Secret sanction

Chapter 35

There are times in life when the wrong thing to do is actually the right thing to do. Maybe vice versa, too. I don’t know. I haven’t gotten around to testing that theory yet.

I looked across the courtroom and knew I had my hands full. The ten members of the court-martial board all had their eyes riveted on the defense counsel, who, to my vast dismay, was very skillfully presenting an incredible opening argument. I was the prosecutor, of course, though right at that moment I wished I could crawl into the defense counsel’s shoes. The legs of my case were being ripped out from under me.

I turned around and looked anxiously at my senior legal assistant, Imelda Pepperfield. She merely shrugged a little, rearranged her gold-rimmed glasses, and gave me a stern glare. If I was looking for sympathy, I had sure as hell turned to the wrong corner. Imelda might even have been the one who originally invented that timeworn phrase about “sympathy” being found in the dictionary between “shit” and “syphilis.”

I had thought my case was fairly airtight. One of those open-and-shut things. Another sure victory under the belt of that brilliant legal scholar Sean Drummond. The facts were irresistibly simple. A sergeant assigned to one of the Army’s black units, in this case a special communications unit that performed some pretty nifty work using communications gear that the American public couldn’t even imagine existed, got caught making illegal use of his credit card.

Unfortunately for both him and the government, it was an Army-issued Visa card. He’d used it to purchase a car, a camera with a zoom lens, some very expensive clothes, even a set of golf clubs. Now the golf clubs, that really took chutzpah. His unit commander discovered the fraud, had him apprehended, then turned him over to us for trial. My caseload had been staggering as a result of the month I’d spent working on that Kosovo thing, but the prosecution was assigned to me anyway. No problem, I figured. I did the preliminary work. I tracked down copies of his receipts. I prevailed on the clerks who handled his purchases to give me positive identifications on videotape, which the judge allowed me to introduce as evidence.

Airtight, right? The very nature of the goods he’d purchased damned him. Any idiot could see that he’d milked his government card for personal gain. The only thing left was to explain all that to the board of officers and sergeants. As was always the case in this court, every board member was selected from a black unit. That was a defense counsel’s nightmare, because folks who go into “black” work tend to be pretty hard-nosed and unforgiving. I figured I’d entertain them with a brief but trenchant opening statement, show them my tidy little pile of evidence, and voila! One more sniveling bad guy headed upriver for his misdeeds.

Unfortunately, the defense counsel wasn’t going along with my scenario. She was up there prancing in front of the board, flashing her arms around, and building this perfectly outrageous defense. She claimed her poor client suspected two officers in his unit of engaging in espionage. He made the purchases, she claimed, to complete a disguise he intended to use to try to prove it. Once a month, she claimed, these two traitorous officers met with their foreign contact on a local golf course where they played as a trio. This was where the money and information changed hands. Her client, she claimed, only bought the car so they wouldn’t recognize his own car. He bought a used car at that, a rust-covered, nasty-looking, beaten-up old 1969 Ford Mustang that cost only four hundred dollars. It wasn’t even a convertible, she emphasized. He’d also purchased a false mustache and a wig to go with the golf clothes he bought, to complete his disguise. And the camera with the 400X zoom lens? How else was he expected to record the money and envelopes changing hands?

The board members were nodding their heads right in time as she made her points. She even whipped out a charge card receipt to prove he had purchased the fake mustache and wig, in addition to all the other apparent luxury artifacts she accurately predicted the one-sided prosecutor planned on presenting during displays of evidence.

I mean, you’ve got to be kidding. I never heard such a scandalous, contemptible, flimsy defense in my legal career. Why didn’t she just say he was making the purchases and reached into his wallet and accidentally pulled out the wrong card? He meant to use his own Visa. That’s a good defense. Hell, it was the exact same defense I’d once used in a similar case. My poor client got convicted, but it was still a good defense.

Unfortunately, the board members were all captivated by her sympathetic eyes, not to mention her other physical charms, which I have to admit were quite considerable. And the one thing she had going for her defense was that it was so dazzlingly unbelievable as to be completely plausible.

