Counterplay

by Richard Aaron

  Hanaman Senior had turned to the courts for relief, and countersued KSEW during the foreclosure proceedings. He told the judge, “Look, here was the deal. They said they would send specialty work to me if I bought this property from them. They have not done that. They lied. They should give me the property back, and millions of rupees, too, for the hell they have made of my life.”

  But KSEW was a Karachi establishment, and the VP was one of its darlings. In his mid-thirties, trained as a lawyer, and on his way up, he could do no wrong. A number of KSEW’s directors knew the judge personally, and attended the same social club—an organization that a worker like Hanaman Senior did not even know existed. The VP, sitting in the gallery of the courtroom, sniggered openly. The judge peered over his horn-rimmed glasses at Hanaman and said, “Look, sir. It’s not in writing, is it?” To which Hanaman replied that they had shaken hands on the deal. The old man got nowhere. He didn’t even get a chance to ask the VP any questions about it. Now alone, bankrupt, destitute, his spirit broken, without any wife or family aside from Kumar, he was dying of alcohol and cancer.

  “And here you are, laughing and talking as though nothing has happened?” Yousseff asked in amazement.

  “But what good is crying going to do, Yousseff?” came the response. “What good are the courts, or judges, or family, or God, or shrieking and wailing for that matter? My father is dying, my mother has left. These things are not going to change. So I may as well enjoy the day, and your companionship. You have given me enough money to buy some food, and pay some of my father’s medical bills. In another month, KSEW will regain possession of this property, and I will be somewhere else, I guess.”

  Yousseff looked at Kumar long and hard. Catching the look, the lad slowed from his constant movement.

  “What is it, Yousseff? You look at me like I’m the devil.”

  Yousseff spoke at length. “I have a proposition for you. I will pay off the mortgage. I will pay off the uncles and creditors. I will look after your father and take care of his medical bills. I will find work for this dry dock company.”

  “Yes, good. Of course. And you will give me a Ferrari and a partridge in a pear tree. Deal, Yousseff. Deal.” Kumar went back to his work.

  Yousseff grabbed him by the shoulder and pulled him away from the welding equipment. “Do not ever, ever discount me. I mean what I say.”

  Kumar was silent for a minute, meeting Yousseff’s gaze. “And you want what with me? Why would you do this?”

  Yousseff paused for a moment, and continued to look Kumar in the eye. “You know my business. If you join me, you are in that business. You will become a captain in my business. You will get your father to sign this dry dock business over to you, so that you are the sole shareholder of Karachi Dry Dock and Engineering. But you will hold it in trust for me. No one else is to know about it. No one. In return, I will cut you in on the profits, and together, we will grow this company.”

  Kumar was quick. “Well, seeing as how it’s Christmas and all, there is something else I want.”

  Yousseff looked at him with an upraised eyebrow. “Yes?”

  “I want to go to school. To the Karachi School of Engineering. I was very good in school, until last year, when I stopped going to help here. I want to go back. I want to get a degree in engineering. I want room to do this. One way or another, I can make this place work, even though I am only fifteen. My father has taught me every part of this business. I can make it go, if you get me the work. But I want to go to school first.”

  Yousseff could hardly believe his ears. His investment had just become infinitely richer. All by itself. “Deal,” he said firmly.

  “Deal,” said Kumar. They shook hands. Omar was the only witness.

  Yousseff gave Kumar the delightful chore of paying off KSEW, which was accomplished the following day. Kumar marched into the VP’s office without an invitation and threw the check on his desk. “There you go, you pig. Choke on this. I will put you out of business.” Kumar Hanaman turned and left before the shocked VP had a chance to call security. It was a high point in Kumar’s young life.

  24

  “Order in the court,” bellowed the clerk in Courtroom 401. The gallery was packed, mostly with other lawyers and journalists. The Lestage trial was a hot ticket. They saw Dana with thirtyseven neatly tabbed and indexed binders, in triplicate, in front of her. There were no banker’s boxes in sight. Dana had three computers going and seemed completely oblivious to the comments and jabs coming from the other end of the counsel table.

