Headwind

FORTY

The appointment to meet at the solicitor’s office at eleven had been made with an awareness that the entire issue would be moot if John Harris was already on his way to New York. Now, with the hopes of a commercial escape dashed, Jay was determined to keep the appointment on time. If they had to fight, being as prepared as possible was vital.

He and Sherry Lincoln had spent the hours before the appointment trying to charter a smaller transoceanic business jet to carry the President to New York, but the effort had failed. No one could react on such short notice to a new customer. The only alternative, Sherry was told, involved deadheading a long-range Gulfstream in from Chicago at incredible cost, but even then, the earliest wheels-up time out of Dublin would be late Thursday morning.

“I’m out of tricks,” Jay told John Harris at a quarter past ten. “We either get the damn thing quashed here, or fly you out on the 737.”

“The crew’s still willing?” the President asked.

Jay nodded. “I talked to them fifteen minutes ago. They’re rested and can leave whenever we decide to. It’s risky, of course. They might have to turn around if the headwinds are too strong, and there’s always the chance they might have to divert to Iceland or Canada, which then opens up an entirely new series of challenges.”

John Harris was silent for nearly a minute before shaking his head and sighing. “No, Jay, I want to wait right here, I think. I like your man Garrity, and from what he was saying… and the fact that I would really rather attack this head-on than run… perhaps I should simply send those fellows back to Frankfurt. I’ll get plenty of protection here.”

“We don’t know that, John! We don’t even have a court or a judge yet.”

“Nonetheless, I know what did and did not happen in the Oval, and I trust the Irish judge to sort it out and give me an adequate opportunity to prove that the tape is a fake.”

Jay stood and stared at the President for a few uncomfortable seconds as John Harris sat on the side of his bed, keeping his eyes on the carpet.

“John, it’s your money, but I want to keep those guys on standby until we know what’s happening.”

Harris nodded slowly. “Very well. But my intention is not to use them.”

The offices of Seamus Dunham of Dunham and McBride, the firm of solicitors Jay had retained on Michael Garrity’s recommendation, were in a working-class neighborhood in a nondescript building several miles from the heart of town.

Michael Garrity was waiting as Jay, Sherry, and the President assembled in the small, somewhat shabby conference room and Matt Ward stood guard in the hallway.

When the introductions were complete, Garrity outlined the case against John Harris once more, with emphasis on the alleged existence of the video. He was surprised to hear that Campbell had agreed to deliver a copy to Jay by evening.

Seamus Dunham took over discussion of the strategy when a phone call pulled Garrity away. The barrister returned several minutes later, ashen-faced and exceptionally quiet. He slipped into a chair at the end of the table, saying nothing, but noticed by them all.

“Michael?” Seamus Dunham queried. “Are you ill?”

Garrity glanced up and tried to smile.

“That’s a good word for it, I think.”

“What’s wrong?” Jay asked from the far corner of the table.

“That was Stuart Campbell. We have a judge.”

“How did he know to call here?” Jay asked.

“Campbell apparently has every phone number in the Western world,” Garrity replied. “It’s the High Court, which I expected. The time is ten A.M. tomorrow morning in the Four Courts complex.”

“And the judge?” Dunham prompted.

Garrity drummed his fingers against his chin for a few seconds before answering, his eyes on the opposite wall. “I truly did not know he was on standby this weekend. Never thought about it, not that I could have changed anything…”

“What are you talking about?” Jay asked, a bit too sharply.

Garrity looked up at Jay. “Only the worst judge we could get for a case like this. Mr. Justice O’Connell.” He watched Seamus Dunham’s jaw drop slightly.

“Mr. Justice O’Connell,” Michael Garrity continued, “who has no love for the United States, and no tolerance for anyone except God, whom he rather imagines himself to be.”

“Can’t we… recuse him?” Jay asked. “If that’s the appropriate word over here… request that he remove himself for being biased against Americans?”

“Oh, he’s not biased against Americans per se, Jay,” Garrity said. “He’s just institutionally ticked off at the U.S. government for all sorts of things. I’m not so sure he isn’t still angry with JFK for getting shot.”

