Under Siege

CHAPTER SIX

At six o’clock the alarm rang beside Thanos Liarakos’ bed. He silenced it and rolled out. He had been asleep less than an hour. He had gotten home from the hospital at three a.m., checked on the kids and the maid, who had graciously agreed to return and spend the night when he called her at midnight. The lady and the kids were all asleep in the same bed. Tired as he was, Liarakos couldn’t sleep. The last time he remembered glancing at the clock it had been almost five a.m.

He showered and shaved and dressed. In the kitchen he wrote a note for the kids:

When he backed the car out of the garage there was a television reporter and a cameraman at the end of the driveway, on the sidewalk. They shouted questions at him as he backed down the drive right at them. Two cameramen. One refused to get out of the way. Liarakos kept the car creeping backward. The reporter, a woman, held a microphone against the driver’s window glass and shouted: “Is Aldana threatening Americans? Is he sane? How much money has he paid you?”

She expected no answers in this theater of the absurd, Liarakos knew. Asking rhetorical questions was the whole show. This was award-winning television journalism.

The rear bumper lightly contacted the camera tripod. Then the man moved.

Liarakos kept the car drifting backward into the street, flipped the transmission into drive, and accelerated away.

The morning was overcast and gloomy. A wind drove the dry brown leaves along the streets in waves. Here and there whirlwinds built little columns of leaves that spun crazily for a few seconds in the gray half light, then flowed on.

His wife was still asleep. The blinds were closed and the lights off in her private room. Still wearing his topcoat, Thanos Liarakos sank into the padded visitor’s chair.

In a few moments his breathing rhythm matched hers. He felt himself relaxing and drifting and didn’t fight it.

He had been in his late thirties when he realized that he could see his entire life, all of it, as if he were a detached observer and his life were a play that he had seen several times before. The whole of it was being acted out before him daily, scene by scene. Yet he knew how it had been and how it would have to be.

Staring at his face in the mirror as he shaved every morning, he could see how the lines would deepen, how the jowls would continue to sag, how the hair would gray and thin. He stared at a face not young and soon to be old.

In nursing homes, he knew, a portion of the daily routine for the elderly is reminiscence therapy. The staff encourages the fragile people waiting to die to look back, to savor the events in their life as if they were great feats woven into a tapestry to instruct generations yet unborn.

Thanos Liarakos was seeing it as it would be, looking back while he was still living it. All his achievements and accomplishments that he had previously thought so important shrank mercilessly from the vantage of this curious double perspective. Court victories lost their sweetness and disasters lost their sting. He had found a way to live with life, or perhaps a merciful God had given him the way. Whichever. Only the perspective mattered.

Drifting now, half asleep, Liarakos swirled the colored glass inside his kaleidoscope of past and future, looking for the pattern. His father had stepped off the boat from Greece with fifty dollars in his pocket and one extra shirt, and parlayed that into five submarine sandwich shops which had sent three sons through college. His mother had raised the sons while his father worked twelve to fifteen hours a day. Those bittersweet days were irretrievably gone. They were as far from the present as the day Odysseus sacked the stronghold on the proud height of Troy. Yet when he talked to his mother he was listening to a voice from the past that would soon be lost to him. So soon, so soon, he would be standing by her grave and his father’s grave, remembering, feeling the life escaping like a handful of sand flowing through his fingers. So he tolerated her diatribes and cherished her.

His daughters — they were his offerings to the human race, to the future and its infinite potential, to God and whatever great and incomprehensible thing He had in mind for the human species. The girls were not special, not gifted — they were just people. They and their children would work and love and marry and have children, long after Thanos Liarakos and the Greek of the sandwich shop were dust. So he loved them desperately.

Elizabeth. Ahh, gentle Elizabeth, with your mother’s heart and your empty desires and your cravings …

You love a woman for many reasons. A goddess she seems when you are young. But finally you see she is of common clay, the same as you, with faults and fears and vain, foolish dreams and petty vices. So you cherish her, love her even more. As she ages you cling closer and closer, holding tighter and tighter. She becomes the female half of you. The roughening of her skin, the engraved lines on her face, the thickening waistline and the sagging breasts, none of it matters a damn. You love her for what she is not as much as for what she is.

Elizabeth, your vices aren’t so petty. You are selling your soul for that white powder. It will lay you in your grave, devastate your husband who loves you, deprive two girls of the mother that you promised to be when you gave them life.

