Truth or Die

Chapter 114

In the world of newspapers, the term is shirttail, a short and related story that’s added to the end of a longer one.

Of course, I only know that because of Claire. She was my go-to for journalistic lingo, and I was hers for all things legal. Between the two of us, we always had a leg up on the Sunday crossword.

Suffice it to say, Dobson’s confession was all the rage for a couple of weeks. All the more so given how it was obtained. But that was the whole point, wasn’t it? Owen never denied that the serum had the potential to foil a terrorist plot that could kill hundreds, if not thousands or more. The question was, who got to decide whether or not we used it? So let the public debate begin, because that’s how a democracy is supposed to work. In the words of Lincoln at Gettysburg, “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”

It was only fitting, then, that Owen gave the recording of Dobson to the DC police, the FBI, and the entire world, via the Internet, all at the same time. First, though, he gave a private screening to Agent Valerie Jensen and Jeffrey Crespin. That was the first of a few deals I negotiated.

Ethics and morality exist on an ever-shifting scale. The trick, I thought, was keeping perspective. Somewhere along the line, there always needed to be a clearly established definition of right and wrong. Black and white. As long as you had that, you could proceed to deal with the gray areas.

At least, that was what I used to teach my students at Columbia Law. But then this past summer happened. I don’t teach them that anymore.

“Look around you, Mr. Mann,” said Crespin. It’s all gray.

Which would explain why he was ultimately fine with my other two deals. They needed his approval.

One was regarding Josiah Brennan.

Jesus himself could’ve returned to defend Brennan in court for money laundering, but there was still no way he could avoid jail time entirely. That is, if the NSA chose to cooperate with law enforcement and pursue charges against him.

All I could picture, though, was Brennan’s nine-year-old daughter, Rebecca, getting frisked every time she went to visit him behind bars. The same Rebecca who could’ve easily ratted out Valerie and me in her father’s office. So I had a different suggestion, and Crespin went for it.

It was time for Brennan to launder some of his own money.

Detective Dave Lamont didn’t have a nine-year-old daughter, but he did have three teenage sons with his wife, Joanie. They also had a mortgage, school tuitions, and orthodontist bills. NYPD death benefits only go so far. His additional life insurance policy, even less far.

So Brennan was charged with something else instead: looking after the Lamont family financially. Also, setting up a special IRA for Lamont’s partner, McGeary. Was it a rich man buying his freedom? Maybe if he’d thought of it first. But he didn’t. Money doesn’t always have to be the root of all evil.

Which was the same rationale I used regarding Shahid Al Dossari, the other deal that needed Crespin’s consent.

Personally, I didn’t care one way or the other what the NSA wanted to do with him. He had skedaddled back to Saudi Arabia the split second Dobson was arrested, and the fact that he wasn’t a US citizen presented a far more complicated legal challenge, especially given his wealth and influence.

But there it was again. Wealth and influence.

“Might as well put it to good use,” I told Crespin.

“Just what do you have in mind?” he asked.

It was actually what Owen had originally had in mind.

Chapter 115

I thought I was curing Alzheimer’s...

That was what he’d told me from the start. Now maybe he will.

Of course, I couldn’t really blame Al Dossari for making a counteroffer to the “strongly” suggested contribution to Owen’s newly founded research facility. Twenty million dollars is a lot of money, after all. Even for a Saudi banker.

Then again, everything is relative. Assuming he was able to fight extradition and avoid trial in the States, he’d still be the Roman Polanski of poker and gambling here. No more trips to Vegas. No more trips anywhere in the United States, his favorite place to be.

In the end, Al Dossari figured that was an even greater price to pay.

God bless America.

And Godspeed to Owen. “I’ve got my work cut out for me,” he said when the facility officially opened in the fall.

“Well, then,” I said. “You better get busy... dude.” For good measure, I rubbed my hands together as if doing a bit of his dry wash routine.

You meet a lot of people in your lifetime, many of whom will have an immeasurable impact on you. Then there are those who literally change who you are. You can generally count those people on one hand. And fittingly, Owen Lewis will always be one of them. In the wake of everything that happened, all the sadness and despair and mayhem, he managed to give me something I would’ve never thought possible. Optimism.

Crazy to think... I still can’t even buy the kid a drink.

So that was that. All the deals I’d cut after Dobson’s confession. As for the one made before it, I’m fairly certain Sebastian has no regrets. In fact, I’m positive of it.

Sebastian Cole may be the last journalist on earth whom President Morris — with his twenty-one-percent approval rating — will actually grant an interview to, but Sebastian’s firsthand account of what happened in that hotel room, including a very revealing Q&A with Dobson while he was under the influence of the serum, gave him the scoop of a lifetime.

Throw in the exclusive interviews Owen and I guaranteed him in return for his cooperation, and Sebastian all but owned the front page of the Times for an entire month.

But the best part — at least for me — was the class he displayed throughout it all. The byline of every article he wrote covering the story read the same. By Claire Parker and Sebastian Cole.

“You’re a far better man than I first gave you credit for,” I told him.

“Likewise,” he said.

It’s been moments like that when I’ve missed Claire the most. That’s when I usually hop in my car and make the drive up to Wellesley, west of Boston, and the Woodlawn Cemetery, where all Parkers have been buried for over a century. Only once, though, have I fallen into the cliché of talking to her tombstone. She would’ve laughed at the sight of that. And who knows? Maybe somewhere she is laughing, and doing that little crinkle thing with her nose that, in a weird and wonderful way, always made her look even prettier.

I know that as time goes on, those trips to her gravesite will happen less often. But not because I’ll miss her less. No, eventually what will happen, maybe amid a gust of wind through the branches of a nearby northern red oak, is that I’ll hear that tombstone of hers talk back to me.

“It’s okay, Trevor,” she’ll say. “Now get on with it, will you? Maybe even ask out that gorgeous agent from the NSA. Though between you and me, she might be a little out of your league.”

Claire always told it like it was.

Though, for the record, Valerie Jensen and I did manage to have dinner together when she was in Manhattan before the holidays. We even went back to her hotel afterward. “Your move,” she told me.

Of course, that was during the game of Scrabble we played in the bar off the lobby. She’d brought the game all the way up from DC. And of course, she kicked my ass but good. Her father also taught her poker, she said. “Maybe we’ll play after the trial.”

Which brings us fully up to date. Dobson’s trial. And me sitting in the first row waiting my turn. It couldn’t come soon enough.

“The prosecution calls Mr. Trevor Mann.”

It felt strange to be back in a courtroom after all these years, and even stranger to be taking the witness stand. I’d always been in front, asking the questions, not actually sitting in the stand.

Place your left hand on the Bible, raise your right hand...

No serum needed here. We were kickin’ it old school.

“Do you solemnly swear or affirm that you will tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?”

You better believe it.