05.Under Siege v5 Read online

  His daughters—they were his offerings to the human race, to the future and its infinite potential, to God and whatever great and incomprehensible thing He had in mind for the human species. The girls were not special, not gifted—they were just people. They and their children would work and love and marry and have children, long after Thanos Liarakos and the Greek of the sandwich shop were dust. So he loved them desperately.

  Elizabeth. Ahh, gentle Elizabeth, with your mother’s heart and your empty desires and your cravings …

  You love a woman for many reasons. A goddess she seems when you are young. But finally you see she is of common clay, the same as you, with faults and fears and vain, foolish dreams and petty vices. So you cherish her, love her even more. As she ages you cling closer and closer, holding tighter and tighter. She becomes the female half of you. The roughening of her skin, the engraved lines on her face, the thickening waistline and the sagging breasts, none of it matters a damn. You love her for what she is not as much as for what she is.

  Elizabeth, your vices aren’t so petty. You are selling your soul for that white powder. It will lay you in your grave, devastate your husband who loves you, deprive two girls of the mother that you promised to be when you gave them life.

  Two nurses entered the room and flipped on the light over the bed. Thanos Liarakos came fully awake and squinted at the two white-clad figures bending over Elizabeth. They pried open her eyes and checked her pulse. The stouter nurse rigged a blood-pressure cuff. Elizabeth groaned but said nothing. She was still intoxicated.

  “Lucky,” one of them muttered as she checked the IV drip. “She was lucky this time.”

  Liarakos looked at his watch. Almost eight o’clock. The sounds of the staff-chattering in the corridors and moving tray carts and equipment came through the open door. He levered himself out of the chair and stood swaying while his heart compensated for the sudden change of position.

  He was still standing at the foot of the bed when the nurses bustled out.

  She looked old. With no makeup and her hair a mess, Elizabeth looked finished with life. No more warm moments with the children, no more sensuous I-love-yous, no more evenings with the fire crackling and the children laughing. She looked used up. Burned out.

  Thanos Liarakos rubbed his face and wondered why he wasn’t crying. Ah, it was that crazy double perspective. He had lived this play before.

  But he should be crying. He really should. This was the place he was supposed to cry.

  The lead headline in this morning’s Post was THE KEY TO HELL. The bold black letters spanned the width of the top of page one. The editor had run a photo of Aldana getting off the plane at Andrews Air Force Base wearing handcuffs and a fierce scowl. Ottmar Mergenthaler and Jack Yocke had shared the byline on the story. Beside the story was Mergenthaler’s column.

  Jack Yocke read the four inches of Ott’s column that was on the front page and flipped to page A-12 for the rest of it. The federal government and the American people, Mergenthaler said, shouldn’t let themselves be intimidated by Chano Aldana, who was obviously going to try the same tactics here that he had used with mixed success in Colombia. If he thought the American people would respond like frightened sheep to terrorism and extortion, Aldana didn’t understand the American people.

  Yocke snorted and tossed the paper on his desk. Maybe he should give Ott a soapbox for Christmas.

  His phone rang. “Jack, there’s a reporter from a Dallas paper on the line. He wants to talk to you about your interview yesterday with Aldana.”

  “I don’t answer questions. I ask them.”

  “Does that mean no?”

  “Yep.”

  Yocke tucked a notebook and pencils in his jacket pocket as he stirred through his message slips and the unopened mail. He would have to return these calls later, maybe this evening. With his coat over his arm, he went looking for his editor. Maybe he could go down to the courthouse with the rest of the newsroom crew and mill around smartly while Aldana was arraigned.

  In a dingy office two doors from the courtroom, Thanos Liarakos arranged his fanny in a chair across a desk from the U.S. attorney for the District, William L. Bader.

  Bader was known as an aggressive prosecutor who meticulously prepared his cases. Rumor with the hard tang of truth had it that Bader had judicial ambitions. Liarakos didn’t hold that against him. Bader was a damn good lawyer.