Two nurses entered the room and flipped on the light over the bed. Thanos Liarakos came fully awake and squinted at the two white-clad figures bending over Elizabeth. They pried open her eyes and checked her pulse. The stouter nurse rigged a blood-pressure cuff. Elizabeth groaned but said nothing. She was still intoxicated.

“Lucky,” one of them muttered as she checked the IV drip. “She was lucky this time.”

Liarakos looked at his watch. Almost eight o’clock. The sounds of the staff-chattering in the corridors and moving tray carts and equipment came through the open door. He levered himself out of the chair and stood swaying while his heart compensated for the sudden change of position.

He was still standing at the foot of the bed when the nurses bustled out.

She looked old. With no makeup and her hair a mess, Elizabeth looked finished with life. No more warm moments with the children, no more sensuous I-love-yous, no more evenings with the fire crackling and the children laughing. She looked used up. Burned out.

Thanos Liarakos rubbed his face and wondered why he wasn’t crying. Ah, it was that crazy double perspective. He had lived this play before.

But he should be crying. He really should. This was the place he was supposed to cry.

The lead headline in this morning’s Post was THE KEY TO HELL. The bold black letters spanned the width of the top of page one. The editor had run a photo of Aldana getting off the plane at Andrews Air Force Base wearing handcuffs and a fierce scowl. Ottmar Mergenthaler and Jack Yocke had shared the byline on the story. Beside the story was Mergenthaler’s column.

Jack Yocke read the four inches of Ott’s column that was on the front page and flipped to page A-12 for the rest of it. The federal government and the American people, Mergenthaler said, shouldn’t let themselves be intimidated by Chano Aldana, who was obviously going to try the same tactics here that he had used with mixed success in Colombia. If he thought the American people would respond like frightened sheep to terrorism and extortion, Aldana didn’t understand the American people.

Yocke snorted and tossed the paper on his desk. Maybe he should give Ott a soapbox for Christmas.

His phone rang. “Jack, there’s a reporter from a Dallas paper on the line. He wants to talk to you about your interview yesterday with Aldana.”

“I don’t answer questions. I ask them.”

“Does that mean no?”

“Yep.”

Yocke tucked a notebook and pencils in his jacket pocket as he stirred through his message slips and the unopened mail. He would have to return these calls later, maybe this evening. With his coat over his arm, he went looking for his editor. Maybe he could go down to the courthouse with the rest of the newsroom crew and mill around smartly while Aldana was arraigned.

In a dingy office two doors from the courtroom, Thanos Liarakos arranged his fanny in a chair across a desk from the U.S. attorney for the District, William L. Bader.

Bader was known as an aggressive prosecutor who meticulously prepared his cases. Rumor with the hard tang of truth had it that Bader had judicial ambitions. Liarakos didn’t hold that against him. Bader was a damn good lawyer.

“I dropped in to have a little chat about the shenanigans your people used to get my client on Judge Snyder’s calendar.”

“What shenanigans?” Bader’s eyebrows rose a sixteenth of an inch.

“You can wipe off the innocent look. You’re wasting it on me. The people in the clerk’s office have whispered in the wrong places.”

“So you’d rather be in front of Maximum John or Hanging Jack?”

“Well, you know how these things are. My client might have lucked out with Judge Worth if the deck hadn’t been so neatly stacked against him.” Judge Worth had the reputation, probably exaggerated, of bending over backward to help defense counsel and screwing the prosecution at every opportunity.

“So why are you in here complaining? The hearing in front of the magistrate starts in twenty minutes. Complain to her.”

“I don’t think opening this can of worms will do you any good in the newspapers, Will. People might get the idea the government is conducting a vendetta against Aldana, trying to make him a scapegoat. I thought you might do something for me, and I’ll live with Judge Snyder.”

“What?”

“Make a motion for a gag order. Both sides. Including the defendant.”

Bader’s eyes went to a copy of the Post on the corner of the desk. He spent several seconds looking at it. Then he sat back in his chair and rubbed his nose. It was a big nose, but it was well arranged in a large, square, craggy face.

“You want a trial or a circus?” Liarakos asked.

“That fool is putting the noose around his own neck. I don’t give a damn if he holds press conferences twice a day and threatens to butcher everybody east of Pittsburgh.”

