Headwind

TWENTY-EIGHT

In normal circumstances, the plush surroundings of the multi-room hotel suite provided by the Deputy Prime Minister’s office would have riveted Jay Reinhart’s attention for at least an hour. His love of antiques and fine furniture usually dictated a happy search for the pedigree of each piece in a well-furnished room. Instead, fatigue and the surreal nature of the mission had already numbed him to the luxurious surroundings.

Jay dropped his roll-on bag in the entryway and went to the bedroom to plop down on the king-size bed in deep thought.

So now what, Kemosabe?

Sherry Lincoln had called him when he was in the car on the way to the hotel to report their imminent departure.

“I’m nervous,” he’d told her, “about bringing the President to London until I’m sure what this government is thinking, but I agree you’d better get out of there.”

“We’re starting engines now,” Sherry said, falling silent for a few seconds as the whine of jet engines rose in the background. “Can you tell me exactly what you’re afraid of, Jay?”

“Well…” he began, gauging how much of the swirling doubt to share with her. “I’m not afraid that London would send him to Lima as fast as Italy might have done, but… there’s a lot of discretion in the British extradition process and it scares me. If this government for some reason decided they wanted or needed to extradite him, they might just succeed. I just don’t know their attitude, and I can’t risk guessing.”

“You sound tired, Jay,” she said suddenly. “Are you okay?”

“I’m… ah…” he started to reply.

“I know it’s presumptuous of me to ask,” she continued, “since we’ve never met.” Her voice was exceptionally soothing, and he found himself almost forgetting that she’d just asked a question.

“What? Oh, no, Sherry. That’s not presumptuous at all. I mean, I appreciate your asking.”

“So, what is the answer?” she prompted.

“Ah, the answer is ‘no,’ I can’t be tired, because I’ve only been up about twenty-eight hours now. I’m just marginally incoherent,” he insisted.

“Well, you can collapse in a minute,” she said, “but right now I need to give you the number for this plane’s satellite phone, since the GSM phones we’ve been using won’t work in the air. This is the one the cockpit crew will answer.”

Jay grabbed a notepad from the bed behind him and took the number down. “I can reach you in flight on this?” he asked.

“Yes,” Sherry replied. “By the way, our estimated arrival time at Heathrow is five-thirty P.M. your time. It’s an hour later here in Italy. Are you going to meet us there? Or what do you suggest we do on arrival?”

“I’ll call you in flight with instructions.”

“And what if we don’t hear from you?”

“Then… tell the President it’s his choice, but if no one stops you, refuel immediately and go on to Iceland, refuel there, and head as fast as possible for Maine. But, Sherry, you can depend on my being there.”

“I was hoping you’d say that. I’ll be looking forward to meeting you in person.”

“Me, too. You, I mean.” He replaced the receiver and sat quietly for a moment, balancing the need to hear from the Deputy Prime Minister’s office with the need to call the solicitor he’d hired, Geoffrey Wallace, to find out what he’d discovered. Wallace had yet to phone him back.

Jay punched in the number to Wallace’s office.

“He’s out at the moment,” Wallace’s secretary said. “But I’m sure he’ll be calling you, Mr. Reinhart.”

He thanked her and disconnected just as the room phone rang.

“Mr. Reinhart? Would you hold please for Ambassador Jamison?”

“I’m sorry, who?”

“Ambassador Richard Jamison, sir. American Ambassador to Great Britain.”

“Oh. Of course,” Jay replied, trying to pull up a mental image of Jamison, whose picture he’d seen quite often on television over the years.

Why is he calling me? Jay wondered as a small shadow of guilt crept into the periphery of his thoughts. Should I have called him as John Harris’s attorney?

“Mr. Reinhart. We haven’t met, but I wanted to thank you personally for what you’ve been doing for President Harris.”

“Certainly, Mr. Ambassador. I’m his lawyer, after all.”

“I understand. Can you tell me when he’ll be arriving in London? I’ve been briefed by Washington to expect him sometime this evening.”

“Actually,” Jay began, caution slowing his response, “I’m not certain yet. Is… that why you’re calling?”

“Well, there are two main reasons,” the ambassador said, his voice crisp and tinged by a hint of New England.

“First, we need to compare notes on what you intend to do, and second, I need to let you know that the team from Washington should be here in about two hours.”

“What team?”

