Bill of Wrongs by Molly Ivins

Author:Molly Ivins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9781588366580
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2009-01-22T00:00:00+00:00

Brandon Mayfield had been surprised when two FBI agents walked into his office on a May morning in 2004. There had been some warning, even if he and his wife, Mona, had misread it. While Mona and Brandon Mayfield were working at the law office, and the three kids were at school, odd things were happening in their house. They found blinds readjusted at the end of the day. Dead bolts the Mayfields never locked were locked when the family returned home in the evening. Footprints of odd shoes were all over the carpets, though the Mayfields don’t wear shoes in their house. Even school papers the children left at home were disturbed.

Brandon Mayfield called the local police, who turned up nothing. But the FBI was the last thing on his mind. There was no reason for anyone to investigate him. Yet federal agents had been in his house for weeks, planting wiretaps, downloading computer files, taking hundreds of photos. If the local police knew, they couldn’t share what they knew with Mayfield.

The sneak-and-peek provisions of the USA Patriot Act allow secret, delayed notification warrants to search homes, offices, and electronic files. FBI agents had been working the Mayfield home, even if they forgot that the sneak-and-peek provisions of the Patriot Act require agents to be sneaky. Mayfield still didn’t get it when the two agents walked into his office and told him they had some questions to ask him.

“If you have questions, put them in writing. I’ll review them and might get back to you,” he told the agents. Then he was frisked and handcuffed. At his first appearance in court, he told Judge Jones that the officers were kind enough (he vaguely knew one of them) to cuff his hands in front so the handcuffs wouldn’t be so visible when he walked out of his office. He told the two agents that if he were seen walking out of his office in handcuffs, his law practice would be destroyed. This story is going to get out, one agent said as he eased Mayfield into the Ford Explorer.

“The media is right behind us.”

“Brandon, think long and hard,” the man playing the bad cop said once they were in the Explorer. “You remember how the Muslim brothers stood up for Mike Hawash? Well, they are not going to be there for you.” Maher “Mike” Hawash was one of the Portland Seven, a hapless group of local jihadists who set out to join the Taliban, never made it to Afghanistan, yet all ended up serving long terms in federal prison.

Two months before Mayfield was picked up, a series of bombs on commuter trains in Madrid had killed two hundred people and injured two thousand more. The Spanish National Police had found latent fingerprints on a bag the terrorists had left behind. One of them was analyzed by the feds and determined to be Brandon Mayfield’s right index fingerprint, which had been on file since he was commissioned as an officer in the Army.

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