by D. W. Buffa
She left my office an hour after she had come, and I knew she would be there the next morning, sitting in the same place in court, ready with an eager smile of encouragement when, in full view of the jury, Kevin Fitzgerald, just before he took his seat next to me, would with unmistakable affection turn and smile at her. It was one of the only things in this bizarre trial I could honestly predict.
There was an inch-high stack of phone messages on my desk, half of them from reporters hoping to get me to say something about what the defendant was planning to do, some from prospective clients with the mistaken belief that a lawyer in a trial on national television must know what he was doing, and, I suspected, the hope that their case might end up part of the pictured memory that had almost completely replaced written history in the public mind. All of these could wait. There were two that could not. The one from Jean-Francois Reynaud was brief but urgent. I called the private number he had left and got a recording. Thirty seconds after I left the message that I was returning his call, he called back. Could I meet him at eight o’clock in the place we had met before.
The other message was from Tangerine, telling me she would call later. I felt like a kid in high school, wondering if the girl he kept calling would ever come to the phone. I started to call her, then thought better of it. If she had wanted that, she would have asked. I had an hour before my meeting with Reynaud and at least four hours of work to get through. It was the necessary preparation for another day in trial: witness statements, biographies, background information, every imaginable detail about the lives of anyone the prosecution was likely to call, including especially the witnesses who had already testified and I was in all probability going to recall as witnesses for the defense. Most of it was dry, routine, the dull, dreary catalogue of what, for most of them, had been the anonymous steps up the public ladder: elections won, elections lost, positions taken, positions changed, loyalties given, loyalties denied, the slow transition from the bright-eyed eagerness of the young reformer, certain that they could never be corrupted, to the squinting self-confidence of the political operative learned in all the virtues of deception. Criminals of the kind I usually represented were more honest. They did not lie about what they were. Politicians, those I was reading about, cared only about the image they created, the image they thought other people, those vast majorities they wanted, needed, to have, wanted, needed, to have of them. It was a mistake to call them hollow; they were solid glass, reflecting back whatever you came looking for. But not all of them. There were a few who were exactly what others thought they were. Their error was the failure to understand that the sincerity of their belief did not make their convictions true. The ones made of solid glass led wherever others wanted to go; these people would take everyone in one direction, whether anyone else wanted to go there or not. The best example was the witness the prosecution was going to call next, the new president’s chief of staff.
I did as much as I could until it was time to leave. There was more work to do, but I could get to it later tonight or early in the morning. Jean-Francois would not have called if there was not something more important than a last review of material I now knew almost by heart. I left the building and started looking for a cab. It was not yet dark and the streets were full of noise, cars jammed close together, drivers honking, shouting, their impatience. People waited in a bunched-up crowd for a red light to change. Smart-looking couples hustled down the sidewalk, eager to get to dinner. An old, gray-haired lady pulled a tattered canvas two-wheeled cart in her heavy, thick-soled shoes. The blind man at the corner newsstand carefully counted out change by the measured touch of his aging fingers.
“Let me give you a ride.”
The backseat door of a long black Lincoln had opened just in front of me. The voice seemed familiar; the face, when he leaned across the backseat and repeated the invitation, was the last one I expected to see. Without hesitation, oblivious to everything except an extreme curiosity to know what Carson Youngblood thought he was doing, I got in.
The driver, wearing dark glasses though it was now twilight, immediately started up the street.
“I wanted to apologize,” said Youngblood, more relaxed and far friendlier than he had been in court. “I don’t have to tell you that I lied. My only excuse is that I didn’t have any choice.”
I did not know what he was after, why he was doing this, but I did not like it. Did he expect that I would give him my approval, tell him that I understood, that there were no hard feelings?
“You lied under oath. That’s called perjury. But I don’t think I have to tell you that, do I?”
Youngblood looked at me for a moment, then looked out the window on his side of the car. He did not say anything, nothing, not a word. We sat in silence as the car moved steadily through traffic, until we were on the street that ran the length of Golden Gate Park.
“Where are we going? I have somewhere I have to be. You offered me a ride, not an invitation to a kidnapping.”
Youngblood laughed. He turned away from the view out his window.
“I can’t be seen with you. I can’t afford to have anyone know I’ve even talked to you. There are some things you should know, things that might help you understand the situation you’re in.”
He seemed friendly enough, but his words seemed like a warning, perhaps even a threat.
“There was not any other way to talk to you. I couldn’t call your office and make an appointment.”
He seemed to think this quite funny. The reason escaped me entirely.
“So you decided to pick me up outside my office. How did you know I’d be there? How did you know what time?”
Youngblood rolled his eyes, and bobbed his head from side to side.
“You go back to your office every day after trial, and sometime later you leave. Why? Did you think you were under some kind of sophisticated surveillance? I’m afraid not, Mr. Antonelli. We just waited up the street. It’s old fashioned, I know, but it works.”
