“Said the guy getting rich off refugee labor.”
“The international relief orgs manage the labor now,” said Lecker. “And we pay a fair wage.”
“And the uppity ‘workers’ have stopped disappearing in the cornfields.”
“Accidents do happen. But you’re right, there were excesses in the effort to save the country. Which is why we ended up on the same side in the end.”
“Better late than never,” said Donny.
Lecker laughed. “You have your father’s odd sense of humor too.” He had peeled the orange, and offered half to Donny.
“I’m sure he kept his executioners chuckling right up until they flipped the switch,” said Donny.
“Well, he stuck to his principles, which is more than I can say for many of those who capitulated to the administration as its leadership became unmoored from the principles we put them in there to uphold, and forgot its loyalties to its original supporters. I’m glad to have known him.”
Donny savored the first slice of the orange. It tasted good.
“He was an asshole,” said Donny. “But nobody deserves to die for that. Or for being born rich.”
“Some of your clients disagree.”
“True, but they’ll listen to me. I can get them to free Heather, with your backing.”
“So Lou told me. And the answer is of course we all want her freed from those lunatics.”
“You can help make that happen, Dr. Lecker. Just give me some realistic parameters to work out a deal.”
“Are you asking me for money, Donny?”
“No. The people holding your ward are asking for money. And you and I both know they have a legitimate case. Even if you don’t concede that they have jurisdiction.”
“I don’t concede anything,” said Dr. Lecker. “Especially not to those communists.”
Donny noticed the scorch sanded into the wood of the table at which they sat. Redwood, singed with the badge of the unique method of timber harvesting Heather’s family business had developed.
“Do you concede that they have her in their custody, and the power to determine her fate?”
“I understand they claim to have ‘arrested’ her. But I don’t trust anything those people say. And I don’t even know if I trust Heather. She has been lost for a long time. Not unlike you, but of an even more radical generation.”
“A kid who dares to ask where the money comes from.”
Lecker raised a derisive eyebrow.
“Just let me go work out a deal,” said Donny.
“My sources tell me you have your own reasons to want to get to New Orleans. You just want me to buy you a ticket.”
“Well, New Orleans is on lockdown. Closed to outsiders, unless you have a transit visa. I think I could talk my way through, but having an official purpose, like being appointed to represent Heather in front of the Tributary, would definitely help me get in. I wouldn’t propose it if I didn’t care about Heather, or honestly believe I could get her home.”
“Or need the money,” said Lecker.
“That too.” Donny shrugged.
“Well, I might be persuaded to take you on, if you can get after a very different sort of deal,” said Lecker.
“What’s that?” said Donny.
“The City of New Orleans are the ones who owe me money. Seven hundred million and counting. Money I paid for the repurchase and remediation of the toxic zone they call Echo Sector. Debt which your friends in the new government there repudiated.”
“I thought you were supposed to be a smart investor. Everybody knew what crooks the administration had running that project. I bet most of that money was skimmed right off the top.”
“About a third of it,” said Lecker. “As we expected and understood. I’m not counting that. The rest of it is there in the cleaned-up soil, and in the seeds we gave them to grow in it.”
“You want them to pay that? They’re broke.”
“If they want to give us the land back, I’m positive I can make my money back.”
“They’re not giving New Orleans back, and you know it. That was the deal,” said Donny. “The price of getting them to leave Washington and take their AK-47s with them.”
“I’m not talking about the whole city,” said Lecker. “Just the part I already paid for.”
Donny bit into another slice of the orange. It had a big seed in it. He pulled it from his mouth, and then looked at it. Then he held it up.
“This is what you really want, isn’t it?”
Lecker almost smiled. “It’s not all we want, but the most important thing. They are growing our seeds. Patented organisms that we own just as we own the land on which they are grown. And they are giving them away.”
“Their law rejects the idea that you can own a living thing,” said Donny. “Especially a thing that can feed the world.”
“We won’t be able to feed the world unless we can raise the funds to continue our research. Because our designs are still not hardy enough to really propagate.”
“Not without an army of free labor.”
“Basically. Tell them we can work out a deal where they share in some of that. As a proper licensee.”
“And then they will remind me the reason they have detained Heather. That Promethean Resources owes New Orleans a lot more than they owe you. The value of seven hundred million trees in the forests, or something along those lines.”
“A fanciful narrative wrapped in a simulation of law,” said Lecker. “You know that. They want us to pay for things Heather’s grandfather did, because some egghead came up with a half-baked theory that trees should have rights?”
“If corporations have rights, why not trees?”
Lecker harrumphed at that one.
“You don’t have to buy it,” said Donny. “But I think the better argument is that you can’t make the shareholders pay out of their own pockets for things the management did.”
“Yes, absolutely,” said Lecker. “Go with that.”
“They already awarded the judgment, though,” said Donny. “So the deck is stacked. But what if I got them to forgive it? You forgive the repudiated debt in exchange.”
