Hendley nodded. “We haven’t paid a visit on Mary Pat in a while. Jack, why don’t you give her a call and take her to lunch? You can run on down to Liberty Crossing and show her the Mir-Rehan connection. I bet she’ll find that very interesting.”
“I’ll give her a call today.”
“Okay. Keep our sources and methods under your hat, though.”
“Understood.”
“And Jack? Whatever you do, don’t mention that you just got back from Paris.”
The conference room erupted in tired laughter.
23
Sixty-one-year-old Judith Cochrane’s rental car came with in-dash GPS, but she did not set it for the forty-mile drive down from Colorado Springs. She knew the way to 5880 State Highway 67, as she had been here many times to visit her clients.
Her rented Chrysler pulled off South Robinson Avenue, and she stopped at the first gate of ADX Florence. The guards knew her by sight but still they looked over her documents and identification carefully before letting her pass.
It wasn’t easy for an attorney to see a client at Florence; it was harder still for an attorney to see a client housed in H Unit, and a Range 13 client was nigh on impossible to meet with face-to-face. Cochrane and the Progressive Constitution Initiative were in the later stages of drafting a lawsuit to address this issue, but for now she had to play by the rules of supermax.
As one of the most regular visitors to ADX Florence, Judith had come prepared. She would carry a purse with nothing of value in it because she would have to leave it in a locker, and she would not bother entering with her laptop or cell phone, because these would be taken from her immediately if they were on her person. She knew to wear comfortable shoes because she would be walking from the administration unit to her prisoner’s cell, a journey of hundreds of yards of hallways and covered outdoor walkways, and she made sure to dress in an especially conservative pantsuit so that the warden would not refuse her entry due to the preposterous accusation of provocative attire.
She also knew she’d be going through X-ray machines and full-body scanners, so she followed prison rules for visitors and wore a bra that was free of underwire.
She drove on past the guard shack, past a long, high wall. She looped around to the south and went through more remote gates, and as she drove slowly she encountered more guard towers, shotguns, assault rifles, German shepherds, and security cameras than she could possibly count. Finally she pulled into a large, half-empty parking lot outside the administration wing. Behind her, at the entrance to the lot, a row of bright yellow hydraulically operated spikes rose from slats in the concrete. She would not be leaving until the guard force here was ready for her to leave.
Judith Cochrane was met at her car door by a female guard, and together they walked through a series of secure doors and hallways in the administrative wing of the prison. There was no conversation between the two, and the guard did not offer to help the much older woman carry her briefcase or pull her laptop bag.
“Lovely morning,” Judith Cochrane said as they marched down a clean white passageway.
The guard ignored her comment but continued to lead the way with professionalism.
Most guards at ADX Florence didn’t think much of the attorneys who defended the prisoners incarcerated here.
Cochrane didn’t care, she could schlep her own bags, and she’d long ago decided that she much preferred the company of the inmates of supermax prisons to the guard force, who were, as far as she was concerned, just uneducated thugs.
Her worldview was as bleak and cruel as it was simple. Prison guards were like soldiers who were like police who were like any federal agent who wielded a gun. They were the bad guys.
After graduating and passing the bar in California, Judith Cochrane was hired by the Center for Constitutional Rights, a legal advocacy group that focused on civil rights.
After that, she worked for the ACLU for a dozen years, and then Human Rights Watch for several more. When Paul Laska funded the development of the Progressive Constitution Initiative, he’d recruited her personally to join the well-bankrolled liberal judicial advocacy group. He didn’t have to work too hard at getting her; Cochrane was thrilled to take a job that let her pick and choose her cases. Almost immediately after the start-up of the organization, the attacks of September 11, 2001, occurred, and to Judith Cochrane and her coworkers, that meant something truly terrible. She knew a witch hunt by the American government was on the horizon: Christians and Jews against Muslims.
For more than half a decade Cochrane was asked to appear on hundreds of television programs to talk about the evils of the U.S. government. She did as many appearances as she could while still defending her clients.
But when Ed Kealty was elected President, Judith Cochrane suddenly found herself blacklisted. She was surprised that the networks didn’t seem to care as much about civil rights when Kealty and his men ran the FBI, the CIA, and the Pentagon as they had during the Ryan years.
These days, with Kealty in the White House, Cochrane had as much time as she needed to work on her cases. She was unmarried with no children, and her work was her life. She had developed many close personal relationships with her clients. Relationships that could never lead to anything more than emotional closeness, as virtually all of her clients were separated from her by Plexiglas windows or iron bars.
She was also married, in the figurative sense, to her convictions, a lifelong love affair with her beliefs.
And it was these convictions that brought her here to supermax to meet with Saif Yasin.
She was led into the warden’s office, where the warden shook her hand and introduced her to a large black man in a starched blue uniform. “This is the unit commander for H. He will take you to Range 13 and to the FBI detail in charge of your prisoner. We don’t have actual custody of Prisoner 09341-000. We are essentially just the holding facility.”
“I understand. Thank you,” she said as she shook the uniformed man’s hand. “We’ll be seeing a lot of each other.”
The unit commander replied professionally, “Ms. Cochrane, this is just a formality, but we have our rules. May I see your state bar card?”
She reached into her purse and handed it over. The unit commander looked it over and handed it back to her.
The warden said, “This prisoner will be handled differently. I assume you have a copy of his Special Administrative Measures, as well as the directives for your meetings with him?”
“I have both of those documents. As a matter of fact, I have a team of attorneys preparing our response to them.”
“Your response?”
“Yes. We will be suing you shortly, but you must have known that already.”
“Well … I—”
Cochrane smiled thinly. “Don’t worry. For today, I promise to oblige your illegal SAMs.”
The unit commander was taken aback, but the warden stepped in. He’d known Judith Cochrane long enough to remain unfazed, no matter what she said or accused him of. “We appreciate that. Originally we had planned to have you meet with him via ‘video visiting,’ like our other Special Housing Unit inmates, but the AG said you absolutely refused that arrangement.”
“I did. This man is in a cage, I understand that. But I need to have some rapport with him if I am to do my job. I can’t communicate with him on a television screen.”
The unit commander said, “We will take you to his cell. You will communicate to the prisoner via a direct phone line. It is not monitored; this has been ordered by the attorney general himself.”
“Very good.”
“We have a desk for you outside his cell. There is a partition of bulletproof glass; this will serve as an attorney/client visiting booth, just like if you were meeting with one of your other clients in the visitation center.”