Fatal Conceit (42 page)

The silence that Karp allowed for the response to sink in seemed to last forever for Fauhomme. “Thank you, Mr. Huff. Your Honor, I have no further questions,” the prosecutor said at last.

Faust stood up, and Fauhomme's spirits rose. She was the hotshot out of the Justice Department; so far she'd been beaten at every turn by Karp, but she'd assured Fauhomme it was all part of winning the war. She had told him before court that morning that she wasn't going to ask a lot of questions about what happened in Chechnya and Dagestan.

“Our contention in my summation will be that the events may or may not have happened as Huff will describe them, but in any event, they have nothing to do with you and Lindsey,” she said. “The more we act like we're trying to make him out to be a liar, the more we look like we're being defensive and have something to hide. Act like you've never heard most of what he says.”

Faust at first kept it short and sweet. She asked a few questions as if to understand the events herself, but then she stepped right in it. “Even if we were to accept your account of what occurred in Chechnya and Dagestan as accurate, do you have any evidence, any evidence whatsoever, that Mr. Fauhomme or Mr. Lindsey were responsible for these events?”

“Yes,” Huff replied. Faust looked stunned, but before she could speak up the diplomat continued. “We, and by that I mean those of us in the State Department, were well aware that everything was being passed through the NSA and the president's campaign manager. We'd—”

“OBJECTION!” Faust almost screamed, before recovering her wits and addressing the judge in a normal tone. “Your Honor, I ask that the witness's statement be stricken as unresponsive.”

“How do you mean?” Hart asked.

“I was asking if he had any real evidence that our clients were linked to the events described by the witness other than that they worked for the administration, like thousands of other people do.”

Hart raised an eyebrow and shook his head. “Ms. Faust, you opened the door to this and the witness walked right in. What we in the law profession regard as legally admissible evidence when we prepare our cases and consider what will be, or won't be, admitted according to the rules of evidence is not what a layperson considers ‘evidence.' You may not like how he is responding to your question, but he is being directly responsive. You asked the witness if he had
any
evidence to link the defendants to the events he described, and he believes that he does. It will be up to the jury to decide if his testimony is persuasive. Your objection is overruled and the witness may continue with his answer.”

Sitting at the defense table, Tucker Lindsey sighed and buried his face in his hands. Fauhomme battled to keep his expression neutral, but he was nearly overwhelmed by the desire to run to the bathroom and throw up.

“Mr. Huff, please continue,” Hart said.

Huff nodded. “Before I returned to Chechnya, I was aware that nearly everything was passing through the national security adviser's office, which was to be expected, but also the president's campaign manager, Mr. Fauhomme. Since my return, I have seen memos from Mr. Fauhomme prior to the election directing others in the State Department to insist that Al Qaeda was not responsible for the attack on the compound, or my capture.”

Fidgeting in the well of the courtroom while Huff spoke, Faust at first did not seem to realize that he had stopped. When she did, she quickly tried to attack. “Is it true, Mr. Huff, that upon your return you requested an appointment to a post as an ambassador?”

“It's true,” Huff replied. “I've made that request several times over the past ten years.”

“Is it true that you believed that after everything you went through, you were owed such a posting?”

Huff frowned. “I wouldn't say I was owed,” he said. “But I do think I've worked hard to deserve such a post, and done my best and proved my integrity, including during my ordeal in Chechnya and Dagestan, though I was certainly not the only one.”

Faust sneered. “Yes, that's right,” she said, “there's this unidentified female hostage, this ‘Wallflower' whom the district attorney has conjured up several times. Does she even exist?”

Huff looked at the attorney with disdain. “Does she exist? Yes, she exists.” Huff paused, trying to keep his emotional grip. “She was a lot braver than I was. In fact,” he said, visibly starting to tear up, “she was willing to sacrifice herself for me.”

Faust didn't hesitate. “Yes, so we've heard,” she said drily, “but not from her. And I don't see her anywhere on the district attorney's witness list. Why not?”

Huff shrugged. “I haven't asked.”