“You don’t know how that will cut and neither do I,” Thanos Liarakos shot back. “What we both know is that we’re officers of the court. Let’s have a fair trial and not let this deteriorate into some kind of Geraldo Rivera spectacular.”

Bader snorted derisively.

“We gotta stopper this asshole before he poisons the well,” Liarakos said softly. “What if no one with an IQ above fifty is willing to serve on the jury? What if one or two jurors become afraid to convict him?”

“I’ll worry about that when and if it happens. He’s your client, dammit! You want him quiet, you shut him up.”

“Gimme a fucking break, Will.”

Bader’s lips twisted and he massaged an eyebrow. He was, Liarakos suspected, trying to decide how Judge Snyder would view the prosecutor’s failure to ask for a gag order if the defendant kept grabbing headlines with veiled threats. Thanos Liarakos sensed that he had won. He sat back in his chair and crossed his legs.

“All right, all right.”

Bader called for a secretary and dictated the motion. When he finished, he asked Liarakos, “Is that satisfactory to you?”

The defense lawyer suggested a change that strengthened the requested order. He cited a case from memory. Will Bader nodded and waved the secretary toward a typewriter.

“I might as well tell you now,” Bader said, “while you’re in a good mood and feeling full of bonhomie — I’m filing a motion today to seize all of Aldana’s assets. Everything he has, including the money he used to pay your fee, is proceeds of criminal activity. Every dime.”

Both men were well aware of the implications of such a motion. If he were stripped of all his assets, an accused individual could no longer pay his attorney’s fee. Of course, the court could then appoint an attorney to represent him, but the defense that could then be mounted was severely restricted by the limited funds that were, by law, available from the government to pay defense counsel. In effect, by confiscating the defendant’s assets in a civil action the government could greatly increase its odds of ultimately convicting the defendant in the criminal case, where the burden of proof was so much higher. These motions were fair, the judges reasoned, because in good conscience a criminal should not be allowed to use the proceeds of his crime to avoid being punished for committing it.

Critics — mainly defense attorneys — argued that the government had the cart before the horse: stripping assets from a defendant before he had been convicted of anything seemed to shrink the presumption of innocence to the vanishing point. The problem was that the profits of crime were real — you could touch the money — but the presumption of innocence was a legal fiction, and ninety-nine percent of the time it was just that, fiction. The defendant was guilty and everybody knew it except the jurors. So the government grabbed the bucks.

Liarakos, of course, had been expecting just such a motion. The only question was when. The arguments pro and con he knew well, for he had fought these motions in other cases. Some he won, some he lost.

He cleared his throat. “I might as well tell you now, my client has engaged another firm to represent him in any civil confiscation action. Off the record, no doubt you’ll get some assets. But you’ll not get them all.”

“Every little bit helps,” Bader said grinning. “What with the deficit and all, it’s nice to see guys like Aldana contributing their mite. We’ll be serving interrogatories next week, and maybe depositions the following week?”

“Not up to me. Serve them on him and he’ll send them to the firm he’s hired.”

If Chano Aldana thought he had problems now, Liarakos told himself, wait until he read the interrogatories. Any answer he supplied could be used against him in the criminal trial. Most of these asset confiscation actions went uncontested for this very good reason. Regardless of how the criminal action went, Aldana was going to return to Colombia a much poorer man.

Which somehow didn’t break Liarakos’ heart.

Jack Yocke stood against the back wall of the courtroom shoulder to shoulder with three dozen other reporters and made notes on his steno pad. “Courtroom packed … crowd hushed, expectant …”

Defense attorney Thanos Liarakos’ assistant, Judith Lewis, was already at the defense table, which was marked with a small sign. To her far right, with an empty chair between them, sat a man in a brown sports coat and slacks. Yocke murmured to the man beside him and pointed.

“The interpreter.”

At the prosecutor’s table sat another woman, whom Yocke assumed was an assistant. He whispered another question to the man beside him. Wilda Rodriguez-Herrera. The man spelled the name as Yocke wrote it down. Why is it, the Post reporter wondered, that most high-powered lawyers these days have female factotums? Both women were in their middle-to-late twenties or perhaps early thirties — it was impossible to tell at this distance — and were dressed for success in conservative getups that must have set each of them back a week’s pay. Yocke jotted another note.

