Deadly Waters (33 page)
Authors: Theodore Judson
12/21/10 22:32 CST
“When exactly did this happen?” asked the FBI agent of Terre Haute prison guard Lester McDougal.
Corporal McDougal adjusted his position on the hardwood chair that was giving him a benumbing pain in his enormous backside. Alfonso Del Barca, currently an inmate on death row, had told Lester three days earlier he had seen a photograph of a California businessman Alfonso identified as the mysterious Charles Corello.
“You see, sir,” said Lester, doubting he would ever be able to accommodate his large body to the small chair and suffering from the cold in the unheated room and frightened by the interrogation room’s one-way mirror, on the other side of which he sensed the presence of his boss, “I thought it was a joke.”
“A joke?” said the belligerent FBI man, getting close to Lester’s face. “Eighty-four thousand one hundred and seven Americans are dead in the largest terrorist attack in world history, and you, Mr. McDougal, think it might be a joke!”
“Maybe ‘joke’ was the wrong word,” said Lester. “I meant to say, these supermarket things, they’re so wild, so full of bullshit--pardon me--I mean, who takes them seriously. So this Mr. Henry Peppers from
The
World
Wide
Sensation
, he sends me a copy of this week’s edition and a note that says, ‘Won’t you show this to one of the Colombians?’”
“He sent you money, didn’t he, Mr. McDougal?” asked the FBI agent. “A thousand dollars?”
The prison guard licked his lips, which were drying and cracking in the glare of the overhead lights. “Was that illegal?” he asked. “I didn’t know. Anyhow, this Alfonso sees the picture of this Mondragon character and starts swearing in Spanish: ‘
Este
es
Corrello
!
Este
es
Corrello
!’ That is Corello!”
“I know what it means,” said the agent.
“Alfonso tears this picture off the front page of
The
Sensation
,” continued McDougal, “and he sticks it out the door of his cell so Claudio Munoz—that’s his cousin or something--over in the next cell, can see the picture. Sure enough Claudio goes nuts and starts shouting and raising hell like Alfonso did. I got Pete Sanchez, a guard on D Block, to come and ask him what they was saying. Turns out Claudio also identified the guy in the picture as one of the leaders of their group, the man they know as Charles Corello.”
“Yes, now we’re getting somewhere,” said the agent. “It’s good that you’re co-operating now.”
The agent sat himself down across the room from McDougal. He glanced at the one-way mirror, behind which he knew his superiors were sitting.
“I brought the other pictures Peppers emailed me up to the cell,” McDougal went on, “and they identified that other California guy.”
“John Taylor,” said the agent.
“Yeah, that he was ‘the Russian;’ that’s what they called him,” explained the prison guard, “the Russian. I showed them some of the dead men. The ones killed in Wisconsin and Alabama. They said the Army man was somebody called Colonel Max. The other people were supposed to be East Germans and such.”
“When did this happen?” asked the agent a second time.
“I think two days ago,” said Lester, repeating the lie he had told moments earlier. “Maybe it could have been longer ago…”
The answer took the agent out of his relaxed mood. Lester could see the muscles bunching in the man’s neck as he prepared to go back on the attack.
“Maybe it was a week or so ago...” said Lester.
“How long a period of time is an ‘or so?’” asked the agent through clinched teeth.
“Five, six days ago... maybe a week,” said Lester, his words limping into the cold air between himself and the agent.
Lester half expected the man to leap across the table and beat Lester’s fat face into the cement floor. The agent only sighed and went to the one-way glass. He leaned his forehead against the mirror and made a hand gesture to someone on the other side. Seconds later two other men in identical brown suits entered the room, one of them carrying a brand new copy of
The
Sensation
that bore the headlines: KILLERS ID BOSSES.
“Good enough, Hudson,” said the man with the paper to the interrogator. “One more question to you, Mr. McDougal. With whom among the guards did you share the money?”
“Hey, it’s a prison,” said Lester, belatedly falling back into a defensive position. “How do you know someone else didn’t talk? Things leak out of here. It didn’t have to be one of us guards.”
12/22/10 09:06 EST
At nine o’clock sharp the president’s chief of staff had given each cabinet member a copy of the brief news summary, the contents of which were a mystery to none of them. No one had yet spoken a word. The Secretary of Defense, he of the elegant silver locks, pretended to read the document, despite having already read the story in
The
Post
in his limousine on the way to work that morning.
