Scott Turow - Personal injuries

"Which reminds me," he said. "I ask people all the time when I meet them: Which do you like better? Even numbers or odd?" From her narrow look, I could see she recognized it as a bar line. Clearly, she'd been warned about Robbie and had no use for his flirting. "I like even numbers," he added, with a futile little smile at his pun. She nodded rather than say anything else and moved to the other side of the room, before Sennett hailed us to our seats so we could talk over the necessary arrangements to be sure no one in Feaver's office questioned Evon or the fictitious cases.

"Did you say she was a Bureau agent or a prison guard?" Feaver asked afterwards. To my eye, she'd been no worse than correct. Robbie, I suspected, was upset by the reality of being watched twelve hours a day in his own office. The truth, though, was that none of us-Robbie, me, even Stan-knew anything about Evon Miller's true identity, any more than we did about Jim or the other undercover agents, the so-called UCAs, who eventually came to work on the case. Project Petros, as the operation was now labeled, ran strictly on the rule of need-to-know, meaning that all players, whether the agents or Robbie or Sennett, were supposed to receive only the limited information required to act their parts. That would minimize the chance that critical secrets would slip out and bring down the entire facade.

The only facts we eventually gleaned about Evon Miller's true background came to us in a roundabout way, largely because Stan had initial reservations about her. He'd found her more tentative than he'd hoped, and was also afraid her low-key style might give her away, since she appeared an unlikely match for someone as flashy as Bobbie. Privately, Feaver found that concern entertaining; he said he was not known as `especially picky.' In any event, Jim, who'd been given control over the agents by UCORC, stuck by his choice. He was impressed by her personal history, which made him believe she had the resilience to handle the rigors of life undercover.

"Apparently, she competed in the Olympics," Sennett explained to me one morning. He tipped a shoulder, knowing no more than that. We were in Warz Park, where Stan ran several miles at 6 a.m. Stan's mania for secrecy was so intense that he had not yet even informed anybody in his office about Feaver. Thus, to avoid questions, we often met here. I'd bought a snappy running suit and followed him once or twice around the tarred oval before we would appear to happen upon one another on a bench. We had gotten together today so that I could hand over documents-the final, signed copy of Robbie's plea agreement and his acknowledgment that he'd reviewed the lengthy written protocol for the undercover operation UCORC had generated-both of which were hidden in the folds of the morning's newspaper. By now it was past Thanksgiving, and winter, like an infection, was beginning to breed in the wind.

As Stan casually picked up the paper, he told me the little about Evon Miller he'd learned. In confidence, Jim had let loose this lone detail about the Olympics in order to reassure Stan. Sennett's motives for telling me, again as a supposed secret, were more pointed.

"Make sure your guy knows she's tougher than she looks," he said. "Don't let him think he can roll over her or outfox her. He plays games, we'll know." A smile tempted me, as it often did confronting Stan's prosecutorial macho, but that riled him. I was jogging in place to keep warm, and Stan stood up from the bench and showed me the newspaper where the signed documents were concealed.

"I have all my cookies on the line here, George. Every IOU and benny. There's nothing left in the favor bank. Don't let him mess with me. And not just for my sake. For his. He screws around, and the way D.C. wrote the guidelines, we have to roll it up and land on him with both feet. Make sure he understands."

I assured him Robbie recognized that if Stan caught him lying he was certain to end up in prison. But Stan laid a finger on my chest for emphasis.

"I'm telling you this as a friend," he said and repeated himself once more before he took off again down the path in the lifting darkness: "We'll know." As I said, this is a lawyer's story. I mean that not only because it is an account of the law's fateful impact but also in the sense that I tell it, as attorneys often do, for those who cannot speak for themselves. I witnessed many of the events of Project Petros firsthand, inasmuch as Robbie always insisted, as he had from the moment Sennett appeared on his doorstep, that I be present whenever Stan was. My memories are enhanced by the hundreds of hours of conversations I have had over the years with the participants, and also by the kind of historical detritus the law often leaves behind: tapes and transcripts and volumes of FBI case reports, called 302s.

Yet, left at that, the tale would be incomplete. The law's truth never ends strictly with the evidence. It depends as well on what attorneys call `inference' and what less restricted souls refer to as `imagination.' Much of Robbie's day-to-day activity was observed only by the agent codenamed Evon Miller, and for the sake of a full account, I have freely imagined her perspectives. Whether she would agree with everything I attribute to her, I cannot say. She has told me what she may, but much of her version is forever locked away behind FBI regulations. My surmises, my conjecture and inference-my imagining-would never pass muster in a courtroom. But I regard them as the only avenue to the whole truth that the law-and a story-always demand.

As for my own role, I hope not to appear like those old warriors whose glory only seems to grow over the years. There was nothing heroic about my part in Petros. The uncomfortable truth is that as soon as I heard what Stan Sennett had in mind that first day in his office, I wanted no part of representing Robbie Feaver.

As a lawyer, I lived by a solemn watchword: Never offend a judge. I laughed at all their jokes. When they ruled against me, even stupidly, I said thank you. I solemnly refrained from any discussion about the ability or temperament of anyone on the bench, living or dead. I have rarely seen a judge who did not bear grudges-it is one of the perks of unquestioned power-and I knew the grudges formed against the person who represented Robbie Feaver would last. Not because all our judges were corrupt. On the contrary, most of them felt, with good reason. That they'd been lifting their skirts high for years to avoid the muddy playing fields of Kindle County. Now they'd be soiled nonetheless. The newspapers would print editorial cartoons representing the courthouse as a cash register; drunks at ball games and bars would make crude jokes whenever a judge took a $20 bill out of his pocket. Having traded the bounty of private practice for the esteem of the bench, they would feel swindled in life's bazaar. And the first person they'd pick on was me, who, unlike Stan or Robbie, would be seen as having chosen to participate for the grubby motive of a fee.

So as I wandered down Marshall Avenue, returning that mid-September day from Stan's office, I was trying to figure how I could get out of the case. I could ask for a staggering retainer. Or claim that I'd been suddenly called for a trial that would consume all my time. But I knew I wasn't going through with any of it.

In the simplest terms, I couldn't stand to draw so dismal a contrast between myself and Sennett, who'd just given me his valorous speech about his Uncle Petros. I never fully understood my lifelong contest with Stan, but I always felt I was running behind. Part of it was that I'd chosen the lucre of private practice, while he lived the more chaste life of a public servant; part was because, as a defense lawyer, I circumvented and thwarted and apologized, while he, as a prosecutor, smote hard blows for what he believed was good and just. Yet now, in the wake of my father's death, I realized there was a way in which I'd always compared myself to Stan in fear.