Exile Hunter (13 page)

They were outdoors.
Linder felt the cool, moist air on his face and imagined how a foggy
November morning in Northern Virginia might look. The air smelled of
burning leaves. It had been mid-September when he arrived in Beirut.
By now, he thought, it must be November or December.

As they crossed a paved
yard, a chill breeze penetrated Linder’s thin prison coveralls and
made him shiver. They climbed a few stairs to the entrance of another
building, where Linder was searched for contraband, then led up a
stairway to an overheated room that smelled of stale cigarette smoke
and coffee. His hood was removed.

The room was long,
narrow, and windowless. Along three of its four sides stood battered
oaken tables arranged in a horseshoe formation. At the far end sat
three middle-aged judges, two men and one woman, in black robes,
while on the left sat a pair of young prosecutors in immaculate gray
DSS uniforms. All eyes were on him as he entered the room, and not
one face showed any sign of warmth, understanding or even curiosity.
On the right sat a gray-bearded black male of about sixty wearing
wire-rimmed bifocals and a shabby tweed sport jacket, whom Linder
guessed to be his court-appointed defense attorney. Each person
seated around the horseshoe-shaped table arrangement had a thick
orange file-folder opened before him or her.

The guards held Linder
a few paces from the door, awaiting further instructions. Linder
jangled his waist chain to draw attention and the guards loosened
their grip while another uniformed DSS officer, perhaps a prosecutor,
leaned across the table at the rear of the room, conferring with one
of the judges. Each of the judges and attorneys sipped coffee; the
two male judges alternated sips with deep drags on their cigarettes.
Every one of them wore a bored expression, as if their work had been
reduced to mind-numbing routine.

At last, the uniformed
DSS official took a seat behind Linder and the buzz of conversation
subsided. The chief judge, a heavy-set man in his sixties, cleared
his throat and called for the defendant to come forward. Suddenly all
eyes turned to Linder again. His guards led him to the center of the
room and retreated two steps. At a signal from the chief judge, the
guards shacked Linder to the steel chair, which was bolted to the
floor, and withdrew to a row of seats along the back wall.

Linder was struck by
the casual informality of the court, the constant murmur of side
conversations, paper shuffling and hands laid on neighbors’
shoulders in a familiar way. The phrase “banality of evil” came
to mind, bringing info focus how tyranny was not the product of
tyrants alone, but also of ordinary people who accepted the premises
of state power and obeyed unjust orders with the attitude that their
behavior was perfectly normal.

The chief judge opened
the proceeding with a similarly casual air.

“Well,” he said
with a half-stifled yawn, “I guess we might as well get started.”
He spoke slowly with a Carolina drawl, and his swept-back silvery
mane, drooping jowls, and black-framed bifocals perched on a
perpetually knitted brow gave him an air of weighty authority.

The chief judge asked
Linder his name, date and place of birth, occupation, rank, years of
government service and other information listed on the inside flap of
the file jacket. Then he read the indictment. Nothing in the bill of
particulars surprised Linder, as it merely restated the various
accusations his interrogators had hurled at him throughout weeks of
nightly interrogations. The charges bristled with names of contacts
and co-conspirators situated within the U.S. and abroad, starting
with alleged plots hatched even before Linder had joined the
Department. Nearly all Linder’s DSS informants and recruited agents
were cited under their codenames either as victims of his treachery
or as co-conspirators.

Foremost among the
charges leveled against him were treasonous acts of aiding and
comforting insurgents and subversive organizations operating both in
the U.S. and abroad. All manner of related charges were then layered
on, including seditious conspiracy, sabotage, advocating overthrow of
the government, espionage, and international terrorism. All were
artfully fabricated to appear plausible in the light of Linder’s
years of undercover work for the CIA and the DSS.

The chief judge then
turned the floor over to the lead prosecutor, a tall, slender,
fair-haired young man with a patrician profile and cerebral aspect.

“Are you personally
acquainted with the late Philip Eaton, who has been convicted in
absentia of treason and other offenses against national security?”
the prosecutor questioned.

