W: The Planner, The Chosen (38 page)

“I grew up. I saw how life really works.  Nobody can take on this government—it’s too big; it’s too powerful.  I was a member of Oathkeepers—we had signed commitments from men and women in the military and every branch of law enforcement. All of us promised that we would never detain fellow Americans without trial.  But you know what? In the end it was them or us. The founders of Oathkeepers disappeared years ago—arrested for terrorism. Nobody knows what happened to them. We all found out pretty quickly that it might feel great to sign a pledge, but at the end of the day all that courage goes out the window when you realize that it’s not just your life that’s on the line.  In Iraq I was alone; in the U.S. I have a family….”

“Everybody’s got a family, Bruce. I’ve got a family, too. I have a three-month-old granddaughter named Haley. I don’t want her to end up like this Linton gal crying over a husband and a brother-in-law she’ll probably never see again while she waits for some federal law enforcement agency to pick her up too. And I don’t want her ever to say, ‘My grandfather had a chance to stop this, but he didn’t because he was scared.’”

“You’ve got a martyrdom complex, Julian. You always have, and it’s gotten worse as you get older.  I don’t have a death wish. I just want to live out my life as quietly as possible.”

“I don’t have a death wish. I have a lot to live for.  Dottie and I just celebrated our thirty-fifth wedding anniversary. I’d like to make it to fifty. I’d like to attend Haley’s college graduation and her wedding, but unless we can restore freedom, none of that is worthwhile. Our parents left us a free America; we have a moral responsibility to do the same for our children.”

“Moral responsibility is not going to seem so noble when they lock the gates behind you in a labor camp, Julian.  Or when the day comes that you know that you’re going to be executed, and you never got to say goodbye to Dottie because you left for work one morning and nobody has seen you since. Might makes right; that may sound clichéd but when push comes to shove, it’s the way it is.  One day you’re going to wish that you had been on the right side of this.”

“I’m on the right side of it now. You remember what I used to tell you? ‘Do what’s right, come hell or high water, and God will give you the upper hand.’ I still believe that, and I’m willing to take my chances. As for you, you’re absolutely on the wrong side of history, morality, and everything else. But you’re on Tom Quincy’s side, so you’ll get to test your theory and see whether the President has enough might to make everything work out okay for you and your family.”

Bruce cursed and slammed down the phone, and Julian went back to work.

Chapter 19

K
eith was sitting in the basement of the dilapidated old row house he had purchased in Baltimore just two days after Julian had agreed to take Michael’s case.  He had picked up the crumbling brick structure at auction because, while two other people wanted it, only Keith had the cash to buy it.  He and Kris needed a place to live that was convenient to D.C. so that she could meet with Julian whenever necessary and so that she could give interviews to whatever press was willing to talk to her. She spent most of her days trying to arrange interviews on radio talk shows or appearances on television news shows to tell Michael’s and Jeff’s story.  Since Baltimore was only 30 miles from D.C., she was able to commute, and the high profile nature of their case gave her some temporary immunity from arrest as she traveled from the city to the house.

The house was truly a shambles. Located in a neighborhood referred to by Baltimore natives as “Pigtown”, it was one of a long stretch of vacant row houses which had been covered with graffiti and vandalized numerous times. The dilapidated structures had managed to survive the city of Baltimore’s regentrification efforts—in the 1980’s the city had euphemistically renamed the neighborhood “Washington Village” but the new name and some new and renovated housing had not changed the dynamics of the community. More recently, FMPD had considered handing down eminent domain orders on every structure in the neighborhood, but they had thought better of that plan. This section of Pigtown was home to so much crime, narcotics trafficking, and prostitution that cleaning it up would have required a lot of law enforcement, and the money and manpower to convert it to sustainable living hardly seemed to be a good investment for an agency whose dollars and resources were already stretched thin.  Besides, if the city were to raze the structures the current residents would scatter into other neighborhoods. By leaving Pigtown intact, the FMPD had assured that its undesirable elements would remain consolidated into that community, and the only police presence that the city would need to provide would be the continued occasional police patrols.

So there it stood—as Kris guessed it probably had for at least 150 years. Every window but one was cracked or sported a bullet hole. The floor boards were loose, and when it rained, the roof leaked like a sieve. The unit contained two tiny bedrooms, one tiny bathroom, and a kitchen that did not appear to have been updated since the 1950s. When Kris saw it, she let out an involuntary gasp, but Keith ignored her.  “I didn’t buy it for the ambience. I did some checking before I bid on it, and I discovered one priceless feature that makes it worth a fortune.” He surveyed his purchase with pride and quipped in his self-satisfied way, “Cheap at any price.”

