Counterplay

by Richard Aaron

  “Come on. Get lost, kid. I’ve got a job to do.”

  “No. My mommy needs you. Come with me. Please come with me,” repeated the little girl.

  “Maybe there’s some kind of an issue. Maybe we should get the cops? After all, this is downtown St. Louis and the kid seems to be by herself.”

  “You are the police,” said the little girl. “My mommy needs you.” She tugged more persistently on the security guard’s pants.

  “Freddie, something ain’t right here. She maybe thinks we’re the cops ’cause we’re in uniform and packin’. I’m going to call this in.” It took ten minutes for the police to arrive.

  “Okay, little lady,” said a large, overstuffed beat cop. “What seems to be the problem?”

  “My mommy needs you.”

  “Will you take us to her?” The little girl nodded. “Is it okay if I pick you up and carry you along, and you direct me?” The little girl nodded again. “You know, little lady, my name is Clarence. What’s yours?”

  “Tyra.”

  “Okay, Tyra, you direct the way. Show me and my partner here where your mommy is.”

  They traveled a surprising distance through alleyways in a rougher part of town. The two officers were having a hard time envisioning a five-year-old navigating these lanes on her own.

  “This way,” she said at length, pointing to a cracked stone porch and an ancient metal door beyond it. “In there.” On the other side of the door, at the base of a long, narrow stairway, was a wheelchair with bent wheels and a crumpled back . Beside it lay a young woman, in her late twenties, obviously dead.

  As more police and forensics were called, Clarence sat Tyra down on the stone landing outside the door. “Tyra, I know this isn’t easy, but tell me what happened here?”

  “Oh, easy. Daddy got mad at her and kicked her down the stairs.”

  “While she was in the wheelchair?”

  “Yes. Mommy could only move around in a wheelchair. She was in an accident and couldn’t move her legs.”

  “So your daddy kicked her down the stairs?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “She was being bad. The house was messed up. You can go upstairs and see.”

  “Where is your daddy?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The conversation went on for a while, with Constable Clarence recording it. There were no tears.

  “Hey, Tyra, wake up,” teased one of her aides, seeing a distant look in her eyes, a look that drifted across her face with regularity. Her mother had been a vicious disciplinarian and had deserved.

  Tyra waited for her head to clear. There had never been a father. “What, Penny?”

  “The deputy director of TTIC is available for questioning if you like, and Admiral Jackson can be made available again if you wish.”

  “Great.”

  “And we were given those GPS coordinates from the Islamabad embassy a while ago. We relayed them to the Karachi office of the Pakistan InterServices Intelligence agency, as you directed. We advised them that Kumar Hanaman was in the vehicle sending out that particular GPS signal.”

  “Oh, yes, the ISI. That’s great, Penny, you’re a dear. Don’t know what we’d do without you.” Tyra flashed a brilliant smile at her dedicated assistant.

  18

  Dana wheeled the ancient lawyer to the Law Courts restaurant, where they enjoyed a cup of coffee and a sandwich.

  “Dana, you’re in some rough water here. You’re kind of stumbling around and your client might actually be innocent.”

  Dana was feeling overwhelmed. First Lord Deathrot had made an appearance, and now, on the same day, a living legend was actually having a cup of coffee with her. She did not know what to say.

  “Feeling a bit outgunned, are you?”

  “Yes, maybe a little bit.”

  Penn-Garrett chuckled. “A little bit, huh? Sheff and Archambault are the best. Those other two guys don’t seem to be too bad either, although they should be backhanded for being such rude twits.”

  Dana had to admit to the obvious. “Okay. A lot outgunned.”

  “Those guys at Blankstein deFijter have all been cited by the Law Society. Disgraceful behavior. Just disgraceful. They’ve done that for years. Bill the hell out of a file and down tools when the money’s gone. DeFijter especially needs to have his arrogant ass kicked.”

  Dana mumbled and nodded some more.

  “The prosecutors have left themselves wide open, you know,” continued the octogenarian.

  Dana studied the man across from her. Short, wide, wrinkled, with white hair that desperately needed a trim. And those famous grey eyes. “Judgeeyes,” lawyers called them.

