Fatal Convictions (38 page)

104

When Alex and Nara were alone, he started to tell her how thankful he was that she was okay, but she cut him off. “I need to say something, Alex. And I need you to just listen. Is that okay?”

Alex was losing strength, but he sensed the importance of this moment to Nara. He nodded and focused on her eyes, those alluring eyes that had first drawn him to her.

“I’m going back to Beirut, Alex. My mother will be in prison for a long time, and my father is committed to finishing his book and rebuilding his mosque. I have to finish my studies, and I believe that I have been given a special opportunity to speak about the plight of women in the Muslim faith. Right now, the whole world is listening. I can’t walk away from that responsibility.”

Alex wanted to tell Nara that she could do that here in Virginia Beach. What about Hezbollah? What about the men who had threatened them both with death if they tried to tie Hezbollah to the honor killings?

“It’s not safe there,” Alex said.

“Beirut’s my home.”

“Make your home here with your father. Your voice can be heard from America.” Alex turned up his palm and reached out for her. “I was hoping we could spend some time together.”

She took his hand in both of hers and moved a half step closer to the bed. “You’re one of the most remarkable men I’ve ever met, Alex Madison, and the things that happened between us were real.” She stopped herself and thought for a moment. Alex could tell she had more to say, and he squeezed her hands for reassurance.

“But our relationship was built on a common goal of defending my father. We’re very different people from very different worlds.”

She looked down at their hands and shifted her weight. “I don’t know how to say this, Alex, so I’m just going to put it out there. The Hezbollah agents in the train car in Beirut were a setup.” She stopped and gauged the effect on him.

“After Hamza Walid cancelled his deposition, I was sure that my father would be convicted of something he didn’t do. I knew we didn’t have the evidence we needed. So I set the whole thing up with some close friends to make it seem like we had been kidnapped and threatened by Hezbollah. I trusted you, Alex, to do your best. But I knew, if all else failed, I could testify about our kidnapping and plant reasonable doubt in the minds of the jurors.”

Even in the mellow world of the opiates, the revelation shocked Alex. He had been envisioning a future together, and she had been deceiving him all along. Not only that, but she had put him in mortal fear of death in order to manipulate a verdict in favor of her father.

Not to mention the fact that one of her friends had punched him.

The train incident had caused him weeks of apprehension and paranoia. If he had put Nara on the stand, she would have perjured herself. She had been lying to Alex. She was prepared to lie to the court.

And then it hit him. Al toqiah. His head churned with the implications.

“Why did you tell me now?”

Nara shrugged. “I couldn’t go back to Beirut
without
telling you. I’m tired of all the lies and deception and everything it’s done to my family.”

She bit her lip and gently rubbed his forearm. “I wish we weren’t separated by half the world and this religious divide and everything else. . . .”

Alex knew he should be angry. She had lied to him! Used him and misled him for her own purposes. But somehow, none of that really mattered.

“It doesn’t have to be that way.”

“But it
is
that way. I’ve seen you preach, and you believe what you say. You live it, Alex. And I can’t abandon my faith and my father after all that we’ve been through.”

Alex felt the tears pooling in his eyes, the wet tracks forming in the corners and running down the sides of his face. The last thing he wanted was for Nara to see him cry.

She reached out and gently wiped the tears away. “I’m sorry, Alex.” She leaned over and kissed him on the forehead. Then she stood and waited, holding his hand one last time.

She squeezed his hand, placed it gently on the bed, and turned to walk away.

“The waves are better here,” Alex said. “We’ve got wide beaches and white sand.”

Nara turned and gave him that lopsided smile he had come to love so much. “But we can go surfing in the morning and skiing in the afternoon,” she countered. “Come over sometime and give it a try.”

“Maybe I will,” said Alex. But they both knew he was lying.

He watched her go, then lay back on the pillow and closed his eyes. He felt empty. Maybe it was the drugs. Maybe it was the sense of betrayal. Maybe it was just the grim reminder of his own mortality that the would-be assassin’s bullet had provided. Whatever the cause, Alex felt a profound sense of sadness settle into his psyche. The carefree and noncommittal surfer who had inhabited his body earlier that year had been irrevocably replaced by a more serious and melancholy man.

Maybe in a few weeks he would get back on his feet. Maybe in a few months he would be surfing again. Maybe someday the Alex Madison mojo would return.

But for now, he mourned quietly and faded off to sleep.

Epilogue

one year later

norfolk, virginia

Alex Madison pulled his pickup into the designated clergy parking area, grabbed his Bible, and walked briskly toward the emergency room door. Last year, the Mobassar case had consumed his December, and Christmas had totally snuck up on him. This year, he was determined to enjoy every moment of the holiday season.

He walked through the automatic doors, feeling a little like Scrooge at the end of
A Christmas Carol
, determined to make up for lost time. “What’s up, Bones?”

The old man with the wiry gray hair looked up from his magazine. “Bah, humbug,” he said.