Aldana entered in company with two U.S. marshals. He was wearing a dark suit and a deep maroon tie. His hands were cuffed in front of him. As one of the marshals took the cuffs off, Aldana looked quickly around the room, scanning each face. Every eye in the room was on him. The room was so quiet Yocke could hear the clink of metal as the cuffs were removed from Aldana’s wrists.

The defendant sat down at the defense table between Judith Lewis and the interpreter. One of the marshals took a chair immediately behind him, inside the barricade, while the other moved to a chair against the wall where he could watch the defendant and the crowd without turning his head.

Lewis whispered something to Aldana. He made no reply, didn’t look at her, kept his face impassive. Now the interpreter whispered in his ear. Aldana replied, a few phrases only, and didn’t look at him. He surveyed the bailiff, who averted his eyes; then Aldana turned his head, leaned forward slightly in his chair, and stared for several seconds at Assistant Prosecutor Rodriguez-Herrera, who was busy with a sheet of paper that lay on the table in front of her.

Now his eye caught the Post courtroom artist in the far corner, who was studying him through a pair of opera glasses mounted on a tripod. For the first time Aldana’s features moved — the upper lip rose into a slight sneer and his eyes became mere slits.

The moment passed and the face resumed its impassive calm. Aldana looked back toward the front of the room, at the magistrate’s bench with the flags behind it. He leaned back in his chair, sat loosely, comfortably, staring at the flags. He crossed his legs. In a moment he uncrossed them.

He’s nervous, Yocke decided, and scribbled some more in his notebook. He’s trying not to show it, but he is nervous. Maybe he’s human after all.

Minutes passed. Coughs and hacks and muttered comments from the audience. Aldana poured himself a cup of water from the pitcher on the table and spilled some. He ignored the spill. After several sips he placed the cup on the table in front of him and didn’t touch it again.

As he stared at Aldana, Jack Yocke reviewed what he had heard about the defendant. A barrio brat from Medellín, Chano Aldana reputedly had worked his way to the top of the local cocaine industry by outthinking and murdering his rivals. He was smarter than the average sewer rat and twice as ruthless. Rumor had it he had personally executed over two dozen men and had ordered the murders of hundreds more by name, including a candidate for president of Colombia. A vicious enemy of the law-and-order forces battling the cartels for control of Colombia, he had ordered airliners and department stores bombed, judges murdered, and policemen tortured.

Yet this monster had a human side: he liked soccer and controlled several teams in the central Colombian league. Referees and star players on rival teams had been assassinated on his order. Finally the government had suspended league play because of organized crime’s corrosive influence on the games.

The last two years Aldana had allegedly spent hiding somewhere in the Amazon. He had been captured by the Colombian government when he decided in a weak moment to visit a prostitute of whom he was fond. Somehow he had survived the ensuing shootout, although six of his bodyguards hadn’t. Sewer rat’s luck.

By all accounts Aldana was an amazing man, a Latin Al Capone with several of Hitler’s worst traits thrown in for seasoning. Yet staring at this slightly overweight, middle-aged Latin male with the black curly hair and the modest thin mustache, Jack Yocke found this tale of unadulterated evil hard to believe. It was incredible, really. Even Aldana’s performance at yesterday’s news conference couldn’t overcome one’s natural inclination to accept the man as a fellow human being. Yocke tried to picture him eating snake and monkey meat in the jungle — and gave up.

U.S. Attorney William Bader had a herculean task ahead of him to convince twelve working-class Americans that Chano Aldana was el padrino, the godfather.

Yocke was furiously scribbling notes when the door to the hallway opened and a man entered, a man wearing a naval officer’s blue uniform. Captain Jake Grafton. His ribbons and wings made a splotch of color on his left breast. Those and the four gold rings on each sleeve looked strangely out of place among all these civilians.

Jack Yocke stared as Grafton surveyed the seating arrangements, apparently concluded the place was full, and took up a station against the wall, near the door. His eyes met those of the reporter. He nodded once, then his gaze settled on Chano Aldana, who had turned to examine the newcomer. Aldana turned back toward the bench.

Several of the spectators looked the captain over, whispering back and forth, and finally dismissed him.

Jake Grafton? Why is he here? Yocke scribbled down the name in his notebook and put three question marks after it.

A few minutes later the door behind the bench opened and Bader came in, followed by Thanos Liarakos. Bader glanced at Aldana and the audience and sat down beside Rodriguez-Herrera.

