Capitol Punishment

PROLOGUE The Surly Bonds of Earth

“Nine-one-one, what is your emergency?”

“I’m not sure,” the woman answered, her small baby cooing softly in her arms. “The house across the street from me, well, this guy kind of stumbled out the front door and fell down. He’s just lying there on the walkway.”

“So a man collapsed. Did you hear or see anything else?” The 911 operator had already alerted the county’s fire-rescue dispatch, as well as the sheriffs department.

“No. I was just doing dishes when I noticed it. Should I go check and see if he’s all right?”

“No, ma’am. Just stay where you are. Now, do you know who the man is?”

“I don’t know his name, but I’ve seen him at that house before. There’s only two of us on this road so you don’t miss folks too easily. God, I hope it’s nothing bad.”

“Don’t worry. We have a sheriffs unit rolling and fire-rescue will be there soon. Twelve-twelve Riverside, correct?”

The woman nodded to herself. “Right near Alamo.”

“Thank you. Help will be right there.”

The call, a medical emergency, warranted a code three — lights and sirens — response, but in the sparsely populated area in the north of Los Angeles County there was little to get in one’s way in any case. Eleven Adam Seven, a two-man unit out of the Los Angeles Sheriffs Department Antelope Valley substation, had been given the priority call just a minute earlier. In the time since, Deputies Phillip Pearl and Danny Contreras had covered a mile and a half, leaving a low rooster tail of dust rising from the two-lane asphalt road in their wake.

“Right turn coining up,” Contreras warned his partner behind the wheel.

Pearl saw the sweep in the road and lifted his foot off the gas and began a steady push on the brake, the nose of the black and white cruiser diving for the road. “Hang on.”

A good grip on the Chevy’s door-mounted armrest kept Contreras planted firmly upright as his partner swung into the turn at thirty miles an hour. Ahead of them was a bare stretch of road with two houses coming at them fast.

“Twelve-twelve’s on the left.” Contreras undid his safety belt with his left hand and grabbed a flashlight from the charger as the cruiser pulled to a stop on the wrong side of the street.

“I’ll put us ninety-seven and get the med kit,” Pearl said.

“Gotcha. I’ll check our victim.” Contreras stepped from the car and walked a few paces to its front, where he stopped and checked his surroundings. His academy days were long behind him, but the training he’d received there, and the bullet he’d taken a few years after that, had ingrained in him a simple rule to live by: Don’t rush in. He scanned the front lawn, just greening in a wet autumn after a relentless summer, and the street side of the tan-colored house. Just as reported, lying outside the open front door was a body. From ten yards it looked about as lifeless as lifeless got, but the only way to know for sure was to get up close and personal. He’d done hundreds of body checks in his career, but had never been able to distance himself enough from the deceased to make the act just another part of his job. Maybe, though, this check would yield some sign of life. Just maybe.

Contreras trotted around a surprisingly green hedge toward the victim. Nearer the open entry door he slowed, checking the darkened interior as best he could from his position in the bright sunlight. Nothing was obviously amiss, so he knelt down and lightly pressed two fingers against the man’s neck in search of a carotid pulse. His other hand probed the body for telltale signs of trauma — blood, bruising, etc. — but found only a sticky wetness soaking the victim’s shirt. He pulled his moistened hand away and sniffed at the liquid, but it had no scent. A swipe of his hand on his uniform pants cleaned it off. His fingers stayed on the neck for a few more seconds until further searching was fruitless. They no longer had a victim…they had a body.

He started to stand to tell his younger partner not to bother with the med kit, but never made it out of his crouch.

Pearl slammed the trunk lid after removing the orange med kit, walked toward his partner and the victim, and froze near the hedge at what he saw. Contreras, who had been giving the man a quick once-over just a few seconds before, was no longer crouched at his side. Instead, the twelve-year veteran was in a heap atop the body of their victim. His face, lying sideways on the man’s chest, was a blank mask of clenched teeth and vibrating features, the eyes open, falling back into their sockets, and the mouth puffing reflexively.

The med kit hit the ground as Phil’s rover came out of its belt holder. “ELEVEN ADAM SEVEN — OFFICER DOWN! TWELVE-TWELVE RIVERSIDE!”

