I have always had a deep fascination of how man faces death. This story was written with an attempt to look at the powerful emotions of a man dealing with his impending violent death.           It was written in February 2001. Copyright 2001 by Benjamin Boulden

          He couldn’t smell the place anymore. His nose had grown accustomed to the odor of urine, and he just shrugged when the man sitting across the table mentioned the stench.
          "I don’t know how you stand the smell." He was a tall man wearing a three-piece suit, a pocket watch sheltered in the vest pocket. He wasn’t old, but he wasn’t a young man either. There was gray at his temples, but his hair was thick and well groomed. He wore wire-rimmed glasses and a Rolex.
          "I don’t notice it anymore." This was Harry Deveroux. He looked around the concrete room, sniffled and wiped his nose with his middle finger.
          "You’ve been here for twelve years?" The man with the Rolex had an expensive ballpoint pen in his right hand, and a large yellow notepad sprawled open on the table. "How did you survive this place Mr. Deveroux?"
          "Call me Harry." His voice was soft, women had once told him it was lyrical, beautiful, but now it was only soft.
          "Okay. Harry it is," the man agreed.
          "What can I call you?" Harry ran his thin fingers through his cropped gray hair.
          The man reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out a white business card and handed it to Harry. It read, "T. Markus Rutherford, Esq.," followed by a phone number and address in Belgium.
          "What does the ‘T’ stand for?" Harry asked.
          T. Markus Rutherford raised his eyebrows, cleared his throat and said, "Tucker." He gave a weak smile and continued, "My grandfather was employed by the late Preston Tucker. Mr. Tucker built cars in the 1950's, it was a long time ago, but I’m named for him . . . and the car he built." He chuckled. "I named my daughter Lincoln, but not after the car . . . but rather Abraham Lincoln."
          Harry smiled, spit on the floor and said, "What do you want with me?"
          T. Markus Rutherford leaned forward across the small wood and steel table, placed his hand on Harry’s. "To be with you." Rutherford cleared his throat uncomfortably. "It’s been a long time and a hard battle for us all, but now it’s over. We, I, think it best you’re not alone."
          "They sent you to keep me from crying?" Harry pulled his hand away. He leaned back on the rickety steel folding chair, a smile brimming on his face.
          "The Organization," the man grimaced and nearly choked on the word, "thought it best that you not die alone."
          "I won’t be alone. There’ll be the guards, an executioner, and, most likely, a few degenerate witnesses that get-off by watching a man die." Harry glared into the deep blue eyes of T. Markus Rutherford and demanded, "What ‘Organization’?"
          "I miss-spoke. Officially, I’m here representing the government of the United States, but . . ." He cleared his throat with a raspy cough.
          "Why are you here Mr. Rutherford?" Harry said. "You people, government types I mean, only care about me because The People care about me. If it hadn’t been for the popular movement, I would have been tried and imprisoned in the United States." Harry looked around the dingy interview room. "A UN jail! I never did a damn thing wrong, and where is my government? The same government that has sworn an oath to protect me?
          "I’ll tell you where they are, I imagine they are planning, even as we speak, who, or what the next target will be. You," he pointed at T. Markus Rutherford, "government-types aren’t interested in justice. The only thing that gets you hot and bothered is Power!"
          "No," said T. Markus Rutherford, "You’re wrong." He stretched his shoulders and looked at his watch.
          "How much longer?" Harry said.
          The man looked puzzled. A deep furrow of wrinkles creased his forehead.
          "How much time until . . . ." Harry trailed off.
          "Um . . . about an hour." He cleared his throat, dabbed his forehead with a white handkerchief, which he pulled from his suit pocket. "I’m here to talk. To write down what you say." He looked away from Harry. "Nothing more."
          "You’re older than you look," Harry said.
          "Yes, slightly." He grinned. "But only slightly."
          "You have business with the United Nations?" Harry leaned back into the steel chair. His eyes flickered between Rutherford and the heavy glass door behind him.
          "No. I was hired by a group of," he paused, trying to phrase his response, "of concerned Americans. They want to hear your story, and your reactions to death." He looked into Harry’s cold eyes. "That's why I’m here."
          "You must have connections if you’re here under the auspices of the United States government." A weak, knowing smile spread across Harry’s face.
          T. Markus Rutherford remained silent.
          A guard walked past the glass door of the interview room. His blue beret angled softly over his sharp buzz-cut blonde hair.
          "I’m the first," Harry said. "There will be more. Many more."
          T. Markus Rutherford nodded.
          "I thought I was okay. What I said. The First Amendment should have protected me, but . . ."
          The tick of the large round clock, mounted against the gray concrete wall, quietly moved time into the past.
          "You’re talking about the paper you wrote: An American Virtue. The article they arrested you for writing?" He waited for Harry to nod, and then opened a large black folder, which sat on the table next to his writing tablet. He flipped through a few typed pages and then read: "‘The most efficient erosion of our civil liberties will be at the hands of our own people. They will long for the security that an organization such as the United Nations will seem to afford. It will be then, and only then, that the American people will no longer be free.’"
