No Way to Treat a First Lady (27 page)

Meanwhile, Judge Dutch had reacted volcanically to the media reports about the Secret Service allegedly pouring whiskey into Dr. Grayson and then driving him off the road into the maple tree. He knew exactly where this canard had begun to quack. In retaliation, he gave orders that no vehicle carrying Boyce Baylor could enter even the basement garage of the courthouse. It turned out that this was, in fact, beyond even his august sovereignty. Judge Dutch's glasses now fogged at the merest mention of Boyce Baylor. The joke began to circulate around the courthouse clerks that the next car to veer drunkenly off the George Washington Parkway would be Judge Dutch's Volvo.

But at least the Trial of the Millennium was coming to a close.

For Beth, however, there was little light at the end of this long tunnel. Las Vegas bookmakers were laying thirty-to-one odds on conviction. And ominously, some commentators were remarking that her physique seemed to be changing, almost as if she were, well, pregnant.

One evening a few minutes past ten o'clock after returning from working at Rosedale with Beth on her concluding argument, Boyce sat in his usual booth at the Sizzle, nursing a glass of inferior brandy and staring halfheartedly at a motion he was filing in his own case. As he worked, a fortune cookie was placed in front of him.

He looked up to tell the waiter that he did not want a fortune cookie, only to see the back of someone disappearing briskly toward the restaurant's front door. Odd.

He looked at the fortune cookie. Its fortune protruded from the sugar clam lips.

He extracted the piece of paper cautiously, as if it might be the fuse to a bomb. In the kingdom of the tricky, the paranoid man still has all his fingers.

It was in handwriting.

Confucius say public phone Colonial and Nash soon ring with interesting tiding. 10:15 pm. WPS.

Boyce threw a twenty on the table and walked out of the Sizzle. There are no emptier streets at night than those of Rosslyn, Virginia. He walked the two blocks to the intersection of Colonial and Nash. It was dark and out of the way, just the place to kill someone. Not that anything that exciting ever happened in Rosslyn.

Calm down,
he told himself. But he was nervous.

He answered on the first ring.

The voice on the other end was cheerful, like that of someone who wanted you to try their long-distance service, at significant savings.

"I always said, if I'd stuck around for my trial, you're the man I'da hired, Counselor."

Boyce had never heard Wiley P. Sinclair's voice, so he had no way of knowing if this was really Wiley P. Sinclair, former FBI counterintelligence officer, betrayer of his country, agent of Chinese intelligence, code name Confucius. All of this he knew from the public record.

"Tell me something," Boyce replied, "that would convince me that I'm really talking to Confucius."

Chuckle. "You mean, like a PIN?"

Wiley P. Sinclair was the FBI's Most Wanted fugitive. He had made a jackass of them (not an especially daunting task). It was said that he was still working for the Chinese. His double agenting had, among other things, helped them get the Olympics and a nifty new U.S.-designed nuclear-tipped torpedo for their submarine fleet.

On visits to Beijing, U.S. presidents and secretaries of state would demand that China turn Wiley over to them. The Chinese would blink through the cigarette smoke and say that they had no knowledge of this Wiley P. Sinclair and then suggest that if there were such a person, he must be working for the imperialist lackeys in Taiwan. And that would be the end of the Wiley P. Sinclair portion of the agenda for that visit.

And now Boyce was—or might be—speaking to him from a pay phone in Dullsville.

"I figured," Wiley said, "that you might want some bona fides. They're in your room waiting for you. Bit of a step down from the Jefferson, isn't it?"

"Why are we speaking?"

"It's complicated, Counselor."

"Trust me. I can handle it."

"Combination of reasons. You've given the bastards one hell of a run for their money. I like your style. Okay, I could tell you I'm doing this just to help, but you'd figure out that's bullcrap. So I'll level with you. My current employers would be very pleased if this information came out. And you're perfectly placed to be the one to bring it out. So here's the 411."

"The what?"

"The information." Wiley P. Sinclair laughed. "Counselor, I'm surprised. I keep up better with the English slang living in Pandaland than you do."

Boyce didn't dare say it out loud to Beth in the car the next morning, just in case it was bugged. He wrote down the substance of what Wiley had told him.

Beth read, looked up sharply at Boyce. He took the paper back, tore it up, and put the pieces in his pocket.

