The Hearing

by James Mills

  Iverson waited. There was no answer.

  “Do you hear me?”

  He listened, shook his head, and hung up.

  When Michelle, shoved against the wall of the command truck by the crush of agents, engineers, and technicians, heard Iverson tell Gus on the phone, “You’ve got about six minutes,” she slipped quickly out into the night air.

  Earlier that night she’d walked into the Winnebago and seen Terry’s orange coveralls neatly folded on the conference table. She hurried back there now. The coveralls were still there. She put her hand on them, and the thoughts came faster and faster. Had Gus heard Iverson, did he know he was supposed to drive out? They had time to drive out, to get away—if they knew, if they’d heard Iverson, if someone told them.

  By now there’d be five minutes left. Plenty of time, if she rushed. She could get to Blossom, running, in a minute. Get down to the garage, the limo, tell Gus to drive out, and come out with them.

  She heard a noise and turned.

  “Oh, hi, Mrs. Parham.”

  “Hi, Terry.”

  Their eyes met.

  Terry said, “Those are my coveralls.”

  “I know.”

  “They wouldn’t fit.”

  “Terry, I—I don’t have very long.”

  “About four minutes would be my guess.”

  “Please.”

  Terry turned. “I wasn’t here.”

  Michelle grabbed the coveralls, sat on the floor, and yanked until she had them on. The cuffs, unrolled, barely reached her ankles. But she was in them, and the ATF-EOD initials were flat and visible on her back.

  She pulled up the hood, tucked in her hair, and jogged to the police barrier blocking the street to Blossom.

  As she passed the cops, maneuvering around the barrier, she waved a hand and kept going, praying they wouldn’t call her back.

  Five steps past the barrier, she knew she’d made it.

  She speeded up, running as fast as she could in the tight coveralls, sprinting for Blossom. She was still a block away, out of breath, when a woman came charging toward her. The woman—short blonde hair, gold bracelets jangling—stopped, struggling for air. “Come … Run …” She took Michelle’s arm, fighting, not letting go, pulling her back toward the command truck.

  Samantha said, “What did he say? He called before, while you were out. Where were you?”

  “We’re getting out of here, Samantha.”

  Gus hunted in the dark of the front seat for the garage door opener. He flipped on the dash light. A dim glow. He found the opener on top of the dash. He extinguished the dash light and pushed the red button.

  Nothing happened.

  Samantha leaned over from the back seat.

  Gus pressed the button again.

  The garage door lurched upward, then jolted to a stop three feet from the floor.

  Gus pressed the button.

  Another lurch, in the other direction. The door banged closed.

  He pressed the button.

  The door clanged open two feet—and stopped.

  Samantha said, “Try it again.”

  This time the door jammed about three feet from the top. Gus wasn’t sure the limo could make it under the door, and he didn’t have time to get out and measure.

  “Can we make it through there, Samantha?”

  She stared out from the back seat, squinting.

  “I don’t know. What do you think?”

  “I think we don’t have a choice. Get down on the floor. Flat as you can.”

  Gus gripped the ignition key, still in the lock, and turned.

  The starter groaned. Groaned again. Stopped.

  He turned the key back to the off position.

  Samantha lifted her head. “It’s not starting.”

  Carl left Gus and Samantha in the garage and raced back to the street, looking for Helen. He almost knocked her down. “Where the hell are you going?”

  “Looking for you.”

  He grabbed her arm. “Run!”

  “Where are the judge and Samantha?”

  “Leaving in the limo. Run!”

  “What about Aguilera?”

  “Run!”

  Carl sprinted fifty feet with Helen, then slowed, dropped a step behind, and headed back for the lawn. Aguilera stood by the tree, still as a statue, looking at him, watching him approach.

  Gus gripped the ignition key and, as if the determination in his fingers could make a difference, gave it a hard, decisive snap into the start position.

  Groan. Grind.

  He pumped the accelerator.

  The engine roared.

