The Accused (38 page)

“And make sure you bring an ambulance. A man has been injured. A very good man.”

60

T
HE JAILERS WERE RUNNING DOWN THE
corridor toward Damon Lynch's cell.

Will was at the barred window of the metal door, yelling for the them to come immediately.

They unlocked the door and swung it open.

The attorney pointed at Damon Lynch's body slumped on the floor.

“Your prisoner—he's having a hard time breathing.”

The two jailers glanced down at Lynch and then looked at Will suspiciously. Slumped against the wall, Lynch was slowly raising his head with one hand stanching the blood from his nose, with the other rubbing his neck, choking and coughing.

“Stop him…he tried to choke me…tried to kill me,” he croaked.

Will pushed his way past the two jailers and then said, “Excuse me, I have a plane to catch.”

As the attorney walked away, Damon Lynch was struggling to his feet. And then the yelling began.

“You punk…you wimp…that was nothing but a sucker punch…come back here and try that again…you really blew it, man, blew it big-time. You'll be so sorry. You're a dead man!”

Lynch's hoarse, screamed threats were reverberating down the corridor as Will walked grimly, stone-faced, toward the stairwell and out of the building.

Pancho was waiting half a block away, and he quickly pulled his blue taxicab up when he saw the lawyer. The other man was still seated in the back.

“Get me to the airport,” Will said in a low voice.

Pancho turned around and smiled, but his smile faded as he studied his passenger's expression.

The man next to Will leaned over.

“How did it go? Did you get the information? Have you got it set up?”

Will didn't turn to look at him, but stared out the window of the cab as it threaded its way through the jammed traffic of Mexico City. It was hot—actually sweltering—but Will didn't feel the heat. He didn't care about where he was or where he was going.

There was only one thing that he did care about right now.

He fished his cell phone out of his briefcase and dialed the number to connect with the Washington, DC, police department.

“Is Captain Jenkins in?” he asked.

The man sitting next to him in the taxicab breathed in heavily and shook his head. Whatever hopes he and his agency had had for the retrieval of information from Damon Lynch, aka Rusty Black, now appeared to be dashed.

The agent knew, as did Pancho, the other intelligence operative, that they could simply wait for the drug dealer's release from the Mexican jail, kidnap him, and secretly remove him to the United States for interrogation. But that would take days, even weeks. And Lynch would play games, legal and otherwise, before releasing any valuable data. Even then, coercive interrogation techniques might not retrieve information that was reliable.

They had pinned their hopes on Will cutting a deal—offering not to report Lynch to the authorities for his involvement in Audra's murder—in return for a full statement about the Mexican connection to the Chacmool incident, hopefully in the context of a sworn deposition. In the small scope of things, that would assist Colonel Marlowe in his defense before the ICC—and on the big scale, it would provide substantial information about a potentially catastrophic threat.

But as Will's fellow passenger watched the lawyer on his cell phone, waiting to talk to Captain Jenkins—and ready to announce Damon Lynch's location and availability for extradition to the U.S. on murder charges in the District of Columbia—he knew that Plan A was definitely collapsing.

“Mr. Chambers?” The special assistant to Captain Jenkins came on the line. “I'm sorry to keep you holding. The captain is out in the field. I don't expect him back for the rest of the day. Is there a message I can give him?”

Will fell silent and considered his options. Then he replied, “No. I'll get ahold of him later myself.”

He clicked off the phone. Then he noticed that the man in the backseat was staring at him.

“Sorry,” Will said. And that was all he said.

“Which airline?” Pancho asked over his shoulder as he was driving.

“Just get me to the airport,” the attorney answered. “I'm going to find the quickest flight I can back to Dulles airport, and to my home. And my wife.”

The occupants of the taxicab were all quiet until they pulled up to the terminal. Before Will climbed out, the man in the backseat reached out a big hand, thrust it into Will's, and squeezed hard.

“Just remember something, Will. It's not too late. We can still turn this thing around—if you're willing to play ball with us.” Then he handed him a white card. It bore only one item—a telephone number with an international exchange for Mexico City.

“Only one thing, Will. If you ever call this number, in order that I know it's you and that you're in a safe environment when you're speaking—secure surroundings—you've got to use a word, the code word. And I don't want you to share this with anybody. Not your wife. Nobody.”

Will fingered the card in his hand.

“Why should I keep this? Tell me why I ought to get this code word from you. Why should I have anything to do with you people?”

“Because,” the man said quietly, “there are lives at stake in this. Something really bad is being planned. That's all I can tell you. Something evil is going to come down unless you keep working with us.”

Will had the door open and was halfway out, mulling over what the agent had just told him.

“Okay,” he said, putting the card in his top pocket, “what's the code word?”

“Coral.”

“That's all?”

The man nodded.

Will slid out of the taxicab, closed the door, and then hurried into the building to try to find the quickest flight back to the Washington, DC.

As he disappeared into the busy terminal Pancho and his passenger looked at each other, but said nothing. Now, all they could do was wait.

61

W
ILL WAS DRIVING HOME FROM
D
ULLES
airport, having made an urgent call to Len Redgrove, when his cell phone flashed a reminder that he had three messages.

He cut short the conversation—they had covered as much as they could. The issue, as Will had explained to his friend, was his dilemma involving Damon Lynch. There was no question that Lynch would be crucial to Marlowe's defense—but Will simply couldn't continue representing the colonel under those circumstances. He would not compromise his desire to have the man charged, convicted, and punished for Audra's death. The drug dealer had wanted to cut a deal allowing him to give a statement and then disappear. That the attorney was not willing to do.

