"Mr. Jones?"
MP paused and stared down at his legal pad for a long moment. Alex didn't have a prayer. MP knew this. Further, he knew better than to irritate the judge and risk losing his obvious sympathy by arguing otherwise. Alex seemed to understand this as well. He was vigorously nodding his head in Elena's direction.
"Mr. Jones?" the judge repeated, taking his tone up a notch.
"Those issues will be addressed in two weeks. Mrs. Konevitch, though, has been accused of nothing."
His Honor was tired of talking. He simply shifted his stare to Kim Parrish.
"The government," she replied, "would strongly prefer that she remain in custody as well."
"I do not react to preferences, Miss Parrish. You had better offer substantiation for denial."
"She's a flight risk as well."
"With her husband in jail?"
"Maybe."
"You need to do better than that, Miss Parrish."
"She was party to his falsehoods. She testified at his hearings, confirmed his lies, and served as his able co-conspirator."
His Honor bent far forward and peered down at his court reporter, who also happened to double as his appointments secretary. "Sally, what did I do last Sunday?"
"You played golf, Your Honor."
"I did?"
"Of course. You had your usual ten a.m. tee time at Washington Golf and Country."
"And were you to ask Mrs. Everston where I was, what do you think she'd say, Sally?"
Sally produced a shy smile and blushed nicely. "She'd say you were at your county school board meeting."
"Am I on the school board, Sally?"
"No, Your Honor. Not for about five years now. It's the same tired old alibi you give her every other Sunday."
He redirected his gaze to Kim Parrish. "Mrs. Everston and I have been married thirty-two years now. You'd think she'd be on to me by now, wouldn't you?"
"I have no idea. I'm not married."
"Then allow me to offer a little wisdom from the trenches. The state of matrimony, Miss Parrish, does not confer infinite or absolute knowledge of spousal activities. Believe it or not, lots of married people cheat on each other, hide money from each other, and, in cases, even have additional wives and husbands. So as much as you might wish it, the laws of this land do not yet assign mutual guilt on married couples. I am not responsible for the horrible quilts my wife knits and afflicts on our poor children every Christmas. She is certainly not responsible for the three times Sunday that I regrettably shifted the lay of my golf ball and thereby cheated my partners into buying my lunch."
"Moving a golf ball and stealing millions are wildly different offenses. I don't agree with your analogies, Your Honor."
"You don't?"
"Absolutely not."
"Bond will be set at $5,000."
"I protest, Your Honor."
"Of course you do."
Before Alex was led away, Elena squeezed his hand, but did not say, "I love you."
Instead she said, "Interactive Internet video?"
"Exactly. And call Mikhail for an update," he whispered before he was tugged away.
24
The destroyed remnants of a long working lunch were strewn around the table. The mess would be picked up by the secretaries shortly after the meeting ended. Laura Tingleman presided from the end of the long shiny table.
The chief lieutenants of the Justice Department were gathered on this Friday morning, as they were every Friday morning, for what had come to be known as the "Weekly Roundup," named in honor of her background as a Montanan. A city girl through and through, Laura Tingleman could barely tell the back end of a cow from the front.
The chief of the Civil Rights Division was just winding up a long, complicated report about the status of a suit brought by an Indian tribe nobody in the room had ever heard of. The tribe demanded the right to sue the shorts off anybody who used the name "Indian," or any variation thereof, or any reference thereto, or any image thereabout, in their product, team, school, or institution, or whatever.
The case had bounced around various lower courts for over a decade. A victory here. A successful appeal there and now it was on the verge of ascending to consideration by the Supreme Court. No fewer than ten civil rights lawyers had been involved full-time, dodging around the country every time the case changed jurisdiction. The tribe in question was quite small, comprising a husband and wife, a weird migratory couple who claimed they were pursuing the nomadic tradition of their forebears and could not be pinned down for any length of time. They claimed to be following buffalo herds, or locusts, or even slight changes in wind direction. Every move incited a new excuse. Coincidentally, their geographic shifts occurred every time they lost an appeal and needed to bounce the case to a different, more radically liberal venue; they staunchly insisted that their ancient native rights took precedence over the newly created White Man Rule, and some harebrained judge somewhere had ruled in their favor. They won legal permission for unlimited changes of venue along with infinite reasons for appeal.
The couple had once been named Antonelli, before they had it legally changed to Chief and Mrs. Stare at My Moon. They happened to be graduates of Yale Law.
The head of the Civil Rights Division and the solicitor general squabbled back and forth. Civil Rights wanted to hand this hot potato to the solicitor general on the grounds that it was within spitting distance of the Supreme Court. The Court had yet to determine whether this case belonged on their docket, the solicitor general shot back, with his loquacious lips pursed. Yes, but the head of Civil Rights wanted his ten lawyers sprung. Also if the couple won, they would go on a legal rampage, suing for billions from schools and companies that apparently were brutally insensitive to the terrible slights they were inflicting on Indians. The costs would be huge, the backlash staggering.
Unfortunately, the White House was putting unbearable pressure on the department to roll over. The president felt the pain of what had happened to American Indians and he wanted to make amends for three hundred years of atrocities, for white men sharing their awful diseases, for stealing Indian land, for decimating the proud tribes. More succinctly, he wanted their votes.
It was a definite no-win situation.
As usual, Laura Tingleman deferred the decision for later-later being when it somehow resolved itself without her fingerprints. Time to bounce to the next issue, and Laura's chief of staff held up an article clipped, a few days earlier, from the New York Times. Said article concerned a Russian couple being prosecuted for immigration violations. Predictably for the Times, the article was slanted and not overly complimentary to the government's case. The word "railroad" was thrown around a few times by the defense attorney, who had been given suspiciously generous play by the Times reporter.
"Does anybody know what this is about?" Laura asked, searching the faces around the table.
Tromble bent forward. "I do, and so should you."
"I should?"
"Sure. From our Moscow trip, remember? This couple ripped off hundreds of millions and are hiding here. We specifically agreed we would return them to Russia for trial."
"I might have a vague recollection about it," Laura allowed. So much business passed through her office, she could barely keep it all straight.
"You were a little tired," Tromble allowed back. "You gave your word to the Russian attorney general. I'm just following through."
"How did it make the papers?" she asked.
Fortunately, Tromble had the answer. "The usual games, nothing to become concerned over. The defense attorney has no case. He knows it, too. He's trying to spin up the media and build sympathy. He and the Times reporter went to college together. She did him a big favor."