by Allan Topol
"Now, I've been around Washington a long time," Ben said. "I can see that for political reasons you guys up here want to get a quick arrest and conviction and show that you're tough on crime. On the other hand, the President won't be happy if we charge the black gardener, Clyde Gillis, and then later on we find this white guy, George Nesbitt, and it turns out Nesbitt really killed him. That won't play well in the inner cities next November. I'd hate to see the man whom we all work for"—he caught Slater's eye—"get hurt by that."
His words made an impression on Slater. As always, potential adverse political consequences commanded attention at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
"How's the search coming for Nesbitt?" Slater asked Fulton, who sprang to his feet.
"One of the two guards who saw Nesbitt—Jeb Hines—is in California now. They started with fifty-eight possibles with that name. Using age and photo IDs on driver's licenses, they narrowed the universe to twenty-six possibles. Now they're using phone calls and personal visits to contact the twenty-six. It's slow going. As of an hour ago, four have been eliminated. That means there are still twenty-two possibles."
Slater stood next to the window and looked out at the White House lawn below for several moments, evaluating the alternatives. Finally he turned around. "Ed, you tell Murtaugh that I want every conceivable resource used in the search for Nesbitt, and I want it completed by four o'clock p.m. Wednesday, Washington time." He glanced over at Van Buren. "I assume we can say that Ches is on board with this approach?"
"Absolutely. I talked to him before coming over here. He agrees that priority number one is finding George Nesbitt. 'No stone unturned' were the words the AG used."
"What happens Wednesday at four o'clock?" Ben asked.
"That's when you file charges against the gardener for murder one and the death penalty."
"That may not be enough time," Ben protested. "Suppose they haven't found Nesbitt by then?"
Slater's face screwed up in anger. He didn't like being challenged by underlings. He was willing to listen to reason, but once he made a decision, the discussion was over. "Well, it's all the time you've got, pal." Reasonableness was gone. Iron was in. "Four o'clock Wednesday. You got that?"
"Just in time to make the evening news," Ben said.
"Oh, really," Slater said sarcastically. "Gee, I hadn't thought about that. You're obviously as smart as your resume indicates."
"I want two more days," Ben replied stubbornly, keeping himself under control. "Till the end of the week."
"Well, you can't have them. This isn't an ordinary case. Robert's death coming now is, to say the least, awkward for the President. It's less than a year until the voters decide on his reelection. Crime's a major issue with the people. Maybe the most important one of all. The political fallout from this crime could be devastating unless we can show that there's prompt and severe punishment."
"But—" Ben continued.
Slater cut him off. "Let me be real clear about where I'm coming from, pal. Yeah, in general I'd like to be certain we charge the right man with Winthrop's murder, but in the confines of this room, I'll be blunt about it. That's not my primary concern. I've got to help the President run this country. That means making people feel safe in their own homes. And I've got to ensure the President's reelection, which will be a tough battle next year. Now, I hate to put it this way, but those two objectives are more important to me than the life of one gardener. Am I getting through to you?"
"Loud and clear," Ben replied.
Then the chief of staff turned to Hennessey. "You tell your boy here that it's four o'clock Wednesday afternoon, or he's off the case. Start looking for somebody else who won't give us this shit."
Looking squarely at Ben, Hennessey said, "It will be filed by four on Wednesday. If Ben won't do it, someone else in the office will."
Ben glared at Hennessey. The goddamn gutless swine, Ben thought. He won't even say a word to help me out. He's letting me swing in the breeze. And Van Buren's no better. She knows damn well I'm right.
Ben reviewed his options. It was a tough call. On a personal level, he wanted to tell Slater to piss up a rope, but then they'd find someone else, someone not as good, to do their bidding. This case was high-profile. It was the kind of case prosecutors would give anything to have, with daily press and television coverage. He wasn't letting go of it. Besides, if Clyde Gillis was innocent and they were trying to railroad him, Ben might be in a position to stop them as long as it was his case. Jennifer was wrong in that note she had sent him. He did have a soul. Every conviction wasn't just a notch in his belt. "Four o'clock Wednesday," Ben said reluctantly.
