Counterplay Read online

  “Cross-examination, Ms. Wittenberg?”

  Slowly Dana stood up, feeling the weight of several hundred eyes watching her inside the courtroom, and a good million or two following the trial on TV. “You never did see my client, Leon Lestage, at Devil’s Anvil, did you?” she began, seeking to distance Leon as much as possible from the mine and the smuggling operations that took place there.

  “Thank you for reminding me,” said the corporal with a slight smile. “He was there a week earlier. Pulled a gun on my colleague Indy.”

  “But you only know that because that’s what Indy told you, isn’t that so?” Dana was trying to inject authority into her voice, but it wasn’t working all that well.

  “Yes, but he would never be untruthful about something like that.”

  “I object to the last answers, m’lord,” Dana said. “It’s all based on hearsay.”

  “Come on, Wittenberg. Are you going to object to your own questions now?” This produced outright guffaws from the prosecutors’ table.

  “No, sir. But it’s clearly based on hearsay.”

  “So it is. But you opened that door. Mr. Archambault did not. And when you open a door, Ms. Wittenberg, you take the risk as to what might be on the other side. Now carry on with your questioning, and if you go offside, I’m sure Mr. Archambault or Mr. McSheffrey will be more than happy to object.

  You don’t need to do that for them.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Dana, her ears again crimson, her voice shaky. The painful process went on for another hour, with Dana keeping a constant eye on the clock, willing it to hit 4:00 p.m., Judge Mordecai’s strictly enforced closing time. She had five minutes to go when she glanced down at her third computer, which she had just turned on. Instead of showing the opening screen of the Lexis database, it was displaying an unusual picture. A short black figure, wearing a Trojan helmet, with two eyes clearly visible and two feet protruding directly beneath the helmet. Beneath the Disney-like cartoon figure were the words, “Lord Shatterer of Deathrot.” The phrase was rapidly flashing on and off the screen.

  Great, thought Dana to herself. Now in addition to the horrors of the courtroom, a virus had invaded her computers. It was 3:56, and Dana had just lost her place in her notes. She was clueless as to the next question. She had already forgotten the last answer. She stood entranced, lost and speechless for a good minute, shuffling through papers before she became aware of the sound of Judge Mordecai’s fingers rapping on the bench.

  “Ms. Wittenberg, we have myself, twelve jurors, three alternates, four other counsel, four officers from the sheriff’s department, and the court clerk and the court reporter all waiting for your next question. Is one on the way?”

  “My lord, I see the time. Is it convenient to adjourn for the day?”

  “No it is not. You have three minutes of questions to ask. Don’t waste the court’s time.”

  What followed was three minutes of questioning on irrelevancies. How was the weather? What was the road to the mine like? Can you describe what Lestage was wearing? The screen on the out-of-control computer changed and was replaced with a suggested question: “Ask her about her dealings with the Terrorist Threat Integration Center.” This suggested question was positioned directly above the flashing “Lord Shatterer of Deathrot” chyron. Dana stared blankly at the screen, silent seconds slowly slipping by.

  “Ms. Wittenberg!” snapped the judge. “Stop wasting time or you’re in contempt. Now ask a normal, relevant, proper question.”

  Her mind emptied itself. Dana was transfixed by the flashing letters on her screen. “Have you had any dealings with Lord Shatterer of Deathrot?” “Pardon?” asked Corporal Gray.

  “What did she say? Lord what?” Sheff was asking Archambault, not even bothering to whisper.

  “Lord who?” asked the judge.

  “Lord Shatterer of Deathrot,” repeated Dana miserably.

  “Lord Shatterer. Of Deathrot?” repeated the judge, slowly emphasizing each syllable. “Have you lost your mind, Wittenberg? Are you trying to get a mistrial so you can avoid your obligation to defend Mr. Lestage? Is that the deFijter strategy?”

  “No, sir. It was a legitimate question. I just mis . . . misspoke.”

  “A what? A legitimate question? Lord Shatterbox of Rot, or whatever? I have been on this bench for twenty years and I have never heard anything that stupid.”

