Double Tap

by Steve Martini

  “Can you tell us a little bit more about Delta Force? What exactly does that unit do?”

  “Counterterrorism, hostage rescue … They’re the tip of the spear,” says the witness.

  “What does that mean, ‘the tip of the spear’?”

  “They’re elite, sir. Top of the heap.”

  “I’m going to ask you to take a look at …” Templeton nods toward the detective at his table, who gets up as if on cue and retrieves the murder weapon, Ruiz’s handgun, from the evidence table. “I’d like to ask you to take a look at this firearm.”

  The detective hands the pistol to the witness.

  “Do you recognize it?” asks Templeton.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Can you tell the jury what the letters USSOCOM engraved on the side of that firearm, near the barrel, what those letters stand for?”

  “They stand for United States Special Operations Command.”

  “And what is the Special Operations Command?”

  “They’re the command unit over Special Forces, Green Berets, Rangers, all of the elite units in the Army.”

  “Would that include Delta Force?”

  “Yes, sir. Especially Delta Force.”

  It’s clear why Templeton didn’t use the army officer Major Ellis, his firearms training expert, to make the point. Ellis would have disclaimed any knowledge of Delta. He probably would have suffered terminal memory loss if Templeton had even whispered the name. Harry and I now know the answer to the mystery, why Ruiz had dropped off the edge of the earth for seven years, according to his military records. He had entered the shadow world of Delta.

  Templeton slows down, checks his notes. He wants to carefully map out the final approach in his head. At this point, impact, vivid contact on all the high peaks for the jury, and the order in which they are touched is everything.

  “Have you seen that pistol or one like it before?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Where did you see it?”

  “In training at Fort Bragg. The Delta Force training base,” he says.

  “Can you tell us what was happening with the pistol when you saw it for the first time?”

  “It was being fired.”

  “Can you describe the circumstances in which it was being fired?”

  “It was being used for a training demonstration in one of the shooting houses.”

  “Can you tell the jury what a shooting house is?”

  “It’s an indoor enclosure used for training. Live-fire exercises. Simulation training for insertions and hostage rescue.”

  “And is there another name for a shooting house? Something else that soldiers sometimes call it?”

  The witness nods. “Sometimes they’re called killing houses.”

  The impact of the two words on the jury is almost palpable. I watch as at least four of them make a note of it on paper.

  “And when you observed this demonstration, who was firing the pistol in question, the Mark Twenty-three forty-five automatic?”

  “It was Sergeant Ruiz.”

  “And do you recall, was he demonstrating anything in particular that day, the day you saw him with a pistol similar to the one in your hand?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Can you tell the jury precisely what it was that he was teaching that day?”

  “We were all inside the killing house,” says Quinn. “Sergeant Ruiz was showing us the proper procedure for target selection with the pistol.”

  “The Mark Twenty-three?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Go on.”

  “He was showing us how to sweep each target so that we could hit it twice, so that we could put it down—what is known as a double tap.”

  At this moment Harry would drop his head onto the table except that half of the jury is watching us. The other half is taking notes.

  Templeton now has the detective deliver a photograph to our table. It’s an eight-by-ten glossy, black-and-white, a picture of a group of soldiers, none of them looking particularly spit-shined, some of them with mustaches and longer hair. Most of the soldiers in the group look like they are older; some of them in their early thirties. Sitting on the ground in the front row is Emiliano. In his hand, unmistakable with the long silencer attached and what appears to be a square block of metal under the barrel, the laser sight, is the Mark 23.

  “Your Honor, I object. We’ve never seen this photograph before.”

  “I only got a copy this morning,” says Templeton.

  Gilcrest waves us forward to the bench and hits the white-noise button.

  “It was delivered to me by the witness during the noon break,” says Templeton. “Outside in the hallway. He only found it last night among some old papers in his files. He had copies made this morning.”

  “Your Honor—”

  Gilcrest holds up a hand, palm out, to silence me as he studies his copy of the photo, delivered to him by the bailiff.

  “Are you offering the photograph to show that the firearm depicted in the picture is the murder weapon?” asks the judge.

  “No, Your Honor. Only to show that the defendant was familiar with and skilled in the use of the model of that handgun.”

  “Your Honor—”

  “I’ll allow it for that purpose,” says the judge. “And I’ll instruct the jury accordingly.”

  “I object, Your Honor.”

  “Mr. Madriani, a witness has already linked the murder weapon to your client. It’s been established that it was issued to him in the Army. I can’t see any harm in showing the jury a picture of him holding a similar firearm.”

  A picture being worth a thousand words, I could split hairs with him all afternoon, but he slaps me down, and we step back to the tables.

  Templeton has the witness identify the photograph, and less than a minute later it’s up on the visualizer in front of the jury. The judge can instruct them until hell freezes. The picture of the murder weapon in Emiliano’s hand, projected onto a screen the size of that in a small movie theater, has a transforming effect inside the jury box. If the weight of evidence means anything—if Harry, Ruiz, and I were sitting on a balancing scale at this moment—our heads would be jammed up against the courtroom ceiling.

  CHAPTER THIRTY–ONE

  Harry and I are alone with Ruiz in the holding area off of the courtroom.