We had reached 19th Street and turned right through the west end of the park. The road led directly to the bridge.
“This happened to me once before,” I remarked as we approached the toll plaza. “A few years ago. There was a case involving another U.S. senator, Jeremy Fullerton. He wasn’t, like Fitzgerald, accused of anything. Fullerton was murdered, and I was defending a young black college student charged with killing him. He had not done it, and eventually he was cleared. He finished college, graduated from medical school and is now a physician. Fullerton, on the other hand, had not lived such an honorable life. He had been involved with the Russians—yes, it happened before—had taken a lot of money from them, funded his campaign, financed the way he lived. Everything had been arranged by an old Russian spy, a man named Bogdonovitch, who had stayed in San Francisco when the Soviet Union collapsed and he was, as he used to put it, suddenly out of a job. Bogdonovitch killed Fullerton, but that’s another story. In the middle of the trial, someone with the government—our government—did what you’re doing now, took me for a ride over the Golden Gate and gave me all the reasons why I shouldn’t dig too deeply into Fullerton’s past, that it would be better if this one kid got convicted than what Fullerton had been doing ever came out. He was very clear, this member of the government. He was sitting in the backseat, just like you are, and he had a driver, just like you have, and they stopped in the middle of the bridge and told me to get out and to think about how many people jumped off the bridge, their deaths declared suicide, as I walked to the other side.”
“And did you, think about what he told you while you walked to the other side?”
“Not a lot. I was thinking mainly of how goddamn cold it was and how much I hated heights. Now, if you’re going to threaten me, go ahead and do it, but if you think it is going to make any difference…”
He ignored me. We continued on in silence, across the great bridge with the long, twisted cables that look like harp strings in the somber light of dusk. When we reached t
he other side, he tapped the driver on the shoulder and told him to pull off at the vista point on the right. The car came to a stop and we got out and walked to the guardrail at the edge of the sheer cliff and, hundreds of feet below, the swirling waters of the bay.
“What my agent, Milo Todorovich, told you when you were cross-examining him in court is true. Bridges was everything he said he was: violent temper, unable to concentrate on anything for more than a few seconds, watching television all the time, the only thing he seemed to care about was what people were saying about him.”
Far away and yet close enough to touch, the city started flickering into life. I shoved my hands in my pockets and listened carefully to what Youngblood was saying, wondering why he had gone to so much trouble to bring me out to this deserted place on the far side of the bridge.
“I’ve been thirty years with the service, and I’ve seen and heard some things that make you wonder what would happen if people really knew the kind of men they have sometimes elected to be leaders of the free world. But whatever their failings, there wasn’t one of them who did not have some idea of their responsibility to the office. Bridges did not feel any responsibility for anything, except to himself. Listen,” he went on, staring across at the dancing lights of the city, “even that isn’t quite true. Every president we have had felt a responsibility to himself—it’s the nature of ambition. They wanted to leave their mark, to be remembered for doing things for their country, important things. They did not always succeed, probably most of them failed, but that was what they wanted. Do you know how often, usually late at night, some of them decided they wanted to go out to the Lincoln Memorial, go out there when no one else was around. They would stand there, looking up, and you knew that they were wondering if they would ever have the chance to be tested like Lincoln was, and, if they were, whether they would reach that kind of greatness. You could see it on their faces, the hope, the doubt, and the regret; regret that they had not lived in earlier times when they thought things were not as complicated, as difficult, as they had become. But Bridges? It’s the last thing he would have done; it’s the last thing he would have thought about. You want to know the secret that explains what Bridges was? It’s easy. Nothing existed except what he wanted now, this minute. Everything was impulse. He was nothing but a child, an overgrown child who would crush anything, or anyone, he did not like. He did not like Fitzgerald, he did not like him at all. He didn’t invite him on the plane.”
I did not understand at first what Youngblood was saying. It had come too fast, without a pause. Then, when it hit me, when I realized what he had said, I still was not sure what it meant.
“Bridges did not want to see Fitzgerald. There was a big fight about it,” explained Youngblood.
“A fight? Between Bridges and…?”
“Michael Donahue. Ellison was chief of staff, but Ellison did not carry any real weight. He was there to make sure everything was scheduled properly, that everyone knew what they were supposed to do. If he had an opinion about anything, he kept it to himself. Donahue was the only one with real influence; the only one Bridges never screamed at—until that day on the plane. Todorovich was standing just outside the door. The door was open. He heard everything. ‘I’m not going to see that son of a bitch!’ Bridges shouted. ‘Why bother? He wants to run against me. What am I going to tell him, that it isn’t going to happen, that he’ll never get the chance? That would be smart as hell, wouldn’t it?’”
“He said that?” I asked sharply. “He said, ‘he’ll never get the chance’? What did he mean? Do you know?”
Youngblood narrowed his eyes, concentrating on what he remembered.
