State of War

5

Three blocks from home, Toni watched Little Alex toddle down the sidewalk, his lurching run just a hair short of a fall with each step that he took. He was fearless, her son. Every time he tripped and went to his hands and knees on the concrete, scraping himself bloody, he got right back up and charged off again. Well, usually after a few tears, just to make sure she was paying attention.

At the moment, the object of his attention was a sparrow. The small bird was cautious enough to keep hopping away as the boy lumbered toward it, but not frightened enough to take wing.

Toni smiled. Somewhere in the back of an old photo album, there was a picture of her as a small child, maybe two or a little younger, sitting on the steps of her parents’ place in the Bronx. Sitting perched on the stoop in front of her, not six inches away, was a bird — it had looked like a blue jay — easily within her reach. How had that bird come to be there? Why hadn’t it been afraid of her?

When she’d first seen the picture and asked her father about it, he had laughed and said it was a stuffed bird. Mama told her different, though. Mama was the one who had taken the picture, and she said the bird had just dropped down and alighted next to her, watching her. Toni hadn’t tried to catch it, and it had stayed there for a long time. Mama was convinced that animals knew when there was a threat and when there wasn’t, and believed that the bird had known that little Toni meant it no harm.

Alex shambled off the sidewalk onto the lawn, and the sparrow did its little two-foot hop three or four times to one side and turned to look at him again. It wasn’t as if the bird seemed to be afraid, except maybe about being accidentally stepped on — which was a real enough danger. It seemed more like it was curious.

A mutual thing, that.

Her virgil beeped at her. She unbelted it and saw it was Alex calling.

“Hey, hon,” she said. “What’s up?”

“Not much. Just calling to see how your day is going.”

“Great. I got home, and now the baby and I are out for a walk. Guru has gone to a movie.”

“Really?” Alex laughed. “What did she go to — some action-adventure thing with exploding heads?”

“No, the new Tanya Clements romantic comedy.”

“Our Guru? The old lady who can beat up three Marines and a pro boxer at the same time?”

“The very same.”

“I’m amazed. Mm.” He paused, then changed the subject. “Listen, hon, I’m going to be running a little late. I have to be deposed by the lawyers on that CyberNation lawsuit. What did you have in mind for supper?”

Toni smiled. “Whatever you were planning on bringing home from takeout.”

“Ah, I see. How’s Indian?”

“Sounds good. Get me the Chicken Masala. And don’t forget the dal and nan.”

“Your wish is my command, O mistress. Kiss our boy for me. I should be there around seven thirty.”

“Good. Love you.”

“I love you, too, Toni.”

After he discommed, Toni stuck the com back onto her belt and watched as the sparrow took off, having finally decided this monster about to fall on it might best be avoided at a greater distance. The bird flew into a tree, landing on a branch about ten feet up.

Little Alex turned to look at her, his face clouding up. He pointed at the tree. “Mama! Bird! Get bird! Get bird!”

As if she could. And as if he had every right to ask. He wanted it, therefore he should have it.

She laughed. “Sorry, baboo, but Mama can’t fly.”

He shook his head and looked very determined. “Mama. Get bird.”

She laughed again. What a wonderful child he was. Utterly convinced that he was the center of the universe. And why not? she thought. After all, she hadn’t done much to disabuse him of the notion. She’d have to start doing that at some point. Otherwise, he was going to have problems when he ran into the other two-year-olds who were just as convinced that they were the sun around which all worlds revolved.

More amazing, maybe, was that the boy had become the center of her universe. A career woman, marital artist, take-no-prisoners gal who now got mushy whenever her little baboo smiled at her. Who would have thought it?

The sparrow took off again and vanished through the cherry trees.

“Bird go bye-bye,” Alex said. He looked crushed.

“Yes. Bird go bye-bye.”

But the sparrow wasn’t the only amusement on the block. A man walking a happy-looking German shepherd dog came toward them, and Alex’s gloom at having lost the bird vanished in a big smile. “Woof-woof!” he said.

“Woof-woof,” she said. “It is a dog!”

Before her baby was born, she would never have believed that she’d be having these kinds of conversations. When she had heard friends or relatives jabbering at their small kids like this, she had been amused, even condescending. She would never talk to her kids that way. Or so she had thought, anyway.

The dog, her tail wagging like a crazed metronome, was straining at the leash slightly, obviously wanting to get to Little Alex. Toni looked at the owner, a fit, largish, fifty-something man in a T-shirt, shorts, and running shoes, with short hair and sunglasses. “Does the dog bite?” she asked. “Is she good with children?”