  Once Judge Mordecai had shuffled his ample frame behind the bench, Dana stood up.

  “What do you want now, Ms. Wittenberg?” he grumbled. “Please no bullshit at the beginning of the court week.”

  “I move that the prosecution of this case be struck and Mr. Lestage be free to be on his way,” said Dana, again trying to hide the slight quiver in her voice and her shaking hands.

  “Wittenberg, I said no bullshit first thing in the morning,” the judge reiterated. “What you just said, even on a severely constrictive reading of the word, would in fact be bullshit.”

  “It isn’t, m’lord. I can prove it.”

  “Well, hustle with it.”

  “Yes. Yes. Of course, sir. It started this way. On Friday evening, around suppertime, Messieurs Danson and McGhee came to my home and dropped off forty-nine banker’s boxes crammed full of documents. There was no order or rhyme or reason to them. In fact, the documents looked like they had deliberately been shuffled—”

  “I object to the innuendo,” said Scheff, rising. “We don’t fiddle with documents in that way. They may have appeared shuffled to my learned friend over here, but they weren’t. We considered your order on Friday and in a very short time frame, with many people working, we had the documents together, and Danson and McGhee delivered them personally to her home. At her home, some kind of monster dog attacked them. We’re not trying to make things difficult for her. We are trying to assist in whichever way possible. My very learned friend is sounding a bit paranoid, actually.”

  The judge said nothing, but simply directed his gaze back to Dana. “What do you have?”

  “I have assembled thirty-seven binders of documents,” Dana replied. “Under each tab there are between five and ten subdocuments. Each of those subdocuments refers to a document that has not been produced. And as you can tell from the subdocuments, those unproduced documents contain important information pertinent to this case. Those documents must exist, and have simply been removed from the forty-nine bankers boxes that we received. It’s the drown-them-with-paper-but-give-them-nothing-of-consequence type of defense. They knew I would work the entire weekend to put this together, and with this trial going, they never anticipated that I would expose what has happened.”

  Sheff stood up again. “That is a travesty. That is an unethical comment made without proof, to prejudice the jury and just plain muck up the trial. Dismiss the application, m’lord.”

  Wittenberg was feeling a little stronger. “The answer is simple, Judge,” she said. “If I am wrong, if I missed documents in the 100,000 sheets I received and analyzed in three days, then I apologize. That is possible. If I am, let him produce the documents that I say are missing and they say are not, and if I missed them, well, I apologize. But let’s see what they have.”

  “A reasonable point, Mr. McSheffrey,” said the judge. “If Ms. Wittenberg missed something, show her the missing documents. If not, if those documents are really around, and these letters under these tabs seems to suggest that they certainly exist, you had better produce them, immediately, to Ms. Wittenberg. Now, are we ready to continue the trial?”

  McSheffrey did not rise to the position of being lead prosecutor on the most serious conspiracy to commit murder case in Canadian—in fact, one might say, world—history by being slow on his feet. Things were seriously amiss here. Dana was sharper than she appeared. Sheff had known from the outset of the proceedings that she was clever and industrious.
But it would have taken a platoon of paper hounds a month of microexamination to pick out the missing documents. That she was in fact correct, and that this was known to Sheff, was quite beside the point.

  “M’lord, with the greatest of respect, I do not agree with the correctness of learned friend’s assertion. I can advise the court and I can provide affidavits from members of the RCMP that they provided everything that could possibly be relevant to my offices forthwith, that we copied it, and that nothing was held back. Could my learned friend provide an affidavit showing what, in fact, she did to argue that the alleged missing documents are indeed missing? She could not possibly have gone through 100,000 documents on a three-day weekend. The documents that she says are missing she has somewhere in those forty-nine boxes. She has just missed them.”

