by D. W. Buffa
Pausing, Fitzgerald looked at me. He knew what the next question would be.
“Was that the reason the president came to California to meet with those Silicon Valley executives we heard about earlier? To discuss ways in which the system could be protected?”
“No. He met with them because they were part of a covert cyber warfare organization Michael Donahue had set up. Their task was not to protect the system; their task was to penetrate and disrupt it.”
“But why would the president want to do that? What good would that do him?”
“Because they were going to do it in a way that would be traced back to the Russians. That was the genius of it. You have heard of kings and tyrants, men like Hitler and Stalin, you’ve heard of tin pot dictators who keep their hold on power by starting wars so that support for them becomes a test of your patriotism. No one can turn their back on their country and its leadership when the country is faced with the possibility of invasion and defeat. Now, today, though Bridges played the terrorism card for all it was worth, it doesn’t take a war. All that is necessary is the failure of a system, the electronic lifeline that holds the democracy together. If Bridges had lived, they would have done it: revealed a Russian threat so invasive and expansive that the only way to defeat it would be to start all over. It might take years—and remember, while the system is being rebuilt there would doubtless be new and different threats. There might never be an end to it. We would all have to trust the government to do the right thing.”
I could not wait for Raymond St. John to ask the obvious next question on cross; I could not let him have that advantage.
“But if you knew this, knew that was what they were planning, why didn’t you tell someone, why didn’t you report all this to the FBI? Why did you have to kill the president?”
“Because I couldn’t prove any of it. Or rather, I could not prove every part of it. The evidence was all there. But each thing, taken by itself, did not prove a crime. Bridges set up a commission, the commission reports that voter fraud could happen, and might already have happened. Donahue calls together a group of cyber warfare experts. It would have been malfeasance not to get the best trained people to assess the nature of the threat. They know why they are doing this, but there wasn’t anyone who was going to tell us on the record, in testimony before the Intelligence Committee, even in closed session with a promise of anonymity. Too many things leaked out. No one was willing to take the chance.”
“But you knew?’
“Yes, absolutely. There was someone, a private source, from one of the intelligence agencies. That person, whose identity I have sworn to protect, had Donahue under surveillance. He had been under surveillance since the meeting he had in June before the election with Rostov and the Russian ambassador. That was the other reason I knew there wasn’t any time, that I had to stop Bridges when I did.”
“The other reason?”
“My source, the one who told me. Someone had him under surveillance, and probably me as well. The night after he told me, he was killed, found dead in his apartment. The police said he died of an overdose. He had never even smoked marijuana.”
Raymond St. John was perplexed, or so he pretended, when he got up from his chair to begin his cross-examination.
“You think you may have been under surveillance, is that what you just testified?”
“It’s quite possible,” replied Fitzgerald, formal, polite, ready to answer any question the prosecution cared to ask.
“Because your source, this person who told you what the president was really up to, an attempt to subvert the government—”
“Subvert the government, that’s exactly right. I couldn’t have said it better myself,” interjected Fitzgerald.
Trying to hide his irritation, St. John smiled to himself, and moved closer.
“You, and your source as well, were probably under surveillance, with the result, again, according to your testimony, that he was killed?”
“That’s what I think. Yes, that’s correct.”
“To stop him, I assume, from telling anyone else?”
“Yes.”
“Because that would be the last thing the president, and the other people involved, would want anyone to find out, is that what we should assume?” he asked, raising his eyebrows as if in anticipation of what he expected to hear.
“That is certainly what I assumed.”
“But your source wasn’t the only one who had this damaging information, was he?”
Fitzgerald was not quite sure what he meant.
“He wasn’t the only—”
“You knew. He told you. It was only after that that he was killed—if he was killed. Which raises the question: if they had you under surveillance, if they knew what you had been told, why did they invite you on Air Force One for a private meeting with the president instead of having you killed as well?”
Fitzgerald dismissed it out of hand.
“Probably because it would have been a little difficult to make my death look like an accident. Probably because,” he continued, throwing back his head in sheer, undisguised defiance, “as you may remember from the testimony of one of your own witnesses, I had on three separate occasions requested a meeting with Bridges in the White House. Each time I accompanied that request with a message that I wanted to discuss what he intended to do about the integrity of our elections, that I had learned something so troubling that I had written a contemporaneous memorandum of everything I had been told.”
To St. John’s astonishment, Fitzgerald reached into his inside suit coat pocket and pulled out a typed three-page document.
“Here, would you like to read it? Everything my source told me the night before he was killed, everything Bridges would have done if I had not stopped him!”
St. John ignored him. The only interest he had in what Fitzgerald had given him to read was to remind him that if he thought it evidence, his lawyer could always decide to introduce it. Then he moved on.
“You say you uncovered this plot, that no one else knew of its existence. You’re the ranking member of the Intelligence Committee. Did you provide this information to the chairman the committee?”
