David Ellis - In the Company of Liars

Allison felt the moisture on her hands, felt a shiver run through her body.

“It just makes me uncomfortable, Jessica. I-probably should have done this before. I would never repeat this to anyone. I’ll give you a great recommend-”

Allison opened her eyes, looked up at Sam, an elbow on his desk, his slumped posture.

“This isn’t going to work,” he told Jessica, bringing his hand to his forehead and looking into Allison’s eyes. “Mat-Mat’s a friend. You know this is crazy. It always was.”

A long pause. Allison could hear her daughter’s protesting voice through the phone. Sam said nothing as Jessica spoke, his face locked in a grimace.

No, she felt sure. This was not right. This was not the way to handle this. Yet she did nothing to stop it.

“Jessica, I’m a lobbyist. It’s the appearance of impropriety. It’s not about being mad at you. I’m not mad at you. I’m-this is just the way it has to be, okay?”

There were more protests, more defensive responses. And then it was over. Sam hung up the phone, looked at her with a wounded expression.

Allison got to her feet and left the office.

Allison’s eyes return to Monica Madley’s newspaper column, her diatribe against the clichй of the hysterical woman who lashes out at the man who scorns her. Maybe the prosecutors will read this column and come away convinced that they made a mistake and bought into a stereotype.

Or maybe, she fears, they’ll decide that they have the right stereotype, but the wrong woman.

Jane McCoy opens the file on her desk:

Zulfikar Ali Haroon was born in a small village outside of Quetta, in the Baluchistan province of Pakistan, in 1978. His father, Ghulam Zia Haroon, was a shoemaker. His mother, Jamila Khan Haroon, was an English professor at Baluchistan University.

In March of 1985, an aerial bomb destroyed a wing of Baluchistan University. Among the casualties were Professor Jamila Haroon and her four-year-old daughter, Benazir. The blast was widely accredited to the Soviets, as one of many attacks against Pakistan since that country became the focal point for resistance to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Less than two months after the deaths of his wife and daughter, Ghulam Haroon was recruited. Ghulam joined theHizb-i-Islami, the most fundamentalist of the Afghan resistance groups that formed the Central Alliance, and the group that received the bulk of CIA arms supplied to themujahedin.

Ghulam Haroon was dispatched to Peshawar to assist in the flow of arms to themujahedin. From the moment that he arrived in Peshawar, he introduced and registered his son as Ramadaran Ali Haroon, changing his first name from Zulfikar. Ghulam Haroon purported to work as a carpet merchant, but his principal work consisted in training and supplying freedom fighters on behalf ofHizb-i-Islami.

“Jane, Mr. Benjamin’s here,” Harrick says. “In the conference room.”

They take a stroll down the hall.

“Hello, Mr. Benjamin,” she says when she enters the conference room. “Mr. Salters.”

Walter Benjamin is the director of governmental affairs, Midwest region, for Flanagan-Maxx Pharmaceuticals. Gerald Salters is his lawyer, an aging veteran of the criminal courts.

“Appreciate you coming back down,” she says. “You came in through the underground entrance?”

“Of course,” says Gerry Salters.

“Okay. Good.” McCoy opens a file folder. Her notes from their last meeting were typed by an office assistant. A wonder, that the typist could comprehend her lousy penmanship. “First, I’d like to go back over what we originally talked about. Then I’d like to cover something new.”

“If you have a specific question, my client can certainly answer it,” says Salters. “But I don’t see why we need to cover old ground.”

“Call it a favor,” she requests. You always learn at least one new thing when someone tells a story a second time. Which is precisely why defense attorneys don’t like to let their clients have more than one conversation with law-enforcement types.

“That’s fine,” Benjamin says to his lawyer. The Flanagan-Maxx executive is painfully thin, but not in a way that she would attribute to exercise. He doesn’t look fit. He looks ill, actually. But you don’t see a lot of happy, healthy faces sitting across from you in this job. Not two years ago, she recalls putting the squeeze on an executive who was borrowing a little here, a little there from some corporate accounts, when suddenly he vomited all over the conference-room table. She ended up with no information from him that day except what he had eaten for breakfast.

Benjamin starts his narrative-hiring Sam Dillon to pass the Divalpro legislation, paying MAAHC to hire Mat, and the sudden switch of three votes in the Senate that allowed it to pass.

“How did Mat Pagone prevail on Senators Strauss, Almundo, and Blake to change their minds? Agent McCoy, I have no personal knowledge of that. You think I have time to micro-manage like that? I’ve got seven state legislatures I’m dealing with, I’ve got seven sets of statutory and regulatory compliance issues to deal with. I don’t have time to ask those questions.”

“Understood,” she says, because she believes him.

“But then Sam calls me one day, January of this year. Couple months ago. About two months after veto session. He says he has some concerns about what may have transpired in the Senate. He tells me, he’s hearing whispers in the corridors of the capital. He says he heard Senator Blake talking about a trip to Sanibel Island, and he knows Mat took the same trip at the same time. So now, Sam says, he’s thinking about those three new votes for our bill. Strauss. Almundo. Blake. He tells me, flat-out, what that concern is.” Walter Benjamin shrugs. “We didn’t know what to do. Neither of us. We’re not sure. We don’t have the power to subpoena or immunize people. We canask, but how exactly do you do that? Approach a sitting senator who just voted for your bill and accuse him of being on the take? We have to have a continuing relationship with these people. That’s political suicide.

“We asked Mat, did he bribe those senators? He said no. Were we totally convinced? Maybe not. But I didn’t know. Sam didn’t know. What more, in God’s name, are we supposed to do? We have nothing but suspicions.”

“Okay, Mr. Benjamin,” McCoy prods. “Keep going.”

“So Mat comes to Sam, late January of this year. He’s panicked. He says federal agents want to talk to him. He says they’ve seized his bank records. They’re looking at money withdrawals Mat made over several months. It looks bad. It smells. Sam says to Mat, come clean. Tell me what happened. And that’s when Mat drops it on Sam.”

McCoy nods. This is her favorite part, or least favorite, depending on the perspective.

“Mat denies the whole thing, right? But he says it to Sam hypothetically. Mat says to Sam, ‘If I were to have done something wrong, the same could be said of you.’ He says to Sam, ‘If money were handed to Senator Strauss, it wasn’t handed to him by me. It would have been handed to him by you, Sam. So we’re in this together.’ ”

Benjamin sighs. “See, Strauss apparently had lunch at the Maritime Club with Sam and Mat, last-I guess it was October.”

“Right.”

“And that was after they played racquetball at the club. Sam and Strauss. But before that, apparently, Mat saw Sam and handed him a bag. A gym bag. He told Sam it was Strauss’s clothes from another time they had played-sweats, in a gym bag that Strauss had left in a locker. Turns out, I guess, that gym bag had some money in it, too. Sam swears he never looked. I’m sure if he had, he would have found some dirty clothes in there. But somewhere in there was, I assume, about a hundred one-hundred-dollar bills. About ten thousand dollars.”