Jonathan wasn’t falling for this crap. “Let me get this straight, Vice-Admiral. A Navy ship rams my client’s vessel, killing a sailor. Then the Department of the Navy submits false records to a federal court. Captain Tucker, perhaps with some nudging from higher ranks, lies in depositions, lies on the stand, and falsifies logbook entries in an attempt to conceal the whereabouts of his ship. Now, you’re telling me this kind of rogue conduct makes our nation safer? That’s hogwash.”
“You’re making some pretty serious accusations.” Scarborough perched himself on the edge of his chair and gazed sternly into Jonathan’s eyes. “Don’t play with fire, Mr. Brooks.”
“You’re being awfully cavalier with your use of our court system, and it’s clear you’ve got something to hide.”
Scarborough’s face turned a bright shade of red—redder than Santa’s ass.
Jonathan wasn’t done. “And why was someone from Bolling Air Force Base following me?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Tillerman said, his eyes not even aimed at Jonathan. “We have better things to do with our time.”
“Maybe you need to check on him, a certain Anthony Gordon,” said Jonathan, sitting back in his chair. “He won’t be reporting for duty.”
“We don’t have all day to move this case along,” said Scarborough, glancing at his Navy colleague. He seemed to be recalculating whatever he had planned to throw Jonathan’s way.
Jonathan stood up. He knew he was not going to get anything more out of them. Besides, what Jonathan had really wanted from this visit was to see Tillerman in the flesh, to gauge his eyes. And now he suspected that Peyton and Tillerman were puppets of a far more powerful person. He looked sternly at the vice-admiral. “I’m headed to Europe in a few hours and before I leave I want your answer as to why the evidence has been tampered with. Here is my card, my cell phone number is on there. If I don’t hear from you, then all hell will break loose.”
Neither the vice-admiral nor Tillerman said a word. It was as if Jonathan had said nothing. Tillerman swayed gently in his chair, his fingers shuffling through a stack of papers. Scarborough crossed his legs and sighed again.
After more than a minute of silence, Scarborough finally spoke up. He cleared his throat and said, “If we go along with your allegations that the Meecham was in fact the proximate cause of your vessel’s damages, and the crewman’s death, will you cease to pursue this matter as it concerns the Navy or any other government agency and simply settle with the insurance company?”
Jonathan caught Tillerman’s expression as the vice-admiral was in mid-sentence. Tillerman appeared astonished—even appalled—at Scarborough’s semblance of compromise. Perhaps they weren’t on the same page. Jonathan now was convinced Tillerman didn’t know everything, and that someone—possibly at the DIA—was playing him like a fiddle. Jonathan couldn’t be sure. Tillerman and Scarborough were one and the same: liars.
Jonathan was tempted to agree. Gary would be delighted, he thought. The Navy’s admission would surely force the insurance company to settle and his client would be vindicated. But Jonathan couldn’t accept. The fact that such an enormous lie had been concocted showed him something far more sinister could be at play. It was a question of principal.
“You’d better explain what really happened that night in question, because I’m going to the depths of the earth to uncover what you’re hiding.” Jonathan, however, realized they had little reason to admit anything at this point. Tillerman would risk contempt of court charges, or worse, disbarment for tampering with evidence. The vice-admiral, too, risked his career if he was involved in some cover-up.
“Then I retract my earlier offer,” Scarborough said as he slammed his fist onto Tillerman’s desk. “If it’s war you want; war you shall get. You will pay a price for your stubbornness, Mr. Brooks.”
Jonathan picked up his briefcase and headed to the door. “I simply want the truth, gentlemen. My client deserves it, as does the family of the dead crewman.”
“Gary decides at your firm, not you,” Tillerman quipped. “We’ll only deal with him from now on.”
Jonathan responded only by shaking his head.
“You’re wasting your time going to Sweden,” were the last words Scarborough said as Jonathan left the room.
Jonathan was all too pleased to be leaving the lying duo. But by the time he reached the elevator, his heart just about stopped. He suddenly realized he had never told Scarborough that he was headed to Sweden, but only to Europe.
