The Jury Master

by Robert Dugoni

  This Marine has unquestioned intelligence, skills, and leadership qualities. The men in his platoon show a unique willingness to follow his command and a loyalty and confidence in his abilities, which, given this Marine’s young age I find remarkable. Nevertheless, I do not recommend this Marine for Officer Candidate School. This Marine’s only explanation for removing his flak jacket during a hostile engagement is that he felt “weighted” and desired to “move faster.” On the surface it appears to be a careless act not in keeping with a man of his intellect or abilities, a clear disregard for his own well-being. Further interviews, however, reveal it to be consistent with a pattern of impulsive behavior. He describes his decision to join the Marine Corps as one made while passing a Marine recruitment center while walking to a hardware store to buy bolts. “It seemed like something to do.”

  It is my opinion the Corps became something heretofore lacking in his life—stability in a daily routine, and a brotherhood and family with his fellow recruits. That he embraced the Corps, excelled, and developed strong bonds with the men with whom he serves is, therefore, not surprising. Nevertheless, his spontaneous decision to join the Corps is consistent with his spontaneous decision to remove his flak jacket. It is indicative of a man dissatisfied with his life and therefore prone to making rash decisions to change it. Such decisions could, in the future, endanger not only himself but also the men for whom he is responsible.

  Madsen put down the report and pressed a finger to his lips, the ends of which lifted upward into a grin. Sloane was not unlike the soldiers he recruited: men without family, skilled and determined, but raw and in need of guidance and discipline. Commanding them was not unlike training a dog. Madsen broke them down and rebuilt them, dispensing enough discipline to control them without breaking their spirit and natural instinct to fight. Throw a carcass of meat into a pack of dogs, and all the training in the world went to hell. Mayhem replaced order. Instincts replaced training. Men were no different. Madsen had seen it in Vietnam more times than he could remember: the dark side of the human psyche that caused men to discharge a hundred rounds into a hooch of women and children, then burn it to the ground. His men did as ordered, without regard for the moral or ethical consequences of their actions. They were men who got things done. And they were men, like dogs, that you did not turn your back on. Ever.

  Madsen closed the binder. The NSA was assisting in breaking down Sloane’s telephone records for the past six months, as well as his credit card transactions. That was all well and good, but Madsen did not have the luxury of time. While there appeared to be no connection between Joe Branick and David Sloane, there most certainly was one. Branick saw fit to call Sloane twice and to mail him a package.

  Exeter padded into the room, claws clicking on the hardwood, head shaking his new chew toy. After his wife died, Madsen had had all the Persian rugs in the house removed. Carpet muffled sounds, and Parker Madsen did not like to be surprised.

  19

  TINA SUPPRESSED A smile, though not very well, and wiped a tear from the corner of her eye. “The beer,” she said.

  “Beer makes you cry?”

  She gave him the empty bottle. “Shut up and give me another one.” He opened a bottle and handed it across the desk. “You’re human, David. The fact that you felt guilt only means you’re human.”

  He chuckled. “Was there some doubt about that?”

  “Sometimes I wondered,” she said with sarcasm.

  “Boy, I guess it’s better not to know what people think about you.”

  “Don’t start getting sensitive on me now.”

  “It’s my human side coming out.” They laughed. Then he became contemplative. “I’m sorry to see you go, Tina, but I’m happy for you.”

  She looked down at her beer. “They’ll find you another good secretary. The firm won’t want to slow down the Sloane trial machine.”

  “You’ve taken care of me for ten years and been a good friend. I appreciate it.”

  She looked up at him. “I have to think of Jake.”

  “I know,” he said. “That’s what makes you such a good mother.”

  She seemed to blush at the comment, then stood to look out the floor-to-ceiling windows. “You know, I can’t recall the last time I had a Friday night free. My mother’s always harping . . .” She stopped. “Well, you know how mothers can be.”

  Sloane didn’t. But that was not for this conversation. “Why didn’t you ever remarry?” The question seemed to catch her off guard, and he was just as surprised that he had asked it. “I’m sorry. That’s none of my business.”

  She spoke to the glass. “A couple reasons, I guess. First, it would have to be the right situation.” She looked at Sloane. “Not just for me, but for Jake, too.” Then she looked back out the window. “Not having a father around is hard, but having a bad one would be worse. He’s been disappointed too many times . . . So it would have to be someone good to him, someone who would spend time with him, someone who would learn to love him.”

  “That shouldn’t be hard. Jake’s a great kid. He’s the only reason I go to the company picnic every year.”

  She turned from the window and walked back to the chair. “Yeah, he still talks about playing catch with you,” she said.

  “And what about you?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “Practicalities.”

  “Such as?”

  “I don’t get out much, and the pool of appealing, single, heterosexual men is rather limited in this city.”

  “What about the guy in Seattle?”

  “Who?”

  “The guy with the architectural firm in Seattle?”

  She laughed. “I don’t think that would work.”

  “Someone here?”