When she finished, Morrow flashed her most winsome smile at the board members and you could almost hear their hearts flutter. Then she turned and smiled at me. Only my smile wasn’t like theirs. Mine was more like the way a lion might smile after a particularly delicious meal. Or maybe before a particularly tasty meal. Whichever. I’ve never been sure how those two smiles might be that much different anyway.

She and I had obviously decided not to go public about Sanchez and the conspiracy. The truth is, you just can’t trade the fate of one man against the fates of a couple million lost souls. All that philosophical blather about ends not justifying means aside, this was one of those times when the ends did justify the means. The reason for laws in the first place is to protect entire societies, and one and a half million Kosovars are a society. And Perrite? He was just one man. At least that was the conclusion Morrow and I came to before we threw in our towels and enlisted in the conspiracy.

Clapper very generously gave us another three-day extension, during which we rewrote our report and completely absolved Sanchez and his men of all crimes. We cited Tretorne’s cooked-up satellite shots as proof that the team merely acted in self-defense. And the coroner’s report? Somehow that never got included in our packet. I think Imelda might’ve lost it somewhere, like in a burn pile. Wasn’t like Imelda to lose things, but hey, everybody makes a mistake sometimes.

We threw ourselves into the whitewash whole hog. The Serbs responded just as Delbert, or Floyd, or whoever that asshole was, had predicted they would. They convened a big press conference and complained about the fact that all their troops had been shot in the head, too. Well, Morrow and I held our own press conference and said there was compelling NSA evidence that this was a contemptible attempted frame job by Milosevic. A few reporters got the gripes over that, but Milosevic had spent so many years telling so many whoppers that he didn’t have much credibility. It actually was sort of a delicious irony that, for once, we were the ones lying about murder. As much as I believe in justice for all, the victims who suffered and died at the hands of the Hammer and his boys hadn’t gotten any. Or maybe this was their justice.

Chief Persico got another Silver Star, and a few of the other team members got Bronze Stars. Right on the White House lawn, too. I liked Persico anyway, so I didn’t mind all that much. Terry Sanchez got moved to the psychiatric ward of a VA hospital somewhere in southern Virginia. Last I heard, they had him in arm restraints so the blisters on his thighs could heal. And Sergeant Perrite? They pulled him out of the team and took away his green beret. That was one of the only two concessions I demanded before I began splashing whitewash at the government’s behest. Perrite still had two years left on his current enlistment, and I talked them into reclassifying him into graves registration, where he’ll spend the next couple of years digging holes and filling them with bodies. It might be a lot less than he deserves, but who knows? It might make him think.

When I meet my maker someday, I’m fairly confident I’ll be able to square all this up. I mean, I’m a lawyer. I’m a damned good one, too. I’ve defended weaker cases and prevailed.

What did I learn? I guess I learned that Murphy was right. Sometimes those principles of duty and honor and country clash against one another in pretty ugly ways. You can’t always make them fit together. You’ve just got to decide which one to throw overboard.

I went to Clapper and extracted one other tiny tribute in return for blemishing my previously pristine principles and integrity. My special legal unit had just lost one of our two defense counsels, a good one, too, who’d left the Army to seek his fortune and fame in one of those huge Washington firms that hibernate in those big, regal glass towers. I don’t know what got into his head. Well, actually I do. It was those damned unlimited expense accounts and mouthwatering bonuses. Just think of what he’ll be missing, though.

Anyway, we needed a replacement and I made Clapper agree to give us Morrow. Right at this moment, though, I felt a strong tinge of regret. I looked at the faces of the board members, all of whom still had their eyes glued on Morrow’s shapely gams. How am I supposed to compete with that? I mean, give me a break. The guy bought a car and clothes and a fancy camera and a full set of golf clubs, all so he could expose some of his officers for selling secrets to the enemy? Morrow’s been watching too many of those Oliver Stone movies.

But the last and final truth was that I kind of wanted to keep her around. I mean, she has those incredibly sympathetic eyes and occasionally they come in handy.

In any case, by now you probably have figured this out about me: I don’t give up easily. Someday soon, maybe right after I kick her ass in this trial, I’m going to prove to the lovely Miss Morrow that I’m not a Pudley. Maybe I’m no Humongo, but I’m no Pudley. Metaphysically speaking, of course.