The owner chuckled. “Cady? She’ll lick his face, is all. Maybe knock him down with her tongue. She’s the biggest sissy you ever saw. I’ve seen the cat shove her away from her own food bowl, and all she did was stand there and whine at me: ‘Help, Daddy, protect me!’ ”

Toni grinned. “Alex, you want to pet the woof-woof?”

“Woof-woof!”

“Go ahead, then,” Toni said to the dog’s owner. “Give her a little slack.” She was a little wary, and she edged a tiny bit closer, but she was determined that she wasn’t going to walk around her whole life stopping her son from experiencing the world.

The dog, who had to weigh a hundred and fifteen or twenty pounds, surged forward, and Toni tensed up. Nothing happened, though, except that it began to lap at Alex’s face.

It surprised him, and he flinched, but then he laughed, reached out, and hugged the big beast around the neck. The dog seemed happy enough, and Alex was ecstatic. “Woof-woof! Woof-woof!”

The owner smiled. “Beautiful little boy,” he said.

“We think so,” Toni said. “So is your dog.”

Alex continued to hug the dog, who seemed to think this was a fine game.

A dog, Toni thought. Now there’s an idea. Somebody to keep Little Alex company. She’d always wanted a dog when she’d been little, but living in an apartment in the Bronx made that a problem. No reason they couldn’t have a dog now, though. Alex liked dogs, she knew. He had even had one for a while. And they had a yard. Kids ought to have a dog, right?

They were in the conference room. There just wasn’t enough table space in Michaels’s office for all the hard-copy documents they needed to spread out and examine.

Michaels looked at the sea of paper. “God, I hate lawyers,” he said.

“Present company excluded, of course?”

“No,” Alex said, shaking his head. “Especially present company.”

Tommy Bender laughed. “Sorry, pal, I don’t make the rules. I just try to keep my clients from being skewered by ’em.”

“Yeah, well, Shakespeare was right. Come the Revolution, first thing we should do is kill all the lawyers. It would certainly make things a lot simpler.”

“That quote is always taken out of context,” Tommy said. “King Henry the VI, Part II, Scene II. It’s spoken by a comedy relief character named ‘Dick the Butcher,’ who is a killer, while his buddy Cade muses about what he’d do if he was king. An early lawyer joke is all it was, a cheap laugh.”

“Can’t have too many cheap laughs,” Alex said. “Or lawyer jokes, for that matter.”

“Here’s one,” Tommy said. “A lawyer and his wife are on a cruise in the Caribbean.”

“I hate the locale already,” Michaels said.

“You should have thought of that before you started shooting people down there. Anyway, the lawyer and his wife are watching the sharks swim back and forth, and the lawyer leans too far forward and falls into the water. The ship’s captain, who is passing by, sees the man fall, yells ‘Man overboard!’ and reaches for a life ring, when all of a sudden the sharks stop swimming. One of them dives under the thrashing lawyer, picks him up on his back, and heads toward the ship, while the other sharks line up in two rows on either side. The shark delivers the lawyer to the ladder, where the lawyer climbs off.

“The captain is stunned. ‘I have never seen anything like that!’ he says. ‘That was amazing!’

“And the lawyer’s wife just shrugs and says, ‘No big deal. Just professional courtesy… ’ ”

Michaels smiled and shook his head. “Why is it that all the best lawyer jokes I hear are from lawyers?”

“We have to be able to laugh at ourselves,” Tommy said. “Everyone else does, and it’s easier than crying about it. Nobody loves the undertaker, either, but he’s got his niche.” He shrugged and pointed at the piles of paper. “All right,” he said. “Let’s get back to your situation, shall we?”

Alex groaned. “Do we have to?”

“Unless you want to cost the taxpayers a couple hundred million dollars for violating the civil rights of the dead guys, it would be a good idea, yes.”

“You know,” Michaels said, “I just don’t understand this. We were in international waters, and they were shooting at us. Doesn’t that help?”

“Yes and no. Mostly, it just muddies things up. A few years ago, it wouldn’t have happened, there were actually laws against suing certain agencies in the performance of their duties, kind of like you can’t sue a sitting President, and some states won’t let cops arrest legislators for piddly stuff when congress is in session. But times change. International Maritime Law is unbelievably complicated, and made even worse by the latest round of rulings from the Hague and by the U.N.’s interpretations of those rulings.”

He sighed. “Look, Alex, the way things stand right now, you can get sued in either state or federal court, since the affected persons were all natives of this country, and of Florida, and so are their dependents. American citizens don’t lose their American civil rights while at sea, especially if they are being violated by other Americans. Obviously, the violators in this case would be you, although you personally won’t have to pay out anything, since you are under the Net Force umbrella, and federally insured and all. Still, nobody in the food chain is going to be happy if we lose this suit.”