“The Secretary of State, several representatives of the Justice Department, and a handful of others. President Cavanaugh dispatched them a while ago to help you prepare President Harris’s defense when he lands here. I assumed you knew?”

“No, sir, I didn’t. I mean, I welcome their assistance more than you know, but I knew nothing about it. Did you say two hours?”

“Less than that now, actually. They’re coming into Heathrow, to the private facility there. If you’d like, I’ll swing by in an embassy car and pick you up.”

“That would be appreciated.”

“About the British. I’m aware of your trip to see Tony Sheffield this afternoon.”

“How do you know that, sir, if I may ask?”

“I’m your friendly local ambassador. When an American lawyer comes calling on the British government regarding the fate of an American President on British soil, the Foreign Office feels somewhat constrained to bring me into the loop.”

The shadow of guilt Jay had felt became a cloud. This was, after all, a matter affecting two great nations, and he’d treated it as a private problem.

“I apologize for not calling you, Mr. Ambassador.”

“Not a problem. May I call you Jay?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. And I go by Richard. Now, look. Neither Sheffield nor the PM is going to call me first. They’ll call you, if that’s what they promised. So, if you’ll take down my personal number, I’d appreciate a call as soon as you learn anything of substance.”

He passed the number and Jay quickly wrote it down.

“In your opinion, Mr. Ambass… Richard, what can we expect the British to do about this?” Jay asked.

“Frankly, I don’t know, Jay. I can tell you this government has been critical of the way the Pinochet case was handled by the Home Office.”

“In other words, they think the Blair government should have supported Pinochet’s assertion that he couldn’t be arrested or extradited because of sovereign immunity?”

“No. The opposite. Some members of this PM’s administration seem to think Pinochet should have been shipped to Spain within twenty-four hours of his arrest, though that’s not really legally possible.”

Jay felt momentarily disoriented. “They… support rapid extradition?”

“I wouldn’t say they support it as a matter of general policy, or that they’re prepared to bypass normal legal process, Jay. But I would warn you that there are voices in this PM’s ear telling him that Britain doesn’t have the right to delay extradition as a matter of political decision. In other words, one of the reasons President Cavanaugh scrambled our Secretary of State over here is to try to convince the PM that Britain must not interfere with their courts in any direction.”

“I’m slightly stunned,” Jay said. “Surely they can’t feel the Pinochet case is directly similar to President Harris’s? I mean, with Pinochet the whole world knew very clearly the charges of official torture were valid. These nonsense charges against John Harris are anything but. They’re absolutely groundless.”

“Well, that’s a good distinction, counselor, but you have another problem. With Pinochet, it was Spain, a third-party country, trying to get their hands on him. Even the Blair government would have supported shipping the general back home to Chile if anyone had thought Chile would really put him on trial. But there was a bad taste in everyone’s mouth about Spain making the complaint. Here was Spain demanding that England ship a Chilean to Spain to be tried in Spain for killing mostly Chileans in Chile. It was a real stretch.”

The ambassador continued. “Now, with John Harris, the problem is that the nation that considers its citizens to have been victims of official torture is the very same nation signing this warrant and demanding Harris’s extradition. In other words, Peru wants him in Peru to answer to charges of ordering the torture and killing of Peruvians. That’s a different ball game.”

“My problem is, sir, that I need time to show in court that the charges are bogus. Obviously the Peruvians want to try him in Peru, where the charges will automatically be considered valid whether they are or not.”

“It’s a real dilemma, I’ll grant you, and I can’t guess whether or not the British PM is going to think it’s sufficiently different from the Pinochet case to justify helping us. I just don’t know, which is why I’ll be waiting with bated breath to hear what they tell you.”

The ambassador ended the call and Jay toggled the phone to try Geoffrey Wallace’s office again. Wallace was still out, he was told, and Jay left a terse message before replacing the receiver and jumping to his feet to pace and think.

An entire delegation of heavyweights was inbound from Washington. Why had no one bothered to tell the President’s lawyer? A small administrative oversight, or a pointed one? He couldn’t decide, and the positive prospect of acquiring bigger guns for the fight ahead was being diminished by the prospect of losing control to the servants of a sitting President who had already made the decision to distance himself from John Harris’s dilemma.

Jay checked his watch, envisioning the EuroAir 737 already in the air and headed toward London. Should he phone them? Should he even consider turning them around or sending them to some other capital?

