“God damn it, Drummond, all right. Enough already. We’ll try it.”

“One other thing?”

“What’s that?”

“We’re going to want to hear what Bales’s wife told you when she broke. A videotaped testimony would be fine. Just make sure you’ve got a chain of evidence on it.”

He looked at me from under his eyebrows. “Who said she broke?”

“Buzz, no offense to your professional competence, but how else did you find out there were four more traitors?”

He rolled his eyes. For a minute I could swear he actually liked me. But probably I was only kidding myself. Spooks don’t have feelings.

CHAPTER 47

I felt deeply honored about the way it got set up. On Tuesday morning at eight, the trial kicked off as scheduled. The next two days, Katherine and Eddie fenced back and forth over board members. As voir dire processes go, it was one of the bloodiest skirmishes in military court history.

See, military law doesn’t have the exact same challenge procedures as federal law, but close enough. As long as Katherine could show that a potential board member had an axe to grind against gays, she could get them disqualified. Eddie’s job was harder, because you can’t disqualify a member just because they don’t have an axe to grind against gays. Eddie had to show they believed gays were a persecuted minority who deserved to be in the Army, whose lifestyle was perfectly normal, even admirable, who were vulnerable victims of military witch hunts and were often framed for crimes they didn’t commit. It wasn’t like a lot of Army people were going admit they felt that way.

As a result, the mayhem was done by Katherine. She was winnowing out the antigay bigots and seeking ten men or women who were either fair-minded or equivocal about homosexuality. The infantry guys on the board got massacred. She knocked off eight that I could count. Three female officers actually made the final list, which was considerably better than how I thought it would turn out. Females, as Imelda had observed, tend to be less judgmental on sexual issues – well, excepting bigamy or adultery. If you’ve got a client accused of either of those offenses, the last thing you want’s a female jurist.

Katherine performed superbly.

How did I know this? Because for once the military opened the trial to the press. There were even TV cameras in the courtroom, and to the best of my knowledge that’s unheard of in military trials. But given the rabid public interest in this case, and that all of Korea was interested in the outcome, a closed court would’ve been a disaster. To preserve the alliance, the Army had to discard its traditional cloaked process.

On the morning of the third day, Eddie got up and made his opening statement. The TV cameras were rolling and he was positively preening. This was the moment he had waited for all his life. He paced back and forth, spoke completely extemporaneously, and went on for exactly thirty minutes. He really did bear an uncanny resemblance to a youthful Robert Redford. And the camera picked that up.

I hated to, but I had to give him credit. He was brilliant. He was brief and he was passionate. He resisted the impulse to hog the limelight and I’m sure it killed him. He emphasized again and again the sheer, disgusting ugliness of the crime. He reminded everybody that the accused was a West Point graduate, an experienced officer, a man who had done his duties in every other way, but was a callous, brutal murderer nonetheless.

This was a sly preemptive strike on his part, since it was evident Katherine was going to emphasize that her client was a highly accomplished officer, with a prestigious professional pedigree, and thus was unlikely to have committed the lowly acts he was accused of.

Eddie had also somehow learned about Whitehall’s boxing career. He spent a few moments dwelling on that theme as well, noting how the blows inflicted on Lee’s body were described by the pathologist as particularly fierce and forceful, the kind that could be rendered only by a powerful, trained fighter.

Eddie kept subtly reminding the board of the homosexual nature of the crime, playing to whatever residue of subtle prejudice they possessed. He was masterful.

Then he reared up on his hind legs and outdid himself. He told the board and faces behind the TV cameras to put themselves in Lee No Tae’s shoes. Imagine you’re twenty-one years old, highly intelligent, handsome, the child of loving parents, a young man with a brilliant future ahead of you. Imagine you’ve just been invited by an American officer to his private quarters for a party. You feel honored, and you happily accept. You like Americans. You trust Americans and you look up to American officers. So you go. The Americans get drunk and you get the first inklings you’ve made a serious mistake. Then – Eddie paused for theatrical effect – then you’re being held down, you’re fighting and you’re kicking and you’re struggling, and the most horrifying things are being done to your body. Two of them restrain you, while the third exploits you. They’re drunk and they’re using you in the most vile ways to satisfy their unnatural lusts. You scream in pain, but they muffle you. You beg them to stop and they laugh. Then a belt is thrown around your neck, and you feel it tightening, and…

Eddie paused there. He gazed into the faces of the board. He affected a bottomless, soulful sadness. He stared down at the floor and shook his head, as though he couldn’t go on, as though the necrophilia was too sickening, as though the revulsion and horror of it was simply too much. Then he bravely gulped and looked back up at the ten faces in the jury box. He placed his hands on the railing, worked up a courageously stern expression, leaned toward the board, and very quietly said, “You are American officers. You will know before this trial ends the terrible damage Thomas Whitehall has done to our profession, to our reputations, to our ashamed nation. Show the world… Show Lee No Tae’s family… Show the people of South Korea that ours is a profession of honor. Wipe away the terrible stain that has occurred. Show that we know how to deal with the man seated at the defense table. Show the world… Well, you know what to show them. You know your duty.”

Then he spun around and returned to the prosecution table, an angry, pouncing eagerness to his walk, as though he could not wait to expunge this blot from the reputation of his profession.

Frankly, to my eyes it was a bit overdone, and it was more of a closing argument than an opener, but that only showed how supremely confident Eddie was. He’d hit all the right notes. He’d never once mentioned Whitehall’s rank, as though Tommy no longer deserved the honored appellation. He’d stressed how deeply Whitehall had shamed the profession of arms, because military officers are the most institutional creatures there are, and Eddie was stoking their furnaces, exhorting them to remember the disgrace Tommy had brought on them. Plus, the defense counsel was a civilian. He was trying to distance her from the board.

But if Eddie was good in front of a camera, Katherine was simply spectacular. You knew the instant you watched her approach the jury box that you were seeing the difference between a hometown player and a Broadway star. He just didn’t have her experience or her instinctive gift for theatrics. Besides, Eddie was too proud of his own good looks. He moved like a peacock. Katherine moved like a graceful, gorgeous swan who’d never owned a mirror because she didn’t need one. She stood perfectly still for a long, telling moment to allow the camera to focus just on her. And what the world saw was a petite, unadorned, plainly dressed woman with the face of an angel. My eyes were fixed on her face, and it suddenly struck me: She looked just like those statues of the Virgin Mary you see in churches. There was such a simple, essential purity to her that it actually made my heart ache.