The Secretary of Interior tapped his nervous feet on the brightly colored carpet and hoped that no one asked him anything. He hated when these policy wonks got together to discuss the fate of the world, as they always made him feel so small just because he knew twenty thousand barn yard jokes and not a great deal else.
The squat woman in charge of Health and Human Services held the paper in front of her but secretly was looking at a Tiffany lamp behind one of the Joint Chiefs; it looked, she opined, strident against the room’s periwinkle wall paper; a simple cream-colored paper would have made a more suitable background.
The Chief Security Advisor, fearing that everyone else would try to blame him for this terrible turn of events, looked forlornly at a nineteenth century French chair standing next to one of the Oval Office’s many side doors that led to God knows what secret chamber, and he wished he were hidden somewhere in the nineteenth century with the chair’s makers.
“None of you are fooling anyone,” declared the chief of staff, breaking the awful silence. “We know why we’re here.”
“This is the end of the world,” declared the head of the FBI. “Thank God it didn’t come in the year of a presidential election!”
The president himself was not present to hear this comment. Yesterday morning when the news broke of the Colombians identifying Mondragon and the other conspirators, the president had instructed his press secretary to treat the story as a joke, if anyone in the press asked about it; after all, this was a tabloid story. This morning, a gray wintry work day in the capital, the same story appeared in
The
Post
, and the president had retired to his bedroom and locked the door, leaving his bulldog chief of staff to rally the troops in this dark hour.
“Thank you for that perceptive comment, Dwayne,” sneered the chief of staff.
“Did you see Hathaway on ‘The Today Show?’” asked the Secretary of State, referring to the Senate minority leader and de facto leader of the other party. “He looked like the damn Cheshire Cat. I swear to God: he was giggling like a school girl when he called for a hearing into how we blew the investigation.”
The chief of staff thrust out his jaw and thought unutterable thoughts about both the Secretary of State and Senator Hathaway. The others observed his facial gesture and planned other ways to remain silent, except, that is, for the Secretary of Defense, he of the silvery locks and the calm, patrician manner.
“It’s not the end of the world, Dwayne,” said the Secretary of DoD, “in fact, this is a tempest in a teapot.”
“Really, Parnell?” asked the chief of staff, now focusing his hatred upon the famous silver mane and the Roman Caesar’s face that was underneath it. “I suppose the Second World War wasn’t all that bad either?”
The Secretary of DoD presented the chief of staff with a copy of the papers Ronald Goodman had given him in the Pentagon basement.
“Turns out,” said the secretary, stretching his arms as if he were lying back on a porch swing on a cloudless summer day, “someone at the DoD looked into this California connection to the dam bombings two years ago. We were diligent, thorough, eager to follow the evidence to wherever it took us. Sadly, our best efforts, as these documents make crystal clear, were squelched by one particular government official, an undersecretary in my department.”
The chief of staff was making a pretence of looking through the papers, and he was
unimpressed by the Secretary of DoD’s story.
“That hardly gets us out of the woods, Parnell,” he said. “If our people screwed the pooch, then in the public’s eyes that proves we all screwed the pooch.”
“You haven’t heard the best part,” said the Secretary of DoD, running a hand over the back of his silver mane. Everyone in the room inched forward to listen to him. Even the Secretary of the Interior pretended he was following this. “The guilty official is a holdover from the
previous
administration. We’re home free!”
Somewhere there is a child rising from a wheelchair to walk once more or there is a blind man miraculously regaining his vision and looking up to see a golden harvest moon, or there is a homeless alcoholic in a Bowery mission finding his salvation and again able to dream of better days. Each of these may experience a degree of happiness, but they will never know the sublime joy that was then unleashed in the West Wing. Tears flowed from the chief of staff’s sky blue eyes, and he went to the Secretary of DoD to shake his hand and call him Old friend. The National Security Advisor at once stepped into a White House closet, fell to her knees, and gave thanks to the Lord with clasped hands. The squat Secretary of Health and Human Services jumped upon the conference table and did a jig while the Secretaries of Interior and Energy clapped along in five/four time.