"How can you be sure it was he?" Beth asked.

"When I got back to my hotel room, there was an envelope under the door. It was the PIN to his old ATM machine. I had someone in my office check his FBI file. It was in there. No one else would know that."

"Except for the FBI. They could be setting you up."

"I considered that," Boyce said. "But why would they bother at this point? I'm going down in flames as it is. Why pour gasoline on me now?"

"To make you burn brighter."

"Maybe. But what if it was him?"

"He."

"This is a gift, Beth."

"He's a traitor to his country."

Boyce was reminded that Beth had been First Lady of the United States. "Is this the time to be splitting ethical hairs?"

"It's not a hair, Boyce. The man is evil."

"Precisely. He and I are on the same bandwidth."

"It's wrong."

"So the Chinese got the Olympics. So they got a torpedo. Is this the end of the world?"

"He protected all their agents in California who were stealing secrets from Silicon Valley."

"No one's saying the man's a saint."

"This is like trying to explain vegetarianism to a shark."

"So why bother? This is not the time for ethical hand-wringing. Save it for your book."

"Just
why
does this fugitive traitor want to help me? I'm asking out of curiosity, not for ethical reasons, if that makes you feel any better."

Boyce decided to leave out the part about how Wiley was doing this for Chinese intelligence.

"Because he genuinely believes you're innocent. And feels that this is a way of doing at least something good. To make up for past misdeeds. Would you deny a fellow human being the chance to atone?"

"The only person on the planet who believes I'm innocent is a former FBI agent who sold out his country to finance his gambling addiction. What a fan club."

"Now is not the time to be choosy."

Judge Dutch listened without comment, his glasses misting to opacity. Deputy Attorney General Sandra Clintick listened in silence with an expression that needled from contempt to incredulity and outrage.

Beth concluded, "I wanted to inform you both of this privately. I know this comes late. I also realize that there are ramifications, since it involves sensitive issues of national security. But there it is, and I intend to pursue it."

"This information," Judge Dutch said, "where did it come from?"

Beth cleared her throat. "From Wiley P. Sinclair."

"Objection!" Sandy Clintick snapped.

"We're not in court, Ms. Clintick," Judge Dutch observed. "You're free to express yourself in nonjudicial language." He turned back to Beth. "But I have to say, Ms. MacMann, I'm not impressed by this. Not a bit."

"I would rather myself that it had come from some other source, Your Honor."

"This is disgraceful, Your Honor," Clintick said. "Disgraceful and desperate."

The judge rocked in his chair. "Mrs. MacMann, if this turns out to be without foundation and you are ultimately found guilty, I will... weigh this at the time of sentencing. Do you understand the implications?"

Beth nodded. "Yes, Your Honor."

"What if this witness—assuming I even allow you to call him—denies it? As he well might? What then?"

"Your Honor," Beth said, "surely you don't expect me to discuss matters of legal strategy in front of the prosecution?"

Beth and Sandy Clintick left the judge's chambers together. Alone in his outer office, Clintick turned to Beth.

"When are you due?"

"June."

Clintick smiled icily. "There's nothing you two wouldn't stop at, is there?"

"It was an accident."

"Oh, right."

"You think this was part of the overall defense strategy?"

"Why not? It's actually a smart move. Makes it harder for the judge to hand down a death sentence, doesn't it?"

Beth returned the gelid smile. "Is that why you haven't mentioned it in public?"

"I'm hoping to get a verdict and sentence
before
you show up in a maternity dress."

"I'll try not to hold you up."

Wiley P. Sinclair, being skilled in the arts of evasion, counterevasion, and even counter-counterevasion, had left Boyce with a means of contacting him, involving bright orange stickers and a stop sign on Glebe Road. A few hours later, Boyce was at a pay phone in Old Town, Alexandria. Wiley P. Sinclair laughed when Boyce told him what he wanted.

"Now doesn't
that
take the cake," Wiley said. When he was finished being charmed by the idea, he said, "You know the three cardinal rules, right? Don't eat at a place called Mom's, don't draw to an inside straight, don't go to bed with someone who's got more problems than you do. Here's a fourth: Don't try to outfox someone named Wiley."

