The Kingmaker (31 page)

He suddenly smiled and said, “So how do you like law, Major?”

“I like it well enough.”

“But you started your career in the infantry, if I’m not mistaken. You saw combat in Panama and the Gulf. Don’t you miss the excitement?”

I tried not to let my jaw drop open, but I couldn’t completely disguise my surprise. He obviously knew all about me. I said, “Law can sometimes be pretty exciting, too.”

He sipped from his drink. “Had I been born in America, I would have chosen law. You Americans make it a delightful game of wits. Unfortunately, we Russians have never relied on our courts. Under the Communists they were façades. Under democracy, nothing has changed. We settle our disputes in the streets with guns.”

I said, “I had a little experience with that when I was in Moscow.”

“I saw the report,” he said, then looked up at Alexi. “Did you ever receive an update from our friends at the detective bureau?”

Alexi looked at him, then at me. “They are still saying the Chechens were behind it. The two officers of the patrol that failed to respond in a timely fashion have been removed from the police.”

Yurichenko was shaking his head. “You see what we must contend with? And to think we were once the second most powerful nation on earth. How the once-mighty have fallen, eh?”

I looked down, and his hand was caressing the queen he’d twice used to thrash me. I said, “If it wasn’t the Chechens, who could it have been?”

“Who can know these things? I’m unfamiliar with you, Major.” Then he suppressed a yawn, which really was a very elegant signal that I’d overstayed my welcome.

Alexi gracefully intervened. “Viktor, the long flight . . . you are becoming tired. You should be going to bed while I cater to the needs of our guests. Is important for you to be fresh for our meetings.”

The old man glanced up at him, and the look on his face was one of huge affection for the younger man. “You young pup, it used to be me who put you to bed.” He turned and looked at me with an abashed expression. “Life is pitiless to the elderly.”

Alexi led the old man to his bedroom, Viktor grasping his arm like a crutch, and I noticed that Yurichenko walked hunched over like a very old man. Only a moment before he had seemed so sprightly and energized. Now he looked feeble and depleted.

Katrina and I raised eyebrows at each other, undoubtedly thinking the same thing. Yurichenko was a piece of work. Norman Rockwell would drool at the sight of him. It wasn’t hard to see why he’d succeeded in the KGB and then been picked by Yeltsin to head the SVR. He was lovably crafty.

Alexi walked out of the bedroom a moment later, shaking his head. “Have you gotten what you wanted, Sean?”

“Yes and no. I obviously didn’t help my client, but I just met a most remarkable man.”

He looked suddenly embarrassed. “Viktor is a, uh, he is very special to me, yes? Like father . . . you understand?”

“I can see why. I’m sorry for disturbing you . . . I had to try.”

“Of course.”

Then Alexi walked us both to the door. He looked at Katrina. “Were you liking Viktor?”

“Who couldn’t like him? I was enchanted.”

He smiled like a little schoolboy. “Then I am bigly delighted you two have met.”

Bigly
delighted? Well, here we were again, me trying to save
my client as these two treat this like an opportunity to meet the prospective in-laws. Alexi swiftly bent forward and gave Katrina a kiss. A simple handshake was fine with me.

Then we were out the door, collecting the two police officers and heading back to the lobby. I’d given it my best try, and I’d failed. I drove home in a severe funk.

W
hen I entered the office at 7:00
A.M.
, another of those ubiquitous vans was parked outside, and a man was hefting more boxes inside. At the entry stood destiny in the form of Fast Eddie himself, leaned up against the doorjamb, emitting a smug, ever-confident glow. The fiddler had come to collect his bill.

I walked up. “Here to see how the other half lives?”

“Something like that. You got a coffeemaker in this slum?”

“Yeah,” I said, and we walked inside. Katrina was already there and had brewed up a fresh pot. I saw no more than six or seven boxes.

I poured two cups and handed one to Eddie, who was gazing with great amusement at the wall safes. It no longer looked like an office; it looked like a refrigerator store stuffed with ferociously ugly appliances.

“I filled all these?” he asked, proud of his handiwork.

“And two warehouses on the other side of the post. You outdid yourself.”