  He flipped on the headlights. The garage door was too low.

  He yelled, “Get flat and brace yourself. We’re gonna hit the door.”

  He put the shift in neutral, raced the engine, gripped the wheel, slid down in the seat belt until he could barely see over the dash, and slipped the shift into first.

  He shot forward with the impact, felt the seat belt tighten across his body, and heard a metal-against-metal crash that sounded like the end of the world. A blast of glass pellets struck his face and chest.

  The car had made it through the door and stopped in the turning circle. The windshield was gone, glass pellets like hailstones blanketed the hood, dash, and front seat. The chrome around the top of the windshield was bent back and the front half of the roof was crushed to the level of the window tops.

  He yelled, “Are you okay?”

  “Are we out? Can I get up?”

  “Stay down!”

  He pulled himself up straight, got the limo heading toward the driveway, and hit the accelerator. He skidded into a left turn and roared up the block, glass pellets flying at him across the hood.

  Red police lights flashed three blocks ahead.

  Gus tore through the intersection, gaining speed, made the next intersection, and headed for a wooden police barricade. Two cops dragged it out of his path and dived for the curb. Gus flashed by them, hit the brakes, spun the wheel, and tried to aim the limousine into the traffic circle at the end of the street.

  The limo rammed the curb, lifted, rotated a quarter turn, hurtled over the grass, and came down on the hood of an empty police cruiser.

  For a moment, suddenly silent and motionless in the flashing red glow of police lights, the limo perched on the cruiser. A cop aimed a flashlight into the front seat. All Gus could see was glass pellets and blood—on his lap, his hands, his arms, the steering wheel.

  The cop holding the light screamed “Ambulance!” and put out his hand for the door handle.

  Reaching into his pocket for a cuff key, Carl raced for the tree. Still ten yards away, with the key in his fingers, Carl saw Aguilera’s face, the tree, the grass, the front of the Trade Commission, go suddenly white as burning phosphorus. Something hit him from behind and his body smashed facedown onto the earth, flattening beneath a rolling weight of wind and fire.

  A blinding white flash filled the night sky. A giant fist punched the side of the limo. Something clutched the roof, lifted the car, shook it, and slammed it down. The roar of a thousand oceans filled Gus’s ears.

  “Samantha!”

  25

  Samantha arranged herself in the leather chair, clasped her hands in her lap, looked up at the fourteen senators facing her, and smiled. She was surrounded by a forest of TV cameras and still photographers.

  It was eight days since the explosion. She and Gus and Michelle had moved back to the rented house in Virginia. Carl was dead. The man who’d put the bomb in the Mercedes—Samantha couldn’t even pronounce his name, Ag-something—he was dead. Gus was bruises and cuts and scratches from head to foot. Michelle had been in the street, two blocks from the Mercedes, against a curb, pushed up next to another woman, Helen someone. It was a miracle, as if the blast had washed right over them. Emotionally, Michelle was a wreck. Once she found out Gus and Samantha were safe, she went hysterical over Carl. All she could talk about was Esther and their two c
hildren. As for Samantha herself, with bruises everywhere, she looked as if she’d spent an hour in a washing machine on spin-dry.

  But she was here. Phil Rothman sat beside her at the witness table, and behind her the front row of spectators was filled with family and friends. Gus and Michelle were there, small bandages covering face cuts. They had agreed to let Samantha testify.

  Michelle’s father, Bob, who had flown to Washington with his wife and sons the first day of the car bomb, sat next to her—crew-cut, white-socks, friendly but powerful, a bear in a blazer. Her mother, next in line, tiny hand smothered in her husband’s paw, was beautiful, the clear eyes and angled features whispering dignity. Beside her were Michelle’s two younger brothers, in their late twenties now, ranchers, brown and weathered. Carl’s widow, Esther, was there with the children, Paul and Ali. Next to them, an arm resting lightly along the back of Esther’s chair, was Helen Bondell. Gus’s mother, recovering from her husband’s suicide (and making no bones about what she regarded as Gus’s role in provoking it), was at a friend’s home in Palm Beach. Gus had telephoned Larry Young in London and assured him that except for minor cuts and bruises Samantha was unharmed. Larry didn’t say anything about a trip to the States to pick her up, and Gus didn’t think it was a good time to raise the subject. From Doreen came nothing but silence, a blessing that seemed—correctly, as it turned out—too good to be true.

