TEN
The public was barred from the closed-door, high-level security hearing, but the press was allowed in to take photos for a few minutes before the session started. Joshua was seated at a long, green clothdraped table, looking uncomfortable while cameras clicked and strobes flashed in his face. He didn’t like having his picture taken, and he didn’t try to hide it as he leaned over to his lawyer seated next to him.
“I’d take any amount of grilling from a senator over this form of torture.”
With a wry smile the lawyer shot back, “I hope you still feel that way after the hearing.”
Then, as if on some hidden cue, the photographers stopped, packed up their cameras, and walked out. Joshua wondered, chuckling to himself, if there had been some sort of high-pitched dog whistle calling them off that only the news hounds could hear. Whatever it was, he was happy to be spared any more embarrassing attention from the press.
He looked around the room. Even though the public wasn’t allowed in, some pretty heavyweight bystanders sat in the mostly vacant audience section behind him: the president’s national security advisor, the chief of staff to the vice president, an aide to the Joint Chiefs of Staff he’d met once but whose name he couldn’t remember, and various other high-level advisors and military personnel. It was a pretty heady peanut gallery.
The senators and representatives began to file into the chamber in ones and twos, taking their places at the raised dais at the front. A few came over to shake Joshua’s hand enthusiastically, but most just took their seats and looked over their notes or conferred with their aides. They were a select group of experienced lawmakers, the so-called gang-of-eight, as they were commonly referred to in Washington political parlance: those members of Congress with whom the president traditionally conferred in times of grave national security, the Democratic and Republican leaders in the House and Senate, and the chairs and ranking members of their respective intelligence committees.
The chairman of this select committee, Senator Wendell Straworth, was a powerful veteran of Washington politics. He was seated in the middle of the dais in a high-backed chair that set him apart from the others. A large, imposing man, with a shiny bald head and thick, tangled eyebrows, he took a minute to survey the room, peeking out over the reading glasses perched at the end of his nose.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” the senator began, “this will be a closed and confidential session of this special committee…created to investigate what I consider to be one of the most shocking and disturbing national security events in the history of this great nation,”
Senator Straworth took a long pause before he continued. “Now we are all painfully aware that this committee has issued letter requests for various documents pertinent to this investigation. Letter requests sent to Mr. Joshua Jordan, a private weapons contractor, as well as to his counsel. To date, Mr. Jordan has refused to produce a single document. I note that Mr. Jordan is present in this hearing room, along with his counsel, Mr. Harry Smythe.”
Senator Straworth slowly turned his gaze to Joshua. “This committee,” he announced with a booming voice, “calls as its first witness Mr. Joshua Jordan.”
Joshua stood up from the table and raised his right hand. He then took the oath and swore to tell the truth under the federal penalties of perjury. “…So help me God.”
Then he sat down.
Joshua was not a religious man, not in the way Abigail was. But just then, as he looked out over the congressional panel assembled in front of him, knowing as he did, the political and legal quicksand that lay all around him, he was happy about one thing: he knew Abigail was praying for him.