Double Tap Read Online Free PDF Page B

don’t do it. “What about the preliminary hearing? If he’s innocent, how come the judge bound him over?”
    “What does Ruiz know about the Information for Security program?”
    “Was he working for the government?”
    “Do you think Chapman was killed because of IFS? Has anybody in the administration talked to you?”
    Harry keeps trudging forward, wading into them, briefcase up in front of his face; he finally looks over at me, half smiles, then says, “He’s Madriani, not me.”
    “Thanks.”
    “Don’t mention it.”
    Like quills on a mad porcupine, a hundred microphones—some hoisted on six-foot booms—are suddenly pointed in my direction.
    Even in the afternoon San Diego sun the camera lights are blinding, portable banks of them arrayed on bars held high on stanchions moving with the crowd as we approach the entrance to the jail in lockstep, half an inch at a time.
    “We’ll have nothing to say right now. Maybe later, after I’ve spoken to Mr. Ruiz.”
    This tentative offering doesn’t appease them. Some character sticks me in the ass from behind, trying to lift his microphone boom over my head. I make a mental note to find another way out of the jail.
    Using his briefcase like a shield fending off swords, Harry pushes on into the crowd, Don Quixote tilting at mic booms and cameras. We run this gauntlet for half a block, the press mob now a wide circle of bodies around us, shutting down traffic as we cross the street. A photographer with a wide-angle lens tries to get a shot from down low. Somebody jostles him from behind, and by the time he snaps the shutter he is close enough to my face that I can read the f-stops off the barrel of his lens. “Extra! Extra! See hair up the lawyer’s nose!” And some people see this as glamorous.
    The murder of a prominent socialite, one of the state’s leading software magnates—a major local employer and a woman who made it to 220 of the Fortune 500—is a good story, but nonetheless it is one that likely would have had only local legs. This morning a front-page piece in a Washington newspaper changed all that. The story, which has now been regurgitated coast-to-coast on all of the morning network news shows, has linked the victim, Madelyn Chapman, and her company to the controversial Information for Security program, known to the press and the public as IFS.
    IFS has been leading news in the national press for weeks now, ever since it became the largest bone in a tug-of-war between the White House and Congress, the President saying he needs the program to safeguard national security and civil libertarians claiming it’s an invasion of privacy.
    Until this morning Harry and I had agreed to become involved in a nice, quiet little murder trial, with perhaps a few local reporters invited. Now that Chapman has been linked to the IFS program, her murder has been ginned into national headlines, and Harry and I are up to our asses in a sea of questions.
    Fifty yards away I can see a small band of uniformed guards. They have crowded up against the inside of the glass doors at the main entrance to the jail. Looking out and laughing, one of them has a cupped hand to his mouth and is talking. They seem to be enjoying the entertainment, two lawyers being engulfed and digested by the news amoeba out front. Want some publicity? Help yourself.
    We grind to a halt, unable to move forward or back. I’m beginning to feel like Custer surrounded by the Indians. This kind of stuff can get out of hand. Somebody pokes Harry with his mic and gets a face full of leather with a handle attached. The guy starts to push back and I stop him before we have a news riot. If this continues, I know that my partner will be packing an anvil in the bottom of his briefcase the next time he comes for a jail visit.
    “They’re taking their time,” says Harry.
    We are cooling our heels in one of the concrete cubicles they call conference rooms at the jail. Harry is standing with a foot up on the