John Grisham Page 5

  “What about Vice President?” Teddy asked.

  “I have a couple of names. Senator Nance of Michigan is an old friend. There’s also Governor Guyce from Texas.”

  Teddy received the names with careful deliberation. Not bad selections, really, though Guyce would never work. He was a rich boy who’d skated through college and golfed through his thirties, then spent a fortune of his father’s money to purchase the governor’s mansion for four years. Besides, they wouldn’t have to worry about Texas.

  “I like Nance,” Teddy said.

  Then Nance it would be, Lake almost said.

  They talked about money for an hour, the first wave from the PAC’s and how to accept instant millions without creating too much suspicion. Then the second wave from the defense contractors. Then the third wave of cash and other untraceables.

  There’d be a fourth wave Lake would never know about. Depending on the polls, Teddy Maynard and his organization would be prepared to literally haul boxes filled with cash into union halls and black churches and white VFWs in places like Chicago and Detroit and Memphis and throughout the Deep South. Working with locals they were already identifying, they would be prepared to buy every vote they could find.

  The more Teddy pondered his plan, the more convinced he became that the election would be won by Mr. Aaron Lake.

  TREVOR’S LITTLE LAW OFFICE was in Neptune Beach, several blocks from Atlantic Beach, though no one could tell where one beach stopped and the other started. Jacksonville was several miles to the west and creeping toward the sea every minute. The office was a converted summer rental, and from his sagging back porch Trevor could see the beach and the ocean and hear the seagulls. Hard to believe he’d been renting the place for twelve years now. Early in the lease he’d enjoyed hiding on the porch, away from the phone and the clients, staring endlessly at the gentle waters of the Atlantic two blocks away.

  He was from Scranton, and like all snowbirds, he’d finally grown weary of gazing at the sea, roaming the beaches barefoot, and throwing bread crumbs to the birds. Now he preferred to waste time locked in his office.

  Trevor was terrified of courtrooms and judges. While this was unusual and even somewhat honorable, it made for a different style of lawyering. It relegated Trevor to paperwork—real estate closings, wills, leases, zoning—all the mundane, nondazzling, small-time areas of the profession no one told him about in law school. Occasionally he handled a drug case, never one involving a trial, and it was one of his unfortunate clients at Trumble who’d connected him with the Honorable Joe Roy Spicer. In short order he’d become the official attorney for all three—Spicer, Beech, and Yarber. The Brethren, as even Trevor referred to them.

  He was a courier, nothing more or less. He smuggled them letters disguised as official legal documents and thus protected by the lawyer-client privilege. And he sneaked their letters out. He gave them no advice, and they sought none. He ran their bank account offshore and handled phone calls from the families of their clients inside Trumble. He fronted their dirty little deals, and in doing so avoided courtrooms and judges and other lawyers, and this suited Trevor just fine.

  He was also a member of their conspiracy, easily indictable should they ever be exposed, but he wasn’t worried. The Angola scam was absolutely brilliant because its victims couldn’t complain. For an easy fee with potential rewards, he’d gamble with the Brethren.

  He eased from his office without seeing his secretary, then sneaked away in his restored 1970 VW Beetle, no air-conditioning. He drove down First Street toward Atlantic Boulevard, the ocean visible through homes and cottages and rentals. He wore old khakis, a white cotton shirt, a yellow bow tie, a blue seersucker jacket, all of it heavily wrinkled. He passed Pete’s Bar and Grill, the oldest watering hole along the beaches and his personal favorite even though the college kids had discovered the place. He had an outstanding and very past-due bar tab there of $361, almost all for Coors longnecks and lemon daiquiris, and he really wanted to clear the debt.

  He turned west on Atlantic Boulevard, and began fighting the traffic into Jacksonville. He cursed the sprawl and the congestion and the cars with Canadian plates. Then he was on the bypass, north past the airport and soon deep into the flat Florida countryside.

  Fifty minutes later he parked at Trumble. You gotta love the federal system, he told himself again. Lots of parking close to the front entrance, nicely landscaped grounds tended daily by the inmates, and modern, well-kept buildings.