Judith Lewis moved to the chair at the far left of her table and Liarakos took the one she had vacated. He spoke to the defendant, got something in reply, then spoke to Lewis.

He looks tired, Yocke thought, and studied the attorney. Dark, trim, of medium height with black hair streaked with gray at the temples, Liarakos habitually wore thousand-dollar tailor-made wool suits. He was wearing one today, if Yocke’s eyes could be trusted. Liarakos normally looked every inch the successful criminal lawyer. Yet Mergenthaler had said that Liarakos had spent the summer of 1989 playing baseball in a professional senior league in Florida. At the age of forty-one he had tried out for a team composed almost exclusively of former major leaguers and made it. Jack Yocke didn’t know exactly what to make of that.

This morning, the reporter thought, the honest, sincere face that juries loved looked softer, less on stage. Then the explanation occurred to him — there was no jury.

“All rise,” the bailiff announced. The lawyers rose respectfully as the audience shuffled noisily to its feet. Aldana hesitated a second, and Liarakos pulled almost imperceptibly on his sleeve.

The magistrate, enshrouded in her judicial robe, entered and took her seat behind the raised bench.

The bailiff chanted the incomprehensible incantation that opened every court session and ended with a curt “Be seated.”

Jack Yocke kept his attention on the defendant. Aldana was leaning forward in his chair staring at the magistrate, a fiftyish woman with her hair pulled back severely, wearing a stylish pair of large glasses. He didn’t take his eyes off her as she read the indictment handed down by a grand jury in Miami several years ago and the interpreter spoke in a low tone in his ear. Yocke could just hear the rat-a-tat-tat of the Spanish, although he couldn’t make out the words.

“How do you plead?”

Liarakos half rose from his chair. “Not guilty, your honor.”

The magistrate ordered a not guilty plea entered in the record, then addressed the prosecutor. “I understand you have a preliminary motion in this matter, Mr. Bader?”

“Yes, your honor. May I approach the bench?”

She nodded and he walked up and handed the clerk a paper, which the clerk stamped and passed to the magistrate while Bader handed a copy to Liarakos.

“The prosecution is asking the court for a gag order in this case, your honor. The order is to apply to attorneys for both sides and the defendant.”

“Any argument, Mr. Liarakos?”

“No, your honor. We will have some motions of our own, and I understand you have set a date next week to hear them?”

“That’s correct.” She gave him the date and time. “Without argument, Mr. Bader, your motion is granted.” She consulted the proposed order. After a moment, she read, “ ‘Counsel for the government and the defendant, and the defendant, are enjoined from discussing this case, the facts, legal theories, possible witnesses, testimony to be introduced at trial, and any and all other matters connected therewith with the press or any of the representatives thereof. They shall not do, say, or write anything for publication or broadcast that might in any way prejudice possible jurors or interfere with the orderly administration of justice.’ Is there a motion for bail, Mr. Liarakos?”

“Not today, your honor.”

“Mr. Bader?”

“We have filed a motion, your honor, to confiscate the defendant’s assets as proceeds of criminal activity.” The courtroom buzzed and the magistrate looked stern. She raised her gavel but the noise ceased before she could tap the anvil. Bader continued: “We’d like you to set a date for a hearing.”

The attorneys and the magistrate discussed the scheduling and checked their calendars and settled on a Monday in January.

“This matter is adjourned until next Thursday.” The magistrate rose from the bench as the bailiff intoned, “All rise,” and the reporters gathered their coats for the dash to the phones.

As the marshals put the cuffs on him, Aldana got in a heated discussion with his attorney. Yocke edged as close as he could.

“Why didn’t you argue against this?”

Liarakos spoke too softly to hear, although Yocke tried.

“But she can’t make me be silent!”

More whispers.

“No one can gag me up. No one.” His voice was loud, but the sharp edge of command was there too. The crowd stopped dead, captivated by this drama. “That woman can’t gag me up while they send me up the railroad for a crime of which I am not guilty. This is supposed to be America! Not the Germany of the Nazis or the Russia of the Stalinistas.”

“This is not the time or place—”

“Are you my lawyer or their lawyer?” The voice was a brutal snarl.

“Shut the fuck up.” Although Liarakos’ voice was low, it cut like a whip.

