Exile Hunter (14 page)

Knowing that whatever
happened to him now was largely beyond his control, Linder slept more
soundly that night than he had in weeks. The guards came to his cell
earlier than usual the next morning. As Linder crossed the courtyard
to the trial annex, he felt droplets of misty rain hit his forehead
and savored the scent of fallen leaves and tree bark. When the guard
stopped him halfway across the yard and made him wait there without
explanation, he slipped his feet out of his flip-flops and seized the
chance to wiggle his toes in the moist earth.

Linder arrived in the
courtroom with muddy feet, where the judges, prosecutors, and other
court officers faced him with the peevish scowls of early morning.
Yesterday’s informality was gone. The chief judge seemed impatient
to get on with the proceedings and recited the charges in a hurried
monotone.

The lead prosecutor
then took over with a recapitulation of the State’s conspiracy
theory, linking Linder to Eaton, Kendall, Chase Phipps, and two dozen
other alleged co-conspirators dating all the way back to Linder’s
middle-school days. Whenever he turned to face the accused, the
prosecutor’s upper lip curled into a snarl and his words were laden
with sarcasm, innuendo, and name-calling.

When the attorney
invoked the names of Philip Eaton and Roger Kendall for what seemed
like the hundredth time, Linder could no longer restrain himself.

“Why not bring
Kendall here? Let me confront him,” he called out. “And Denniston
and Bednarski, too, while you’re at it.”

The prosecutor paused
to send Linder a withering stare before resuming his diatribe.

“You, sir, are a
highly accomplished liar,” the prosecutor addressed Linder when
summing up his closing argument. “For years untruths have been your
stock-in-trade. Now the time has come to strip away the lies and lay
bare the naked truth. You stand guilty on all counts and everyone
here can see it as plain as day.”

“On the contrary,”
Linder replied. “I have told you the truth from the beginning. I’m
innocent. And the prosecution has failed to prove otherwise beyond a
reasonable doubt.”

“Does the defense
counsel have anything to add?” the chief judge asked, nodding to
Paul Griggs.

“The prisoner’s
testimony speaks for itself, Your Honor,” Griggs replied. “But I
respectfully reserve the right to address the court during the
sentencing phase.”

“Very well," the
judge replied. "At this point I have a request of my own. After
reviewing the exhibits presented by the prosecution, I would like to
compare them to a specimen of the prisoner’s signature.”

Linder cast a
suspicious glance at the chief judge.

“Don't worry,
prisoner," the judge answered. "I am not asking you to sign
anything substantive. Bailiff, prepare a slip of paper large enough
for the prisoner’s signature and nothing more.”

The bailiff brought
Linder a card no larger than a cigarette paper. He wrote his
signature diagonally across the card, filling the entire space, and
handed it back.

The chief judge
examined the signature before passing it to the bailiff, who handed
it to the prosecuting attorneys and defense counsel. Next, the lead
prosecutor removed a document from his file and presented it to the
chief judge. For several minutes, the three judges examined the
document and spoke to each other in hushed tones. Finally, the chief
judge asked the bailiff to show the final page of the document to
Linder.

“Do you recognize the
signature as your own?” the chief judge demanded.

“It looks like mine,
but I’m sure I never signed this confession, if that’s what you
mean.” All at once Linder remembered the injection the troll had
given him at his final interrogation. There had been a document and
the troll had given him a pen.

“Are you denying that
you signed it?”

“If I did sign, I was
not aware of it and had no intent to sign. I certainly don’t admit
to anything that’s in this document,” he answered, raising his
finger to point at the confession and coming up short as his
handcuffed fist reached the end of its chain. “This is an outrage,
Your Honor!”

The chief judge
conferred again with his two colleagues, then with the lead
prosecutor and the defense attorney. Afterward, the latter approached
Linder and bent low to speak in hushed tones.

“That confession is
your last chance,” Griggs warned, wiping nervous sweat from his
brow. “Accept it and you may still get off relatively lightly.
Refuse and you’re finished. Lights out.”

“I’ve changed my
mind about you, Griggs,” Linder replied with ill-concealed scorn.
“I don’t want you defending me any more. You’re fired.”