“But, John Harris was the U.S. government, so to speak,” Jay said. “That makes it even more important that he stand down.”

“Jay, Mr. Justice O’Connell has yet to disqualify himself on any case I know about. You might say he’s biased about his impartiality. We could file a challenge, but inevitably it would fail without some particularly outrageously prejudicial statement from him, and he’s much too careful for that.”

Seamus Dunham was nodding. “That’s a blow, for certain. He’s been a strong proponent of the Treaty Against Torture. He’s even written a few articles. He was furious that Washington tried to sit on the fence in the Pinochet matter.”

“We can’t forum shop?” Jay asked. “We can’t get another judge?”

“We don’t do it like that here,” Michael explained. “You’re stuck with what you’ve got, and we’ve got a major problem right out of the starting gate.”

John Harris leaned forward, catching Michael Garrity’s eyes.

“What do you expect him to do that you wouldn’t expect another judge to do?”

Michael began shaking his head sadly. “He’s a tyrant in the courtroom, Mr. President. He’s very hard to predict, and very hard to work with. Anything irritates the man, and he’ll destroy a perfectly good argument or train of thought by bellowing at you for no apparent reason. In other words, his temper and his antics tend to foul up the barrister’s ability to try any case brought before him.”

“Is he reversed very often by your Supreme Court?” Jay asked.

Garrity and Dunham both shook their heads no. “Seldom.”

“Which tells me,” John Harris replied, “that tyrant or not, he knows the law.”

“It’s not interpreting the law I’m worried about,” Michael Garrity said. “It’s exercising the broad discretion he’ll have in this case.”

“So what do you recommend?” John Harris asked.

“I recommend,” Michael began, “that we spend the rest of the afternoon trying to build a body of case law to refute the idea that either an unproven videotape or a single allegation can constitute a reasonable basis for this warrant.”

“And the prospect for success?” the President asked, his eyes firmly tracking both lawyers.

Seamus Dunham sighed and looked at Michael Garrity before meeting the President’s gaze.

“Mr. President, I would strongly advise you to be prepared for anything. What we have here is a stacked deck.”

Stuart Campbell excused himself from the beehive of activity in the Presidential Suite and adjourned to his bedroom, taking along the videocassette recorder he needed to make a copy of the tape for Reinhart.

“No one else is to have access to that taped evidence but me,” Stuart had warned his team. “I have the equipment to make the dub, and I’ll do it myself.”

It was 4:30 A.M. by his bedroom clock when he opened his briefcase and removed a small item in bubble wrap. He laid it on the bed, pulled a tiny digital video camera free of the wrapping, and removed a tiny tape cassette. He turned on the camera and inserted the tape, settling on the edge of the bed and watching the black screen suddenly come alive with black-and-white images of the back of a man’s suit coat. The man disappeared out of the frame behind a desk. Then the camera-bearing individual apparently sat on a couch and readjusted himself and the focus of the camera to a recognizable image: the familiar interior of the best-known office on earth.

The sound quality was poor but serviceable, and as Campbell had done with the first copy of the tape in Lima, he watched it from beginning to end, making absolutely certain that the words he had heard spoken were precisely as he recalled.

At the tape’s end, it appeared that Reynolds had turned off the camera just as he departed the Oval Office, leaving as the last image a bouncing shot of a long hallway outside the eastern entrance with a uniformed officer visible, standing by a mirror to one side.

Stuart had long since prepared the basic legal brief on the tape. Having met Reynolds and recorded his voice in a sworn, witnessed statement, he had evidence that the voice on the Oval Office tape and Reynolds’s voice were the same.

Campbell fumbled through his briefcase to verify the presence of the other tape, the one containing numerous network television clips of John Harris and his voice, ample proof for a cursory comparison of Harris’s voice and image on the Reynolds tape. He pulled out the transcript of the conversation, wondering if John Harris really recalled the words that had been spoken, or if he’d heard only what he’d expected to hear that day. In any event, the transcript would be devastating to Harris.

Stuart carefully put the transcript and supporting tapes away.

It had been wise, he thought, to insist that Barry Reynolds turn over the original tape. A copy would carry much less weight if examined by experts.