  “How so, sir?”

  “Okay, kid. Here’s how we’re going to get those guys.” He leaned forward conspiratorially. They spoke for half an hour. Dana was amazed. PennGarrett was rattling off the names of cases, along with citations. Nobody remembers cites, but Penn-Garrett did. He referred to sections and subsections of the Rules of Court, and the latest legal interpretations.

  When they were done, Dana’s head was swimming. She had started writing case names, cites, principles, and rules on a coffee napkin, which quickly turned into two napkins. She had half a dozen napkins covered with hieroglyphics, both sides. She was concerned that she would not be able to read her own handwriting, but she managed. By the time they were done, Dana was smiling more than the Sage of Smithe Street.

  19

  Twenty-four hours had passed since the Inzar Ghar breakout. When they had heard the sirens, they ditched the truck for another vehicle, and then another. Police cars had whizzed by in both directions as Kumar and Zak crouched below window level, so only Richard was visible. They ended up driving a two-year-old Volvo.

  Richard, Zak, and Kumar headed into the fertile southern farmlands, sticking to the back roads. Both of them had grown up in the embassy compound in Islamabad and were not strangers to the back roads and trails and languages of the region. Zak and Richard had spent years exploring the country with their parents, from the magnificent Himalayas in the north to the vast river delta around Hyderabad and Karachi. They monitored as much of the media as they could, but there did not appear to be a manhunt for them. There were no advisories or notices, no apparent search parties or helicopters flying lazy eights. Not yet, anyway.

  “Do you think maybe we’re in the clear?” Richard asked. “It’s been quiet for a day.”

  “Rich, you are truly dumber than a bag of hammers. Think about the question for a minute. Yousseff orchestrates the mother of all terrorist attacks. He uses incredible technology to achieve this. The guy who put this together is sitting in the back seat here. Yousseff makes billions by playing the markets. He uses that money to buy a country, cheap. Like on sale, you know, like at the five-and-dime. Then he brings in American technology and know-how to harness the incredible wealth of Afghanistan. So he can make many billions more. And for some reason we foot soldiers don’t get that the big boys in DC are with him. Are you following this picture?”

  “Sure, Zak. Do you have to preach a sermon about it every time you try and make a point?”

  “Yeah, I do bro, because you are not getting the point. Yousseff will stop at nothing to kill us. Kumar specifically. You and me because we just plain piss him off. That means that DC will do the same. That means what are we going to do with Kumar? Have you figured that out?”

  Richard bit his tongue. Zak had been darker, angrier, since his return from Afghanistan. He had been a brilliant agent, but the events that led to the unearthing of the terrorist plans for the stolen Semtex had also led to Zak’s cover being blown and a vicious incarceration in Inzar Ghar before Kumar had been imprisoned there. Hamani, in some sort of medical experiment, had removed several of Zak’s toes, and his left forearm, all without anesthetic. The replacement arm that the CIA had given him was a spectacular piece of technology, containing an experimental neuron/silicon interface and some intriguing weaponry in a
ddition to the technology that had enabled Turbee to connect the TTIC supercomputers to the Inzar Ghar security system. It was all razzle-dazzle, but Zak was not the same. He had developed a reckless, sarcastic streak. He tempted death unnecessarily, a poor risk in a deadly game.

  “I think I can answer some of the question for you, Zak,” said Kumar from the back seat.

  “Holy cow,” said Richard. “He speaks.”

  “Okay, Kumar,” said Zak. “We’re listening.”

  “Yousseff will have learned of my departure within minutes of my leaving Inzar Ghar,” Kumar began. “I have known him for thirty years, and unlike most people like him, he has a small sliver of a conscience. He could kill 20,000 Americans because he calculated that it would help 20 million Afghans. Yousseff never had a problem with that kind of calculus. But he didn’t want to kill me because we had been friends, close friends for such a long time. Now that I am no longer under his control, he will not stop until I’m dead. He will make it impossible for the Americans not to do the same. We cannot cross any American border, and we cannot walk into any

  American military base or embassy. We are fugitives.” “How safe are we in Pakistan?” Richard asked.

