“Oh, and also email your existing database to me,” he added. “I need to know how you’ve structured it.”
“Sure, Turbee,” Dana replied. “We can load this stuff up into Chris’s van and take it downtown and scan the stuff in a few hours. Blankstein deFijter has cutting-edge scanners.”
“How fast are the scanners?”
“Fast. They gobble up ten pages a second. And there are a couple of them.
BDF does a lot of very complex commercial stuff and they do a lot of this.”
“That’s great,” said Turbee brightly. “Scan in everything and load it into the cloud. Here’s a file address. I think I can help you out.”
“What can you do?”
“Dana, you have no idea what we can do. We are powered by IBM experimental octa-core supercomputers. We have more computing power than virtually any other place on the planet. If you scan everything in and get it to me, we can create the indexes you need, and I can cobble together a little program that sorts things by date and adds it to your database. It will even number the pages for you. We use AI-based algorithms.”
“How long will that take?”
“Once I get your file and your existing database, maybe an hour or so.”
“What did you say? You can slide the documents into the database automatically, number them, identify them by author, by date, in an hour?”
“Most of them. There will be some documents without a date and of uncertain authorship, but even those we can estimate a date depending on context and content. There’s a heuristic aspect to the program.”
“What about issues. Can it sort by issue? By legal issue?”
“Should be able to do that. You must have a list of key words and key issues already going, right?”
“Sure I do, Turbee. I have a list of key things that I search for.” “Send me that list, Dana,” Turbee said.
“Can you do things like proximity searches? Stem searches? Fuzzy searches? All of those things?”
“Absolutely I can. Initially it will be a bit slow, but the whole system learns as it goes. We are deep in neural net coding here. And if I run stuck, I can enlist one of the machine learning systems at Stanford or U of Toronto, or the National Weather Service. We can grab virtually an infinite number of flops of processing power. It’s never been a problem. It’s pretty accurate.
How long will it take you to scan everything in?”
“Probably five or six hours,” Dana said, looking at the pile.
“That gives me enough time to put a program together. We can have everything indexed and into the database by this time tomorrow, easy.”
“No way,” Dana said. “That’s just flat-out impossible.”
“Not at TTIC, it’s not.”
Dana looked at Chris and mulled things over. She was missing a big piece of the picture. Turbee might be able to supply that.
“Okay,” she said, after a pause. “You guys are trying to keep the world safe from terrorists. I’m sure that’s a full-time job. Why are you involving yourself in this case?”
“It’s a long story,” Turbee sighed.
“Maybe, but I need to hear it. I’ve never met you, and I don’t know what’s going on. All I know is that I’m defending a monster conspiracy case, by myself, against four of the sharpest prosecutors I’ve ever seen. Weird things are happening in this case. Your involvement is truly strange. Before I take another step in this direction, Turbee, you had best tell me why you contacted me and now are agreeing to solve this document nightmare that I’ve got.”
“I guess you’re right,” Turbee said. “I will give you an explanation. It’s a little involved and this will take a few minutes.”
“Go ahead,” said Dana. “I’m all ears.”
Turbee tumbled into a somewhat disjointed description of the two schools of thought as to the perpetrators of the Colorado River attack and who he thought was responsible. He referred to the official view, which was delineated in the Calvin Jones report, and the conspiracy view, a view that Turbee shared with George—a view that was the subject of thousands of websites, many of which had been surreptitiously created by him and George—a view shared by a few hundred million others.
“Okay, Hamilton, or Turbee. That’s interesting, but how does that help me?”
“We think that your client is actually innocent,” Turbee responded. “He’s not a nice person, I’ll grant you that, but he probably didn’t know it was Semtex, as opposed to heroin, going through his mine at Devil’s Anvil. We have a pretty good idea who the conspirators were, and Lestage was not one of them.”
“But you are sticking your neck out a mile. You are using government resources for things that . . . you know, Turbee, I’m a lawyer. Are you sure you’re not going to get into trouble over this?”