Kris did not ask what that feature was—she owed Keith a great deal, and she was not going to question his judgment. But, secretly, she thought that this shack could not be worth a fortune if it were built on the original site of the Fountain of  Youth and the waters still ran beneath it. From Keith’s perspective, she could see only two positives this place offered: First, the entire block was vacant, rundown row houses, so they did not have neighbors spying on them. Of course, the downside of that was that the block was filled with prostitutes, drug dealers and transients looking for a place to sleep indoors. She was living in a neighborhood that she would have been afraid to drive through in better days. Second, the house had a single car garage that locked, and Kris was certain that it was the garage that had sold Keith on the house. In this neighborhood a garage really was valuable, as they could not have expected to park the Jeep on the street and find it still there the next morning. Keith bought chains and reinforced locks for the garage and their front door, and Kris prayed a lot and wondered whether her brother could not have found someplace just a little better located in which to end their ordeal. However, Kris knew something that she had never shared with Keith. Moshe had told her that Michael and Jeff were being detained in a federal facility near Baltimore. She could hardly believe that with all of the locations from which he had to choose that Keith had purchased a house in Baltimore. She was tempted to tell him that Michael and Jeff were there, in Baltimore, but she promised herself that no matter what happened she would keep that information to herself.

Kris never would discover what Keith considered to be the truly special nature of the property, however. The original structure had been owned by smugglers, and during the Civil War the property had been used to store and move contraband back and forth between the harbor and the lookout point at Federal Hill. Although the original warehouse had later been converted into row houses, the original basement had hardly been touched, and this basement opened onto a tunnel running under the property which led all the way to the Civil War lookout point at Federal Hill. Since Federal Hill was always crowded with tourists, someone practiced at the art of being invisible could take advantage of the constant crowds to disappear into and out of the tunnel without being noticed, and that same person could then enter the row house basement without ever being visible from the street.

Keith would never have known about this feature if David had not pointed it out to him. Keith had met David when he had driven to a store to buy some food during the three days that he and Kris were waiting for news about Cicchetti’s decision as to whether he would take their case.  Keith was highly suspicious and normally did not like strangers, but when David struck up a conversation with him in the check-out line, Keith took a liking to him.  For the next two days, whenever Keith left the motel he seemed to run into David. He never told Kris about David’s existence because he knew that she would panic; she would immediately assume that he was a government spy sent to watch them and wait for an opportunity to arrest them. Keith knew virtually nothing about David, but there were two reasons why he was positive that David was not a spy: First, Keith prided himself on being a great judge of character. Second, David reminded Keith of someone he knew and trusted.

Today, Kris was in Philadelphia giving an interview to a talk show host who, though not sympathetic to Michael and Jeff, was counting on the sensational nature of the interview to boost ratings. Since the trip was 100 miles each way, she would be gone for most of the day, which gave Keith a perfect opportunity to call this meeting.  So now he sat in the basement on a metal swivel chair left by one of the previous tenants, which allowed him to swivel back and forth between his guests.  Jessie and Kyle sat on a ragged loveseat and David sat on a chair opposite them. David had entered through the tunnel and was waiting for Jessie and Kyle when they arrived. For their part, Jessie and Kyle blended in pretty well with the transients on the street. They had entered through the far end of the building where drug dealers moved in and out with ease and then crossed through the gutted row houses until they had reached the door which Keith had strategically installed in the main room of his row house.  They announced their presence with the “secret knock”, upon which Keith admitted them and led them down to the basement. Now they stared suspiciously at the stranger sitting across from them.

“I’m not comfortable with this,” Jessie fidgeted and twisted the curly red hair on his portly arms as he motioned at David. “You know, man, I’m a very private person.  I’m not okay with outsiders—especially now with Feds everywhere.  How do we know we can trust this guy?”  He spoke of David as if he were not in the room.

“He’s good. I’m vouching for him,” Keith clicked the cheap ball point pen he was holding into the on and off positions in a series of rapid successions.

“What do you know about him?” Jessie persisted.  “I mean, he just shows up, you know him a few weeks, and here you are, like, introducing him to your closest friends.” Jessie eyed Keith with a new level of suspicion he had never before shown.

Keith ignored Jessie’s panic, “Hey, you can trust me.  You’ve always been able to trust me. And I’m a great judge of people. There’s nothing to worry about; I’ve got this.”

Kyle had not said anything, but he had not stopped staring at David since he had entered the room. “You look really familiar. Have we met someplace?”