  “I dropped in to have a little chat about the shenanigans your people used to get my client on Judge Snyder’s calendar.”

  “What shenanigans?” Bader’s eyebrows rose a sixteenth of an inch.

  “You can wipe off the innocent look. You’re wasting it on me. The people in the clerk’s office have whispered in the wrong places.”

  “So you’d rather be in front of Maximum John or Hanging Jack?”

  “Well, you know how these things are. My client might have lucked out with Judge Worth if the deck hadn’t been so neatly stacked against him.” Judge Worth had the reputation, probably exaggerated, of bending over backward to help defense counsel and screwing the prosecution at every opportunity.

  “So why are you in here complaining? The hearing in front of the magistrate starts in twenty minutes. Complain to her.”

  “I don’t think opening this can of worms will do you any good in the newspapers, Will. People might get the idea the government is conducting a vendetta against Aldana, trying to make him a scapegoat. I thought you might do something for me, and I’ll live with Judge Snyder.”

  “What?”

  “Make a motion for a gag order. Both sides. Including the defendant.”

  Bader’s eyes went to a copy of the Post on the corner of the desk. He spent several seconds looking at it. Then he sat back in his chair and rubbed his nose. It was a big nose, but it was well arranged in a large, square, craggy face.

  “You want a trial or a circus?” Liarakos asked.

  “That fool is putting the noose around his own neck. I don’t give a damn if he holds press conferences twice a day and threatens to butcher everybody east of Pittsburgh.”

  “You don’t know how that will cut and neither do I,” Thanos Liarakos shot back. “What we both know is that we’re officers of the court. Let’s have a fair trial and not let this deteriorate into some kind of Geraldo Rivera spectacular.”

  Bader snorted derisively.

  “We gotta stopper this asshole before he poisons the well,” Liarakos said softly. “What if no one with an IQ above fifty is willing to serve on the jury? What if one or two jurors become afraid to convict him?”

  “I’ll worry about that when and if it happens. He’s your client, dammit! You want him quiet, you shut him up.”

  “Gimme a fucking break, Will.”

  Bader’s lips twisted and he massaged an eyebrow. He was, Liarakos suspected, trying to decide how Judge Snyder would view the prosecutor’s failure to ask for a gag order if the defendant kept grabbing headlines with veiled threats. Thanos Liarakos sensed that he had won. He sat back in his chair and crossed his legs.

  “All right, all right.”

  Bader called for a secretary and dictated the motion. When he finished, he asked Liarakos, “Is that satisfactory to you?”

  The defense lawyer suggested a change that strengthened the requested order. He cited a case from memory. Will Bader nodded and waved the secretary toward a typewriter.

  “I might as well tell you now,” Bader said, “while you’re in a good mood and feeling full of bonhomie—I’m filing a motion today to seize all of Aldana’s assets. Everything he has, including the money he used to pay your fee, is proceeds of criminal activity. Every dime.”

  Both men were well aware of the implications of such a motion. If he were stripped of all his assets, an accused individual could no longer pay his attorney’s fee. Of course, the court could then appoint an attorney to represent him, but the defense that could then be mounted was severely restricted by the limited funds that were, by law, available from th
e government to pay defense counsel. In effect, by confiscating the defendant’s assets in a civil action the government could greatly increase its odds of ultimately convicting the defendant in the criminal case, where the burden of proof was so much higher. These motions were fair, the judges reasoned, because in good conscience a criminal should not be allowed to use the proceeds of his crime to avoid being punished for committing it.

  Critics—mainly defense attorneys—argued that the government had the cart before the horse: stripping assets from a defendant before he had been convicted of anything seemed to shrink the presumption of innocence to the vanishing point. The problem was that the profits of crime were real—you could touch the money—but the presumption of innocence was a legal fiction, and ninety-nine percent of the time it was just that, fiction. The defendant was guilty and everybody knew it except the jurors. So the government grabbed the bucks.

  Liarakos, of course, had been expecting just such a motion. The only question was when. The arguments pro and con he knew well, for he had fought these motions in other cases. Some he won, some he lost.

