The Rule of Nine

FIVE

Life has turned upside down in the eight months since the shoot-out in front of the naval base. I have trouble sleeping at night. Like a turtle shrinking into its shell, sudden noise has me compressing my neck until my head is between my shoulder blades. The doctor tells me that this will pass in time.

Who could have ever guessed that a chance meeting with a young woman, Katia Solaz, in a grocery store would have led her to become a client in a murder case, or that the quest for evidence in that case, and the search for a witness in Latin America, would have ensnared us in an attempted nuclear assault on an American military base. It is like an ongoing nightmare.

In the hours after the shootout, before the smoke had even settled, federal, state, and local police held a chaotic news conference not far from the scene. My name, along with Herman’s, got mentioned as “persons of interest” already in custody. It didn’t matter that the cops told the press we were not necessarily suspects.

In less time than it takes to boil an egg, the names Paul Madriani and Herman Diggs ricocheted from one cable news network to another. It was a story with global reach. Within an hour, people in Hong Kong supping on Chinese glass noodles with chopsticks were seeing file photos of Herman and me on television. Bad news travels fast. News of a terror attack travels at the speed of light.

It began as a routine homicide case, the murder of Emerson Pike, a somewhat secretive old man who dealt in rare coins and whose past seemed shrouded. To the police the motive was obvious, theft. And when Katia was arrested with coins belonging to the victim in her possession, her guilt was self-evident. But then no one knew of Pike’s background, except the federal government, and they weren’t talking. In the end it was history that ensnared us, Pike’s past, and that of Katia’s grandfather, the old Russian, and the specter of the Cuban missile crisis.

When it was all over, the feds held us for five days. They picked up Harry and planted the three of us, Herman, Harry, and me, in separate cells at the federal lockup in San Diego so that we couldn’t talk and compare notes. Then they interrogated us around the clock.

When I asked them if they were going to read me my Miranda rights and allow me to have legal counsel, I was told I was not a suspect, at least not yet. When I demanded that they either arrest me or let me go, they ignored me. After conferring with his lawyers, Thorpe then told me I was a material witness. He intended to hold me as long as necessary, for my own safety.

Because of the circumstances, they couldn’t be sure whether they had all the perpetrators. If some of them were still at large, they might try to silence me. At least that was the story.

What they wanted was information. Short of violating attorney-client confidences, I told them everything I knew. At one point they brought in experts. Whether they were military or CIA wasn’t clear. There were no introductions. The questioning went on until I lost track of time. Inside, with no windows, I couldn’t tell whether it was night or day, or how long I had been there. I wondered about Harry and Herman and assumed that they were getting the same treatment.

Once they were certain they had squeezed us for every thing they were going to get, they brought Harry, Herman, and me together in a room. There Thorpe, flanked by a lawyer from the Justice Department in Washington, warned us in the strongest possible terms to say nothing to anyone about the events leading up to the assault on the naval base. In particular, they told us not to mention the explosive device. They told us that we could be charged criminally if any of the information we had given them turned out to be knowingly false.

Given the stress we were under, the multitude of details, and the fact that none of us could be sure whether our stories conformed entirely, truth was largely in the eye of the beholder. It was the sword Thorpe held over our heads to assure our silence.

Before they let us go, Thorpe warned us that the press was waiting outside. He offered to take us out through the basement and give us a ride. At first, I turned him down, but then he showed us the photograph.

It was a picture taken that afternoon of the area outside our law office. A sea of cameras and lights blocked the entire sidewalk in front of the Brigantine restaurant, near the arched entrance to Miguel’s Concina where our office was located. There were satellite trucks double-parked on the street out front from one edge of the photograph to the other.

He explained that they were also camped out on the front lawn at my house, and that the media trolls had found Harry’s apartment and Herman’s place as well.

I asked about my daughter.

The FBI had taken Sarah out of the house that afternoon. She was fine. They were providing protection. They had a place for us, a kind of “safe house” near Balboa Park, until they could figure out some way to get the media heat off us. We didn’t have to accept his offer. It was up to us. We could go to a hotel, but there was no assurance that the press wouldn’t find us. It was clear Thorpe didn’t want us in front of the cameras. There was no telling what we might say.

All I wanted was to see Sarah, hold her in my arms, and bury her head in my shoulder. We took him up on his offer. If we had to, we could make other arrangements later.