“Bottom line, Len,” Will had said to Redgrove, “is that you're going to have to handle the defense of Marlowe yourself. I will sit down with you and go over everything I have done up to now. But you're going to have to do this without me. I am withdrawing as Marlowe's attorney.”

His friend and co-counsel told him he certainly understood and said he felt candidly that his younger colleague would be irreplaceable.

Then Will accessed the messages that had popped up on his screen. All three were from Fiona. She didn't explain anything, but said there was an emergency and he needed to come home immediately. The first call sounded frantic—it sounded as if she were crying. The second message was calmer, as was the third.

Chilled, he called her immediately.

“Fiona, dear, I'm about twenty minutes from home. I don't want to wait. Tell me right now what happened.”

“An intruder. A man. He got into the house.”

“Dear God!” Will whispered.

“Tiny was here. He chased him out. There were some shots fired. Tiny got hit, but he's all right. The other man was killed. The sheriff's department has already been here a couple times. They're taking Tiny in for questioning. He's very calm about the whole thing. His arm is going to be all right. I just praise God that you asked him to stand guard. But why didn't you tell me you had him on surveillance? And that you had given him a key to the house?”

“I guess I should have. I thought about it as I was heading over to The Hague. I really don't know how to explain it. I just had this fear. I know who we're dealing with…and I know I don't think I could live if anything happened to you.”

Fiona started crying softly and told him she loved him.

“Honestly, darling, I had Tiny watch over you as a precaution. Because there was a risk…even though I thought it was a slight risk Mullburn would try to do something. But I never really believed…I somehow couldn't believe it would really happen.”

Will's voice tightened as he began to choke back tears.

He raced home. Parking his car right at the door, he forgot to turn off the ignition before he took his foot off the clutch, and the car lurched forward, killing the engine. Not bothering to pull out the keys, he ran into the house. He and Fiona embraced—and stayed locked together for a long time.

The sheriff's department arrived again shortly afterwards and took statements from both of them. They assured Will that the investigation into Tiny was a formality, and that he would be restored to normal status.

Will and Fiona spent that day, and the next, within inches of each other's side. Will said he didn't want to talk much about what had happened down in Mexico but would discuss it with her later. He was just glad she was safe. Then he started telling her that he was feeling it was perhaps time to get out of law practice. That handling cases involving threats to his family was just more than he could tolerate. He loved his wife too much to sacrifice her for
any
case—no matter what the stakes, no matter what the issues.

Fiona was a willing listener, but offered little comment in reaction to her husband. She just shared with him how violated she felt to have had an intruder in the house—and how frightening it was to feel so vulnerable.

They both took the next day off from work and spent it together. In the early afternoon, after a quiet lunch, Will asked Fiona if she wanted to take a walk. The two of them strolled up into the surrounding foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. When they got to a high point—in a clearing they would often pick as a hiking destination, they turned around and looked northeast at the vista of mountains off in the distance. There was a mild breeze blowing, so Fiona took out her baseball cap, swept her hair under it, and placed it firmly on her head. She was quiet, waiting for her husband. She knew he had something he had to tell her.

He began describing his meeting with Caleb Marlowe. And the hearing, and the flight over to Mexico City. And his interview with the man he thought was Rusty Black…and how he had turned out to be one of the specters in the nightmare that had been haunting Will since Audra's murder.

And then he walked Fiona through his reaction—his physical attack on Lynch. And how, with that single blow, he had made an irrevocable decision that he would not be using the man as a source of information to help his client's defense. And how his withdrawal as legal counsel for Marlowe was now a foregone conclusion.

When her husband had finished talking, Fiona slipped her arm around his waist and put her head on his chest. The two said nothing for several minutes.

Then she looked up and asked Will a question.

“Have you connected yet with Captain Jenkins? Have you told him that you've located Damon Lynch?”

He shook his head.

“No, I tried to call him down in Mexico, but he was out in the field on some investigation. He's probably back in the office by now. But I didn't want to try to get ahold of him again until you and I had a chance to discuss this.”

Fiona turned to him, not saying anything at first. Then she spoke.

“This has to be done the right way,” she said thoughtfully. “We need to pray about it. But you've got to make this more than just a decision about a legal case.”

“What do you mean?” Will said, grasping at her meaning.

“Audra. Damon Lynch. You and me,” she said. “Your ability to let God take the chains off—the chains of the past. Maybe this is the decisive moment for you. For both of us…”

After a pause and some further deliberation, Fiona offered a suggestion.

“Will, I want to suggest something to you. Let's go over and talk to my Da about this.”

“Any particular reason?”

She shook her head. “I can't tell you exactly. I just think we need to get his wisdom on this.”

That night they drove to Angus's apartment and surprised him for dinner. He was overjoyed to see both of them at one time. He hugged his daughter, getting tears in his wrinkled eyes, and told her how shocked he was about the attempted attack.

As Fiona was fixing dinner Will sat down with Angus in the living room and discussed the background of Marlowe's case, Damon Lynch's connection to Audra's brutal murder, and his own moral and spiritual dilemma—over withdrawing from defending Marlowe in the ICC trial, in light of the fact he could not honor his client's wishes to cut a deal with Lynch in exchange for information.