Headwind

TEN

“EuroAir Forty-Two, your requested clearance is denied. Your destination must be Rome, sir.”

Craig Dayton turned to Alastair Chadwick with his eyebrows raised.

“What the heck does that mean?”

Alastair was shaking his head. “I’ve never been refused a clearance before and told where to land. At least not in civilian flying.”

Craig toggled the transmitter. “Rome Approach, do you understand that we are not asking, we’re telling you we want a clearance to Naples?”

“Disapproved, Forty-Two. Those are my instructions. You will be cleared from holding to the approach at Da Vinci Airport as soon as you request it.”

“And if we request clearance direct to Malta instead?”

“Ah… stand by, Forty-Two.”

There was a brief pause before another voice – clearly a supervisor – came on the channel. “Forty-Two, the Italian Air Force central command is instructing you to land immediately at Da Vinci Airport. Are you ready for your approach?”

“Check our squawk, Rome!” Craig snapped. “Then see if you want to tell me what to do.” He reached over the center console to the transponder control head and changed the numbers to 7500, the international code for hijacking.

“The alarms will be going off down there now for certain,” Alastair said. “We haven’t just crossed the Rubicon, we’ve burned the bridge behind us.”

He could see Craig gritting his teeth in anger and shaking his head. “I can’t believe their arrogance!”

The first controller’s voice returned to their headsets, far more cautious than before.

“EuroAir Forty-Two, we have received your seventy-five hundred squawk. What is your request?”

“Direct Malta,” Craig said, releasing the transmitter button and turning to Alastair. “That’ll take us right over the top of Catania and Sigonella.”

Alastair nodded as the controller replied.

“Roger, Forty-Two. You are cleared present position direct Malta. Climb and maintain flight level two eight zero.”

“Departing holding and departing one zero thousand for flight level two eight zero,” Craig replied. “Initial GPS heading is two one four degrees.”

The apparent frenzy of activity at the arrival gate just ahead had caught Stuart Campbell’s attention as he approached the departure lounge. An overabundance of grim-faced police officers were milling around and talking urgently into their two-way radios, occasionally glancing out at the empty spot on the ramp which should have held the Boeing 737 designated as EuroAir’s Flight 42.

Campbell found the airport manager in a huddle with two members of the Carabinieri.

“Gentlemen? Is something happening I’m not aware of?”

“They were in a holding pattern,” the airport manager began, “but now they are refusing to land.”

“What, precisely, do you mean, ‘refusing to land’?” Campbell asked.

One of the officers lowered his radio and spoke a few words directly into the manager’s ear.

“What?” the manager replied, his eyes wide.

“Si,” the officer responded.

“What is it?” Campbell asked.

The manager was shaking his head. “Now the captain is requesting to fly to Malta.”

“You’ve got to be joking,” Campbell said with a disbelieving smile. “That’s not going to solve his problem!”

Stuart Campbell pulled out his GSM phone and punched in a number as he walked slowly toward the floor-to-ceiling window of the terminal lounge. Outside, at the adjacent gate, he could see the captain and first officer sitting in the cockpit of the Boeing 727 he’d chartered to fly John Harris to Portugal. He saw the captain suddenly reach for his ringing cell phone.

“Yes?”

“Captain Perez? Stuart Campbell, here. Have you been monitoring the frequency?”

“Yes, sir. Forty-Two is in holding and asking for a clearance to Malta. What do you want us to do?”

“Get airborne and, wherever he decides to go, you file for the same location. Understood?”

“Yes, sir. Will you be coming with us, Mr. Campbell?” the captain asked.

“Let me think about that. Stand by.”

Stuart Campbell mentally reviewed the options. The Italian warrant based on the Interpol warrant would be good anywhere in Italy and could be faxed to the Maltese authorities. But what if EuroAir’s captain decided once again to head somewhere else, such as Morocco or Spain? He’d have to scramble to get to wherever they went, and coordinating the capture would be even more difficult if he was sitting in the cabin of an airplane.

He was having to think three moves ahead, precisely like a game of chess. He smiled to himself and shook his head. So my choices are, move the king’s knight to king three, or leave the knight in place.

And he was the knight to the Peruvian president’s king.

He raised the phone back to his ear. “No, Captain, I’ll stay here. Check in with me when you’re on the ground, wherever that might be.”

President John Harris sat in silence for a second with the phone pressed to his ear as he revisited his decision and concluded he was right. Sighing, he straightened in the seat.

“Jay, I want you to listen to me very closely.”

The disillusionment in the voice from Laramie was painfully obvious.

“Yes, sir. I’m listening.”

“My best strength has always been my judgment of character and capability. I think my presidency was successful, and if so, the reason was that I appointed the best people.”

“Thank God I wasn’t on that list. I would have destroyed your record.”

“No, Jay, you wouldn’t have. Quite the contrary. You would have done a superlative job, and we both know the error in judgment which got you in such trouble was an affair of the heart, not some act of greed or ambition.”

There was a short laugh on the other end. “Definitely not ambition.”

“No, and if Karen’s case hadn’t come before your court before I announced my appointments, you would have been the President’s lawyer, and perhaps later, attorney general.”

“You’re far too gracious, sir.”

“No, as I say, I’m an extraordinary judge of character, and yours hasn’t changed.”

