The Hearing (26 page)

Gus felt he’d said enough—too much maybe.

Rothman said, “A call from Harrington came in a few minutes before the cops telephoned about your father. I haven’t returned
it yet. What do you think I should tell him?”

Gus took a couple of deep breaths.

“Phil, I do not want to withdraw, and neither will Michelle. The nastier they get, the more I want to stay. And frankly they
can say whatever they want about my motives, that I want the job to legalize drugs and make money, or I want it to uphold
abortion and murder babies, or I want it to repeal abortion and subjugate women, or anything else they want to say. Right
now, Phil, the way I see it now, we’re fighting a bunch of thugs, and I don’t care if they’re wearing three-piece suits or
what schools they went to. They’re thugs, Phil, and I will not submit to them. Period. Car bombs, blackmail, suicides—this
is not the way this country needs to pick Supreme Court justices. If they get away with this, Phil, there’ll be no end.”

Gus stopped, inhaled deeply, and his lungs filled with the hot, foul air in the limo. Samantha was on the edge of her seat
now, hands balled into fists. Why are children so ready for a fight?

Phil said, “When I’ve spoken to Harrington I should have a better picture of what the options are.”

Gus hung up.

Almost immediately, the phone buzzed, and it was Michelle.

“Gus, how are you? How is Samantha? It’s just—I’m so sorry, Gus. I don’t know what to say.”

He didn’t want to talk about his father now. They’d have to wait until they were alone.

She said, “Is Samantha all right?”

“She’s fine, taking everything better than I am, I think.” Samantha was tugging on his arm. “She wants to talk to you. Here
she is.”

He handed the phone to Samantha. “Hi.” Her voice was soft, almost shy, not matching the excitement on her face.
She listened to Michelle, then smiled widely. “He’s okay. I’m trying to take care of him.” More silence. “Yeah, it’s really
hot in here. But we’ll be out soon. Don’t worry about us. We’re fine. We just miss you a lot. Okay. Right. Me too. Here he
is.”

She handed the phone back.

“Gus?” Carl’s voice.

“We’ve gotta cut this short, Gus. The technicians are on us to save power on your phone. We’ll call later.”

They hung up, and in two hours Rothman called back. He’d picked Harrington up in his car and they’d driven around Washington
and talked. Harrington, looking tired, bags under his eyes, had offered to suppress the agreement between Gus’s father, the
tobacco company, and Vicaro’s father if Gus’s name were withdrawn from the confirmation process. He said he had to have an
answer by four that afternoon. Rothman said he’d see what reaction there was “from the others.”

Gus said, “What are you going to tell him?”

The limo clock was at ten past one.

Rothman said, “What do you want me to tell him?”

“No go. No withdrawal.”

“Are you sure, Gus? You don’t have to do this, you know. You never signed up for car bombs.”

“Phil, you know as well as I do that withdrawing would not change anything with this bomb. If we said I was withdrawing they’d
just say, ‘Oh, fine, we believe you, we’ll disconnect the bomb right now.’ And we come out, and they blow us up. They know
the minute they let us out of here I’d un-withdraw myself. They want me dead, Phil, withdrawal or no withdrawal. Bargain with
these guys, get an
agreement, walk us out of here, and we’re dead, Phil. These are
Colombians
. Ask Carl. He’ll tell you.”

“I understand what you’re saying, Gus.”

“Let me know what the President says, Phil. Let me know what happens with Harrington.”

They hung up, and Samantha said, “Game of cards?”

“No, thanks, Samantha. I’ve got a lot on my mind.”

“It’ll help. My dad taught me. Whenever we had problems, we got out the cards. Play and talk.”

“What do you want to play?”

“Five-card stud.”

She took a sheet of notepaper from a side pocket in the door and tore it into pieces.

“These are postage stamps. I always play for stamps.”

She dealt.

Carl left Michelle in the FBI command truck and walked outside.

Max Iverson, who’d asked to talk to him, was waiting. Carl said, “Take a walk?”

They strolled past a barrier and continued about thirty feet up the deserted, tree-lined sidewalk toward Blossom and the Mercedes.

When they were well out of earshot of other agents and police, Iverson said, “Interesting development.”

“Tell me.”