“Jesus...” Jonathan whispered to himself as the realization sank in deeper. Obviously, Scarborough knew about his airline reservation. Jonathan’s fighting instinct egged him to return to Tillerman’s office and confront the vice-admiral head on. He thought hard during the elevator ride down. Bastard.
By the time he reached the ground floor, the adrenaline was flowing like a river. But he didn’t want to fumble. And fumble he might if he headed back upstairs. The vice-admiral was capable of much more than threatening words. He had power, knew more about the case than he let on, and didn’t appear to be the kind of man who either loved lawyers or the rule of law.
Jonathan strolled to the exit. By then he had convinced himself Scarborough had not accidentally uttered those words. He wanted Jonathan to feel the crosshairs crawling over him. It was disturbing. Frightening even.
Walking toward the parking lot, Jonathan’s heart pounded in his chest. He felt in imminent danger, and this was no trivial feeling for a man who had grown up in New Orleans, a city where rich, middle-class and poor neighborhoods stand adjacent to one another, and which trains you to be vigilant and wise about spotting trouble.
An eerie feeling lingered as Jonathan drove away from the naval base. He crossed the Potomac once more, but this time headed to Dulles airport, a thirty minute ride northwest of the city.
About half-way to the airport along I-66, he glanced in the rearview mirror and saw a large, white sedan speeding along the left lane of the divided highway. It was traveling at over eighty miles per hour, he guessed. There were two people in the front seat. He continued to glance back as the car gained momentum and then suddenly he spotted the person in the passenger side hold what looked like a pistol with a long barrel.
A gun. A silencer!
He tightened his grip on the steering wheel and held his breath. The white car was flying up the highway and had pulled up behind Jonathan’s rental Oldsmobile. Before Jonathan could spark another thought, the armed passenger had rolled down the window and pointed the weapon in Jonathan’s direction. Jonathan craned his neck over his shoulder to see the threat directly, as if the mirror might have been lying. It hadn’t. The car was about to pass Jonathan’s when it suddenly decelerated to match his speed.
As Jonathan slammed on his brake pedal, his side window suddenly shattered into tiny pieces. The glass sprayed over this body and across the dashboard.
Jesus! He frantically swept the glass pebbles off his face with one hand.
The other car also braked, its tires venting thick white smoke, but it had overshot Jonathan’s compact by two car lengths. Jonathan swerved into the left lane, behind his pursuers, just as they sliced across his path into the right lane. In the rapid crisscross, Jonathan unintentionally tapped the rear bumper of the attacking vehicle, causing it to slide left. It slid further, and the car lost its rear traction. The car spun right, the loud sounds of shredding rubber tearing through the air.
Jonathan quickly swerved to avoid hitting the car again. He narrowly missed it as the front end spun past him. He glanced over his shoulder, his eyes never leaving the other car. The assailants who had nearly ended his life a split-second ago spun out of control into the grassy median. Their car began rolling. Two of the doors instantly flew open, ejecting one man into the air as it twisted violently into a huge ball of metal, asphalt and soil. Jonathan kept going and stared at the rearview mirror at the wreckage as it came to a standstill in a cloud of dirt.
“Holy crap,” he ba
rked, now thinking only of getting the hell out of Dodge. He sped up. Fortunately, there had not been another car nearby, and no witnesses to jot down his license plate. His heart was racing.
A couple miles before reaching the airport, he exited the highway to clean most of the glass off the floor. The bullet had come close, finding its resting spot in one of the center console’s adjustable vents.
He drove to the Hertz lot and told the attendant the window was broken and that it had not worked after he’d rolled it down. Jonathan quickly headed to the terminal, assured that by the time the rental car staff noticed that the window was not there at all, he would be comfortably seated in his plane.
Jonathan had been lucky. He had made it safely to the plane, albeit with only two minutes to spare, but an overwhelming sense of confusion, fear and disbelief haunted him as he waited for the airplane to leave the gate. He was convinced Tillerman and Scarborough were behind this attempt on his life. Before boarding, he had tried to reach Gary, but all he could do was leave a quick message on Gary’s voice mail, telling him about the incident and warning him that anyone associated with the case was in mortal danger. The long flight to Sweden would be filled with perplexing thoughts about his near-death experience. Nothing would be the same again.