  “It’s four o’clock,” said the clerk, turning around and advising the court.

  “Nicely done, Wittenberg,” said a caustic Judge Mordecai. “You blew the last half hour off the clock. You need to learn that you come to court prepared, that you have your questions organized ahead of time, so that you don’t pull the nonsense you just did.”

  “Yes, my lord,” said Dana. Corporal Gray, from the stand, felt a little sorry for her. Leon, in the prisoner’s dock, was no longer so sure about Dana as his counsel. She seemed clueless; evidence was just rolling over her and she was delaying, fiddling, and reading a book on procedure while questioning a witness. And the Lord Deathrot question. The whole mistrial thing was becoming decidedly attractive. Maybe tomorrow he would see what he could do to mistrial the show and start fresh with someone else. This kid was going down.

  Dana bowed and slouched out of the courtroom with her text, some notes, and two of the computers. She hadn’t even made it to the barristers’ room before she heard McGhee’s voice drifting down the hall behind her.

  “Sheff, that last one was a screamer. Lord Death of Shatterrod? Or whatever? Wow, she needs to change pharmacists.”

  “Hey, you’re too hard on the Little Puppy,” she heard McSheffrey speaking in a voice just loud enough to carry down the hallway. “Two days have gone by, and she now knows what hearsay is. Sort of.”

  “And leading questions, Sheff,” came McGhee’s voice. “She figured that out, too.” The four of them howled with laughter as Dana walked as rapidly as she could to the women’s barristers’ room, quickly changed into her street clothes, and almost ran out of the courthouse toward the nearest SkyTrain station. At least there she would be a face in the crowd.

  Anonymity was not to be. On the train one of the passengers recognized her. The trial had made the evening news regularly, and Trial TV had sent up a team from Atlanta. Those with nothing better to do were watching the trial, which proved to be more entertaining by the hour.

  “Hey, you guys,” he said loudly. “It’s the lawyer, Puppy Little, from TV. Or was it Chicken Little? Or Shattered Puppy?”

  “Nah,” said his friend. “Try Lord Chickenrot of Death.”

  Again there were gales of laughter. Dana had nowhere to run and silently took the abuse, but when she arrived at her basement suite in Richmond, she literally fell through the doorway and into the arms of her fiancé.

  “I can’t do this, Chris. We’ve got another ten weeks of trial, and I can’t deal with the people. The judge is crazy, the prosecutors are brilliant, my client hates me, and I don’t know what I’m doing.” Her giant 185-pound Saint Bernard, Bam-Bam, put his paws on her shoulders and tried to lick her face.

  “Shush, babe,” said Chris, wiping her tears away. “There’s another part to this story. Everyone knows you’re just out of law school, and that you’ve got incredible courage to do this. The Law Society has called deFijter in for a ‘consultation.’ But you, Dana, you’re a hero. The jury—and I’ve been watching them on my smartphone at work—I think they like you. Nobody wants to see a bully stomp on someone. They’re on your side.”

  “My side?”

  “Yes, I think so. And if you do ten weeks of this trial, win or lose, you always win. You were the lady with enough jam to take on this incredibly difficult case, against four highly skilled prosecutors, and you’re not rolling over when the meanest judge in the litter is taking gratuitous shots at you. Come on. I’ve got a fresh salmon in the oven. Bought it off the docks at Granville Island two hours ago, and I’ve got your favorite white wine. Let’s unwind for a while. You’ve had
a stressful day.” That, and another big lick from Bam-Bam, and she began to settle down some.

  “What was that ‘Deathrot’ question about, though, hon?” asked Chris as he poured her a glass. “It didn’t quite seem to follow?”

  “I misspoke. You know how I can do that. Someone had hacked into my computer and the words were flashing on my screen and I just blurted them out. It was someone who knew about the trial and I think was trying to help.” “How so?” Chris asked.

  “This person seemed to know things about the case that I don’t.”

  “Well, relax. It was just a little glitch.” Little did either of them realize that much more Deathrot was on the way.