* * *
I'm signing my own death warrant, Chen thought as he sat in the garden of his large villa in Taipei and looked at the stars in the dark sky, as if they could soothe his anxieties.
"Where are you?" his wife Mary Ann called in English, with a British accent, from inside the house.
"Out here."
"What's wrong?"
"Nothing."
"It's the middle of the night. You climb out of bed to sit outside, and you tell me nothing's wrong."
"I didn't want to disturb you."
Wearing a thin powder blue cotton robe, she came out carrying two snifters of cognac and handed him one. "I figured this should help."
"It won't hurt."
"You're worried about your trip tomorrow and the next month in Shanghai?"
"I'm not sure why I offered to go. It's ridiculous that I can't even fly there. That I have to go through Hong Kong. He was stupid to put a plant there."
"You were trying to be the good son. The plant's in trouble."
"That's an understatement. The notebook computer line has been down for weeks. He should never have put a plant on the mainland."
She shook her head at him. "You've been like this for days. First I thought you were worried they might arrest you for your protest activities in the United States at the time of Tiananmen, but I decided that's too long ago. Besides, they want the Shanghai branch of Diamond Computer Company too much to hassle you over that. Then I started thinking." She paused to sip some cognac.
The shrewd look in her eye put him on the edge of his chair.
"The gray-haired man who came to see you a couple of months ago. The one you introduced as a professor from MIT. He wasn't that, was he?"
Chen wasn't surprised that she had figured it out. The first time he had met Mary Ann at a lecture at Harvard, when he had been a student at MIT, he had been struck by her intelligence. She was a junior at the time. Born in Hong Kong, she had lived there with her parents, both British, who knew that once the Chinese took over the island, their golden life as expats in paradise was over. He met her a year after Tiananmen when they killed Mai, the woman he had been in love with, who had gone home to Beijing for the protests.
"What does he have you doing over there?"
"Who?"
"The gray-haired man."
He met her gaze head-on. "I won't lie to you. But I can't talk about it."
She reached over and put her hand on his. "I won't tell you what to do. You've got your own devils driving you. What happened to Mai is part of it. I know that. But think about us. Think about our life. Our children. Trying to get even with them isn't worth it."
He sighed. "It's not just getting even. We live in a world where money rules. People, like my father, who gave up everything and fled here with Chiang Kaishek are now ready to surrender their freedom for cheap labor and greater profits for the computer company."
"Aren't you being unfair?"
"I don't think so. If they get the confederation with the mainland they want, our freedom will be gone in a few short years."
"So we'll go back to England or the United States."
"The trouble is, I like our life here."
She shook her head and finished her drink. There was no point arguing. She wouldn't be able to change his mind. From the time she had met him, she knew there was a part of him
she would never be able to reach.
She finished the cognac, which suddenly tasted bitter. "Let's go back to bed," she said.
They made love. Afterward, she began sobbing. "Be careful. Whatever you do. Please. I want you to return."
Her words shook him. Was he being a fool? Six months after Tiananmen, Donovan, the gray-haired man, had arranged a meeting with Chen at a Boston bar. His proposal had been simple—If you want to strike a blow against Beijing, tell people back home you're spending the summer at a U.S. high-tech firm and let the Company, as he euphemistically referred to the CIA, give you some training. "A sort of summer camp in the mountains. We'll pay you what you'd make at a high-tech firm. Then at some time in the future, we may call on you and ask you to do something for Taiwan, to strike a blow against Beijing. Of course, you'll be able to refuse. It'll be your choice."
In fairness to Donovan, it had been his choice to participate in Operation Matchstick. Donovan never pressed him. Donovan laid out the diagram for the operation, and said, "It's up to you, Chen. Are you in or out?"
