The Accused (40 page)

Elbows on knees, he was sitting forward in his metal folding chair, and staring at Will Chambers.

The court reporter was positioned about four feet off to the side. She was eyeing the prisoner nervously. The two Mexican jail guards stood behind him with their arms crossed.

The attorney leaned forward and returned Lynch's stare, eye-to-eye.

“Let me repeat the question—in case you have some problem answering it. I know it's a complicated one for you.”

He then paused and asked the question again.

“What is your full name?”

The prisoner sneered, looked around the room, and scratched the growth on his chin. He put his lips together as if he were going to speak, but nothing came out.

One of the Mexican jailers looked at the other and smiled.

“Your name?” Will asked again, this time with his voice raised.

Lynch's head bobbed a little as he looked from one side of the room to the other. Then he stopped the bobbing and looked back toward Will.

“You want my birth certificate name? Is that what you want?”

“Yes.”

“The name on my birth certificate is Damon Lynch. That's what it says.”

As the attorney carefully and cautiously led the drug dealer through his questioning, first going over his connection to the AAJ through drug-dealing networks, and then over his connection with officials
within the Mexican government, he was waiting for the man to pull the plug at any moment.

He was waiting for Lynch to say that that was it. No more talking. That he wanted an ironclad guarantee that, upon his release from the Mexican jail the following day, nothing would be done to apprehend or interfere with him. But he made no such demand. His answers were brief, coated in sarcasm, but generally responsive.

After about an hour of background questioning, Lynch wanted to take a break to smoke and stretch.

During the break he lit up a cigarette and then made several inappropriate comments toward the court reporter.

“Mr. Lynch—I would imagine that if someone were to punch you in the face, right on your broken nose, that would hurt, don't you think? So please be more polite to my reporter.”

Lynch threw his cigarette down to the ground and took a few threatening steps toward Will. The two guards quickly intervened.

Before they settled back to the questioning, Lynch moved over toward Will a little, and in a low voice he said, “How do I know you're going to keep your word? How do I know you haven't already called the American cops to come get me?”

“You're just going to have to trust me.”

The prisoner laughed and looked up at the ceiling.

“Yeah, right. I'm really going to do that. I'll tell you what. If something happens to me—if they arrest me when I'm walking out of this jail tomorrow, I'm going to make sure everything I say in this deposition gets retracted. You understand me?”

Will didn't respond.

The two of them sat down, cautiously eyeing each other.

Then the attorney led him into the final two areas in his questioning. The first was the extent to which he knew about a planned incident involving the safe house in the village of Chacmool. Lynch indicated that he dealt on a regular basis with the cell members of the AAJ, and they said they had a contact within the Mexican government. The plan had been to kidnap Carlos Fuego along with his family and set them up as sitting ducks in the house. The American commandos would be led to the site and prompted to shoot at the building, injuring or killing the hostages. The AAJ members were to escape through an underground tunnel leading out to the jungle. Three of
them made it safely out. The fourth—the lookout—was killed on the front steps in the shootout.

As Lynch explained it, the AAJ had an inside source. This Mexican official had been able to find out about the movements of the American commandos, following the kidnapping attempt against Secretary Kilmer, from the high levels of the government. The plan, of course, had been to have Kilmer killed—but that plan had been foiled. Kilmer had been released unharmed, and two of their cell members had been killed.

“Do you have any direct evidence,” the attorney asked, “that the four cell members of the AAJ who were to be present at the safe house that night were the same AAJ members who had participated in the attempted kidnapping of Secretary Kilmer?”

Lynch squinted and laughed contemptuously.

“Of course I don't know that. Gimme a break. I have no idea.”

Will knew that this was a problem. He anticipated that the French prosecutor would try to show that, while the commandos might have been justified in using deadly force to free the kidnapped secretary, the privilege of deadly force could not be properly extended if they could not connect the AAJ cell group at Chacmool with the kidnapping.

Now the attorney was ready for his final line of questions. They would all revolve around one key piece of information—the identity of the Mexican official who had collaborated with the AAJ to set up the Chacmool trap.

“Do you know the identity of the Mexican official who conspired and participated with the AAJ to orchestrate the kidnapping of Carlos Fuego and his family, and draw the attention of American special operations forces to the safe house?”

Lynch paused for a second, then sat up straight in the metal folding chair. He stretched both arms and yawned. Then he lifted one muscular arm and, flexing his bicep, he pointed to it and smiled at the court reporter.

“You want some of this?” he asked her.

He was toying with them, but Will knew he had to keep his cool.

“Mr. Lynch, I'd like to ask you the question again. Do you know the identity of the Mexican official who was involved in setting up the Chacmool incident?”

Now Lynch had both of his arms raised in a bodybuilder's pose and was flexing both of his biceps and admiring them.

“Your answer, Mr. Lynch?”

The drug dealer turned back toward Will and shook his head in disgust.

“You know,” he began, “if I were you, there's no way I would let me out of this jail alive. Do you know that? So that means you're no real man at all.”

“Mr. Lynch, are you going to answer the question? Or do I pack up and leave this room and get myself to the nearest telephone?”

Lynch's head was bobbing again, but he was studying Will carefully.

“Yeah—I know who it was. I know the guy.”

“Do you know what part of the Mexican government he works in?”

“Yeah. I know that.”

“What department of the government?

“He works in the Ministry of Tourism. That's a laugh, ain't it?” the prisoner said with a cackle.

“And what is his name?” Will asked.

He was looking the man in the eye. Neither attorney nor prisoner flinched or moved.