“Mr. President… John… it makes no difference now. I can’t…”

“That’s enough,” Harris interrupted. “Now listen. We both understand that this is a very serious situation both for me personally, and for our country, and for every other ex-president who ever leaves home. Believe me, I do not want to fall into the hands of the Peruvians, or under the control of this warrant. I am not handing you this assignment with the expectation that you’ll fail. But, I also have no illusions about the difficulty ahead of you, or the extreme mismatch between what kind of staff support you don’t have, and what some of the major international firms could provide. So why do I insist you handle it? I have two things going for me on this decision, Jay. First, I will trust my life to the international legal abilities I saw in a young lawyer named Jay Reinhart, whom I hired many years ago; and second, my gut tells me the only way to beat Campbell and Miraflores at their game is to adhere to the doctrines of Sun Tsu.”

“The… Chinese philosopher?”

“I’m not sure how much of a philosopher he was, except on the doctrine of warfare, but the man was millenniums ahead of his time when he asked why anyone would fight an enemy on the enemy’s terms. To hire a major firm would be to do exactly what our friend Campbell expects. We’ll do just the opposite.”

“Sir…”

“You’ve fulfilled your ethical duty to warn me of the potential consequences of hiring you, Jay. For the record, I hereby accept that risk and waive that concern. Now, that’s the last I’m going to hear about it. You get your tail in gear and get me the hell out of this mess. Understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ll call you back in thirty minutes for a progress report.”

John Harris disconnected and smiled to himself, wishing he could see the expression on Stuart Campbell’s face when he found out who the former leader of the free world had hired.

Sherry had slipped into the seat next to him as he finished the conversation. She sat studying her boss for a few seconds before pulling him out of his reverie with a question.

“Could I ask what that was all about?”

John Harris turned to her, still smiling. “I just hired my lawyer.”

“Okay…”

“And he’s sitting in Wyoming, wondering if I’ve lost my mind.”

“I see. Have you?”

Harris laughed and shook his head. “Nope. He comes with baggage, Sherry, but he’s the best, as I said earlier.” He described the handicaps and the challenges Jay Reinhart would face, as well as his background, watching her expression darken.

“Why was he thrown off the bench in Texas?” she asked.

“He was a very good judge for four years. Being a judge was a radical departure from international law practice, but it was something he’d always wanted to do. And he was caring, fair, and tough. The very model of a jurist. But one day he got a murder case. A beautiful young woman, a battered wife who’d had the hell beaten out of her for a decade by a local monster with social standing and a successful business career. One evening she blew him away with a twelve-gauge just before the nightly beating and rape could commence. The district attorney, a wife abuser himself, ignored the realities of the case, charged her with aggravated first-degree murder and went after the death penalty.”

“Good grief!” Sherry exclaimed, looking up as a man in his upper seventies stopped just behind their row of seats. The President followed her gaze, his eyes landing on Matt Ward, who had intercepted the visitor.

“Matt?”

“Mr. President, excuse me,” Matt said, gesturing to the man behind him in the aisle. “This gentleman wanted to say hello.”

Harris turned farther around and smiled at the man, noting how frail and gaunt he looked. He raised an index finger in a “wait” gesture and the man nodded.

John Harris turned back to Sherry. “Anyway, in a nutshell, the woman had no money – the husband had seen to that. She hired an incompetent hack as a defense attorney and Jay could tell on opening arguments she was, without question, headed for death row, and he simply couldn’t stand it.”

“But what can a judge do?”

“Nothing, legally,” he said, aware of more movement behind him. Glancing back, the President saw a second man crowding in beside the first, a small American flag pin on his lapel.

“You want to talk to these fellows now, sir?” Sherry asked under her breath.

“Shortly,” he said, turning around toward the two. “Gentlemen, give me just a minute here, okay?”

“Absolutely!” the first one replied, moving back slightly.

“Yes, sir,” the other echoed, a bit loudly. Harris could see a large hearing aid in his left ear.

Jillian had spotted the small gathering and moved into the first-class cabin from the galley to shoo them away, but Harris waved her back with a smile and a small stop gesture of his hand before turning back toward Sherry. “So, Jay simply couldn’t stand seeing this beautiful, battered young woman railroaded by circumstance. Remember, this is long before the acceptance of the concept that a battered spouse who murders her batterer may be acting in self-defense even if the killing didn’t occur during the beating. Anyway, Jay released this emotionally damaged young woman on an exceptionally low bail, which he paid himself, anonymously. He also tried, anonymously, to hire a better lawyer for her, but that didn’t work. Finally he started meeting with her surreptitiously to advise her and try to save her, and along the way he fell helplessly, hopelessly in love with her.”

“What happened, then?” she asked.

“Judge Reinhart waited until the trial had essentially passed the point of double jeopardy, where she couldn’t be retried, and then he sabotaged the case in a very clever way. The prosecutor and DA went nuts, discovered the ex parte contacts, told the media, and everything blew into a major public scandal. When the smoke cleared, he escaped criminal liability, but they removed him as a judge and suspended him as a lawyer, a difficult procedure in Texas. This, of course, all occurred about the time I was taking office.”

“He stayed with her?”

“He married her,” the President said, snapping his seat belt open, “and then did his best to rehabilitate her. The poor woman was under constant psychiatric care, but I’m sad to hear… he just told me… she killed herself last year.” Harris moved forward in the seat and prepared to stand as Sherry reached out to touch his arm, her face a study in concern.

“Sir, are you sure that Reinhart is…” She stopped as he raised his hand to silence her.

“Am I sure I want Reinhart defending me given what Washington or the media might say? Yes, Sherry, I’m very sure.” He got to his feet and turned to the men in the aisle, who had been joined by two more of roughly the same age. Extending his hand, President Harris smiled broadly at them.