The TRIBUNAL (19 page)

    “What don’t I know?”

    Maria looked down at the napkin in her hand. “This could get me in a lot of trouble, Mr. Anderson.”

    Kevin was perplexed. He decided to remain silent and see what Maria Jones would do.

    She wrung her hands. “Your client was the most significant operative the CIA had in Yugoslavia,” she said finally.

    “What do you mean?”

    “Draga worked for the CIA. He passed on the best intelligence information we had on the war and on President Milosevic.”

    Kevin couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “How do you know that?”

    “I read the reports of his handler, William Evans. That was my main job for three years at the CIA.”

    “I’m speechless,” Kevin said after a long pause. “My client has never even hinted at such a thing.”

    “The Agency probably promised to take care of him when his trial is over. They did the same to my husband and me. Then they gave him life and me twenty years.”

    Kevin’s brain was working overtime to digest this new revelation. Then, reality set in. “I’ll never be able to prove it,” he said dejectedly.

    “Yes, you will,” Maria said, looking Kevin directly in the eyes. “I kept copies of the reports.”

    A shiver ran through Kevin’s body.

    “My mother has them. She lives in Oakland.” Maria wrote her mother’s address on Bud’s napkin, along with a short note. “She’ll give you the papers. You might also want to talk to William Evans. He retired. I think he works for Hilton Hotels now, in security.”

    Kevin thanked Maria profusely. His mind was racing as he drove directly to Oakland to see Maria’s mother. If what Maria told him was true – and he had no doubt that it was – how would this impact his defense of Draga? In passing vital information to the CIA, had Draga been working to
prevent
war crimes, not commit them? Could his first client as a defense lawyer really have been on the side of the good guys?

    Kevin wondered why Draga hadn’t told him of the CIA connection. Was he willing to sit silently in prison for the rest of his life? Or
had
the CIA promised Draga his freedom, as Maria, who knew about these things, had strongly suggested?

    As he drove on the freeway, Kevin suddenly wondered if he was being followed. The prison authorities could have notified the CIA of his visit to Maria Jones. They could have even bugged the conference room at the prison.

    Kevin got off at the next exit. He checked his rearview mirror; three other cars were also exiting. He waited at the red light at the bottom of the exit ramp. When the light turned green, he continued straight ahead and re-entered the freeway. He looked to see if any of the other cars were doing the same maneuver. They were not.

    Although he was still not sure if he was being followed, Kevin was anxious to see Maria’s mother as soon as possible. He wanted to get his hands on the reports before they disappeared like his graymail motion had vanished into thin air.

    As he exited the freeway again and approached what he thought was the right street, Kevin decided to once again be cautious. He circled a few blocks, and then stopped to look at his map. He did not see anyone following him.

    Maria said her parents had moved to Oakland from the East Coast after her imprisonment. Kevin could see they were living in a multi-ethnic, poor neighborhood of single-family homes. If the whites, blacks, and Hispanics ever started fighting each other in the United States like the Muslims, Serbs, and Croats had in Bosnia, this neighborhood would be ground zero.

    Kevin passed the house. It was a white, wooden single-story house with a small lawn in front. There was an old Chevrolet Impala parked in the driveway. The house needed a paint job, but the lawn was immaculate and was landscaped with nicely kept bushes. Around the yard was a chain-link fence. In this neighborhood, by necessity, all the houses were well fortified with security bars on many windows and doors.

    After circling the block and not seeing anyone following him, Kevin parked. He opened the chain-link gate and walked up a few steps to the front door. The screen door was closed, but the inside door was open.

    “Hello,” he called, “is anybody home?”

    There was no answer. Kevin called again. There was still no answer. A feeling of dread crept over Kevin. People did not leave their front doors open in this neighborhood. Had someone been here before him? He rang the bell. No one came to the door. Kevin thought about calling 911 on his cell phone, but decided to walk around to the back of the house. He slowly backed down the steps and followed the driveway alongside of the house. When he reached the back yard, he saw a woman tending to some plants.