“I might, Dana. You have to promise me not to tell anybody about this. I won’t, either. Then no one will ever know. But there is a dark side to a lot of this, Dana. For whatever reason, powerful people in Washington do not want this conspiracy stuff to come out. We at TTIC have been told that if we get further involved in this, we will get fired or jailed, or worse. The people behind this are powerful and dangerous. Because of that you need to promise me you will not tell a soul about my involvement. Do you promise?”
“I promise,” said Dana solemnly. “I will not betray you.”
“Good. Now Dana, the documents will help because I think I can show that there are holes in the documents you have been given.”
“What do you mean, holes?”
“Yes, Dana. Holes. Like if a couple of documents refer to a certain email and that email has not been produced. I can give you a printout of missing documents. And all the documents that refer to it. That should help you in court.”
“Well, Turbee, if you could actually do that, I owe you a glass of wine or something,” Dana said. “I’ll scan this to a file and email it to you.”
“I prefer root beer.”
“Okay, Turbee. Thank you. I really owe you. You’re a lifesaver.”
“It’s nothing,” said Turbee. “Nice talking to you.”
Chris and Dana looked at one another and mouthed the same word. “Root beer?”
The three of them went to work. Dana scanned in the pages; Chris made four trips in their small SUV to bring all the documents from their suite to Blankstein deFijter; Bam-Bam sat beside the scanners, a silent sentinel. They worked for the next five hours scanning the forty-nine boxes of information into her computer, and by 10:00 p.m. Dana sent the email.
By midnight they were done. “Let’s see what the IQ kid does with that stuff,” Dana said.
“Hopefully he can do what he says he can do. If he can’t, you’ll be taking a big risk in front of Judge Crab-Crank. You can’t use any of it if it’s not organized.”
“And it isn’t. I saw the way the documents ended up in the boxes. Everything was out of order, out of place and backwards. They did that deliberately. I know the tactic. A lot of big law firms are guilty of it. You know, give them wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow of irrelevant crap, making sure to take out the critical stuff. It’s a nonstop game. Or it sure is at Blankstein deFijter.”
“Isn’t that a little unethical?”
“It’s a lot unethical, but it goes on all the time. It wears you down, especially if there are four lawyers on the other side, and then just you.”
“Ah, but that’s the point, Dana. It’s no longer just you. You’ve got the IQ kid, and you’ve got that old guy in the wheelchair . . .”
“Lee Penn-Garrett.”
“Yeah, him.”
“He’s brilliant,” Dana said. “He’s lived his whole life in the law and now
that they’ve forced him off the bench, he’s just become a court junky. He’s the guy who got this documents thing going. He showed me what to do.”
“Yes,” Chris said. “And now you’ve got one of the most brilliant computer scientists on the planet helping you, and perhaps this whole TTIC outfit
as well. They obviously have their reasons, but look at what Turbee says he can do with the documents.”
“So what do you say we do now, Chris?”
“Thought you’d never ask. A hot tub, a glass of dry red, and off to bed.”
“Sounds grand. I was kind of thinking the same thing.”
Over the next three days, Dana had a blast doing nothing at all. Early morning walks around some of the quieter Surrey streets with Bam-Bam in tow, gardening, some household chores, and bonding time with Chris. Sunday at 4:00 p.m., Turbee got back to them. The email was interesting:
All the documents are in a database. Everything is indexed. They’re in the cloud. You should simply be able to paste them into the database you’ve already got. I used the same search and index program that you’ve been using. Now here’s the interesting part. Documents 1072, 14089, 32119, 76088 all refer to a letter dated Oct 1, 2017. That letter has not been produced. Documents 7659, 87884, 90121, and 10687 all refer to an email dated Oct 2, 2017. We have found thirty-seven such missing documents, with details set out below . . .
“Chris,” said Dana breathlessly. “This is like spun gold. This is manna.
You have no idea what this is going to do in court on Tuesday.” As the fates would have it, neither did she.
