Necessity Read online

  JEAN-FRANCOIS REYNAUD was still waiting, an hour after I was supposed to meet him. He had told me it was a matter of some urgency, but that meant in the French translation, as he explained to me with Gallic calm, that it was also urgent that he not leave before he saw me.

  “I was taken for a ride,” I remarked as I slid into my side of the booth.

  “Not for the first time, I imagine,’ he replied with a droll smile. Sitting against the corner of the booth, a drink in his hand, he shoved a plain manila envelope across the table. “You may find these of some interest,” he said as I pulled out a handful of documents and, what surprised me more, half a dozen photographs.

  “These are…?”

  “Photographs taken of various meetings between several different Americans and several different Russians. The Americans—you will find three of them—are all people you know. One of the Russians is a banker who is close friends with Putin, one is the Russian ambassador to France, while the other is a general in the Russian army, the head of their cyber warfare division. Now, there are certain rules…” Pausing to take a drink, his expression could not have been more serious. “You can keep the photographs, and you can use them any way you see fit. The only condition is that you do not reveal to anyone at any time where you got them or who took them. They can’t be traced back to us any other way. The documents, the transcripts of what was being said when the photographs were taken, are the transcripts I gave to you before. My government won’t allow them to leave my possession, but there is no objection if you want to study them and taken any notes you please. But, again,” he continued, “you do so on the condition that you never reveal how you have this information. Are we agreed?”

  “And where am I supposed to work my way through all this,” I asked, thumbing through a pile at least six inches thick, “if they have to remain in your possession?”

  Reynaud shrugged his shoulders as if the answer was plain to anyone with the limited intelligence needed to see it.

  “Why, right here, of course!” He lifted his hand to signal the waiter. “I have a very good relationship with the owner. I may be his best customer. Would you like something to eat? I’ve had dinner.”

  I ordered a sandwich and coffee; he ordered a bottle of sparkling wine.

  “It’s champagne, rather good champagne, but because it comes from California and not from France, they can’t call it that. Some think it unfair, but we own the name, and we are, if nothing else, meticulous when it comes to language. Champagne is, always will be, French. So, while you work through all these astonishing papers, I will sit here and consume each glass of this American imitation and pretend I know the difference.”

  Reynaud had emptied the bottle sometime after midnight, before I finally finished.

  MICHAEL DONAHUE WAS the prosecution’s last witness, and even as he was being sworn in, I was not certain why Raymond St. John had decided to call him. He had proven his case: Walter Bridges had been murdered, stabbed to death with a knife; the defendant, found next to the body, the knife still in his hand, had confessed to the crime. All the elements of the crime had been proven beyond any, much less a reasonable, doubt. My confusion ended with the prosecution’s first question. I had forgotten that this was as much a political as it was a criminal trial.

  “When did President Bridges first come to believe that Senator Fitzgerald might be willing to do anything, including violence, to keep him from accomplishing what he had promised the American people he would do?”

  “Objection!” I cried before I was halfway out of my chair. “One, it’s hearsay; second, it’s completely irrelevant to the case!”

  St. John had prosecuted too many cases not to come equipped with a practiced smile that advertised indulgence for the ignorance with which an objection has been made.

  “The witness is testifying to what he was told directly by the president; not what he thinks the president may have thought. And with regard to what is relevant and what is not, I would remind my learned friend that it is the defense, not the prosecution, that wants to argue the law of necessity. The prosecution is certainly entitled to show that the defendant had threatened violence before this so-called necessity could ever possibly have arisen.”

  Evelyn Patterson tapped the eraser end of a pencil three times in quick succession on the bench. Then she tapped it once against her chin.

  “Yes, all right, I’ll allow it.” She bent her head toward the witness stand on her left. “You may answer, Mr. Donahue.”

  Donahue was tall, overweight, with sloping shoulders and a double chin. His hands were small, soft and puffy. His heavy-lidded eyes were as strange as any I had seen. Grayish-blue, they moved with a kind of relentless irritation, as if everything that came under their stern, implacable scrutiny invariably failed to come up to some standard of his own devising.

  He had listened to the question, he had listened to the judge rule on my objection, and he had not moved. He just sat there, slouched in the witness chair, wishing he did not have to be here at all.

  “When did the president first decide Senator Fitzgerald was a threat?” repeated St. John.

  “Within twenty-four hours of the election. As soon as it was known that Walter Bridges was going to be our next president. No, I’m wrong,” he said as he lurched forward and pointed a short, accusing finger at Kevin Fitzgerald, sitting next to me. “You started making threats before all the returns were in, before the votes were counted. You don’t remember? On television, you said that if Bridges won, it would be the worst thing that had ever happened to the country. And then you said, remember, that there wouldn’t be any way Bridges would be able to serve a full term. You’d make sure it never happened!”

  “Your Honor,” I complained, “would you please instruct the witness to address himself to the court and not attack the defendant!”

