THE SIMPLE TRUTH
THE SIMPLE TRUTH
Also by David Baldacci:
Absolute Power
Total Control
The Winner
Acknowledgments
To Jennifer Steinberg, once more for superb research.
To Lou Saccoccio, for his able assistance on military legal matters.
To Lee Calligaro, whose stories about his tenure as a JAG attorney during the Vietnam War fascinated me, and who is also the finest trial lawyer I have ever met.
To Steve Jennings, for his astute editorial comments.
To the Warner Books family — Larry, Maureen, Mel, Emi, Tina, Heather, Jackie J. and Jackie M. and all the rest of an incredibly fine and dedicated group of people who make my life so much more enriched.
To my mother, for the finer points of southwest Virginia, an area she knows awfully well.
To Karen Spiegel, who has been with me for a long time on this story.
To attorney Ed Vaughan, for educating me on some of the finer points of Virginia law and practice.
To those other sources, for their help in enlightening me on that fascinating place, the United States Supreme Court.
To my friend and agent, Aaron Priest, who provided me, as always, with a lot of good counsel as I worked my way through this novel.
To Frances Jalet-Miller, for putting so much time, effort and spirit into helping me realize the full potential of this work. I couldn’t have done it without you.
The Truth is rarely pure and never simple.
— Oscar Wilde
CHAPTER ONE
* * *
At this prison the doors are inches thick, steel; once factory smooth, they now carry multiple dents. Imprints of human faces, knees, elbows, teeth, residue of blood are harvested large on their gray surface. Prison hieroglyphics: pain, fear, death, all permanently recorded here, at least until a new slab of metal arrives. The doors have a square opening at eye level. The guards stare through it, use the small space to throw bright lights at the human cattle on their watch. Without warning, batons smack against the metal with the pop of gun reports. The oldies bear it well, looking down at the floor, studying nothing — meaning their lives — in a subtle act of defiance, not that anyone notices or cares. The rookies still tense when the pop or light comes; some dribble pee down their cotton pants, watch it flow over their black low-quarter shoes. They soon get over it, smack the damn door back, fight down the push of schoolboy tears and belly bile. If they want to survive.
At night, the prison cells hold the darkness of a cave but for odd shapes here and there. On this night a thunderstorm grips the area. When a lightning bolt dips from the sky, it splashes illumination into the cells through the small Plexiglas windows. The honeycomb pattern of the chicken wire stretched tight across the glass is reproduced on the opposite wall with each burst.
During the passage of such light, the man’s face emerges from the dark, as though having suddenly parted the surface of water. Unlike those in the other cells, he sits alone, thinks alone, sees no one in here. The other prisoners fear him; the guards too, even armed as they are, for he is a man of intimidating proportions. When he passes by the other cons, hardened, violent men in their own right, they quickly look away.
His name is Rufus Harms and his reputation at Fort Jackson Military Prison is that of a destroyer: He will crush you if you come at him. He never takes the first step, but he will the last. Twenty-five years of incarceration have taken a considerable toll on the man. Like the age rings of a tree, the ruts of scars on Harms’s skin, the poorly healed fractures of bone on his skeleton are a chronicle of his time here. However, far worse damage lies within the soft tissue of his brain, within the centers of his humanity: memory, thought, love, hate, fear, all tainted, all turned against him. But mostly memory, a humbling tumor of iron against the tip of his spine.
There is substantial strength left in the massive frame, though; it is evident in the long, knotty arms, the density of Harms’s shoulders. Even the wide girth of his middle carries the promise of exceptional power. But Harms is still a listing oak, topped out on growth, some limbs dead or dying, beyond the cure of pruning, the roots ripped out on one side. He is a living oxymoron: a gentle man, respectful of others, faithful to his God, irreversibly cast in the image of a heartless killer. Because of this the guards and the other prisoners leave him be. And he is content with that. Until this day. What his brother has brought him. A package of gold, a surge of hope. A way out of this place.