Steve Martini
Shadow of Power
Free With Bonus Material
A Paul Madriani Novel
To my cousin Al Parmisano, to my assistant, Marianne Dargitz, and to my daughter, Megan, without whose constant encouragement and support this work would not have been possible
Contents
Prologue
The sugar-white powder was so hot on their feet that…
One
I open the envelope and start to paw through the…
Two
It is an axiom of criminal defense that a good…
Three
Seven hours in the air allow me to make up…
Four
At the airport, my trip from JFK in New York…
Five
I had barely entered my hotel lobby when I felt…
Six
If you think politics is the occupational calling of the…
Seven
Upstairs, the walls of the main courthouse are decorated with…
Eight
The framers of the Constitution may have been brilliant, but…
Nine
Every seat is now filled. The overflow is sent back…
Ten
Ten minutes turns into an hour, a good part of…
Eleven
Saturday morning, and the small Craftsman bungalow on Coronado, the…
Twelve
Monday morning, and Quinn’s courtroom is like a pool filled…
Thirteen
By the time the prosecutor finishes with Detrick, the morning…
Fourteen
The next morning on my way to court, I find…
Fifteen
Why would the killer remove the gloves before he left…
Sixteen
I am told that the phenomenon on the surface of…
Seventeen
Eight o’clock Saturday morning, and I’m planted in my favorite…
Eighteen
Monday morning Harry and I hook up at the same…
Nineteen
The subpoenas, all three of them, went out this morning…
Twenty
Harry called Herman in Washington at the crack of dawn…
Twenty-One
Quinn takes the noon break. I ask for a meeting…
Twenty-Two
They say bad news comes in threes. I believe it.
Twenty-Three
Monday morning, and Harry and I are back in the…
Twenty-Four
As we head off to court Tuesday morning, Harry and…
Twenty-Five
The problem we are having is with the video, the…
Twenty-Six
Quinn calls the lunch break, and Harry and I meet…
Twenty-Seven
The next day, to avoid the media crush downstairs, Quinn…
Twenty-Eight
When Harry and I arrived at the courthouse just after…
Twenty-Nine
We have rested our case. The trial of Carl Arnsberg…
Thirty
Because of the riots, Quinn has had to move the…
Thirty-One
Over the phone that night, Harry and I put our…
Afterword
Rule of Nine Excerpt
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Other Books by Steve Martini
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
PROLOGUE
May
Curaçao, the Dutch Antilles
The sugar-white powder was so hot on their feet that they skipped and took long strides across the distance to the darker sand cooled by the surf. Here incoming waves piled up small pieces of sharp, broken coral and created a steep shelf in the shallow water.
Arthur Ginnis had trouble hobbling through the ankle-deep waves and nearly fell as his feet slid down the coral shelf into deeper water. To someone still recovering from hip surgery, the warm, clear salt water of the Caribbean was like therapy. He moved out until it was up to his chest, at which point he slipped his mask and snorkel on top of his head and started to pull the swim fins onto his feet.
The sun glinted off the aquamarine surface of the sea. Behind them a large four-masted schooner was tied up to the dock at the end of the jetty, full of tourists on a trip to one of the other islands. Another, larger vessel, a research ship, was moored farther back in the lagoon. The island was dotted with deep lagoons and coves cut into the coral rock by eons of erosion. It was a smuggler’s paradise.
But Ginnis and his young friend had another mission in mind. Locals had told them about a small tugboat sunk on the reef several hundred yards out. Hip or no hip, Ginnis was determined to dive on it. The doctors wouldn’t allow him to use tanks any longer. They told him he was too old. So he was relegated to free diving with a mask and snorkel. The tug was said to be in shallow water, not more than twenty feet down. It was perfect, even though his wife had protested, raised hell as only she could, and told him she wasn’t happy, that he was being foolish. Ginnis was tired of being housebound, after months of recovery from the surgery. If this was a vacation, he was going to enjoy it.
The hot sun and tropical images triggered all the senses of the imagination, of adventure and romance. At seventy, Ginnis was an irrepressible romantic. Whenever he had time to read for pleasure, which wasn’t often, Treasure Island remained from his youth as one of his favorite books. It was for this reason that he always returned to the islands at least once each year. The vacation house they owned on St. Croix had been damaged the previous year in a hurricane. So this year they’d rented a house in Curaçao. It was perfect, since nobody on the island knew who he was. Even the local paper was published in Dutch. It was something from a pirate fantasy. It kept him close to the dreams of his childhood—the adventure of tropical seas and the lure of finding something of history buried in the sand. As foolish as it might appear for a grown man, particularly someone of Ginnis’s stature, these surroundings gripped his imagination and held him captive.
He considered it a major coup that he’d managed to ditch the U.S. Marshals Service, his usual companions. He had accomplished this with the help of Alberto Aranda.
