And, in fact, he had. Desperate men know no boundaries.
Sebastian sat back in his armchair, folded his legs, and used the few seconds of complete silence that followed to make it very clear that, yes, he actually did have some questions.
“Have you ever told a lie?” he asked.
Dobson’s reaction was as expected, his eyes narrowing to an incredulous squint. “What kind of a question is that?”
“A rather simple one,” said Sebastian.
Dobson looked at me for help with this suddenly crazy British journalist for the New York Times. I was the broker of this deal, after all.
But I was also a former prosecutor.
“Had you ever met Claire Parker?” I asked.
“What?” said Dobson. “Who?”
“Did you not hear me or do you not know the name?”
“I know the … I mean, I know who she is.”
“You mean was, right? You’re aware that she was murdered in Manhattan a little over a week ago, aren’t you?”
I watched as Dobson looked over my shoulder at the door. It was his way out. Escape. Freedom. From what exactly, he wasn’t sure yet. But it couldn’t be good.
That is, for a lesser man.
And in that moment, right there, a lifetime of ego and arrogance—of Dobson always thinking he was the smartest guy in the room—did exactly what we thought it would. It kept his ass seated square on that couch. Complete and utter inertia.
“Yes, it was all over the news,” he said calmly. “Claire Parker, the writer for the Times, was shot to death in the back of a taxi.”
“Do you know why she was murdered?” I asked.
“It was reported as a robbery,” said Dobson.
“Do you think that’s what it was?”
“Why wouldn’t it be?”
The smug expression, the self-satisfaction … he looked like a kid who’d just figured out a board game without reading the rules.
“I don’t know, you tell me,” I said. “Do you know why she was really murdered?”
Dobson opened his mouth to answer, but it was as if the hinges of his jaw had suddenly jammed. Every muscle in his face and neck snapped to attention as if somewhere in his brain a switch had been flipped. And indeed it had.
“No,” he managed to push past his lips, but as soon as he did, it was as if the word had turned around and punched his lights out, his head jolting back and his legs shaking as if the couch had just become an electric chair.
His eyes darted to the table in front of him, the coffee table. He stared at his cup, the realization sinking in. He couldn’t believe it. He didn’t want to believe it. But he had no choice. He was getting the ultimate taste of his own medicine, and it was going down hard.
So was he.
CHAPTER 113
“DID YOU instruct Frank Karcher to have Claire Parker killed?” I asked, and immediately repeated the question, full-throated, over the sound of Dobson desperately trying to fight against the pain. “Did you. Instruct. Frank Karcher. To have Claire Parker killed?”
Even if he wanted to leave now, he couldn’t. His body wouldn’t let him.
But he also had no intention of answering. Forget every word, it was every syllable that had become a struggle—and yet he somehow managed to string two together after sucking in a gasp of air.
“Fuck you!” he bellowed.
From the corner of my eye, I saw the flat-screen against the wall light up. Dobson turned to look, only to realize he was looking at a live feed of himself. Feeling pain was one thing, watching yourself feeling it added a whole new component. Owen was playing for keeps. We all were.
Fuck you back, Dobson. Have you forgotten how your serum works?
Only this wasn’t his serum.
This was the one he’d wished he had from the start. The one that didn’t kill people even if they were being honest. Better yet, it didn’t need to be injected. It could be absorbed into the bloodstream without being compromised by stomach acids.
The only thing Owen couldn’t do was make it tasteless. But strong black coffee was a pretty good masking agent.
I leaned forward, staring into Dobson’s eyes, which had turned red from burst blood vessels. He looked like a demon.
“The only thing that will stop the pain is telling the truth,” I said.
But as I looked at him, his body convulsing so violently it felt as if the entire room were shaking, I realized we both knew that wasn’t true. There was something else that could stop the pain.
Sebastian looked over at me, worried. I could read his face. Is Dobson that deranged? Is he crazy enough to do it?
I shook my head, but it was too late. Dobson had seen Sebastian. And of all things—as his eyes began to leak with red tears, his fists balled so tight I thought they would both snap off at the wrists—he did something that for the first time made me think that, yeah, maybe he was that sick in the head.
He smiled.
I turned away, only to see him again on the television, the smile seemingly wider. He wanted us to know. If I’m going down, I’m taking you all with me.
No. He was bluffing, I was sure of it. Sebastian, on the other hand, wasn’t. He was more than looking at me now. He was pleading.
“Do it,” he said. “Please.”
I put my hand in my pocket, feeling for the cylinder. I knew it was there; I must have checked it twenty times before Dobson arrived. But I had no intention of taking it out, let alone using it.
“Do it!” Sebastian repeated. He was scared to death. Or, more specifically, scared of the murder charge that would be slapped on all of us.
In the cylinder was the antidote. A small syringe with a spring-loaded needle and the ability to negate the effects of the serum in a matter of seconds. “Just in case,” Owen had said.
As in, just in case Dobson would sooner die than confess.
But I wasn’t having it. Or maybe I was simply too angry, too consumed by the desire to see him own up to what he’d done.