  He said, “Hello, Mackey,” to the white guard at the door, and “Hello, Vince,” to the black one. Rufus at the front desk X-rayed the briefcase while Nadine did the paperwork for his visit. “How’re the bass?” he asked Rufus.

  “Ain’t biting,” Rufus said.

  No lawyer in the brief history of Trumble had visited as much as Trevor. They took his picture again, stamped the back of his hand with invisible ink, and led him through two doors and a short hallway. “Hello, Link,” he said to the next guard.

  “Mornin, Trevor,” Link said. Link ran the visitors’ area, a large open space with lots of padded chairs and vending machines against one wall, a playground for youngsters, and a small outdoor patio where two people could sit at a picnic table and share a moment. It was cleaned and shined and completely empty. It was a weekday. Traffic picked up on Saturdays and Sundays, but for the rest of the time Link observed an empty area.

  They went to the lawyers’ room, one of several private cubbyholes with doors that shut and windows through which Link could do his observing, if he were so inclined. Joe Roy Spicer was waiting and reading the daily sports section where he played the odds on college basketball. Trevor and Link stepped into the room together, and very quickly Trevor removed two twenty-dollar bills and handed them to Link. The closed-circuit cameras couldn’t see them if they did this just inside the door. As part of the routine, Spicer pretended not to see the transaction.

  Then the briefcase was opened and Link made a pretense of looking through it. He did this without touching a thing. Trevor removed a large manila envelope which was sealed and marked in bold “Legal Papers.” Link took it and squeezed it to make sure it held only papers and not a gun or a bottle of pills, then he gave it back. They’d done this dozens of times.

  Trumble regulations required a guard to be present in the room when all papers were removed and all envelopes were opened. But the two twenties got Link outside where he posted himself at the door because there was simply nothing else to guard at the moment. He knew letters were being passed back and forth, and he didn’t care. As long as Trevor didn’t traffic in weapons or drugs, Link wouldn’t get involved. The place had so many silly regulations anyway. He leaned on the door, with his back to it, and before long was drifting into one of his many horse naps, one leg stiff, the other bent at the knee.

  In the lawyers’ room, little legal work was being done. Spicer was still absorbed in point spreads. Most inmates welcomed their guests. Spicer only tolerated his.

  “Got a call last night from the brother of Jeff Daggett,” Trevor said. “The kid from Coral Gables.”

  “I know him,” Spicer said, finally lowering his newspaper because money was on the horizon. “He got twelve years in a drug conspiracy.”

  “Yep. His brother says that there’s this ex-federal judge inside Trumble who’s looked over his papers and thinks he might be able to knock off a few years. This judge wants a fee, so Daggett calls his brother, who calls me.” Trevor removed his rumpled blue seersucker jacket and flung it on a chair. Spicer hated his bow tie.

  “How much can they pay?”

  “Have you guys quoted a fee?” Trevor asked.

  “Beech may have, I don’t know. We try to get five thousand for a two-two-five-five reduction.” Spicer said this as if he had practiced criminal law in the federal courts for years. Truth was, the only time he’d actually seen a federal courtroom was the day he was sentenced.

  “I know,” Trevor said. “I’m not sure they can pay five t
housand. The kid had a public defender for a lawyer.”

  “Then squeeze whatever you can, but get at least a thousand up front. He’s not a bad kid.”

  “You’re getting soft, Joe Roy.”

  “No. I’m getting meaner.”

  And in fact he was. Joe Roy was the managing partner of the Brethren. Yarber and Beech had the talent and the training, but they’d been too humiliated by their fall to have any ambition. Spicer, with no training and little talent, possessed enough manipulative skills to keep his colleagues on track. While they brooded, he dreamed of his comeback.

  Joe Roy opened a file and withdrew a check. “Here’s a thousand bucks to deposit. Came from a pen pal in Texas named Curtis.”

  “What’s his potential?”

  “Very good, I think. We’re ready to bust Quince in Iowa.” Joe Roy withdrew a pretty lavender envelope, tightly sealed and addressed to Quince Garbe in Bakers, Iowa.

