Novels by Richard Brawer

“Come on, ask it already!” Jason said to himself.

For an hour Jason had been sitting next to his boss at the witness table before the House Armed Services Sub Committee investigating arms smuggling, waiting for the question and at the same time dreading the answer.  His shirt under his armpits felt clammy.  The corner of his mouth ticked a condition that he’d never had before yesterday when he found that note in his boss’ handwriting. He was a litigator.  He was used to extricating himself from a seemingly untenable position a lying defendant had put him in.  But he never faced anything like what his boss was about to do to him.

 Congressman Forrest, the committee chairman, stared down at them from the raised platform.  His face was as austere as the stone statues all around Washington. “Do you know a Maurice Bishop?”

Finally! Jason thought.  He stared into his briefcase and held his breath.

The microphone arched upward off the green tablecloth looking like a cobra ready to strike if the wrong answer was given.  Undaunted, his boss leaned into it.  “No, I do not.”

“And there was the lie,” Jason thought.

Jason thought he had steeled himself for that lie he knew was as inevitable as the question itself.  But hearing it out loud rocked him. He ran his tongue over his dry lips.  Afraid his face would show his distress he turned his head from the inquisitors and glanced out the windows.  The Capitol building was under renovation.  Construction scaffolding crisscrossed the façade.  From inside the hearing room the gray steel tubing looked like prison bars.  “How appropriate!” he thought.

He knew his boss’ perjured himself but he couldn’t utter a word about it.  Attorney client privilege was unimpeachable.  However, in this case, where American soldiers had been killed, if his complicity were discovered, attorney client privilege wouldn’t protect him from the public scorn.  He’d be ostracized from every law firm in the country because no juror would be on his client’s side if they knew about his collaboration in his boss’ lies. The bang of a gavel jolted him and he turned back to face the panel.

“Witness dismissed,” Congressman Forest said.

Jason snapped the latches of his briefcase closed, the sound evoking a vision of handcuffs clamping around his wrists. His teeth clenched, he ushered his boss out of the hearing room.  Before they took two steps across the threshold reporters converged on them, waved microphones and tape recorders in their faces and fired questions hoping for that one damning sound bite that might win them a Pulitzer.

“How bad is the security at your factories?”

“Have you found the security breach?”

“How do you think your RI-360 got from the bottom of the ocean and into the hands of Iraqi insurgents?”

“Don’t you feel any remorse for the American soldiers killed by your weapon?”

At six-two and two hundred pounds, Jason presented an intimidating appearance.  Without a word, he stepped forward with an outstretched arm, pried open a gap in the wall of reporters, and guided his stern-faced boss through the gauntlet.  Hustling down the stairs and through the Great Rotunda of the Capitol he thought about the huge sacrifice he had made that allowed him to rise in his profession to become lead council for America’s largest weapons manufacturer.

When he graduated law school ten years ago, he had changed his name wiping away his family heritage. His uncle, who had treated him like a son after his father was killed, and his mother were devastated, but they understood. He had to disassociate himself from the Sorrentino crime family if he were to become a respected and honorable lawyer.  He wasn’t about to let anyone drive him back into the past, not even the man who convinced the board of directors to hire him. 

He had to confront his boss with the note, and if his boss didn’t have a plausible explanation, he had decided, lawyer client confidentiality or not, he would turn the evidence of his boss’ perjury over to the Congressional Committee.  His career as a lawyer would be over but that was far better than being accused as a conspirator in arms trafficking that resulted in the killing of American soldiers.

Well meaning?  How could what his boss had done ever be construed as well meaning?  Without understanding?  Like everyone in that meeting room who heard him, his boss knew exactly what he had said, “No, I do not know Maurice Bishop.”

That lie was delivered in consummate repose.  Not a quiver of his boss’ lips.  Not a flicker of his eyelids.  Not a drop of perspiration formed on his boss’ forehead.  With every dyed black hair on his seventy year old head impeccably in  place, his boss remained as stoic as when he stated his name, Ross Latham, and his title, Chairman and Chief Executive of Rathborn United Industries.

Jason’s hand tightened around the handle of his briefcase.  He would have liked to drag it up to his chest and encircle it with his arms for safer keeping, but he knew he couldn’t do that.  It would tip off anyone watching them that something important was inside.  Which there was.  Hidden behind a leather divider was absolute proof of Latham’s lie.

On the first floor, they passed through the revolving door and walked silently until they reached the plaza at the west front of the Capitol.

“Ross, we have to talk,” Jason said.

“Call my secretary on Monday.  I’ll tell her to fit you in.”

“Now!”

Annoyed that an employee, even his lawyer, would use that tone to him, Latham scowled, “About what?”

Jason stopped forcing Latham to stop with him.  Closing within an inch of his boss’s ear, he whispered, “About your meeting with a man on the most wanted list of every law enforcement agency in the world.”