  11

  January 2006

  A high-ranking al-Qaeda militant had been captured and no amount of interrogation, no waterboarding, no boiling or burning by some surrogate outlaw state gave the US even so much as a grain of information. Tyra had been in the consulate where the latest round of interrogation had taken place. She had volunteered her services, and once the CIA had moved past the fact that she was a woman with no experience in this sort of thing, and she convinced them that being medically schooled was training enough, they gave her a shot.

  She asked for half an hour with the terrorist, alone. She was granted this. Thirty minutes later she came back with a list of seven key high-ranking terrorists together with their contact particulars. It turned out to be one of the greatest intelligence scoops of the al-Qaeda era, and became one of the incidents that propelled her through the ranks of the military and intelligence communities, and ultimately into the White House.

  Her success, however, had a dark side. A corporal was sent into the subbasement to clean up the mess Tyra had left behind. The militant was still alive, in a manner of speaking. The corporal stood, transfixed, wanting to scream, to run, but paralyzed by what he saw. He developed post-traumatic stress of such severity that he was unable to continue to serve his country. He was discharged from the military a few weeks later. He wandered around his home city of New York for eight months, falling into a life of alcohol and drugs before he committed suicide.

  The witness room was small, no more than ten feet square, buried deep within the Pentagon. The deputy director of intelligence, Admiral Jackson—in this case the interviewee—sat opposite Tyra Baylor, the interrogator. A court stenographer was transcribing the conversation, which was almost exclusively one-sided. CJ sat at one end of the table. Two uniformed Marines stood by the doorway of the windowless shoebox.

  Admiral Jackson had come up through the ranks from the Naval Academy, where he had graduated with distinction in the ’60, serving in various theaters of war: Vietnam, both Iraq wars, and various campaigns intercepting Somali pirates along the East African Coast. He’d earned a Purple Heart, a Navy Cross, and a Silver Star, to name but a few. When, at sixty, he announced his retirement from the Navy, several members of the cabinet, and ultimately the president himself, convinced him to accept the position of DDI, which had remained unfilled for two months. Now, at seventy-two years old, he had become the character and the conscience of the intelligence community.

  “Was there a comm-link set up that night, Admiral?” Tyra asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do you know about Yousseff Said al-Sabhan?”

  “Nothing.”

  “How do you regard the conspiracy theory that Yousseff Said al-Sabhan and Kumar Hanaman organized the Colorado attack?”

  “I have no view on it, ma’am.”

  So it went for an hour, with answers that gave nothing. Tyra Baylor gave it a shot. “You know, Admiral, I am here on the order of the commander-inchief. I have other ways of getting you to talk, you know.”

  The admiral looked directly at her. She was physically extremely attractive, in her mid-forties, and in immaculate physical condition. She had been given many gifts, but, unfortunately, she possessed neither empathy nor a moral compass. His eyes narrowed but otherwise he remained expressionless. “I heard.”

  “I will report your conduct back to the president, Admiral Jackson. We are dealing with an important national security matter and you, as DDI, are not cooperating. Don’t go far.” The admiral remained mute and the two stared at each other for a few seconds. There was an edge in the room. She flicked her fingers at him. “Dismissed,” she said, casually.

  12

  Michael Buckingham, the American ambassador to Pakistan, was momentarily lost in the aroma of a morning cup of coffee in his corner office at the main embassy complex in Islamabad. The door banged open and Jordan Sunlenew, the deputy ambassador, accompanied by two Marines, strode in with purpose.

  “Jordan, what the hell—” began the ambassador.

  “I’m sorry, Michael, but I’ve got instructions directly from brass at the State Department. You are under arrest.” The muscles of his face were scrunched together—he looked as though he was being forced to eat a lemon.

  “I’ve been ordered to take you back to DC.”

  “Lovely,” replied the ambassador, not completely surprised by the development. “Do I have time to pack?”

  “No, you don’t. There is a plane waiting for us at Benazir Bhutto International Airport and I have orders to take you there at once. But there is something more immediate. You know those two troublemakers, Richard Lawrence and Zak Goldberg, they were here recently, weren’t they?”

