"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."
Nobody asked how he knew this. He wouldn't have told them if they had. If the Russians could tap and wire the lawyer's office, it was clearly a national security imperative for Tromble to have a few taps of his own. It was only fair to know what the Russians knew.
"Do we have a solid case?" Laura's chief of staff asked.
"It's in the hands of INS," he fibbed, smoothly and persuasively. "We're providing assistance from the side; only when they ask, though. Believe me, it's waterproof."
"How can you be so sure?" the aide countered. Every eye in the room swiveled to Tromble. How indeed?
Though the Justice Department was purportedly above the fray of politics, this was a liberal administration, and the White House had packed the senior appointed ranks with legions of die-hard, woolly-headed lefties. Tromble was the exception, the lone, fierce duck out of water. The others in the room detested him, and secretly, on a more ambivalent note, nearly all were convinced he was the right man for the right job-a tireless, efficient, ruthless hatchetman who ran his besuited stormtroopers hard. Behind his cover they could spout all the tree-hugging, abortion-loving, big government nonsense they wanted. In the first two years of his incumbency, national crime rates had plummeted a historic nine percent.