  “Maybe.” She seemed to consider this for a moment, then looked back out the window. “But he’s still searching to find himself. And until he does, I can’t expect him to find me.” She put her beer on the edge of his desk.

  He was about to ask her if she wanted to get a cup of coffee when he remembered Melda and looked at his watch. “I’m late. I forgot I have a date.”

  Her expression went blank.

  “When you’re seventy years old and bake an apple pie, you expect the person to be there to eat it.”

  “Melda.”

  “Come on, I’ll give you a ride.”

  “It’s too far out of your way. You’ll be really late.”

  She was right. “I’ll pay for a cab.”

  “You bet your ass you will. I’m not taking the bus this time of night.”

  He tossed the empty carton of Chinese in the garbage, grabbed a pile of work from his desk, and reached to stuff it in his briefcase.

  Tina grabbed his hand, stopping him. “You’re supposed to be on vacation. Take at least a day off, David.”

  20

  HE RAN HIS hand over the cover as if he were feeling fine silk. The edges had worn, the cover yellowed with time, and the word “Classified,” stamped in red at odd angles, had faded to pink, but there was no mistaking it. Charles Jenkins started to open the cover, then closed it like the door to a closet filled with bad memories. His chest tightened to the point that he ran a hand over it and pulled back his shoulders. He felt suddenly out of breath.

  “Are you all right?” Alex Hart asked.

  No, he wasn’t all right. He felt as if he were having a heart attack, and if he ever was going to have one, this was the moment. He looked down at the table. The file still existed. Absurd. All these years he’d thought it had been destroyed. It hadn’t. Joe had taken it. The thought snapped him back to reality, and the reality was, if Joe had gone to the trouble of hiding the file for thirty years, he would not have entrusted it to just anyone. That put the stranger standing in his living room in a completely different light.

  “How did you know him?” he asked.

  “Joe? He was a friend of my father.”

  “Who’s your . . .” The place in his memory that her face had tweaked in
the garden flew open like an unlatched door in a strong wind; the resemblance was remarkable.

  “Robert Hart,” he whispered.

  She looked surprised. “You knew my father, also?”

  During their two years in Mexico City together, Jenkins and Joe Branick had visited Professor Robert Hart’s home several times. Hart was an American married to a Mexican national. He taught at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and had homes near the Mexican Golf Club and in a suburb outside Washington, D.C.—a lavish lifestyle for a university professor. But it was not Robert Hart’s face that Jenkins now saw so clearly. It was the face of the beautiful criolla woman who had greeted him and Joe at the door to her home. Her straight dark hair reached to the middle of her back, green eyes revealing her Spanish descent. Alex Hart was the spitting image of her mother, except for her height and the curl in her hair. Both came from her father. The past, one Jenkins had worked so hard to bury, had now been thrust in his face in the form of a woman he last saw riding a bike in the front yard of her family home.

  “I need a drink,” he said.

  He walked into the kitchen and rummaged in the cabinets, finding it at the back of a shelf. Back in the main room he set the bottle of Jack Daniel’s and two mason jars on the table, poured two fingers in each, handed one to her, and downed his shot, feeling the raw burn that caused his eyes to water. When the sting passed he poured a second shot.

  “How old are you, Alex?” His voice was rough from the alcohol, like Clint Eastwood’s in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

  She laughed. “I’m well past twenty-one, but thanks for the compliment.” She had her mother’s easy way about her.

  “You look like your mother.”

  She lowered the jar. “Thank you. She died a little over two years ago.”

  “I’m sorry. Your father—is he still alive?”

  “No. He died six months later. The doctors said it was a heart attack. I think it was a broken heart. He loved her so.”

  “Yes, he did. He was a good man.” Jenkins sat down and offered her the second chair. This time she sat. “I take it you know he worked for us?”

  Robert Hart had for many years been a well-paid CIA consultant on South American affairs. His specialty was right-wing Mexican revolutionary groups.

  “Not until I was older. My mother explained it to me.” She downed her shot, grimaced, and put the mason jar on a stack of envelopes.

  They considered the file between them like something that might bite. “Do you know how Joe got it?”

  She shook her head.

  “You were working with him, though.” He rubbed his hands together, a habit when he thought. Then he said, “Oil. Nonreligious oil.”

  It was not a great leap of intellect. To the contrary, Robert Peak’s election platform had played on American frustration and anger at rising gas prices dictated by OPEC, and on the surging resentment at the loss of American lives fighting oil wars. Americans were tired of Muslim terrorists holding them hostage. Much like Richard Nixon’s promise during his presidential campaign to end the war in Vietnam—without revealing how—Peak had promised to end America’s dependence on Middle East oil. Political pundits called it a campaign ruse. Peak had always been well financed by the oil companies, and as long as they remained the largest shareholders in American car manufacturing companies, the likelihood of Peak doing anything that impacted their bottom line was slim to none. Others speculated that Peak intended to lobby Congress to pass a bill that would require increased research of alternative fuel sources and increase the percentage of automobiles required to run on those fuels. That, however, would affect the oil companies, and so long as the automobile manufacturers remained the major shareholders in those corporations, that scenario was also unlikely. With the economy continuing to spiral into the toilet, Peak was in no position to alienate his biggest political support structure. There were several Latin American possibilities: Venezuela, though the government was teetering on the brink of chaos, and Mexico, with its over 75-billion-barrel oil reserve, but only if he could get at the oil, literally, and with current technology. Neither was likely.