  McSheffrey was highly skilled at the art of document nonproduction and well experienced in courtroom victories by document obfuscation. He could and would indeed provide affidavits from twenty loyal RCMP officers and junior Crown staffers, all of whom would swear that they copied everything, disclosed everything, and held back nothing. He simply would not swear an affidavit himself, nor would he have a certain key senior officer swear any affidavit—no one would ever detect that slight wrinkle. But Dana was working on her own, or was she? Penn-Garrett might know the law inside and out, but he no longer had the stuff within him to sort through 100,000 pages of documents. And what was this bullshit little Trojan troglodyte that kept appearing on her computer screen? And those apparent haywire messages? And how could she, a very junior lawyer, possibly know about the existence of TTIC at all and its apparent connection to this case? It was time to set lose the hounds to see what could be retrieved.

  “I can assure this court,” said Dana, shading the reality just a touch, “as an officer of this court, that the documentation has been reviewed with scrupulous care to my satisfaction, and that the documents that I have stated are missing in those thirty-seven binders are, in fact, missing. The documents must exist, because they are referred to, but they do not appear anywhere in this collection of material. The thirty-seven missing documents are not in the forty-nine boxes.”

  “There you go, Sheff,” said the judge. “I think you have a problem.” “Well, I want to see an affidavit,” said McSheffrey.

  “I can give an affidavit in the, in, in the form that I have just said,” Dana said. It was only a minor, barely perceptible stumble. But in the presence of two men who had spent decades reading witnesses and juries and other lawyers, and been involved in thousands of eyeball-to-eyeball negotiations over everything from life sentences to multimillion-dollar claims, such barely perceptible slips signal much.

  “No, not some general, vague, ‘I have used my best efforts’ or ‘I verily believe’-type language. What actual steps were taken? If my very learned friend spent three days looking on 100,000 documents, and was able to discern where allegedly thirty-seven documents are allegedly missing, she should tell us how she did that. A best-efforts-type affidavit won’t do here.” “Well, that won’t be a problem, will it, Ms. Wittenberg?” Judge Mordecai was softening a bit on her. To have put those documents together over a weekend was impressive.

  “I can swear an affidavit in the form that I have said. The documents have been reviewed with scrupulous care and thirty-seven documents are missing,” she replied evenly, mindful of the promise she had given Turbee.

  “No, no. This should not be a problem. You swear an affidavit setting out exactly who did what so that the court can be assured that these thirtyseven missing documents truly are missing documents. Sure, if you had help from whomever at Blankstein deFijter, good for them, those jackasses finally accepting some responsibility for something. But just set out who did what, be back here by two, and we will carry on. Don’t tell us that the documents have been reviewed with care. Who reviewed them and what exactly was done?”

  “M’lord, I can give you an affidavit in the form that I have said. I am afraid I cannot go beyond that.”

  “What?”

  “I cannot go beyond that. The documents have been reviewed with scrupulous care.”

  “You almost had me fooled there for a second, Wittenberg. I actually thought you were doing some lawyerly things for a second. You have just made it easy for me. Either you give the court an affidavit showing to my satisfaction what you did to determine that thirty-seven documents truly are missing or you don’t get to make the pitch about missing documents to the jury. Not to me, not in front of the jury, not to any witness, period. Got it?”

  “But m’lord—”

  “Easy choice. Swear an affidavit to show that the thirty-seven documents are not in the bankers boxes Mr. McSheffrey gave you. Either you went through them yourself or people went through them with you and you describe how that was done, and how your binders were put together, or you are done with this line of inquiry. How hard can that be? You worked three days straight. Good. Tell us what you did. Period.”

  Dana gave up and slumped into her seat. She could not give up Turbee. She had given her word. Archambault, who knew what card McSheffrey had just played, congratulated him, sotto voce, “Absolutely brilliant, Sheff. Awesome.”

  McGhee leaned over and stage-whispered to Dana. “You just don’t want to swear an affidavit that your mutt-job donkey-sized ugly-ass dog did the photocopying, do you, huh, Scarface?”