  “How much?” Trevor asked, taking the envelope.

  “A hundred thousand.”

  “Wow.”

  “He’s got it, and he’ll pay it. I’ve given him the wiring instructions. Alert the bank.”

  In twenty-three years of practicing law, Trevor had never earned a fee anywhere close to $33,000. Suddenly, he could see it, touch it, and, though he tried not to, he began spending it—$33,000 for doing nothing but shuttling mail.

  “You really think this will work?” he asked, mentally paying off the tab at Pete’s Bar and telling Master–Card to take this check and shove it. He’d keep the same car, his beloved Beetle, but he might spring for an air conditioner.

  “Of course it will,” Spicer said, without a trace of doubt.

  He had two more letters, both written by Justice Yarber posing as young Percy in rehab. Trevor took them with anticipation.

  “Arkansas is at Kentucky tonight,” Spicer said, returning to his newspaper. “The line is fourteen. Whatta you think?”

  “Much closer than that. Kentucky is very tough at home.”

  “Are you in?”

  “Are you?”

  Trevor had a bookie at Pete’s Bar, and though he gambled little he had learned to follow the lead of Justice Spicer.

  “I’ll put a hundred on Arkansas,” Spicer said.

  “I think I will too.”

  They played blackjack for half an hour, with Link occasionally glancing in and frowning his disapproval. Cards were prohibited during visitation, but who cared? Joe Roy played the game hard because he was training for his next career. Poker and gin rummy were the favorites in the rec room, and Spicer often had trouble finding a blackjack opponent.

  Trevor wasn’t particularly good, but he was always willing to play. It was, in Spicer’s opinion, his only redeeming quality.

  FIVE

  THE ANNOUNCEMENT had the festive air of a victory party, with red, white, and blue banners and bunting draped from the ceiling and parade music blasting through the hangar. Every D-L Trilling employee was required to be present, all four thousand of them, and to heighten their spirits they had been promised a full day of extra vacation. Eight hours paid, at an average wage of $22.40, but management didn’t care because they had found their man. The hastily built stage was also covered in banners and packed with every suit in the company, all smiling broadly and clapping wildly as the music whipped the crowd into a frenzy. Three days earlier no one had heard of Aaron Lake. Now he was their savior.

  He certainly looked like a candidate, with a new slightly trimmer haircut suggested by one consultant and a dark brown suit suggested by another. Only Reagan had been able to wear brown suits, and he’d won two landslides.

  When Lake finally appeared, and strode purposefully across the stage, shaking vigorously the hands of corporate honchos he’d never see again, the laborers went wild. The music was carefully ratcheted up a couple of notches by a sound consultant who was a member of a sound team Lake’s people had hired for $24,000 for the event. Money was of little concern.

  Balloons fell like manna. Some were popped by workers who’d been asked to pop them, so for a few seconds the hangar sounded like the first wave of a ground attack. Get ready for it. Get ready for war. Lake Before It’s Too Late.

  The Trilling CEO clutched him as if they were fraternity brothers, when in fact they’d met two hours earlier. The CEO then took the podium and waited for the noise to subside. Working with notes he’d been faxed the day before, he began a long-winded and quite generous introduction of Aaron Lake, future President. On cue, the applause interrupted him five times before he finished.

  Lake waved like a conquering hero and waited behind the microphone, then with perfect timing stepped forward and said, “My name is Aaron Lake, and I am now running for President.” More roaring applause. More piped-in parade music. More balloons drifting downward.

  When he’d had enough, he launched into his speech. The theme, the platform, the only reason for running was national security, and Lake hammered out the appalling statistics proving just how thoroughly the current Administration had depleted our military. No other issues were really that important, he said bluntly. Lure us into a war we can’t win, and we’ll forget about the tired old quarrels over abortion, race, guns, affirmative action, taxes. Concerned about family values? Start losing our sons and daughters in combat and you’d see some families with real problems.

  Lake was very good. The speech had been written by him, edited by consultants, polished by other professionals, and the night before he’d delivered it to Teddy Maynard, alone, deep inside Langley. Teddy had approved, with minor changes.