Alex reached into the pocket of his down jacket and pulled out two tickets to the Old Dominion basketball game on Saturday night. “Merry Christmas to you, too,” he said, handing the tickets to Bones.

“Good message Sunday,” Bones said. “Except it was about twenty minutes too long. I think I read someplace that Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount was only ten minutes.”

Bones had been coming to church for the last three months. When he first came, he told Alex that he hadn’t darkened a church door in nearly forty-two years. Now he was a faithful attender, and he never missed a chance to complain about the length of Alex’s sermons.

“If I were Jesus, I could get it done in ten minutes too,” Alex said. “But then again, if he were in my shoes, preaching to the folks in my congregation, he might take forty-five.”

They bantered for a while, and Bones gave Alex the room number for Billy Canham, a church member who had just endured a total hip replacement. Billy only came to church on Easter and Christmas and to watch the grandkids in the vacation Bible school program, but his wife was a longtime member. Alex had been by earlier, before the surgery.

When Alex got to Billy’s room, Judy Canham hugged him and told him how thankful she was that he had come. “They’ve had trouble getting his blood pressure back up, so they can’t give him enough pain medication,” Judy explained. “He’s in a lot of pain.”

Billy was squirming on the bed, his face contorted. “Get me out of here,” he demanded. “Preacher, my back and hip are killing me.”

“He’s got to relax,” Judy said.

Billy gritted his teeth. “Easy for you to say. Get that doctor back in here! I can’t take this!”

It took every ounce of Alex’s patience to get Billy calmed down as nurse after nurse came in to check his vitals and determined his system was still not ready for drugs. Eventually, his blood pressure stabilized enough for the anesthesiologist to start pumping him full of morphine. By the time the medication had circulated, the tight lines on Billy’s face had relaxed. Soon he was sleeping like a baby.

“I’m so glad you came,” Judy said.

“I should have just given him Sunday’s sermon,” Alex said. “That would have put him to sleep.”

Alex left the room and chatted with some of the ICU nurses he had befriended a year ago during his own hospital stay.

Before leaving, Alex made his traditional rounds to the two rooms that had changed his life.

Room 4103 was where it all started. Ghaniyah Mobassar had been supposedly recovering here from her car accident nearly eighteen months ago. She was now serving a fifteen-year term in the state correctional system. Alex thought about her courage and determination, however misplaced. Here was a woman who had crashed the passenger side of her car into a tree at nearly forty miles an hour so she could fake a brain injury. Alex still shook his head in disbelief at the thought of it.

Tonight there was an older man in the room recovering from a perforated bowel that had occurred during a colonoscopy. Alex talked to the man for a few minutes and prayed with him for a full recovery. He left a copy of his business card. One-sided.
Reverend Alexander Madison, South Norfolk Community Church.
He invited the man to come visit when he got back on his feet.

At the other end of the hall, in Room 4154, was a single mom who had fractured her sternum in a car accident. “A drunk driver pulled into her lane,” one of the nurses told Alex.

This was the room where Alex had rehabbed just last year. The room where Nara Mobassar had walked out of his life, leaving him confused and melancholy. Alex smiled to himself when he thought about that day. It might have been the drugs, or the intense emotions of the case, or the fact that he had come so close to dying. Whatever the reason, his reaction to Nara’s confession and departure confirmed to Alex that he should never try to make major life decisions while semiconscious and lying in a hospital bed.

At the time, Alex had desperately hoped Nara would not go back to Beirut. He had asked her to stay. Somehow, he had thought, the two of them could make it work. In hindsight, he recognized just how incompatible they would have been. And the more he thought about her deception, the more he realized that she had probably never cared for him as much as he had cared for her.

Alex and Khalid had stayed in touch. The imam had published his book and was now a leading voice in the effort to discredit those who had hijacked the Muslim faith with their violent interpretation of jihad. Nara had returned to America only once, to testify at the sentencing hearing for Fatih Mahdi. The jury had given Mahdi multiple life sentences without parole; his case was now winding its way through a labyrinth of appeals.

During Nara’s visit, Alex and Shannon had eaten lunch with Nara and Khalid and had listened to Nara’s recounting of her advocacy work in Lebanon. Alex was happy for her, and they parted with a polite hug. But the spark was gone. Alex had moved on. He sensed that Nara had as well.

They promised to keep in touch. But the only time she popped into his mind was on days like today, when he headed to Room 4154. And even now, he had no regrets about the direction his life had taken.

Alex Madison had never been happier. He had left the practice of law and thrown himself into his work at the church. Over the past year, the small congregation had turned into a medium-size fellowship, with all the good problems that accompanied growth. At first Alex felt guilty leaving his grandfather’s firm. Slogan number ten on his grandfather’s list came to mind often:
If you’ve been called to be a lawyer, don’t stoop to be a king.
But eventually he realized that the sentence really wasn’t about practicing law at all. It was about finding your calling—the one thing that God created you to do.