Griggs flustered, then
turned away from Linder to address the chief judge.

“Your Honor, the
defense rests.”

“One moment, Your
Honor,” the lead prosecutor called out. “May we have a finding on
the admissibility of the prisoner’s signed confession?”

“It will be admitted
into evidence as Exhibit K,” the chief judge replied.

The prosecution team
beamed and shook each other’s hands while the judges gathered loose
papers and stuffed them into orange file jackets. Linder felt
disgusted that the American rule of law had sunk so low, but at the
same time he recognized how little moral standing he had to complain
about fairness. Over the past seven years, he had helped to send
scores of his fellow citizens to courts just like this one, where
they had received the same quality of justice. He recognized the
irony of his situation and felt a sardonic smile twist his lips.

“All rise,” the
chief judge announced, fixing his eyes on Linder. “The court finds
the defendant guilty on all counts. Were it not for certain
extenuating circumstances, the punishment would have been death by
firing squad. But because of the defendant’s prior government
service and his voluntary confession, the court sentences the
defendant Warren Linder to spend the rest of his life at hard labor
in a Corrective Labor Camp north of the sixtieth parallel.”

So that was it, Linder
thought, breathing rapidly now, his blood rising. Life at hard labor,
so they could avoid the unpleasant business of executing a former
guardian of the state. Siberian exile. Oblivion.

Linder remained
standing until all the court officers filed out of the room. Instead
of two guards, there were now four to escort him back to his cell.
They didn’t use the hood yet, however, which allowed Linder to see
the troll waiting for him on a bench outside the courtroom. The
interrogator approached and, for a moment, Linder half expected him
to reach out for a handshake.

“You put up a good
fight,” the troll told him while a guard found the hood and slipped
it over Linder’s head. “Sorry about the injection, but nobody
leaves without a confession. I mean nobody.”

“Call it what you
like,” Linder replied. “but I confessed to nothing.” For a
moment he wondered what consequences the troll would have faced had
he not cheated to win his case.

”Go ahead, be a
sorehead if you want,” the interrogator answered with a
self-righteous look. “But someday you'll thank me for what I did.
Without that confession, you’d be dead.”

In this life, one is given only one conscience.
Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn

SIX YEARS EARLIER, JUNE, WASHINGTON, D.C.

Warren Linder
grumbled at finding the last remaining seat in the business class
rail car. The last time he had traveled to the Farm for training, he
had driven his beaten-up old Audi. But having returned from overseas
only days before, he no longer owned an automobile and wasn’t sure
when he would ever buy another. Under the Unionists, new cars were
taxed to the hilt and used cars were ridiculously overpriced.

Linder had paid the
extra fare for a business class seat out of his own pocket, since
government reimbursement rates covered only coach class fares. He
expected it would be worth the money to avoid the hordes of
ill-smelling migrant workers and refugees with their piles of luggage
and smelly food. But the business class car was also overbooked and
it looked and smelled as if many of the passengers had spent the
night in their seats all the way down from Boston.

If the train departed
on time, he would be in Williamsburg by noon, giving him time to
check in for the month-long Ops Refresher Course and fit in a
three-mile run and some reading before he met Neil Denniston at the
Officers’ Club for Happy Hour. But, since the train routinely left
late and required an additional hour or more to make up for equipment
failures, he would be lucky to have time to unpack and shower before
the flag came down outside the club and the bar opened for business.

The train pulled out of
Washington’s newly reopened Union Station an hour late and followed
the Potomac to Alexandria, Woodbridge, and Quantico en route south
through Fredericksburg, Richmond, and Williamsburg to Newport News.
Since Linder had been fortunate enough to be posted overseas through
the worst days of what most people referred to as the Events, he
looked forward with morbid fascination to seeing how Virginia’s
cities, towns, and countryside had fared during the six years he had
been away.

Certainly, some of the
Events had been global in scope. For example, he had endured power
outages caused by massive solar flares while posted to Beirut. But
the Lebanese, having experienced power outages routinely during their
long civil war and from occasional Israeli air strikes, were
supremely resourceful at nursing their battered electric power grid
back to health and coping whenever the grid was down.