The lawyer turned to the nearest marshal. “Clear these people out of here, please, and give me a moment alone with my client. You may wait in the hallway. Ms. Lewis will knock on the door when we need you.”

“Everybody out.” The crowd began to move.

Just before he went through the door, Jack Yocke glanced back at Chano Aldana. The defendant was glaring at Liarakos, his face dark with fury, his lips pressed together. His body was tense, coiled.

In the hallway Yocke sprinted to catch up with Jake Grafton. “Captain, wait! Please! Jack Yocke of the Post. I was at your party the—”

“I remember you, Jack.” Grafton had his dark bridge coat over his arm and held his white hat with the scrambled eggs on the bill in his left hand. Yocke glanced at his chest to see if the blue-and-white ribbon of the Congressional Medal of Honor was displayed there. It wasn’t. Maybe Mergenthaler was correct: he had said that Grafton never wore the decoration he received several years ago for ramming El Hakim’s plane with his F-14 over the Med.

“I’m curious, Captain. You were the last man in town I expected to see here today. Why’d you come?”

“Wanted to get a look at Aldana.”

“Officially?”

For a fraction of a second Grafton looked annoyed. “What’s an official look?”

“I mean is this personal or does the Joint Staff have some interest in Aldana?”

“No comment.”

“Aw, come on, Captain! Gimme a break. Why is the military interested in Chano Aldana?”

A grin spread slowly across the captain’s face. He settled his white hat on his head, nodded, and turned away.

Jack Yocke watched him go, then remembered he needed to find a phone.

“You should have seen him come unglued, Ott. That man is something else!”

“Jack, you need to stop using those banal phrases. People will get the idea you’re a semiliterate bum.”

“I’m telling you, Ott, you should have seen him! Oh, he never really lost his temper. He didn’t actually threaten Liarakos, but that look! This man could order the murder of hundreds of people. He could kill them himself. I was ten feet from him and I could literally feel the energy.”

“Maybe you should write a letter to Shirley MacLaine.”

“Listen to me, Ott. Aldana is criminally insane.”

“He’s behind bars and guarded night and day. What should we do about it?”

Yocke lost his temper. “Okay, go ahead and snicker like a retarded hyena. I’m telling you we’ve got a rattlesnake in our pocket and the pocket is cloth. Dammit, Aldana scared the hell out of me!”

“He scared the hell out of me too,” Ott admitted.

The telephone rang. Yocke reached for it without looking.

It was his editor. “Jack, the feds just closed a savings and loan over in Maryland. Please go up there and interview everyone you can lay hands on. Try to find some depositors this time.”

“You want some brain surgeon who’ll miss his ski Christmas in Aspen?”

“I was hoping that with some diligent effort you might find some little old white-haired lady who’s got five bucks in her purse and no access to her checking account.”

“What’s the name of this place?”

“Second Potomac Savings and Loan.”

Where had he heard that name before? Yocke asked himself as he pocketed his notebook and checked his pocket pencil supply. Oh yes, that Harrington guy who was killed on the beltway — he’d worked there, hadn’t he?

The wind made the bare tree limbs wave somberly back and forth under the gray sky. Sitting under an ancient oak just inside the tree line, Henry Charon listened intently to the gentle rattling and tapping as the limbs high above him softly impacted those of other trees. The noise of traffic speeding by on the interstate eighty yards away muffled all the lesser forest noises, the rustle of the leaves, the sound of a chipmunk searching the leaf carpet for its dinner, the chirping of the birds.

The hunter tried to ignore the drone of the cars and trucks. He paid close attention to the gusts and swirls of the wind, subconsciously calculating the direction and velocity.

The rest area in front of him was almost empty. At the far end sat a ten-year-old pickup with Pennsylvania plates and sporting a camper on the back. The driver was apparently asleep inside. Closer, facing the highway, sat the rental car that Charon had driven to this rest stop halfway between Baltimore and Philadelphia. He had rented it using one of his fake driver’s licenses and a real Visa card in that name.

A station wagon chock-full of kids and pillows and suitcases came off the highway and pulled to a stop in front of the rest rooms. Youngsters piled out and ran for the little brick building. New Jersey tags. Three minutes later the station wagon accelerated past the pickup toward the on-ramp.

Henry Charon adjusted the collar and fastened the top button on his coat. The wind had a chill to it, no doubt due to its moisture content. Yet it didn’t smell of snow.

