Barrett reported that the book offers were coming in at the rate of several a day, the latest being $7 million. This was about what Banion figured it would cost him in legal fees just to avoid the electric chair - though Barrett had decently not yet brought up the subject of money.
A guard announced that he had a call from a Mr. Stimple, of Ample Ampere. What could Bill be calling about? "Jack! How are you?"
"I'm in prison, Bill, and they are talking about executing me. How are you?"
"We're all pulling for you, I want you to know that. From the big guy on down."
"Thanks. I feel much better now."
"J
ack, this is a long way off, and we're all really, really hoping that it would never come to this, but let me just put it on the table. They use our product down there, as you know
..."
"Product?"
"The XT-2000."
"Yes?" Where was this headed?
"If it ever c
ame to that, not that it will, I
want you to know - this chair is just state of the art."
"Yes. I was under that impression."
*
Increasingly obscure
figure, believed to have been J
FK's press secretary.
"Nothing at all like your standard model, where people were catching fire and - well, you wrote about it." "Urn."
"This one is painless, noiseless, smokeless. It's really - our engineers just surpassed themselves."
"Bill, is there a point to this? Or did you just call to console me?"
"Let me just plant a thought, all right? If it does come to that, in return for a substantial - and I'm talking seven figures - donation to your estate, to a charity of your choice, heirs, whatever. . . would you consider making a statement at the time about how - maybe pleased isn't the right word - relieved or reassured you are that the technical aspect is being handled by Ample?"
"That I'm being electrocuted by one of your products?"
"It won't come to that. But I just wanted to plant the idea. I mean, better to bring it up now than when everything's . . ."
"Emotionally fraught?"
"Exactly. Still the word wizard!"
"Thanks, Bill. You've really lifted my spirits."
"Hey, that's my department."
FLICKERY WINS LANDSLIDE VICTORY; VOWS NEW ERA OF HONESTY, OPENNESS
PRESIDENT'S CELESTE WOES SEEN AS KEY FACTOR IN STUNNING LOSS
Barrett's news wasn't very good. Barrett said the feds were going to indict him the next day for incitement of violence among other charges.
Banion decided he might as well tell Barrett about MJ-12 and all the rest of it.
Barrett listened attentively, nodding here, frowning there. When Banion finished, he kept nodding, as if lost in thought. "Well?" Banion said.
"You know. Jack." he said, "we really ought to consider the merits of a psychologic
al defense."
TWENTY
One year later
If his life weren't hanging on the outcome of the trial. Banion would certainly long since have died of boredom.
He did his best to appear interested as his lawyer, the flamboyant, silver-maned westerner Jasper Jamm, methodically labored to besmirch the reputation of the forty-eighth aerospace engineer he had thus far called. (Only twenty-three to go.) At moments Banion wondered if a quick death in Ample Ampere's noiseless, smokeless, energy-efficient electric chair wouldn't be preferable to this water-drip torture.
The day before, he had drifted off during some mind-numbing testimony from a hydraulics engineer, occasioning a severe lecture from Jamm. "I need you to make
love
to this jury," he said gravely, "not to look like you don't give a possum's ass. Where do you think you are? Back in one of your Princeton eating clubs?"
Banion looked up at the stern face looming over him - Jamm stood six feet six in his cowboy boots.
"Don't you think
they're
bored too?" Jamm demanded.
"Is this your strategy?" Banion said. "Boring them into letting me off?"
Jamm was halfway into quoting another apothegm from Running Water when Banion wearily held up his hand to indicate that he was just not in the
mood
for another wise saying from Jamm's favorite nineteenth-century Shoshone philosopher-warrior, however fucking sagacious he was. Jamm made much of his partial Native American ancestry, despite his distinctly Caucasian looks. In place of the traditional necktie, there was a string bolo tie fastened with a silver-tipped bear claw. He wore a Stetson hat and Lucchese boots made from the skin of Gila monsters. He kept a pet cougar at his home in Idaho, and hunted elk in the Rocky Mountains with bow and arrow, using flint arrowheads made by his voluptuously attractive wife. Bliss. It was rumored - and never quite denied by him - that he had Custer's scalp in a secret compartment in his study. Before each trial, Jamm fasted and went naked into a sweat lodge in his backyard, there to prepare himself for the coming battle.
There was some feeling, within the criminal legal community, that all this colorful juju was for the benefit of the media, whom he assiduously courted. They of course gobbled it up. Given the choice between a lawyer who quotes Justice Brandeis and golfs, and one who claims to be related to Sitting Bull and slays large, antlered animals in his spare time, the press will usually go for the latter. Jamm's undeniable charisma and folksy sound bites eventually landed him his own television show, immodestly titled
The Best Defense,
but it had been canceled due to poor ratings, and he wanted it back. Fewer people had been stopping him for autographs in the street.
For all the grousing from other top criminal lawyers, Jamm was acknowledged to be among the best. Whether in a moment of weakness you had blown away your loved one or embezzled a few million dollars, betrayed your country, dumped toxic waste into the water supply, whatever, Jasper Jamm was the man to see. He had a way with juries. Who but Jamm could have convinced the Tracy Lee Boodro jurors - or at least enough of them - that his client was being controlled by the Central Intelligence Agency through the pacemaker in his chest at the time he dynamited the nuclear power plant in Jerome, Tennessee? When it came to imputing government conspiracies, Jamm was without peer. There was no telling what he might be able to do when handed a real one.
The trial was now in its eighteenth expensive week. Other than a theatrical opening statement - hysterically protested by the prosecution - in which Jamm hinted that the government itself had blown up
Celeste
in order to provide continued work for the military-industrial complex -
Objection!