Lecker leaned forward. “I didn’t agree to meet with you, Donny, because I wanted to work out some loser’s version of a ‘win-win’ deal. I agreed to meet with you because Lou made a very smart point to me, the kind of strategic insight only a first-rate trial lawyer like him can provide: that with you, we have an opportunity to enlist on our side someone the other side thinks is on their side. I am persuaded that is worth a try. But if you want me to pay you, as I know you do, then you will need to help me win. The Council needs to stop giving away our seeds. And they need to drop this retributive case against the company. In exchange, we will help them feed their people and achieve prosperity beyond their crunchy little imaginations.”
“Don’t forget about Heather,” said Donny.
“Of course not,” said Lecker. “That’s an essential part of the package. The most important part.”
Donny wondered if Lecker would be happy to have Heather out of the way.
He looked at the old dentist, sitting atop his virtual billions, the man who helped install the regime that had trashed the country in its misguided effort to save it, and now was angling to make a new fortune feeding the people he had helped starve. Donny tried to imagine presenting his list of demands to the new leaders in New Orleans, a junta of battle-hardened guerrillas and ideologues determined to liberate entire ecosystems from people like Lecker.
“I think I can do that,” he lied.
“Excellent,” said Lecker.
“I’ll need some hazard pay in addition to my usual fee.”
“I thought we could keep it simple. I hate hourly billing arrangements, all the wrong incentives. I propose a success fee. Say, a hundred thousand dollars.”
Donny wondered if Lecker knew about his deal with Thelen. It should have been a lot of money to Donny, even though it would have been
small potatoes for the lawyers like Lou he had come up with, and chump change for a master of the universe like Lecker. But for Donny, it was just enough to cover his immediate needs. Which made him feel all the more pathetic when he found himself begging for a little more, from this guy who was going to pay him to betray the people who trusted him. Betray them again.
“We can start there,” said Donny, trying to project confidence. “But I’ll need a bit more to cover my expenses.”
“Excellent,” said Lecker. “We can throw in another ten thousand up front for per diem. I will have our lawyers draw up the paperwork.”
“While you’re at it, have them send a notice to the court in New Orleans adding me as counsel on your case.”
Lecker nodded.
“And maybe see if you can throw in some life insurance,” said Donny. “Because not everyone there will be happy to see me.”
“You seem like you can be pretty persuasive when you need to get out of a jam,” said Lecker. “And assuming you’re referring to what I think, I for one appreciate you standing up for your principles. A rare thing these days. And the other part of why I was willing to consider this proposal.”
“Plenty of people stand up for what they believe in,” said Donny. “More than ever, I’d say. Like the people you want me to persuade to compromise just that. The problem is that what most people seem to believe in the most these days is the need for people who believe in something else to die.”
Lecker laughed, a sincere guffaw from deep in the belly.
Donny didn’t think it was funny.
“Strong punishments have their place,” said Lecker. “Especially in undisciplined societies. But you were absolutely right that our president, for all his failings, did not deserve to be executed for his politics.”
“He ordered the illegal execution of his own people, Doc. You can call it politics if you want, but it’s murder. The penalty should have been death. I just stood up for my belief that the state does not have the right to murder anyone. And I made my point, even if they killed him anyway.”
Lecker nodded. “Of course,” he said, wearing a knowing grin.
“Is this where you open the door and the disappearing president walks in, tanned, rested, and ready?”
Lecker smiled big, revealing his excessively white dentist’s teeth. “And then he can help me toss you from the balcony!”
“Save that for after I get your money,” said Donny.
“Yes, right.” Lecker laughed. “But no, nothing would be worse than if the urban legends came true and he reappeared. To my surprise, an ungoverned country suits me quite well. Suits the country quite well.”
“How’s that?” said Donny.
“We can do what we want,” said Lecker.
Donny nodded. He had a pretty good idea who the “we” was. And it made him wonder if the restoration wouldn’t be such a bad thing after all.
15
Donny met with his most-hated client just once before the sentencing hearing, at the offices of the lead lawyers on the case, Weitz, Weldon & Hogan.
It was early in the year before, late winter, less than a year after the uprising. Donny remembered how cold it was that morning as he walked to the meeting, trying to make a Texas-weight trench coat keep the mid-Atlantic winds of February at bay.
The President was a prisoner of the new government. Prisoner number one. But the new government wasn’t much of a government. The situation in Washington was kind of like Donny imagined it had been when the General was in power and the students would take over a college campus. Some of the faculty and staff were still there, and everybody was secretly waiting for the National Guard to show up and restore the old order. So the deposed chief executive, who hadn’t been replaced yet and never would be if the radical wing of the rebellion had their way, lived under house arrest in a brownstone at Logan Square, guarded by English troops detailed to the peacekeeping coalition that was responsible for keeping the Americans from killing one another—and keeping their nuclear arsenal secure until the decommissioning was complete.