  “Yes, Jordan, they were. Earlier yesterday morning.”

  “They had a third fellow, a captive—Kumar Hanaman—with them, didn’t they?”

  The ambassador shrugged. He had nothing to hide. “Yes, they did. They had broken him out of some kind of mountain prison complex owned by an Afghan drug dealer.”

  “Where did they go?”

  “They didn’t tell me. They were in a hurry and were here for twenty minutes or less.”

  “How did they leave here?”

  “They took one of the embassy vehicles. A new Mercedes. I let them take it.”

  “It would be fully tricked out with GPS and all?” asked Jordan.

  “Come on, Jord, it was a brand-new Merc. The thing could probably drive itself.”

  “I will need the model and the serial number,” said Jordan. “Instructions from DC.”

  “Sure. Our internal business admin section can get that for you.”

  “Now, Michael, you know that this incident of blowing Kumar out of Inzar Ghar is not a Sunday drive. Richard and Zak had all kinds of backup. Nobody even knew Kumar was there, let alone where Inzar Ghar is, let alone how you engineer a jailbreak in a foreign jurisdiction without anyone knowing about it. Who in the intelligence community cobbled all of this together?”

  “I don’t think it’s any big secret, really,” replied the ambassador. “Richard and Zak worked for the Terrorist Threat Integration Center. I don’t know who the individual personalities were, but the lead agency in this was probably TTIC. Maybe it was Dan Alexander, the director there, or Liam Rhodes, his deputy, or Admiral Jackson, the DDI. But I honestly don’t know anything more than that.”

  Once the Mercedes’ ID information was provided, Jordan sent a text on his encrypted sat phone. The text was received nine time zones to the west, by Tyra Baylor’s phone. She smiled and called the Springfield, Virginia, headquarters of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. “We need to identify and locate a GPS transponder—from a new Mercedes, somewhere in Pakistan” were the instructions. She passed on the Mercedes’ serial number.

  She called the president next. “Matt, this is where we are,” she said. “Kumar is in a new Mercedes somewhere in Pakistan. We have the make, model, and serial number. The NGA is hunting for its transponder signal now. Once we have it, I will talk to the people at USCENTCOM. They have the capability to take it out, but it’s Pakistan and you know what they’re like. They get all uppity if we fire a missile in their airspace. Fort MacDill will need an executive order to proceed. Can you get one of the aides there to draft it up?”

 
; “Will do that. I will convey this to my chief of staff. You do your part, I’ll do mine. This Kumar problem should be solved within the hour.”

  Next Tyra called the Fort MacDill headquarters of USCENTCOM. It took mere seconds to be patched through to the general in charge of the entire central command. She explained the problem, and told him to stand by for an executive order.

  She stretched in the large Chevy Suburban that was taking her back to the White House from the Pentagon, where she had interviewed the admiral. Once she had stroked her way into the White House, she acquired and exercised God-like power, and loved it.

  It was less than half an hour after Jordan had spoken to Ambassador Buckingham that several highly stealth Predator MK-7 drones, flying at 60,000 feet in Pakistani airspace, changed course and began to fly lazy eights above the Indus River Valley corridor in central Pakistan. The drones were armed with Hellfire missiles.

  13

  “Where are we headed, Rich?” Zak asked.

  “Away from the embassy,” Richard replied. “If this was here a rogue operation, they’ll go to the embassy as ground zero and start searching in concentric circles from there.”

  “Good. Lovely. Who are ‘they’? Or does that sound too paranoid?”

  “Paranoia is good here. If we are running rogue, ‘they’ are probably the American government. Or military. Or the CIA, or some combination. Could also be the Pakistani security forces. They want Kumar dead. Kumar alive is an enormous threat. Yousseff has created a brilliant cover, and Kumar can totally destroy it.”

  “And that would mean, logically, that Yousseff’s people in Afghanistan want Kumar dead,” added Zak.

  “Much more than that. They know that we are in Pakistan. That means the Pakistani ISI is after us, which means the cops are after us, which means the CIA, the FBI, the—”