And Alex had found his.

Rosa Gonzalez, the patient in Room 4154, was a wiry woman with a swollen face and the usual assortment of tubes hanging from her body. Given the amount of painkillers flowing through her veins, she was surprisingly lucid and talkative. She opened up to Alex about the challenge of raising her two sons, and she teared up when she admitted that she didn’t know what she would do now.

Alex stayed ten minutes longer than he had planned and assured Rosa that everything happened for a reason. He said it with the conviction of someone who had been in that very bed, recovering from serious trauma himself. He told Rosa as much, and he prayed with her before trying to leave for the third time.

“Wait,” Rosa said. “I thought I recognized you. You’re that lawyer who defended the Muslim guy. I knew I’d seen you before.”

“Guilty,” Alex said. He always blushed a little when people recognized him like he was some type of celebrity. It was happening less and less these days.

“That case was incredible,” Rosa said.

Alex hoped Rosa wouldn’t want to spend another five minutes talking about the details of it. Everybody had an opinion. There were some who still believed Khalid was guilty.

“Do you think you could take my case?” Rosa asked. “I was thinking about hiring this guy who called me earlier today, but I’d rather have someone like you.”

Alex thanked her for the compliment and reached into his coat pocket for a Madison and Associates business card. Just because Alex had left the firm didn’t mean he could no longer share in the profits. He handed the card to Rosa and told her that she should never hire somebody who had the audacity to call her at the hospital.

“The least he could do is show up in person,” Alex joked. But his humor was lost on his new friend. Rosa took the card and put on her reading glasses.

“She’s the best lawyer in America,” Alex said proudly. “Maybe the world. She helped me out in that case we were just talking about.”

“Oh yeah, I remember her.” Rosa held the card between her thumb and forefinger, staring at it through her glasses. “She was some kind of gymnast or something. But the name doesn’t ring a bell.”

Alex couldn’t resist a small grin as Rosa scrunched her forehead, as if trying to remember, then read the name out loud. He liked the way it rolled off her tongue.

“‘Shannon Madison, Attorney at Law.’”

Acknowledgments

Another book, another page of IOUs. It’s getting to be like the national debt.

A big chunk of that debt is owed to Kamal Saleem, a former Islamic terrorist who wrote about his conversion to Christianity in
The Blood of Lambs
. I interviewed him at length and, with his permission, used variations of his experiences and mind-set as the basis for my book’s antagonist. Kamal is one of the most intense and committed persons I’ve ever met. You should read his story and, if you get the chance, hear his testimony.

Joel C. Rosenberg’s book
Inside the Revolution
also helped form one of my main characters—a reform-minded Muslim cleric on trial for murder. The imam is patterned after the Islamic moderates portrayed in Joel’s book—an eye-opening study of the political and spiritual dynamics in the Middle East.

Research is just the beginning. There are many other “bondholders” whom I’ll never be able to repay. They include:

• The hall-of-fame team at Tyndale House Publishers who believe in these stories and make it fun to be an author. Karen Watson, Jeremy Taylor, Stephanie Broene, Ron Beers, and many others have shown me more patience, grace, and encouragement than any author deserves.

• My agent, Lee Hough, whose vision and skill keep me on track. Lee is not just an excellent agent but also a great story doctor and friend.

• Mary Hartman and Michael Garnier, two other friends who review my manuscripts and have way too much fun identifying the inconsistencies and inaccuracies that I manage to sprinkle throughout my drafts. I can’t imagine writing a book without their help.

• The folks at Trinity Church, where I serve as teaching pastor. They are a constant source of encouragement about my books and never cease to amaze me with their passion for Christ.

• Rhonda, Rosalyn, and Joshua, the best family on the face of the planet. I might be a lawyer, but you can trust me on that one.

Before I get to the final prop, a word about separating fact from fiction might be in order. When a lawyer/pastor writes a story about a lawyer/pastor, readers probably assume that many aspects of the story track the author’s life. That assumption would be incorrect. Other than the occupations, Alex and I have little in common. The Virginia Beach churches where I’ve had the honor of preaching—Trinity Church and First Baptist, Virginia Beach—are amazing churches with none of the pettiness that Alex faces in the book. Moreover, unlike the book characters, my legal assistants (including Tracy Garcia, who helped on this book) have been top-notch, and the judges in Virginia Beach are some of the best anywhere. The bottom line: I don’t pastor a church or practice law the way Alex does, and I certainly don’t solicit clients like he does. I’d prefer to keep my law license.

And finally, though it seems trite to put the Savior of the world in an acknowledgments page—how could I leave him out? This book is the story of an advocate who stands up for a client when, from all appearances, the man should be condemned. Come to think of it, that’s also the story of my life.

But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate who pleads our case before the Father. He is Jesus Christ, the one who is truly righteous. He himself is the sacrifice that atones for our sins—and not only our sins but the sins of all the world.
1 John 2:1-2