  Emiliano is overflowing with apologies. “I’m sorry, but I couldn’t tell you. We were sworn to maintain the secret. There is a presidential decision directive.” He cites to us the number, what is known as PDD-25.

  “What does it say?” I ask.

  “Gave us immunity from the law, as long as we didn’t tell anybody what we did. That was the condition,” he says.

  I look at Harry. “If there’s a presidential directive barring public disclosure as to Delta, and if it has the weight of law,” I say, “we might be able to use it.”

  Harry thinks about this. “Ask the judge to strike Quinn’s testimony? Instruct them to disregard the photo? They’ve already seen it,” says Harry. “He’s already ruled that the photo can come in.”

  “He didn’t know about the directive and neither did we. We ask for a mistrial.” I turn to Ruiz. “Do you have a copy of the directive?”

  He shakes his head. “It’s classified. I only saw a summary.”

  “What did the summary say?”

  “Nothing about Delta. But the people who saw the document, who had clearance to see the whole thing, they said it excused us from the law. Total exemption, they said, everything, as long as we didn’t talk, even posse comitatus“

  “Delta was operating in the U.S.?” says Harry.

  Ruiz nods.

  Posse comitatus is federal law adopted after the Civil War to rein in U.S. troops and to prevent them from being used against their own citizens, except in federally declared emergencies.

  I had seen claims in the press about Delta’s activities inside the United States. But until now I had always discounted t
hem.

  “Don’t ask me where, ‘cuz I can’t tell you,” he says. “That’s why I couldn’t say anything when you asked me what I did. The seven years,” he says.

  “You’ve never seen the actual document?” says Harry. “The directive?”

  “Just the summary. None of the troops in Delta saw the real thing. But we were told that we were excused from the law. Everybody under Joint Special Operations Command was.”

  “Remember I asked you whether you’d ever been to Special Operations Command, and you said no?” I look him straight in the eye.

  “That was the truth,” he says. “They’re located at MacDill Air Force Base, in Tampa. I’ve never been there.”

  “You knew what I was talking about.”

  “Yes.” He looks at me, then down at the floor, and nods. Emiliano stands in the corner of the room, his hands stuffed into the pockets of his suit pants, looking like a chastened schoolboy. His jacket lies on the floor where he took it off and threw it when he came in.

  “I know you’re angry,” he says. “You have a right to be. But what was I supposed to do?”

  “For starters, come clean with your lawyers,” says Harry.

  “And if I told you about Delta, what would you have done? You would have had to find some way to tell the jury about it. Then Templeton would have been all over it.”

  “But we could have brought it out,” says Harry. “Now it looks like we’re hiding it. And the picture, the one with the gun in your hand …”

  “I don’t carry a gun anymore. That’s a fact,” he says. “I haven’t carried a gun since I left the Army. You know what I use for protection?”

  Harry shakes his head as if he could care less.

  “A water pistol,” says Ruiz. “You don’t believe me? Ask the cops,” he says. “Sure, they didn’t put it in their report. They put it under ‘personal items’ when they booked me. But that’s all they found when they arrested me.”

  “Why the hell would you carry a water pistol?” says Harry.

  “Pretty handy,” says Ruiz. “You fill it with ammonia, it’s better than pepper spray, and you don’t need a license to carry it. You hit somebody in the eyes or the nose, believe me, they ain’t gonna bother you no more.”

  “And you can do that at a distance with a water pistol?” says Harry.

  Ruiz just looks at him and nods slowly, as if to say if he had his water pistol he’d show him right now.

  “Let’s not let the jury in on that little secret,” says Harry. “When it comes to target shooting, I don’t think we’d need to give them any more credentials. All the same, you shoulda told us about Delta.”

  “Why? So you could put me on the stand and ask me questions I couldn’t answer? I took an oath, a vow,” he says, “never to reveal what we did in the unit. I don’t care how it comes out, you mention Delta and Templeton’s gonna squat all over it. Besides, my time in Delta had nothing to do with Chapman’s murder.”

  “How do we know you’re out?” Harry is reading my mind.

  “What do you mean?”

  “How do we know you weren’t working for Delta when you were out at Isotenics? According to everything we’re hearing, they were having a lot of problems with the Pentagon,” says Harry. “The brass might like somebody on the inside providing information as to what Chapman was doing.”

  “This is bullshit,” says Ruiz. “You saw my discharge papers. You think they would let me sit here and rot if I was part of Delta, working for them?” He shakes his head. “They would have had somebody else arrested by now. The government may have killed her, but I didn’t do it. That’s why I’m the patsy.

  “This was a setup from day one,” he tells us. “It wouldn’t matter how it came in. The minute anybody used the word in that courtroom, Templeton would have pointed at me and said, ‘The murderer from Delta.’ Hell, they’re already saying it.”

  He looks at Harry. “You read the newspapers. You see what they’re saying. How we’re all highly tuned killers. How they train us to murder and then don’t give us therapy,” says Ruiz. “How we’re all trigger-happy, wired-on-the-edge macho men trained to slap everybody around the minute we don’t get want we want.

