Rule of Capture

by Christopher Brown

  It was harder to read the faces of the Coasties. Donny was old enough to remember when the Coast Guard was not scary, the one branch of the armed forces dedicated to helping people instead of killing them. To most of Donny’s clients, the robot bug face of the chopper jockeys was the face of the oppressor, as likely to drown you as pull you out of the water. Their visored helmets were stenciled all over town by the anonymous street artists who tagged the answers to questions real journalists were afraid to ask. Donny had cross-examined his fair share of Coast Guard special operators, successfully revealing their limited capabilities for independent thought when you took their augmented informatics away, and he resented having to bum a ride to work from them.

  He knew the feeling was mutual. He could sense it when the dude checked his ID, as if some scarlet designation flashed up on the display. Or when the copilot saw Donny stumbling through the rotor wash with his tie blowing around his neck, and signaled him to hurry the fuck up, thumbing at the open door to the back bay in a way that felt more like the finger and suggested he half-hoped the tie would get caught in one of the blades.

  Bridget Kelly was already there, strapped in with her crew. She glanced at Donny as he climbed aboard, then quickly looked away and back at the tablet on her lap, scrolling through her plans to fuck up Donny’s day.

  “Good morning, Bridget,” said Donny, once his headphones were on.

  She acted like she didn’t hear him. Maybe she couldn’t hear him, as loud as it was. Or maybe it was something in the way she looked like the orthodontist had overtightened her entire personality.

  Or maybe his case was better than he thought, and it had her worried.

  More likely, the heightened profile this case had obtained after the escape had dialed up the pressure to produce the desired outcome. Bridget’s career—and maybe more than that—rode on it.

  Seeing the stress on her face, Donny wondered if maybe that meant it wasn’t too late to work out a deal.

  He looked at the guy sitting next to Bridget to make sure they were hearing him over the wire. The guy, whom Donny hadn’t worked with before, had the look on his face of a teenager protecting his older sister.

  Behind them were the other two helping Bridget on the case, a Coast Guard JAG officer Donny remembered as Lieutenant Wachs and a tall skinny paralegal who went by Rounds.

  “I wish I had as good a team as you backing me up,” said Donny.

  Bridget kept typing.

  Donny waited.

  “Sorry we couldn’t get the clearance for your legal assistant to come along,” she said.

  “It’s okay,” said Donny. “She technically works for my co-counsel now, so I wasn’t surprised. It’s probably better this way. I’ll have more freedom without anyone looking over my shoulder.”

  The airman sitting next to little brother had turned his attention to Donny. Donny had a pretty good idea what the airman’s goggles said about him. He turned to little brother.

  “Will you help me when Bridget and this guy try to shove me through the hatch and see if I can fly?”

  “Don’t give me any ideas,” said Bridget. You could tell the airman already had the idea.

  “You know what they call that, don’t you?” said Donny, still looking at Bridget’s younger colleague. “‘Sending you on a trip to Argentina.’ Much more efficient than dealing with lawyers, especially when they just have us acting out a script where everybody knows the ending.”

  Donny pointed at the hatch, through the window, at the open sea below. The guy looked, and when he looked back at Donny, and saw how the airman was looking at Donny, you got the sense Donny had gotten through.

  Donny had heard such stories. They always sounded like urban legend, and most of the people who repeated them were the sort of folks who thought it sounded like a good thing to do, which in a way was even scarier than the stories. An extreme variation on “ship them back where they came from.”

  The red car stories had sounded like urban legend, too.

  Donny looked around the chopper and wondered where they kept the parachutes. And then he looked out the window, at the sea lapping against what passed for a coastline here in this boggy region of subtropical river deltas that had once been underwater for millions of years, and wondered why it couldn’t hurry up and get things back the way they were supposed to be.

  The chopper banked, and suddenly you could see the tanker formerly known as the Hungry Sooner floating there at the edge of territorial waters, which were conveniently marked with a line of buoys blinking as far as you could see in either direction.

  Now known as Marine Mobile Holding Camp Hotel Charlie Zero Zero Two, the Hungry Sooner had served many corporate masters in its forty years, most recently making inter-American runs for Zapata to and from the fields it had leased after the so-called liberation of Venezuela. Percy had researched its entire history, and generated a report, as they worked every angle to find holes in the legality of the setup. Zapata had leased the Hungry Sooner to ARTCo, the American Management and Retraining Company, one of the leading U.S. private prison operators. ARTCo in turn worked out a contract to operate the ship as conveniently mobile extraterritorial detention. Now that the offshore wars were all over and the detainees were not foreign nationals, but Americans who’d had their nationality taken away, the ship stayed right here within commuting distance of downtown.