“Who is she?”

“Again, all I know is that her first name is Lucy and she was an interpreter for a high-level counterterrorism team that happened to be at the compound when I was there.”

“Mr. Karp, can you answer counsel's question as to this woman's existence?” Judge Hart inquired.

Karp stood and nodded reluctantly. “Yes, Your Honor. And I can make her available to the defense to call if they so wish. I did not include her on the witness list for reasons that will be obvious; her name is Lucy Karp and she's my daughter.”

S
ITTING AT THE VANITY OF
her apartment bathroom, Ariadne Stupenagel looked in the mirror and hesitated with her signature red lipstick next to her mouth. She knew how to apply a good foundation to hide the little lines around her eyes and lips; that the proper application of blush covered the tiny veins on her cheeks and nose, and a revolving account at Privé hair salon in the Soho Grand Hotel “kept the gray at bay.”

Still, she knew what was beneath the hair color and makeup, just as she knew that under the formfitting blue dress she'd decided on for court, the underwire bra and support girdle belied the fact that gravity and time were taking their inevitable toll. “Ah, Sam, look what the years did to me,” she muttered in a low voice.

“What was that, honey?”

Her fiancé, Gilbert Murrow, poked his head out from the walk-in closet, peering at her curiously through his round, John Lennon–style glasses. He was trying to grow a Vandyke, complete with soul patch, to look “more hip,” but such transformations were generally beyond him, especially when he was also wearing his standard office attire, which featured a plaid vest, suspenders, and a bow tie.

“Nothing, baby, just talking to myself,” she replied with a smile.

Gilbert looked as if he was about to say something, or was trying to think of what he should say under the circumstances, but then gave up and disappeared back into the closet. She bit her lip. Nerd or not, she loved him. Maybe more so because, while he sometimes fretted that his over-the-top girlfriend would wake up and discover he was, in his words, “a boring old pencil pusher in the District Attorney's Office,” she'd never met a less pretentious or more intelligent man. She didn't think he was boring at all; he shared her love of early punk rock music, foreign films, seedy jazz clubs, and smoky blues bars. And what he lacked in experience in bed, he more than made up for in enthusiasm. However, she knew he was feeling a little insecure or confused about what he should be doing in regard to her grief over Sam Allen.

After the meeting at the White Horse Tavern, she'd gone home and told Gilbert what Sam had said about Chechnya and the upcoming congressional hearing. She'd left out the part about being former lovers. But whether he caught something in her voice or look, or he was so in tune with her, he guessed there was more than what she'd said. “How did you and Allen meet?” he'd asked quietly. He tried to sound offhand, but she knew he was steeling himself against yet another revelation about some former flame.

Ever since they met, Stupenagel had not tried to hide her hedonistic past from him. It would have been difficult anyway, because a couple of her conquests, including sybaritic assistant district attorney Ray Guma, worked in the DAO. When he'd declared his love for her, Gilbert said that he didn't care about her past; whether this was true or not, she'd still been upfront with him. But for some reason this time, the truth was reluctant to come out. “We were friends a long time ago.”

“Friends?”

The question angered her, but she quickly realized that her reaction was probably because she was feeling guilty. She told him the truth. “We were lovers, but like I said it was a long, long time ago. He's been married for more than twenty years, and I haven't
heard from him in at least that long. He came to me because I'm a journalist; there was nothing else to it.”

Gilbert blinked, but then just nodded. “Okay. Um, it's always good to see an old friend . . . even if it's just business.”

As usual, Stupenagel's heart melted whenever her “little man” tried to be brave and hide his jealousies. In fact, his insecurities were sort of a turn-on, which was what she was thinking when she wrapped her arms around him and looked down into his light-blue eyes. “It's just business, Murry Wurry. Sam and I were mostly friends who occasionally romped around in the hay, but you're the only man I want in my bed and in my life. Okay?”

Gilbert had winced. “Okay, but did you have to say ‘romped around in the hay'? I've got a bad visual.” Then they'd both laughed and gone to bed, where she'd done her best to allay any fears that he was not her one and only.

