Counterplay

by Richard Aaron

  Judge Mordecai rolled his eyes and the two junior prosecutors sitting beside McSheffrey and Archambault laughed out loud. Dana turned crimson.

  Turbee was oblivious to such things.

  “No. That can’t be,” Dana exclaimed.

  “Leading question,” said Sheff, jumping to his feet.

  “Worse,” remarked the judge. “It wasn’t even a question.”

  “Can you maybe explain that?” asked Dana, who, praying for miracles, landed one.

  “Yes,” said Turbee. “All of the emails were falsely inserted by a very clever programmer. The computers had been sent to us at TTIC, and I was able to scrutinize the hard drives of each with great care. The emails were dated over about a six-month period, on their face, anyway. But they were all written to the hard drives at the same time.”

  “Did you draw any conclusion from that?”

  “The conclusion was obvious. If emails dated over a six-month period had actually been written to the hard drive at the same time, it suggests that the emails were false. A deliberately false trail had been created.”

  “How exactly did you come to that knowledge?” Dana asked.

  Turbee launched into an excessively complex and technical explanation involving file allocation tables, proxies, and hexadecimals until Judge Mordecai stopped him.

  “Mr. Turbee, you’ve lost everyone, I think. Perhaps we could move on?”

  “Of course, sir. Can I ask a question?”

  “What is it, Mr. Turbee?” Judge Mordecai did not like witnesses asking questions.

  “Where are the hard drives for Mr. Lestage’s computers? I think I could tell very quickly if the same manipulation of hard drive data had occurred there.”

  “Will you make those available to Ms. Wittenberg and Mr. Turbee at the noon adjournment?” asked Judge Mordecai.

  “Of course we will. They are in the evidence locker in this building.”

  “Thank you. Carry on, Mr. Turbee.”

  “I will, of course, but can I have another glass of water?” Turbee could see George cringe slightly in the public gallery. The clerk provided Turbee with another glass with a pleading look in her eyes.

  “Did you testify at the inquiry that took place after the disaster?” Dana’s hand on the tiller was steadier. She was realizing that she had pure gold on the stand.

  “No, I did not.”

  “Do you know why not?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Did the inquiry mention anything about data falsely written to the hard drives of the key conspirators?”

  “No it did not.”

  “Do you know why?”

  “No, but I was certainly angry about it.”

  “Why?”

  “The investigation of the hard drives provided the answers in black and white. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that the emails were false.

  The inquiry did not go into it.”

  “I would like to move to another area,” Dana said.

  “Before you do, can I add one comment?”

  Dana shrugged and brushed her long hair back. “Sure.”

  “There was a deep incongruence in the evidence,” Turbee began. “You see, that terrorist attack was the most sophisticated terror attack that I’ve ever seen. That was obvious when we followed it through from

  beginning to end, which we did at TTIC. There were multiple submarines involved. One submarine fit perfectly inside the hull of an old cargo ship. The explosive device that was used was a something that had been developed at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. It was a Tiani/ Melvin focused-charge device. It is a very, very complex device to make, involving multiple layers of different metals of different weights and densities with an incredible degree of precision. Very, very smart people had done this.”

  “So?”

  “Well, the cover-up was moronically simple. The emails used sixty-fourbit encryption. There are off-the-shelf programs that will break such a code. A sophisticated level of encryption these days is 1,024 bits. At the NSA, they regularly break incredibly complex data encrypted at 2,048 bits and higher. The authorities were literally handed the names of the members of the Los Angeles terrorist cell. The people who built this weapon and executed such a complex plan, pretty much to perfection, do not encrypt at sixty-four bits.

  That just doesn’t—”

  “Objection, opinion without foundation, and hearsay,” said McSheffrey.

  Before the judge ruled, the back door opened and an elegantly dressed, silver-haired lawyer bowed to the court and walked down the aisle dividing the public gallery. He opened the small gate that separated the gallery from the counsel tables and remained there waiting to be heard. Had Judge Mordecai had his way, he would simply have let him stand there for the duration of the trial and ignored him completely, but Turbee stopped talking, and Dana stopped questioning.

