Lawyer, Lawyer Pt. 01

"Mr. Verage, do you know Britney Spears?"

I looked over at Mrs. Snyder.

"Tanya is a big fan," Mrs. Snyder explained. "She asks everybody that."

"O-kay. No, I've never met her, Tanya. Although I understand that she serves on the Senate Intelligence Committee. Maybe I'll meet her this time."

I rolled my eyes and sent Mrs. Snyder into paroxysms of laughter.

"I know," I said. "Californians."

It was Californians, after all, that had sent Britney Spears to the Senate three years ago, after Dianne Feinstein retired. The Democrat and the Republican vying for the open seat were both scandal-plagued nincompoops, and some of Ms. Spears' teenage fans -- and what was she still doing with teenage fans, anyway, at the age of 37? -- had started a write-in campaign. At the same time as these teenagers began their "Write-In Britney Spears" campaign, a group of older cynics had started the "This Whole Thing is Bullshit!" campaign. Britney probably got a couple thousand write-in votes on her own. Early on Election Day, though, ballots started appearing with "B.S." scrawled across them.

The Democratic head of the state election board and her Republican deputy panicked. Oh my God! People might think that a substantial number of Californians were smart enough to realize that both major party candidates were idiots, and that if those were the choices, they'd just as soon do without a senator, thank you very much. The two officials huddled together and instructed local officials to count those ballots as votes for B -- Britney S -- Spears. By the time they realized that a plurality of California voters had done the unthinkable, Britney Spears had been declared the next senator from California. Senator Britney Spears. The mind boggles. "Mr. Verage." Mrs. Snyder finally stopped laughing long enough to raise her hand. I raised my eyebrows in astonishment. I looked at my daughter and back at Mrs. Snyder. Come on, lady.

"I'm sorry." She laughed at her mistake. "Mr. Thompson. Don't these policeman and officials you write about look a little askance at your comedies? I mean, aren't you basically making fun of them?"

"Oh, no." I waved my hand. While she was asking the question, I was hoping that I would be able to explain the word 'askance' to the class, partly because they were only fourth graders and partly because I actually knew what the word meant. But the second part of Mrs. Snyder's question had raised a point of pride, one to which I had to respond immediately, because it challenged a tenet to which I religiously adhered.

"I've never made any of them a subject of comedy," I explained self-righteously. "All of the laughter in my book comes at the expense of my main character, Joseph, and sometimes at the expense of his friends. No, these officials are all incredibly helpful."

**********

At least that had always been the case until two days after my "speech," when I met Colonel "Call me Colonel" Endicott P. Monroe, the head of the Federal Counterterrorism Command. The general public is, as a rule, wholly unaware of the Federal Counterterrorism Command. As far as they know, the Sackler Gallery of Asian Art and the National Museum of African Art on the Washington mall are seven underground floors filled with exactly what they purport to be filled with, Asian and African Art. Only by boarding the elevator on the northeast corner and pressing the buttons 6, 3, and 3 in order (for "F," "C," and "C") will the stunned visitor emerge on the eighth underground floor, the uppermost of three floors devoted to the Federal Counterterrorism Command.

To tell the truth, I was more than a little hesitant when I walked into the nerve center of the Command early Thursday afternoon. Authority always scares me. Particularly when it's buried under tons and tons of rock. And having Colonel Monroe emerge into the foyer wearing his clean, pressed Marine uniform with his shiny medals and ribbons didn't help, particularly after the hour that I'd just spent getting fingerprinted and X-rayed and retina-scanned.

Colonel Monroe hadn't even finished shaking my hand when he told me curtly that he had never read a work of fiction in his life, and that he was meeting me only because my request to learn about the FCC's work had been passed down to him from a superior he couldn't ignore. If I had started with him, he seemed to imply, I would have been cut to pieces shortly after I got out of the elevator by the laser beams planted in the ceiling.

"Mr. Thompson," he said brusquely. "Your schedule calls for an hour-long tour of our facilities here at the FCC. After that, I will introduce you to Mr. Richardson, who is our FBI liaison. He is scheduled to give you a tour of the FBI facilities tomorrow morning. For the remainder of the afternoon, however, I've been instructed to give you a choice for a more specific area you might want to look at. We have readily available presentations on nuclear proliferation, biological warfare, and chemically induced memory interference, which would be handled by my section, or counterfeiting or pornography, which are in Mr. Richardson's bailiwick."