“Up yours, Hathaway!” shouted the chief of staff and felt like he would enjoy beating up a small man there and then.
“When we get through with them, even Cogswell can have his eight years!” declared the Secretary of State, meaning that the photogenic but intellectually challenged Vice President Cogswell--at the moment attending the funeral of the richest man in Albania--had a shot at the presidency.
The Director of Communications ran up the marble stairs to the presidential bedroom and slipped a note underneath the door. By ten o’clock that morning the commander-in-chief was downstairs drinking champagne and tasting but, out of deference to the administration’s anti-smoking program, not lighting up a contraband Cuban cigar.
By twelve thirty-seven they were deep into lunch and a second crate of champagne; the Secretary of the Interior was singing cowboy songs, and the First Lady had been brought in to play the piano. By one in the afternoon the Secretary of Health and Human Services had cornered the elegant Secretary of DoD against the periwinkle wallpaper.
“I love you, Parnell,” she breathed into his ear. “I’ve always loved you.”
“I have told you before, Martha,” said the man of the hour, “that you should never drink this early in the day.”
12/23/10 01:54 PST
John Taylor had dreamed the same nightmare for three nights in a row. The one image of the dream, the one that appeared without introduction and ended without conclusion, was John himself standing in the middle of a snowy field. He was holding something that resembled a traffic sign, and had to shift it from hand to hand on account of the bitter cold. When he could, John rubbed his bare palms together and told himself: “Only one hand cherishes the other. Only one hand cherishes the other.”
When he awoke, he wrote that phrase on his night stand pad and wondered at its meaning.
John tried to telephone his estranged son in Los Angeles three times that night and had each time gotten the answering machine’s message that ran: “Hello, this is John Taylor. I’m not here now. If you want to leave a message, wait for the beep. Except for my father. He can go fuck himself.”
John Taylor left a message anyway.
“Only one hand cherishes the other,” he said. “That means... it means only you can understand me, only I can love you. We are like two hands, Johnny, you and I.”
He hung up each time knowing that the young man would not return his call.
Mondragon rarely visited Taylor’s house any more. He continued to telephone nearly every day to boost John’s sagging spirits, although a conversation with Mondragon was not always uplifting. That old friend had called John at half past seven the previous morning to tell him there was a possibility that they might both be arrested soon.
“Nothing to worry about,” Mondragon had said. “They know nothing. Because there is nothing to know. We haven’t done anything wrong. Did you know, John, your line is being bugged? Some ATF or FBI or whatever alphabet soup agency they send will take us somewhere, separately of course. They will take us somewhere downtown, maybe down state. Ask us some questions. We will deny everything, and as soon as we make our appearance in court, the judge will let us go. Don’t let them panic you, John. That’s the main thing. Deny everything. You’ve never been to South America. You never impersonated any Russian spy. This is a story some terrorists on death row have concocted. Oh, I should say the judge won’t just let us go; he’ll set bail. No problem. My lawyers have everything mapped out. I hope you aren’t drinking these days, John. I need you dry for this. When you’ve been drinking you tend to say foolish things. Things that aren’t true.”
“Only one hand can cherish the other,” said John Taylor.
“What’s that?” asked Mondragon. “You’re sitting there drinking right now, aren’t you?”
“No,” said John, and set the open bottle of Scotch on the floor amid the dozens of empty bottles. “I’m not.”
“You better not be,” said Mondragon. “Focus on the job at hand. Oh, by the way, because we may have to prepare a legal defense and not because we have anything to hide, don’t talk to me on this line ever again. I’ll find some other way to contact you.”
He was gone then, leaving John Taylor holding the telephone and yearning to ask Mondragon what he thought the dream meant. Erin was so smart, thought Taylor, he would be able to tell him what the snowy field and the traffic sign represented. The two of them might sit down together over a cup of coffee sometime, then Mondragon could explain everything, and John could sleep again. In fact, sleep so deep and in such earnest he would lay down the sign and go to sleep in the snowy field itself, not caring if he ever again awoke.
“One hand...” thought John as he lay on his bed, and he put his hands together; the warmth radiated between the palms and the fingers, comforting him for a moment.
The phone rang again at a few minutes before two in the morning. John snatched up the receiver in hopes that it was once more Mondragon on the line to give him some more instruction.