Donovan was clever, Chen had to admit. Even in his choice of a name for the operation. If you thought about those missiles across the strait aimed at the heart of Taiwan, aimed at his house, they were like matchsticks. Deadly matchsticks poised to snuff out their lives.
Chen didn't view himself as a hero. He was an ordinary man, who had been drawn by stages into something larger than his own life.
Would he affect the course of his people's future by slowing down the rush to embrace Beijing for economic reasons?
Would he be remembered as a hero? Or as a fool and a stooge for the American devil?
Chapter 9
Ann asked Jennifer if she would walk with her from the hotel to Adams Chapel on Madison. Irreverent as always, Ann whispered to Jennifer that she was wearing a thick black veil because she didn't want anyone to notice if she broke out in a smile. Gerry, with her husband, walked on the other side of her mother, and Matt, accompanied by his wife, was two steps behind, deep in thought, undoubtedly of unfinished business with his father. Neither of the couples had children because they were concentrating on their careers—a fact that displeased Ann, who wanted grandchildren.
As she walked, Jennifer's thoughts turned toward her brother, Gabe, as they always did when she attended a funeral.
They had been children of privilege, born to a surgeon and his beautiful wife, Valerie, in tony Winnetka in the gold coast suburbs of Chicago. It was a world that might have satisfied most of its residents, but not the restless Val, who took off one day without any warning, leaving behind a four-year-old daughter and two-year-old son, on a quest for the mystic life in Nepal, from where she never returned. From then on, it was just Jenny and Gabe against the rest of the world. They were doing reasonably well, she thought, until their father moved his new wife into the house with her own three children. That was October of Gabe's freshman year in high school. Two months later, her brother died from an overdose of drugs he had purchased on the school grounds.
A part of Jennifer died that day as well. What was left she threw into the theater and acting as a way of escaping from reality. With the aid of Miss Cohen, a marvelous drama teacher, who not only coached her at school but got her a summer apprenticeship at the Goodman Theatre and later a scholarship to Carnegie Mellon, Jennifer's escape from reality became a reason for living.
Blaming her father for what had happened to Gabe, she hadn't spoken to him since she left for college. After many years of bitterness, it was Ben who had helped her come to grips with what happened. He had persuaded her that it was time to bury the past in a distant place in her mind and to move on. Only at funerals did those memories come flowing back and rip her apart. There she was at the cemetery outside of Winnetka screaming, "No, no, no!" and holding on to Gabe's coffin so tightly that her father had to pull her away in order for it to be lowered into the ground.
As soon as they entered the Adams Chapel, the Secret Service was in evidence along each wall, anticipating the arrival of President Brewster. Outside, reporters were milling around like sharks waiting for someone to toss a blood-soaked body from a boat.
Three minutes before eleven, the precise time on the day's schedule Slater had set for the President, a sleek, bulletproof black Cadillac limousine pulled up in front of the chapel. Out stepped the President, accompanied by his wife, Beverly, and Jim Slater. A second car traveling behind carried the Cunninghams.
Philip Brewster might not be the best president this country ever had, but he was a gracious, decent man, Jennifer thought. Robert Winthrop had been his close friend since school days and his political adviser for almost two decades. When he stopped and told Ann in a halting voice that choked back tears how sorry he was, there was no doubt that he meant it. "We'll find out who did this," he vowed.
As soon as the President sat down, the organ began playing. Ann gripped Jennifer's arm hard, digging her nails into her skin. The sudden intensity of Ann's emotion startled her.
Twenty minutes later, President Brewster climbed the steps to the podium to speak. "When I first arrived at Phillips Exeter Academy forty-one years ago, one boy stood out among all others in our class. He had maturity, intelligence, and a zest for life beyond his age of thirteen years. He..."
Jennifer stopped listening. If the President only knew. Her mind began wandering, thinking about what Ann had told her last evening. It was Jennifer's guess that Ambassador Liu hadn't taken his video to the Oval Office. The President, standing up there intoning piously about his friend, didn't realize that he had been spared a major scandal.