“I wanted to be sure you had everything,” he said, smiling wickedly. “The government can’t afford to be accused of withholding key evidence in such an important trial, can it?”

I gave him a frosty sneer. “We have yet to see a single thing that’s even remotely damning on the charges of treason or murder.”

“Oh well then, let’s see if we can rectify that,” he said, moving immediately toward a box marked with the number 6. “Let me tell you what’s inside this box,” he announced, mimicking one of those hyper-obnoxious game show hosts. “In here are copies of highly classified documents that were turned over to us by what our CIA calls a Russian asset. A court order seals that asset’s name. However, the source’s identity and employment have been confirmed by the director of the CIA and a military judge.”

Not liking the sound of this one bit, I asked, “And what’s so special about those documents?”

“As you’ll see when you go through them, some are briefing papers and talking points provided to the President and Secretary of State for their discussions with the Russians. Some are NSC internal policy papers. There’s more . . . but I won’t spoil the suspense. Just say it’s my favorite box.”

I frankly didn’t see how anything he told me was going to spoil the suspense. After all, everything he’d just said had already been given to the press.

“Okay, so there’s a bunch of important papers in the box.”

Eddie tried to look serious, but he just couldn’t pull it off. He broke into a big, jubilant smile and announced, “Each of the originals has Morrison’s fingerprints on them. The papers were acquired from a special vault in Moscow where Russian intelligence stored them for historical purposes. Some go back as far as 1992. You’ll note at the top of each page there’s a stamp in Russian Cyrillic. Those are the log-in dates when they were received in Moscow. Do I need to spell this out for you?”

“Sure, Eddie, spell it out for me,” I said, trying to look unruffled as I swallowed the bile coming up in my throat.

“Over the years, your client turned these documents over to his Russian contact. They create a trail of espionage that dates back a decade. There are no other fingerprints on these pages, only Morrison’s, and that’s confirmed by the FBI crime lab.”

I tried to look unimpressed, because that’s how we crafty defense attorneys are supposed to appear in moments such as this. I couldn’t. I stared at the box like it contained the plague, too dumbstruck to speak.

Finally I said, “And you expect me to accept the fact you won’t give me the name of the man who provided them?”

“Did I say it was a man?”

“I’ll submit a challenge the minute the trial opens.”

“Go ahead. Waste your time. It’s sealed by court order. This kind of thing gets challenged in espionage and mob trials all the time and goes nowhere. Besides, our source isn’t a witness. Our source was just a courier.”

He was right, of course, and I asked, “And what’s in the other boxes?”

“Open them and see for yourself.”

I began cracking open more boxes. He leaned against a wall, sipped his coffee, and observed with all too evident glee, like a little boy watching a porno flick. The first couple boxes contained hundreds of memorandums written by Morrison from his days at State and the NSC. I only had time to glance at the headings, but they were largely policy positions or recommended responses to Russian actions. I assumed these were papers meant to prove how Morrison perverted the American decision-making process in favor of his Moscow overlords.

The fifth box contained technical drawings and blueprints, apparently the designs pilfered from the export control office. I lifted a few out of the box as Eddie said, “There’s no fingerprints on those, but they came from the same Russian storage facility as the fingerprinted ones and were filed under the same source
title. Oh, and don’t overlook the receiving stamps in the upper corners. Compare them with the fingerprinted documents—most of the dates correspond. Call it circumstantial if you want, but any reasonable board is going to conclude they were handed over at the same time.”

The next box contained statements from people Morrison had worked with over the years. While I only had time to glance at them, the words “brutally ambitious” and “amorally selfish,” or variations of the same, appeared again and again.

The last box was long and rectangular. I opened it. Inside was an autographed baseball bat.

Katrina observed all this from a distance, her eyes shifting from Eddie to me. Eddie shoved himself off the wall and walked to a position about two feet from me. “So it’s time to talk a deal.”

I was staring at the baseball bat. I dreamed of swinging it at his face. Eddie had played it perfectly. He’d withheld the most damning evidence until this meeting, knowing that whatever optimism I walked in with would be eviscerated by the materials in these boxes.