He thought back to his brief meeting in Baltimore with Reynolds and his surprise at Reynolds’s belief that President Miraflores had ordered him killed in retaliation for the Peruvian raid.

“Miraflores knew I had been the bag man for the operation,” Reynolds had said. “But he didn’t realize I was acting under presidential orders.”

“Who told him?” Stuart had asked.

“I did,” Reynolds had replied quietly as he sat in his living room with the drapes drawn. “Before I left the Company, we confirmed the contract on my head. I knew his death squads would get me sooner or later if he didn’t cancel the contract, but I also knew he’d never attempt to assassinate an ex-President.”

“And, even though you technically commissioned the raid, you thought he’d forgive you?”

“I knew Miraflores hated John Harris, because his brother was killed in that raid. I knew he’d trade my scalp for Harris’s.”

“So you gave him the tape you’d made for insurance.”

“I sent him a copy of the tape,” Reynolds had confirmed, “and agreed to testify if Harris was brought to trial under international law, and if he’d call off his dogs. So far, so good.”

That had been two months ago.

Campbell looked at the video camera again, a late-nineties model. He’d had no idea such technology existed before Harris’s presidency, especially in the form of a tiny camera worn concealed in something as small as a tie clip with the recorder itself in a briefcase. But Reynolds had shown him the camera in Baltimore. It seemed a little crude, but it worked.

John Harris had been standing at the window of Seamus Dunham’s office only half listening to the intense legal analysis being discussed behind him while his mind drifted half a world away.

He thought of Alice, as he did so many times a day. Her loss three years ago to something as simple and devastating as a medical error would always haunt him, along with the wholly illogical feeling that if he’d been at her side in the operating room, the wrong medication would not have been administered.

The images of her triggered the usual struggle to stem the tears. Outwardly, he had handled her death with the dignity that defined her life, refusing to sue a devastated medical team, forgiving the surgeon and anesthesiologist and the three nurses both in public and in private, trying to help them through the hell of public outrage and misunderstanding. There had already been a national focus on preventable medical error, but Alice’s death – the death of a former First Lady – provided a catalyst, and she would be proud… no, she was proud, he corrected himself, of the progress that had come from her loss, and the lives that had been saved in the years since with so many improvements in healthcare safety.

And now, he thought, here I am with another challenge of character. And how should I handle this, honey? Run? Stay? Fight? Fold? The options had become so terribly confusing, the black hole of fear in his middle rising up every few hours to engulf him and confuse his decisions. I was the President of the United States of America, he told himself. I have a duty to stand and fight with dignity.

But did he have a duty to submit to a thinly disguised assassination attempt wrapped disingenuously in the robes of the law?

He ached with the pain of needing her now, at this moment, to nudge him in the right direction again, as she had so many pivotal times during those incredible four years in the White House. The night he’d reached his wits’ end over the issue of running again, for instance. How, he’d asked her, could he possibly let his party down with reelection virtually guaranteed? Yet, hadn’t he placed the marrow of his credibility behind the concept of a single, six-year term, a change that would require a constitutional amendment, but benefit the nation greatly? That was a major campaign promise to the American people. How could he walk away from that?

Alice had joined him quietly in the Oval after chasing out the Chief of Staff and shutting the door. Together they had stood at the window overlooking the Rose Garden for the longest time, watching the fountain in the distance and the Washington Monument as she squeezed his arm and said nothing.

“What do I do?” he asked her at last. “How can I walk away from this responsibility?”

She had smiled at him and pointed to the lighted spire of the monument.

“George set the example, didn’t he?” she said. “His greatness was teaching us by example that principles would guide and protect this nation when the politics of the moment had been long forgotten.”

He remembered the weight that had lifted from his shoulders then, and the ease of making the announcement that shocked the nation and made him an outcast in his own party.

The job was still undone, he reminded himself. There was still no single six-year term. Perhaps living to keep fighting that battle justified turning tail and running. Perhaps not.

But there was one thing that loomed always in his mind, accepted and unquestioned and unquenchable: how empty the world was without her.

I miss you, honey! he thought, almost losing the battle to fight back the tears.