He vaulted the low hedge, gun coming out to cover the open door — Was there a shot? I didn’t hear anything! — and was at his partner’s side in an instant, his hands easing him off the body as he searched for some reason for the collapse. Air passed in and out of Danny Contreras in strange spurts, but it was unnatural, reflexive, like the death throes of a landed fish. Like no breathing action Pearl had ever seen or heard. He searched for some cause, some reason for his partner’s collapse. It was as if an invisible assailant had struck his partner…had struck…had—

Then Deputy Phillip Pearl knew. He was three years out of the academy, a former military policeman and veteran of the Gulf War. With just a few seconds of life remaining, the intensive training he’d received after arriving in Saudi in the fall of ‘90 came back to him. But all it brought was the realization that there was nothing to be done. He heard sirens in the distance, strange, high-pitched warbles that stretched out to long wails, then became loud snaps as violent as thunder as his brain stopped processing auditory signals in any recognizable way. He thought briefly about reaching for his rover, but couldn’t. His body would not respond to even the simplest command. Arms and legs seemed like separate entities functioning on their own.

CRACK!

He thought he felt motion, in his face or head, maybe, but couldn’t pin it down. What little of his vision that had lasted this long then faded to blackness, leaving him trapped, somehow still sensing something, his mind wandering as he tried to focus on his family, thinking of them this last time. This very last—

“All rise.”

Judge Malcolm Horner entered his ninth-floor courtroom from chambers to the sound of the marshal beckoning all in attendance to stand. The ten-year veteran of the federal judiciary walked straight to the bench without looking to the gallery, an assembled mass of litigants, press, and interested parties that filled the long, narrow courtroom in the Edward Roybal Federal Building in downtown Los Angeles to capacity. Two low steps up put him on the granite-faced riser that supported the bench, an imposing cube of wood and marble that, when viewed from the back of the courtroom, had the appearance of an altar. Had the architects had the space they might have added a vaulted ceiling to complete the image of a cathedral. God over the law, the law over man.

That impression was not lost on John Barrish, though he denied the existence of a deity, as well as the power of the state to judge a man for his beliefs. And that’s exactly what this was. Barrish knew. The papers of officialdom might say United States v. John Barrish, but they really meant State versus Freedom. A nonexistent God could not pass judgment on him, and a corrupt, hegemonic government could certainly not break him and make him deny who he was, from where he came, or the right of his kind to take their place in history. They feared what he stood for. They feared those who stood with him. They feared the truth.

“Be seated,” the marshal said, his voice carrying in the cavernous room.

Barrish lowered himself and sat stoically next to his court-appointed lawyer, a Jew with some constitutional zeal, and faced the judge without looking at him. An African. How appropriate, Barrish thought. The State had chosen one of those who had bastardized the America of long ago to sit in judgment of him. There were twelve others chosen as triers of fact, of course. All his “peers.” Four of those were Africans. Two Mexicans, he thought, though one might be of purer Spanish blood. He had no mixed features common to the blending of the Spanish conquerors with their Indian slaves. Four appeared to be white, but appearances were just that. A surface reading was often treacherous when looking for a person’s true heritage. That required the study of their ancestry farther back than some influences that had altered their skin color. His two Asian “peers,” for example. The eyes of one belied Spanish ancestry — the Spaniards were mighty people at one time, Barrish knew from study. More rounded eyes, probably from the Philippines. Narrow eyes close together. Japanese. That was the mark of the other. Twelve people. Mongrels. Some purebreds. None were his peers. The sham was so obvious it was ludicrous.

Seymour Mankowitz leaned a bit to his right and touched his client’s elbow with his. “Look at his face, John.”

Barrish didn’t.

“Do you see that?” Mankowitz suppressed a smile. “See his expression? He didn’t buy it.”

Barrish heard his attorney’s hopeful words, but placed little stock in them. He knew the power of the State. He knew it well. It had taken almost all that was his, all that he had worked for. His home. His business. Those were the costs of an unrelated civil action brought by a group of lazy Africans, the darlings of the State. With this, a criminal action, they were trying to take his freedom, to take him from his family. Those things they could do. But one thing they could not. One thing remained his wherever he might be, in whatever circumstances he was placed. Everything they could usurp from him and still John Barrish knew he would have his fight. It couldn’t be reasoned out of him, stolen from him, or beaten from his fiber. In fact, every attempt to weaken his resolve, every trial, every character assassination hurled at him through the media, every penny robbed from him by the State’s thieving IRS, every single thing they had done in pursuit of that elusive goal had had more than an opposite effect. Resolve, however strong, was no longer an issue. They had pushed so hard that the line between man and mission had faded to inconsequential. John Barrish was the fight now. The fight was him.

“Counselors, would you approach, please,” Judge Malcolm Horner said as he looked down upon the parties to the trial.

Mankowitz left his client with a soft grip on the shoulder and followed his opposite, Deputy U.S. Attorney Leah Cobb, to the bench, his eyes casually glancing down for a peek at the lines of the high-cut panties he had come to believe she favored. They stepped onto the riser and drew close. Horner had open before him a file containing Mankowitz’s motion for dismissal.

