The Infiltrators by Donald Hamilton Read Free Book Online

well-groomed lady attorney when I came up before Judge Hillman, stringy-haired and bare-legged in my crumpled black dress. I thought I’d die of humiliation. And two hundred thousand dollars bail, my God! And then having to face the newsmen and their cameras like that…!” She shook her head abruptly. “Not that it really mattered. Nothing mattered anymore, because Roy was dead.”
    She drew a long ragged breath, and I saw that her eyes were wet. After all the years, she could still cry for her lost husband. Or, I reminded myself sternly, pretend to cry for him, for my benefit.
    “I was right about that,” she continued. “It didn’t matter a bit in the long run. There was much worse to come. But even then, when I forced myself to go to the office the next day, the chill in the air told me where I stood. The crown princess had slipped on a banana peel and got egg on her face, to scramble a few metaphors. She’d suddenly become a liability to the firm instead of an asset. But they were nice about it. They gave me leave of absence and continued my salary clear up to the verdict. And Mr. Baron himself handled my defense. But I knew that even if he got me off, my special favored place with the firm, that I’d worked so hard to achieve, was gone forever, and nothing in my life would ever be the way I’d hoped.”
    There was a sudden flutter of black wings over the trees as the two crows, disturbed by something, rose and flapped away into the distance. A crow isn’t normally the most graceful flier in the world, although he can soar like an eagle if he feels like it, but he gets the job done in a professional and businesslike manner.
    Madeleine licked her lips. “Strangely, those are the only things I remember clearly, the early things: the pleasant married business of getting all dressed up for a celebration dinner with my husband, the terrible shock of seeing those handcuffs on me, the ghastly trapped-animal feeling of being locked up in a cell for the first time in my life, and the dreadful indignity of having to face the court and the newsmen looking like that. Of course, that was only the beginning, but the rest… I guess I was kind of numb through all the rest. I didn’t really
feel
anything through all the months of legal maneuvering, even the verdict and the sentencing and the appeals. Denied. And then being shipped across the country, passed from one federal marshal who happened to be going the right way to another, mostly in handcuffs with everybody staring at the depraved female criminal on her way to the pen; and those dreadful little jails where they parked me along the way; and arriving all bedraggled again, like that first morning in court, but by then I didn’t even care how awful I looked in my grimy slacks and soiled blouse after all that traveling. I… I’d even picked up some bugs, you know, in one of those horrible little cells into which I’d been stuck between the various stages of the journey. It wasn’t until later that I realized it was all deliberate.”
    “Deliberate?” I asked.
    She didn’t look at me. She went on, staring at the busy highway, “Yes. To break me down. They couldn’t kill me, like Roy; to have us both disappearing and dying under suspicious circumstances would have been too much. So I had to be framed into prison, and not only framed, but broken, smashed, demolished as a thinking, potentially dangerous human being. It wasn’t hard, considering my sheltered upbringing. The self-confident and self-satisfied young lady was very vulnerable. Drag her rudely out of her lovely home in handcuffs, throw some terrible charges at her, take advantage of her initial shock to expose her to scorn and ridicule at her very first court appearance on the… the wrong side of the law, continue to humiliate her at every turn, convict her of a dreadful crime against her country, sentence her to the most brutal penal institution available, and soften her up for it by shuttling her from