* * *
Jennifer wasn't the only one who had tuned out the President. Jim Slater turned his head ever so slightly, looking unobtrusively out of the corner of his eye. Ann Winthrop was sitting on the center aisle. To her left was Jennifer Moore, whom he had met just before the ceremony, with Ann providing the introduction. Jennifer was properly dressed in black. With her legs crossed, her skirt had ridden up a little. She was showing an awful lot of gorgeous leg.
That wasn't all Slater liked about Jennifer. He had received an e-mail from Fulton on Air Force One en route to New York, pulling together her bio at Slater's request following the morning meeting with Ben. From it, Slater learned that Jennifer had graduated from Carnegie Mellon eleven years ago, which made her about thirty-two now. She had gone off to New York for a career in the theater. After a year of waiting tables and taking bit parts way off-Broadway on the second floor of warehouses, she had gotten her big break. In an article attached to the e-mail, the New York Times had covered in detail the story of how Jennifer, as a young understudy in a Broadway revival of Picnic, directed by Ann Winthrop, had been propelled into the lead midway through a performance. Trent McCall, while standing and kissing Denise Waller onstage, the star whom he'd been trying unsuccessfully to sleep with ever since rehearsals had begun, grabbed her buttocks and pressed her close to his erection, grinding his body against her. Irate and red-faced, Denise had pulled away and shouted, "You groped me, you asshole!" Then she slapped his face and stormed off the stage.
While the stunned audience murmured in their seats, Ann pleaded with Denise to go back on. "It's him or me," she shouted at Ann. "You can't have both of us." For Ann, that was no choice. Denise's understudy, Jennifer Moore, was ready to go. Ann went to the center of the stage in front of the curtain and announced, "Give us ten minutes and the performance will continue with Jennifer Moore in the role of Madge Owens." Jennifer had received the audience's goodwill, followed by good reviews, and she finished out the run.
Other Broadway parts followed, but they were too few and far between for the actress to live decently, so, armed with introductions from Ann to some key Hollywood players, she set out for Tinsel Town. After a couple of minor roles in feature films, a few television movies-of-the-week, and lots of prime-time guest appearances, something happened that made Jennifer return east to attend Columbia Law School. Fulton hadn't been able to find out
what that something was.
Following graduation, she came to Washington. In the criminal division of the Justice Department, she was viewed as a rising star, but after three years she gave it up, joining the Washington law firm of Blank & Foster. Last year she had become a partner, specializing in litigation. She was a member of the board of the Dolly Madison Theatre, the Washington Opera, and the Women's Legal Defense Fund. So why the hell is she defending Clyde Gillis, the gardener? Slater wondered.
The longer he looked at her, the more he started thinking about her in ways that had nothing to do with Clyde Gillis or the case. There was something enticing and sexually provocative about her—even dressed for a funeral—with her honey blond hair pulled back tightly.
As the President sat down and the minister moved back to the lectern, Slater sneaked a look at his watch. God, how much longer is this crap going to continue? I've got so much to do back in Washington.
Mercifully, the service ended fifteen minutes later. With the crowd milling around and gradually drifting out, Slater approached Ann. "If you're going back to Washington, you're welcome to join us on Air Force One. Marshall and Betty Sue are staying in New York. So we've got room for you and your kids or anyone else you want." He was hoping that she'd bring Jennifer.
"My children are heading back to San Francisco and Philadelphia," she said in a tone of resignation, sorry that neither one offered to spend time with her. Sad that they didn't have any semblance of a family. "It's just me and Jenny."
"I think I can handle that," Slater said, concealing his delight.
* * *
"You have some visitors," was all the guard told Clyde Gillis.
Uncertain what to expect and beaten down after Ben's effort at intimidation the night before, Gillis walked with hesitancy out to the central visiting area in the jail. It was a single room with twenty wooden tables and benches scattered around. Half a dozen armed guards constantly patrolled the perimeter, watching for any exchanges between the prisoners and their guests—each of whom had passed through metal detectors.