21
“Richard, Kumar, heads down!” Zak yelled as he saw the RPG launcher poke through the open rear window of the car to their immediate left. “Slide right down! Rich, all windows down!”
Richard reacted instinctively, a bolt of adrenaline blasting through his brain. He knew instantly what Zak was thinking, and the training of a Navy pilot never quite leaves, no matter how many years one travels. He had the instrumentation of the Volvo memorized, and before Zak could finish his sentence, all four windows dropped open. The ISI operative’s finger squeezed the trigger, with the weapon being aimed from the rear driver’s side window of the police car. The missile leapt from the front of the tube aimed at the rear passenger side Volvo window.
While a sledgehammer can of course kill a fly, sometimes disproportionate application of force can yield unanticipated consequences. The rookie ISI agent, in his youthful eagerness to follow the orders received from Karachi (“Kill them all, don’t bother with questions”), had earlier taken the Russianmade RPG-32 Nashshab out of the trunk of the police cruiser and found it just the correct length to use in these circumstances. He and the equally junior driver had, in fact, quarreled over which one would have the benefit of pulling the trigger in what promised to be a delightful exercise.
The thermobaric grenade screamed through the open passenger’s side window of the Volvo, through its interior, out the open rear driver’s side window, and into the ghost cruiser on the driver’s side of the Volvo. There it struck the passenger’s side window of the second police car, careened into the crusier’s interior, exploded, and instantly turned the cruiser into a mass of flame. The whomp of the explosion lifted the Volvo more than ten feet off the ground and smashed it into the marked cruiser where the two rookies both had pronounced “Oh shit” expressions on their faces. The Volvo was of robust construction, and its passenger compartment was completely cushioned by a circle of airbags. However, they were knocked into another lane of traffic, and between that and the explosion, the result was the equivalent of a Daytona big wreck, with car after car piling into each other.
The vehicles behind them had not yet come to rest as Zak helped Richard and then Kumar out of the Volvo that, fortunately, had landed on all four wheels.
“We’ve got to move fast, Zak. It’s likely that we’ve been ID’d or GPS’d in some fashion, and as I read it, there are at least four PCs involved in this. And if they’ve got an RPG, it’s got to be the Inter-Services people, which means we’ve got to scram.”
“Yeah. There’s got to be at least a dozen cops in that pile of wreckage. Let’s go that way, bro,” he said, pointing to a line of traffic that had been traveling in the opposing direction. Many vehicles had stopped with engines left running as people began to rush toward the wreckage.
“There’s a decent-looking Honda Pilot running, no driver,” said Richard, pointing. “Let’s go.”
They were in the Honda, negotiating past the wreckage and heading away from the scene. A good half hour had passed before the Honda owner realized he had been rolled. They were heading in the general vicinity of Karachi. “Look, Zak, I think we’re screwed here. There is no place we can go. First of all, we have no passports. Sure we can get them. Now we’re heading to Karachi and we can get some good fakes put together. That costs money, which we don’t have. But where does that get us? If we get out of Pakistan, we still need to get into the US. If we get into the US, we somehow need to get this story public. If Kumar here survives long enough to be put in front of a TV camera, without corroborating evidence he’ll be stir-fried in the media as just another crazy old loon with a conspiracy theory to peddle. What’s the strategy here?”
“Rich, we start the impossible journey one step at a time. The first step is to get the hell out of Pakistan, to find safe ground somewhere.”
“That’s the point. There is no safe ground. If our own country thinks we’ve gone rogue, if somehow it was the US that tipped off the ISI and told them we were terrorists, and told them to shoot first and then ask questions, if the US is behind that, we’re not safe anywhere.”
“Well, there’s always North Korea, bro.”
“Fuck you, Zak. Don’t want worms.”
They switched vehicles a number of times. Both Zak and Richard were technically clever, and Zak had an endless supply of electronic gadgets embedded in his forearm so that the theft of vehicles, especially older models, was not particularly problematic.
