Jay took a deep breath and tried to look unperturbed. “That’s simply a ‘he said, she said’ case, Sir William. You can’t base such a warrant on one man’s uncorroborated allegation, especially since we know nothing of this man Reynolds’s credibility.”
“Mr. Reinhart, I’m sorry you have had inadequate time to research this. Mr. Reynolds knew the orders he would receive from the President would be covered up and that the official line would be that the meeting never took place, and he knew his position was very perilous should anything go wrong. So he took a singular, if illegal and risky, precaution to preserve the record if he should be later accused of acting without authorization: he used a state-of-the-art electronic device to secretly videotape his meeting with the President. In other words, sir, we have the proof, and it’s in our possession and ready for the committal hearing.”
Jay sat down in confusion, trying not to look as stunned as he was. If there was a videotape, even one inadmissible in a U.S. court, the entire equation had changed.
But the John Harris he knew was incapable of approving such a thing! And even a videotape could be misinterpreted.
“Gentlemen, with your permission,” the judge began, “I should like to reclaim my humble court and issue my ruling now, which is as it was to begin with. I find this Interpol warrant to have met all the requirements necessary for granting it full faith and credit, and I am thus going to sign the provisional arrest warrant for the apprehension of one John B. Harris, formerly known as President of the United States, for the charge of multiple specified violations of the international Treaty Against Torture. The arrest may be effected at the earliest opportunity when Mr. Harris is found within the territorial jurisdiction of the United Kingdom. And I shall now call a ten-minute recess and try to recall why I took this magistrate appointment to begin with.”
The magistrate got to his feet as the assemblage stood and waited for him to disappear into his chambers. When he was gone, Stuart Campbell turned and laid a copy of his brief in front of Jay.
“I need a copy of that videotape,” Jay said, managing a reasonably normal voice.
“Well, that will take some time, of course, if we’re willing to release it at all at this stage. I shall make that determination and let you know. Where are you staying? If we release it, I’ll see it’s delivered to you.”
“I need the tape today.”
Stuart Campbell turned to one of the solicitors who had accompanied him. “Can we even physically provide the tape today, James, should we decide to?”
“Maybe,” the man answered.
Campbell turned back to Jay. “Provided I agree you should have it, and I make no guarantees about that, I shall honestly do my best to get it to you rapidly, Mr. Reinhart.”
“You realize it’s probably inadmissible as evidence?”
“A major point for us to argue, eh?” Campbell replied. “That depends entirely on where Harris is tried, doesn’t it?”
“This isn’t over,” Jay said.
“Indeed, it is not,” Campbell said, shaking his head without smiling. He sighed and continued. “Please understand, Mr. Reinhart, I do admire your client, but even titans must answer to the law. We began moving in the direction of that little tradition nine hundred years ago with the Magna Carta and the legal restraints it placed on the original King John, if you recall. Eliminating sovereign immunity under this treaty is a great fulfillment of the rule of law, and I have no intention of breaking nine hundred years of progress by making an exception for your King John.”
THIRTY
Aboard EuroAir 1010, Sigonella Naval Air Station,
Sicily—Tuesday—5:15 P.M.
Alastair finished the read-back of the air traffic control clearance and turned to Craig with a smile as he made a zooming gesture with his left hand and punched his transmitter button.
“Sigonella tower, Ten-Ten would like immediate takeoff clearance.”
“Damn right!” Craig echoed. “Let’s get the flock out of here.”
“Roger, Ten-Ten,” the young Navy controller in the tower replied. “You’re cleared immediate takeoff . . . ah, stand by, sir.”
Alastair turned his eyes toward the tower. “Say again, tower?”
Craig had begun rolling forward, but he braked now, stopping the jet short of the white “hold line,” which stood as a visual barrier to the runway beyond.
“What’s going on?” Craig asked.
“I don’t know . . .” Alastair began, following Craig’s gaze to the right. There were lights moving over the runway surface at the far end, more than five thousand feet distant.
“Cars?” Alastair asked.
Craig nodded. “I guess.”
The tower operator’s voice boomed in their ears, betraying surprise. “Ten-Ten, we, ah, have unauthorized vehicles entering the runway. Hold your position.”
Craig’s left index finger found the transmit button on his control yoke. “What do you mean, tower? What vehicles?”
“We’re unsure, Ten-Ten. They came through a back gate or something. Stand by.”
Headlights were aligning themselves with the reciprocal runway heading and racing toward their position. Two, three, and four more cars fell into formation behind and both pilots could now see red and blue rotating beacons flashing urgently on the top of each car.
