Speaking In Tongues by Jeffery Deaver

Author:Jeffery Deaver [Deaver, Jeffery]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: thriller

16

Rhetoric, Plato wrote, is the universal art of winning the mind by argument.

Tate Collier, at eleven years of age, listened to the Judge recite that definition as the old man rasped a match to light his fragrant pipe and decided that one day he would “do rhetoric.”

Whatever that meant.

He had to wait three years for the chance but finally, as a high school freshman, he argued (what else?) his way into Debate Club, even though it was open only to upperclassmen.

Tournament debating started in colonial America with the Spy Club at Harvard in the early 1700s and opened up to women a hundred years later with the Young Lathes Association at Oberlin, though hundreds of less formal societies, lyceums and bees had always been popular throughout the colonies. By the time Tate was in school, intercollegiate debate had become a practiced institution.

He argued in hundreds of National Debate Tournament bouts as well as the alternative-format-Cross Examination Debate Association-tournaments. He was a member of the forensic honorary fraternities-Delta Sigma Rho, Phi Rho Pi and Pi Kappa Delta-and was now as active in the American Forensics Association as he was in the American Bar Association.

In college-when it was fashionable to be antimilitary, antifrat, anti-ROTC-Tate shunned bell-bottoms and lie-dye for suits with narrow lies and white shirts, There he honed his technique, his logic, his reasoning. If…then…Major premise, minor premise, conclusion. Knocking down straw men, circular logic and ad hominem tactics by his opponents. He fought debaters from Georgetown and George Washington, from Duke and North Carolina and Penn and Johns Hopkins, and he beat them all.

With this talent (and, of course, with the Judge for a grandfather) law school was inevitable. At UVA he’d been the state moot court champion his senior year at the Federal Bar Moot Court Open in the District. Now he frequently taught well-attended appellate advocate continuing-ed courses, and his American Trial Lawyers’ Association tape was a best-seller in the ABA catalogue.

When he’d been a senior at UVA and the champion debater on campus the Judge had traveled down to Charlottesville to see him. As predicted, he’d won the debate (it was the infamous pro-Watergate contest). The Judge told him that he’d heard someone in the audience say, “How’s that Collier boy do it? He looks like a farm boy but when he starts to talk he’s somebody else. It’s like he’s speaking in tongues.”

No, there was no one Tate Collier would not match words with. Yet the incident with Sharpe had left him unnerved. He’d let emotions dictate what he’d said. What was happening to him? He was losing his orator’s touch.

“I blew it,” he muttered. And told Bell what had happened.

“Did he have anything to do with it?”

“I think he did, yeah. He was slick, too slick, He was expecting me. But he was also surprised about something.”

“What?”

“I think something happened he hadn’t planned on. It’s true. I don’t think his boys would kidnap Megan themselves, But I think they hired somebody to do it. Oh, and he knew we were divorced and that Megan was seventeen.

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