Suddenly, I heard the door flung open behind me, the sound of Owen bursting into the room. As fast as he was moving, he managed to keep his voice calm.
“Trevor,” he said. Just my name. That, and all the subtext that went with it. Are you sure you know what you’re doing?
And for the first time since this whole nightmare had started, I was.
I stood and walked slowly over to Dobson, sitting on the coffee table directly in front of him. There would be no more yelling from me, no more demanding that he come clean.
He simply needed to know that I was fine with his decision either way. He had everything to lose, and I had nothing.
“She was pregnant,” I told him. “She was pregnant with my child.”
And with that, I stood up and walked out of frame. The choice was his now, and only his.
Truth or die?
EPILOGUE
CHAPTER 114
IN THE world of newspapers, the term is shirttail, a short and related story that’s added to the end of a longer one.
Of course, I only know that because of Claire. She was my go-to for journalistic lingo, and I was hers for all things legal. Between the two of us, we always had a leg up on the Sunday crossword.
Suffice it to say, Dobson’s confession was all the rage for a couple of weeks. All the more so given how it was obtained. But that was the whole point, wasn’t it? Owen never denied that the serum had the potential to foil a terrorist plot that could kill hundreds, if not thousands or more. The question was, who got to decide whether or not we used it? So let the public debate begin, because that’s how a democracy is supposed to work. In the words of Lincoln at Gettysburg, “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”
It was only fitting, then, that Owen gave the recording of Dobson to the DC police, the FBI, and the entire world, via the Internet, all at the same time. First, though, he gave a private screening to Agent Valerie Jensen and Jeffrey Crespin. That was the first of a few deals
I negotiated.
Ethics and morality exist on an ever-shifting scale. The trick, I thought, was keeping perspective. Somewhere along the line, there always needed to be a clearly established definition of right and wrong. Black and white. As long as you had that, you could proceed to deal with the gray areas.
At least, that was what I used to teach my students at Columbia Law. But then this past summer happened. I don’t teach them that anymore.
“Look around you, Mr. Mann,” said Crespin. It’s all gray.
Which would explain why he was ultimately fine with my other two deals. They needed his approval.
One was regarding Josiah Brennan.
Jesus himself could’ve returned to defend Brennan in court for money laundering, but there was still no way he could avoid jail time entirely. That is, if the NSA chose to cooperate with law enforcement and pursue charges against him.
All I could picture, though, was Brennan’s nine-year-old daughter, Rebecca, getting frisked every time she went to visit him behind bars. The same Rebecca who could’ve easily ratted out Valerie and me in her father’s office. So I had a different suggestion, and Crespin went for it.
It was time for Brennan to launder some of his own money.
Detective Dave Lamont didn’t have a nine-year-old daughter, but he did have three teenage sons with his wife, Joanie. They also had a mortgage, school tuitions, and orthodontist bills. NYPD death benefits only go so far. His additional life insurance policy, even less far.
So Brennan was charged with something else instead: looking after the Lamont family financially. Also, setting up a special IRA for Lamont’s partner, McGeary. Was it a rich man buying his freedom? Maybe if he’d thought of it first. But he didn’t. Money doesn’t always have to be the root of all evil.
Which was the same rationale I used regarding Shahid Al Dossari, the other deal that needed Crespin’s consent.
Personally, I didn’t care one way or the other what the NSA wanted to do with him. He had skedaddled back to Saudi Arabia the split second Dobson was arrested, and the fact that he wasn’t a US citizen presented a far more complicated legal challenge, especially given his wealth and influence.
But there it was again. Wealth and influence.
“Might as well put it to good use,” I told Crespin.
“Just what do you have in mind?” he asked.
It was actually what Owen had originally had in mind.
CHAPTER 115
I THOUGHT I was curing Alzheimer’s….
That was what he’d told me from the start. Now maybe he will.
Of course, I couldn’t really blame Al Dossari for making a counteroffer to the “strongly” suggested contribution to Owen’s newly founded research facility. Twenty million dollars is a lot of money, after all. Even for a Saudi banker.
Then again, everything is relative. Assuming he was able to fight extradition and avoid trial in the States, he’d still be the Roman Polanski of poker and gambling here. No more trips to Vegas. No more trips anywhere in the United States, his favorite place to be.
In the end, Al Dossari figured that was an even greater price to pay.
God bless America.
And Godspeed to Owen. “I’ve got my work cut out for me,” he said when the facility officially opened in the fall.
“Well, then,” I said. “You better get busy … dude.” For good measure, I rubbed my hands together as if doing a bit of his dry wash routine.
You meet a lot of people in your lifetime, many of whom will have an immeasurable impact on you. Then there are those who literally change who you are. You can generally count those people on one hand. And fittingly, Owen Lewis will always be one of them. In the wake of everything that happened, all the sadness and despair and mayhem, he managed to give me something I would’ve never thought possible. Optimism.
Crazy to think … I still can’t even buy the kid a drink.
So that was that. All the deals I’d cut after Dobson’s confession. As for the one made before it, I’m fairly certain Sebastian has no regrets. In fact, I’m positive of it.