  “You are not. Most of his heroin travels through Pakistan. He has had the city police forces in Rawalpindi, Karachi, and Hyderabad paid off for years. He has connections high up in the ISI and even in the Pakistan military. He views bribes as a form of tax—a necessity in doing business of any kind, especially running drugs.”

  “You’d kind of expect that out of places like Pakistan,” said Zak.

  “Zak,” Kumar replied, “it is no different in the USA, or in Europe or Russia. It’s also an easy way to get rid of spare cash, and he has hundreds of millions of dollars lying around.”

  “Just lying around,” Zak repeated. “A lot of it at Inzar Ghar, by the way.”

  “The reason that I say this,” Kumar continued, “is that within minutes of my escape from there he would also have let all of the security agencies in Pakistan know. He would have told them that I am a dangerous drug dealer, and probably has already circulated my picture. Probably yours, too. If you think the local police and military are not looking for us, you are naïve.”

  They were silent for a few minutes. “You know, Zak,” said Richard, “we need to get to the harbor. We need to get to Karachi Dry Dock and Engineering.”

  This company, often referred to as KDDE, was founded by Yousseff and Kumar thirty years earlier as a small dry dock and engineering company on Karachi Harbor. Yousseff and Kumar had used KDDE to build ever more sophisticated submarines that they used in their drug smuggling enterprise. KDDE had developed the technology and the miniature submarines that were used in the Colorado River attack.

  “Why there?”

  “Plenty of ships to get on. And it’s Kumar’s home turf. You know the people there, Kumar. You can get us onto a ship or one of those fancy minisubmarines, can’t you?”

  Kumar nodded. “Possibly.” The conversation continued along this vein, and neither Richard nor Zak noticed that several late-model cars had hemmed them in.

  “Goddamit, Zak, we’re boxed,” Richard yelled. They had been so engrossed in conversation that they hadn’t noticed there was an unmarked police cruiser in front of them, one directly behind, and one in the lane to their left. They were being forcibly slowed.

  “Richard, the cop car beside us. Guy’s got an RPG launcher. Both rear windows are down. They wouldn’t be crazy enough to—”

  “Zak they are . . . .” The fingers of the gunman were slowly beginning to squeeze the trigger of the launcher. “They’re going to lob an RPG in here!”

  20

  The commotion began with a sharp rap on the door. Dana answered it.

  “Yo, Little Puppy.” It was the ever-annoying McGhee.

  “Yeah, funny. What do you want, McGhee?”

  “You live in a dump,” he said, looking around the small suite. “But it’s not about what I want. It’s about what you want.” “Huh?”

  “You asked Judge Mordecai for documents between TTIC and the RCMP. Well, here they are.” He stepped back and hollered to his partner. “Danson, start bringing ’em down here.”

  A few seconds later Danson showed up, almost falling, carrying three banker’s boxes of documents. “Where d’ya want them, Dana?” Bam-Bam delivered a throaty growl. Had Danson understood the faintest thing about dogs, he would have been more wary.

  Dana pointed silently to a bare wall along one side of the little kitchenette. “There would be good, I guess,” she mumbled. Danson followed with another two, then McGhee with more, until forty-eight boxes were stacked. McGhee brought in the final box and attempted to slide it, curling style, toward the others. He misjudged some (or perhaps it was planned) and the box, dropped from too high a height, hit the floor and cracked open, spilling hundreds of documents onto the kitchen floor.

  “Sorry, kid,” Danson said, watching the papers slide from one end of the kitchen to the other. “Anyway, see you in court Tuesday.” Judge Mordecai had given them Monday off so Dana would have an extra day to review the documents. With more chuckles and laughter, the two turned around to leave. Bam-Bam lost it. He stood up and placed his huge front paws on Danson’s shoulders. His lugubrious face was inches from Danson’s. With a low bark, Bam-Bam pushed Danson forward, causing him to tumble to the floor. Bam-Bam stopped and looked at Dana. Dana knew that if she gave a thumbs-down, Danson would shortly be coding at the nearest trauma unit.