“Some of our tech people were over the Trade Commission in a chopper last night with infrared thermal imagers. They can see
bodies inside the building. It’s occupied.”

“Can they tell how many?”

“They say two. There was warm body radiation concentrated at the front of the building, a sitting room.”

“How do they know it’s a sitting room?”

“Architects’ drawings from the city records office. Inside the back door, there’s a stairway to the second floor. At the top
of the stairs, there’s a corridor to a sitting room at the front of the building. That’s where the tech people say the personnel
are gathered.”

“Keep going.”

“We’re developing a contingency plan for an intrusion. Just in case.”

Carl led Iverson a couple of steps farther up the block away from the command truck. “What’s State think about that?”

The State Department had sent over a deputy assistant to keep an eye on the enforcement people. State had already let it be
known that if anyone was even thinking of requesting permission to enter the Colombian Trade Commission, they could save their
breath. The Trade Commission was viewed as an extension of the Colombian embassy and therefore sovereign Colombian property,
inviolable. Of course State
had
been known to change its mind. Changing your mind was what diplomats did for a living.

“I haven’t yet seen a need to discuss it with them.”

Carl said, “What’s the plan?”

“First step, put someone inside, up the stairs, down the hall, insert voice sensors. We’ll hear everything said in the front
sitting room. Cover the rear door with a TV, tell us if anyone comes or goes.”

“Put someone inside. Just like that.”

“The spooks do it all the time. Stick a black box in the alarm line, read the current, duplicate it, feed it in, cut the
line, the system can’t tell the difference. In and out, no one’s the wiser.”

“Happy little band of burglars, you guys are.”

“Not burglars. Burglars take things. We leave things behind.”

“So you get in, leave your stuff. Then what?”

“We have the option of picking our moment, enter an intrusion team, take everyone out.”

“Before they could set off the bomb?”

“The intrusion people say yes. They’ve got—they call them incentive inhibitors. Special ordnance. Grenades. Blast, light,
sound. Flatten those guys, blind them, deafen them, scare them out of their minds, totally immobilize their will. It’s thirty
seconds before they even begin to think about thinking. No problem.”

“No problem? Come on, Iverson. Nothing’s that easy.”

“These guys aren’t amateurs, Carl. They went into a Delta Airbus in Italy, hit it through two doors, knocked out six terrorists,
released a hundred and thirty-seven passengers and crew—elapsed time, six and a half minutes, casualties zero. The guys in
that Trade Commission they could do before breakfast, not even get real awake.”

“How long would they be out?”

“Recovery from the entry ordnance—blast, gas—about ten minutes. If they behave themselves.”

“We need them cooperating.”

“Oh, they’ll cooperate. The entry operation leaves targets in a highly cooperative frame of mind. A whole personality change.
Please and thank you all the way.”

“I want to know about the device, Max. It’s on a remote detonator, but there’s a timer, too. I want to know when the timer’s
set for.”

“If they know, they’ll tell us.”

Carl took a few more steps toward Blossom. He stood thinking, turned, and walked back.

“If we don’t confront the occupants, just do a surreptitious entry, put in voice sensors and a TV camera, nice and quiet,
what’s the risk, total?”

“Virtually zero. Do it all the time. We’ve got specialists never do anything else.”

“Okay. Camera and voice sensors. The rest, I’ll think about it.”

Carl left Iverson and went back to the command truck.

A young man in white shirtsleeves appeared in the doorway of the command truck. “The EOD guys are here.”

Carl wheeled back the swivel chair and stood.

He said to Michelle, sitting next to him. “Come with me.”

Two men and a woman waited for them in the sitting room of the ATF Winnebago camper. One of the men wore a suit, the other
man and the woman were in bright orange hooded coveralls. Michelle’s eyes were drawn immediately to the woman. She was young,
early twenties, hardly more than four feet tall (her coveralls baggy, rolled up at the cuffs), with short curly brown hair
and eyes that sparkled. A cheerleader, baton twirler. Baton twirling was a big thing in Alabama high schools. Was she from
the South?

Carl said, “This is Mrs. Parham.” He mentioned the men’s names, but Michelle didn’t get them. Her attention was fixed on this
tiny, bright-eyed girl, called Terry.

Terry said, “Hi. Nice to meet you.”

