…In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist…
Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Farewell address to the nation, January 17, 1961
CHAPTER 1
"Come on, ask it already!" Jason said to himself.
For an hour he 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 it. 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 seemingly untenable positions. But he never faced anything like what his boss was about to do to him.
“Do you know a Maurice Bishop?” asked Congressman Forest, the committee chairman.
"Finally!" Jason thought. He stared into his briefcase and held his breath.
“No, I do not,” his boss answered.
"And there was the lie," Jason muttered under his breath.
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!
Because he knew his boss’ answer was a lie, he was now suborning perjury. In this case, where American soldiers had been killed, if his complicity were discovered, disbarment would be the least of his worries. 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 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 to allow him 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 mother and his uncle, who had treated him like a son after his father was killed, 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 he would turn it over to the Congressional Committee.
Circling the House chamber, a gold lettered quotation above one of the lacquered, dark wood doors to a meeting room caught his eye. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in the insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning, but without understanding. Louis Brandeis.
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.”