Aranda was in his early thirties, old for a court clerk. But then he had gone to law school late, after serving a stint with the Peace Corps in Africa, in, of all places, the Sudan. He was as tough as a marine, and an expert diver. Ginnis didn’t tell anyone, but it was one of the reasons he’d hired Aranda, that and the fact that he liked him.
As always, Ginnis was thinking ahead, in this case planning for the summer. After all, he was on light duty from the Court. They didn’t expect to see him back full-time for at least six months. Time to have some fun.
“You can count this as one of the better perks of clerking.” Ginnis puffed a bit. He was out of shape, the result of his long recovery. With the new hip, he now had as much metal in his body as your average robot.
Aranda, six feet and slender, looked at him, smiled, the kind of expression Ginnis might have expected from the son he never had. His only regret was that Aranda had not been on staff in the same year as Trisha Scott, the surrogate daughter he’d had as a clerk the year before. Aranda was the kind of man Trisha needed, not that fraud Scarborough, a counterfeit intellectual addicted to self-promotion. Ginnis spit into his dive mask and worked it around. The whisper of a smile lingered on his lips as he considered what was about to happen.
“You sure you’re up to this?” Aranda interrupted the reverie. “First time in open water since the surgery, you should take it easy. That’s what the doctor said. Go slow.”
“I’m fine. And the doctor isn’t here. Just try to keep up.” Ginnis pulled the strap behind his head and dropped the mask over his face. He mouthed the snorkel, took a few deep breaths, then launched himself headfirst into deeper water.
He was stiff as a board. The muscles in his legs ached from lack of exercise. He had tried to stay fit all his life. With hardly an ounce of fat, he was as sinuous and wiry as in his youth. It was true that many of his generation, given the advances in medicine, genetics, and the new drugs, might well live past one hundred. And given the political knife’s edge, what passed for balance on the Court these days, there were members of Congress who prayed daily for judicial immortality.
Visibility in the clear water made it seem as if he were looking through air—infinite. Large oval masses of brain coral loomed up from the bottom as Ginnis glided over them, flicking the fins on his feet, his arms trailing along at his sides, like flying in a liquid sky. A small camera in a sealed plastic case hung from a cord around his right wrist. He snapped pictures as he went, stopping to catch coral growths, some angelfish, and at one point the smiling face and large eyes of Alberto Aranda peering out through his dive mask.
A hundred yards out, three massive mooring platforms anchored to the bottom marked their path of travel. They had gotten detailed directions to the sunken tug from the dive shop on the jetty. As they swam between the first two mooring platforms, the bottom dropped away.
Ginnis floated through a mass of bubbles rising to the surface, then saw two divers beneath him, their tanks emitting used air from the regulators. It was difficult to tell how deep the divers were. The magnification caused by the clear water played funny tricks with depth perception. It looked as if Ginnis could reach out and touch them, but the two figures appeared to be in miniature. Ginnis knew they were farther down than they looked from the surface, perhaps thirty feet, maybe more.
As he passed the third mooring platform, the surface began to take on the undulations of the sea. They were now approaching the point of land where the inlet to the lagoon poured into the open sea. Here the water was rougher. Curling white ribbons of froth capped some of the waves. The afternoon trade winds were kicking up. Ginnis struggled against the current as the neglected long muscles of his legs burned. Still he pushed himself. It was the only way to full recovery, and Ginnis was determined to recover all his former strength and agility. At his age he knew that anything conceded was gone forever.
He lifted his head from the water, dropped his feet, and did a slow pirouette looking for Aranda. He didn’t see him. He put his face back into the sea, scanning beneath the surface. As he did, seawater entered the open end of his snorkel. Ginnis panicked. He struggled to keep it from entering his mask as he coughed up salt water.
For an instant the cold, irrational hand of dread gripped him. Ever since he first started diving, he had learned that fear, particularly the blind fear of quick panic, was the deadliest killer in deep water, far more lethal than sharks or any other natural predator. And the only antidote was self-control. If you wanted to stay alive, you had to fight it, master it, as he did now.
He cleared the water in the snorkel’s tube and looked around again. There was still no sign of Aranda, but no reason for concern. Aranda was a strong swimmer. He knew what he was doing in the water. They had become separated, that was all, a common enough occurrence in open water.
Ginnis regrouped. Rather than remove his mask in the chop of the sea, he cleared it by blowing air out through his nose, holding the top of the mask to his forehead.
He placed his face back in the water to test the seal and to see if Aranda might have dived down to look at something on the bottom. It was then he saw it: a bleak gray form resting on the bottom, an occasional glint, the orange flake of rusted metal. It was the stern of a small boat beneath him and perhaps thirty feet farther out to sea.
