Counterplay

by Richard Aaron

  “He didn’t know,” said Kumar over the tornado of objections. “The Semtex was wrapped in red cellophane and came in brick-like sizes, about the size of an ordinary shoebox. Yousseff had instructed everyone, including me, who knew the true nature of the cargo, to tell anyone handling it that it was simply an enormous shipment of heroin, just packaged in a different manner to make it more saleable and easier to transport. The only thing we had ever transported through the Lestage mine was heroin. We had never shipped anything else through there up until this point.”

  McSheffrey didn’t require a briefing to cross-examine Kumar. A ten minute line of questioning had Kumar freely admitting that he used his skills to have desperate addicts, generally with stolen money, shoot up through dirty needles heroin compounds mixed with everything from rat poison to fentanyl in order to generate vast profits for himself and his cronies.

  Then he admitted that in order to play the markets, he was instrumental in blowing up a major dam on the Colorado River, ultimately resulting in the deaths of 20,000 people.

  “So you agree with me, sir, that you are guilty of committing 20,000 counts of murder to enrich yourself?”

  “Yes,” said Kumar, so softly that all in the courtroom had to strain to hear him. “Yes, I murdered 20,000 people. I believed Yousseff when he said to me that very few would die . . .”

  “So it would have been fine if you would have murdered only ten or twenty people? That’s your standard?”

  Kumar did not answer, despite being prompted several times by McSheffrey, and ultimately by the court, to do so.

  “That concludes my questioning, m’lord,” said McSheffrey after twentyfive minutes of cross. Kumar stood up and stepped out of the witness box.

  “Oh no, Mr. Hanaman. You are not leaving here. Sheriffs, take this man into custody. He just admitted to murdering 20,000 people. This man is not going to be walking around on our streets.”

  Kumar had a strangely blissful expression on his face as the sheriffs cuffed him and led him away.

  As Dana began packing up her computers, the piece of paper that had been sitting on counsel table when she arrived slipped out from between several sheets of paper and fluttered to the floor. George picked it up and handed it back to her.

  “Gee, Dana, you never struck me as running funds through obscure foreign bank accounts. I guess I misjudged you.”

  “What are you talking about, George?”

  “Well, I’ve moved money all over the world, mostly to minimize my taxes. All perfectly legit, you know. Nothing illegal. Don’t tell Mordecai.”

  “So?”

  “So, Dana, that’s an international SWIFT code. It says that. The letters are an identifier for the bank. I think this one is for some outfit in the Caribbean.”

  “George, Blankstein deFijter barely pays me enough money for rent. Before that I was a student working my way through law school at minimum wage. I’m as far away from international banking as you possibly can get.

  That’s not mine.”

  “Yours, Mr. Penn-Garrett?” asked George.

  “Offshore banking? Me? Hell no. My ex-wife has it all.”

  “Why don’t you let Turbee and I have that? We can run it through our various databases and maybe come up with something. Someone out there is delivering a message of some kind.”

  63

  Back in the hotel room, George was reviewing the letters and numbers on the slip of paper. “I use these SWIFT codes all the time,” he said.

  “Everyone in Silicon Valley does. You use them to move offshore money around. The first four letters identify the bank, the next two the country, and the last letters refer to the city and the specific bank in that city. The numbers would be the account number itself.”

  “What does this one refer to?” asked Khasha.

  It took George a few minutes of noodling on the internet to identify it. “It’s the International Bank of Barbuda, their main branch is in St. John, Antigua. On First Street.”

  “Can you get into that bank, Turbee?” Richard asked.

  George looked at Richard disdainfully. “He got into American Express in order to hide that fuel bill from Jakarta when you guys were on the Allegro Star. This is like breaking into your mother’s piggy bank.”

  “Okay. Let’s assume he can. Do we?”

  “Richard, come on,” said George. “We’ve broken into a dozen places every day since this started. We’re fugitives trying to clear ourselves. Let’s not get all righteous now.”

  “Okay, George. But there’s something disquieting about this. An international SWIFT code with account information just happens to drop on Dana’s desk. No one knows how it got there or who placed it there, or why. What’s going on here?”

  Zak broke a lengthy silence. “We’ve had help. From the beginning, someone’s been helping us out.”

  “Why do you say that?” asked George.

  “There were a couple of places where we were just too shit-ass lucky,” began Zak. “Go back to the beginning. Richard. Do you remember when we got out of Inzar Ghar with Kumar, and we were standing by the main entrance and there were twenty or thirty of Yousseff’s soldiers standing there, pointing guns at us?”

  “Not something I care to remember, but yes. That was ugly.”

  “And a missile,” continued Zak, “we thought it might have been a Hellfire, took them all out. We thought it was either from a Predator drone or the guys in the Stealth Hawk, but it wasn’t. To this day we don’t know who fired that, but we assume it was our own armed forces, because we assumed they were helping us.”

