Code Name: Camelot (Noah Wolf #1)(7)
She wondered what JoAnne Galloway would do, referring to Demi Moore’s character in the movie. Would she give up and let her client suffer for a crime he probably didn’t commit? Would she fight on, knowing she was throwing away her own career? Pissing off a congressman like Gibson (and even worse, a potential president) would almost certainly be the end of any hope of making a name for herself, either in JAG or in private practice.
Galloway wouldn’t care, she was sure, but then, Galloway was a fictional character who didn’t have to look into a mirror each day and think, If only I had been smart enough to walk away from Foster.
She was scheduled to go and see her client in just a little over an hour, right after lunch. She honestly wasn’t sure what she was going to say to him, and decided not to think about it while she ate. She took the file with her and left the office to head for the Officer’s Mess.
Lunch didn’t help, because as hard as she tried to avoid any thoughts about Sergeant Foster, those big blue eyes of his kept popping up in her mind. Granted, when he had told her his account of the situation, he had sounded almost like a robot, but there was something so purely innocent about him, despite everything he had seen and done in his military career, that she couldn’t help believing he was telling her the truth. That being the case, she wasn’t sure that she could live with herself if she didn’t fight for him with everything she had.
When her lunch was finished, she walked over to the stockade and signed in. She was escorted to the interview room, and sat down at the table to wait for her client. He was brought in a couple of minutes later, and took the chair across from her.
“Lieutenant,” he said. “Good to see you again, I wasn’t sure you’d be back.” He smiled at her to soften the comment.
“Sergeant Foster,” she said, “I’m gonna level with you. Everything I’m doing to try to help you is being blocked at the highest levels, and I don’t know that there’s anything I can do that isn’t going to make things worse. Are you aware that Lieutenant Gibson’s father is a United States congressman and maybe running for president?”
Noah let an eyebrow go up a quarter inch. “Seriously? No, I didn’t know. The Lieutenant and I didn’t move in the same circles, so I never heard about that.” He let out a low whistle. “Now that I know it, though, it makes sense why everything has happened so fast. I mean, I was arrested within two hours of making my initial report, which sort of discounts Colonel Blanchard’s claim that he had sent investigators out to the scene of the crime beforehand.”
Mathers felt her eyebrows crunching again. “What you mean by that?”
Noah shrugged. “Where everything happened, it’s up in a mountainous region where there aren’t any roads. Some places, we had to walk single file going out and coming back, and it took us more than four hours to walk back to the rear. Now, let’s do the math. I gave my statement at about fifteen hundred hours, but I was arrested just before seventeen hundred. Since one of the men I brought in would have had to show the investigating unit how to get there, there’s no way they could have made it out and back in that short a time.”
“Helicopter. They probably flew out, that would only take minutes.”
“No, Ma’am, with all due respect,” he said. “The whole reason we were out there in that area was because we were searching for some antiaircraft batteries that ISIL had up and operating. A chopper flying over that area would have been shot down, no doubt about it. No, they definitely would have walked, and there’s no possible way they could have gotten there, looked the scene over, supposedly discovered that the bodies of the girls were missing, and then come back to make a report that resulted in my arrest.”
Mathers sat there and stared at him. “Is there any possible way that we can prove that?”
Noah shook his head. “Not a chance,” he said. “In order to make it stick, you can bet Colonel Blanchard has got the whole unit ready to back up his version of how, and probably where, it happened. All the documentation will show the event taking place somewhere close enough to reach in that timeframe, I’d bet on it. They would have gone after the bodies of our men sometime later.”
Mathers leaned forward, her hands open on either side of the file that was lying in front of her. “Sergeant, I’m trying everything I can think of, but the truth is that I’ve already been informed there’s no possible way I can win. In fact, my CO told me this morning that if I continue to try, all I’m going to do is ruin my own career.” She closed her eyes tightly for a moment, then opened them again and let them bore into his. “I’ve tried to decide what to do, and I—I just can’t figure it out. A part of me says I need to do everything possible to keep you from getting the death penalty, or at least to make it feasible for us to try the appeal route we discussed the other day, but another part tells me to run from you as fast as I can. Like I said, though, I can’t decide, so I’m going to leave this up to you. You tell me what to do, right now, and I’ll do it. Do I keep trying, or do I just go through the motions and let them convict you?”
Noah sat forward and put his right hand over her left. “Your CO is right,” he said. “If you keep trying to help me, this whole thing is going to blow up in your face and ruin your life, just the way it’s ruining mine. There’s no point in both of us going down. Give me whatever it is I need to file in order to fire you, so we can get you out of this mess.”