During these explanations, Selby became aware of the growing tension around him. It was like the weight that settled in the air before the first storm clouds appeared, a charged tension that was usually shattered by rumbles of distant thunder or a sudden lightning flash.
Selby was something of an authority on tension... he had experienced those areas of human response a good deal more than the average person. He had been conditioned for years to the provocative cadence of snap counts and referees’ whistles and the sudden warning roar from packed stadiums.
It was the breaking point of those moments that professionals could usually predict and defend themselves against. Amateurs tended to be caught off-balance. But there was a dangerous equipoise in such situations that experts recognized — the compression of emotional elements beyond given flashpoints. There they burst and erupted in spasms of violence.
But with all Selby’s experience, he missed the breaking point of the trial, because it came from an unlikely source and spiraled with irrevocable pressure in three unpredictable sequences.
Earl Thomson interrupted Flood’s discourse to Brett by suddenly shouting at Shana, “You claimed I hated you, you swore that under oath, but that was wrong. I hated something close that I couldn’t—”
As the marshals moved from their posts, Earl pointed at Shana. “I didn’t hate you. I disciplined you. I controlled you because I had to. You were a diversion, a tactic—”
His voice broke like a child’s, but it rose above the hammering of Flood’s gavel. “You didn’t know what I hated, why I had to hate it.” He was shouting frantically. “Nobody asked me that, nobody thought of that...”
Turning around quickly, Shana said to her father, “Help him, please, I don’t care, can’t you do something, help him?”
Selby was so stunned by her outbreak of compassion for this miserable young man’s pain, that he didn’t immediately identify the object shining dully against Adele Thomson’s plaid robe. His peripheral vision was usually automatic, inherited from anticipating a thousand blind-side blocks, but he wasn’t aware of what was about to happen until he saw the shocked glaze in George Thomson’s eyes.
There was a gun in Adele Thomson’s fragile hand. Dom Lorso was close enough to strike the gun aside, deflect the barrel from pointing directly at George Thomson. But he said in a tired voice, “It’s better this way, Giorgio, better for all of us. You know that it is...”
Selby threw himself over the railing in front of his daughter and Brett, but the Sicilian sat motionless, his eyes lidded in his gray face, and watched Adele Thomson fire three shots which struck George Thomson just below his heart and sent him crashing backward, already dying, into the arms of the shocked marshals. The bailiff reached Mrs. Thomson then and took the gun from her withered fingers.
Selby held his daughter and Brett close to him and listened incredulously to the sound of Earl Thomson’s sudden laughter threading in a senseless counterpoint through the roaring confusion in the courtroom.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
In mid-June, some eight weeks after Earl Thomson’s aborted trial, Selby sat in Senator Lester’s private office, which adjoined a conference room furnished with a bar, a burnished walnut table and a dozen leather armchairs.
Summer was well advanced in the capital. The Potomac was swollen and shimmered with heat and the leaves of the trees on the banks were a lush, dark green, moist with an oily humidity-
In an hour or so the avenues would be circled with streams of traffic, but now Selby could see the famous lighted monuments of the city, the great marble heads and figures of the nation’s founders gleaming through the darkness.
In the small kitchen beside a reception room, Victoria Kim made tea and heated breakfast rolls. She could hear a murmur from the executive suite, the senator and Selby’s muted voices.
Their work was almost done, the debriefings over; Miss Kim had already confirmed Selby’s return ticket to Philadelphia. For several days he had been meeting with operative agencies and committees, giving them accounts of his conversations with his brother, Jennifer Easton, George Thomson and various personnel at Summitt City.
Simon Correll’s death, given its circumstances, had created a worldwide stir; the news media had covered the story with obsessive intensity. A plant manager, Clem Stoltzer, arriving in the Summitt mall after the slayings, had theorized that the security guard, one Henry Ledge, had attacked Correll without provocation, apparently suffering from a psychotic seizure. Police and ballistic experts testified only that both men had died in an exchange of gunfire from a Beretta Model 951 and a .45 army automatic, both guns found at the scene. There were no witnesses.
A federal investigation of Summitt City’s connections to Camp Saliaris and the Chemical Corps was underway with a panel of general officers. A civilian overview was provided by retired congressmen and public officials. These inquiries were coordinated with a probe at East Chester, Pennsylvania, into the criminal conspiracy indictments stemming from Earl Thomson’s confession to the charges brought against him by the People of Pennsylvania.
Civic and political leaders from many nations had commented respectfully on the death of Simon Correll. His Excellency, the Suffragan Bishop Waring, spoke to reporters from his new station, the Abbey of St. Georges in Brussels. The bishop said, “It was my privilege to know Mr. Correll and his family for many years. He was a man of the world, a master of complex enterprises, but with a sense of poetry and imagination. In the words of two great Americans, Mr. Correll ‘understood profoundly that injustice anywhere threatened justice everywhere’... and that ‘in the councils of nations as well as the human heart, the concept of God must be a verb, not merely a noun.’ ”
The participants in the cover-up at East Chester fell like a row of dominoes. Earl Thomson had involved his beloved mother and Miguel Santos. Oliver Jessup incriminated Lieutenant Eberle and Captain Slocum. Slocum, after plea-bargaining futilely with DA Jonathan Lamb, had surrendered the tapes which proved at least one degree of Counselor Allan Davic’s complicity. Davic was suspended immediately by the bar associations of Pennsylvania and New York. Slocum was indicted for perjury and misprison of felonies — specifically for lying about the substance of his first interrogation of Earl Thomson and of withholding information relating to Casper Gideen’s murder by Lieutenant Gus Eberle, and the felonious assaults by Earl Thomson on Shana Selby.
Goldie Boy Jessup contended in shouting, biblical rhetoric that he had been “possessed” by both Captain Slocum and Lieutenant Eberle. He had been forced to accept their “false gods.” He had lied and accepted bribes only to save his life for the further service of the Lord Jesus.
On the federal level, the investigation of the Chemical Corps’ illegal fiduciary connections with the Correll Group were complicated by the fact that General Adam Taggart, after destroying certain military files and all his personal papers, had seated himself at his desk and taken his life with his service revolver.
“That was a plus, of course,” Senator Lester had confided to Selby. “Simplified things considerably.”
The general’s son had not been extradited by Jonathan Lamb. The U.S. Army had by then placed its own legal hold on the officer... Derek Taggart was arrested in Germany and ordered to face a court-martial for conduct described in the Articles of War as detrimental to the “integrity, good reputation and best interests of the service.” It developed that the young German carpenter with whom Ace Taggart lived off-base had been picked up by the German police for trafficking in drugs to the military and using the Frankfurt quarters he shared with Taggart as the “drop” for these operations.