  “M’lord, there seems to be a gentleman here.”

  “Damn, Wittenberg, you are brilliantly observant. I would never have seen him if you had not told me. Carry on.”

  “But m’lord, he seems to be wanting something.”

  “Don’t you know what ‘carry on’ means? Now ask your question.”

  “I forget where I was.”

  “I don’t,” Turbee said, “but I can’t talk with this man standing there. He is making me nervous.”

  “Fine then, McPhail, why are you intruding in this trial?”

  Alistar Donald McPhail was the one of the most respected lawyers in the city, the named senior partner with the law firm Inverness McPhail International. IMI was a megafirm with branches throughout Canada and in New York, San Francisco, Hong Kong, Dubai, London, and many other financial centers. Alistair McPhail’s firm boasted 3,000 lawyers and 10,000 employees. Judges literally bowed to him when he chose to make an appearance in a courtroom, which these days he did once or twice a year.

  “I have been instructed by the president of the United States of America—”

  “Ooh. Instructed by the president of the United States of America, have you? Sure. And I have been instructed by the Lord God Almighty. Now what are you doing cluttering up my courtroom?”

  McPhail never twitched or blinked from the judicial onslaught. He knew who Judge Mordecai was, and the reputation he had for berating counsel. “My lord, perhaps some respect could be shown from the bench. I am here on an assignment of great consequence. The man in the witness box is illegally divulging confidential information. The president has asked that this cease immediately and the witness place himself in our custody so that he can be taken back to Washington.”

  “Are you serious? This is a serious request? Is it April Fools’? Are we on Judge Judy? What am I missing here?”

  “You are not missing anything. The witness is disseminating confidential, proprietary information to a worldwide audience. The security of the United States of America has been placed in jeopardy.”

  “I don’t care. This is not the United States of America, in case you’ve forgotten. And no one comes into my courtroom and tells me what to do.”

  “Judge Mordecai,” McPhail said steadily, “this will cause a major international incident between Canada and the US. This will be viewed with utmost gravity by the president and his staff. We ask you one last time, please, to stop this man from testifying, at least temporarily, so that we can apply for an injunction preventing him from saying anything more. And, of course, we want him turned over to the FBI.”

  “What’s the president going to do? Carpet-bomb the courthouse? Have me arrested? Get out of here. Maybe you can get your order from the Court of Appeal; they’re plenty haywire up there most of the time. But this is a trial. You are interfering with it. Get out of here, and tell your client that he’s a jackass if he thinks he can just shut down a Canadian trial because he doesn’t like what a witness has to say.”

  McPhail didn’t move. Judge Mordecai lost his patience. “Sheriff, escort this twit out of my courtroom. McPhail, you get the prize for bringi
ng on the dumbest motion of the year. Dumber than anything Wittenberg has done in this trial. And that’s pretty far out there. Get out.”

  The entire planet had seen the interplay, and most cheered. But in the Oval Office, the president momentarily considered sending a Stratofortress or two in Vancouver’s direction.

  “No more delays. Wittenberg, ask your next question.”

  Dana looked back at her notes and realized that before the intrusion, Turbee was talking about encryption. “Can you explain to the court what encryption is?”

  Turbee didn’t answer.

  “Mr. Turbee, sir, we were talking about encryption. Can you explain to the court what that is?”

  Turbee reached for the water glass and brought it to his mouth, but he was shaking so much that the water spilled over the lip.

  “Mr. Turbee, do you require a break?” asked the judge.

  “They are going to arrest me, sir,” he said, his voice cracking and shaking. “They are going to put me in prison.”

  “Not in my courtroom. Not if I have anything to say about it. McPhail is a jackass and the president of the United States is a complete idiot. If I get any more pissed off, I’m going to issue an order to arrest him. Obstruction of justice. I’ll send the RCMP to Washington to pick him up. Don’t worry, Mr. Turbee, they can’t touch you in here.” What was of course unsaid was that “in here” would not be indefinite.