Lynch swallowed and then coughed, putting his hand to his still-painful neck and rubbing it. He fingered the red marks that were still on his throat as a result of Will's near-strangling of him.

“You know, I'm a little confused. I had an injury here in the jail cell a couple days ago. I got sucker-punched. So as a result, I'm a little foggy about things. Could you ask that question again?”

“Yes. Here's the question—who was the Mexican official who conspired with the AAJ to set up the Chacmool incident?”

After a few minutes of reflection, Lynch answered.

“You know, I'm not real sure. I'm not real sure about that…”

“Mr. Lynch?”

“Yeah? What?”

Will asked the court reporter to go off the record.

“Would you like to smoke your cigarettes in the open air of the outside world? Would you like to go do your dirty business—whatever it is—without having to check in with jail guards? Want to use the toilet without asking permission first? Or do you want to continue living in
a cement cage until you finally get old—until you get really old…and get sick. And then, if you're lucky, they take you to the infirmary—when they get the time.

“Or maybe you cough yourself to death. Or you get cancer. Or you simply start dying from bad hygiene. Or maybe, a lot sooner, some other guy just puts a knife in your back. Then they take you out in a box and drop you in the ground. That's what happens when a guy spends the rest of his life in jail.”

Will stared Lynch straight in the eye.

“Now perhaps your memory's been refreshed about the Mexican official who conspired with the AAJ.” He nodded to the reporter.

The other man tried to manage a smile, but unsuccessfully. His eyes searched the room for something, anything—but whatever it was he didn't find it.

“Okay. So here's the name. Here it is. Manuel Abdal Vega. That's the guy's name.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, I'm sure. That's it.”

Will stood up so abruptly that Lynch almost fell back in his chair. The guards stood up straight.

The attorney turned to his court reporter.

“You and I are going to go back to the airport together. And then I would like you to get me an immediate transcript. If you can, e-mail an advance copy to me tomorrow in The Hague.”

He packed up his briefcase and escorted the reporter to the door as she gave Damon Lynch a wide berth.

As Will reached the metal door frame of the cell, the other man called out to him.

He turned—and Lynch said under his breath, “You and I got unfinished business. Just remember that.”

“You know, Damon, I'm trying to forgive you. For what you did—for what happened that day with Audra—because Jesus Christ died in my place and forgave me. I want you to know that. I really do. But know this also—just because I've forgiven you, that doesn't mean that if you ever come against my family, or anybody I love, or anybody else
for that matter—that doesn't mean I won't turn you into a grease spot on the sidewalk.”

Lynch was still staring, slack-jawed, at Will as he disappeared down the corridor and made his way to the outside of the prison building—on his way to catch his flight to the Netherlands.

65

I
N THE FINAL WEEK OF PREPARATION
before the trial of Colonel Caleb Marlowe, Will Chambers had, in all, only two hours and thirty-five minutes of free time. He spent it by leaving the suite of rooms that had been reserved for him at the Embassy Hotel in The Hague, and then walking the twenty minutes down to the beach and taking in the view of the North Sea for a few minutes. Then he sauntered over to a museum, where he took in some of the paintings of Vermeer and Rembrandt. As his open time ran out, he walked back to the hotel, which was within view of the tall clock-tower spires of the Peace Palace—the home of the World Court, which handled civil matters brought to it between competing nations. The International Criminal Court was not within view of his hotel, but it was not far away—just a few minutes' walk away from the Peace Palace.

Every day he spoke exactly thirty minutes on the phone with Fiona. He would remind her of his love for her. And he would double-check to make sure Tiny was still on guard. Fiona said that the big detective was falling in love with her cooking—which struck them both as immensely funny.

The remaining time, some nineteen hours a day, Will worked feverishly with Professor Redgrove, as well as with his senior associate, Jacki, whom he had flown over to the Netherlands to assist him.

Four days before trial he got a knock on his hotel room door.

When he opened it, two United States Marine Corps escorts stepped inside, and a small entourage entered and marched through to the large conference room of the suite.

The U.S. government had sent a briefing group to assist in the defense of the case. For the next three days, Will, Redgrove, and Jacki were briefed by the Assistant Director of the Military Foreign Affairs
Office, legal counsel for the Central Intelligence Agency, and legal counsel for the Defense Intelligence Agency. On the fourth day, just twenty-four hours before the opening of the first trial session, a senior lawyer from the Office of the Solicitor General of the United States arrived and went over the international law implications of the case, and discussed the defense's planned argument by Professor Redgrove, which related to jurisdictional objections. Will didn't stay for that, as he was delegating it to his co-counsel. Instead, he spent the day preparing Caleb Marlowe for the trial and his expected testimony.

After ten hours, Will and Marlowe finished the formal business of his criminal defense. Marlowe stretched and leaned back in his chair in the detention center, and then he asked the attorney about his life and his marriage to Fiona.

Then, for the first time, the retired colonel shared some of the details of his own life. How his first and only marriage had started with such promise. But soon, his wife had grown tired of the grueling schedule of a special operations warrior.

Tensions began developing in their marriage. He went to a chaplain for advice. But in the counseling session he discovered he had an emptiness and a hunger in his soul that went deeper even than the profound issues of his marital troubles. The chaplain then explained something to him. How sin not only for Caleb Marlowe, but for everyone, would be an insurmountable barrier in our desire to connect with God were it not for one, irrefutable fact—that God had sent His own Son, Jesus Christ, to be the sacrifice for those sins. All it took, the chaplain told him, was to acknowledge that Jesus Christ was both his Savior and his Lord and let him come into his heart by faith.