  TEDDY WAS TUCKED under his quilts and watching the show with great pride. York was with him, silent as usual. The two often sat alone, staring at screens, watching the world grow more dangerous.

  “He’s good,” York said quietly at one point.

  Teddy nodded, even managing a slight smile.

  Halfway through his speech, Lake became wonderfully angry at the Chinese. “Over a twenty-year period, we allowed them to steal forty percent of our nuclear secrets!” he said, and the laborers hissed.

  “Forty percent!” he shouted.

  It was closer to fifty, but Teddy chose to downplay it just a little. The CIA had received its share of blame for the Chinese thievery.

  For five minutes Aaron Lake blistered the Chinese, and their looting and their unprecedented military buildup. The strategy was Teddy’s. Use the Chinese to scare the American voters, not the Russians. Don’t tip them. Protect the real threat until later in the campaign.

  Lake’s timing was near-perfect. His punch line brought down the house. When he promised to double the defense budget in the first four years of his Administration, the four thousand D-L Trilling employees who built military helicopters exploded in a frenzy.

  Teddy watched it quietly, very proud of his creation. They had managed to upstage the spectacle in New Hampshire by simply snubbing it. Lake’s name had not been on the ballot, and he was the first candidate in decades to be proud of that fact. “Who needs New Hampshire?” he’d been quoted as saying. “I’ll take the rest of the country.”

  Lake signed off amid thunderous applause, and reshook all the hands on the stage. CNN returned to its studio where the talking heads would spend fifteen minutes telling the viewers what they had just witnessed.

  On his table, Teddy pushed buttons and the screen changed. “Here’s the finished product,” he said. “The first installment.”

  It was a television ad for candidate Lake, and it began with a brief glimpse of a row of grim Chinese generals standing rigidly at a military parade, watching massive hardware roll by. “You think the world’s a safer place?” a deep, rich ominous voice asked off-camera. Then, glimpses of the world’s current madmen, all watching their armies parade by—Hussein, Qaddafi, Milosevic, Kim in North Korea. Even poor Castro, with the last of his ragtag army lumbering through Havana, got a split second of airtime. “Our military could not now do what it did in 1991 during the Gulf War,�
� the voice said as gravely as if another war had already been declared. Then a blast, an atomic mushroom, followed by thousands of Indians dancing in the streets. Another blast, and the Pakistanis were dancing next door.

  “China wants to invade Taiwan,” the voice continued as a million Chinese soldiers marched in perfect step. “North Korea wants South Korea,” the voice said, as tanks rolled through the DMZ. “And the United States is always an easy target.”

  The voice changed quickly into one with a high pitch, and the ad shifted to a congressional hearing of some sort, with a heavily bemedaled general lecturing some subcommittee. “You, the Congress,” he was saying, “spend less on the military each year. This defense budget is smaller than it was fifteen years ago. You expect us to be ready for war in Korea, the Middle East, and now Eastern Europe, yet our budget keeps shrinking. The situation is critical.” The ad went blank, nothing but a dark screen, then the first voice said, “Twelve years ago there were two superpowers. Now there are none.” The handsome face of Aaron Lake appeared, and the ad finished with the voice saying, “Lake, Before It’s Too Late.”

  “I’m not sure I like it,” York said after a pause.

  “Why not?”

  “It’s so negative.”

  “Good. Makes you feel uncomfortable, doesn’t it?”

  “Very much so.”

  “Good. We’re going to flood television for a week, and I suspect Lake’s soft numbers will get even softer. The ads will make people squirm, and they won’t like them.”

  York knew what was coming. The people would indeed squirm and dislike the ads, then get the hell scared out of them, and Lake would suddenly become a visionary. Teddy was working on the terror.

  THERE WERE two TV rooms on each wing at Trumble; two small bare rooms where you could smoke and watch whatever the guards wanted you to watch. No remote—they’d tried that at first but it had caused too much trouble. By far the nastiest disagreements occurred when the boys couldn’t agree on what to watch. So the guards made the selections.