          Harry smiled broadly.
          "It has become a very powerful document." Rutherford’s words were stilted and spoken in a hushed tone. "Very powerful indeed, to those who yearn for freedom."
          "You must be a powerful man to bring that document here, into this jail." Harry tapped the table with the knuckles of his left hand. The sound echoed tinny against the thick walls.
          "I have diplomatic credentials," replied T. Markus Rutherford. His meaning clear, the guards did not dare search his leather satchel.
          "You should be careful with trust like that Mr. Rutherford, or you’ll be in a place like this." Harry waved his left hand at the lonely, gray walls.
          T. Markus Rutherford nodded. Harry noticed a very slight tremor in his hands and a flash of red fear in his eyes.
          "You know they arrested me, not for the paragraph you read, but for other words of truth I wrote?" Harry spoke softly in a conspiratorial voice.
          "Yes." He turned the page of his notebook relieved at the turn of the conversation. "I’ve read the court documents. They convicted you for the phrase," he spoke these last words from memory, keeping his eyes on Harry. "‘The United Nations should be feared by the world as the great aggressor and usurper. There are those that wish to enslave mankind, and the United Nations is the tool they currently use."
          "I still like that paragraph," Harry smiled. "After all these years, and all the trouble it caused." A dim light shone in his eyes.
          It was, realized T. Markus Rutherford, the light of hope.
          "They told me if I retracted those words I could live." Harry looked at the bland gray table. "Stupid bastards! They thought I would trade my life for a lie. Their lie." He laughed, but it broke into a wheezing cough. "Not that I have much life left," he said when the coughing stopped.
          "They convicted you of inciting hate against the United Nations and the peoples of the World," T. Markus Rutherford said flatly.
           Harry smiled grimly. "A nice little law, no? They had the good grace to drop the blasphemy charge, at least."
          T. Markus Rutherford chuckled uncomfortably. "It seems if one publicly questions the current political trend one is extradited and punished by the International Criminal Court."
          Harry nodded. "I’m afraid I don’t see the humor."
          "No, of course not." T. Markus Rutherford fumbled with his papers awkwardly and then changed the subject. "Why did you request the firing squad?"
          "I want to be certain that each of the fools that came to watch me die, know that I was murdered." His face was pale with passion. The knuckles of his hands were white from the pressure they exerted against the table. "I don’t want their nightmares satisfied with an image of me falling asleep like a baby. They should see me in their nightmares, they should understand that they witnessed a violent murder another human. I want them to watch me die violently and see it in their nightmares every night when they sleep."
          The two men sat in silence; the clock ticked.
          A brisk rap on the door and two burly men with blue berets walked into the room and stationed themselves at either side of the steel-jammed entrance.
          A third man dressed in a cheap black suit followed. He surveyed the room with his gray eyes, stopped at T. Markus Rutherford and said, "Your time has passed, sir." He spoke in English, but the accent betrayed his Russian birth.
          "I was planning to stay," he glanced at Harry, "for the execution." Rutherford gave the Russian an icy look.
          "No. Go, please," Harry said.
          "You’re certain?" Rutherford’s voice was trill with disbelief. "I planned to stay."
          "I don’t want you there," Harry said. "I want to die alone . . . at least as alone as these," he looked at the Russian, "pigs will allow."
          Rutherford stood; looked at Harry, a silent tear broke on the corner of his eye. "It was a pleasure Mr. Deveroux." He held his hand to the seated man.
          Deveroux extended his own hand, the heavy chain that secured him to the concrete wall dragged across the table, and the two men clasped hands in farewell.
          "Yes. A Pleasure." Harry bowed his head slightly and Rutherford turned toward the door.
          "Wait!" Harry forced a jovial tone. "Tell my wife. Tell her I’m sorry."
          T. Markus Rutherford nodded in understanding.
          Harry Deveroux had not spoken, or had any correspondence with his wife since the day he was arrested.
          She had been there the day the men with blue berets came for him. They beat her within an inch of death. She never recovered. Her physical wounds scarred over and healed, but her mind was never the same.
          "Tell her I’m sorry." Harry cried the first tears since his arrest. "Please."
          T. Markus Rutherford nodded and walked out the door, the Russian helping him with a light push in the back.
          "I’ll be back for you," the Russian looked at the wall clock, sneered and said, "in ten minutes."

*          *          *

          "This evening at five o’clock Eastern Time, International Criminal Harold Deveroux, was put to death in Libya. His final word before he faced the firing squad was simple, yet eloquent. The word he muttered: Freedom. He is the first to be tried and punished under the International Criminal Court Treaty signed by then President Bill Clinton, nearly twenty years ago, in December 2000. In other news . . ."
          T. Markus Rutherford wistfully nursed a glass of gin and watched the blow-dried anchorman smile at the camera.
          The gentle Mediterranean breeze that tugged at the sheer curtain of his hotel window also blew across the compound of nearby Mommar Quaddafi Memorial International Prison were only a few hours earlier Harry Deveroux was shot to death.
          In a few more days it would be a new decade, its laws already in place.