Jay moved to the largest room of the suite, where he’d spread out his three legal pads on an elegant mahogany dining table. The track of his thinking so many hours ago in Laramie and over the Atlantic was clearly visible on one of the pads, the various candidate capitals crossed out one by one until only London remained.

Am I wrong about this? Good Lord, the stakes are too high to be wrong!

Jay moved into the kitchenette and loaded the coffee maker with his mind a half continent away. If the Prime Minister decided to throw the weight of government in the direction of rapid extradition, could he essentially override the legal process? And if so, to what degree?

I’ve got to know the status of the warrant, Jay thought.

There was nothing he could do to stop that process, of course, but once the President had been arrested, Geoffrey Wallace could move instantly to challenge the legality of the arrest, the legality of the warrant, and the legality of any decisions made.

Calm down! There is no way the British PM would send John Harris off in chains to Peru without months of hearings and appeals.

He was sure of that. He was almost sure of that.

The phone rang and Jay moved to sweep up the receiver, relieved to hear the prodigal solicitor on the other end.

“Terribly sorry, Mr. Reinhart. But it’s been a bit of a cock-up getting this figured out, and now that I have, you’d better get yourself down here.”

“Where is ‘here,’ and what are you talking about? I’ve been trying to reach you for hours.”

“Indeed. I’m at the Bow Street Magistrate Court near Covent Garden. I’ll give you the address. Campbell has already arrived, but the matter isn’t slated for a half hour. You have time to get here.”

“This hearing is to perfect the Interpol warrant?”

“Righto. I’m ashamed to say that it took me a while to discover that only the Bow Street Magistrate Court handles extraditions. Then, when I checked the Bow Street docket, I was wrongly informed the matter wasn’t set yet. But it was, you see. In fact, it was set this morning for a hearing at three-thirty this afternoon, which is thirty minutes from now. Could have been an administrative error, I suppose, but the earlier misinformation smells like a favor to a crony.” Wallace passed the address quickly, adding, “You realize there may be little we can do to oppose this first step?”

“Yes, I understand.”

“I rang up someone who knows this magistrate, and I’m told he’s unlikely to do anything but quickly issue the arrest warrant. The extradition warrant will take a later hearing.”

“May I speak at all in court?”

“It’s rather informal, so I doubt if the magistrate would toss you in the Tower of London for interjecting a few words. Whatever you might be able to say, however, will most likely have no legal significance at this stage. This is merely a formality to translate the Peruvian Interpol warrant into a provisional British arrest warrant. You can oppose it if the judge allows, but on a very narrow basis. You know, did Peru really send it? That sort of thing.”

Jay rang off and raced to the elevator with his briefcase. He punched the button repeatedly, then gave up and ran to the stairway, descending the six flights to the lobby, where the doorman whistled up a taxi. The ride to the court took less than fifteen minutes, and Geoffrey Wallace was waiting for him at the curb as he climbed out of the cab.

“Mr. Reinhart?”

“Yes. How’d you know?” Jay asked.

“You look appropriately stressed,” Wallace said, introducing himself and ushering Jay through security into the small and somewhat scruffy lobby and off to one side. The solicitor was probably sixty and just under six feet tall. Jay memorized his cheerful features, round face and a full head of sandy hair that almost looked like a rug.

“Let me introduce you to our QC,” Geoffrey Wallace said, as a spectacled man approached. “Nigel White, this is Jay Reinhart, the American attorney representing President Harris, who is your client.”

Jay and White shook hands as Wallace raised his finger and gestured toward the far side of the hall. “That’s Campbell over there,” he said, inclining his head toward Stuart Campbell, now huddled with several other men in dark suits.

“It’s been a long time, but I recognize him,” Jay said.

“Really? So you know the old bugger?” Wallace said, surprised.

Nigel White had begun consulting his notes and was paying no attention as Jay nodded. “How much time do we have before the matter’s called?” he asked White.

“Perhaps ten minutes,” the senior barrister replied without looking up.

“Wait here, please, gentlemen,” Jay said, squaring his shoulders and moving toward Campbell, mindful of the small flutter in his stomach.

Sir William Stuart Campbell, QC, was the adversary, but he was also a legend in international law, and it would almost be an honor to lose to such a man.

Almost.

