The Falcon came out of the clouds and settled into a stratum of smoother air. Strauss slipped his glasses back on and looked down at the file open on the worktable in front of him: The United States v. Sheikh Abdullah Abdul-Razzaq. It had been given to him late the previous evening inside the White House by the president himself. Strauss had learned much by reading the government’s case against the Egyptian cleric, mainly that it had been a house of cards. In the hands of a good defense lawyer, it could have been toppled with the flick of a well-presented motion to dismiss. But the sheikh hadn’t had a good defense lawyer; instead he had enlisted the services of a grandstanding civil rights warrior from Manhattan who had walked straight into the prosecutor’s trap. If Lawrence Strauss had been the sheikh’s lawyer, the case would never have gone to trial. Abdullah would have pleaded down to a much less serious offense or, in all likelihood, walked out of the courtroom a free man.

But Lawrence Strauss didn’t take cases like Sheikh Abdullah’s. In fact, he rarely took cases at all. In Washington he was known as the lawyer no one knew but everyone wanted. He never spoke to the press, stayed clear of Washington cocktail parties, and the only time he had been inside a courtroom in the last twenty years was to testify against a man who assaulted him during an early-morning run through northwest Washington’s Battery Kemble Park. Strauss had never won a major trial, and no groundbreaking appeal bore his name. He operated in Washington’s shadows, where political connections and personal friendships counted for more than legal brilliance, and, unlike most of his brethren in the Washington legal community, he possessed the ability to cross political lines. His politics were the politics of pragmatism, his opinion so highly valued that he usually spent several weekends a year at Camp David, no matter which party was in power. Lawrence Strauss was a cutter of deals and a smoother of ruffled feathers, a conciliator and a crafter of compromises. He made problems and prosecutors go away. He believed trials were a roll of the dice, and Lawrence Strauss didn’t play games of chance—except for his Thursday-night poker game, which included the chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, two former attorneys general, and the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Last week he’d won big. He usually did.