As it had been with the divers, it was hard to tell how deep the wreck was. It looked as if it lay on a shelf. Ginnis guessed that it might have hit the shallow reef as it cut too close to the point coming out of the harbor, since its bow was facing toward the sea.
The vessel was small, maybe twenty feet in length, and old, one of the little working tugs that might have been used years earlier for close work in the many small inlets that served as harbors around the island. From its state of decay, it appeared that the boat had been on the bottom for a while.
As Ginnis floated listlessly, facedown on the surface, a small school of French angelfish, their bulging yellow eyes black-dotted by the pupils, flashed in front of him, then just as quickly returned, stopped, and seemed to stare at him. Ginnis groped for the camera on his wrist, brought it up to his eye, and snapped another picture. He lifted his head from the water and scanned the surface one more time for Aranda. The clerk must have turned back or taken the wrong route between the large mooring platforms. Sooner or later he would turn up.
Ginnis returned his attention to the sunken tug, sucked in a lungful of air, then flipped head over ass and pulled for the rusting metal hulk on the bottom.
June
San Diego, California
“I’m going to tell you something I haven’t told anyone else. Can you keep a secret?” the man at the mirror said.
“You have to ask?”
Scarborough was busy shaving in the palatial master bath in the top-floor suite at the Presidential Regis Hotel in San Diego. The room overlooked the bay and the arching Coronado Bridge off in the distance.
Dick Bonguard, leaning against the frame in the open doorway behind him, was a talent and literary agent, a man with media connections and top-notch PR skills. He had picked up Terry Scarborough as a client on the rebound from a New York literary agency a year earlier. Scarborough had wanted edgier representation, an agent who, like the second stage on a rocket, could boost his self-made celebrity beyond the grip of gravity.
Bonguard had this in spades. In his thirties, tall, blond, blue-eyed, and ruddy-faced, he had become part of the young power set in New York media circles. Even though Scarborough was ten years older, if you stood the two of them together dressed alike, they would look like a matching pair of salt and pepper shakers, Bonguard light and fair, Scarborough darker.
The relationship paid off in a smash-hit book for both men. Perpetual Slaves: The Branding of America’s Black Race, authored by Scarborough, was on its way to becoming one of those “must-reads of a generation,” as one review said. The book was cemented at the top of the bestseller list and showed no sign of budging anytime soon. Scarborough was earning his bones as the hottest fire-belching political dragon on the national scene. Colleges and universities couldn’t get enough of him. That the roots of slavery were deeply embedded in the United States Constitution and still showing was his message.
“I’m thinking about using the opportunity tonight to leak the letter,” said Scarborough.
“What? Why would you do that?” Bonguard stood in the doorway, stunned.
“I know what you’re going to say. Just listen to me for a second. I mean revealed with skill, in an offhand manner. What better venue for something like this than Leno? Scarborough looked up to make sure that Bonguard was following him.
The two men had been using code words to talk about this in front of others for months. They called it the “J letter.” It was the second and burning secret of slavery, the glowing embers of which Scarborough had stirred with his book.
“I thought the plan was to hold the letter for the sequel?” said Bonguard.
“Plans change,” said Scarborough.
The author was already sitting on $22 million in book royalties. Every week Perpetual Slaves stayed at the top of the list, the royalties grew. They hadn’t even started counting foreign sales, and with anti-American fervor peaking in Europe, Latin America, and the Near East, the prospects loomed large.
“Listen to me,” said Bonguard, “you don’t want to do that. Outing the letter now would be a huge mistake.”
“You think so?”
“Yes. There’s a rhythm to all this—it’s called timing, and if you screw with it, you’re going to pluck the golden goose.” The agent was flummoxed. As far as he was concerned, this had been nailed down months ago.
“You forget, I am the golden goose,” said the author.
“Of course you are. I know that. But we’ve been all over this,” he said. “You ride the first book to the bank as many times as it will go.”
Naturally, this meant that Bonguard was hanging on the back, riding the animal with him.
“In the meantime you take the letter, you write the second book, nobody knows anything about it, we just tease the mobs every once in a while to keep them awake, ‘blockbuster revelation on the way—same topic—plumbing the true depths of white bigotry at the founding of our nation.’
“Then, when the fury over Perpetual Slaves is just starting to ebb, we unpack the boxes and load the hardcover sequel onto the shelves. That’s when we leak it—discovery of the parchment of national shame.” Bonguard stood there looking into the mirror, making sure his client got it.
“Trust me, between the millions of zealots on the right who don’t believe it and the millions on the left who say I told you so, the fallout will send the second book into orbit.”
Scarborough continued to drag the razor across his face. “I don’t think so.”
“Are you getting cold feet?” said Bonguard. “I know you’re taking a lot of heat out on the circuit, a lot of criticism from the press about the flamethrowing speeches….”
Shadow of Power Free with Bonus Material Page 1