  Those were not the exact words Broyles had used when he explained to Donny where the proceedings would be held.

  As the chopper came in, you could see the cage city of kennels for humans laid out across the foredeck. The detainees on the deck were all in white jumpsuits, the color issued to the compliant, who got to enjoy the open air. The others were down below, in the former storage tanks that had been converted into holding pens, two for the men and one for the women.

  That’s where Xelina was. And seeing it made Donny wonder if they could come up with a better strategy of getting her out. And maybe getting most of her shipmates out with her.

  Because otherwise, he’d have to risk ending up down in there with them.

  51

  The tribunal held its hearings aboard Hotel Charlie in a former cargo hold on one of the lower decks. To get there you walked down a long narrow hallway that passed one of the sections that had been turned into detention chambers, and when the buzzers sounded and the door opened you could hear the yelling and screaming.

  All part of the show.

  They had decided to hold the hearings on the ship rather than endure any more risks of transporting prisoners back to shore. Especially Xelina. The courtroom was improvised, with a desk for the judge up on a wooden platform, tables for each of the prosecution and defense, and two tables set together along the side with chairs for the members of the panel that served the role of a jury. There were a few more chairs along the back and sides for prosecution witnesses and government representatives as needed. The walls were metal, and the furniture and everything else was plastic. A live feed had been set up to pipe back to the room at the federal courthouse where members of the press, victims, family, and others with good cause to attend could watch the proceedings—on a forty-second delay and subject to censoring at the discretion of the security officer.

  Donny’s table had four chairs, even though they hadn’t let him bring anyone along to help him. As he settled in, he looked at the flags they had hung on the wall, the portrait of the President, and the camera over his head that would be recording the lawyers from the court’s point of view. The tribunal administrative officer came in to tell them that the audio and video were still not syncing up, and Donny imagined the reporters watching his opening like some badly dubbed character in a Japanese monster movie.

  Godzilla was not the Raymond Burr performance he had in mind.

  52

  You could say they were making the rules up as they went along, but that would give them too much credit for having rules.

  The procedural model for this new star chamber was a
hybrid of three different types of unfair trials that had been around for a very long time: the immigration and asylum proceedings that were presided over by administrative law judges who worked for the President instead of being part of the independent judicial branch; the treason and espionage trials in which only the prosecution could present secrets in evidence and political motives were excluded; and the military tribunals that had been used to summarily lock up and sometimes execute enemy combatants during the Civil War, the hot and cold wars of the twentieth century, and the more recent conflicts with terrorist insurgent groups in the hemispheric south. There had only been five of these cases taken to trial since the courts were authorized earlier that year, three of which resulted in denaturalization and a sentence of indefinite detention until the government could find a government willing to acknowledge the legitimacy of this proceeding and provide sanctuary to America’s most dangerous expatriates. The fourth was a case Miles had been handling, which he had managed to get Broyles to transfer back to regular federal court for a bench trial based on an evidentiary defect that made the outcome-oriented judge a little nervous.

  Donny had copied Miles’s strategy to get the fifth case diverted as well. That was Jerome’s.

  Thinking about the hundred or so detainees on the ship waiting their turn, Donny wondered if it was true, that denaturalization was the only sentence worse than death. To be a stateless person in a world of increasingly closed borders, locked in a penal post-American purgatory stripped of rights. Jerome had it worse than Xelina, in the end. But her case was more important, because the outcome would affect not only her future, but everyone’s.

  That was part of the reason they had moved her to the front of the line, scheduling the trial so fast that the defense would have little time to prepare.

  A trial that wouldn’t be necessary if Xelina hadn’t escaped.

  But that was past them now, and the only thing that mattered was what was happening on this ship, in this room, with this judge.

  Donny thought about the Broyles he had known as a colleague. About the things he cared about. About the quirks in his personality that could work for you or against you. About the ambitions that still drove him, and the private anxieties about oversight from above that you could sometimes exploit.

  Broyles did not look anxious when he arrived through the hatch in the back. Instead, he made Donny nervous, when Donny stood for the “All rise” and saw that Broyles was wearing his old Navy dress uniform under his robes, with brass at the lapels, gold piping down the legs, and campaign ribbons earned through the offshore interrogations he liked to reenact as darkly humorous anecdotes over drinks after work.

  “Please be seated,” said Broyles, after he climbed up onto the little platform they had built and took his seat. He looked around the room. “Is our video feed up and running properly now, Mr. Hackett? With sound?”

  He got the answer he wanted.