What if snow came while he were still in Washington? How would that affect his plans?

Charon was still considering it when another car came off the interstate and proceeded slowly through the parking area. One man at the wheel. Tassone. He drove slowly through the lot, looked over the rental car, and braked to a stop beside the pickup. After a moment Tassone’s car, a sedan, backed the hundred feet to the rest room building, where he turned off the ignition and got out.

Tassone glanced around as he walked toward the rest rooms. In a few moments he came out and strolled over to where Charon was sitting.

“Hey.” Tassone lowered himself to the ground and leaned back against a tree trunk six feet or so from Charon. “How’s everything?”

“Fine,” Charon said.

“Gonna snow,” Tassone said as he pulled his coat collar higher and jabbed his hands into his pockets.

“I doubt it.”

Tassone wiggled around, trying to find a soft spot for his bottom. “Wanta sit in the car?”

“This is fine.”

“What d’ya think about the job?”

“You’ll have to make a list.”

Tassone fumbled inside his coat for a pencil. From an inside jacket pocket he produced a small spiral notepad. “Shoot.”

Charon began to recite. He had not committed the items to paper since the possession of such a list would inevitably be incriminating. Tassone could write it down in his own handwriting and take the risk of the list being discovered on his person. Charon could still deny everything.

It took five minutes for Tassone to list all the items. Charon had him read the list back, then gave him two more items, with careful descriptions.

Tassone looked over the list carefully and asked a few questions, then stored the notebook in his pocket.

“So it’s feasible?” he asked the hunter.

“It can be done.”

“When?”

“When could you deliver everything on the list?”

“Take about a week, I think. Some of these things will take some work and some serious money. I’ll call you.”

“No, I’ll call you. A week from today, at precisely this time.” Both men glanced at their watches.

“Okay.”

“No names.”

“Of course. You’ll do it then?”

“How many people know about me, counting yourself as one?”

“Two.”

“Only two?”

“That’s right.”

Something was stirring in the leaves behind them. Henry Charon came erect in one easy motion and, with a tree for cover, stood looking carefully in that direction. Then he saw it, a flash of brown. A red squirrel.

“Ten million, cash, in advance.”

Tassone whistled. “I—”

“That’s for the first name on your list. One million for each of the others, if and when. No guarantees on any of them. You pay a million for each one I get. Take it or leave it.”

“You want the bread sent to Switzerland or what?”

“Cash. In my hands. Used twenties and fifties. No sequential numbers.”

“Okay.”

“You have the authority to make this commitment?”

Now Tassone stood. “You ain’t going to pop anybody until you get paid, are you?”

“No.”

“Well, I’m telling you you’ll get paid. How long before you get started?”

“A week or ten days after I get the stuff on that list. Two or three weeks would be better.”

“Better for you. Not for me. We want you started as soon as possible.”

“Let’s see how you do getting the equipment I requested.”

“Okay,” said Tassone, and dusted off his trousers. “Okay. I’ll call you in a week.”

When Jake Grafton returned to his office in the Pentagon, there was a message waiting. The chairman wanted to see him. He called the chairman’s office and reached an aide. They agreed he could probably get in to see the general in fifteen minutes or so.

This would be only the fourth occasion on which Jake had met General Hayden Land. For most of the thousand officers on the Joint Staff, a meeting with the senior officer in the American military, even with all the Joint Chiefs present, was a rare occurrence. As he walked out of the office this morning the other six officers in the antidrug section appeared and formed a line of sideboys at the door that Jake would have to walk through. They did some pushing and shoving, then came to rigid attention and saluted with mighty flourishes as Jake walked between the rows.

“You guys!”

The other naval officer in the antidrug section whistled, imitating a boatswain’s pipe.

“Carry on,” said Jake Grafton with a wide grin and headed for the corridor.

Grafton was the senior officer in the group, which spent its time doing the staff work required to allow the Joint Chiefs to make informed decisions about military cooperation with antidrug law-enforcement efforts. When Jake reported to the Joint Staff a year ago he came to this billet for the simple reason that the O-6 who held it was completing his tour and leaving. Grafton had no special training for the job — indeed, he spent the first two months simply trying to understand what it was the military was doing to assist the various law-enforcement agencies — but no matter. Learning on the job went with the uniform. And this past year the job had grown by leaps and bounds as an increasingly alarmed public demanded every federal resource be harnessed to combat the narco-terrorists, and the reluctant Joint Chiefs had finally turned to face the pressure. So Jake Grafton had been busy.