The thought left him momentarily amused, even with a squadron of butterflies now performing airshows in his stomach. He had no intention of losing John Harris to Stuart Campbell.

“Gentlemen, excuse me,” Jay said in a metered tone as he reached the group. The three men talking with Campbell turned and parted slightly when they saw Jay’s eyes locked on the big Scot.

“Yes, hello?” Stuart said pleasantly, his eyebrows arched slightly in an unspoken question.

Jay offered his hand and Stuart took it firmly, saying at the same time, “I’m sorry, I failed to catch your name.” He leaned over slightly as if needing to bring his ear down to a lower flight level to accommodate Jay’s shorter stature.

“Why, Sir William, you don’t remember me?”

The broad smile that had mesmerized and conned innumerable jurors and witnesses flashed across Campbell’s face, masking his deepening confusion, as he let go of Jay’s hand.

“I’m terribly sorry, but I’m very much afraid I don’t.”

“Really? Let me refresh your memory. The year was nineteen seventy nine, and you were representing British Airways and trying to keep an upstart little airline from Texas named Braniff from flying to Gatwick. Ultimately, you lost.”

“Oh, yes! Mrs. Thatcher ran roughshod past the law on that one. I recall the case, but…”

“Do you, perhaps, recall the young American attorney from a Washington firm who came over to assist the primary counsel?”

“Yes, but you couldn’t be that same young man,” he said. “That chap later became a judge somewhere in the States and was thrown off the bench and disbarred, as I recall.”

“One and the same, Sir William, although I was never disbarred. Merely suspended. The license is reinstated now.”

“Really? And your name is…”

“Reinhart. Jay Reinhart.”

Campbell’s eyebrows arched again as he recognized the name. “Of course. Well, Mr. Reinhart, what brings you here to this humble court?”

“We talked yesterday, if you recall,” Jay said evenly, enjoying the progression of emotions playing across Campbell’s normally placid face as he sized up his opponent.

Campbell smiled then and glanced away before returning his gaze to Jay. “Certainly you’re not attempting to tell me you’re the lawyer representing President John Harris?”

“I am, indeed. John used to be my senior partner, if you recall.”

“Yes. Now I do. Are you still associated with that firm?”

“No. I’m a sole practitioner, and I’ve retained local counsel, of course.” He gestured to Geoffrey Wallace and Nigel White, and Campbell nodded in their direction with perfunctory courtesy.

“Surprised to see me here, are you, Sir William?”

“There is little that surprises me at my age, Mr. Reinhart. I must say, though, I am surprised that John Harris’s attorney would waste his time here. All we’re doing today is perfecting the Interpol warrant as a provisional arrest warrant, as I’m certain you know. The London Municipal Police are actually the applying party, and considering the validity of the warrant, it’s hardly an adversarial process.”

“Of course. And yet I’m here to make it an adversarial process.”

Stuart Campbell gave Jay a condescending look, his head at an angle as if not believing the stupidity of the statement he’d just heard. Jay saw him shake his head as he leaned closer, his eyes on a far wall, his voice very low and meant just for Jay’s ear.

“I should help you out a bit here, old boy, to save you embarrassment. You see, this is a magistrate court, and this is really not the forum for opposition in this sort of matter, despite the circuslike atmosphere they created here in the Pinochet case. Pity that Mr. Wallace hasn’t briefed you on this, but as an American lawyer, you are not entitled to speak in open court for your client. I’m sure you wouldn’t want to be reprimanded by the likes of a mere municipal magistrate.”

“I’ve been reprimanded by the best of them, Sir William. What’s the difference if one of them’s wearing a wig and dispensing petty justice in a legal backwater?”

Campbell straightened up, his voice resuming a normal volume.

“Really? Well, please don’t tell our esteemed magistrate in there of your innate contempt for his little court. Oh, and by the way, we don’t wear wigs in the magistrate courts.”

“That’s not contempt – it’s reality. This is a very basic level of the judiciary for England. In centuries past, if I recall, this would have been the court of common pleas, and we’d be jostled by men holding geese and fighting over disputed chickens.”

“Not really. The courts of common pleas were a bit more common than this. But, very well, Mr. Reinhart. This should be entertaining. I shall enjoy jousting with you before the bar.”

“Until then,” Jay replied, turning with a barely contained smile to return to Geoffrey Wallace.