  “Very well then. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for your efforts in accommodating our new venue here, which is the same court, but a very different room. One designed to provide us a level of what you might call judicial operational security that the mainland does not. For those of you watching our live feed, thank you for your presence as well, and please be reminded that we will be sending you our footage with a delay in the event I or the government’s security officers believe there is any need to censor any portion of the proceeding.”

  Broyles said that last part as if it were something natural. Maybe it was now. And then he gaveled it in.

  He started with the lecture for the lawyers. How he wanted to provide two days for the government to present its case, one day for the defense, and the fourth day for closing arguments and hopefully a swift verdict. It would be split over two weeks, with a break for the holiday. When Donny complained about the inequitable allocation of time, Broyles told him he didn’t see that Donny would need much more than half a day based on the outline of the case he had provided, but that he would be open to revisiting it later in the week.

  With Donny standing there at what was a weirdly close distance between bench and bar, Broyles went on to badger him about why he was still insisting on having a trial in the matter, when the defendant has already inculpated herself with her escape, flight, and standoff with the government. Donny said we admit no such thing, having arranged a partial immunity as a condition of surrender, and we plan to prove why this court must exonerate my client summarily.

  Broyles told Donny please don’t talk like a TV lawyer just because we are on TV.

  Then he summoned the panel.

  Instead of a jury, Xelina’s guilt or innocence of the predicate charges would be assessed by six uniformed federal officers, five of whom were men.

  When they were seated, Broyles called for Xelina.

  And when they opened the back hatch to bring her in, you could hear the screaming, even though they had her gagged.

  53

  The bondage of Xelina was so complete that you wondered how she moved. And the answer was, she barely did—weighted down with the chains, she was partly carried by the guards, one on each arm and another behind her.

  Instead of a hood, they had outfitted her with blindfold and headphones to maximize the sensory deprivation.

  “Judge, this is outrageous,” said Donny.

  “Master Chief,” said Broyles, addressing the head guard. “It does seem a little much.”

  “Protocol, sir, for any movement of the prisoner,” said the Master Chief. “Now that we’re here the eyes and ears can come off. The mouth is up to you.”

  Donny caught her gaze as she opened her eyes to the courtroom.

  “Leave it on for now, until things are settled,” said Broyles.

  Donny put his index finger over his lips, and then stepped over to his client. As he removed her gag, he dropped the tiny black device he had been wearing as a lapel pin into the small chest pocket of her jumpsuit, where the guards sometimes stuffed the prisoner’s paperwork.

  “Kimoe!” said Broyles, alarmed at Donny’s disobedience but oblivious to his misdirection.

  “I heard you,” said Donny. “And my client has a right to breathe freely.” He looked at Xelina, hoping she understood, and then turned to Broyles.

  Broyles watched for a moment with his stern father face on. Xelina leaned on the back of her chair. She looked weak now, not just from the chains.

  “Perhaps we can try it out,” said Broyles.

  “Thank you, Your Honor. Can we lose some of the restraints as well? This is nuts. Way beyond any reasonable need.”

  Broyles looked at Xelina. Then he looked at the main camera, the one with the red light on.

  “We’re not ready for that yet,” he said. “She has escaped once.”

  “Welcome to the Harold Broyles Theater of Performative Cruelty,” said Donny. “See the live Indians hung from chains.”

  “Security officer, mask that remark,” said Broyles.

  “Yes, sir,” said Walton.

  “Kimoe, are you going to ape for the cameras throughout this proceeding?”

  “No, Your Honor. That’s not what I’m doing. I am advocating for my client, the best way I know how. And trying to advocate for some measure of actual due process in this so-called court. A goal I would think Your Honor would share.”

  “I’m watching you,” said Broyles.

  So were the members of the panel. You could feel the gazes. Feel the weird gravity of judgment. The cameras, and whatever eyes they extended, were more abstract and intangible. The feed was not carried on TV, but the members of the press viewing it back at the courthouse would be reporting on the trial.

  “And they are watching us,” said Donny. “The people at the other end of the feed, and all the people who will see this in the future.”

  “They will thank us,” said Broyles. “I used to think they would thank you. That we all would thank you.”

  Donny was helping Xelina get settled into her chair, which s
eemed barely sturdy enough to bear the extra weight of the steel with which she was burdened.

  “I saw your television interview, by the way,” said Broyles.

  Xelina looked like she was about to lose it.

  “If I find you arguing this case in public like that again I will find you in contempt and lock you up right here with your clients.”

  “I thought you might say that, Your Honor. But if the government gets to talk about this case in the White House briefing room, we should be able to get our own message out. And help people see that what the government is presenting as an outbreak of ‘domestic terrorism’ that justifies the imposition of martial law is no more than a crisis manufactured by them to hoodwink the people and perpetuate their power.”