  He cleared his throat. “I might as well tell you now, my client has engaged another firm to represent him in any civil confiscation action. Off the record, no doubt you’ll get some assets. But you’ll not get them all.”

  “Every little bit helps,” Bader said grinning. “What with the deficit and all, it’s nice to see guys like Aldana contributing their mite. We’ll be serving interrogatories next week, and maybe depositions the following week?”

  “Not up to me. Serve them on him and he’ll send them to the firm he’s hired.”

  If Chano Aldana thought he had problems now, Liarakos told himself, wait until he read the interrogatories. Any answer he supplied could be used against him in the criminal trial. Most of these asset confiscation actions went uncontested for this very good reason. Regardless of how the criminal action went, Aldana was going to return to Colombia a much poorer man.

  Which somehow didn’t break Liarakos’ heart.

  Jack Yocke stood against the back wall of the courtroom shoulder to shoulder with three dozen other reporters and made notes on his steno pad. “Courtroom packed … crowd hushed, expectant …”

  Defense attorney Thanos Liarakos’ assistant, Judith Lewis, was already at the defense table, which was marked with a small sign. To her far right, with an empty chair between them, sat a man in a brown sports coat and slacks. Yocke murmured to the man beside him and pointed.

  “The interpreter.”

  At the prosecutor’s table sat another woman, whom Yocke assumed was an assistant. He whispered another question to the man beside him. Wilda Rodriguez-Herrera. The man spelled the name as Yocke wrote it down. Why is it, the Post reporter wondered, that most high-powered lawyers these days have female factotums? Both women were in their middle-to-late twenties or perhaps early thirties—it was impossible to tell at this distance—and were dressed for success in conservative getups that must have set each of them back a week’s pay. Yocke jotted another note.

  Aldana entered in company with two U.S. marshals. He was wearing a dark suit and a deep maroon tie. His hands were cuffed in front of him. As one of the marshals took the cuffs off, Aldana looked quickly around the room, scanning each face. Every eye in the room was on him. The room was so quiet Yocke could hear the clink of metal as the cuffs were removed from Aldana’s wrists.

  The defendant sat down at the defense table between Judith Lewis and the interpreter. One of the marshals took a chair immediately behind him, inside the barricade, while the other moved to a chair against the wall where he could watch the defendant and the crowd without turning his head.

  Lewis whispered something to Aldana. He made no reply, didn’t look at her, kept his face impassive. Now the interpreter whispered in his ear. Aldana replied, a few phrases only, and didn’t look at him. He surveyed the bailiff, who averted his eyes; then Aldana turned his head, leaned forward slightly in his chair, and stared for several seconds at Assistant Prosecutor Rodriguez-Herrera, who was busy with a sheet of paper that lay on the table in front of her.

  Now his eye caught the Post courtroom artist in the far corner, who was studying him through a pair of opera glasses mounted on a tripod. For the first time Aldana’s features moved—the upper lip rose into a slight sneer and his eyes became mere slits.

  The moment passed and the face resumed its impassive calm. Aldana looked back toward the front of the room, at the magistrate’s bench with the flags behind it. He leaned back in his chair, sat loosely, comfortably, staring at the flags. He crossed his legs. In a moment he uncrossed them.

  He’s nervous, Yocke decided, and scribbled some more in his notebook. He’s trying not to show it, but he is nervous. Maybe he’s human after all.

  Minutes passed. Coughs and hacks and muttered comments from the audience. Aldana poured himself a cup of water from the pitcher on the table and spilled some. He ignored the spill. After several sips he placed the cup on the table in front of him and didn’t touch it again.

  As he stared at Aldana, Jack Yocke reviewed what he had heard about the defendant. A barrio brat from Medellín, Chano Aldana reputedly had worked his way to the top of the local cocaine industry by outthinking and murdering his rivals. He was smarter than the average sewer rat and twice as ruthless. Rumor had it he had personally executed over two dozen men and had ordered the murders of hundreds more by name, including a candidate for president of Colombia. A vicious enemy of the law-and-order forces battling the cartels for control of Colombia, he had ordered airliners and department stores bombed, judges murdered, and policemen tortured.