“Hello?” he asked.
“Mondragon is going to kill you,” said a voice Taylor half-recognized.
“What? Who is this?” he asked, immediately thinking of the man he had met in the Blue Horn bar in November, a man he thought he might have told too much already. “Is this you again?” asked Taylor.
“Mondragon is going to kill you,” repeated Bob Mathers. “He fears you will break under pressure. You’re not a killer like he is.”
“We know who you are!” yelled Taylor into the phone. “Your name is Robert Mitchell or something like that. Erin told me.”
“You’re close,” said Bob.
“You’re a deputy sheriff somewhere in Arizona,” added Taylor.
“I was,” said Bob.
“You live in Phoenix now. You’re a security guard. Something like that,” said Taylor, straining to remember the things Mondragon had told him. “You had better leave me alone.”
John Taylor rose to an upright position in his bed and searched for the nightgown he always placed over the second pillow since the night his wife left him.
“My family is in a safe place,” Bob told him. “Mondragon won’t find them or me. It won’t do any good to threaten me.”
“Why are you...” began Taylor, and then remembered that the man had every reason to pursue him.
“Never forget,” said Bob when Taylor failed to reply, “he is going to kill you. He’ll do it because he can, and because the only one he trusts is himself.”
Like Mondragon before him, Bob Mathers was gone without warning, leaving Taylor with dozens of questions he wanted to ask.
John imagined himself lying in the snow, covered by a blanket so deep spring never came and the world forgot where he was buried or that there ever was a John Taylor. He wanted to close his eyes and see darkness that never ended. In the darkness that came before sleep he saw the face of the dead Navaho, and when he drifted into dreams he saw the snowy field and himself holding the metallic sign and shivering from cold. He still felt cold when he awoke, and to warm himself up Taylor had to tear open his new case of Glenlivet and gulp down a quart bottle in less than a minute so that his mind could at last dive below the blessed snow into the land of forgetting.
When he came to he was in a hospital bed and men in blue suits were gathered in his small room.
“He’s opening his eyes,” said one of the strangers.
“Ask him before—” said another, but John went back to sleep before the man could finish.
Upon awakening from his stupor a second time, he beheld a different group of men in blue suits, plus the grey Armani suit of Aaron Becker, one of Mondragon’s attorneys.
“Mr. John Taylor,” said one of the blue suit men, “you are under arrest for violating the Antiterrorist Act of 2002 and for conspiring to murder Andrew Feller, Marsha Cloves, and Benjamin Gonzoles and 84,104 other American citizens,” and he laid a warrant on Taylor’s chest. “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney—”
“OK, Eliot Ness,” said attorney Becker, shoving the federal agent aside. “My client chooses not to speak to you about anything.”
“One hand...” murmured Jack, “...the other...”
“What did he say?” asked the agent.
“He says he wants you to leave him alone,” said Becker.
“Your client is in the custody of the United States of America,” said the agent in charge, reluctant to concede an inch to a lawyer.
“I’m not finished Mirandizing him,” said the agent who had spoken to Taylor first.
“Well, chief,” said Becker, “do what you have to do, then I get to speak to Mr. Taylor, alone.”
“You have the right to an attorney. The court will provide you with one if you are unable to procure one of your own,” the agent read from a card in a sing-song voice.
Taylor for some reason thought this was overwhelmingly funny and laughed at the recitation he had previously heard only on television.
“Why is he laughing?” asked the agent. “Are we sure he can understand?” he asked the agent in charge.
“Mr. Taylor is a sick man,” said attorney Becker, positioning himself between his client and the federal men.
“He’s a drunk,” said one of the blue suits.
“Thank you for that expert diagnosis, Doctor,” said Becker sarcastically. “Could I have your name, sir? I’m sure the judge will be happy to hear you were verbally abusing my client.”
“You’ve lived a long time for a man with your mouth,” said the agent in charge.
“Now you’re threatening me, huh?” queried Becker. “I could have quite a civil suit going here. And your names are?” he asked again, this time getting a note pad from his briefcase and wetting a pencil point with his tongue. “Did you know I once got five million bucks from a Fortune 500 company when one of their CEOs took a swing at me? God knows what I could get from the federal government.”
