The Last Judgment (36 page)

“Meir. It was Mossad agent C. Meir,” Tiny said loudly.

“Tiny, you're my hero,” Will yelled back. Clicking off, he took his pen and printed the name in the blank lines of both the original pretrial and the copy for the prosecutor.

He looked at his watch. It was four-forty-seven.

“Please hurry,” Will yelled to the guards at the gate as they checked his briefcase and cell phone.

It was four-forty-nine when Will sprinted into the tribunal building and raced to the clerk's office. There was one window open for filing court pleadings. He arrived just as an Arab man was sliding down a folding metal window cover.

“No!” Will yelled out. He grabbed the metal closure at the bottom, leaving about a handsbreadth opening.

“File this!” he ordered, and thrust his papers through the gap.

The man started yelling and tried to push the papers back.

“File these—it's your job! Do it now—do you hear me?”

Several security guards came running over toward Will, their weapons already drawn.

“I'm an American lawyer—and if this clerk does not file these papers, I will call the reporters for American television and tell them what happened here.”

The guards stood motionless, their revolvers pointed at Will. The clerk, frozen on the other side of the window, still had Will's pretrial disclosure statement in his fist.

After several seconds, the senior guard waved his gun toward the clerk and said something in Arabic.

The clerk threw Will a dirty look. Then he slammed the court stamp down on the original, and also reluctantly stamped Will's copy of the papers.

Will examined his copy. The stamp bore that day's date.

When he turned, Mira was standing a few feet away, smiling.

“That was a close call,” she said, laughing a little.

Will gave an exasperated sigh.

“Will, you really look tired. You work all night on this?”

He nodded.

“You poor man. You'd better take better care of yourself.”

Will handed her a copy of his pretrial disclosure statement and said, “Can you serve this on the Palestinian public prosecutor's office?”

Mira nodded enthusiastically. “Is there anything else I can do?”

“Yes. Call the jail in Ramallah. Line up a meeting between me and Gilead for tomorrow. And tell them I will need several hours—and I don't want to be interrupted.”

“Glad to. How about you and I both interview him? If I'm going to be effective I need to get all the information I can for his defense—”

“Listen, Mira,” Will said, “as defense amicus curiae you're in a little different situation than I am as Gilead's personal defense counsel. No offense, but I think I'd better meet alone with him.”

“Certainly,” she said with a smile. “No problem. After I serve these papers I'll contact the jailers.”

Then she pulled out one of her cards and wrote something on the back.

“Here's my cell number and my home number. It's actually my brother's apartment. I'm living with him. In case you need to contact me in an emergency.”

Will took the card and nodded. They shook hands, and Will trudged out of the building and hailed a cab. Now he needed to get back to the hotel, as well as try to call Fiona. And then maybe crash for a few hours' nap before getting back to work.

53

B
ACK AT HIS HOTEL ROOM
, Will called Fiona. Andy's solo at the concert had gone wonderfully, she reported. He was also starting baseball practice after school.

She went on to describe her meeting in DC as productive. As part of the resolution, her upcoming concert in Baltimore would be recorded—but that certainly made it much more complicated. Her agent and the concert promoter were trying to sort out the details.

“So often I wish I could just pursue this music ministry without all of the complications…all of the endless details,” she said with a sigh.

“How are you doing otherwise?”

“Okay. Missing you. Terribly. I'm lonely. It's probably good I'm so busy. Keeps my mind off not having you here. And off of Da not being around anymore…I sure wish we didn't have to be separated.”

“Me too. I love you, darling. So much.”

“I saw you on TV.”

“Oh?”

“You were walking to the courthouse building. Outside a tall gate. There were a bunch of protestors screaming at you.”

“Yeah. On my way to the pretrial hearing. That was interesting.”

“How did it go?”

“They're cutting me no slack at all. I have a feeling this is going to be bare-knuckle boxing all the way.”

“What else is new?” Fiona said, with a little resignation in her voice. “Since when have you ever taken the easy road? That would be too obvious…too routine.”

“Soon,” Will said, trying to be reassuring, “I'll be home. Then it will be back to life as usual. I'm looking forward to that so much.”

“ ‘Usual,' ” Fiona said, as if almost to herself. “That's not who you are. I'm beginning to wonder…did God make you that way? Or is it something else…always the steep, stony, climb for you…always the rough road. Is it something you've picked for yourself? Some need. Some hidden drive. Pushing you on. Never content.”

After a moment's silence she added, “But you know…I love you so much. Sorry, I'm just rambling on here, I guess.”

“No. I want you to be honest with me. Always. Listen—please pray for me—and for this case,” Will said with a special urgency in his voice that Fiona detected. “And Gilead.”

“You sound worried.”

“Not just that. You know I've always assumed I could handle anything. Sounds awfully arrogant, doesn't it? And it probably is. I think you're right. Something is always pushing me on. Frankly, I always felt that—given enough time and energy—I could handle any case that came along, no matter how complex. But now…this is different.”

“What do you mean?”

“This whole thing seems so beyond me, darling. Simple as that. I'm doing everything right. I'm preparing for the fight—just as I've done for the last thirty years. But I've never been quite so aware…so acutely aware…of my total weakness. You've always called my cases ‘David against Goliath
.'
Good description. But this one…it's more like an ant versus Goliath.”

“Grasshoppers,” Fiona commented quietly.

“What?”