  “But they don’t talk about that when some asshole sets off a bomb on a bus or flies an airplane into a building. No. Then they just want it taken care of, and they want it done so it’s clean, sanitary,” he says. “They want their own professional killers. They want us to be the best in the world. They want us ready to go when things happen, but they want us to be nice when we’re sitting on the shelf. To shoot the enemy in a humane way, which means they don’t have to watch it,” he says. “They want to be told that all the bad guys are dead, and if not, why not. And when you slow down to reload, they want to draw a line in the dirt and say, ‘That’s it, you can stop now,’ while the fuckers who shot us are sitting over there, just the other side of the line.”

  He stands there looking at Harry, fire in his eyes. “You want to know why I didn’t tell you? That’s why. Because the lawyers who do their cases in court, and the reporters who report it, don’t live in the same world I do. They live in a fantasy world where you can eat hot food, and drink clean water, sit on a clean toilet seat, and turn everything on and off whenever you want, like a light switch. So you can forget about Delta. The only question now is, where do we go from here?”

  “You finished?” says Harry.

  “Yeah, I’m finished.”

  “I’d love to forget about Delta,” says Harry. “Now, if you can just tell us how to get the jury to do it …”

  “It had nothing to do with Chapman’s murder. I told you, I didn’t kill her. Everything else I said was true. I don’t know who shot her or why. She was afraid. She called me and asked me to keep an eye. That’s what happened, and that’s what I told you.”

  Without putting Ruiz on the stand, we have no way of even asserting any of this, much less proving it. Confronted with the videotape and photos of Emiliano “stalking” the victim, his story that she asked him to provide security without telling anyone else, and that she was afraid of some mystery assailant, appear both self-serving and highly convenient to the point of being contrived. To put Ruiz on the stand to testify to this would be judicial suicide. Templeton would shred him on cross.

  “Son, let me tell you,” says Harry, “so that you know exactly where you stand at this moment. And I’m not telling you this to make you feel any worse than you already do. Larry Templeton is going to ride that photograph, the shot with the gun in your hand. He’s gonna whip it like a stallion right through his closing argument. I can tell you right now, with absolute certainty, that picture will be the last thing lingering up on the visualizer when the lights come up and the show is over. When that happens, if I were a betting man, and I am, I’d be placing all my money on the prosecutor.”

  “Thank you for your honesty,” says Emiliano. He looks at me. “How ‘bout you, Counselor?”

  “I don’t like to gamble. If I had my choice, I’d start over.”

  “That would be a neat trick,” Ruiz says.

  There’s a rap on the door. It’s Gilcrest’s bailiff. He has one of the guards open it from the outside with his key.

  “Judge wants to see all the lawyers in chambers,” he says.

  The guards take Emiliano. Harry and I head out into the empty courtroom. We round the bench and down the side hall toward the back. Gilcrest’s office door is open when we get there. Templeton is waiting for us in the outer area.

  “What’s this about?” I ask.

  Larry shrugs. “Your guess is as good as mine.” He follows Harry and me through the door.

  The judge looks up from his desk. “Gentlemen, I hope you don’t have any plans for the weekend, seeing as mine were just trashed. I’ve received a phone call from the clerk at the Court of Appeals,” he says.

  “They made a decision on the evidence,” says Harry.

  “No,” says the judge. “It seems Mr. Sims h
as decided to withdraw his appeal.”

  Harry and I look at each other.

  “Well. Looks like you’re finally going to get your evidence,” says Templeton.

  On the way out of the courthouse Harry is hitting numbers on his cell phone, calling the office, telling the staff to cancel their weekend plans. We separate near the bank of elevators. I tell Harry I’ll see him at the office in the morning, and I take the stairs. One floor down, I step out of the stairwell and head for one of the pay phones.

  I don’t use my cell phone; I don’t want to call from the office or the house. It may not even be a technical violation of the judge’s gag order, but I don’t want to find out. The phone rings twice. I’m hoping that he’s there. On the third ring he picks up.

  “AP, Saentz here.”

  “Hello, Tim.”

  “Who is this?”

  “Deep Throat,” I say.

  He recognizes my voice.

  “I just want to give you a heads-up, nothing about the trial,” I tell him. “But you might want to call the Court of Appeals to find out if anything happened today.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.” Then I hang up.

  I head for the stairs. On the way, I walk right in front of the door with the sign on it. The one that reads: Courthouse Press Room.

  Saturday morning and Gilcrest’s irritation is surpassed only by his wife’s. The judge has had to tell her that their weekend anniversary trip to Santa Barbara is off. Today he is camped at his office in the courthouse as we use Herman to act as courier, shuttling boxes of documents across the bridge, reams of paper from Isotenics, as quickly as Gilcrest can review them.

  The judge promised us a three-day continuance if the evidence was released. True to his word, he has given the jury Monday off as we pore through piles of paper.

  We have researched the presidential decision directive. PDD-25 is classified. All that exists is a summary online. It deals with joint military operations between the United States, the UN, and NATO. Ruiz is right: the summary says nothing about Delta Force or the Joint Special Operations Command. Harry and I made a desperate pitch for more time from the judge, but Gilcrest said no.