  “How does he do it?”

  She studied him for a moment. “A reopening of the Mexican oil market to American oil companies and related manufacturing industries.”

  Jenkins shook his head. The nationalization of Mexico’s oil market was as sacrosanct to Mexicans as the Virgin of Guadalupe. In 1938, after an audit revealed that United States and other foreign oil companies were robbing Mexico blind, Mexico’s President, Lázaro Cárdenas, expelled them and nationalized Mexico’s oil. Cárdenas had then forced Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John D. Rockefeller to back down from the confrontation, threatening to sell Mexico’s oil to Germany during World War II if the United States did not. Mexican history books proclaimed Cárdenas a hero, and Mexico continued to celebrate March 18 as a “day of national dignity.”

  “They’ll never do it.”

  “Members of the administration have been meeting with representatives of Castañeda,” she said, referring to Alberto Castañeda, Mexico’s recently elected young president, who was being likened to John F. Kennedy.

  Jenkins remained skeptical. “Why? What’s in it for Mexico?”

  “An increased percentage of the American oil market at a fixed per-barrel cost tied to the world market. That’s tens of billions of dollars.”

  Jenkins thought about the information for a moment. “How high up are the talks?”

  “The president wasn’t going to South America to talk about global warming.”

  “And they wouldn’t risk the confidentiality of the talks by bringing in Peak unless they were close to cutting a deal.” He stood and paced, the wood planks groaning as he transferred his weight. Castañeda was known to be a right-wing conservative, publicly opposed to any foreign intervention into Mexican affairs, including subsurface mineral rights. “It’s counterintuitive for him to be engaging in these discussions.”

  “You’re thinking like an American. In Mexico the president is elected for a single six-year term. He doesn’t have to worry about being reelected.”

  “It will ruin any chance his party has of staying in power. It makes no sense.”

  “Or it makes perfect sense.”

  He stopped pacing. “Tell me how?”

  “Peak has him over a barrel—no pun intended. Mexico’s oil fields were put up as collateral for the last financial aid package after the collapse of Mexico’s private banks.”

  “Okay.”

  “If Mexico fails to repay that debt, they could lose control of the oil anyway. Castañeda’s not exactly negotiating from a position of strength. He can blame the prior administration for getting Mexico into NAFTA; it was a bad deal. This allows him to cut Mexico’s losses and negotiate a better deal. On its face it will help Mexican laborers to work in the United States, create better-paying jobs for the poor, expand Mexico’s economic market, and bring money for social improvements.”

  “His primary support groups. He can paint himself as a hero,” Jenkins said, picking up on her train of thought.

  “He said he would be a president of the people, for the people. It’s too good an offer to let pass.”

  Jenkins looked out the plate-glass windows to where the Arabians grazed in peace. “That’s the problem. There is no such thing as ‘too good an offer’ if Robert Peak is involved.”

  21

  Financial District,

  San Francisco

  THEY STOOD SHIVERING, the collars of their coats turned up against a cold wind funneling through the canyon of high-rise buildings. It moaned softly as it passed, and brought the smell of the bay from a week of ninety-degree temperatures that spoiled the plant life and left a metallic taste in the air. The heat wave had ended.

  Sloane found the financial district at night eerily quiet; it was like standing in the courtyard of an enormous, suddenly deserted apartment complex. The sheer immensity of the buildings played tri
cks on the mind, making one expect to hear all kinds of noise: people talking, car engines, sirens. Instead it was only the hum of the wind, an occasional car engine, and the scraping of an errant paper blowing up the sidewalk and gutters. San Franciscans fled the downtown business area at sunset, migrating to their homes, to the restaurants in North Beach and Chinatown, and to the trendy nightclubs South of Market. It left the financial district feeling like a ghost town from a Hollywood set.

  “You don’t have to wait with me, David. I know you’re worried about being late.”

  He pulled out his cell phone. “I’ll let her know I’m running a bit behind.”

  Melda’s phone rang three times before her answering machine picked up. Sloane left a message, flipped his phone closed, and looked at his watch again.

  “Everything okay?” Tina asked.

  “I’m just surprised she’s not home yet.”

  “Go ahead. I’ll be fine.”

  “No. It’s all right.” He put his hands in the pockets of his jacket and hunched his shoulders to protect his neck from the cold. “She probably stayed to have a cup of coffee with a certain gentleman she’s been talking about.”

  “Another man? She stood you up!”