    She had apparently not heard his calls or the front doorbell.

    “Excuse me,” Kevin said from the edge of the yard.

    The woman looked up. She was a stout woman with a wide, pleasant face. She looked to be in her seventies, and her brown hair was neatly in place. When she saw Kevin, she put down her pruning shears and walked over to him.

    Kevin did not wait for her to speak. “I’m sorry to bother you. I’m Kevin Anderson, a lawyer from Santa Rosa. I’ve just come from visiting your daughter, Maria, and she asked me to come here and give you this.” He pulled out the napkin and displayed it for the woman to see.

    The woman looked surprised at the mention of her daughter. She took the napkin. “I need my glasses. Come on in.” She led Kevin into the house through the back door.

    Kevin found himself in a small kitchen with a wooden table placed against the back window overlooking the yard. “Sit down. Can I offer you a cup of coffee?”

    “Oh, no thanks.”

    “How about some tea, or milk? I’ve got some soda, or even some wine.”

    “I’ll take a soda, thank you.”

    Kevin looked around the kitchen. He saw the refrigerator, filled with photos held up by magnets. He had come to believe that you could tell a lot about a family by looking at what was posted on the refrigerator. From his seat at the table, Kevin saw pictures of a large Italian family, and several pictures of Maria in happier and younger days. He saw none of Maria’s husband.

    “I’m sorry, I don’t know your name,” Kevin said as Maria’s mother came back to the table carrying a pair of eyeglasses and a glass of cola.

    “Alice. Alice Mancini.”

    “It’s nice to meet you. And thank you for welcoming me into your home.”

    “We don’t get many visitors. All our family except Maria is back East.”

    Alice put on her glasses and read the napkin. On one side, she read Bud’s note to Maria, and on the other, Maria’s note to her. “This scares me. Maria has never asked me to get her papers before. I wish I could discuss this with my husband.”

    “Where is your husband?”

    “He died two months ago.”

    “I’m sorry. I – didn’t know.”

    Alice studied the napkin. “I will honor my daughter’s wishes.”

    “Thank you so much.”

    Kevin waited at the kitchen table while Alice headed toward the front of the house. When she returned, she carried two shopping bags, which she put on the table.

    Kevin reached inside one bag and pulled out a large mailing envelope. Inside the envelope was a four-inch stack of papers. Kevin started looking through them.

    Inside the second bag, Kevin found the mother lode. There were about thirty reports from William Evans. Kevin flipped through the reports quickly. They were dated from 1992 through 1995, and contained information from Draga about upcoming military actions in which the Black Dragons would be participating. There were also reports from Draga of meetings he had with President Milosevic and others in the Yugoslavian government.

    Reading this material gave Kevin goose bumps. He was holding dynamite in his hands. The information in these reports might not only clear Draga of war crimes, but could prove that President Milosevic was the one giving the orders to the Bosnian Serbs in the war in Bosnia. The U.S. government might also be badly damaged by these reports. They showed that it knew of the attacks on cities and towns in Bosnia before they happened, and had done nothing to prevent the thousands of deaths that followed.

    Kevin could not contain his excitement. “This is the best Christmas present I’ve ever gotten. I’m going to take these and copy them right away. I’ll have them back to you in an hour.”

    Kevin strode quickly from the house, the shopping bags tucked under his arms. He got in his car and drove to downtown Oakland, where he knew of a 24-hour copy center. It was rush hour, and Kevin found himself crawling along city streets. He looked in the rearview mirror. There were no signs that he was being followed. If someone had been following, Kevin suspected they would not have let these documents get into his hands in the first place.

    At the copy center, Kevin made two sets of copies. He mailed one copy to himself in Holland just in case the other copy was somehow taken from him before he got there, or when he came through Customs. Kevin shook his head at the irony of his situation. Just a few months ago, as a federal prosecutor, he could show his credentials and be waved through Customs. Now, he was smuggling papers to avoid Customs agents.