The agents grumbled, and seconds later moved en masse out of the room.
“That’s better. Go buy each other a doughnut,” brayed Becker to the retreating G-men. As soon as the door shut behind them he knelt beside Taylor’s bed and whispered into his client’s ear: “Don’t worry, Mr. Taylor. We’ve already got an in with the judge. We’ll have you out of here in a couple hours.”
Those couple of hours became a couple of days in the hospital ward while Taylor recuperated in his bed. Then he went into a cell in a federal facility in suburban Los Angeles. Legions of men dressed in FBI and ATF windbreakers and armed with automatic weapons prowled the hallway outside his cell door and in the courtyard beyond his window. Although there was no one there other than the agents and Taylor, the armed men cautioned Jack every day that he should speak to no one other than Becker, who came to the facility every morning at nine.
Taylor did not go to court until the day after Christmas. The legions of federal men put him into a van and drove him to a downtown courthouse where a gauntlet of
television cameras and flashing light bulbs held by screaming journalists greeted him. None of them were anyone Taylor knew, yet they all called out to him as though they were intimate acquaintances of long standing.
“Why did you do it, John?” they shouted at him.
“Was it because you lost the family business?” others demanded.
Both frightened and bemused, John Taylor stared hard into the bright lights in hopes of seeing something beyond them, and he spoke a few incoherent words pertaining to his hands.
The inside of the courthouse was an island of calm amidst the media cacophony outside. Everyone is so polite here, thought John. Even the federal prosecutors who argued that bail should not be set were civil and went so far as to declare that they were concerned for Taylor’s safety. They did mention the deaths of more than 84,000 people and the destruction of billions of dollars of property, but John did not hold that against them.
“If we can give bail to Mr. Taylor and his associate,” (He was referring to Mondragon, although Taylor could see Erin nowhere in the courthouse.) “then there are thousands and thousands of individuals sitting in the Los Angeles County Jail--few of them charged with more than one murder--who rightfully should have bail set for them,” argued the lead federal prosecutor.
But attorney Becker was a legal dynamo ready to spring Taylor by any means necessary. He pointed out that only the testimony of the forty Colombians, men sitting on death row, could be presented against his client. There was not a shred of physical evidence, not a fingerprint, not a drop of blood, not a single frame of video tape.
“Your honor,” said Becker, drawing himself to the full height his tiptoes offered him, “we in the legal profession know how the prison grape vine works. First one prisoner sees a written report in the media dealing with a crime. He tells someone else what he knows, and that confidant tells another man. Soon, the entire prison, and eventually the entire prison system knows the tale. Within days of this dissemination of knowledge, someone is going to a guard, a prosecutor, to anyone of authority, and telling them this story as if they had a familiarity with events only someone involved in the crime could have.
“A simple Internet search I conducted the other day uncovered nine such cases where a false ‘witness’ came forwards, and these were in this year alone,” he said and held up a fistful of printed pages for emphasis. “Who knows how this particular cock-and-bull story that has entangled Mr. Taylor came to be? I expect one of the convicted Colombian terrorists somehow got hold of one of these irresponsible tabloids and hatched a plot to shift some of the blame for what he and his comrades did onto someone else. These men have had nearly two long years to get their stories straight. Two long years to scheme and plot and to decide upon one particular version of the story, the one that is going, in due course, your honor, to be presented here. I know, your honor, bail is not usually set in a capital case, but here there is no case.”
The judge had already rolled his eyes several times while Becker spoke. He now interrupted the monologue. “Mr. Becker, I am pleased to hear you have gotten back to the question of bail. We are not trying the case today, or burying Caesar. Please make your point so we can get on with the proceeding.”
“Thank you, your honor,” said Becker, not sounding in any way thankful. “My point is that someone in the Justice Department got wind of this story the Colombians were telling and felt they had to arrest my client. You must set a reasonable bail, your honor, for this case has no merit. If we allow convicted criminals to in effect charge the innocent, what will happen next? Will Charles Manson make a deal with prosecutors because he knows who really committed his crimes? Will the next Tim McVey tell us the real Oklahoma City bomber? Speaking of Oklahoma City, your honor, is this accusation against my client not the same thing as giving credence to the John Doe Number Two Theory? What is there here besides the unsworn words of guilty men?”