Lebanon had also
suffered earthquakes during the Events, the worst of them hitting
hard in the Sannine Mountains and the agricultural lands of the Bekaa
Valley, toppling many of the surviving ruins at Baalbek, including
the Temple of Jupiter’s iconic eastern facade. The attendant
tsunamis had inundated selected areas along the Mediterranean’s
eastern shore, but early warnings along Lebanon’s coast had
prevented the heavy loss of life experienced to the north in Syria.

Oddly, Linder hadn’t
really noticed the global cooling that followed two years of volcanic
eruptions along the Ring of Fire until he visited Kuwait, where the
cooling was considered a boon, reducing the Gulf State’s scorching
daytime highs by as much as fifteen or twenty degrees.

But, as everyone knew,
the Events had hit America disproportionately hard, and not only
because of its highly developed infrastructure and its fragile
just-in-time industrial and consumer supply chain. Nature seemed to
have reserved its cruelest blows for the Americans. The sun had aimed
its worst solar flares at North America, tsunamis had struck its most
populated and vulnerable coastal regions, earthquakes rattled hardest
where Americans were least prepared, and the timing of each disaster
had aggravated its effect, catching people asleep in their beds, for
example, or expelling them from their homes in the dead of winter.

As the train stirred to
leave Union station, Linder watched the crowd on an adjacent platform
heave forward to board an overcrowded northbound local to New York
and Boston. He was grateful that traffic on the Virginia line was
relatively light, due to greater competition from buses and jitney
vans along a route less congested and less subject to disruption than
the Northeast Corridor.

As the train passed
through riot-torn Northern Virginia suburbs, Linder gazed out the
grime-caked window onto empty thoroughfares littered with broken
glass that stretched between vacant or burnt-out high-rise buildings.
Like 1970s Beirut, the streets were alternately deserted or
overcrowded, as if separated by the kind of no-man’s-lands that had
divided Beirut, Berlin, and Nicosia decades earlier.

In the congested areas,
squatters hung laundry out to dry on lines that stretched from one
broken window to another. Homeless nomads camped out in parks or
vacant lots, erecting their tents and makeshift shanties between
mounds of rubble. In some neighborhoods, entire blocks lay waste
where homes and commercial buildings constructed with unreinforced
masonry had collapsed from quakes centering along the New Madrid
Fault, particularly the Great Memphis and Roanoke quakes that had
rung church bells all the way north to Maine.

Even where physical
damage appeared minimal, as in some formerly affluent suburbs and
towns, Linder spotted isolated blocks and sometimes entire
neighborhoods that had been torched and looted. The areas between
these burnt-out wastelands looked shabby and gray, with vacant
storefronts, potholed streets, broken streetlamps, weed-choked median
strips, and dangling electrical wires. The only commercial activity
Linder could see was centered around open-air flea markets, where
shoppers gathered at the tailgates of parked trucks to buy
black-market goods.

Linder closed the
window shade, drawing a quizzical glance from the elderly woman
seated in the aisle seat beside him. He smiled at her before leaning
back and closing his eyes.

From the outset of his
nearly six years overseas with the Agency, Linder had dreaded the
prospect of returning for a Headquarters assignment. During the worst
days of the Events, he fully expected Congress and the President to
downsize the Agency and reduce its overseas presence as a cost-saving
measure. But, to his considerable relief, America’s enemies around
the world had prevented that. Rather than back off and let Allah and
Mother Nature dispatch the Great Satan, the Jihadists saw the Events
as a divine invitation to kick America while it was down.

Later, as the Events
wore on and North America reeled under their impact, Linder often
considered resigning from the Agency and taking up residency in some
peaceful foreign country rather than return. But each time he delved
into the details, he realized how impractical it would be. Anywhere
he might want to resettle, borders were closed to would-be immigrants
and refugees. The world’s leading economic powers were in
depression and, wherever jobs existed, a flood of applicants
appeared. Even if he found a country that would accept him, how would
he earn a living?