  A man moved the microphone closer to Samantha’s lips. She touched it and it let out a loud hum. The man moved it back and asked her not to touch it. She said, “I’m sorry.”

  She wriggled in the chair, trying to avoid a lump that was sticking her in the back, and in the process leaned close to the microphone. She pulled back, as from a snake’s head, and said, “Sorry.”

  She took a deep breath and smiled again. She felt she was making too much trouble.

  Several of the senators looked at her and smiled. The chairman was Eric Taeger, old and white-haired, his harsh impatience already evident in the way he pushed the papers around on his desk. Mr. Rothman had told her, “Answer his questions, but don’t be frightened. Two minutes after this starts, he’s going to be more scared of you than you are of him.”

  Senator Taeger looked at her and said, “We’re glad to have you with us, Miss Young, and we hope that despite everything you’ve been through you won’t find this too difficult.”

  “Oh, that’s okay,” she said. “I’m fine.”

  He looked to the side. “Would you swear the witness, please?”

  Taeger had not wanted Samantha to give sworn testimony (“She’s too young to know what it means, and too young to be tried for perjury if she lies”), but Gus’s supporters on the committee had insisted, knowing sworn testimony would have greater impact.

  Someone offered her a Bible, and she put her hand on it.

  “That’s a nice Bible,” she said.

  “Do you solemnly swear …”

  She said, “I do,” and took her hand back. “I feel like I just got married.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Nothing. I’m sorry.”

  Taeger said, “Can we adjust the microphone, please? We’re having trouble hearing the witness. Thank you.”

  Philip Rothman was exhausted. In the eight days since the bomb went off, he’d led a twenty-four-hour-a-day war to get the Judiciary Committee to resume the hearing quickly and allow Samantha’s testimony. The White House and its congressional allies had pleaded fairness: Gus had been smeared by horrifying accusations made against his daughter—that she had been raised in a whorehouse, actually worked there. Surely Judge Parham and Samantha deserved the right to explain, to give the other side. The news media, foreseeing the drama, added its voice to demands that she be allowed to testify.

  Rothman knew—and the ferocity of the opposition’s resistance made it clear that they knew too—that if Samantha took the stand while public sympathy for her was still high, and if the committee vote and the floor vote came before the emotional response to her appearance had had time to cool, Gus’s seat on the Supreme Court was assured. How could the opposition stand against the innocent candor of a bright, pretty thirteen-year-old girl who had just escaped from a drug trafficker’s car bomb?

  During the last two days, opposition to her testimony had abruptly declined, as Rothman had guessed it would. A week ago, the day after the explosion, Rothman had spoken with Samantha’s doctor. She was not seriously injured, but she was exhausted. “Emotionally, she’s been through a war. She’ll need a lot of rest. She’s on the edge. Anything more, you could have a breakdown.”

  Four days after that conversation, Rothman had walked into the office of Peter Rexroth, the White House intelligence coordinator.

  “Peter, I need a little favor. Confidential, to say the least.”

  “It all is.” Rexroth was a former CIA officer.

  “How long would it take to get me a voice distortion device and a non-pub phone number?”

  Rexroth opened a drawer in his desk, withdrew a disk of transparent plastic resembling an orthodontic retainer, and handed it to Rothman. “The number will take about ten minutes. What’s the listing?”

  “Warren Gier. His home.”

  Senator Taeger put his forearms on the desk, leaned toward Samantha, and gave her the most unsuccessful smile she had ever seen, warm and sympathetic as a knife edge.

