The Patriots' Club

54

“What is ‘Crown’?” shouted Bobby Stillman.

“I have no idea,” said the man they had captured in Union Square for what she thought was the fortieth time.

“Of course you know,” she insisted, then slapped his face, her sharp fingernails leaving angry furrows on his cheek.

He sat kneeling in the center of the hard terrazzo floor, wrists and ankles bound, and a broom handle laid across the backs of his knees. Prime U.S. beef buffed up, brainwashed, and trained to kill by the finest minds in the military, then spat out onto the streets to ply his trade to the highest bidder.

“You work for Scanlon,” she said, walking a circle around him, spitting her words at him like bullets. “Or is that musket on your breastbone just to attract the girls? Scanlon hires out exclusively to Jefferson. Why were you in New York?”

“We go where we’re ordered.”

“And your orders were to kill Tom Bolden?”

“No ma’am. Please, may I stand up?”

He’d been sitting in this position for thirty minutes. The weight of his buttocks and upper body pressed the broom handle into the crook of his calves, cutting off all circulation to his extremities. By now, the balls of his feet and his toes felt as if thousands of razor-sharp needles were stabbing him again and again. Soon the pain would advance to his ankles, his calves. She’d forced the experience on herself. It was unbearable. She had screamed in less than half the time.

“No,” she answered. “You may not. What brought you to Union Square?”

“We were supposed to find Bolden.”

“You were supposed to kill him, weren’t you!”

“No.”

“Your shooter missed. He wounded an innocent woman. Tell me something I don’t know. What is ‘Crown’?”

The man tried to lift himself off his knees, but Bobby Stillman pushed him back down. He moaned, but refused to answer. When his moans became shouts, and then screams, she lifted her foot and pushed him onto his side. “Five minutes,” she said. “Then we start over.”

Bobby Stillman walked outside the cottage and gazed into the falling snow. She was tired. Not just fatigued from the events of the day, the last week, but bone tired. She’d been on the run for twenty-five years. She was fifty-eight years old and her belief in her cause was fading.

A gust brought a flurry of snowflakes onto the porch. At least five inches had already fallen, clogging the mountain roads that led to her cabin in the Catskills. In an hour, two at most, the roads would be impassable. They would be stranded. She breathed deeply, and listened to the silence. The man’s shouts remained with her. It was necessary, she told herself.

She remembered a night long ago. The hot, humid air was electric with the chirping of crickets and the rattle of cicadas. And then the tremendous blast as the bomb that she and David had so carefully put together exploded outside the R & D lab of Guardian Microsystems. It had been her first step; the moment when she decided to vote with her feet. To act. To rebel. No, she corrected herself. To exercise her rights as a defender of the Constitution.

Twenty-five years… a lifetime ago.

She had arrived in Washington, D.C., in the summer of 1971, a young, ambitious woman eager to make her mark. A graduate of NYU Law School, editor of the law review, a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War, she burned with a desire to serve. She had never viewed the law as a license to earn money, but as a call to duty, and her duty was to ensure that the rights granted by the Constitution to individual and government alike were scrupulously enforced. When she accepted a job as a staff attorney on the House Subcommittee on Intelligence, her friends were shocked. To cries that she had jumped the fence and joined the establishment, she said, nonsense. The choice was a natural one. There was no better place to exercise her calling than Capitol Hill. “Make law, not war,” was her activist’s motto.

The vice chairman of the subcommittee was a maverick second-term congressman from New York named James Jacklin. Jacklin was a decorated veteran, a winner of the Navy Cross, as close to a real-life “hero” as she’d ever met, if that’s what you could call a man who dropped napalm on women and children from the safety of a supersonic steel tube zipping high above their heads. She came to work prepared for battle, a red-haired rebel in a miniskirt with a maxim for every occasion and attitude to spare. Her job on the committee was to advise on the legality of actions proposed by the intelligence community. Even then she was a watchdog.

Instead, the two hit it off immediately. Jacklin was not the hawk she had expected. He, too, was against the war, and never afraid to express his opinions. For her every lick of fire, he contributed a chunk of brimstone. Together they exposed the secret war on Cambodia. They argued against the CIA propping up General Augusto Pinochet, the corrupt Chilean strongman. They called for an end to the firebombing of Hanoi. If her rulings were not always adopted, he urged her to keep fighting. To speak up. Jacklin anointed her the committee’s conscience.

The words were praise, indeed. He had served. He had lost a brother in the war. He knew firsthand the cost of conflict. He said that the price paid for a government’s foreign involvement was measured not only in lives but also in loss of influence, and a ceding of moral authority. It was this last that America could least afford. America of all nations. America must be a beacon of democracy, a bastion of freedom. America was the only country in the world formed not on the basis of common geography, but on a common ideology. America must remain a symbol.

And she loved Jacklin for it. For daring to speak out. For putting his ideas more eloquently than she ever could. For showing her that America’s values were a question not of politics, but of common sense.

Until the night she discovered him secretly copying her briefs and leaking them to his friends in Langley.

James Jacklin was a spy. A mole, in the vernacular that was just beginning to make itself known. And his mission was to infiltrate her and the “team” he said she represented. “The left.” His job was to gain her trust. To influence her rulings. To report the enemy’s actions in advance. He succeeded brilliantly.

Bobby Stillman’s initiation into the radical fringe was immediate.

She resigned her position on the Hill. She left Washington for New York. And she took a job with the organization that was the bane of all lawmakers regardless of age, color, creed, or party affiliation: the American Civil Liberties Union. She filed briefs. She argued cases. She wrote articles to halt the incursion of the government into the private sphere. Yet, her passivity sickened her.

From the sidelines, she watched as Jacklin rose to the position of secretary of defense and quietly rebuilt the nation’s military. She listened to his promises of a peacetime force and a need to look inward and knew he was lying. Every day that passed, she promised herself that she would act. Her anger grew in proportion to her frustration. After four years, she had her chance.

Jacklin had left the Pentagon and started Defense Associates, an investment firm that specialized in restructuring businesses active in the defense sector. When she saw that he had bought Guardian Microsystems, she knew she had found her chance.

Guardian Microsystems, which produced the most sophisticated listening devices known to man. Parabolic surveillance dishes capable of picking up conversations a half mile away. Miniature bugs that could listen through walls. The Reds didn’t have a chance. He had talked about the technology lovingly back when they had shared a bed. The thought that he would turn it against the people was the final straw.

Then came Albany.

A cry echoed from inside the dilapidated cottage. Reluctantly, Bobby Stillman walked back inside. Her colleagues had returned the Scanlon operative to his kneeling position. Look at him, she told herself. He’s the enemy.

She was no longer sure.

Sometime in the last hour, she had come to believe that she was as guilty as he.

“What is ‘Crown’?”