“What about just settling? Wouldn’t it be cheaper?”

“No question, but the people suing you don’t want to settle — or, more accurately, the attorney representing them doesn’t want to. You know those sharks in the joke? If this guy fell into the water, the sharks would scatter for their lives. Of course, he would just walk back to the ship — on the water, if you get my drift. We are talking about Mitchell Townsend Ames.”

He waited a moment, and when it became obvious that Michaels didn’t have a clue who this was, he shook his head. “Don’t you ever read a paper, Alex? Or watch the news on TV? Ames is the guy who routinely takes on the major drug companies. And wins. He’s filed half a dozen class-action suits against the pharmaceutical houses and has never lost one. This guy’s a doctor-slash-lawyer, bright as an H-bomb fireball, and meaner than a bag full of hungry wolverines.”

Michaels shrugged. “If you’ve seen one lawyer, you’ve seen ’em all.”

“No, sir, that ain’t how it is,” Tommy said. “Mitchell Ames eats top guns and spits shrapnel. He’s fast, sharp, and he knows both ends of the game when it comes to health suits, plus he is good-looking — and can dumb it down so a jury full of third-grade kids could understand every word of his evidence. He is a very dangerous man in court.”

“And he doesn’t want to settle the case.”

“Correct. Look, I understand how you don’t think this should have been filed, that you were justified in your actions, and in a criminal court, I would easily kick Mitchell Townsend Ames’s ass and make him write ‘I’m so sorry Uncle Michaels’ on the chalkboard a hundred times. But this isn’t a criminal court. They’ve filed this as a civil matter, where the burden of proof is different — easier — and where the plaintiff has cause to open all kinds of cans of worms. We can block some of it on the grounds of national security, but he’s still going to shine some light on corners you’d rather were kept dark.”

“We don’t have anything to hide,” Michaels said.

“Yes, you do. You just haven’t thought about it enough. Did anybody make any jokes about this incident? Maybe some gallows-humor remark that might have gone out in an e-mail?”

Michaels shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s possible, I suppose, but I don’t see every e-mail — or even remember every one I do see.”

“Right. So you have this jury looking at some thug’s kindly old mama, all teary-eyed, and Ames whips out this e-mail with a remark like, ‘Teach ’em to mess with Net Force!’ and over that, a picture of her poor dead son taken the day he graduated from high school, or maybe on prom night. Juries are sympathetic to that kind of thing. If he can put a human face on the guy — and he will, even though the bad guy was a cold-blooded headbreaker — he’ll be able to cast Net Force as a bunch of bloodthirsty jack-booted storm troopers who laughed as they shot him and spit on his corpse just for fun. Now you and I both know it didn’t happen like that, but a good lawyer can convince a jury it did, and Ames is as good as they come.”

Michaels shook his head.

“And that’s just for starters. Once he gets going, this guy can convince a jury of God-fearing folk that you’re the Antichrist, or at least Satan’s second lieutenant. I’ve seen him do it. It will get ugly. Your best defense — your only defense — is to show those nice folks on the panel that you had to do what you did, no way around it, else the Republic would have fallen, that you hated to do it, and that you are a much, much nicer fellow than the dead guys. Which won’t be easy.”

“Aren’t you my lawyer?”

“Sure. But after the trial is over, I’ll go have a drink with Ames, if he’s interested. We like to pretend that we don’t take these things personally.”

“Well, excuse me if I do take it that way.”

“Yeah, that’s allowed.”

What a rotten situation this is, Michaels thought.

“All right, let’s get the story down to brass tacks,” Tommy said. “Our legal status is quite clear, of course. Your military arm technically works under the auspices of the National Guard and not the FBI, and thus can be activated and sent out of the country when deemed necessary. Our charter doesn’t say that, exactly, but we can blow smoke and wave mirrors and make that sound good. And we are proceeding on the idea that Net Force had reason to believe that the gambling ship was essentially a pirate vessel. This might be a fine legal hair to split, given the strict definitions of piracy according to the U.N. Convention of the Law of the Sea, Article 101, but when you factor in the Internet and terrorism, I think we can pull that off. You, as a duly authorized representative of a sovereign nation, had the right to board and seize the vessel pursuant to Article 105 of the U.N. Convention.”

“I knew it all along,” Michaels said.

Tommy grinned. “Sure you did. That’s why you need lawyers.”

Alex didn’t smile back. Somehow, this just didn’t seem all that funny anymore.

“All right,” Tommy continued, his grin fading. “Start with how you began to suspect that CyberNation was fielding bad guys doing illegal things.”

“That’ll take a long time.”

Tommy nodded. “Then we better get started.”