“No, I did not. There wasn’t anything I could tell him.”
“Because, Senator Fitzgerald, you didn’t have any evidence to back up this conspiracy theory of yours, isn’t that the reason?”
“If I had evidence—the kind of evidence you mean—I wouldn’t have had to do what I did, would I? I could have stopped it cold. If my source had not been killed, if—”
“If…yes, we understand, Senator Fitzgerald. You had no evidence. There wasn’t any, which means you couldn’t—”
“I didn’t say there wasn’t any; I said I didn’t have it. I knew what was going on, but I couldn’t prove it.” He turned quickly to the jury. “If someone tells you that he has just seen the man who murdered your wife or husband, and after he tells you who it is, that same person kills him as well, are you really going to let someone tell you that you don’t know what happened?”
“Your Honor!” protested St. John. “The witness isn’t answering my question, he’s giving a speech.”
“Maybe you should ask better questions,” I observed before Silverman had time to react.
Silverman looked at Fitzgerald, then he looked at St. John, and then, finally, he looked at me.
“If we’re done now, perhaps, Mr. St. John, you might want to ask your next question.”
“You had no evidence, but you had to stop him?” he said with cynical disbelief. “Isn’t the truth, Senator Fitzgerald, that you killed him because you could not stand the fact that this political neophyte, this man you thought a charlatan and a fraud, had what you wanted more than life itself—the presidency? It drove you crazy, didn’t it, that someone like that, an ill-educated, blustering fool, the most ill-prepared man ever to occupy the office, a man who should not have been elected county sheriff, had done what you had spent your life wanting to do? Isn
’t it—”
“Isn’t it time you asked a question? Isn’t it time you let the witness answer one?” I suggested with the polite contempt for an honest, if misguided, mistake. It put St. John’s teeth on edge.
“Perhaps you would like to ask them for me, cross-examine your own witness. Who knows, with you to tell him what to say, he might even just once tell the truth.”
I took the challenge in good stead, and played it for everything it was worth.
“Yes, of course; I’ll be glad to help. Senator Fitzgerald, isn’t it true that you acted solely for the purpose of saving the country from an attempt to destroy our system of free elections, and for no other reason whatsoever?” I asked with as much severity as if I were the one prosecuting him for murder.
For one of the few times in his sober life, Raymond St. John went red with rage.
“Your Honor, this is—”
“The result of your invitation. Next question, Mr. St. John.”
He took two quick steps forward, then two slightly slower steps back. Four steps to bring him back into control. He looked at Fitzgerald and continued his cross-examination as if everything had gone just as he had planned and expected. He bore in again on Fitzgerald’s well-known ambition, only now he added what until the last minute I was not sure he would. It got close to what I had sometimes thought myself about why Fitzgerald had done what he did.
“Walter Bridges had what you wanted, and you became convinced he was not going to give it up. Isn’t that the crux of your testimony here today, that he was going to make sure there would not be another election? Isn’t that what you said?” he asked, or rather, demanded, as he moved within an arm’s length from where Fitzgerald sat.
“He was going to stop us from having another election. That is what he was going to try to do. Yes, that’s right!” Fitzgerald fired back. “That’s exactly right!”
“And if you stopped him, stopped Walter Bridges from doing that, you would have saved the country, isn’t that what you testified?”
“I had to do it. I had to save the country. I had no choice. You would have done the same thing!”
“You saved the country. You’re not a murderer! You’re a hero, the greatest one the country has ever had. You knew what would happen then, didn’t you? You wouldn’t be convicted of a crime—we don’t do that to people who save the country! We elect them to high office, we ask them to lead us, we make them president if we can. That’s why you killed Walter Bridges, that’s why you had no choice—it was the only way you could get what you wanted, the only way you could take his place, the only way you, instead of Walter Bridges, could become president! Isn’t that right, Senator Fitzgerald? You wanted it so bad you committed murder!”
I tried to salvage what I could, repeating on re-direct some of the questions I had asked before about what he had learned about what Bridges was planning to do, and why, once again, he had decided there was no other way to stop him, but St. John’s cross-examination had been devastating, among the best I had ever seen. I left the courthouse thoroughly depressed, wondering whether there was anything I could do to avoid what now seemed almost inevitable.
“I WAS THERE today, sitting in the back. The prosecutor, St. John, is rather good, isn’t he?”
Jean-Francois Reynaud looked at me with sad, wistful eyes, and a slight, dubious smile of encouragement. It was a French way of telling me that things might be bad, but they could always get worse.