  McPhail walked up the stairs through the gallery and passed by Lee Penn-Garrett.

  “Hey, Donny, that didn’t go so well did it? An application like that in front of Mordecai is kind of a no-hoper, man. Where’s your head at?” His whisper was just loud enough for most anyone to hear.

  “Lee, if you weren’t in that wheelchair, I’d whack you,” McPhail said, fists clenched as he walked toward the rear doors.

  Dana continued with her questioning. “What can you tell us about encryption?”

  “The people who encrypted this data were not the people who organized and executed this attack.”

  “How so, Mr. Turbee?”

  “The level of encryption was incredibly simple. The attack was not.”

  “Objection, speculation. Irrelevance,” McSheffrey blurted. “Not supported by the evidence. Off the wall, m’lord.” “Shut up,” Mordecai growled.

  “Judge, that man,” Turbee pointed to McSheffrey, “that man is correct. It is speculation. It is intelligent speculation, but at this point, it is speculation. TTIC was working very hard at proving this, and we believe that with satellite feeds, email and text intercepts, and so on, we will be able to establish this in the near future, but to this date, it is just speculation.” “There,” said Sheff proudly.

  “Shut up, McSheffrey,” the judge snapped. “Maybe it is speculation, so we will go no further. It is your good fortune that we have such an honest and straightforward witness.”

  Over the course of the next hour, Turbee explained the many complexities of the attack and TTIC’s role in it. The time approached 12:30.

  “We will adjourn for lunch,” Mordecai ordered.

  “Can I add one thing I forgot?” asked Turbee.

  “Yes, but make it fast, son.”

  “It’s back to those hard drives. I need them now, and I need a powerful computer to look at them. It will take me a few hours.” “Where are they, McSheffrey?” Mordecai asked.

  “Still in our evidence locker.”

  “Then take Mr. Turbee to them. How much time do you need, Mr. Turbee?”

  “I don’t know what’s on them, or how many there are.” “How many, McSheffrey?” asked the judge.

  “About fifteen or twenty.”

  “That will take me the rest of the day, sir,” Turbee said.

  “You’ve got it. We resume Monday at 10 a.m. We are adjourned. There had better not be any more foolishness in this trial.” Somehow Judge Mordecai knew, even as he pronounced those words, that it was not to be.

  Outside the courtroom, Turbee shook his head and sighed. “I’m going to prison, Dana. I’ve broken so many rules that it will be forty years. Life.”

  Khasha gave him a hug. “Remember the plan, Turbee. A lot of good will come out of this. Already the world knows that there were emails with ridiculously low encryption that were not even referred to in CJ’s Colorado report.” “And that’s not all,” came a familiar voice behind them.

  Turbee turned and squinted. A scraggly looking man in ill-fitting clothes, heavily bearded, eyes hidden behind sunglasses and a Canucks cap, lid down low, stood before them. “Who?” he asked.

  “It’s me, you dummies. Richard. Richard Lawrence.”

  In that instant of recognition, Turbee turned and gave Richard a hug. The last they had spoken, Richard and Zak were gassing up in Jakarta and Turbee had misdirected an Amex bill for them. “How did you get here? How did you get through security?”

  “It’s a long story,” said Richard, “and we can talk about that later. I need to talk to the defense attorney here. Introduce us, George.”

  George turned to Dana. “This is one of the agents who busted Kumar Hanaman out of Inzar Ghar.”

  “Inzar what?”

  “Yousseff’s mountain fortress in the Sefid Koh, a range of mountains in the tribal lands separating Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

  “Is Zak here?” asked George. “Did you bring Kumar?”

  “Yes and yes,” Richard replied. “We need to fill defense counsel in here. She needs to know what’s going on.”

  “That would help. I’ve been stumbling through this trial after my law firm deserted me.” Dana said. “And I have absolutely no idea where we’re going with Turbee on the stand.”

