David Kessler - No Way Out

What on earth did it mean?

But there was another question nagging away at Andi. How did this “Lannosea” know that Sherman and Alex had badgered her into working on the Claymore case? She hadn’t told anyone.

Alex was reading through the report about the case, trying to find other weaknesses. So far, Bethel’s change of mind was the only one. But it looked like the most promising. The only thing that Alex was worried about was that it seemed like such an unlikely change of mind that he was wondering if the DA’s office had a trick up their sleeve.

Aside from that, he also had the problem that this was not a case that depended on the testimony of the victim. They also had DNA evidence. If Claymore had said that he had consensual sex with Bethel then it would have been a whole different ball game. They could have argued consent. Although the medical evidence and pictures made that difficult, the defense at least had breathing room.

But Claymore had closed the door on that by claiming that there had been no sexual contact between himself and Bethel Newton — and even that he had never met her.

That left Alex and Andi with the problem of explaining why she had accused him. Of course the obvious answer was that she had been attacked by some one who looked like him. Alex had even played a long shot by asking Claymore if he had an identical twin. But Claymore responded with such a withering look that he didn’t have to open his mouth for Alex to know perfectly well what the answer was.

The phone rang. Alex picked it up. Juanita told him that it was a call from the Santa Ritter jail. Alex said he’d take it.

“Hallo Elias.”

“Pardon?” said an unfamiliar voice.

“Oh I’m sorry,” said Alex, I thought you were some one else.”

“This is the deputy governor of the Santa Ritter jail. I’m afraid I have to tell you that your client, Elias Claymore, has been stabbed.”

“Stabbed?”

“Yes sir, but not fatally. He’s in the jail hospital. We have a fully equipped hospital here.”

“But how did it happen?”

“Usual story… a fellow inmate with a shank.”

Alex was surprised to hear this described as “usual.”

“How serious is it?”

“It was pretty serious. He was stabbed in the stomach. They’re still operating, but the anesthesiologist came out a couple of times and said it looks like he’s gonna make it.”

Alex breathed a sigh of relief.

“Did you catch whoever did it?”

“Not yet, but we’ve got CCTV so we’ll look at the tapes.”

“Okay what about security for my client?”

“We’ve got guards posted outside the operating theatre and we’ll keep him in protective solitary until the trial.”

Until the trial?

Alex sensed the full import of these words. If Claymore was found guilty and imprisoned, he wouldn’t be kept in solitary any longer. He might be transferred to an open prison, but he’d have to join the general population. Alex realized in that moment that this wasn’t just about his client’s freedom. If he didn’t secure an acquittal, Elias Claymore’s life wouldn’t be worth two bits.

When he opened his eyes, he didn’t know where he was. All he could see was that the walls were white. He tried to gather his wits. The last thing he remembered, he had been thinking about his early life and the crimes he had committed. Was that where he was now? In prison? Had it all been a dream? Had he never really been released? Or escaped?

He struggled to remember.

He had joined several black power groups as they struggled to liberate themselves — and some of them had used rather clever tactics. For example, they availed themselves of the Second Amendment right to “keep and bear arms.” But when the White Establishment decided that the second amendment wasn’t quite so sacred — now that the Brothers were asserting their rights under it — the movement split. Most of them didn’t want to risk their newfound support among the white liberals by falling afoul of the new gun laws. But Elias Claymore held out for continued bearing of arms, arguing that self-defense still required possession of guns and that in any case the White Establishment had no right to change the rules in the middle of the game.

After serving a one-year stint in prison for firearms offences, he came out angrier than ever and over the next two and a half years he raped five white women, after “practicing” his technique first on three black ones.

By this time, the Brothers regarded him as more of an embarrassment than an ally and it was widely rumored that it was one of his own who betrayed his hiding place to the FBI. He still remembered the day the Feds came for him. It was anger, not fear, that he felt as he saw the flickering lights in the distance and knew that he had nowhere to run from the vast convoy of lawmen that it had taken to bring him down.

He considered fighting to the death and taking down as many of the “pigs” with him as he could. It was not vainglorious courage. If he went to prison, he fully expected to be killed there. So he saw no reason not to make his last stand here and now. But he realized that if he could at least have his day in court, he would have the one thing that the White’s Man “free press” had denied him until now: a platform from which to speak and from which his message would surely be heard.

He was arrested and charged with six counts of rape, based on the testimony of those who came forward. Sentenced to nine years, he escaped after one, under the cover of a prison riot, with the aid of another group — this one basing its ideas on racially separatist version of Islam rather than secular revolution.

But three years in Libya and Sudan had shattered the illusion. He had seen corruption and double standards in Libya. Then when rumors of a US government plot to kidnap him started floating around, he moved on to Sudan. It was there that he saw how the blacks in the south of that country were treated as second class citizens. No amount of excuse-making and weasel talk could change that.

Yes, many of those blacks were Christians and their persecution was partially religious rather than racial. But so what? If that was their belief system, were they not entitled to it? Did it make any difference if their oppressors claimed that it was religion rather than race that reduced the Blacks of southern Sudan to the status of second-class citizens? Oppression was oppression and if he wasn’t prepared to make excuses for oppression in America then why should he make excuse for it here in the Third World?

And the more he spoke to the Christian blacks in the south of Sudan, the more he learned about their culture and ideas and the more he realized that he had fallen for some one else’s illusion. He had been led to believe that Christianity was the religion of the oppressors and that Islam was the natural religion of the black man. But it was here that he saw the other side of the coin. And America too was changing. Whatever its faults, America was growing and learning from its past mistakes. At least the American way had a future.

He had once said that indifference was impossible: if you’re not part of the cure you’re part of the disease. But as he looked toward his homeland — his real homeland, America — he saw that more and more people were becoming part of the cure. He had seen the first glimpse of it back in the sixties — in the freedom riders of all races. He saw it now in the newly enfranchised young who were asserting themselves politically as well as in more trivial ways. The same wind of change that had once swept colonialism out of Africa had blown “Jim Crow” out of America.