City of Endless Night

49

Bryce Harriman was led by the armed corrections officer down the sterile hallways of the Manhattan Detention Complex, then ushered into a tiny room with a table bolted to the floor, two chairs, a clock, and an overhead light — both fitted with wire screens. There were no windows; he only knew that it was quarter to nine in the morning because of the clock.

“Here you are,” the officer said.

Harriman hesitated, looking at two beefy, shaved-head characters already in the holding cell who were eyeing him as if sizing up a cut of rare roast beef.

“Come on, let’s go!” The guard gave Harriman a light shove. He entered and the door clanged shut behind him, the bolt shooting into place with a clank.

He shuffled in and took a seat. At least he wasn’t wearing leg irons anymore, but the orange prison jumpsuit was stiff and abrasive against his skin. The last many hours had passed in a dreadful kind of blur. The arrest, the trip in a squad car to the local precinct, the waiting, the arraignment and booking for embezzlement, and then the depressingly short ride to the detention complex just a few blocks away — it was over almost before he could process what had happened. It was like a nightmare from which he could not shake himself awake.

As soon as the guard was gone, one of the brawny guys came and stood over him, real close, staring down.

Harriman, not knowing what to do, finally raised his head. “What?”

“My seat.”

Harriman jumped up with alacrity while the man sat down. Two seats: three men. No cot. This was going to be a long day.

As he sat on the floor, back propped against the wall, listening to the yammer and bluster of fellow prisoners up and down the cell block, the mistakes he’d made paraded themselves before his eyes in dumb show. He’d been blinded by overconfidence, reinforced by his recent celebrity — and he’d fatally underestimated Anton Ozmian.

His first mistake, as Ozmian had taken pains to point out, had been to overlook the obvious question: Why had Ozmian beaten up the priest in the first place? Why no repercussions? It had been such an outrageous assault, right in front of an entire congregation, that his reportorial alarm bells should have rung, five-alarm.

His second mistake had been tactical: showing the piece to Ozmian before publishing it. That had not only tipped his hand, but also given Ozmian time to react. With bitter self-recrimination, he remembered all too well how Ozmian’s lieutenant had slipped out for a few minutes early in their meeting — only to return after setting the frame job in motion, no doubt. And then they’d kept him there in the office, talking, while the trap was being sprung. By the time he walked out of the DigiFlood building, flushed with success, he was already dead meat. He recalled, with a fresh wave of frustration and shame, what Ozmian had told him earlier: Our company has many fine programmers, and they created a most lovely digital theft leading back to you. And you simply do not have the knowledge, or the resources, to undo it. That was proving all too true: in one of the few calls he’d been allowed to make, he’d told his editor what had happened to him, how he’d been framed, and how he’d write a hell of a story about Ozmian that would explain it all. Petowski’s response had been to call him a liar and hang up.

It seemed an eternity, but it was actually only six hours later when his two cellmates, who had blessedly ignored him, were taken out of the holding cell. And then it was his turn. A guard came, unlocked the door, and ushered him down the hall to a tiny room with chairs and a table. He was told to sit, and a moment later a man arrived, wearing a well-tailored suit and gleaming shoes that squeaked as he walked. He had a cheerful, almost cherubic face. This was Leonard Greenbaum, the lawyer Harriman had retained — not a public defender, but an experienced and lethal defense attorney, the most expensive Harriman could afford…given the fact that most of his assets had now been frozen. The man nodded a greeting, put his heavy leather case on the table, sat down across from Harriman, opened the case, removed a pile of papers, and spread them out before him.

“I’ll be brief, Mr. Harriman,” he told the reporter as he looked over the papers. “After all, at this point there really isn’t much to say. First, the bad news. The district attorney has an airtight case against you. The paper trail has been all too easy to establish. They have the records of your opening the Cayman Islands account, along with a video of you entering the bank, they have records of you secretly transferring all the funds from the foundation, and they have evidence of your intent to flee the country the day after tomorrow, in the form of a one-way plane ticket to Laos.”

This last was news to Harriman. “Flee the country? To Laos?”

“Yes. Your apartment has been searched by order of the court and all documents and computers seized. It’s all in there, Mr. Harriman, as clear as day, along with the electronic ticket.”

Greenbaum’s voice had taken on a sorrowful, even reproachful tone, as if he wondered why Harriman had been quite so thickheaded.

Harriman groaned, put his head in his hands. “Look, it’s all a setup. A frame job for blackmail. Ozmian created all this out of thin air. He’s got the best hackers in the world working for him, and they staged this whole thing! I told you about my meetings with Ozmian, how he threatened me. There will be records that I was in the building, not once but twice.”

“Mr. Ozmian admits you were in the building, but states you were simply looking for more information on his daughter for a new article.”

“He did this to me as pure revenge because of what I wrote about his daughter! The man texted me right as I left the building, telling me what he did and why!”

The lawyer nodded. “You are, I take it, referring to the text that cannot be located on your phone or anywhere else.”

“It’s got to be somewhere!”

“And I agree. That’s the problem. In my experience — and no doubt, that of the prosecution — texts simply don’t delete themselves. There’s always some trace left somewhere.”

Harriman slumped in his chair. “Look, Mr. Greenbaum, I hired you to defend me. Not catalog all this phony evidence of guilt!”

“First of all, please call me Lenny. I’m afraid we’re going to be working together for a long time.” He put his elbows on the table and leaned forward, his voice sympathetic. “Bryce, I will defend you to the utmost. I’m the best in the business and that’s why you hired me. But we have to face facts: the DA has an overwhelming case. If we insist on going to court, you’ll be convicted and they will throw the book at you. The only chance you have — the only chance — is to plead.”

“Plead? You think I’m guilty, don’t you?”

“Let me finish.” Greenbaum took a deep breath. “I’ve spoken with the DA, and under the right circumstances he’s inclined to be lenient. You’ve got no priors, and you’ve led an upstanding, law-abiding life so far. In addition, you’re a well-known reporter who has provided a public service to the city with this recent case. As a result, he might be willing to think of this as a onetime aberration, albeit egregious. After all, stealing funds from a charitable foundation for cancer patients, established under the pretext of memorializing a deceased friend…” His voice trailed off.

Harriman swallowed. “Lenient? Lenient how?”

“That’s to be decided — if you give me authority to negotiate. The fact is, none of the extradited money was actually spent, and you did not flee the country. I could get you off with intent. If you were to plead guilty to that, with luck I’d say you’d have to do no more than — oh, two years, three, tops.”

With another groan, Harriman let his head sink back into his hands. There was no other word for it, this was in fact a living nightmare — a nightmare that, it now seemed, he would not wake from for at least a couple of years.