  Danson, not appreciating his perilous situation, snarled like a cornered little dog. “That was deliberate, you bitch. Mordecai will hear of this on Tuesday morning.”

  “Sorry, Mr. Danson,” Dana snapped. “You came here with disrespect. Bam-Bam does not like that. You come at me and you’re liable to lose an arm or leg. Now get out of my house.”

  They did, and she gave Bam-Bam a large hug, and then an even larger bone. “Thank you, puppy, for helping me out.” She knew, just absolutely knew, that the Saint Bernard understood her.

  Dana was as close to tears as she had ever been. She sat, despondent and helpless, facing a stack of forty-nine bankers boxes, totally crammed with documents. Each box must have contained at least a thousand pages, double sided. Chris was sitting beside her, sharing her angst. An equally distressed Bam-Bam lay on the floor, head resting on his forepaws, trying to sort out how he could help. Chris had repackaged the documents in the split box, and added it to the pile.

  “How am I going to read and organize that? In three days?”

  “You’re a fast reader, hon. And you’re not afraid of long hours,” Chris said, trying to sound encouraging. “You climb a mountain one step at a time.”

  “It’s not the reading of them. I have to add them to my database. They all need to be summarized. Scanned. Indexed. Reviewed for issue relevance. Dates need to be figured out. I can go fast, ten minutes a document, so if I worked twenty-four hours a day, I’d have it finished by sometime next year.”

  They both sat on the floor along the opposite wall, looking at the mountain. “Damn, I should’ve picked medical school,” said Dana for the twentieth time. Chris nodded but did not respond. The three sat, depressed and despairing.

  “What about those weird emails that you’ve been getting, Dana? From this Lord Deathrot—this Turbee person. If he is who he says he is, he might be able to help.”

  “Nothing to lose, I guess. I spoke to him yesterday. I’ll Skype him.” She clicked on an icon on her screen and, within seconds, a cryptic interface appeared showing the little Trojan warrior, all helmet and feet, with “Lord Shatterer of Deathrot” blinking on and off below it. The graphic faded, and an image of Turbee coalesced on the screen. He had dirty blond hair, thick glasses, and sprinkles of beard popping out here and there. He was wearing a shirt bearing a large, obtrusive coffee stain.

  “Hi, Dana. This is me, Hamilton Turbee. What do you need?”

  “I don’t know if you can help. But t
hose prosecutors just dropped a hundred thousand documents on me, and I can’t possibly enter them into my database in the next three days. Could you help?”

  “I might be able to. Do you have a high-power industrial scanner?”

  Dana paused. “There are a couple at Blankstein deFijter. We could use those.”

  “You database all your documents, don’t you?” Turbee asked.

  “Yes, I do. It’s the one advantage I think I have over the other guys. I can find and retrieve information much faster than they can.”

  “And in addition to the database, you have search software?”

  “Yes I do. It indexes everything and goes through the database with blinding speed.”

  “Okay, Dana. Your problem is really simple. All you need to do is add a hundred thousand pages to your database.”

  “You don’t say, Turbee. That’s all I need to do. Simple little exercise.”

  “Actually, Dana, it is a simple exercise. It’s just that there are a lot of pages. Or at least you think there are.”

  “Well, Mr. Smarty-Pants, what do you think?”

  “Dana, this is what TTIC was designed to do. We add thousands of databases to our indexing system every day. If there is a new store chain opening up in Indonesia, and they process sales centrally in any way, we have it.”

  “Oh. Big Brother. Wow.”

  “I don’t think we’re related, but thanks for the compliment. Anyway, the AI algorithms, the technology for doing all of this, was engineered by large teams of software and even hardware engineers, but George designed a lot of the hardware, and I designed a lot of the software. I can index this for you. In fact, it’s probably easier because we already have, like, petabytes of info on the Colorado River attack. Our search engines are AI driven and the software will likely recognize all of the specific nouns in your forty-nine boxes.”

  It never occurred to Turbee that to share government resources of this nature, in this fashion, would have earned most people a lifetime ticket in Fort Leavenworth, but his mind didn’t work that way.