It was the beginning of a long nightmare. Harry, Herman, and I spent weeks hiding out in an office tower in San Diego. We shared two condos near Balboa Park, Sarah and I in one, Harry and Herman in the other. When the FBI tried to gather some clothes and personal belongings for us from home, stories on the cable channels with film footage showed authorities presumably removing evidence from the residence. There was nothing Thorpe could do to set them straight without revealing that he knew where we were, and that there was a reason for hiding us.

Work files from the office were shuttled by secretaries, driven by the FBI to the office across the bay. Local police ran cover in squad cars if the media tried to follow them.

Sarah was unable to tell her friends where she was living. She couldn’t go anywhere without an FBI chauffeur.

It became impossible for me to show my face in court without being questioned by print reporters on the courthouse beat. The two times I appeared in the courthouse, a near press riot erupted when word got out that I was there. The FBI decided it was not a good idea. I was forced to step away from a case that was scheduled for trial. When the judge threw a fit, the U.S. attorney’s office quietly went behind closed doors and got a continuance along with a substitution of counsel. The bottom line was I could no longer practice.

Over time the details of the shootout unfolded, a little more each day. Other names surfaced, most of them foreign sounding, all perpetrators who were dead. Slowly, like leaves from a tree in autumn, the satellite trucks in front of our office began to thin out.

The authorities made it clear that the investigation now centered on those who had planned the attack. To their knowledge there were no other active perpetrators. The shooters and those carrying out the plot had all been accounted for.

In time the myth of the IED was unveiled. A news blackout was thrown over the contents of the truck, all part of the continuing investigation.

Thorpe was worried that if he simply went to the press and told them right up front that Herman and I were not involved, it might look suspicious. A sharp reporter would wonder what we knew that might cause the FBI to carry water for us. So instead, Thorpe posed one of his undercover agents as a journalist during a news conference. After all the hot questions were asked and answered, the agent, with his notebook out, his pencil at the ready, prefaced his question by saying, “This is sort of ancient stuff, but as I recall, just after the scene was secured outside the base, didn’t you arrest a local lawyer and a private investigator? Can you tell us, were they involved in any way?”

Thorpe mustered up his best toothy grin and said, “No. They were taken into custody and questioned, but they were cleared. They weren’t involved in any way. As I recall, they just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Then he pretended that he couldn’t remember our names, until one of his minions behind him whispered in his ear.

“That’s right. As I recall, Mr. Madriani was the lawyer and I think Mr. Diggs was his investigator. They…no, as I remember, I think they just happened to be in the area talking to a witness who lived in the neighborhood regarding a totally unrelated matter. And they got pulled up in the net. It’s regrettable, but it happens. No, they were cleared long ago,” he told them.

Thorpe watched as some of the reporters in the room jotted down notes. “Next question.”

It took a full day for the gardener to clean up the mess in my front yard after the media horde pulled out. Crushed paper cups, cigarette butts, and discarded sandwich wrappers covered the lawn. Part of the top rail on the low fence separating the garden from the sidewalk was gone. The flower bed behind it was flattened and the shrubs around it trampled where the fourth estate had decided to blaze a new trail to the house.

The office fared a little better, but only because the owners of the building hired security to keep the cameras and equipment out on the sidewalk. Miguel’s Cocina sold enough coffee and chips with guacamole that Harry was afraid they might frame us on other charges just to get the customers back.

We’ve been back in the office now since early May, a couple of months. The first few days we noticed a black town car parked across the street in the same spot each day. The shadowed silhouette of two men could be seen in the front seat. Thorpe was probably trying to make sure that we weren’t inviting any journalists in for coffee. No doubt they were tailing us but it was hard to tell. After a while we noticed that the car was gone. Apparently the FBI was satisfied that Harry and I had developed a terminal aversion to publicity.

We brought in a professional security service to check the office for electronic bugs, wires, and taps on our phones. Everything tested clean.

The print press, always the first to find a story and the last to give it up, made a few calls to the office, mostly voice-mail messages that we never returned. One enterprising reporter tried to inspire a new angle with the rumor that we were preparing to sue the government for defamation and invasion of privacy. He wanted to know if it was true. Before Harry could warm to the idea, I shot a one-line e-mail back to the guy telling him, “No truth to the rumor and no further comment.” A lawyer unwilling to file a lawsuit; this seemed to kill the last vestige of the beast. Life had finally returned to normal.