- the trial had so far yielded little in the way of drama. (Banion wondered. Where
did
the courtroom drama genre ever originate?)
Jamm's strategy, apart from his customary "breaking" of the jury down into brain-dead zombies so that he could remake them to his will, was to (a) disagree with everything the prosecution said, including "Good morning, ladies and gentlemen of the jury," (b) demolish the wrongful death charge, and (c) produce reasonable doubt in the minds of the jury that his client was guilty of the odious charge of treason. This last was the most troublesome of the numerous charges against him, fifty-eight in all, inasmuch as it carried the death penalty.
NASA had yet to determine what exactly had caused
Celeste
to explode. There weren't many pieces of the rocket left much larger than a thumbnail. The investigation was at this point focusing on the rocket's self-destruct mechanism, normally designed to go off in the event something went wrong and the craft began heading murderously into a populated area. It was not designed, so far as anyone knew, to detonate when the president of the United States pressed the ignition button.
The fallout from the
Celeste
explosion had been radioactive. The ex-president, who had lost his re
-
election, was now embroiled in a world of legal hurt of his own. stemming from the revelation that he had secretly ordered NASA to move up the launch date. Top NASA officials had been forced to resign in disgrace. Now it was Banion's turn to pick up his share of the tab.
Originally, the government had been able to indict him on only a plethora of charges ranging from demonstration permit violations to incitement to riot, reckless endangerment,
et cetera, et cetera,
and wrongful death. A Mr. Newbert Figg, aged seventy-two, a retired citrus farmer from nearby Onanola. Florida, had driven to Cape Canaveral just to "see what all the fuss was about," according to the testimony of the lachrymose widow Figg. When
Celeste
blew up, Mr. Figg, beholding the spectacular fireball, suffered his third and final heart attack. The United States - as in
United States vs. John Oliver Banion
- being avid to throw everything at him that it could, leapt to link Banion to this cardiac event. They charged that Banion. by convening his Millennial Man Militia, had created an "attractive nuisance" and was thus directly to blame for the demise of Mr. Figg.
Jamm was confident of convincing the jury that Banion had not conspired with half a million of his followers merely to bring about the death of a curious septuagenarian with a history of heart problems.
But then a larger difficulty presented itself, in the persons of Dr. Falopian and Colonel Murfletit. Banion's former brain trust, fleeing federal authorities for their role in this millennial ka-ka, had turned up in Moscow, where they were publicly embraced as heroes by the ever-belligerent Russian government and given state jobs advising the Kremlin on
Inoplanetnye Dela.*
Banion was left to look like the Third Man who had not managed to escape. (Scrubbs made the Fourth.) The government was thus handed the golden opportunity to divert some of the public heat from its own flaming hide. It promptly added treason -18 United States Code section 2381, providing aid and comfort to the enemy - to the groaning board of charges.
As their cases were so intricately intertwined, Scrubbs was to be tried separately. He had valiantly resisted the government's repeated
*
Literally, "extraterrestrial affairs."
attempts to get him to incriminate Banion and cop to the much lesser charge of conspiracy to impede traffic. Fine, said the government -then he too would stand trial for treason.
Jamm promised it would get more interesting when they came to this portion of the trial. Meanwhile, there were another twenty-three aerospace engineers to discredit in an attempt to persuade the jury that far from being the cream of American aerospace technicians, they were nothing but imbeciles and incompetents who could not be trusted with fixing a leaky faucet, much less overseeing a $21 billion space station.
So Banion sat, a rictus of ersatz concentration froz
en onto his face, forbidden by J
amm even the consolation of doodling on a legal pad. For a while he had sought mental relief by filling up pads with every list in his memory: names and dates of U.S. presidents, Jesus' genealogy going back to King David, the kings and queens of England, the handicaps of Supreme Court justices, and the names of the 711 survivors of the
Titanic,
which he had memorized on a bet as a child at Camp Ear Wig.
"Mr. Crummekar," Jamm said, leaning companionably on the edge of the witness box. "In nineteen seventy-four, while you were attending Oklahoma Tech as an undergraduate, you belonged to a
fraternity,
is that correct?"
"Objection."
"Sustained."
"I apologize, Your Honor. I will rephrase that. Mr. Crummekar, did you ever participate in a 'toga party' at Delta Kappa -"
"Objection."
"Sustained. Mr. Jamm, I have spoken to you about this before." "Your Honor, there is no margin for error in aerospace technology. I am merely tr
ying to establish that -" "Get on
with it, Counsel."
By the time Jamm had finished with the last aero-space engineer, in the twenty-seventh week of the trial, Banion was personally convinced, by the looks of hatred coming from jurors 6, 9, and 10, that they not only were itching to send him to the chair but would vote for putting him to death by the slowest means possible. Jamm, however, appeared quite satisfied, even exultant over having established that one of the technicians had filled a prescription for an antidepressant two weeks prior to the launch. That night he went on seven TV shows and declared, "One of the key members of the launch team was on drugs. It is the government that should be on trial, not Mr. Banion."
Weeks 22 through 27 were consumed with the less than riveting testimony from eighteen cardiologists as to whether Banion had the blood of Mr. Figg on his hands. Jamm was prepared. His investigators, a nasty pair of high-priced Washington ferrets, had established that Mr. Figg had a copy of
Juggs*
in his pickup truck at the time of the launch. Jamm had charts ready to go showing the heartbeat of a seventy-two-year-old male during arousal. Much as he felt innocent of the death of Mr. Figg, Banion privately expressed his earnest hope to Jamm that he would not have to play the
Juggs
card.