“I have one of those faces.  Everybody thinks I look like somebody they know. I’m not a Fed. Now let’s get going—my meter is running.”

Keith stepped in to take control of the meeting. “The reason I brought everybody here is because we need a new strategy for Mike and Jeff. These interviews Kris is doing keep her busy and make her feel better while she’s waiting for her lawyer to work on her case, but they’re not gonna help Mike and Jeff.  These news people just want a story for the nightly show—most of the time the stories are not that positive, but even if they were, they’re over in two minutes, and suddenly everybody’s looking at wedding pictures of some movie star, and they’ve forgotten that Mike and Jeff ever existed.  We’ve got to find a way to get their story back in front of people.”

“The Feds shut down
The Wall
—you know that,” Jessie ran his hand through his matted hair, “They’ve got new technology that makes it harder to keep websites up now. A few months ago it took them days to shut us down. Now they could probably do it in hours. But, that aside, even if we could get it back up now it just wouldn’t have the same impact. The government has announced that most of the names were fake—they weren’t real people. The Feds released a statement that
The Wall
listed as missing people who had been dead for fifty years. That’s a lie, but a lot of folks believe it.”

“Well, that’s the reason why David’s here,” Keith swiveled his chair back in David’s direction.  “He says that he can offer us something a little harder to dismiss.”

“Like what?” In spite of himself, Kyle was interested in this stranger and his reason for being there. And he could not shake the feeling that he had seen him before—several times—so he continued to watch him carefully as he tried to remember how he knew him.

“Pictures,” David answered. “Pictures of the missing people. Every person who is arrested is officially photographed before they’re imprisoned.  If you had those pictures along with the information you had on
The Wall
, it would be a lot harder to say that it’s all a scam—that these people don’t exist.”

Jessie looked shocked, “How do you know that the Feds have pictures?  And assuming that they do, and they probably do, how could you possibly have access to them?  I’m good; I’m really, really good, but even I don’t have access to that kind of stuff.”

David responded, “You have your sources and I have mine. I can definitely get them. The question is, can you use them?”

Jessie did not answer right away. He sat combing his beard with his stubby fingers, thinking that this information was both intriguing and horrifying.  If David really did have access to the photos, he was a high level bad guy.  On the other hand, if they really could get their hands on them, they would be proof of the arrests….

“Look, this is the bottom line, guys,” Keith interjected.  “We need to apply some pressure to SCOTUS to hear this case and overturn this law. Cicchetti says that Supreme Court Justices are just people like everybody else. If that’s true, then they care about what people think. So the only way that we can affect the outcome of this is to change people’s minds about indefinite detention, and the best way to do that is to put a human face on it.  The best way to do
that
is with pictures. So far all I’ve got is two—one of Mike and one of Jeff. Something tells me that we’re going to have to do better than that to save the country.”

“How many pictures are we talking about?”  Jessie now addressed David.

“One for every person who’s been arrested—about 100,000 so far. And I can update them in real time—in case you run out.”

“Holy…..” Jessie knew that tens of thousands of Americans had disappeared, but the idea of 100,000 photos of U.S. citizens detained without trial was overwhelming—and awe-inspiring.

“If David can get you the pictures, can you use them to put the website back up?” Keith looked back at his long-time friend.

“No…. But I’ve still got one play left,” Jessie started to explain, but Kyle interrupted.

“Jessie and I had an idea while we were doing
The Wall
.  It would work—we could use the pictures there. The thing is, are you totally sure that these are real pictures?  I mean, they’re not doctored or anything? Cause if we put up Photoshopped pictures of some lady who’s supposed to be in custody and then the Feds can prove she took her kid for ice cream in the park yesterday you’re gonna be worse off than you are now.”

“The pictures are genuine—absolutely authentic,” David assured them.

Jessie and Kyle both looked at Keith, “I already told you he’s good. I’ll vouch for him.”

“Okay, I’m gonna need to get the pictures, along with the descriptions.”

“How do you want me to get them to you?” David leaned forward.

“Not to me—no direct contact. You email everything to Keith,” Jessie looked at Keith, “I’ll set you up with a secure email account tonight and then you give it to David.  Don’t use it for anything else. I’ll tell you how to get the stuff to me.  Not too many at a time.  No more than three in one email, no more than two emails an hour.  I don’t want anybody to get suspicious about large volume emails.  When can we get the first ones?”

“As soon as you get me Keith’s new address.”

“Do you two want to tell us your idea, or do you want us to try to guess?” Keith looked at Jessie, but Kyle responded.