It wasn't a difficult choice. I had done counterfeiting -- I mean, I had written about counterfeiting -- but the prospect of spending any more time with Colonel Happy that I absolutely had to made me shudder. And, I rationalized, I was actually still under contract with Julie's law firm to do research on pornography. Even after Julie had broken down under Karen's cross-examination, I was still fascinated by the video. The, uh, technology underlying the video, of course. Julie admitted, when we were lying in bed together on Saturday night, that two parts of her story were true: she really didn't have any idea how they'd done the video, and her client had paid ten thousand dollars for it. That meant, as far as I was concerned, that there could still be another doll on the loose. I picked porno.

Colonel Happy looked a little disappointed. He was probably hoping I'd pick the memory thing, so he could show me his little fun house.

Eager to get rid of me after that, he rushed me past the rooms of technicians with their mega-computers that sifted through all of the telephone calls in the world, and the rooms that contained cubicle after cubicle of people poring over reports and analyses from counterterrorism experts around the world. Then he brought me triumphantly into the nerve center, where giant screens broadcast images from dozens of "disposable" unmanned space-planes that had replaced satellites as the country's most effective real-time imaging tool. With a smirk, the Colonel told me that in this room he could watch anyone in the world scratch his ass while he was still scratching it as long as he could tell his birds where to look.

The first smart-ass question that occurred to me -- did he mean real birds, or was he still referring to the space-planes? -- died on my lips. No such luck with the second, though.

"And is that a clue?" I asked.

"A clue?"

"To terrorism?"

"Is what a clue, sir?"

"The ass-scratching. 'Cause, you know, I do that sometimes."

His look sent a shiver down my spine. Maybe he was using the radio implanted in his brain to request his superior's permission to kill me.

"Maybe it's time to meet your Mr. Richardson," I suggested.

It was. A phone call summoned Mister "Call me Drew" Richardson. I was a little nervous watching him approach as well. His brown hair was cropped close to his head and his carriage suggested an obvious military background. And even though he was probably only an inch taller than I was, he had muscles in his eyebrows that could have whipped any of the muscles I had anywhere else.

"Mister Thompson." He broke into a smile and started vigorously pumping my hand. "It's a real thrill to meet you. I've read every one of your books. I love that whole Joe Average premise. I particularly loved that one blind date, in your second book, I think?"

"The one where he doesn't see the woman's seeing-eye dog underneath her chair at the restaurant?" I nodded. Everybody liked that one.

"And then asks if she likes silent film?" He started laughing. "And then tells her he has tickets to a pantomime?"

I smiled weakly.

"Please," I said, "call me Jason."

"Call me Drew," he added. "Come on back to the office."

I found myself glad that I'd chosen pornography. This guy was okay. As he dug a first edition of my second book -- the one with the blind girl blind date -- out of his desk for me to sign, I glanced around the room. The first thing I saw was what he'd probably tried most to hide, a certificate that accompanied a Silver Star that he'd earned in 2010. He couldn't not put it up, but he'd put it in as inconspicuous a place as he could find. Still, he was no match for a writer like myself, a master of observation. And then his diplomas. Good diplomas, too: Georgetown, Harvard, Caltech. And then the pictures. A picture of him and the President of Colombia. A picture of him standing over the Colombian President's body with a pistol. A picture of him with our President. I turned back. I really didn't want to know what was in the next picture.

Fortunately, Mr. Richardson was ready to start my pornography lesson.

"How much do you know about pornography and terrorism?" he asked me.

"I'm okay on the pornography bit," I said. "The connection to terrorism is a little beyond me. Before we get started, though, can I ask you a question?"

"Certainly," he nodded.

"Is it possible to fake a video of, oh, I don't know, Britney Spears, so that you and I would be convinced that it was her?"

"It's possible," he agreed. "We have that technology. Hollywood has that technology. But it's not commercially feasible. It would cost over ten million dollars and tie up some pretty fancy computers for a long time. You could get the real Britney Spears for less. Or you could have, before she was elected to the Senate. And even with the technology, there are times when it will still look fake.