Linder recoiled. Though
he had suspected it, interrogators had never let on that Eaton was
dead. He remembered the shouts and screams piped into his embassy
cell and wondered if the old man had lived long enough to complete
his interrogation.

“I wasn’t aware
that he had died,” Linder answered.

“Answer yes or no to
the question.”

“Yes.”

“Do you know his
son-in-law, Roger Kendall, who has been similarly convicted?”

“Yes.”

“And do you know
their associate, Phipps Chase, now a fugitive from justice, last
known to be in Europe?”

“Yes,” he answered,
stifling a laugh at the garbled name.

“And did you give aid
and comfort to these known enemies of the Unionist State of America
and conspire with them to overthrow the popularly elected government
through armed attacks on its officials and installations?”

“Hell no.”

The prosecutor smiled
and turned to face the three judges.

“The prisoner denies
the conclusion, but he cannot deny the facts on which it is based. In
these proceedings, Your Honor, we will present those facts, one by
one, and then demonstrate the pattern they form. When we have
finished, it will be abundantly clear that the accused has committed
treasonous acts and should be found guilty as charged by this court.”

The chief judge nodded
and the prosecutor went on to read from a contact report that Linder
had written years before, describing a clandestine meeting between
him, as an undercover officer, and a member of the Rocky Mountain
Militia, which was then mounting guerrilla attacks against government
troops in Colorado.

“’…and we agreed
that the team’s next target for assassination should be the
District Director of FEMA for Colorado and Utah. I offered to support
them with forty untraceable Belgian FAL assault rifles, which I
delivered to them the next morning.’ Did you deliver the rifles as
promised?” the prosecutor demanded.

“Yes, but our
technicians had removed their firing pins. It was a sting operation.
I was acting as a DSS undercover officer.“ Linder pointed out.

“Let the record show
that the prisoner answered “Yes.” Strike the additional comments.
I submit the prisoner’s Colorado contact report as Exhibit A.”

The prosecutor read
from another contact report in which Linder had described a meeting
in Berlin with an exiled rebel leader who sought Linder’s help in
returning to the U.S. to join the insurgency.

“'He told me his
greatest concern about traveling to the U.S. for the operation was
the difficulty of obtaining a U.S. visa that would withstand scrutiny
at the border. I took his passport and returned it two days later
with a valid U.S. tourist visa that I said I had obtained by bribing
a vice consul sympathetic to the rebel cause.’” The prosecutor
paused for emphasis. “I ask the accused: did you deliver the
aforesaid visa?”

“Yes,” Linder
replied, “but we arrested the suspect the moment he got off the
plane. It was a set-up. Can't you see that?”

“Strike the
prisoner’s additional comments and enter an answer of ‘Yes’ to
the question.”

Linder looked back in
mute appeal at his defense attorney, who shook his head, advising the
defendant to remain silent.

For the next three
hours, the prosecutor read excerpt after excerpt from official
documents in which Linder described his dealings with known or
suspected insurgents as part of a broader scheme to lure them into
captivity or ambush. In each case, Linder’s actions were taken out
of context and made to appear as if he had acted on his own to help
the enemy. His attempts to clarify or explain were dismissed out of
hand and struck from the record. His defense attorney, seated at a
table slightly behind him and to his left, scribbled notes from time
to time on a legal pad but raised no objections. Though Linder never
expected impartiality from such a tribunal, its overwhelming
one-sidedness and the lack of opportunity for rebuttal did not even
meet the standards of a show trial.

At last, the chief
judge banged his gavel and called an adjournment for lunch. The
judges, prosecutors, bailiff, court reporter, and defense attorney
left the room. Halfway through the lunch hour a fresh pair of guards
replaced the ones who had sat through the morning portion of the
hearing. Linder was given neither food nor water. He was, however,
permitted to urinate in the prisoner’s lavatory, and thereafter to
sit cross-legged on the floor at the rear of the courtroom until the
judges returned from lunch. He remained shackled at all times.