“No, Raymond St. John isn’t bad at all, better than most. What he did, at the end…”
“Yes, but that may not have been so effective as you think. When someone gives a speech, or a teacher gives a lecture, what do we remember? The first and the last things said. I believe that is a rule without exception. What you start with, what you end with, always has the largest impact—at the time when everything is still fresh in your mind. It is what you will remember later as well, until someone tells you what you heard, then the same rule applies again: what they tell you at the beginning, and what they tell you at the end, is what you think important. So, at the end of the trial, when you give your closing argument—and perhaps even before, in whatever you manage to bring out through the testimony of your other witnesses—what St. John ended with today will not be first or last anymore, will it?”
It was a little after nine o’clock. I had come back to the city from Sausalito because Reynaud had left a message with Albert Craven that he had to see me and that it could not wait, but there did not seem to be anything urgent in his voice, nor did he seem to be in any great hurry to tell me what was so important. I was actually relieved, or at least I did not mind, if he wanted to take his time. Perhaps it was the way he could detach himself from what was going on all around him, the sense that even the business of his own government had nothing to do with him personally, that he was only an observer, always interested, but never quite involved. He made me feel that he was a spectator, and that, in his presence, I was one as well.
“I used to watch trials fairly often when I was young. My father was a lawyer. Quite a good one, too; one of the very best there was in Paris, years ago, after the war. He never really liked it, I’m afraid. He would have preferred, like his father, to go into politics, but he was, if I can put it like this, the prisoner of his name.”
“The prisoner of his name?”
“Reynaud. His father, my grandfather, was Paul Reynaud, premier of France, the last one before the German occupation.”
“Reynaud. Paul Reynaud.” I repeated the name with the innocent surprise of a new discovery.
“You know about him?” asked Jean-Francois, surprised that I did.
“Not much, I’m afraid. But a little. Didn’t he head the government, or what there was of one, when the Germans were about to take Paris and the government fled to Bordeaux?” I remembered something else. “Didn’t he have a mistress who insisted that surrender was the only thing left to do?”
Reynaud’s head bobbed side to side, keeping time to the rhythm of his family’s remembered past.
“Yes, she was, in her day, quite beautiful, and quite the worst thing that ever happened to my grandfather. She was not a stupid woman. The Germans had destroyed the French army; there was not an army left to fight. There were two choices: move the government to North Africa, where you would have the French navy at your command, or surrender on the best terms you could still negotiate. She knew the war was lost, but for her, and a great many others, there was more to it than that. The war was lost because France deserved to lose. We were weak, decadent, too divided even to form a government that could last more than a month or so. The Germans, with their discipline and courage, were the wave of the future. Our future, the French future, would belong to those with the foresight and the courage to see this and to act on it. My grandfather, Paul Reynaud, would not do this, but she made his life so miserable with her constant interruptions, her constant unsolicited advice, that he was too distracted to come to any definite decisions, too preoccupied to understand that events were moving too quickly, that there were other forces, other interests, at work. Before he knew what was happening, he was out of power and the government dissolved. Marshall Petain and Pierre Laval took control. General deGaul left for England, the German armistice was signed, and the German army, with Hitler in attendance, marched down the Champ Elysees.
“After the war, deGaul returned in triumph, and while no one thought of Paul Reynaud as a traitor, the way they did, for example, Pierre Laval, no one wanted to be reminded of what had happened in the last days before the fall of France. My father practiced law and lived an essentially private life. It is also, if I can make my own confession, the reason why I joined our foreign service instead of trying my luck at a career in politics. I did not want to be a lawyer, and I had an interest in, shall we say, politics at a higher level, the politics among nations.”
I wondered whether that was also the reason—whether he had also been a prisoner of his name—that he had never risen abou
t the rank of French consul in a foreign country.
“I didn’t mean to burden you with the ancient history of my family, but sitting in court today, watching Senator Fitzgerald, listening to what he said, I was put in mind of what happened years ago with the fall of France. Marshall Petain became the figurehead of a government that depended on the Germans. He had been a hero of the First World War, the French general given credit, though not all of it was deserved, for the German defeat. We lost millions of men in that glorious victory, an entire generation. Petain was in his eighties, shrewd, vindictive, mean-spirited, and in the early stages of senility, but everyone still thought of him as the savior of France. When he went on the radio and blamed the French defeat on the cowardice of politicians, everyone believed him; when he insisted that the honor of France required that we submit to the German victors, there did not seem any alternative.
“Petain gave the new, collaborationist government legitimacy. The real power, however, was Pierre Laval. It is a name that, even today, is still reviled. He believed, like my grandfather’s mistress, that France had become rotten to the core, that the French could not govern themselves. Unlike Petain, who had spent his life in the army, Laval had spent his in politics, a member of parliament who had seen governments come and go with the seasons, a man with deep-seated resentments against all those—and there were a great many—who had conspired to keep him from holding any important office. Laval was now in charge, but of course only to the extent his German masters allowed. This is where it gets interesting, and why I started to remember this while I was watching your trial.”