“Ms. Cobb, I wanted to give you one last chance,” Horner offered. “Anything?”

Leah Cobb thought she saw sympathy in the judge’s face, as though he wanted her to have some way, some brilliant legal maneuver, to make Mankowitz’s motion worthless. But she didn’t. She had almost nothing. Her case, her way of tying John Barrish to the murder of four little black girls in a Los Angeles church, was at rest beneath a gleaming grave marker that did not do FBI Special Agent Thom Danbrook justice. Only he could definitively tie John Barrish to the guns used to murder those four children as they practiced for a Christmas concert. Because of the many months he had spent undercover, he could have pointed his finger at the man whose hate dwarfed his diminutive physical stature and say that he had purchased the weapons from one of his brother hate groups. But the cliché was irrefutable: Dead men told no tales. Thom Danbrook was dead, as dead as Leah Cobb’s case against the leader of the Aryan Victory Organization, and neither could be resurrected.

“Your Honor, unfortunately I have nothing more,” Leah said.

Horner looked at the prosecutor for a long moment, hating what had to come next “Ms. Cobb, the government has had the opportunity to present its case. In the context of the trial as a whole the jury would be your judge, but — and I never like to do this…in any case — at this point it is my responsibility to determine if you’ve done your job. I’m sure you’ve done your best, but you haven’t sufficiently impugned Mr. Barrish to warrant continuing this trial.” He saw the youthful attorney cast her eyes downward briefly. She was angry at herself, Horner knew, though he also was certain she could have done nothing to overcome the situation pure chance had put her in. “And delaying that conclusion any further will do no good. You had an additional six months following Agent Danbrook’s murder to rework your case.” Danbrook was her case, Horner knew all too well. Or, more properly, his testimony would have been. But a chance encounter with two murderers had robbed Thom Danbrook of his life, and Leah Cobb of her only way to show that Barrish was more than just an ignorant observer of a plan that had resulted in four black children dying a horrible death, trapped in a church as bullets cut them down. Horner felt her anguish. He also felt his own rage at having to set John Barrish free. “Step back, please.”

Mankowitz took the lead this time. The front rows of the gallery could easily see the contrasting expressions on his and the prosecutor’s faces. A hushed murmur rose from those in attendance.

“You’re going home, John,” Mankowitz whispered.

Barrish swallowed, still not ready to believe it. He had narrowly escaped prosecution for the same crime by the State of California because of a lack of evidence, a bullet dodged until the federal government had decided to take a crack at him under the guise of “violating the civil rights” of the dead African children. For over a year now he had been held without bail in federal custody in the tower-like Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown Los Angeles. Locked up like an animal. Subjected to the taunts and brutality of the African inmates. Slurs and hateful threats had been hurled at him. So had choice bodily excrements left to ferment for days in foam cups just for that purpose. All while his keepers laughed at the display. He had expected no less from the Africans, and no more from the agents of the State. Was it going to be over now? he wondered, still looking defiantly straight ahead.

“Would the marshal please bring the jury in.” In a moment the twelve citizens were in their place on the courtroom’s left wall. “Mr. Mankowitz, would you and your client please stand.” Horner watched as the self-described leader of the Aryan Victory Organization rose with his attorney. Such a small man, the judge thought. Physically and otherwise. Yet this man was hate, and he inspired that in those who would do his bidding. And he was about to be let loose upon the world once more.

Horner waited for a few seconds before beginning. “It is the opinion of the court that the government has failed to present sufficient evidence against the defendant to warrant the continuation of this trial. The motion to dismiss offered by the defense is hereby granted.” The background murmur became a soft gasp. “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, thank you for your attentiveness and service. You are dismissed from this case. The marshal will see to your needs.” Rather quickly, with shared looks of surprise, the twelve jurors filed out for the final time. And then it was time for the most distasteful part of what had to be done. “Mr. Barrish, the charges brought against you in this case are hereby dismissed. Accordingly you are remanded from custody and are free to go. Good day, everyone.”

The gallery and litigants stood as the judge left, and a few reporters tried to move to the front of the court. Three very serious federal marshals stopped them four rows back.

Deputy U.S. Attorney Leah Cobb stood motionless, just staring at the empty bench, looking right after a few seconds. “You have no idea what you’ve done, Mankowitz.”

Seymour Mankowitz looked the prosecutor’s way, smiling. His eyes traveled halfway down her slender body. “And you have no idea just how fine an ass you have, Leah.” He ended the retort with a leer that was meant more to anger than to invite. It was enough to motivate her quick departure.

“You’d better get him down to the basement,” a huge marshal suggested to Mankowitz. “The crowd’s already gathering out front.”