The afternoon’s
proceedings turned away from the who, what, and where of Linder’s
alleged crimes and centered more on the how and why. At the chief
judge’s direction, Linder answered the first few questions in as
few words as possible, so as not to antagonize the court. He admitted
facts that were indisputable and denied those that were false.
Whenever he sought permission to extend his answer, however, the
court refused. Even his defense attorney seemed annoyed whenever
Linder strayed from the script.

Upon reflection, it
seemed to Linder that the heart of the case against him was rooted in
a loose set of circumstances: that he had been raised in a heavily
Catholic suburb on Cleveland’s East Side where anti-Unionist
militias had later taken root; and that Linder had allegedly harbored
a clandestine sympathy for friends and neighbors in the militias even
before he became an officer in the Department of State Security.
During his years of undercover work in the Department, the prosecutor
alleged, these sympathies had matured into a shift in loyalty away
from the Unionist State toward the insurgent cause.

The prosecution’s
ensuing review of Linder’s DSS career sought to demonstrate that
the defendant had on many occasions covertly aided and abetted
enemies of the state like Philip Eaton and Chase Phipps. Linder’s
counter-allegations against Bob Bednarski were cut short and
dismissed as a self-serving diversion. Proof of Linder’s true
intentions, the prosecution insisted, could be found in his promise
to Eaton, recorded via long-range microphones, to “go to bat” for
the rebel financier.

The afternoon session
ended after three more hours, when the female associate judge took
the chief judge by the elbow and whispered in his ear. The latter
glanced at his watch, then promptly banged his gavel, and declared an
adjournment until the following morning. Once the judges and other
court officers left the room, the bailiff called Linder’s two
guards to attention, while the defense counsel made his way to where
the prisoner stood, still shackled to his chair.

“I'm Paul Griggs,”
the public defender introduced himself. “The court appointed me to
represent you.”

“Terrific,” Linder
replied. “When do you plan to start?”

Griggs threw Linder a
sharp look.

“This isn’t
courtroom TV, mister,” he said, folding his bifocals and returning
them to his pocket. “This is a National Security Tribunal. The
rules of procedure here don’t permit the defense to raise
objections. My turn to speak comes at the end, right before they
pronounce you guilty.”

“How encouraging,”
Linder remarked, suddenly feeling weak at the knees and slumping back
into his chair. Though he had realized from the start that his chance
of acquittal was slim, he felt like a complete fool for having
believed he had any chance at all. “If it’s not a state secret,
what do you intend to say in my defense when your turn finally
comes?”

“I plan to throw your
case at the mercy of the court.”

Linder let out a
dismissive snort. “Why not try arguing the facts and the law? These
charges are complete hogwash and you know it.”

Griggs shook his head.

“Too late for that
now. They’ve made up their minds. The only thing left is to decide
how hard they’re going to hit you. My job is to persuade them to
soften the blow.”

Griggs turned on his
heel without waiting for an answer.

When the courtroom
emptied, the guards slipped the hood over Linder’s head and led him
out into the prison yard, where he felt a chill wind blowing dead
leaves in swirls around his bare feet. The air smelled of rain, wet
earth, and rotting leaves and Linder wondered whether he would be
buried six feet beneath earth like this by the time winter turned the
rain to snow. He took in a deep breath while trying to imprint on his
memory the smell and feel and sound of the wind that gusted around
him.

When Linder reached his
cell, another meal of bread, water, and a ration bar awaited him. He
squatted cross-legged on his bunk and contemplated the day’s events
while peeling back the bar’s foil wrapping and taking the first
bite. He ate slowly, focusing on the dominant vanilla flavor and then
on the various other flavor notes, some bitter or rancid. When the
trial ended, he would likely be transferred to another facility,
either a federal prison or possibly a corrective labor camp.
Depending on where he ended up, the food might be better or worse,
but at least it would be a change.

And now that change was
nearly upon him, for it seemed to Linder that the trial was already
over but for the sentencing. Considering his years of government
service and the fact that his jailers had failed to extract a signed
confession, it might still be possible for his sentence to come in at
the low end for national security crimes, perhaps only five to ten
years. On the other hand, if he were convicted on the most serious
charges, the judges could impose the death penalty.