  Yet this monster had a human side: he liked soccer and controlled several teams in the central Colombian league. Referees and star players on rival teams had been assassinated on his order. Finally the government had suspended league play because of organized crime’s corrosive influence on the games.

  The last two years Aldana had allegedly spent hiding somewhere in the Amazon. He had been captured by the Colombian government when he decided in a weak moment to visit a prostitute of whom he was fond. Somehow he had survived the ensuing shootout, although six of his bodyguards hadn’t. Sewer rat’s luck.

  By all accounts Aldana was an amazing man, a Latin Al Capone with several of Hitler’s worst traits thrown in for seasoning. Yet staring at this slightly overweight, middle-aged Latin male with the black curly hair and the modest thin mustache, Jack Yocke found this tale of unadulterated evil hard to believe. It was incredible, really. Even Aldana’s performance at yesterday’s news conference couldn’t overcome one’s natural inclination to accept the man as a fellow human being. Yocke tried to picture him eating snake and monkey meat in the jungle—and gave up.

  U.S. Attorney William Bader had a herculean task ahead of him to convince twelve working-class Americans that Chano Aldana was el padrino, the godfather.

  Yocke was furiously scribbling notes when the door to the hallway opened and a man entered, a man wearing a naval officer’s blue uniform. Captain Jake Grafton. His ribbons and wings made a splotch of color on his left breast. Those and the four gold rings on each sleeve looked strangely out of place among all these civilians.

  Jack Yocke stared as Grafton surveyed the seating arrangements, apparently concluded the place was full, and took up a station against the wall, near the door. His eyes met those of the reporter. He nodded once, then his gaze settled on Chano Aldana, who had turned to examine the newcomer. Aldana turned back toward the bench.

  Several of the spectators looked the captain over, whispering back and forth, and finally dismissed him.

  Jake Grafton? Why is he here? Yocke scribbled down the name in his notebook and put three question marks after it.

  A few minutes later the door behind the bench opened and Bader came in, followed by Thanos Liarakos. Bader glanced at Aldana and the audience and sat down beside Rodriguez-Herrera.

  Judith Lewis moved to the chair at the far left of her table
and Liarakos took the one she had vacated. He spoke to the defendant, got something in reply, then spoke to Lewis.

  He looks tired, Yocke thought, and studied the attorney. Dark, trim, of medium height with black hair streaked with gray at the temples, Liarakos habitually wore thousand-dollar tailor-made wool suits. He was wearing one today, if Yocke’s eyes could be trusted. Liarakos normally looked every inch the successful criminal lawyer. Yet Mergenthaler had said that Liarakos had spent the summer of 1989 playing baseball in a professional senior league in Florida. At the age of forty-one he had tried out for a team composed almost exclusively of former major leaguers and made it. Jack Yocke didn’t know exactly what to make of that.

  This morning, the reporter thought, the honest, sincere face that juries loved looked softer, less on stage. Then the explanation occurred to him—there was no jury.

  “All rise,” the bailiff announced. The lawyers rose respectfully as the audience shuffled noisily to its feet. Aldana hesitated a second, and Liarakos pulled almost imperceptibly on his sleeve.

  The magistrate, enshrouded in her judicial robe, entered and took her seat behind the raised bench.

  The bailiff chanted the incomprehensible incantation that opened every court session and ended with a curt “Be seated.”

  Jack Yocke kept his attention on the defendant. Aldana was leaning forward in his chair staring at the magistrate, a fiftyish woman with her hair pulled back severely, wearing a stylish pair of large glasses. He didn’t take his eyes off her as she read the indictment handed down by a grand jury in Miami several years ago and the interpreter spoke in a low tone in his ear. Yocke could just hear the rat-a-tat-tat of the Spanish, although he couldn’t make out the words.