“Okay.” He turned to his client. The man was still looking blankly ahead, at nothing in particular. His chest was rising and falling more than Mankowitz had ever noticed. Relief. That had to be it. “John. Let’s go.”

The two men followed a small phalanx of marshals to a service elevator out of view of the press. It took them directly to the restricted area of the basement parking garage.

“He has transport, right?” the big marshal asked Mankowitz.

“I have everything I need,” Barrish told the big African, turning away and walking toward the blue Aerostar waiting with its side door open.

“I tried to tell him it would be better to have some protection leaving here,” Mankowitz told the marshal.

“No skin off my back,” the marshal said, thinking to himself that a lynching by that very large and very dark crowd out front might be very appropriate, considering…

John Barrish climbed into the van and took the middle seat as the door was closed. His wife grabbed him around the neck in a hug that was so tight it was almost painful.

“John. John.” Louise Barrish kissed her husband’s neck and started to cry. “John. You’re coming home.”

John felt the warmth of her tears rolling onto his cheeks. He reached up with both hands, gripped her shoulders, and broke the hold she had on him. “Get off of me!”

Louise fell away as her husband pushed her toward the large tinted window on the van’s left side. Her hands came up to her face, the tears falling upon each trembling finger.

John looked to her with the eyes she remembered. They also contained the look she had wished would be gone. Somehow gone. “This isn’t the time.”

“Pop.” Toby Barrish looked back to his father from the passenger seat, his lazy right eye askew. “You look strong.”

“Always,” John answered, happy more than anything to see his two sons after so long a separation. “Stanley, where are we going?”

The younger Barrish boy adjusted the rearview mirror to see his father. “We have a place.”

A place, obviously provided by his one remaining benefactor. Four walls and a roof. Not a home. That had been taken by the State. Still, it would serve the purpose. A place to eat, to sleep, to think. And to prepare.

“Do we have it yet?” Barrish asked his eldest son.

Toby looked back, smiling. “Freddy picked it up today. I’m gonna get it from him tomorrow.”

“Good,” John said, his head nodding confidently.

Stanley glanced at his father in the mirror as he wound the van up the serpentine driveway to the street. “So we’re going to do it?”

John gave his son a look that caused him to turn away from the reflection of the man who’d given him life. He flashed on the seemingly endless days spent penned in by concrete and steel. “Yes, Stanley. Now more than ever.”

It was eagerness, Toby realized. And anger. His father was a master at harnessing the power of the latter, in himself as much as in others.

“There’s a bunch of niggers out there,” Toby warned his father.

John snapped his head toward his eldest son, which was enough of an admonition.

“Sorry, Pop,” Toby said, knowing exactly what his transgression was. “Africans.” Many people referred to his father as a refined racist because he didn’t run around in a white hood saying “nigger” every time he opened his mouth. But Toby saw no difference in the terms. African. Nigger. Coon. It didn’t matter, though he respected his father too much to challenge his views on the subject. And in due course it would not matter. Soon there would be an America populated by Americans, and what anyone called someone with an excess of skin pigment would be up to them. The Africans would be back banging their drums and taking Swahili names for themselves. The Mexicans would be back in tortilla heaven. The Japs and the towelheads would all go home. America, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, would be white, as it was meant to be. Soon. Sooner than anyone could imagine.

“You might want to duck down, Dad,” Stanley suggested. “We’re going out the side but there might be cameras.”

“I’ve got nothing to hide,” John declared.

“Sit tall, Pop,” Toby said as light from the street above washed over the driveway ahead.

“I just thought—”

“You thought wrong, Stan,” Toby said, cutting his brother’s words off.

The Aerostar crested the driveway and pulled through a line of police onto the blocked-off street. Cameras were everywhere, but only a few demonstrators had figured out that the front of the Federal Building might be a symbolically fine place to show their anger, but the object of that anger would be nowhere near it There were some signs, plenty of obscene gestures and shouting, and lines of hypocritical police holding back those with vengeance in their hearts. They would arrest John Barrish for his beliefs, and they would protect him because of the same. It was a duality they would come to regret in very short order.

“I’m glad you’re going to be with us for this, Pop,” Toby admitted. His father had conceived the entire plan some time before, nurturing all the elements until everything was in place. Even his incarceration hadn’t halted the preparations. He had seen to that, seen to everything being able to go ahead without him. Still, he deserved to be part of it. “You get to enjoy it all.”

John Barrish stared straight ahead at downtown traffic, not really smiling, but feeling something beyond pleasure. It was desire. A burning desire that nothing could match. “Not ‘enjoy,’ Toby. Savor.”

It was the closest words could come, but words meant very little now. Talk was no longer cheap in John Barrish’s mind — it was without value. Action was the only measure of expression worth a damn.

They have no idea…