The Hunted

"I hate that apartment. I'll be happy to unload it. After four days in a small, cramped cell, I suddenly love the idea of wide-open space."

"Set a low price and dump it quickly. Then find a cheap rental, one you can get out of quickly. You'll need all the money you can get your hands on. My legal costs are probably going to be enormous."

"What about Orangutan? No longer an option?"

"It's history. But I've got a new idea. Probably even better than Orangutan Media, something I've been toying with for a while."

The van was beginning to slow down. In a fast rush of words, Alex shared the rough details of his idea. Elena nodded. She would have to learn a lot quickly. The concept was great, though. It would mint money, if she could pull it off. The van wheeled into an underground garage beneath the INS building. Alex and Elena were separated, taken upstairs in different elevators, then deposited in different cells and left alone to stew with worry.

Thirty minutes later, a guard arrived, unlocked the cell, and escorted Alex down several long, well-lit corridors to a small courtroom. Elena was already there, seated at a table beside MP. Their lawyer had his back turned to Elena and was engaging in a conversation with an attractive, older, dark-featured female seated at what Alex presumed was the prosecution table. A considerably younger male colleague in a dark suit sat to her right, looking nervous and out of place.

Alex sat beside MP, who quickly bent around him and said to the prosecutor, "Kim Parrish, I'd like you to meet my client, Alex Konevitch."

Alex held out his hand and looked her dead in the eye. "It's nice to meet you."

The room was small. They were about three feet apart. She nodded but took a step back, said nothing, and studiously avoided his hand. Go ahead, MP was thinking from the sideline-take a nice long look at the man you're about to persecute. You'll be responsible when he lands in a coffin. He's young and handsome, and his wife is young and beautiful-they have so much to live for-but go ahead, ignore your conscience. Get them killed.

She understood exactly what MP was doing. A long awkward moment, then she suddenly buried her nose in the blank legal pad on her table.

A moment later, the judge entered through a side door. There was none of the procedural rigmarole Alex had observed on American TV. No announcement, no standing. No long perorations or lawyers being introduced. Apparently, immigration cases adhered to a less formal pattern.

Judge John Everston IV presided. He spent a brief moment surveying his court to be sure everything was the way he liked it.

Alex's and Elena's eyes were glued to the face of the man who held their lives in his hands. He was neither handsome, impressive-looking, nor even mildly judicial-looking, with a long, droopy face, thick, arched eyebrows that lent an impression of severe fierceness, scarecrow gray hair, and small eyes hidden behind bifocals that seemed impossibly thick and bleary.

John Everston had started out as an immigration attorney thirty years before, a fine, precise, hardworking lawyer whose service was eventually rewarded with a judgeship. His lawyer career had been spent in the prosecution trenches. He came from a long line of deeply rooted, well-heeled southern Virginia aristocrats. And though everybody assumed otherwise, banishing immigrants had been a job he utterly loathed, and nearly always was ashamed to perform. He carefully hid a soft spot for the miserable masses who flocked to America for a thousand different reasons and suddenly found themselves at risk of being booted out. Left alone, they generally turned into perfectly respectable citizens. The law had forced him to separate families, to dispatch honest, hardworking people back to a life of hopeless squalor, and occasionally to send them back to conditions that meant certain death. Thirty years of practicing law on both sides of the bench had converted him from a mild liberal to a fairly rabid one.

And like every liberal judge in the country-in his opinion, like any judge with half a brain-Judge Everston detested John Tromble and he loathed the attorney general for failing to reel him in.

His eyes took in the court recorder, the bailiff at his station along the wall, the attorneys at their appropriate tables, and the young husband and wife huddled miserably in their atrocious orange prison apparel. He finally settled on a small group tucked in the back of the small visitors' section-a pair of bespoke gentlemen in nice suits and a young lady dressed decidedly more flippantly in ragged jeans, a torn T-shirt, and plastic flip-flops.

The judge directed a long finger in their direction. "It's not often I get visitors in this courtroom. When I do, I always like to make your acquaintance. You look like a reporter," he suggested to the young lady; from the way she was attired, she could be nothing but. Jeans and a ripped T-shirt-he had threatened lawyers with contempt just for wearing distasteful ties.