No Small Words

Judge Sowell Lame was staring down from the Superior Court bench at Golden Fawn, whose defense attorney had told her in no small words to wear a suit and no braids in her hair for this court appearance.  Golden Fawn had no explanation for why marijuana had been found in her medicine bag except that the Southwest Plaza management was probably trying to frame her because she and her fiance were constantly complaining about housing code violations.  Her explanation for the other substances in the medicine bag was a vague "for ritual purposes" statement.  Lame glanced over at the handsome fiance sitting behind the defense table in a crisp U.S. Coast Guard uniform adorned with medals.  What kind of medals do you get for being in the Coast Guard?  The defense attorney had raised some very strong points about the (in)admissibility of the marijuana into evidence in the first place.  On the other hand, Lame was wondering if these two troublemakers hadn't planted the marijuana themselves the day before the federal inspection in order to frame the building managers for framing them.  Now I'm getting into the realm of speculation.  Lame was not inherently opposed to intuition as a force in deciding law cases as long as there was some type of support for the finding.  The U.S. Attorney cleared her throat, nervous about the judge's darting eyes and lapse into silence.  Lame looked at her in surprise, then looked at Washington Post reporter Perry Winkle waiting expectantly in the back.  I don't wanna get in the paper for this one.  Lame was already rising to his feet and raising his gavel as he granted the defense attorney's motion to dismiss. 

"Hi, I'm Perry Winkle with The Washington Post.  Do you have a few minutes to talk?"  Vasquez answered "no" for his fiancee and tried to shepherd her past him; the last thing they needed was one of their bosses reading about this arrest.

"It's about Ardua."  Golden Fawn and Vasquez turned back and saw that this statement had not come from the reporter but from a wild-eyed old man wearing a coat that was too big for him.  "I've seen what you can do to her.  You ain't the only one, but you're one of the best."  Dubious McGinty was much better washed and shaven than usual, but they could see the wildness of the streets still hovering over him.

"Can you tell me what you know about Ardua?" asked the reporter.  Vasquez asked for the reporter's card, then said they were in a hurry and had to get to work.  "Call me anytime," Winkle said as they walked away from him.

A few miles to the west, Congressional aide Ann Bishis was hobbling painfully in her black pumps down a lumpy Georgetown sidewalk looking at house numbers until she finally found Senator John Kerry's red brick house on O Street.  Her boss, Congressman Herrmark, had asked her to take care of this errand last night, but she was smarter than him and knew that more witnesses were likely to spot her activity and deem it suspicious at night than by daylight.  She stopped, looked carefully around, then tossed the package over the wall into the side garden.  She didn't know what was in it and didn't care--though if pressed for a guess, she would probably have suspected some sort of stern warning about Kerry's energy bill, or maybe about the health care bill.  "OWWW!"  The package had hit somebody!  Bishis took off running down the street as she heard the unmistakable sound of Senator Kerry's voice lofting over the wall:  "Who's there?!"  She paused to rip off her shoes and hurl them behind a bush, then ran as fast as she could until she managed to turn the corner before Kerry had made it out of his garden gate.  She ran a little further, then crouched down behind an enormous boxwood, muffling her panting with her hands.  She heard some distant dog barks but nothing else.  She began praying to Hera to protect her, and her breathing slowed down, and her heart stopped racing.  Favored one.  After several minutes, she got up and hurried off to find her car, as a red-faced Senator on the other side of the block iced his head and called the police to examine a suspicious package.

Several miles to the east, Charles Wu discreetly left a small package on a park bench, then walked slowly over to the Woodrow Wilson Memorial--where he would pretend to read idealistic quotations while waiting for the package to be picked up and a different one left in its stead.  He could see out of the corner of his eye that "C. Coe Phant" was already making his way to the package, so Wu relaxed and headed inside the shiny marble foyer.  The truth was, he was still a little unsettled by what had been negotiated in Singapore.  It was the best of times, it was the worst of times--for spies.  He knew there were two sources of power in the world:  people and money.  But money was a negotiable tender that he could spend wherever and however he liked.  His increasingly complex cultivation of human contacts between here and Asia was getting more and more difficult to manage.  (And he had lost his favorite taxi driver and African intelligence source to the Leon Swain Taxicab Commission sting!  How could that guy be so stupid?!)  And though he would have laughed at anybody that screamed "New World Order!" or conjured up "Streetfighter"-style images of elite international security platoons that could liberate (or take over?) an entire country, the blend of Interpol intelligence with blue-helmeted-boots-on-the-ground was capable of causing a really major shift in power in a lot of previously anarchic places.  And hardly anybody knew about it.  Wu walked up to the next Woodrow Wilson inscription:  "We are not put into the world to sit still and know; we are put in it to act."  Then he felt the burden of how much he knew.

Lurking behind a huge white pillar, Henry Samuelson glared at Wu, who had no right to be basking in Woodrow Wilson's words!  Behind another pillar, "John Doe" was having another frontal lobe epileptic seizure, then began speaking in tongues--prompting one of the Shackled to look down with interest even as an irritated Samuelson walked quickly away without hearing Doe's prophecy about the Eliminati.