    When he left the copy center, Kevin saw a sports store featuring Oakland Raiders souvenirs. He decided to get a present for the #1 Raiders fan in The Hague. After this brief detour, Kevin returned the originals to Alice Mancini.

    When Kevin arrived back in Santa Rosa, Diane and Ellen were not at the hotel. Kevin had hardly seen Ellen since they had arrived in California. She had so many sleepovers with her friends that she had not spent a single night at their hotel. Kevin sat down and studied the reports. He found one report that excited him. In 1992, Draga had furnished William Evans with a list of the Black Dragons. Unfortunately, the list had not been attached to any of the reports.

    As he read over the reports, Kevin realized that he needed to find Evans. The man might be his star witness in The Hague. Kevin turned on his laptop computer and got on the Internet. After some searching, he found the Hilton Hotel Corporation website. He wondered whether he could locate an employee through the website. Hilton had thousands of employees. After searching the website, he came up with nothing.

    A few minutes later, Diane and Ellen came into the room. “Hi, Daddy,” Ellen said. When she saw the laptop, she asked, “Can I check my e-mail? My friends from Holland are probably wondering what I’m up to.”

    “Sure, I was finished anyway.”

    He watched as Ellen effortlessly accessed her e-mail, then squealed with delight as she read her messages from her friends. “Jennifer thinks she’s getting a scooter for Christmas. And, Katie is going to Disney World.”

    Watching Ellen operate the computer with ease gave Kevin an idea. “Ellen, could you spend a minute being a detective again?”

    “Sure, Dad.”

    “I need to try to find a William Evans who works for Hilton Hotels. I want to know what city he works in. How would I do that?”

    “That’s easy.” Ellen turned back to the computer and typed in www.google.com. “This is a search engine. It searches all kinds of places on the Internet.” She typed in the words “William Evans” and “Hilton”.

    Kevin stood, looking over Ellen’s shoulders. Ellen scrolled down through several entries that appeared on the screen. Then she clicked on one of them. It was a newspaper article about the recent prosecution of a skimming operation at the casino of the Flamingo Hilton Hotel. The article said that Hilton’s internal security staff, headed by William Evans, had uncovered the fraud.

    “He’s in Las Vegas, Dad,” Ellen said matter-of-factly.

    

    

    “Santa found me even in a hotel!” Ellen shouted.

    She burst out of bed in their hotel room, flipped on the light, and looked at two wrapped Christmas presents at the foot of her bed. “Can I open them?”

    Kevin looked at the clock radio on the night stand. It was 5:03 a.m. “Santa came early, it’s still dark out. But go ahead and open them.”

    He and Diane struggled to clear their heads and open their eyes. They sat up in bed and watched Ellen attack the wrapping paper.

    Her first present was a “Talk Girl” portable tape player. “This is great! Now, I can record messages in Holland and send them to my friends in Santa Rosa.”

    Ellen put the tape player aside and opened Santa’s second present. The second gift was a “Password Diary.” It was a journal for writing in, but to open it you had to say a password into the microphone on the side. It had voice recognition technology, so only the holder of the diary could get in, even if someone stole the password. Ellen was delighted. “I love it!” she squealed, hugging it to her chest.

    Ellen tried out the diary right away.

    Kevin was thankful that Santa had included batteries. He imagined himself driving around Santa Rosa at 5:30 a.m. on Christmas looking for a place that sold batteries. After Kevin, Diane, and Ellen opened their presents to each other, it was still early.

    Kevin decided to jog up to Lake Ilsanjo in Annadel State Park. He started out fine, but found himself struggling once he got to the hills. He had been running in a flat country for the past six months, and he could definitely feel the difference. When he finally reached the lake at the top, Kevin’s mind began working on how to approach William Evans in Las Vegas. He decided to get some advice from Bud Marcello.

    Two days later, after getting Bud’s input and assistance, Kevin flew to Las Vegas. When he arrived, he was met by two beefy escorts in a black Lincoln Town Car. A broad-shouldered, clean-cut young man, who looked like an NFL lineman, got out of the passenger’s side. “You Kevin Anderson?”