Farragut crossed his arms. "And what are you going to offer as proof? Can you get anyone -- well, anyone but her and those two Mormons -- to testify that they communed with God at that debate?"
Katzmarek grimaced. "If she's right about what happened, we might not have to."
"What are you babbling about?"
"You know how there's a fine line between insanity and genius? Well, she figures the meltdown was the flip side of an uncontrolled mob, that because both sides of that raucous crowd were being played so expertly against one another, what could have been a descent into mindless violence instead became a brief encounter with the divine."
"Sounds to me more like you've had an encounter of your own. Man, have you listened to yourself lately?"
"More importantly, have you looked in a mirror? You look like you haven't slept in days."
Farragut slumped in his chair, and nervously stole a glance at the guards in the hallway. "I haven't. Like you said, this is a private prison. They don't seem to care that the White House has finally banned abusive treatment at federal lock-ups. And they're pretty up-front about why they're doing it, too."
Katzmarek set his pen down. "Oh?"
"You."
* * *
When Katzmarek returned, he met Gina Heuff at her local coffee shop to assess the best combination of factors for producing a recurrence of the meltdown mob phenomenon. Unsurprisingly, Congressman Woburn turned out to be their best shot at energizing the progressives in any crowd, even if many Democrats thought he was dangerously extreme. Identifying his most effective foil, however, was not such an easy matter. After all, they were not so much interested in a good outcome as they were an unstable proxy fight.
"Here's your double-tall," he said, setting it on the small table. "So who's in the mix?"
She told him that she had narrowed the field to three contenders, none of whom was scheduled to have a public face-off with the congressman in the foreseeable future. As she ticked each one off, she laid a photo on the table. The first, Congressman Ian Corbham, was the unrepentantly vociferous defender of the shadowy religious power fraternity that had shut Woburn out of his first run for office. It was a good match, but it was also far too likely to turn into a personal fight, rather than a proxy one, and that would defeat the purpose. The second was Francine Chen, the CEO of the largest payday loan company in the state, a corporate cheerleader who had become the public face of the industry that Woburn had staked his career on controlling. And the third, Matthew Fields, was a former clergyman who had left the church in disgrace, only to forge a publishing empire that catered to the same deviant interests that had gotten him sacked in the first place.
"Okay," he said after draining the last of his mocha, "if those are our best bets, how can we instigate a face-off between Woburn and one of them? The wingnuts at that private prison have been leaning on Corwin Farragut pretty hard since I took up his case, and unfortunately, there's nothing we can do to stop it. They've been shielded from prosecution and oversight, and believe me, they'll do anything short of actually killing him to protect their butt."
While Katzmarek kept in touch with Farragut by phone, they spent the next few weeks working the fringes like a pair of sheepdogs on a mission. His time was doubly limited, because there were other cases he was putting off in order to force the issue on this one, and because there was just so much abuse Farragut could take before he'd confess to whatever else they wanted to charge him with.
Finally, they caught a lucky break. Whether it had been good or bad luck remained to be seen, because the proxy match they'd cajoled into being was with Ian Corbham.
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