The first black man to hold the top job in the military, General Hayden Land was reputed to be as sharp as they come, an extraordinarily fast study on the intricacies of military policy. He was also, rumor said, very politically astute. He had come to his current post from the National Security Council where he had personally witnessed the meshing of politics and national security issues and the resultant effects on the military.

As he walked out of the Joint Staff spaces just ten minutes after he had entered, Jake was again hailed by name by Mr. James, the portly door attendant who had been greeting members of the Joint Staff for over twenty years. He seemed to know everyone’s name — quite a feat considering that there were 1,600 officers on the Joint Staff — and shook hands right and left when they streamed past him into the secure spaces in the morning. “Short day, eh, Captain Grafton?”

“Some people have all the luck,” Jake told him.

The foyer of General Land’s E-Ring office was decorated with original paintings that depicted black American servicemen in action. As the aide informed the general that he was there, Grafton examined them again. One was of union soldiers in the crater at Petersburg, another was of cavalrymen fighting Indians on the western plains, and a third was of Army Air Corps pilots manning fighters during World War II.

“He’ll see you now,” the aide said, and walked for the door. That was when Jake’s eye was captured by the painting of a black sailor defiantly firing a machine gun at attacking Japanese planes. Dorrie Miller aboard U.S.S. West Virginia at Pearl Harbor.

“I like the general’s taste in art,” he muttered to the aide as he passed into the chairman’s office.

“Captain Grafton, sir,” the aide said to the general behind the desk, then stood to one side. The general carried his fifty or so years well, Jake thought as he scanned the square figure, the short hair, the immaculate uniform with four silver stars on each shoulder strap.

“Come in, Captain, and find a chair. I called down to your office this morning to suggest you go see Aldana, and they said you had already left.”

“Yessir, I went over there.” Jake sank into a chair with the general’s gaze upon him. “Just curious, I guess,” Jake added. “The prosecution asked for a gag order and got it. That might help keep the lid on, at least for a little while.”

General Land turned his gaze toward the window, which looked out across the Pentagon parking lots at the skyline of Arlington. “You really think it’ll come out?”

“If only American soldiers knew, sir, I’d be more hopeful. They know what classified information is. But with all those Colombian cops and Justice Department lawyers in on it, there’s just no way. The press is going to get this and probably pretty soon. Who knows? Aldana’s lawyer, Liarakos, may want to make a motion to have the court consider the legality of the arrest. I’m not a lawyer and I don’t know any to ask, but Liarakos looks like the type of guy who will throw every stone he can lay hands on.”

“Oh, but surely it’s got to be legal,” the general said. “The attorney general is the one who requested our help.”

“All I’m saying, sir, is that Liarakos may raise the issue with the court. In fact, the press may have already caught the rumblings of this. This past weekend a reporter, one of my wife’s language students, was at a party at my house. He saw me today in court and buttonholed me afterward.”

“Reporter for whom?”

“The Washington Post, sir.”

Land grinned. “God,” he said, “I feel like Dick Nixon. Think Deep Throat’s been whispering?”

Jake laughed. “I don’t think Gideon Cohen is going to have a heart attack if he reads in the newspapers that American Special Forces troops captured Aldana with the cooperation of Colombian police. I told him that it would come out eventually and he shrugged it off. He knows.”

“What about this Aldana?”

“A psychopath.”

“Umm. When he was captured he told the major leading the raid he was going to see them all dead.” General Land showed his teeth. It was not a nice smile. “I was against us getting into this mess. The military has no business in law enforcement. Won’t work, can’t work, isn’t good for the military or the country. But when I heard that scum threatened our men, my doubts got smaller. Maybe Cohen’s right. Maybe we need to go in there and kick some ass.”

“General, if you want my opinion, you were right the first time. These cartel criminals have bribed, threatened, bullied, and occasionally subverted the Colombian authorities. They haven’t gotten to our men yet, but now they’re going to try. We’re not set up to investigate our own people. We take any eighteen-year-olds who can pass the written test and the physical and turn them into soldiers, sailors, and marines. Background checks and loyalty investigations are messes we shouldn’t get ourselves into.”

“We may have to,” General Land said. “The world’s changing and we may have to change with it.”