“Grasshoppers. Remember? The Israelite spies are sent by the Lord to check out the land of Canaan before they enter, after crossing the wilderness. They came back saying there were giants
in the land, and they felt like little tiny grasshoppers in the shadow of their enemy. It took a man like Joshua to lead them in and claim victory.”

Will smiled. “Maybe I should read up on it again. Thank you, dear. You're right. I have to keep a spiritual perspective on this…You know, speaking of spies, I talked to Jack Hornby earlier today. He wants to do an article on Caleb Marlowe.”

“I wonder where he is,” Fiona said. “You've always thought he'd survived that attack in Mexico haven't you?”

“Yes. That postcard I got later…unsigned…I've always had that feeling…”

“You know, we also got another blast from the past,” Fiona added. “A note from Tex Rhoady.”

“Tex? What do you know—how's he doing? I've haven't heard from him in a couple of years, ever since he left his little airplane service in Georgia and went back to Texas. What's he up to?”

“He's finally gotten married.”

“No kidding. That's great.”

“And he says he's running some kind of aircraft business…experimental helicopters…it didn't make a lot of sense to me.”

“I'll have to get back in touch with him when this is all over.”

“So, are you going to be able to come home for a few days…before you get too close to trial?”

Will's uncomfortable silence told Fiona the whole story.

“You're feeling pressed to stay over there, straight through till trial…aren't you?” she asked.

“I'm afraid so. I've already called Tiny and told him to join me here.”

Fiona didn't fully succeed in hiding her disappointment. Will wanted to elaborate, to explain how
this time
it would be the last of this kind of case. But he didn't try. He was convinced it was so, that Gilead Amahn's prosecution represented a last chapter in his life. But how could he convince his wife of that? Mere words wouldn't do. He would simply have to make it happen. This would be the end of something for him, a consummation, the last act…
of that he felt unshakably certain, though he did not exactly know why.

After his call to Fiona, Will telephoned Nigel Newhouse. He had e-mailed the English barrister and very candidly revealed his concern that he might be stretched beyond his limits in mounting Gilead's defense alone. Back at the office, Todd Furgeson was totally occupied in handling Jacki's work while she was out on maternity leave, not to mention Will's other caseload. Will had assigned research, e-mail communication, and Internet information-gathering to Jeff Holden. But beyond that, the novice lawyer had little he could do to assist Will at this point.

Would Newhouse consider joining the defense team at this late hour, with the trial date only ten days away? The barrister said he would carefully consider it and get back to Will within forty-eight hours.

There was also Will's concern about a working space before and during the trial. Larry Lancer, the director of the Holy Land Institute for the Word, had a couple offices next door to the institute. He had kindly offered them to Will and anyone else helping with Gilead's defense. As promised, the institute had been paying all of the bills for the defense, which by now had become staggeringly high. Lancer had simply indicated they had a “private benefactor” who was funding it all. Will didn't pry.

Within twenty-four hours of Will's filing his pretrial disclosures, the Palestinian prosecutor filed a raft of written objections, motions, and responses. One of them—not surprisingly to Will—had to do with the name of the second-to-last witness Will had typed into his pretrial statement, the one he'd added in the middle of the night in his hotel room. After Mira had had a chance to read it over she called Will, also bringing it up.

“I was very surprised when I read your witness list,” she said. “A very surprising witness name—”

“You mean the line where I added the name of Mr. Meir, the Mossad agent?”

“No, not that,” Mira said. “The name before that.”

“Oh. Yes.” He understood her interest and the public prosecutor's interest, not to mention the media's laser-beam attention to the name. He had already received thirteen calls from the foreign press since filing his papers and could tell that the hotel's front desk was becoming exasperated. He had returned none of the calls.

“I must say, I truly admire your courage,” his fellow attorney said with a titter. “I really do. To name the man who is at this moment negotiating a peace plan here in Jerusalem—Foreign Secretary Warren Mullburn—that is truly extraordinary!”

“I'll take that as a compliment, I guess…” Will said, laughing a little himself. “And, thanks, Mira, for setting up my conference with Gilead. By the way, I've secured a location for a temporary office. It's the space next to the Holy Land Institute for the Word. They're letting me use it for the case. So starting tomorrow, I'll move my files in there.”

“I'd love to hear your thinking on Mullburn…and on that Mossad agent,” Mira replied. “Maybe I could help you prepare for those witnesses.”

After the conversation, Will checked the time. It was getting late. He would try to get four, maybe five hours of sleep. And then, tomorrow, he would meet with Gilead, move into the temporary office, and begin the final march—the last ten days of preparation before the trial.

He would be thorough, all-consumed, and focused. He would try to ignore the fact that now, at his age, the grueling process of trial preparation and sleepless nights was not as easy as it had once been. But one thing above all he would try to push out of his mind.

He would try to avoid the catastrophic distraction that kept occupying his inner moral sense. The lingering idea that threatened to tie him in knots.

The thought that his defense of Gilead Amahn, if unsuccessful, would result in Gilead's execution.

54

T
HE LARGEST ROOM IN THE
O
RIENT
H
OUSE
had been converted into a fully functioning courtroom for the Gilead Amahn trial. Its interior had been transformed into a blandly modern space—with rows of Scandinavian-style blond wood tables, each with a computer fixed within its top, one computer screen for each seat. Each seat had a set of earphones, which were wireless and could be clipped to a belt buckle.