The Gun Runner's Daughter Read Online Free PDF Page B

Post
ran a short account that the State Department had suspended all open export licenses held by the Falcon Corporation pending the outcome
of the Rosenthal trial. A second article, from the UPI news wire, reported that the Israeli envoy had protested the move.
    Each article was small, as if not even the writers understood the importance of what had just happened. That was because, perhaps, it was important to so few people. And that it was, to those
few, so vitally important did not matter yet.
    Dee Dennis read the account in a taxi from Dupont Circle to Thirteenth and F, where he worked on the skeleton staff still assisting Independent Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh in cleaning up from the
Final Report of the Independent Counsel for Iran/Contra Matters.
And as he read he felt regret.
    Ronald Rosenthal. Dee had followed the account of his arrest, the month before, with something close to salivation. This, he had thought at the time, was the kind of criminal whose ass you can
lock up without fear of a government pardon and unfettered by the nasty
Kastigar
decision that had so complicated his life under Walsh. It was precisely in the hope of this kind of
prosecution that he had so far turned down all the offers of jobs as counsel or analyst that had come to him since Walsh finished, whether from powerful New York houses who had flown him up in
company jets to talk over lunch at the Harmony or Maidstone, from congressional offices or committees, or from NGOs—nongovernmental organizations—on Mass. Ave. and Beltway Bandits in
Arlington. That he had refused them all was because Dee Dennis wished to work on a criminal prosecution for the Justice Department. One like this.
    The weekend of Rosenthal’s arrest, the month before, his father had mentioned the case as the two flew up to their family home in Martha’s Vineyard, where the rest of the Dennises
were already waiting to celebrate Independence Day. That he should be au courant with this affair was, to Dee, a surprise: Edward Treat Dennis, counsel to the Democratic National Committee during
the election, was now White House counsel. Rosenthal was properly the business of the Justice Department, and between the two there were meant to be fire walls.
    “You see we indicted Ron Rosenthal?”
    “Yeah. What’s it all about?”
    His father had shown surprise.
    “Deedee, that’s the son-of-a-bitch who took Ocean View Farm off of Gerry Saunders.”
    Now Dee understood his father’s interest. It was Rosenthal, the big property owner on Martha’s Vineyard, where generations of Dennises had been born, and where Dee had summered his
whole life. Rosenthal had bought Ocean View Farm in foreclosure from one of the island’s oldest families during hard times in the sixties, and no sooner had he acquired it than he’d
started subdividing. So quickly, in fact, that the State Assembly had passed a three-acre wetlands zoning law to stop him. As for his father’s emotion, Rosenthal’s tenure on the island
was only a quarter century old. Many of the original families, environmentalists before there was any such movement, much resented this newcomer gaining control over large tracts of fragile
oceanfront.
    Still, even if his father’s interest in the case was more personal than political, Dee knew that his influence was both. Watching his father turn his attention back to a report he was
reading, for a brief moment Dee considered asking a direct favor.
    But caution—practiced caution, never taught but intuitively grasped—interceded.
    If his father didn’t understand by himself, Dee Dennis knew, there was no point in asking.
    It was a shame. But after his return from the Fourth of July weekend on the island, Dee Dennis doubted he had thought about Rosenthal even once.
    And now, on August 1st, riding a taxi to work through the morning rush, he read the page 15 item on the sealing of Falcon’s John Street office with a sudden spike of attention. Then he
closed the paper