  “You bastard,” she hissed, sweeping her hand vigorously outward and away from her body. This had some unintended consequences. When Dana made her dismissive gesture, the edge of her sleeve, a long, drooping sleeve, caught the edge of a well-worn Blankstein deFijter binder, carrying it to the edge of counsel table where it landed, spine edge first, causing the metal clamps to open, scattering more than a hundred pages of documents and document tabs across the courtroom floor between the prosecutor and defense tables. A titter ran through the courtroom.

  “I think my ex-ceed-ing-ly learned friend,” said Sheff, accentuating the syllables, “might require a few moments to compose herself.”

  “Yes, Sheff, it kind of looks that way. Very good, then. We’ll take the twenty-minute morning adjournment a little earlier, and Ms. Wittenberg, try and regain some composure, would you? This is a court of law” He banged his gavel and was gone. Dana did not even stand when the clerk commanded the court to do so, keeping her face a centimeter from the computer screen into which she wished she could disappear.

  Danson and McGhee exited first, jabbering excitedly at McSheffrey’s masterstroke. They did not know there actually were thirty-seven deliberately suppressed documents sitting in a locked drawer in McSheffrey’s office. Turbee had scored 100 percent.

  Archambault and McSheffrey strolled out more slowly and were engaged in quiet, earnest conversation. As the two exited the courtroom, Archambault shook his head. “How the hell did she do that, Sheff? There were more than a hundred thousand pages in there. How could she have organized them all?”

  “She did more than that,” McSheffrey said. “She’s got them all into a database. She had to input them. And then somehow she found out about the thirty-seven documents that we had pulled out.”

  “I’ve done these types of cases before,” Archambault responded. “It’s not physically possible to do that. She could work twenty-four hours a day for three weeks straight and not have all of that close to being cataloged. She had assistance.”

  “Yeah she did.”

  “That old relic in the back of the courtroom maybe?”

  “No. Penn-Garrett’s too far over the hill,” replied McSheffrey. “She had help. Serious, big-time guidance from someone. Someone with a lot of computing power. There’s wheels within wheels here, Archy. She doesn’t want to disclose who her friends are. We’ve used that against her but we have to tread carefully. We were able to keep Dana here off balance because of her inexperience. But this thing could unwind on us.”

  25

  They were heading south along Mauripur Road towards the harbor. With the chaos c
reated at the refinery, Richard, Zak, and Kumar had been able to shake off their pursuers and flee into the Karachi night. It had taken only one more car theft to bring them to the door of Jimmy Stalbach, who was living large in a leafy upper-class suburb on the western edge of the huge city. Jimmy still transported high-risk cargo for Yousseff, typically via the minisubmarines that were used in the Colorado River attack. He commanded an atmospheric sum for every expedition, and had limited his endeavors to three or four a year. The rest of the time he lived in debauched splendor, splitting his time between mansions in Karachi and Vancouver. They spent the night at Jimmy’s home and arranged to connect with him the following day at the Advanced Projects Testing Zone, a secured area within the immense KDDE yards.

  Yes, of course he would pilot another mission. His lifestyle required another infusion of cash. And, in any event, it was for an old but seldom seen friend. Kumar and Jimmy had known each other since the early days of Karachi Dry Dock and Engineering, but had lost touch when Yousseff began creating various enterprises in California and British Columbia, primarily to sop up and launder the vast quantities of cash that the drug trade produced there. The need for legitimate business enterprises is why the California arm of KDDE, Pacific Western Submersibles, Inc., was created with Kumar as its CEO. PWS, as it came to be called, extended and improved the technology of its sister company, KDDE, and built ever more sophisticated miniature submarines for the military and commercial markets. While KDDE’s primary business remained the repair, refurbishing, and ultimately building of large ferries and oceangoing ships, PWS focused on minisubmarines. There was substantial overlap in the business of the two companies.