John Nance - Headwind

“I know it’s presumptuous of me to ask,” she continued, “since we’ve never met.” Her voice was exceptionally soothing, and he found himself almost forgetting that she’d just asked a question.

“What? Oh, no, Sherry. That’s not presumptuous at all. I mean, I appreciate your asking.”

“So, what is the answer?” she prompted.

“Ah, the answer is ‘no,’ I can’t be tired, because I’ve only been up about twenty-eight hours now. I’m just marginally incoherent,” he insisted.

“Well, you can collapse in a minute,” she said, “but right now I need to give you the number for this plane’s satellite phone, since the GSM phones we’ve been using won’t work in the air. This is the one the cockpit crew will answer.”

Jay grabbed a notepad from the bed behind him and took the number down. “I can reach you in flight on this?” he asked.

“Yes,” Sherry replied. “By the way, our estimated arrival time at Heathrow is five-thirty P.M. your time. It’s an hour later here in Italy. Are you going to meet us there? Or what do you suggest we do on arrival?”

“I’ll call you in flight with instructions.”

“And what if we don’t hear from you?”

“Then… tell the President it’s his choice, but if no one stops you, refuel immediately and go on to Iceland, refuel there, and head as fast as possible for Maine. But, Sherry, you can depend on my being there.”

“I was hoping you’d say that. I’ll be looking forward to meeting you in person.”

“Me, too. You, I mean.” He replaced the receiver and sat quietly for a moment, balancing the need to hear from the Deputy Prime Minister’s office with the need to call the solicitor he’d hired, Geoffrey Wallace, to find out what he’d discovered. Wallace had yet to phone him back.

Jay punched in the number to Wallace’s office.

“He’s out at the moment,” Wallace’s secretary said. “But I’m sure he’ll be calling you, Mr. Reinhart.”

He thanked her and disconnected just as the room phone rang.

“Mr. Reinhart? Would you hold please for Ambassador Jamison?”

“I’m sorry, who?”

“Ambassador Richard Jamison, sir. American Ambassador to Great Britain.”

“Oh. Of course,” Jay replied, trying to pull up a mental image of Jamison, whose picture he’d seen quite often on television over the years.

Why is he calling me? Jay wondered as a small shadow of guilt crept into the periphery of his thoughts. Should I have called him as John Harris’s attorney?

“Mr. Reinhart. We haven’t met, but I wanted to thank you personally for what you’ve been doing for President Harris.”

“Certainly, Mr. Ambassador. I’m his lawyer, after all.”

“I understand. Can you tell me when he’ll be arriving in London? I’ve been briefed by Washington to expect him sometime this evening.”

“Actually,” Jay began, caution slowing his response, “I’m not certain yet. Is… that why you’re calling?”

“Well, there are two main reasons,” the ambassador said, his voice crisp and tinged by a hint of New England.

“First, we need to compare notes on what you intend to do, and second, I need to let you know that the team from Washington should be here in about two hours.”

“What team?”

“The Secretary of State, several representatives of the Justice Department, and a handful of others. President Cavanaugh dispatched them a while ago to help you prepare President Harris’s defense when he lands here. I assumed you knew?”

“No, sir, I didn’t. I mean, I welcome their assistance more than you know, but I knew nothing about it. Did you say two hours?”

“Less than that now, actually. They’re coming into Heathrow, to the private facility there. If you’d like, I’ll swing by in an embassy car and pick you up.”

“That would be appreciated.”

“About the British. I’m aware of your trip to see Tony Sheffield this afternoon.”

“How do you know that, sir, if I may ask?”

“I’m your friendly local ambassador. When an American lawyer comes calling on the British government regarding the fate of an American President on British soil, the Foreign Office feels somewhat constrained to bring me into the loop.”

The shadow of guilt Jay had felt became a cloud. This was, after all, a matter affecting two great nations, and he’d treated it as a private problem.

“I apologize for not calling you, Mr. Ambassador.”

“Not a problem. May I call you Jay?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. And I go by Richard. Now, look. Neither Sheffield nor the PM is going to call me first. They’ll call you, if that’s what they promised. So, if you’ll take down my personal number, I’d appreciate a call as soon as you learn anything of substance.”

He passed the number and Jay quickly wrote it down.

“In your opinion, Mr. Ambass… Richard, what can we expect the British to do about this?” Jay asked.

“Frankly, I don’t know, Jay. I can tell you this government has been critical of the way the Pinochet case was handled by the Home Office.”

“In other words, they think the Blair government should have supported Pinochet’s assertion that he couldn’t be arrested or extradited because of sovereign immunity?”

“No. The opposite. Some members of this PM’s administration seem to think Pinochet should have been shipped to Spain within twenty-four hours of his arrest, though that’s not really legally possible.”

Jay felt momentarily disoriented. “They… support rapid extradition?”

“I wouldn’t say they support it as a matter of general policy, or that they’re prepared to bypass normal legal process, Jay. But I would warn you that there are voices in this PM’s ear telling him that Britain doesn’t have the right to delay extradition as a matter of political decision. In other words, one of the reasons President Cavanaugh scrambled our Secretary of State over here is to try to convince the PM that Britain must not interfere with their courts in any direction.”

“I’m slightly stunned,” Jay said. “Surely they can’t feel the Pinochet case is directly similar to President Harris’s? I mean, with Pinochet the whole world knew very clearly the charges of official torture were valid. These nonsense charges against John Harris are anything but. They’re absolutely groundless.”

“Well, that’s a good distinction, counselor, but you have another problem. With Pinochet, it was Spain, a third-party country, trying to get their hands on him. Even the Blair government would have supported shipping the general back home to Chile if anyone had thought Chile would really put him on trial. But there was a bad taste in everyone’s mouth about Spain making the complaint. Here was Spain demanding that England ship a Chilean to Spain to be tried in Spain for killing mostly Chileans in Chile. It was a real stretch.”

The ambassador continued. “Now, with John Harris, the problem is that the nation that considers its citizens to have been victims of official torture is the very same nation signing this warrant and demanding Harris’s extradition. In other words, Peru wants him in Peru to answer to charges of ordering the torture and killing of Peruvians. That’s a different ball game.”

“My problem is, sir, that I need time to show in court that the charges are bogus. Obviously the Peruvians want to try him in Peru, where the charges will automatically be considered valid whether they are or not.”

“It’s a real dilemma, I’ll grant you, and I can’t guess whether or not the British PM is going to think it’s sufficiently different from the Pinochet case to justify helping us. I just don’t know, which is why I’ll be waiting with bated breath to hear what they tell you.”