'And how long will it take once it's started?' Clinton wanted to know.
'Shouldn't take too long,' she said. 'I'll have them present the worst of the evidence quickly. I'd say two days should do it and we'll have that indictment.'
'Wednesday then,' Clinton said, nodding, a happy smile upon his face. Soon this entire Laura Whiting mess would be but a memory. 'I'll be eagerly awaiting it.'
Hathaway's prediction of two days turned out to be an accurate one. The Denver federal grand jury, which consisted of seven women and five men, were horrified at the crimes that Laura Whiting, current governor of Mars, was accused of participating in. The evidence that they were presented, coupled with the extensive media coverage of the events that all had been following of late, prompted them to issue a six-page indictment against her on six distinct federal charges, all of which carried lengthy prison sentences if the accused was found guilty.
The two prosecuting attorneys who had presented the case thanked the grand jury for their time and then dismissed them, reminding all that they had agreed to serve for a year and could be called up again. The twelve members left the federal courthouse and went about their business, all of them proud to have served and eagerly awaiting their next assignment, blissfully unaware that the justice system had no intention of ever using them again. They had served their purpose.
The text of their indictment was on Hathaway's terminal before the first of the jury members were even able to board a commuter train for their homes. She quickly read it over and then sent it on to Clinton's office via a secure landline. Clinton read it over ten minutes later and then composed a voice mail giving instructions for Hayes.
'Take her into custody tomorrow morning,' he told his subordinate. 'Take enough teams with you to insure that she will not be liberated from you by her security forces or pissed off greenie civilians. The most important thing to remember is that she be taken alive and unharmed. I don't want a single hair on her head to be damaged, nor a single piece of her clothing rumpled. If she were to be hurt or killed during the arrest we would have hell to pay among those Martians. She is not to become a martyr, do you understand?'
When he finished the voice mail he attached a certified copy of the arrest indictment to it and then told the computer to send it on the secure channel to the FLEB headquarters in New Pittsburgh. The documents and his mail were digitized, encrypted, and then sent through the WestHem Internet system to a communications satellite in geosynchronous orbit over the coast of Brazil. Since the main communications computer knew that direct communication with the planet Mars was now impossible thanks to the sun being directly in the path, the signal was sent across the solar system to another communications satellite in orbit around Ganymede. It took forty-eight minutes for it to arrive there at which point it was re-routed and sent to another satellite in orbit around Mars. This leg of the trip only took eighteen minutes. And so, one hour and six minutes after being sent, the message and the indictment arrived at the terminal of Corban Hayes.
Hayes watched the email message and then looked over the indictment very carefully. He had a very bad feeling about what he was being asked to do but nevertheless he began to make the arrangements to carry it out. He called Mitchell and several other of his top agents into his office and told them the news. All of them were delighted that the greenie bitch was finally going to go down. They went over the basic plan to take her into custody the next morning.
'We need to make sure that we tip the big three first thing in the morning so they'll have cameras and reporters there to watch us taking her away,' Hayes told them. 'However, if we tip them too early, they'll start asking questions before we want them too. Those media people are helpful but they're also very annoying at times. So, until tomorrow, nobody says a word to anyone about the indictment. This is top secret stuff, okay?'
Everyone agreed to keep it under their hats for the time being. They were dismissed so they could start drawing up their plans and of course the secret leaked within ten minutes to some of the civilian staff. An agent named Skeller, who was trying to penetrate the pants of a young secretary named Darla, was the first to spill the beans. Darla asked him in her flirtatious way just what the big meeting had been all about. Since Darla was an Earthling and very loyal to the FLEB, he didn't see any harm in telling her. 'We have an indictment for Whiting,' he whispered in her ear. 'We're gonna take her into custody tomorrow morning and send her back to Earth for trial.'
Darla quickly told another Earthling secretary the good news and that secretary quickly told another. It wasn't very long until the word reached the ears of a Martian receptionist down in the front lobby of the building.
Lisa Vaughn was a fourth generation Martian who worked in the FLEB office because it was the only job that she had ever been able to get and the only thing that kept her from vermin status. She hated Earthlings, particularly the federal variety that were her bosses, but she endured this miserable employment in order to keep her child from growing up in the ghetto. Her ex-husband, the man who had fathered her one legally allowed child, was already vermin, having lost his job in a merger of two computer software companies two years before, so he was of no help to her. If she had had any other prospect of employment over the years, she would have gladly taken it. But, since jobs were few and far between she had stayed on and, some months before, a man from the MPG intelligence division had recruited her to report to him various information about the daily operations of the agency. She was, in short, a Martian spy. She received no money or anything else in exchange for the information she passed on. She did it only out of sheer loyalty to her heritage and out of sheer hatred of the Earthlings that worked in this building; Earthlings that treated her as a piece of furniture at best and with open hostility at worst. How many times had agents or civilian staff come into the building and called her a greenie to her face? How many times had they excluded her from their gossip circles, from their after work parties or gatherings? How many times had she heard them mocking her Martian accent as they talked about her? It had not taken terribly much for the handsome MPG lieutenant to convince her to pass a few things on to him.
It was as she was in the lobby level staff restroom that she first heard about the indictment of Laura Whiting and the plan to take her into custody the next morning. Lisa had been in one of the toilet stalls, relieving her bladder of the coffee she had consumed when two female secretaries for the piracy section of the office had entered to re- apply their make-up after their lunch break. For more than five minutes she sat there silently, listening to them flippantly discuss how 'that greenie bitch' Whiting was finally going to get what was coming to her.
'I
'I never had any doubt about it,' the other responded. 'So they're going to take her tomorrow morning?'
'First thing,' she agreed. 'At least that's what I heard from...'
Soon the two women finished their work and left the room. Lisa waited another three minutes before getting up and returning to her desk. She had been briefed to keep her ears out for just such talk and to report it as quickly as possible. Of course she could not use the main terminal on her desk to make the notification. That would be madness even though the message would seem innocent on the surface. Instead she unclipped her PC from her waist and flipped open the small screen.
'Call Gina Hawkins,' she told it, referring to one of the names in her address files. To anyone overhearing her or homing in on her conversation with electronic devices, it would seem she was doing nothing more than conducting a personal call during business hours, something that was against the rules but fairly commonplace. No one would know that she had no friend named Gina Hawkins or that the number she was using to get hold of her was actually a relay station for MPG intelligence.
A pleasant faced female appeared on her screen a moment later. 'Hi, this is Gina,' she said in a thick Martian accent. 'I'm not able to answer your call at the moment. Please leave your name and number and I'll get right back to you.'
'Hi, Gina,' she said into it lightly. 'This is Lisa Vaughn. I just wanted to see if you were interested in going out to O'Riley's tonight after work. Give me a call back if it sounds good. If not, maybe I can stop by your apartment tomorrow morning on the way to work. I have to pick up that blouse I let you borrow. See ya.'
With that, she clicked off and put her PC back on her waist. She returned to her duties. At the relay station the computer terminal that took her call identified the code phrase — 'Hi Gina, this is Lisa Vaughn' - and automatically sent a copy of the message through several other relay stations. Two minutes later it arrived at the desk of Major Tim Sprinkle, head of MPG intelligence. He took one look at Lisa's message and knew, just by the words it was composed of that an indictment for Laura Whiting had been received at the FLEB office and that agents were going to attempt to pick her up the next morning. Within seconds he was on the terminal to General