“Todorovich told me what he heard. He remembered it almost word for word, and I wrote it down so I would not forget. That’s what Bridges said. I’m not sure what he meant. But whatever he meant, it did not stop Donahue from insisting that he meet with Fitzgerald when they landed. He said that the reason Bridges did not want to was the reason why he should. ‘We have to do everything we can to keep him in the dark.’”
“In the dark about what? What were they planning? Fitzgerald was not going to be able to run against Bridges, and they wanted to keep him from finding out how they were going to stop him? That has to be it. They must have had something on him, something they could use to keep him from trying to run against Bridges for the presidency. But for some reason they didn’t want Fitzgerald to find out.”
Youngblood was not listening. He was too absorbed in what he had been told, the story he was now trying to tell me with as much accuracy as he could.
“Bridges didn’t care. Fitzgerald and ‘all the others like him, could go to hell.’ He wasn’t going to see him and there wasn’t any point trying to get him to change his mind. Donahue told him he did not have any choice. Fitzgerald had already been invited. It was too late to tell him the meeting had been cancelled. That’s when Bridges went ballistic. He started screaming obscenities, accusing Donahue of always doing things behind his back, always telling him one thing and doing another, always—”
“He said—Donahue said that Fitzgerald had already been invited? When was this, after they had landed?”
“No, not after they had landed—during the flight.”
“Jonathan Reece, the president’s assistant, testified that he was sent down from the plane to invite Fitzgerald on board.”
“I know; I heard. I have no reason to think he was not telling the truth.”
“And Ellison testified that Bridges told him to do it. He never mentioned Donahue. What made Bridges change his mind? Why did he decide, after screaming at Donahue that he would not even talk to Fitzgerald, to invite him on Air Force One?”
The prospect of a brief face to face meeting with Fitzgerald had made Bridges apoplectic. It struck me as a case of nerves, tension reaching a breaking point when something is about to happen that, one way or the other, will change everything. What could they have been planning, what could they have had on Fitzgerald, that would have put Bridges so much on edge?
“Something they made up, something that isn’t true, something that, if anyone found out, would blow up in their faces?” I ventured.
Youngblood kicked at a rock on the pavement, put his hands on the small of his back and after one last glance across the bay, gave me a strange, ironic look.
“A false story, with just enough circumstantial evidence, that he was planning to murder the president? It’s not impossible. They said the purpose of the trip was so that Bridges could speak at the tech convention. That was what the public was told. But he was here to do a few other things as well. He was scheduled to meet privately with a couple of executives from companies that specialize in cyber warfare, how you screw up someone’s electronic system, how you protect your own system from someone’s interference. This is the interesting part. The two companies involved work with the government on some really highly classified things—you never heard this from me—the kind of cyber warfare that makes the attack look like it comes from someone else. They can invent anything, create a whole chain of evidence, email messages, phone records, anything they need to make you believe that something has happened that never happened at all.”
With a grim expression, Youngblood searched my eyes, as if I knew the answer to a question he was almost afraid to ask.
“Do you think Fitzgerald did the right thing? I’m sworn to protect the life of the president, but before Bridges, I never had to ask myself if my oath included someone who might be planning treason. That’s what Fitzgerald thought, isn’t it, that killing him was the only choice he had? Ever since it happened, I keep wondering if he was right. I brought you out here to clear my conscience. I don’t know how important it is, but I thought you should know why Bridges was coming out here and what happened on the plane, when he and Donahue got into it.”
He would lose more than his career, he would be facing the possibility of prison time for what he had told me. I trusted him; I hoped he trusted me.
We started back to the car. The lights from the Golden Gate cast everything in shadow.
“You had Fitzgerald for three days. Anything you can tell me, anything that struck you as peculiar?”
It was an unusual question for a lawyer to ask about his own client, but, as Youngblood instinctively understood, there was nothing normal about the series of events in which we had both found ourselves involved. His first reaction was to emit a short, almost noiseless laugh, a grunting acknowledgment of the obvious, that everything about it had been peculiar. Then he changed his mind.
“The most peculiar thing was that it was not really peculiar at all. It was fascinating—though let me add right away that I only thought about it later—that he did not seem the least bit angry or upset. He never shouted, never demanded an attorney, insisted on his rights, never showed the least bit of defiance, and he never, not even once, showed any sign of feeling guilty about what he had done. He treated us with—and I know this must sound strange—complete respect. And it wasn’t just because he thought we were only doing our jobs. He seemed interested in how we did them. It was like a training exercise in which he was playing the part of a captured terrorist, going through an interrogation, being waterboarded, as if it were all pretend, knowing that he wouldn’t be treated nearly as harshly as he would if it were real; knowing that, at the end of it, he would not only walk away but join in the discussion about the ways in which we might improve the technique. I can’t quite put my finger on it. Maybe it was because he believed what he did was right; maybe that is the power of being willing to become, if necessary, a martyr to a cause. But I think it was something more than that. I don’t think he thinks he is guilty of anything; he thinks he is innocent.”