The Gun Runner's Daughter (15 page)

September 4, 1994.
New York City.

1.

Woods Hole. Buzzards Bay. Fall River, Mystic, Groton, New London. The night before, still blissfully unaware of Dymitryck’s death, Dee had taken the I-91 connector through
New Haven and accelerated down the Merritt to New York, speeding. The road humming under the light tires of the little car, engine revving at eighty, he took the unlighted Merritt in smooth sweeps
of his arms on the wheel. His mind drained of any thought beyond the speed. Only the foolish, Dee knew, reflect at night.

Perhaps he did not reflect. But some mental process was spinning itself on nonetheless, and north of Larchmont he pulled off the road and into a little restaurant parking lot, still wondering
what he was about to do.

Inside, he ate dinner, slowly, thinking. After perhaps an hour he rose hesitantly and, at a bank of telephones, punched Shauna’s home number from his pocket diary, then his credit card
number. A man answered, obviously just woken. Without saying who it was, Dee asked for Ms. McCarthy. Waiting, Dee felt fear and courage, intermixed. The courage surprised him.

Then, in an aural refocus, he became aware that a radio was playing the news. A man had been attacked and stabbed at Logan Airport. Police suspected an attempted robbery. But the case was
complicated by the fact that the man was a reporter on his way to testify in Washington before the House Intelligence Committee. The newscast announced the reporter’s name just as
Shauna’s sleepy voice came on the other end of the line.

Without a word, acting purely from instinct, Dee hung up.

In the city, at the Yale Club, he got the details on CNN. Dymitryck was on his way to Washington to testify to House Intelligence on the bombing at Harlanstrasse 14, which was
under investigation by Bob Torricelli from New Jersey. Now, Dee heard the details of the familiar story. Nicky had been interviewing a Turkish arms dealer, Mehmet Hourani, who claimed to have proof
of American involvement in a Chilean cluster bomb factory that was supplying Saddam Hussein up until the Gulf War.

The interview had taken place in Hourani’s apartment on the outskirts of Munich, and about halfway through, a bomb had gone off, killing Sargonalian and Nicky’s cameraman. Dymitryck
himself had been badly injured, but not too badly to come out, days later, with the original article detailing Rosenthal’s role in the Bosnian sales. Hourani had been killed before giving
Dymitryck the Iraqi story he had come for. He had, however, given him the Rosenthal story.

Nonetheless, CNN reported, the murder was being called a robbery gone awry by the Boston police, although on what evidence, Dee could not see.

And now, step by step, Dee began to understand how correct had been his instinct in hanging up before Shauna came to the phone. Stomach sinking, he began, in minutes, to understand what his
instinct had seen in a fraction of a second.

For no matter what fantasy the Boston police were feeding the media about a murder gone awry, the FBI was certainly, right this minute, covering every step of Dymitryck’s movements prior
to his death. The most cursory investigation, he knew immediately, would reveal that this man had just come from the island. And the most idiotic of investigators would be able to connect his
presence on Martha’s Vineyard with his interest in Ronald Rosenthal.

Then, suddenly, an image of the roll of film the man had dropped on the ground came to him and Dee felt sweat rolling down his sides.

And that was it. Had he been photographed going into the Ocean View farmhouse? And was the FBI going to find those photographs in the effects of the dead reporter?

If so, his explanation to his boss, that he had simply not connected his onetime sweetheart to his current defendant, would look very thin indeed. If Dee were connected—not in the past but
in the present—both to his defendant’s daughter and, by extension, to a brutal assassination, then his recusal was practically irrelevant.

And that Dee understood made it crucial that he do nothing.

For if, by some chance, he had not been photographed, then the connection between Dymitryck’s death and Allison Rosenthal, no matter how big a media sensation it may be, would not affect
him.

And, if there were any chance at all that he had not been photographed, then the last thing in the world he wanted to do was, by his public withdrawal from the case, connect himself with
Dymitryck’s murder during a trip to Martha’s Vineyard to investigate notorious gun runner Ronald Rosenthal, a story that would, Dee had no doubt, be on the front page of every newspaper
in the country the next morning.

The only thing that could eclipse such a story would be the revelation of his secret love affair with that notorious gun runner’s daughter.

What Dee’s instinct had seen the moment he heard the news of Dymitryck’s death was that he could not do that to himself, and, even more important, he could not do it to Alley.

At three o’clock CNN reported that the FBI had determined that Dymitryck was at Logan Airport en route to Washington from Martha’s Vineyard. Following this report, Dee went out to a
pay phone and called Ocean View. But the telephone rang and rang until a machine answered with a curt command to leave a message, and he hung up.

A process that he repeated, and with the same results, every hour until seven
A.M.

By seven, CNN had not reported anything new since three.

A last call to Alley had produced nothing.

With a glacial dread in his blood, Dee showered and dressed for the office.

With no idea at all what he was going to do.

2.

At first, he thought that the murder would not be mentioned until he spoke to McCarthy. But when he did, she said nothing about it. As he let himself be carried through the
preparations for the press conference, Dee Dennis realized that the connection had either not been made, or was for some reason not being discussed.