"Now let me start with a few things about money laundering," he said, and he was off.

He was an incredibly patient teacher, but I had trouble with regular laundering. Whites, colors; hot, cold, warm; bleach, no bleach. Money laundering was easily three or four times as difficult.

"I'm sorry?" I asked after he'd lost me yet again.

"Khartoum?" he said. "In Sudan?"

"Oh, sure," I agreed. "Muslims."

"Catholics, actually, sir," he said in a low voice.

"Catholic terrorist pornographers?" Nobody was going to believe that. What I wrote may have been fiction, but it had to be believable fiction.

"I swear to God, sir."

"Catholic God?" I couldn't resist.

Mister Richardson started laughing, and after that we became good friends. So good, in fact, that when the presentation was over, he asked me what was on my schedule for the rest of the night.

"Having dinner at the Bonanza?" I suggested. "Why? You going on a secret pornography stakeout or something? Can I come with?"

"No, sir," he chuckled. "A buddy and I got two courtside tickets to the Wizards game, and he had to, uh, go out of the country for a, um, a meeting."

My eyes went back to the pictures and back to Mr. Richardson.

"Yeah, one of those meetings," he said quietly. "So if you're not busy, I was thinking maybe you'd like to go."

"Sure," I said. "Let's do it. But you have to call me Jason, right? I'm not spending an evening drinking beer with somebody who calls me 'sir.'"

We had dinner together at my hotel and then he drove us -- in a fifteen-year-old Volkswagen Golf; somebody wasn't making the big bucks -- to the Gigantic Phone Monopoly Center in downtown Washington. I was delighted to find that the game was against the Sacramento Kings, the only NBA team in which I had even the slightest interest. And the seats were great, although mine was next to a thirteen-year-old urchin who screamed out his request for an autograph each time one of the Kings players went by. Finally, when the layup drills had ended, and my ear was starting to hurt, I turned to look at him.

"I'm so sorry," his mother apologized from the seat on his other side. "We just moved here from Sacramento, and he's such a big fan I promised him that I'd get him a seat where he could try to get another autograph. I can't believe how expensive these seats are. And we tried to find the bus when the players arrived, but . . ."

"So who have you got already?" I asked, looking down at the book he eagerly held in front of him. Other than the annoying whine, he wasn't actually that bad a kid.

"Jerome Gardner!" he said excitedly. I raised an eyebrow and looked at his mother.

"He's playing in Italy this year," she explained. "But he got in almost every game last year."

"Oh," I said. One of those guys with splinters in their asses.

By now the teams had started their shooting drills, and I looked out at the Kings' aging star, a one-time has-been whose career was resurrected when the NBA introduced the five-point shot. He was being fed by an assistant coach, and it was a beautiful sight to see him stroking them in from just inside half-court.

Pass -- catch -- release . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . swish.

Pass -- catch -- release . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . swish.

Pass -- catch -- release . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . swish.

Pass --

I opened my mouth to take advantage of a lull in the crowd noise.

"Joshua Gunn!" I screamed.

-- catch -- release . . .

"Joshua Gunn, if you don't get your miserable butt over here and give this boy an autograph, I'm gonna speak with your mother over Thanksgiving."

. . . four . . . swish.

The next pass hit him in the head, but he looked my way with a sheepish grin and hustled over. Joshua "Gunner" Gunn, one of my best friends from high school along with Julie Pinsky's late husband Gordon, was quite possibly the nicest guy I knew. His was another one of the marriages I'd used the dolls to arrange, with a very nice, very attractive cheerleader named Sue Waggoner. The man owed me, to be blunt about it, and I pointed to the autograph book that the wide-eyed kid was tentatively proffering. Gunner asked the astonished little boy's name and wrote him a nice message and told him not to talk to strange men during basketball games. I told him to take the book back to the bench and get it filled up.

"How's Jules?" he asked as he headed off, book in hand.

"She's good," I said. I grinned. "She's real good."

"Asshole," he shot back.