  “Sorry, your Honor,” apologized Donahue before she could reply. “But after what he did, I just couldn’t…”

  St. John caught his eye, stopping him before he could say another word.

  “A lot of things are said in the heat of a campaign,” he reminded him. “Isn’t it possible that Senator Fitzgerald meant those remarks in a purely political sense, that he would oppose him in the Senate, try to block whatever the president might try to do, even, in the most extreme case, try to remove him from office through impeachment?”

  The impatient eyes of Michael Donahue opened wide with contempt.

  “There isn’t any doubt what he meant: the president had to die.”

  There was a hush in the courtroom, everyone waiting to see what was going to happen next. Donahue turned and faced the jury.

  “He told me a week after the election, during the transition. I visited him in his Senate office. We hoped that, despite everything that had been said during the campaign, we could develop a working relationship with the other side. No one had been more vocal in their criticisms of Walter Bridges, but we knew Senator Fitzgerald was an intelligent man, and though we disagreed with his politics, we thought we might find at least some common ground. But he didn’t want to talk about anything except the election, how Bridges should never have won, that there were too many questions about how it had happened, that the whole thing was a sham. The only real question was how much Bridges knew about what the Russians had done. I tried to point out to him that whatever the Russians may have tried to do, they had not changed any votes. All the votes had been counted and Walter Bridges had won the election. I kept insisting that the only real issue was whether we could now work together for the good of the country, or whether he and the other members of his party were more interested in trying to destroy a presidency just because they lost. That is when he told me that a Bridges presidency would not last, that someone was sure to kill him. And then he added—I’ll never forget it—that if no one else did it, he might have to do it himself!”

  Fitzgerald had me by my sleeve, insisting it had never happened. I looked at him and, knowing the jury was w
atching, nodded my agreement. I scribbled a note to myself on how to use this on cross, and then watched while St. John led his witness step by step through what was meant to be the final, crushing blow to our only hope of a defense.

  “The defendant’s anger, his willingness to threaten violence against the president, was based on his belief that the election of Walter Bridges was in some sense illegitimate, the result of foreign interference?”

  “They were all angry about that, Fitzgerald more than most. It wasn’t just that they had lost, it was that Bridges was going to change things in ways they had not been changed before. We weren’t going to be bound by what Washington thinks, by what, no matter which party is in power, are the agreed upon limitations of what can be done, or even thought about. They were right when they accused us of being revolutionaries. That is exactly what we were, though not in the way they meant it. They thought—Fitzgerald thought—we were there to declare war on government, that we were going to dismantle the Washington bureaucracy. They never understood—they still don’t understand—that we—I mean, President Bridges—was determined to change not just the way government works, but the way government thinks, what its purpose is.”

  The more Donahue spoke, the more, it seemed, he wanted to say, and the less St. John wanted him to go on. He tried to keep him on point.

  “The defendant was angry about the election and a week or so later told you that if someone else did not do it, he would kill the president,” said St. John, as calm as if he were relating a well-known story. “Were there any other occasions when, to your knowledge, the defendant did or said something threatening?”

  “Almost every speech he gave on the Senate floor, almost—”

  “Objection!” I said without raising my voice or rising from my chair.

  “Sustained. Mr. Donahue, you were asked a specific question. Give a specific answer, if you can. Were there other, specific threats of the kind you just described?”

  Donahue was not interested in what Evelyn Patterson thought was the way he should answer. Grim-faced and determined, he stared straight ahead until she finished.

  “Every speech he gave, and almost every day the Senate Intelligence Committee met.”

  “Mr. Donahue, I—”

  But her complaint died in a sea of noise, everyone talking at once, wondering what secret information Donahue had decided to reveal. The proceedings of the Senate Intelligence Committee were always kept confidential. But that apparently was not going to stop Donahue from using what he knew to attack the credibility of the defense. St. John did not know what to make of it.

  “Every time the Senate Intelligence Committee met, Senator Fitzgerald would insist that the president had to go, that—”

  “Objection!” I shouted, springing out of my chair so quickly that it almost tripped over. “This is the same thing another one of the prosecution’s witnesses tried to do, twist the meaning of words out of all recognition.”

  “Mr. Donahue!” shouted Judge Patterson in her turn. “Damn it, look at me when I’m talking to you. You’re not in Washington now, you’re in a court of law. Either answer the question you’re asked or face the consequences.”

  St. John started to ask another question, but Patterson did it for him. With a glance that promised a long stay in hell if he did not do exactly what she told him, she asked him point blank if he had himself ever heard the senator threaten the president during a session of the Senate Intelligence Committee. When he answered, with a show of reluctance, that he had not, her glance became deadly.

  “You’re not on the committee, you’re not a member of the Senate. The only time you could have heard Senator Fitzgerald make such a threat, or make any statement at all, is if you were there as a witness, under subpoena, isn’t that correct, Mr. Donahue?”

  “That’s right, and…?”