  Then he dropped the smile—Samantha thought she could hear it hit the floor—and said, “Well, young lady, you’ve had quite a stressful adventure, and we don’t want to add to your distress here. Some of us, however, do have one or two questions you could help us with.”

  “Okay.” She nodded, smiling.

  “Before we get to your recent relationship with Judge Parham—”

  “He’s my father.”

  “—we’d like to get a little of your background. You were born and brought up in Milwaukee by a Mrs. Doreen Young, is that correct?”

  “I was adopted by the Youngs.”

  “Why were you adopted?”

  “They wanted a child.”

  A tiny ripple of laughter rolled gently through the hearing room.

  “I mean, how did you come to be adopted?”

  “My mother couldn’t keep me, so she put me up for adoption.”

  “And why couldn’t she keep you?”

  “I think … Well … You could ask my mother. She’s right here. She’d know.”

  Another ripple. Along the row of committee members, half smiled and half did not.

  “You never saw your real mother until—”

  “My biological mother. My legal mother was Mrs. Young.”

  “Thank you for correcting me. You anticipated my question. You never saw your biological mother until a few weeks ago, is that correct?”

  “I saw her for the first time nine weeks and two days ago, at eleven-thirty in the morning, at the airport in Nice, France.”

  “You have a good recollection of it.”

  “Yes, sir. It was the most important day of my life. My father was there too. Judge Parham.”

  Rothman had his elbows on the table, his chin in his hands, his eyes fixed on Taeger. Things were not going well for the chairman. Things rarely went well for seventy-six-year-old men jousting with thirteen-year-old girls. Guile is never a match for innocence.

  Gus was glowing, literally. He could feel the blood warming his face. Samantha was so beautiful. Michelle and she had spent half of yesterday shopping, picking out a dress “suitable for the Judiciary Committee.” They’d picked something dark blue with a white collar, simple but elegant, youthful but dignified. Gus had never seen anyone so beautiful as Samantha at this moment, so natural, so relaxed. Could you believe it? She was having fun.

  Taeger said, “You’ve been following the various media reports about your situation?”

  “Well, we weren’t allowed to use the TV in the limousine, and then afterwards I was in the hospital for a couple of days.”

  “And th
ey found that everything’s okay?”

  “Oh, yes. I’m very healthy.”

  “Good. Before you were in the limousine, did you follow the media reports?”

  “A little. I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “Well, did you read or hear that when your mother told your father she was pregnant that he urged her to have an abortion?”

  Rothman was on his feet.

  “Mr. Chairman—”

  “Please sit down, Mr. Rothman. These are necessary questions. I would remind you that it was not I who insisted that Miss Young testify. If you want her to testify, then you will have to allow us to ask questions.”

  “Appropriate questions.”

  “If I feel I need your assistance in determining what is appropriate, I will call on you. Meanwhile, please sit down.”

  Rothman sat. Nothing so far had surprised him. Taeger’s questions had been anticipated. Rothman’s job was to exploit the questions as best he could and let the simplicity of Samantha’s answers win points for Gus. Later, when Taeger really got down to the dirt, Rothman’s payoff would come.

  “Miss Young, did you hear the question?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Would you answer, please?”

  “I heard that on the TV.”

  “That …”

  “That my father had wanted my mother to end the pregnancy.”

  “How did that make you feel?”

  Rothman was up.

  “Mr. Chairman, may I remind you, sir, that you are talking to the thirteen-year-old daughter of a nominee for the Supreme Court? It’s difficult to see how the intent of this hearing is furthered by humiliating, hurtful, and unnecessary questions.”

  “Sit down, Mr. Rothman.”

  Rothman lowered himself slowly into the chair.

  “Can you answer the question please, Miss Young?”

  “How did it make me feel? It didn’t make me feel at all. I mean, I don’t even know if it’s true. I know my mother and father love me. I know that, for sure. And anyway, I wasn’t aborted, was I? I mean—here I am.”

  That drew a couple of claps from the spectator section.