"I wouldn't presume to try to set a trap for you," Boyce said. "But we need this document. Otherwise they're just going to deny it, and where does that leave us? Who're we going to call then?"

"No way, Counselor."

"Do you want this to happen, or not?"

"Are you saying it's a deal breaker?"

"Yeah."

There was a long pause. Then Wiley P. Sinclair chuckled.

"Oh, are they going to be hot for my ass again. Red hot. I'm going to have to relocate so deep in Pandaland that I may end up discovering a whole new
species
of bear. But okay. You're my kind of lawyer, Counselor. You do whatever you gotta do for your client. Say, I just gotta ask—she did it, right?"

"That's on a need-to-know basis."

"I can't wait to see their faces when she waves this thing in court. You a betting man, Counselor?"

"Not in your league."

"Do you know they had two hundred agents in Vegas looking for me? I was there, and they missed me! What a buncha numb-nuts. I went in
drag!"
Wiley laughed. "Lay you three to two that Judge Dutch is gonna burst a nose artery when she shows up in court with this."

Wiley insisted on making the arrangements. Boyce counted the laws that he, Boyce, was breaking in doing this. He stopped at six.

Two days later, Beth and Sandy Clintick were back in Judge Dutch's chambers.

"I will ask you a last time not to use again the word
bullshit,
Ms. Clintick," Judge Dutch said. "We're not in court, but neither are we in a bar."

"Then I'll use the word
travesty,"
Clintick said, fuming. "This is a travesty. And you are permitting it."

"I haven't permitted anything as of yet, Ms. Clintick. But I won't permit
that
sort of language. Anywhere."

"She comes in here"—Clintick pointed at Beth, who was quietly enjoying her fury—"with an affidavit, by a fugitive
traitor..."

"I've made no determination yet as to the affidavit, Ms. Clintick," he said, then cast a disdainful glance at Beth. "Other than to acknowledge that it exists."

He picked up the piece of paper imprinted with the notary public's seal. "I take it," he said, "that this notary had no idea who Wiley P. Sinclair is."

"That would be correct, Your Honor. Mr. Sinclair—or so I was informed by Mr. Baylor, who supervised the notarizing and witnessing—was asked for two forms of identification, which he provided. A driver's license, apparently still valid, and a Social Security card."

Judge Dutch sniffed. "This is appalling, Mrs. MacMann."

Beth shrugged. "I admit it's untidy, Judge. But Mr. Sinclair's legal ability to make an affidavit is unaffected by his status as a fugitive."

"We appear," Judge Dutch said with a sigh, "for the time being to have hopscotched beyond the issue of his criminality. Mr. Baylor will have to bear the burden of that matter. Since he is the one who"—he looked at her unbelievingly—"had the unlawful contact with our fugitive, Mr. Sinclair. Of course, Mr. Baylor can always claim that there was some duress, or that he was unable to effect the arrest of Mr. Sinclair."

Beth wondered—was he prompting her?

"At any rate," he continued, leaning forward, "we must now confront this Log Cabin business."

"Defense calls Roscoe Farquant."

Oh, the stir, the buzz, the rumbling, the craning of heads and shifting of glutei in Judge Umin's courtroom. Boyce, feeling more than ever like a mole in his backseat hole in the bowels of the courthouse basement garage, would have given a testicle and three Supreme Court decisions to be there in person.

It had—naturally—leaked to the media that Beth was going to call the head of the National Security Agency, the only agency left in Washington that really had any secrets worth knowing. Her subpoena had created a sensation. NSA lawyers said he would not honor the subpoena. Judge Dutch replied that in that case he would have General Farquant arrested. The NSA relented. Nothing so concentrates the mind as the prospect of handcuffs.

No one knew what exactly she planned to ask him. The pixel pundits frothed over with speculation.

Farquant was, as most NSA chiefs tended to be, a former military person. He looked it: trim, peach fuzz hair, glasses, eyes beady with the big-big secrets. He looked like a man who wouldn't tell God something on the grounds that God was not cleared to know.

"General Farquant," Beth said, addressing him in a courtly, respectful manner, "I won't waste your time or the court's establishing your credentials, which are beyond question. You are the director of the National Security Agency, and have been for the last five and a half years. That agency collects electronic information on behalf of the U.S. government. Is that an accurate description of its role?"