The Other Caribbean Corpses

A few hours ago, Atticus Hawk was celebrating Martin Luther King Day for the first time in his life. He had cleaned up a Southeast park with his girlfriend, Jai Alai, then they had attended a memorial service before heading over to spend the rest of the day with her family. He felt like a different person in a different life. The future held unimaginable experiences and adventures that had once been outside his orbit. Then his boss had called. Now he was the Justice Department torture expert again. Now he was the Guantanamo apologist again. Now he was...sick. "This is the man you put in charge of investigating CIA crimes?" A suit that Hawk did not recognize was pointing at Hawk and waiting for Hawk's boss to answer in the affirmative. Then the suit just shook his head. They were not even at the Justice Department: they were thirteen men and two women crammed into a bungalow living room in Tenleytown. (Hawk didn't even know the address because a car had been sent to pick him up.) "Now which of you legal geniuses is going to explain this?" He was pointing to a printout of the Harper's expose on murders covered up at Guantanamo:

http://harpers.org/archive/2010/01/hbc-90006368,

which had made Hawk so ill while reading it during the car ride that they had pulled over three times for him to barf. (He had told the driver he wasn't used to reading in a car.) "HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?"

Hawk wasn't sure if "this" was a reference to the article or something in the article, and he looked to his boss for guidance, but his boss remained silent. I did exactly what my country asked me to do. Hawk wanted to cry. I controlled the investigation. Hawk was thinking about Jai Alai, wondering how he could talk her into eloping tonight...somewhere outside of the U.S. Does her son have a passport? Will they put a hold on my passport? Maybe I'm already on the Do Not Fly list. The room was so silent they could hear the sound of Hawk's boss scratching his fingernails on a chair arm.

Hawk cleared his throat. "Well, the fact that this is being published by Harper's indicates that the testimony was not credible enough for serious journalists to publish."

"I don't give a rat's ass if it's being published in Soap Opera Digest! I want an explanation!"

Hawk cleared his throat again. "This news is going to be completely lost in the midst of the saturation of Haiti coverage."

"They are publishing the full story in March, you moron! This story is not disappearing! Now explain--"

"OK, certain elements within the military saw the election of Obama--"

"PRESIDENT Obama!"

"--President Obama as an opportunity to rewrite military history. We at Justice are still ruled by the laws of evidence and--"

"They are reporting that the CIA has a secret prison on Guantanamo where they torture people to death! Then they pretend it's suicide! We're the freaking Gulag now! How the Hell...."

Not far away, Henry Samuelson was staring out his study window after his third reading of the article. He knew exactly which CIA head was going to roll for this screw-up, and it was about time. Never send a boy to do a man's job. Nobody had ever questioned a suicide on Samuelson's watch...ever. If the CIA can't get its act together, we're going to have to take action. He fingered the Heurich Society tie clip he wore daily (even on days like this, when he stayed inside all day long) and tapped his foot angrily on the floor.

Back at the Tenleytown bungalow, another Washington insider felt the icy grip from the Potomac settling deep into his dying soul.