“Craig, in the vernacular, ‘Oh shit!’ ”
“Roger on the ‘Oh shit,’ ” Craig replied, glancing at Alastair. “Get him to give us a blanket takeoff clearance.”
Alastair nodded and punched the transmit button simultaneously. “We’ll take the responsibility, tower, but give us a clearance to take off when we can do so safely.”
There was silence for twenty seconds before the tower operator’s voice returned with a defiant tone. “Roger, Ten-Ten, you’re cleared to takeoff at pilot’s discretion and at your own risk. Caution for men and equipment on the runway, and none of them is under the control of the tower.
“Get Captain Swanson on the phone!” Craig ordered, turning to Alastair. “You have the number?”
“Yes.” Alastair yanked a piece of paper from his pocket with one hand while pulling the satellite phone from its cradle with the other. He punched in the digits and waited as they watched the official cars stop one by one in the middle of the runway at two-thousand-foot intervals, effectively making a takeoff attempt suicidal.
Seconds ticked by like minutes as Alastair waited for the Navy commander to answer his GSM phone.
“Captain Swanson? Alastair Chadwick. We’ve got a problem out here.” He quickly explained the dilemma, then turned to Craig.
“He says he just found out. It’s the Carabinieri. They just came barreling onto the field. He says they smashed through a back gate.”
Alastair turned back to the phone. “Yes, sir?” He listened, nodding at intervals. “I understand. We’ll hold on.”
“What?” Craig asked.
“He’s trying to call Rome and find out what’s happening. He says his orders haven’t changed.”
The car closest to the 737 began moving toward them again, accelerating toward the head of the runway, where it turned off and stopped, the headlights pointed at the cockpit. Craig could see the doors of the police car open and several men get out, each of them carrying what appeared to be automatic weapons.
Office of the Foreign Minister, Rome, Italy
Deputy Foreign Minister Rufolo Rossini had been on his way home when summoned. He raced to his boss’s office to be confronted by the white-hot anger of a blind-sided bureaucrat.
“He misunderstood, Giuseppe!”
Giuseppe Anselmo’s secretary physically leaned around the corner and flagged his attention.
“Sir, I think you should talk to Captain Swanson at Sigonella.”
Anselmo turned with a finger in the air to rebuke her for the interruption, then thought better of it.
“Why?”
“The Carabinieri are overrunning his base.”
�
��The . . . what?”
She motioned to the phone and Anselmo launched himself at the instrument as he pointed Rossini to a chair. “Is this your work, too?”
Rossini had turned chalky-white and was having trouble getting a complete sentence out. “I . . . ah . . . don’t know how . . .”
Anselmo motioned him into a chair disgustedly as he yanked up the receiver and listened to Swanson’s complaint.
“I want you to stand by on this line, Captain. This is not being done on our orders. In fact, I just ordered Air Traffic Control to let them depart.”
He replaced the receiver and bellowed around the corner for his secretary to get a connection with the Carabinieri commander nearest to the leased Navy base, then turned his full fury on Rossini.
“What, exactly, did you say to them?”
“You mean the . . .”
“You know exactly what I mean! Why are they overrunning an American base?”
“All I said was that we . . . appreciated their help, and were still trying to find a way to detain Mr. Harris and his plane.”
“Wonderful! You said this to a Sicilian commander?”
“Yes.”
“A Sicilian commander who was left red-faced yesterday when told to leave that base? Are you insane?”
The phone rang and Anselmo scooped up the receiver with his right hand in a rapid, fluid arc which ended at his face.
“Is this the commandant? Good. This is the foreign minister of Italy. Listen very, very closely!”
Aboard EuroAir 1010, Sigonella Naval Air Station, Sicily
Four armed men wearing uniforms of some sort had arrayed themselves in front of EuroAir 1010, one of them making a lateral gesture across his throat and pointing to each wing.
“He wants us to shut down,” Alastair translated.
“Like hell I’ll shut down!” Craig replied.
“Right. He’s waving an Uzi.”
“Let him wave it. I’m not shutting down.”
Alastair pressed the satellite phone to his ear, waiting for some sign that Captain Swanson had returned to the line.
“Alastair, check the runway diagram. Taxiway Bravo, the next one down. How much runway available from there?”
“Enough,” Alastair answered.
Craig’s left hand hauled the nosewheel steering tiller to the right immediately as he goosed the throttles and sent the four men ahead scrambling backwards. The 737 turned sharply right and reversed course as he guided the nosewheel back to neutral and then left to head back down the taxiway as if they were returning to the ramp. Craig glanced over his left shoulder, straining to see the reaction.