  “Zak Goldberg is also in town,” said Richard. “He has firsthand knowledge of what happened.”

  “How so?” asked Dana.

  “He ran undercover with Yousseff for three years before the Colorado attack. He knows a lot about who organized it. He knows that your client had very little to do with it.”

  “Who’s this Yousseff? Why are you people always talking about Yousseff?”

  “Dana,” said Richard, “we need to talk. Between us, and Kumar, and with what Turbee knows, we can give those miserable prosecutors a pretty wild ride.”

  “I’m not sure I want that. Everything I do in that courtroom backfires on me, and I just want the trial over with before I lose my mind. When I’m done with this, I’m hanging up my gowns and applying for med school. This is the worst career decision I’ve ever made.”

  “Can we at least talk about it?” George asked. “We’ve come a long way and we know a lot of inside stuff. Probably most of it is classified, but we don’t give a damn. We could really help give you the big picture.”

  Dana paused for a few seconds. “Sure. Why not. But I’m going home to my fiancé and my dog. Why don’t you follow me?”

  Turbee brightened. “Dog?”

  As they were getting ready to leave, McGhee approached them with two large boxes. “You want the hard drives? Here they are,” he said. He pointed to the boxes. “All twenty-seven of them.”

  “Thanks,” said Dana, noting that McGhee was less ebullient than usual. After he had left, Dana turned to Turbee. “I have a powerful computer at home,” she volunteered. “I can let you use it.”

  “Thanks. It won’t be powerful enough, but it can serve as a gateway to TTIC,” Turbee replied.

  45

  It was crowded in Dana’s small basement apartment. Richard had returned to the Gastown hotel and picked up Zak and Kumar. Khasha, George, and Turbee were also there. Chris had slapped together a mess of spaghetti. Serious conversation about the Lestage case and the terrorist attack was interspersed with laughter. Turbee spent most of his time on Dana’s computer or talking to an earnestly listening Bam-Bam.

  “So, really,” said Dana as Chris was bringing a massive cheesecake to the table, “why are you so sure that this guy, Yousseff Said al-Sabhan, was the master planner of it all?”

  “That’s where Za
k here comes in,” explained George, pointing at the TTIC agent. “He was a CIA agent embedded at the upper echelons of Yousseff’s operation. He spent three years undercover to get to where he was. He was the guy who was initially able to warn the CIA of the impending terrorist attack. As he was doing so, he was caught, and Yousseff slammed him into a mountain fortress called Inzar Ghar. He was kept there and tortured for the better part of two weeks. After the Colorado attack, he was able to escape and showed up, several months later, minus a limb and a few toes, at Bagram Airfield, a few miles outside of Kabul.”

  “Yeah,” said Zak. “I almost died. I was given an exotic artificial arm full of gadgetry. I was accompanying Yousseff just before Yousseff met with some of the key mission planners. There is no doubt Yousseff organized all of it. In fact, Yousseff made a fortune off the attack by playing the international markets before the attack happened. He knew the financial chaos that was to come and apparently made billions from that. Then he used that money and the connections he already had to basically bribe everyone in the government in Kabul, and now he’s running the show there. The American administration wants to keep him on their side; hence the present myth as to who was responsible for the attack. Anyone but Yousseff.”

  “That’s great, Zak.” Dana was shaking her head, stabbing at her cheesecake. “That maybe gets you a cup of coffee. That’s completely useless as evidence.”

  “But that’s the whole story,” said George. “You can use this. Lestage is a scumbag, but he had nothing to do with the terrorist attack. Yousseff simply used his drug connections to ship several tons of Semtex into the US.”

  “But almost everything you’ve mentioned, Zak, everything is hearsay. All your knowledge is secondhand. Or thirdhand. It comes from the events and experiences of people other than you. If I put you on the stand, that old goat Mordecai will put me in an asylum someplace. He’s close to doing that now.”

  “Why couldn’t I be a witness?” asked Zak.

  “You only know a tiny sliver of what happened,” Dana replied. “We need an insider, and that ain’t you.”