Donny’s responsibility that day was to keep his fellow Americans from killing just this one American. One he wouldn’t mind killing himself, if he weren’t so sick of killing.
Donny had watched the trial that determined his guilt. Everybody did. It was on all the channels.
Donny’s old colleague Percy, who had gone on to become an A-league plaintiff’s lawyer and then a member of Congress, was on the prosecution team. Percy had a personal stake in the case, and the scars and mementoes of dead friends to prove it.
Among the discoveries after the people took Washington was that the President had maintained a closed-circuit television system on his desk in the Oval Office and in the presidential bunker, through which he could access live feeds from the interrogation center that had been established at Quantico under Emergency Executive Order 37541. There had been leaks about this before, not that those kinds of leaks ever made it into the mainstream domestic press in those days—the censors mostly kept that sort of news contained to the underground whispernets. What the leakers hadn’t known was that all of those feeds were automatically recorded by the bots that managed the White House archive. An AI named Publius X, whose programming included ideological parameters that caused it to see that footage as things patriots of the future would wish to see. Would even enjoy.
While evidence from the system logs showed that the federal AIs were swapping these videos and similar content with one another, even the President himself did not know that what he watched had been encoded in the permanent record. Or that such records included the sound of his voice providing instructions to the interrogators. Instructions, suggestions, jokes, descriptions, and orders, sometimes in a dictatorial scream, other times in a distracted aside.
The prosecutors spent the second day of their case playing excerpts from these. Seven hours of excerpts.
One involved a client of Donny’s. An editor at the Houston Current who had been arrested for allegedly serving as a conduit between members of the underground. Hearing the familiar voice of the President, but a more private version of the voice—a casual conversational tone you had never heard—suggest which interrogation enhancement to deploy from the menu of techniques that had been cleared as not technically constituting “torture” was more than unsettling. For Donny, who knew the precise clinical methods each of the code words described, just the audio alone would have been bad enough. Hearing the President sing the chorus for “Yellow Submarine” in a half-assed and slightly deranged-sounding Liverpudlian accent over a speakerphone mic, and then watching the grainy footage as the interrogators in their white-room suits and masks grab the naked prisoner by the hair and dunk his head in a urine-filled toilet until he suddenly and apparently unexpectedly drowned in it, actually made Donny puke.
There was much debate in the pretrial hearings regarding whether such footage should be seen by the public, with the defense arguing it would prejudice the fact finders and some arguing it would violate the privacy rights of the prisoners and their families. But the louder voices in the cacophony fighting to direct where things went in those days argued more convincingly that all courtroom proceedings must now be conducted on camera, with all evidence available for all to see. And that everyone in the American public, especially those who had supported the President, needed to confront those truths as a first step in their reeducation and national reconciliation.
Ann Landis was the partner at WWH who had made those pretrial arguments, and the truth was, she was right. It certainly prejudiced Donny. So much so that when Ann escorted him to meet his new client, and he saw the two SAS operators in their black berets guarding the conference-room door, he felt an intense and almost eldritch sense of fear well up in him as he prepared to step through.
“Good morning, boys,” said Ann, who obviously liked having them around. Ann was a former federal prosecutor Donny had a case against some years earlier, and the member of the Preside
nt’s defense team who suggested they bring Donny in to help with the sentencing.
Donny had thought it was a good idea, until he saw the motherfucker sitting there at the conference-room table, and wondered if there was a way to kill a man with a porcelain coffee mug. If he could stab El Presidente’s eyes with his ballpoint pen deep enough to reach the brain before His Majesty’s Stormtroopers got to him.
“Happy Monday,” said Ann. “I believe most of you know Donald Kimoe.”
There were five other lawyers in there, from three different firms. They all shook hands, and introductions were made where needed.
The President remained seated there in his blue swivel armchair, sizing up Donny. They had told Donny beforehand that the President no longer shook hands, for fear of poisoning and general germaphobia. Donny said that works for me.
The President wore a very nice blue suit, with a pocket square, a red silk tie embroidered like the scales of a dragon, and the blue-black American-flag lapel pin of his officially disbanded political party. He no longer looked scary, though he still looked a little dangerous. He had been reduced to human scale. Without the klieg lights and regal trappings of office, he looked like a CEO who had just been unexpectedly fired, and now sat in the office of some HR flunkies as they collected his company phone and told him all the things he could no longer do. Maybe it was that image in his head, or maybe it was the anger and grief he felt bottled up inside, that made Donny walk right up to the guy, reach down, and remove the pin from his lapel.
“You can’t wear this anymore,” said Donny, holding up the pin. “Not if you want to live.”
You could feel it in the room when he said that. But Donny didn’t look to see the faces of the other lawyers. He just looked at the President and waited.
The President smiled, the smile of someone who still believed he had power, or would soon get it back. Power to punish anyone who angered or disrespected him.
Donny held out the pin, waited for the President to put out his hand, and dropped it in his palm. The President slowly closed his hand around the pin, then slid it into his jacket pocket.
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