“He wants to see you,” said Teri. “Just buzzed.”
“All right.” Corrine pulled down her suit jacket, then took out her compact to do a quick makeup check. “Anything new with your son?”
“Pitch meeting tomorrow. He’s hopeful,” said the secretary. Teri’s son Billy was in LA trying to make good as a screenwriter, and his various adventures were often the subject of small talk between the two women. Teri probably knew his schedule as well as Corrine’s, and she knew Corrine’s exceedingly well.
“I’ll sneak down for lunch when we’re done,” said Corrine.
“You have the DEC people at one.”
“Hold them if I’m late.”
“You will be,” said Teri. “It’s nearly one now.”
“I’ll do my best,” said Corrine. She stepped out of the office, turned right, then nodded at the Secret Service man in the hallway ahead. Her destination — the president’s office — was only two doors from her own. She stopped, rapped perfunctorily on the doorjamb, and pushed in.
In the four months that Jonathon McCarthy had served as president, the faint lines Corrine had noticed on his forehead during the campaign had furrowed deeper. At times of tension they formed trenches in his forehead and just then they looked like river channels, belying his quick smile.
A Southerner by heritage and inclination — according to his campaign biography his forebears had stepped on Georgian soil as indentured servants in 1710 — McCarthy retained the style and grace of the well-to-do family he had been born into and rose as Corrine entered the room.
“Miss Alston, I’m glad you could join us,” he said.
He didn’t bother introducing the others, as Corrine not only knew them but had helped vet most of them when the president was considering whom to appoint to his administration. Next to the president’s desk sat Defense Secretary Larry Stich, his green sweater clashing with his gray suit and red tie. To his right was the national security advisor, Marty Green. The CIA director, Thomas Parnelles, was sitting in a chair at the other side of the room, his hands in a tent over his nose, partially obscuring the jagged scar on his cheek that reminded anyone who met him that he had worked his way up from the field.
“How was the play?” asked the president.
“It was very good,” Corrine answered, taken by surprise.
“Actually, it was
“Very good,” said Corrine. While her father had made his money backing movies, classical theater was his first love, and Corrine had seen or read all of Shakespeare’s major plays by the time she was in grade school. Her mother, however, had been an actress, and carefully steered her daughter’s interests toward “more useful arts.”
“I played Richard in college,” McCarthy explained to the others. He laughed. “That doesn’t go out of this room now, gentlemen. I can count on Miss Alston’s discretion as she’s my attorney, but you all are subject to question. If it gets out, there will be lie detectors in your future.”
McCarthy used the lie detector line about once a week, but the others laughed anyway.
The president leaned back in his chair, furling his arms in front of his chest as he always did when he changed the subject to something serious.
“We have a bit of a knot I’d like your advice on, Miss Alston. It’s somewhat delicate, as of course you appreciate.”
Corrine set her jaw, willing all emotion from her face. She called it full lawyer mode, and had learned to do it when, after graduating summa cum laude from an accelerated program, she’d come to congress as a staff lawyer for the House Appropriations Committee. Within a year she had moved over to Defense, and shortly after that went to work with the Intelligence Committee. Still only twenty-six, she no longer needed the set-jaw scowl to get others to take her seriously, but it was by now habit.
Parnelles began speaking, talking in his usual clipped sentences about a combined CIA/Special Forces operation investigating the possible disappearance of nuclear waste in the former Soviet Republic of Kyrgyzstan. The tangled trail of the operation had led to Chechnya, where the operation happened to come across a militant with connections to both al-Qaida and a lesser-known militant organization called Allah’s Fist. In the course of their work, the CIA realized that the subject had also caused the murder of several American citizens in an attack on a shopping mall in Syracuse, New York, twelve months before. They had kidnapped him and taken him to Guantanamo.
“Let me suggest that you’re using the wrong word,” said Corrine sharply. “I don’t believe you’d wish to characterize legal actions authorized by the U.S. government as ‘kidnapping.’ The word you’re looking for is ‘apprehend.’ Such actions have lengthy precedent and are legally recognized. And I’m sure that’s what occurred here.”
Parnelles gave her the sort of smile a father might give a five-year-old who’d just lectured him on not smoking, then continued. The man was being held at the detention facility on Guantanamo under heavy guard. They suspected he had important information about a plot involving a hazardous waste bomb that might be targeted for the U.S.
Corrine realized what the dilemma was without the CIA director having to spell it out — they wanted to put him on trial for the mall attack, but were afraid of messing up the case by interrogating him improperly.
During his campaign, McCarthy had advocated using the criminal justice system to prosecute terrorists rather than the military tribunal system favored by his predecessors. In McCarthy’s view — and Corrine concurred — the entire point of fighting terrorists was to preserve American traditions, freedoms, and institutions. The legal system provided plenty of tools to prosecute such murderers. In Corrine’s opinion, terrorists were not enemy combatants — that status implied a certain dignity and righteousness that they clearly did not deserve.
“What do you think, Miss Alston?” McCarthy asked her when Parnelles finished.
“Should I speak as a citizen, or as the president’s private counsel?” she asked.
“Both,” said the president.
“As a citizen, I think you should tear the bastard’s balls off.”
The president laughed.
“However, speaking as a lawyer, if you want to try him in federal or state court, you have to consider carefully how you deal with him. I would think it appropriate to consult with the Department of Justice.”
“We’ve followed their guidelines,” said Parnelles. “This is new ground.”
“If you’re going to ask about torture,” said Corrine, “that’s not my area.”
Parnelles glanced at the president.
“Not torture,” said McCarthy.
“We have a drug,” said Parnelles. “It’s a kind of ultimate lie detector test. We would use it in conjunction with the interrogation, so we’d be better able to judge how valid the information is.”
“I can’t give an opinion on something like that off the top of my head,” Corrine told him.
“Is that because you think it’s something we wouldn’t want to hear?” asked McCarthy.
He’d become adept at reading her hesitations over the past two years; she had joined his campaign as an intelligence advisor and quickly become an all-around confidante, eventually leaving her Senate post to help him full-time. McCarthy had called her in, as he usually did, not simply because he valued her opinion but because it wouldn’t be shared with anyone else. And if her opinion was something he had to ultimately disregard, no newspaper would ever start a story: Despite receiving legal advice to the contrary…
“There’s a possibility of a gray area,” Corrine said, still hedging. “A voluntary submission—”
“It wouldn’t be voluntary,” said Parnelles.
“Few things in life truly are,” said the president.
“There are legal theories in both directions,” said Corrine.
“Stop speaking as a lawyer, dear,” said McCarthy. He could see clearly which way she was leaning, but the others, less familiar with her, couldn’t.
“I wouldn’t use the procedure, then put him on trial,” Corrine said, pausing as she selected the neutral
