Steve Martini - The Enemy Inside

The supervisor tells me there is no need for it. They have a private conference area already set up. I tell him that we’ll have to talk about that when I get inside.

He looks at the two guards, nods, and Dan and I go through the metal detector. The guard isn’t happy about it, but he hands me the noise generator on the other side and we head to the sealed door beyond.

Her name is Hannah Parish. She’s an assistant US attorney. She introduces herself along with her boss, a senior supervising deputy attorney general, Fenton Yasuda, with the Criminal Division. It seems we all have our own surprises today. Parish and Yasuda are from the Department of Justice headquarters in Washington. No one told me they would be here.

“Why don’t we go ahead and sit down,” she says.

We are in a small conference room at the end of a long hall. We start to take chairs around the table. She looks at Dan and says, “I don’t think there’s any need for Mr. Wells to stay, do you?”

“I don’t have anything to hide. And besides, he came all this way,” I tell her.

She looks at me, smiles pleasantly, and tells me there may be some confidential matters that require discussion.

“Not as far as I’m concerned,” I say. “Until I talk to my client, the only thing I’m prepared to talk about are the ground rules, in particular where he and I can meet and where we can have absolute confidence that what we say to each other is confidential.”

Parish and her boss probably see this as an opportunity to take my deposition, to find out whatever they can about what I know.

“I understand you brought some kind of a noise generator with you.”

“I did.”

“Why would you do that?” she asks.

“For the same reason you use parabolic mics or worse, their laser cousins. You want to listen in and I don’t want you to.”

“I’m an attorney,” she says. “I understand the sanctity of the attorney-client privilege.”

“In that case, I’m sure you can understand the practical need to protect it, particularly when we consider the stakes involved in this case.”

She looks at me, little slits for eyes. “So what do you propose?” she says.

“I’d like to talk to my client outside under the open sky. I assume he has seen daylight recently?”

“He gets exercise four times a week, outside in the recreation area,” says the supervisor.

“Would that be the concrete pit?” I say.

He just looks at me.

“Then I assume it is. Let’s hope the sunlight doesn’t blind him. I believe you have an outdoor exercise track, surrounding a field.” I know they do because I have seen it from the satellite photo on Google Earth. “I want to meet him there. Alone. No guards. No mics, just him and me.”

“This is a maximum security prison,” says the supervisor. “The people in this institution are highly dangerous.”

“I don’t doubt it for a minute. But if you’re talking about Mr. Betz, I’ll take my chances. You know as well as I do he represents no danger at all, at least not to me.”

Parish, Yasuda, and the supervisor huddle at the other side of the table with their backs to me. When they turn around, Parish tells me they want to go in the other room and talk. What they want to do is stall for time until they can come up with some method to give me what I want and still listen in.

“Take it or leave it,” I tell them. “I either talk to him now or else I walk. If I do, you can tell Senator Grimes for me that all bets are off.”

“What do you mean?” says Parish.

“Just tell her, she’ll know.”

They look at each other. The supervisor shrugs, nods. “All right,” she says. “It’ll take us a few minutes to move him.”

“Please don’t take too long. I’d rather not have to leave.”

“Give us ten minutes,” says the supervisor.

I’m standing alone on the grass infield in the center of the fading green oval, some of it dirt, surrounded by the dusty track when I see him. He is hooded in black and manacled, wearing an orange prison jumpsuit. His hands are held to his side by a waist chain. For some reason they haven’t bothered to put the ankle chains on. Probably because they know that Betz is going nowhere.

He is accompanied by three guards who shuttle him along like a blind man. With the hood over his head, he is exactly that. They shuffle along slowly, covering the seventy-five yards or so to where I’m standing.

Betz appears to be very slight of build. It’s hard to tell in the jumpsuit. But he’s not very tall, maybe five foot seven. Walking, he looks a little knock-kneed as if perhaps they’re holding him up.

When they reach me I hear him breathing heavily through the hood. One of the guards tells Betz he may want to close his eyes for the sunlight. It is one of those brilliant Colorado days, blue skies and not a cloud overhead.

“Do you mind if he borrows one of your hats?” I ask them.

“Sure,” says one of the guards. “He can use mine.” He asks Betz if he’s OK.

“Is that you, Walter?”

“It is.”

“I’m all right.”

“You might want to close your eyes. We’re gonna take the hood off.”

“OK.”

They pull the hood from his head. His hands in pure reflex try to come up to shade his eyes, but the waist chain won’t allow it. Betz squints, closes his eyes, and tries to look down toward the ground.

The guard puts the baseball cap on Betz’s head and pulls the visor down low on his forehead to shade his eyes. “You OK?”

“Good. I’m fine. Thanks for the hat,” he says.

“It’s OK.” The guard looks at me. “He’s all yours. Do yourself a favor. Don’t wander too far. Guards up in the towers.” He gestures toward one of them with his head. “They will use deadly force if you get anywhere near the fence.”

“Thanks for the warning.”

The guards leave us.

I reach into my pocket, take out the white noise generator, and turn it on. It emits a low audible hum.

“What is that?” says Betz.

I explain it to him. He looks at the device, then back at me. I’m not sure he believes me.

“Sorry we had to meet out here under these circumstances. But I needed to get you away from the buildings where we could talk in private. You are Rubin Betz?”

“Last time I looked,” he says. “Course that was a while ago.” His face is gaunt, pale, lines etched under his eyes. For a man who is supposed to be forty-six, Betz could pass for sixty.

“My name is Paul Madriani. I’m a lawyer. I was sent here to represent you. Did anyone tell you I was coming?”

“Yeah, they told me. Who hired you?” he says.

“To tell you the truth, I’m not even sure myself. I’m not going to lie to you. For all I know, it may be the same people who put you in this place.”

“Then why should I trust you?” he says.

“You don’t have to. Just hear me out. I think I know what’s happening. You’ve been in here now for what, almost two years?”

He nods.

“Things have happened that you may not know about. Do you ever get any visitors?”

He shakes his head. His eyes never leave me.

“So in that time you’ve had no visitors at all?”

“My lawyer,” he says. “But he’s dead. They told me he died in an accident. That was right after they put me in here. You tend to lose track of time.”

“Then Olinda Serna never came to visit you?”

He looks at me but doesn’t say anything.

“Did you know she was dead?”

By the expression on his face, the look in his eyes, I can tell that he didn’t. “According to the police report it was an accident. But it wasn’t. She was murdered.”