* * *
News anchor desks are the antithesis of a newsroom. They are spotless, brightly lit places where persons trained in the art of speaking flawlessly inform their communities of the good, the bad and the absurd.
But cameras never show the real newsroom, the loud, chaotic motor at the heart of Channel 6, where insults and bad English fly freely, where yelling is the norm and where almost everyone indulges in self-importance while also secretly harboring a desire to do something vastly more fruitful with their lives.
“Five minutes to airtime,” yelled a woman somewhere behind Linda, who was waiting for the last draft of a story to pop up on her screen, while at the same time concentrating on the plan she had concocted.
“Where the hell is Charles?” another loud voice rang out.
Linda laughed and turned to the evening weather anchor next to her and said, “You know there’s a problem when the makeup guy can’t be found and our co-anchors are bald and old.”
Seth shook his head and grinned. They were the only two on the Ten O’clock News team who weren’t.
“So, you want to hear my segue for tonight?” he asked, as he did every night.
“Let me guess...” Linda said, turning her head sideways and holding back giggles. “Given that the last news bit will be about that two-headed snake found in the back of a taxi, I’d imagine you could be quite inventive.”
“Uh-oh, is that the last piece?” he asked worriedly. “I thought it was the story about that truck towing the double-wide trailer under a bridge and ripping the roof off.”
“Nope, it got tossed.”
“Damn, I had the perfect line...And tonight you won’t need a roof over your head either, since the weather will be clear.”
“Gag!” Linda said, shaking her head. “Thank God we won’t have to hear that one.”
“I can still do a lot to segue from the two-headed snake.”
“Three minutes!” the same woman yelled.
“You’re outta time,” Linda replied, hoping he would simply drop the segue, if just for tonight.
Linda leaned left and glanced past her monitor at the assignment desk—the command post—where the loudest person in the station stood, his elbows spread wide and his hands planted on his large waistline.
“Okay, let’s hustle,” he barked, and then turned to his attentive cadre of interns, who followed him like flies.
“Are we cleared for the Hammond baby-switching story?” Linda asked her newscast producer at the center of the octopus-like assembly of tables.
He returned a thumbs-up.
“Done,” she uttered and hit the enter key, prompting her printer to spit out the last couple pages of the script, freshly uploaded from the copy editors, who were glued to their monitors ten feet away.
One last thing. She picked up the phone and dialed Tim, the all-around helper, whose most appreciated skill was to work the teleprompter, and to do it perfectly.
“You know it’s not in there, right?” Linda asked him. “Remember what we talked about?”
“Sure, no problem,” Tim replied. “I’ll work around it.”
Linda smiled. “You’re my hero.”
She stood up, yanked the pages from the printer and headed to the anchor desk at the far end of the room. As she took her seat, two staffers swarmed around her. One quickly attached her microphone and the other directed the cameramen to test each shot.
Linda inserted her earpiece and immediately began hearing three or four voices stepping over each other to form a chaotic chatter. Her producer was asking about the satellite feed. The director was telling her to leave out the “T” when pronouncing the name of the convicted murderer George Faggot. The associate director was complaining about the lighting. And for some reason the audio operator was humming an Elvis tune until another voice yelled at him to stop.
But the showpiece of this evening came to Linda as a complete surprise. Brett, her co-anchor, appeared out of the dark perimeter of the stage in a mustard-colored suit, with a bright red tie to boot. Under the bright lights, and with his pasty skin and large bald head, he looked like a giant French fry, with a touch of Catsup.
Someone should yank his clothing allowance, she thought, before reminding herself that he was one of the best in the business. A great voice, that is. A stocky man, ten years her senior, he never hid his desire for her coveted lead anchor position. Not with that suit, you won’t.
Several more lights came to life. The director gave the cue, the theme music echoed from the speakers overhead, and the little bulb above camera two glowed red.