I took a few deep breaths. “Okay, what’s your deal, Eddie?”

In a clinically chilling tone he said, “Very simple. Plead to everything and Morrison gets life. In return we get as much time with Morrison as we need to get the full details of his treachery. We reserve the right to employ lie detectors during the interrogations. If we don’t trust him, or we think he’s holding back, the deal’s off. If we don’t like his attitude, the deal’s off. You have forty-eight hours to get a response from your client.” He looked at his watch. “That gives you till 7:31
A.M.
, day after tomorrow.”

As smug as he was trying to act, this was his first offer. No sensible attorney takes the first offer. It just isn’t done. Even Eddie would be disappointed if I didn’t try to up the ante.

“Not good enough,” I staunchly insisted. “We both know our government doesn’t want this going to trial. What with our warming relations with Russia, and this joint effort in counterterrorism, and the nuclear reduction pact, a down-and-dirty
trial’s the last thing anyone wants. And I assure you, Eddie, I intend to drag the trial through the scummiest sewers you can imagine. I’ll turn everybody’s dirty underwear inside out. Besides which, the sum of Morrison’s knowledge is worth more than just a death sentence you probably won’t get anyway.”

Eddie stood there chewing on his lip. I was bluffing, but it looked like it was working. He must’ve just realized that he’d underestimated me. The overconfident bastard must’ve thought I’d just lie down and take whatever he had to offer.

He shuffled his feet, and I knew I had him. He said, “You’re sure?”

“I’m sure. Thirty years with a chance of parole for good behavior is the minimum. Morrison was a great soldier, and that has to count for something. And who knows how much of this evidence I’ll be able to get thrown out, or to explain. Come on, Eddie, I need something I can take to my client. Give me something I can work with here.”

He looked at the bat, and then stared at the ceiling as though searching the heavens for guidance. Finally he dug a hand into a pocket and withdrew two black-and-white photos that he tossed onto the table.

I studied them—both were pictures of men, who were about early-middle-aged, fit-looking, and smiling pleasantly into the camera.

Eddie said, “One is Sergei Romanov; the other is Mikhail Sorbontzny. Sergei was married with three children, and Mikhail had two young kids. Both were recalled to Moscow. Mikhail was tortured for weeks and then shot. Sergei was just shot. Morrison’s wife was their controller. She’s been tested with lie detectors and didn’t turn them in. That narrows it down to her husband.”

I stared at the photos as he disclosed this.

He continued, his voice deadly frosty, “Don’t take the deal. For one thing, I’ll enjoy kicking your ass just because I don’t like you. For a second thing, your client deserves the death sentence
and I want credit for the kill. Ask one more time for better terms and the deal’s off. Now be a good boy and go talk to your client. You have forty-seven hours and fifty-five minutes.”

With that, Eddie spun around and left, trailing the reek of vanity in his wake. As deal discussions go, I’d never seen it done better. He’d set it up to watch me gape and stutter, because that’s the way Eddie is. And he’d withheld the two photos till the end to add to my humiliation.

Usually in espionage trials, the best the government can do is posit a circumstantial case. Traitors tend to be crafty fellows who work in shadows and isolation, leaving little evidence and few witnesses. Almost always when the government suspects espionage they therefore attempt an entrapment, hoping their target will walk into the setup and offer them enough evidence to persuade a jury they had the intent to betray.

If Eddie was telling the truth about what was in box number 6—and he better be or he’d face disbarment—he had the murder weapon with the fingerprints on it.

I looked over at Katrina, who sipped coffee and observed our exchange. “What do you think?”

She pointed at box number 6. “In a word, we’re screwed.”

“Looks that way, doesn’t it?” I said, still reeling and trying to come to grips with all the nasty ramifications.

She took another sip of coffee and seemed to be thinking hard. “He doesn’t care what we plead, because he believes he has an airtight case. We can’t attack his key evidence because we’re foreclosed from knowing how he got his hands on it. And—”

The phone interrupted, and I went over to answer. It was Alexi, saying, “I am only having a minute, Sean. Viktor is upstairs preparing for his meetings and I have fabricated an excuse to come down to the lobby.”