The Helford Trials (Helford #3)

Chapter Two

At first, I thought it was pointless to have a trial for Shawn Masterson.

His guilt was evident. He didn’t try to hide that he had committed several horrible international crimes, and he must have killed over a hundred people just documented in hits by Helford Academy and the company upstairs. No one sitting in the courtroom doubted that he did all of those things, that he had killed all of those people. My father told me to calm down, that it was nothing but a technicality, but I still sat in my seat with my hands gripping the sides of my chairs, straining against the knuckles. It took all of my self-control not to stand up and scream and curse everything about Shawn Masterson’s life and name and legacy. But he still had supporters. He still had his mindless drones. I couldn’t step out of line if I didn’t want to walk straight into a spray of gunfire.

So I heeded my father’s warning, and I said nothing at all.

I let the evidence speak for me.

The trials were being prosecuted in a fashion of almost a disciplinary hearing, where a half dozen judges all sat around a crescent table and listened to the evidence and came together to judge whether someone was guilty, not guilty, or pardoned. The judges were part of a committee, this one something about American spy acts on and off US soil, but, to me, it didn’t matter who they were with. The CIA was left scrambling with the reveal of their dirty little secret, and the US government, along with the partnership of many other powerful governments around the world, were scrambling to fix the problem to the best of their ability. They wanted someone to blame, someone to point the finger at. They were having these hearings everywhere, for everyone. Every name that was named was up for possible jail-time, and there wasn’t anywhere for them to hide. All of their secrets had been buried deep in the catacombs of Helford and the company upstairs, the CIA, and now it was all falling down around their ears. Everywhere was looking for spies in foxholes. Everyone everywhere was wondering who, exactly, was watching them.

And there were so many more operations than even Caitie’s. There were so many young spies being manipulated and abused around the world, and we were only just getting numbers in. Some of them had the ability to disappear into the backdrop, wearing faces that were not theirs, and they could disappear. They would more than likely not stand trial if they didn’t turn themselves in first. Them, I almost felt sorry for. But there was so much to be sad about, and it was only going to begin with Shawn’s trial.

They decided to try him in Washington D.C., probably as some warped sense of nationalism, for a whole world to be able to say, “Well, at least the capital took care of him”, as if his verdict would be different if he was tried in Baltimore or Bali. One of the many names being dropped in their worldwide scandal in the news stories was Shawn Masterson. No one was under the impression that he was innocent.

But he had to be proved guilty. They had to look at a list of crimes and know that yes, these are the ones he committed. He is responsible for them. He is the reason that these things happened.

Even the CIA wasn’t touching this trial. Shawn Masterson was their fatal error. Without him, Helford Academy and all of its operations would have moved on seamlessly and uncorrupted. It was Shawn that turned everything upside down.

But that didn’t mean that Shawn still didn’t have friends.

There was a company upstairs prosecutor sitting at a table in front of the committee, papers stacked neatly in front of him and a permanent self-satisfied smirk on his face. He looked like the kind of man that was malicious just for the hell of it, and I kept my eye on him for the entirety of the time, as if afraid he would go unstable right there in front of me. But this man, Calvin Milton, he was the thing that diplomatic nightmares were made out of. He didn’t fight with his fists—he fought with his ability to twist thinking, and to send entire empires crashing down with just a single word.