“Good evening from the Channel 6 Newsroom,” Linda began. She started with the grim news of the day: a suicide at a downtown high-rise, the accidental electrocution of a teen in the Ninth Ward and a liquor store heist gone real bad. The first set of commercials passed, as did her next segment, and the second commercial break, and then her co-anchor introduced the fluffy news of the day.
As she followed the teleprompter, she knew her cue was coming up. Any second now. And, regardless of what el commandante in the control room might think, she was going off-script, come hell or high water.
The teleprompter stopped, as she had requested of Tim. The French fry basted under the lights, his deep voice carrying his story about a recovering one-legged pelican as if it would profoundly influence the lives of the station’s two hundred thousand viewers.
She gazed at him as one would at a circus act turned dull. She skipped her segue to give herself more time. A ninety-second window was all she had, and every word lined up at the tip of her tongue.
“It’s not every day when a commercial case in Federal District Court downtown draws the attention of the media,” she said, turning away from Brett to face camera four.
“What’s going on...” someone said loudly into her earpiece.
She ignored it. “But over the past couple of days, the case of Victory Lines v. Sentinel Insurance Group has exploded into a bizarre mystery fit for the movies. In testimony over whether there was a collision between a New Orleans-based freighter and a U.S. Navy vessel, the captain of the military vessel lied under oath. And he was caught.”
A screaming match erupted in Linda’s earpiece. The boys in the control room had a rogue anchor in their midst. She had done it before—once. Today, she reminded them she could do it again. That’ll teach them to turn down a story I find important, she reasoned, relishing her audacious rule-breaking.
“Attorneys for the shipping company are looking for your help,” continued Linda, pulling her earpiece out as the tirade became unbearable. “If any of you viewers served in the Navy in March 1989 in the North Sea or Baltic Sea, please call us here at the station.”
She gla
nced at Brett, and that’s when she just couldn’t resist something more. “We’ve asked the pelican, but he was in the Gulf at the time.”
The weatherman was convulsing in laughter, as was the sports anchor, who had just taken his seat. The teleprompter kicked in. She smiled and the next approved story exited her lips as if nothing had happened. Such misbehavior. It was a perk of being the star anchor, though she’d still have to go through the motions of being scolded by the paper tigers.
* * *
Jonathan took his place in line at Swedish passport control. He was tired, having changed planes in London, which made the trip seem even longer than he’d feared. But his greatest concern was for his safety. He wondered if his arrival in Stockholm would be as delightful as the drive-by near Dulles.
During the flight, Jonathan had questioned his decision to travel so far to inquire on a small newspaper article about a crash, given that he was nearly killed. He was tempted to take the next plane back and call the authorities. But something inside him persuaded him to follow his gut. If indeed Scarborough and Tillerman were behind the whole thing, they had felt compelled to try to stop him from going to Sweden. And if that was the case, he was surely onto something big.
At the terminal, he again tried to reach Gary. His secretary said he had gotten Jonathan’s earlier message, but was in court and not reachable by cell phone.
“Is there a number he can call you at?” she asked.
“No, I’m still traveling. I’ll try again later.” Jonathan didn’t want to tell her where he was headed. “Just tell Gary to ask Allen where I’m going.” The message had to be cryptic, since he feared the phone lines were tapped.
Jonathan had planned to take a shuttle south to Stockholm’s smaller airport, Bromma, and head from there to Gotland. But now he needed to cloak his path with anonymity. Fortunately, he had not booked a continuing flight to Gotland, so there was no way anyone would know of his intention to reach the island. He realized a ferry ride would offer him a more discreet mode of transportation, but he had to ensure no one at the airport would follow him to the dock. After claiming his luggage, Jonathan quickly headed to an information desk and asked about the ferry. It left from Nynäshamn, a town about a forty-five minute drive south of Stockholm. Scanning his surroundings with great care, he headed to a cab at the curb and asked to head into town. As the cab pulled away from the terminal, Jonathan eyed the traffic behind him. There were other cabs, a few private cars, a minivan, and a bus. A few minutes passed.
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