They were nearing the outskirts of Karachi when Kumar spoke. “Shayam,” he said, using the name that Zak had used when he was undercover riding with Yousseff in Afghanistan before the Colorado River attack. “Shayam, I have a plan. I think I know how at least we can get out of Pakistan.”
22
November 16, 1984
The flames raged skyward, making terrifying whooshing sounds. The smell of incinerating rubber and burning roof tar was sickening, and the heat rolled out of the burning orphanage in waves. Reflections of flames and emergency lights of various hues and colors lit up the night sky. Orders were being barked, rescue ladders were erected and extended, and fire hoses pumped thousands of gallons of water into the nineteenth-century St. Louis building. First responders were frantically attempting to dampen the flames. From somewhere within the burning structure came the piercing screams of children.
A small twelve-year-old girl covered in soot and ash was sitting on the curb nearby. She was holding a small stuffed tiger and wearing a torn pink dress. An enigmatic smile flickered around the corners of her lips. The sirens, screams, searing flames, and sounds of destruction swirled and morphed together in a compressed flow of noise . . . and became the pressurized internal airflow system of Air Force One.
Tyra snapped out of her reverie and fell back into the moment in the main conference room in the midsection of the 747. One of CJ’s aides had entered a boardroom with an email from the Islamabad embassy. Tyra was now wideawake. The president had poured himself a shot of Jack and CJ was foraging for a beer. All three were tired and not particularly pleased. They had returned from a five-day whirlwind tour of European allies. It pissed Tyra off to smile nonstop for substantial periods of time five days in a row. She was even less happy when CJ read the email from the American embassy in Islamabad.
“Those morons at the ISI. Sounds like they had it nailed and let them get away,” Tyra groused.
“Did they really try and lob an RPG into a vehicle from one highway lane away?” The president sounded impressed.
“Yeah, they did. And Kumar and his supporting cast promptly switched vehicles and disappeared again,” Tyra added. “The problem is that now they know the ISI is on to them, which means they will deduce that we are on to them, so they
will now know that they are on every terrorist-wanted and nofly list in existence. They will definitely stay under the radar.” “They can’t do that forever,” said CJ.
“Don’t count on that, fats,” Tyra rebuked. “Zak and Richard both grew up in Islamabad. Kumar grew up in Karachi. In fact, his main business, Karachi Dry Dock and Engineering, is headquartered on the Karachi docks. There are 20 million people living in the metropolitan area, if not more. They will have many friends there. They can, in fact, stay below the radar for a year or two. That would give them plenty of time to dig up corroborating evidence to show that Yousseff Said al-Sabhan was the directing mind and will of the terrorist attack. We would lose Afghanistan for sure.”
“And our many investments there,” added the president.
“So what do we do?” CJ was coloring up a bit. He, too, had all manner of exposure in the situation.
“We put some guns on the ground in Karachi. We can run a hit squad out of the consulate in that city. I will talk to the deputy secretary of state personally, if you are fine with that, sir,” Tyra said, looking at the president.
“Sorry,” he responded. “You’re going to have to enlighten me here. So we burn some diplomatic capital and we get a crew in Karachi. So what? Karachi is bigger than New York. What’s the plan, Tyra? A door-to-door search?” CJ was looking at Tyra, equally perplexed.
“You two are not thinking. You need to figure out what their destination is. And it can only be one place.”
“What would that be, Tyra?” asked the president, a hint of sarcasm in his voice.
“A dog always runs to familiar territory. Kumar and Yousseff built KDDE from the ground up. It’s a huge company with extensive holdings with frontage on Karachi Harbor. That’s home turf. There will be endless modes of transportation there. They build and repair ships there. They probably have a helicopter on the premises. They will have endless numbers of vehicles, and they will have an absolutely loyal staff. That’s how Yousseff and Kumar built their businesses. The means for them to get out of Pakistan is with that company. That’s where they have to be going. That’s where we intercept them. We can work with ISI. Remember, they want Kumar dead as much as we do. Surely we have someone on Air Force One here who can get that ball rolling for us?”
Counterplay Page 9