After all, as Steve Post had said that morning on the radio during Dee’s taxi ride downtown, Nicholson Dymitryck, in his writing for the
NAR,
had moved from virulent denunciation of
what the magazine called the “Reagan-Bush Junta” to a steady, bitter critique of the “Clinton Compromise” without missing a beat.

And now, watching his fellows in the U.S. attorney’s office, Dee realized that no one in his little world had connected the murder with what they were doing. The realization made a sense
of unreality pass clean through him.

That was growing to be a familiar sensation, and it only heightened as time accelerated—so it seemed—to the conference. In truth, it was already impossible, but he did not want to
admit that. An hour before the press conference the team watched CNN’s preconference coverage of the Rosenthal trial, only to find it following the story of Dymitryck’s murder. Now the
FBI had concluded that the murder was definitely a robbery: Dymitryck’s wallet and briefcase were missing, and witnesses had identified the perpetrators as two young black men. The report
pushed the sense of unreality to some sort of an apogee, for Dee. No one—least of all the FBI—could believe this nonsense. What did it mean? As if physically crippled, Dee watched the
report helplessly, feeling the moments pass.

A powerful dread was now in him. Only a schizophrenic, he thought with a feeling close to tears, could avoid feeling the impossible ambivalence, the pure duality of his position. Nothing meant
what it seemed to mean, nothing.

This thought, without warning, loosened the clutch of his dilemma, and in a practiced mental maneuver, Dee seized the chance to turn his mind to the challenge ahead.

It was a challenge for which, he thought wryly, he had been bred.

The David Treat Dennis who presented himself to the cameras was a composed, articulate, handsome young man, inspired by a sense of righteousness, of moral probity, and
manifesting a winning level of nervousness. Behind him, as he spoke, a slide projector showed images culled from Bosnia, Rwanda, Nicaragua, Guatemala—all unattributed—showing the
various effects of antipersonnel land mines, cluster bombs, and combat weapons, largely on young children. Showing these images had been Ed Dennis’s idea, and that they were entirely
irrelevant to the prosecution of Ronald Rosenthal bothered no one, least of all Dee: this was not a courtroom. His voice, when the audience finally hushed and he began talking, was only helped by
the raspiness of his night awake.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we talk about the arms trade, and the way we talk about it obscures the reality of what people like Ronald Rosenthal do for a living. Yes, they wear suits; yes, they
work in offices; yes, they pay taxes. But the reality of their work is selling death and profiting from war, and our prosecution of Ronald Rosenthal sends one message, pure and simple: munitions
sales are governed by the law of the land. They are a matter of foreign policy that only our executive branch can alter; a matter of legislation that only our Congress can rule on; and when they
are illegally undertaken they become a matter that our courts cannot ignore.”

Coming from this earnest, handsome, articulate young man, the speech got the benefit of the network cameramen’s kindest attention: this was prime-time material, straight into the can. Only
one lone reporter, a young woman in the back of the room, sounded a note of discord when she asked in a precise, confident voice, “You don’t mean to say, Mr. Dennis, that there
aren’t more arms being exported under the Clinton administration than any other previous government? And a follow-up: how is your prosecution being affected by the reports of a secret arms
pipeline between the Falcon Corporation and the Bosnian Muslims being blessed by the White House?”

With a showman’s instinct, Dee answered only the follow-up.

“The Justice Department has, to my knowledge, found those reports groundless, Ms. . . .”

“Laura Isenberg, Pacifica Network.”

A name, clearly, the handsome young lawyer found easy to disregard, as he turned his attention to a man from ABC.

The conference was aired live on C-SPAN, and when Dee arrived back in the office his father was waiting on hold.

“Deedee. Tremendous. The way you handled that girl was word-perfect. Who briefed you on that?”

Hollow with fear, Dee had hung up the phone, and after receiving the rest of his congratulations, made his way to his office.

Shauna was taking the staff to a champagne lunch at Delmonico.

Watching the harbor water glinting, steely, dispassionate, Dee lit a thin Dunhill Panatela, pulling the smoke deep toward the aching anxiety in his stomach.

It was like a wound.

3.

Once, during her time in Paris between college and law school, Alley had surprised her father by picking him up at the airport on one of his business trips.

Her father had emerged from customs in the escort of four black-suited men. Outside, two BMWs had been waiting: one for her father, one for the men, and they’d driven straight to the
Israeli embassy, where, while her father conferred behind closed doors with the ambassador, the four men had drawn handguns—big, automatic nine-millimeters—to fit the holsters they wore
under their suit jackets.

What business required this security—unusual even for her father—Alley had known better than to ask, and she’d managed to forget that the four men were even there, most of the
time. But one night at the Flore, while her father was in the bathroom, a very drunken man tried to pick her up while she sat alone, upstairs, at a small table. She ignored him, he got mad and
lurched toward her, and before she could raise a hand to stop him he was lying on the ground with a knee on his chest while one of the bodyguards searched him with violent efficiency, then dragged
him out of the café. She watched, horrified—he had been harmless. But she had been too surprised to intervene.

When her father returned, enraged, she told him never to allow that to happen again, and hushing her, aware of the attention they were getting, he’d agreed. But she’d suspected that
all he’d done was ask the guards to change their clothes, and whenever her father or his work were in the news, she’d noticed that casually dressed Israeli-looking men in jeans and
sports jackets happened to be discernible around her.