  It was a challenge he should not have made.

  “And, Mr. Donahue? And? Well, how about this, were you there, a witness under subpoena?”

  He looked away, waiting for the prosecutor to get back to business.

  “Answer the question, Mr. Donahue!” She was furious, and not just with the witness. “Mr. St. John, you will instruct your witness to answer or he will not be the only one held in contempt!”

  “Yes! I appeared before the Senate Intelligence Committee. And, no, I was not under subpoena. I agreed to testify.”

  “In connection with the Russian investigation?”

  “I’m not at liberty to say.”

  “I’ll take that as a yes. And during your appearance as a witness, did Senator Fitzgerald make any threat against the life of the president?”

  “No.”

  “There,” she said with a flash of condescension in her eyes, “see how easy that was. Now, Mr. St. John, you may continue with your witness, now that he has learned how to behave like one.”

  I had seldom seen anything like it. For a moment, St. John was too stunned to speak. Then, before Donahue could say something else to antagonize the court, he changed the subject in a way that made it seem he had not changed the subject at all. He was simply moving to the logical next step.

  “The Senate Intelligence Committee was investigating Russian interference in our election. Was that the reason the president had come out here to California, because he was concerned with what the Russians had tried to do?”

  Donahue sat forward, intensely interested, not so much in the question but, it seemed, in anticipation of his own response. It was the look you sometimes saw in an actor’s face that quick split second before he said his lines in a stage performance. His lips had begun to move, a mute rehearsal, before St. John had finished asking the question.

  “He was here to speak at the technology conference, but he was also here to meet with some people from Silicon Valley, the leading experts on the kind of cyber technology that the Russians were using, experts who were best equipped to create the technology needed to make sure our elections would always be secure from interference, whether it was the Russians or anyone else. All the things people like Kevin Fitzgerald said they wanted done, Walter Bridges was doing them. And if Fitzgerald had not murdered him, Walter Bridges would have made certain that this country, and everyone in it, was safe and secure.”

  Leaning back in my chair, my elbows on the arms, I spread my fingers wide apart and slowly pressed them together just beneath my chin while I studied Michael Donahue’s ever shifting gaze. I was in no hurry. This was going to be a very long cross-examination.

  “You graduated from Princeton with a degree in history, and then law school at Columbia, is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  My left hand fell to my chest and I scratched briefly at my chin with my right. I was, quite on purpose, lackadaisical.

  “Walter Bridges, on the other hand, went to business school, is that right?”

  “Yes, he got an MBA.”

  “In business school, when you get an MBA, you study accounting, finance, things like that, things that have mainly to do with money, am I correct?”

  “Yes,” he replied, not at all certain where this was going.

  “You don’t study history, or political science, you don’t learn about the great revolutions of the past, you don’t learn about the American Revolution or the American Civil War, you don’t learn about the history of this country, you don’t learn what led to our entry into the First World War, or the Second, you don’t learn anything at all about the history of our relations with other nations—you learn about money, how to make it, how to run a company, how to measure profit and loss on a balance sheet. Is that a fair description of the differences in your respective educations?”

  He shrugged his indifference and said that he supposed it was.

  “That put you in an interesting position, didn’t it? You’re a well-educated man, while Walter Bridges, according to the standard implicit in your education, was not.”

  “I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

  Sl
owly rising from my chair, I looked at him, and then at the jury. I began to move toward him.

  “Of course you do. You knew all about history and politics and the law. Walter Bridges only knew how to make money. I take it you never thought to give him advice about how to do that, did you?”

  “No, I never did. I’m not sure I would have known how.”

  “But it didn’t work the same way, the other way round, did it? Bridges did not know anything—he had never studied, the way you had, history and politics and law—but that did not mean, did it, that he always took your advice?”

  Donahue thought me naive.

  “He was the president. I was just one of his assistants.”

  “You were more than that, Mr. Donahue. You were—what was it you were called?—the White House intellectual, the mind behind the power, the architect of the new world Walter Bridges was going to build. But that did not mean that he always agreed with what you said, or that he even always listened, did it?”

  “I think I just answered that.”

  “Perhaps. You testified that shortly after the election you met with Senator Fitzgerald in his Senate office. Is that still your testimony?”

  “Of course it is. Did you think I—”

  “Just the two of you? There was no one else in the room?”

  “No, just the two of us.”

  “And it was in that meeting that the senator said…I want to make sure I have this right,” I remarked as I went back to the counsel table and glanced at the notes I had made. “According to you, the senator said if no one else killed him, he might have to do it himself. Is that still your testimony?”

  “That’s exactly what he said.”

  “You were with Walter Bridges when he was giving speeches during the campaign. You were there, were you not, when he told people at his rallies that they should ‘beat the hell’ out of protesters? Did he mean it, is that what he really wanted them to do?”

  “No, it was just a way of expressing his contempt for people who were trying to stop him, interrupt what he was saying, but—”