“No shooting, then?” Alastair asked evenly.
“No . . . no, they’re standing there looking stunned.”
“Craig, they still have three cars on the runway.”
“You’ve heard of the good old American game of ‘chicken’ haven’t you?”
“Dear me, you’re not serious?”
“Am I serious?”
“Never mind!” Alastair said quickly. “Stupid question.”
Craig let the 737 accelerate to thirty knots before braking and turning sharply left onto the second runway entrance. He barreled to the middle of the runway and turned right, aligning the nose of the jetliner with the runway heading. The roof lights of three police cars flashed defiantly in their faces at intervals down the concrete ribbon.
Craig advanced the throttles while holding the brakes, bringing the engines up to full power, the 737 straining and lurching against the locked friction of the tires barely holding the runway surface.
“Flash the landing lights three times, then tell the tower we’re rolling.”
Alastair complied as Craig released the brakes smoothly, feeling the craft leap forward.
In the landing lights, he could see the first car several thousand feet ahead as it sat in the middle of the tarmac pointing toward the moving jet. There were no doors open.
“They’re still there,” Alastair said. “Thirty knots.”
“They’ll move.”
“Fifty, sixty . . . a thousand feet away from him.”
“I know it.”
Suddenly the car ahead jumped into motion and careened off to the right side of the runway, safely clearing the concrete before they rolled over the spot he had occupied.
“Eighty knots, Craig. Two cars to go.”
“Roger.”
The jet’s acceleration began to slow slightly as aerodynamic drag began working against the smooth passage of the aircraft, but the lights of the next car were steady in the middle of the runway surface two thousand feet ahead, and the onrushing Boeing was covering the distance at a far greater rate.
“Move, damn you!” Alastair said under his breath, as that squad car lurched into gear and moved sharply off the surface to the left.
“The last one’s going as well!” Alastair said, his voice almost gleeful. “Vee one, and rotate!”
Craig nursed the control yoke back, lifting the angle of attack of the wings until the lift exceeded the weight, and the powerful aircraft lifted clear of the runway surface heading west.
“Positive rate, gear up,” Craig ordered.
“Right you are, positive rate, and the bloody gear is coming up. Well done, mate! But how did you know they’d get out of our way?”
“This is Italy. If one of those guys let’s his car get smashed, he’d have to pay for it out of his own pocket. No way would they have left one on the runway.”
Bow Street
Magistrate Court, London, England
Jay Reinhart left the courtroom dazed and struggling to hide it. A dull ache in his middle was protesting his failure to eat or drink anything for hours. He tuned out the discomfort and turned on the rented GSM phone.
It rang almost immediately, with Sherry Lincoln on the other end.
“We just lifted off from Sigonella,” she told him, relating the ninety-minute takeoff delay and her call to the Italian foreign minister that had apparently shaken the air traffic clearance from Rome Control.
“I thought you might already be on approach to Heathrow,” Jay said, holding a finger in his other ear against the noise around him and mouthing the word “wait” to Nigel White and Geoffrey Wallace, who nodded and moved off to confer while he talked.
“No,” she replied, “it’ll be about an hour and forty-five, I’m told. What’s your situation?”
He relayed the result of the hearing, but omitted any mention of Stuart Campbell’s chilling revelation that a clandestine videotape existed that might implicate the President.
“So they issued the British warrant?” Sherry asked.
“Yes, and we can expect them to be at the plane with it when you get here.”
“And now it begins?”
He sighed. “I still see no reasonable alternative, Sherry, but . . . I think I should speak with the President.”
“Hold on. He’s sitting next to me.”
John Harris’s voice came on the line quickly, and Jay repeated the basics.
“Sir, there’s something I have to ask you.”
“Go ahead, Jay.”
“Does the name Barry Reynolds ring a bell?”
There was a very brief hesitation, and Jay imagined he heard a snort of disgust. “Of course. Reynolds was the CIA covert-operations man who set up the massacre in Peru that’s at the root of this problem. Why? Did his name come up in that courtroom today?”
This is an open line, Jay reminded himself. It could be monitored.
“Yes, it did, John. Stuart Campbell claims he has a clandestine videotape of Reynolds talking with you for thirty minutes in the Oval Office. . . . I can’t get to my notes right now, but the meeting allegedly took place around two weeks before the attack.”
“A what?”
“A tape. A videotape. Supposedly, he was wearing a small camera.”
“In the Oval Office?” John Harris almost roared the question into the phone.
; “Yes.”
“My Lord in heaven, Jay!”
Headwind (2001) Page 27