up. Sometimes he wondered if his old man had been lucky at the end, collapsing from a heart attack during the biggest, best day of his life, the afternoon when Dr. King stood up and gave his dream speech at the Lincoln Monument in Washington.

  There wasn't much left for Payton to do on the job, even if he'd still possessed the energy. JoAnne Chesimard was safe and sound in Cuba with her daughter, almost an adult now in her own right, and a rapper known as "Paris"—birth name Oscar Jackson Jr., formerly a Black Muslim—had some out with "Assata's Song" on an album he called Sleeping with the Enemy.

  Sawyer didn't mind that Jackson had ripped off the album's title from last year's Julia Roberts movie about wife-beating. He didn't care so much that most of Jackson's lyrics struck his ears as garbled gibberish that Payton couldn't understand. What did it mean, for instance, when the so-called singer growled, "It's better to have nothin' than somethin' at all"?

  Screw it. So what if the "music" celebrated a fugitive from justice? Another line from the song summed up how he had come to feel about NYPD: "The time had come for me to break away from that."

  Starting right now.

  Sawyer slid his exit papers into a manila envelope and went downstairs to catch the next subway train bound for One Police Plaza.

  Birmingham, Alabama: November 3, 1992

  It had been another bad year for the Klan. Now David Jordan wondered if the new year coming up would turn out being better for America at large.

  Convicted lyncher Henry Hays had sought reversal of his 1984 death sentence from the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals, but that three-judge panel had turned down his motion in February, denied a rehearing in April, then denied certiorari in June. Dave supposed Hays would try again in federal court, but he'd about run out of viable issues and must be getting nervous now, thinking about that Huntsville gurney and the needles that some guard would be inserting in his arms.

  The big loser this year, Klan-wise, was David Duke. Of course, he'd "quit" the Klan twelve years ago—although he still showed up at rallies every now and then—and had his eyes fixed on the Lily White House, but he wouldn't be the new guy moving into Lincoln's bedroom or the Oval Office come New Year's. He'd run as a Republican in this year's presidential primaries, and while he'd picked up 119,000-odd votes along the campaign trail, not a single delegate had voted for him at the GOP's August convention in Houston.

  What was he even thinking? Who could have believed Republicans would turn their backs on the incumbents, Bush and Quayle? Maybe a character who thought too highly of himself and his appeal to grassroots voters.

  Of course, there'd been opposition to the party's bumbling, often embarrassing "ins." Quayle proved he couldn't spell "potato" when he'd visited a spelling be at Rivera Elementary School in New Jersey, and Bush pronounced himself "amazed" at his first glimpse of a supermarket bar code scanner at the National Grocers Association meeting in Orlando. So what? Did anyone on Earth expect the GOP's top dogs to be a couple of regular guys?

  If so, dream on, America.

  The problem, clearly, was a split inside the party. "Journalist" Pat Buchanan, a far-right ex-advisor t
o Presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan, had reaped nearly 3 million primary votes and doomed billionaire libertarian Ron Paul's dream of running the nation, while Duke laid claim to the party's fascist wing, and while Bush ultimately carried the convention, he'd foolishly handed the keynote speech to Buchanan, whose rant about a "religious war" alienated most of the GOP's moderates and its tiny handful of surviving liberals.

  With that in mind, it was no surprise when Democrats nominated Arkansas governor Bill Clinton with Tennessee senator Al Gore when they convened at Madison Square Garden. Tonight, Clinton had beaten Bush with a decisive margin of 5.8 million popular votes, trouncing him in the Electoral College with 370 votes to 168. That victory had been foretold on the last night of the Democratic National Convention, with the strains of Fleetwood Mac's "Don't stop thinking about tomorrow."

  Here in Alabama, Democrats seemingly had stopped looking to the future. Lifelong party leaders had been jumping ship in droves, even George Wallace granting that he'd voted for the Bush-Quayle ticket. Son George Jr. hadn't left his father's party yet, but he'd miscalculated badly by running for Congress this year, halfway through his second term as state treasurer, and the move had backfired on him, with black voters rallying against his father's bitter memory.

  Dave wondered once again if he had grown too settled where he was, halfway across the country from the remnants of his East Coast family and their nefarious activities. He felt no burning need to see Gotham again, and yet…

  San Salvador: November 16, 1992

  Sometimes Hardy Gantt wondered if he had "gone native," as some honchos at Langley liked to say of agents who'd grown too accustomed to field work in a particular location. No one had accused him of it yet—at least, not to his face—but if they had, Gantt guessed he would've said familiarity let him be better at his job than others who had never set foot anywhere outside the States.