Well, except that one brief moment in mid-romp when you flashed back to Nairobi and the lean, hard body of Captain Allen,
she thought as she faced herself in the mirror.

Three days later, everything changed. She'd been writing a story about underage sex trafficking–related murders in Manhattan when she got the call from a friend who worked at the Casablanca: Sam Allen was dead. “I overheard the room service manager say it was suicide.”

Stunned, she'd thanked her friend and hung up before bursting into tears. But as she regained her composure, Sam Allen's earnest face and voice took over.

“These aren't just any blackmailers. . . . I've been told in no uncertain terms to let it go until after the election. . . . If something were to happen to me, I'd want someone to look in on Jenna. . . . These are pretty nasty people, but they're counting on their scheme to keep me quiet . . . who knows, maybe I'll get run over by a bus on my way to the Capitol.”

She scowled. His words weren't those of a man contemplating suicide. He was worried about what his family would be put
through if the blackmailers made good on their threats, but mostly he was angry. She knew the man, even after twenty years; he'd been fighting mad, not one who was giving up.

Then her own response had come back at her sounding like prophecy. “I don't like it, Sam, anybody willing to blackmail the acting director of the CIA would probably stoop to just about anything.” And so they had; they'd stooped to murder. She'd shoved her sorrow back into her heart and replaced it in her brain with fury and a lust for revenge. They weren't going to get away with it; not on the pages of her newspaper, and not with the justice system. She'd hurried out of the apartment, calling Marlene on the way, and then stormed into Karp's office, only to find that he was already on the trail of the killers.

On the way to Orvin that afternoon, she had not been able to shake the feeling that Sam had known what was coming. That's why he'd made sure to remind her about the cabin on Loon Lake and asked her to look after Jenna Blair. His prescience had saved the life of the woman he loved, though it had cost Stupenagel a bullet in the shoulder that still caused her a lot of pain. Typing with one hand while she healed, she'd transferred her anger into her stories and fought with her emotions to be a journalist, not the friend and ex-lover.

Still, sometimes, in the dark of night, with Gilbert gently snoring next to her, she would get up and wander out onto the apartment balcony to cry. She wept because a great man had been sacrificed for the evil desires of lesser men. She cried for Sam's wife and sons, and for Jenna Blair. Then she sobbed for a young journalist and a brave soldier who'd shared more than a bed . . . and for all the years that had passed since.

For eight months she'd alternated between tears and anger. Just the night before, she'd cried again. Thinking about what she expected to happen in the courtroom that morning, she relived the times she'd spent with Sam, then thought about how he had died and broke down. This time, however, Gilbert awoke and found her
on the balcony. She expected him to fumble around in his insecurity for what to say, but he just came up and held her close. Then he took her by the hand and led her back to their bed. “Everything is going to be okay in the end, and if it's not okay . . .” he said as she lay her head on his shoulder and let her tears drip down onto his chest.

“. . . it's not the end,” she finished. They both loved the Brazilian poet Paulo Coelho and she found that particular line of his comforting as she drifted off to sleep. In the morning she'd awakened thankful for having loved and been loved by such fine men as Sam Allen and Gilbert Murrow.

Looking back at the mirror, Stupenagel scowled at herself. Sam Allen was in the grave, and she was worried about the fine line between just enough foundation and eyeliner, and trying not to look like an aging woman covering up the passage of time. She expertly applied the lipstick and used a tissue to blot the excess. Looking down at the perfect crimson image of her lips on the paper, she sighed, and then neatly folded it and placed it and the lipstick in her purse.

Standing, Stupenagel walked into the living room, where she saw that the morning's
New York Times
was still on the coffee table where she'd left it. Her eyes went to the main headline, F
ORMER
H
OSTAGE
T
ELLS
J
URY
W
HITE
H
OUSE
L
IED
A
BOUT
C
HECHNYA
, and the subhead below it,
DA admits female hostage his daughter.