She was so perky she bounced on the balls of her feet. Definitely not the South. More like New York.

The man in the suit unfolded a side-view diagram of a Mercedes station wagon and smoothed it out on the coffee table.

He put a laptop computer next to the Mercedes diagram, opened the lid, and touched some keys. The screen showed a profile
of the Mercedes, white lines on a blue background.

“We put in a probe and it came out with RDX, encountered ten inches below the vehicle’s ceiling.”

Carl thought, Well … and we’re all still alive.

“We’ve made very close measurements of the height of the vehicle off the pavement. Working with our explosives people and
Mercedes engineers, extrapolating the volume of the RDX from the distance between the Mercedes ceiling and the top of the
RDX, computing from the weight of the RDX, and the capacity of the vehicle’s shock absorbers, we get a very reliable estimate
of 1,980 pounds of RDX. That gives a profile like this.”

He pressed a key on the laptop. The white outline of the Mercedes profile filled quickly with yellow.

“The yellow shows the volume in the Mercedes of the RDX. You’ll notice it’s not completely full.”

He ran a pencil point along a narrow area between the top of the yellow and the upper outline of the top of the Mercedes.

“There’s a space.”

Carl glanced at Terry.

“You like the look of that?”

Terry grinned. “Very much.”

Carl said, “Forget it.”

“Carl”—it was the man in coveralls—”this is our job. This is what we do. It’s not the first time.”

“You don’t have to tell me again.”

“People who use RDX in vehicle bombs are sophisticated. They know what they’re doing. They use highly reliable detonators.
No surprises.”

Carl was silent, looking at the laptop.

Michelle said, “Excuse me?”

Eyes turned to Michelle.

“Can you tell me what this is all about?”

They looked at Carl, who took a step back from the laptop.

“They’re from ATF’s Explosive Ordnance Division. They deactivate explosive devices.”

Michelle could not keep herself from flashing a look at Terry.

Carl said, “They want to try to deactivate the device in the Mercedes.”

“How can they”—she looked at Terry—”how can they … are you …”

Terry looked at Carl. Carl said, “Go ahead.”

Terry said to Michelle, “I can go in, locate the detonator, and deactivate it.”

“What do you mean—go in? What if … I mean … I’m sorry.”

The man in coveralls said, “We’ll cut an opening in the roof. As you can see from the computer, there’s not much room there,
but there’s a little, about ten inches between the RDX and the ceiling. That’s about—”

Terry interrupted. “There’s enough. I’m not very big.”

Michelle didn’t want to believe it. Gus and Samantha were a few yards from that explosives-packed station wagon. Not to mention
Terry herself.

The man said, “It’s not the first time we’ve done this,
Mrs. Parham. Mercedes people say the roof metal is one-point-seven millimeters thick. We use a circular saw we got from the
Emergency Service cops in New York. No flame, no heat, no sparks. Two-foot hole takes thirty seconds. Lift it right out.”

Terry said, “I squeeze inside, squirm back to the detonator, deactivate it, and come out. Then they hook up a truck to the
Mercedes, tow it away someplace safe, and blow it up. End of problem.”

Michelle shook her head. Then she said, “If this goes wrong … my husband and daughter … I’m sorry, Terry. This is very brave
of you, and I appreciate the risk you’re ready to take, but if something goes wrong …”

“It won’t go wrong, Mrs. Parham.”

Carl took a step to the diagram on the table. “You seem very confident.”

Terry said, “We don’t do this stuff unless we’re confident.”

Carl said, “And the more you get away with, the more confident you get.”

“We’re not reckless.”

Michelle thought, Not reckless? Of
course
you’re reckless. If squeezing yourself inside a vehicle filled with explosives isn’t reckless, what in the world …

Michelle looked at Terry’s hands. She was not wearing a wedding ring. She was not wearing any rings at all, or a watch or
a bracelet. Maybe when you worked with bombs you didn’t wear jewelry. She said, “Are you married?”

“No.”

“Boyfriend?”

Terry grinned and looked at the man in the coveralls, who smiled. Both of them? What if they got married? Did
they work together? What if one got blown up? What if they
both
got blown up? What if they had children and got blown up?

Carl said, “Any more questions?”

The man in coveralls said, “There’s not that many alternatives.”