The game began, and Drew and I were having a great time. He bought me a beer; I bought him a dog. We talked about the Wizards; we talked about terrorists. We left out the pornography part, in deference to the kid. We kept on talking right up until, just before the end of the first half, a golden angel started to descend the steps from the upper luxury suites. I remember thinking, with a teeny, tiny portion of my mind, that I thought you accessed those suites from the back, like from a private elevator. But there was apparently also an entrance right into the arena seating, way up near the top. Probably in case Dan Snyder, who by this point owned every sports team in the Balto-washi-mond area, sees somebody he knows sitting in the nosebleed section and wants to invite him in for a Courvoisier.

The vast majority of my brain cells were not thinking about how to access the luxury suites; rather, they were marching in lockstep with my eyes, which were following a gold lamé jumpsuit that contained a set of breasts so perfectly sculpted that when they moved -- and believe me, they moved -- the reflected light, even under fluorescent lamps, illuminated that dingy arena like one sunburst after another. Drew was in the middle of a sentence about something when I stopped to watch, at first only to admire the way her long blonde hair flowed away from her head like an aura. Drew shut up after a few more seconds, and joined me in watching.

By then, she was probably a third of the way down the steps, and a full half of the crowd failed to respond to an electrifying dunk by the Wizards' shooting guard. Rows fell silent, one at a time, when she passed, and the referees eventually stopped the game to direct the attention of one of the mop guys to some non-existent spot of sweat on the floor. When he failed to move, one of the referees grabbed him by the collar of his shirt and shoved him out onto the court, without ever himself taking his eyes off of the woman who had now made it down to section 135.

She came down the steps to the courtside seats, smiling at the men -- and women! -- who leapt out of her way like the Red Sea had done for Moses. And then she was at the end of the court, walking along the out-of-bounds line, until, no more than ten feet away from us, she tossed a shiny metal object towards us. I caught it and, more by feel than sight, recognized it as a cellular phone.

"It's for you!" Sue Waggoner Gunn gave me a malicious smile as she crossed in front of us and continued out into the concession area, throwing Gunner a kiss as she went by the huddle he was standing in.

The whole crowd exhaled, and I stared at the phone. There was a reason that I never carried a cell phone; I hated them. I was a writer. I worked at home. When was the last time you heard about a literary emergency? Oh, I had one hard-wired in the car, for real emergencies involving the kids. Otherwise, though, I found them annoying. And I refused to be part of the 99.9998 percent of the American population that annoyed all of the people around them by screaming so loudly into the damn things that you'd think they were using tin cans with string between them. Did they ever bring good news? Was there even the remotest possibility that this was good news?

I flipped it open.

"Hello?" I said dumbly.

The voice on the other hand was deep and feminine, white hot and icy cold.

"Just where the fuck are you?"

"At a basketball game?" I guessed.

"And what the fuck are you doing there?"

"Um..."

"And who are you fucking sitting next to?"

I took a quick look at the boy, who'd had his autograph book returned to him by one of the Kings assistants and was smiling at me like I was the Second Coming. Nah, couldn't be him.

"Drew?" I decided. "He's the -- he's just a guy at the, uh, FCC. We just met this afternoon when I interviewed him. He had an extra ticket."

"And you've been sitting there buying him beer and hot dogs."

It was much more of a statement than a question. I reflexively looked around. I had thought those space-planes with the ass-scratching resolution were fancy. Even those FCC guys couldn't do this.

"Actually," I said, "he bought the --"

"Put him on."

"You want to, uh, talk to him?" I asked. "To Drew?"

"Put that fucking asshole shithead on the phone."

Now it was my turn to sigh. I looked at the phone and looked at Drew, who stared back with detached interest.

"It's for you," I said.

"The phone? Who is it?"

"I think it's my wife."

"Hello?" he asked. After that he had to hold the telephone a good distance away from his head, so that his hearing would be at least recoverable after a series of long and complicated operations. But that didn't prevent him, or me, or the first three rows of Wizards fans, or the Wizards radio guys, or the boy, whose mother quickly covered his ears, from hearing that Drew was a worthless fucking asshole shithead son of a bitch who should crawl back into whatever hole he came out of and then rot in hell.

And that that went double for somebody else, too.

The line went dead. Drew clicked the phone shut and handed it back to me.

"So I guess I won't be having Thanksgiving dinner at your house this year," he said with a dull laugh. "So, uh, your wife doesn't like basketball?"