Sebastian Cole may be the last journalist on earth whom President Morris—with his twenty-one-percent approval rating—will actually grant an interview to, but Sebastian’s firsthand account of what happened in that hotel room, including a very revealing Q&A with Dobson while he was under the influence of the serum, gave him the scoop of a lifetime.
Throw in the exclusive interviews Owen and I guaranteed him in return for his cooperation, and Sebastian all but owned the front page of the Times for an entire month.
But the best part—at least for me—was the class he displayed throughout it all. The byline of every article he wrote covering the story read the same. By Claire Parker and Sebastian Cole.
“You’re a far better man than I first gave you credit for,” I told him.
“Likewise,” he said.
It’s been moments like that when I’ve missed Claire the most. That’s when I usually hop in my car and make the drive up to Wellesley, west of Boston, and the Woodlawn Cemetery, where all Parkers have been buried for over a century. Only once, though, have I fallen into the cliché of talking to her tombstone. She would’ve laughed at the sight of that. And who knows? Maybe somewhere she is laughing, and doing that little crinkle thing with her nose that, in a weird and wonderful way, always made her look even prettier.
I know that as time goes on, those trips to her gravesite will happen less often. But not because I’ll miss her less. No, eventually what will happen, maybe amid a gust of wind through the branches of a nearby northern red oak, is that I’ll hear that tombstone of hers talk back to me.
“It’s okay, Trevor,” she’ll say. “Now get on with it, will you? Maybe even ask out that gorgeous agent from the NSA. Though between you and me, she might be a little out of your league.”
Claire always told it like it was.
Though, for the record, Valerie Jensen and I did manage to have dinner together when she was in Manhattan before the holidays. We even went back to her hotel afterward. “Your move,” she told me.
Of course, that was during the game of Scrabble we played in the bar off the lobby. She’d brought the game all the way up from DC. And of course, she kicked my ass but good. Her father also taught her poker, she said. “Maybe we’ll play after the trial.”
Which brings us fully up to date. Dobson’s trial. And me sitting in the first row waiting my turn. It couldn’t come soon enough.
“The prosecution calls Mr. Trevor Mann.”
It felt strange to be back in a courtroom after all these years, and even stranger to be taking the witness stand. I’d always been in front, asking the questions, not actually sitting in the stand.
Place your left hand on the Bible, raise your right hand …
No serum needed here. We were kickin’ it old school.
“Do you solemnly swear or affirm that you will tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?”
You better believe it.
“THIS IS NOT A TEST”—EVERY NEW YORKER’S WORST NIGHTMARE IS ABOUT TO BECOME A REALITY.
ALERT
FOR AN EXCERPT, TURN THE PAGE.
AT 3:23 A.M., the two Supervac trucks turned off their headlights and pulled off the northbound FDR into a junk-strewn abandoned lot beside the Harlem River across from the Bronx.
After he put the first truck into park, Tony took a quart of orange Gatorade from the cooler they’d brought, cracked its lid, and commenced gulping. His stubbled face was filthy, and he was sweating exuberantly, had in fact sweated through the back of his heavy coveralls.
“Hey, you want some of this, Mr. Joyce?” said Tony, coming up for air.
“No. All yours, Tony. Truly, you broke your butt down in the hole. I’m proud of you,” Mr. Joyce said.
It was true. Tony had some heft on him and could use a few hygiene suggestions, but no one could say he wasn’t a worker. He’d been going at it hard fo
r the last three hours between the two manholes, really hustling. He’d been Johnny-on-the-spot for every task with the equipment without a word of complaint.
They were finally done now. At least with the prep work. It had gone off without a hitch. The truck tanks were empty now, and the manholes were closed. Everything was set up and ready to go.
“How’s the link?” Mr. Joyce called into the radio he took from his pocket.
“Crystal clear,” Mr. Beckett in the other truck replied.
They had hacked into the MTA internal subway video feed, and Mr. Beckett was now monitoring the security cameras at every 1 Line station from Harlem to Inwood.
“OK, I see it,” Mr. Beckett said over the radio a second later. “It’s pulling out of 157th in the northbound tunnel. There. It’s all the way in. You have the green light, Mr. Joyce.”
Mr. Joyce took the cheap disposable cell phone from the left breast pocket of his blue coveralls. It was a Barbie-purple slide phone made by a company called Pantech, a training phone one would buy a suburban girl for her middle-school graduation. He turned it on and scrolled to the phone’s only preprogrammed number.
Theory becomes reality, he thought, and he thumbed the call button, and the two pressure cookers planted in the train tunnel ten stories beneath Broadway twenty blocks away detonated simultaneously.
THE INITIAL EXPLOSION of the pressure-cooker bombs, though great, was not that impressive in itself. It wasn’t meant to be. It was just the primer, the match to the fuel that the two trucks had been pumping into the air of the tunnel for the last three hours.
The tunnel was semicircular, seventy-three feet wide at its base, twenty feet high, and a little less than four miles long. Within seconds of the blast, a powerful shock wave raced in both directions along its entire length. There were no people on the subway platforms so late, but in both stations the wave ripped apart vendor shacks and MTA tool carts and wooden benches.