  “Except, now that you mention it,” Richard replied, “it couldn’t have been us because according to DC, we’d gone rogue at that point.” “So who was it then?” asked Khasha.

  “We’ve been running too fast to even think about it,” said Richard. “But it’s a mystery.”

  “And that happened a second time,” said Zak. “Remember when we were running from the embassy in Islamabad, and there were Predator drones that were shooting at us?”

  “I don’t want to remember that part,” Turbee replied.

  “Well, they shot three Hellfires at us from close range and they missed each time.”

  “I do recall that,” said Richard. “And now that you mention it—”

  “Hellfires don’t miss from close range,” said Zak, finishing Richard’s sentence.

  “And they missed three times. That does not happen.” Richard scratched his head and looked at one of the computer monitors that Turbee and George had set up. “Three times. Turbee, could someone else have messed with the signal, you know from Edwards Air Force Base, causing the Predators to misfire?”

  “Yes, Zak, of course. If you know the access codes, and the encryption, and the frequency and all of those things, yes, anyone can do it. That’s what you wanted us to do—”

  “But someone else must have done that,” said Richard, because they missed twice at point-blank range.” “Three times,” said Zak.

  “There’s another troubling detail,” said Richard. “We crossed 6,000 miles of ocean in the Allegro Star and they did not find us. They knew generally where we were coming from, and, at some point, probably at around the time that we figured out what to do, they must have figured out that Vancouver was our destination. They would have known what the Allegro Star would have looked like from above. Yousseff would have told them. Then it becomes a question of scouring the ocean and finding us. Now, it’s a pretty big pond and all, but if you know generally the route, that’s where you would direct all of the eyes in the sky to look. And, I mean, there’s a hell of a lot of eyes up there now. Literally hundreds of satellites. These searches are now managed by AI and image recognition software. We no longer have a barn full of people looking at photographs. The whole process is automated, and fast.”

  “And they’ve got the ONI database,” Turbee added. “With computerdirected searches that should have been easy. But they never found you guys. Not in the five or
six days that it took you to cross the Pacific. The likelihood of them not finding you, when they would know generally where you would be, is just astronomically low, unless . . .”

  “Unless what, Turbee?” prompted Khasha.

  “Remember how we were able to dodge the image recognition software when we traveled from DC to Vancouver? We went through airports where there are literally tens of thousands of cameras. I got into the various databases and I changed the critical measurements that the software looks for. So when we were caught on camera, which we certainly would have been, hundreds of times, the software would not recognize us as us. You can easily do that for a ship. Just make the Allegro Star shorter, or longer, or wider, give her a few additional features, take a few away. Once you know what you’re doing, it’s easy. Every satellite over the Pacific could have photographed you guys and the system would never have identified you.” “We had help,” Zak nodded.

  “Help from someone with incredible computer sophistication,” added Turbee.

  “I have an idea,” said Khasha. “You know, the courthouse has hundreds of cameras, and after the attack, they tripled the number of cameras in and around Courtroom 401. Why don’t we go through their hard drives? Maybe we can find something.”

  “We can do that,” said Turbee, reaching for a keyboard.

  “For once,” said Khasha, “can we do it honestly? We know the sheriffs now. They’re our friends. Let’s just ask them.”

  Permission was sought and obtained. It did not take long. The sheriffs identified which eight cameras were either inside the courtroom or immediately adjacent to it.

  “There you go,” said Richard. “Have a look at that.” One of the cameras showed that at 9:40 a.m., as soon as Courtroom 401 was unlocked, an Asian man with a slight build dropped a note on top of a stack of notes and papers that Dana had left in the courtroom after Kumar’s testimony. They captured the image and ran it through the CIA, NSA, and FBI databases using the TTIC computers. Within fifteen minutes they had it. Tang Xiao Peng, a security aid to the consular general in the Vancouver Consular Office. A member of the Chinese Foreign Security Services, an intelligence branch with functions similar to the CIA. A Chinese spy.

  “There’s our answer,” said Richard. “We’ve been in the employ of the People’s Republic of China. They’ve got the technology to use armed drones. They have the software to manipulate images or interfere with electronic signals to fire weapons.”

  “Why China?” asked Turbee.

  “If Yousseff boots the US out of Afghanistan, which is starting to look more and more likely,” Richard explained, “there will be a vacuum there. Afghanistan does not have the industrial base or the technology to start extracting oil, or build pipelines, or develop rare earth metal deposits. There would be many candidates other than us who would want to elbow in, but the two front-runners are Russia and China, for basically geopolitical reasons.”

  “And China shares a border with Afghanistan,” Zak added. “Just a little short border, where that peninsula of land juts way out east of Kabul. It’s called the Wakhan Corridor, and it sticks out maybe fifty miles between Pakistan and Tajikistan. The eastern end touches Xinjiang Province, the westernmost part of China. China being China would run an eight-lane freeway through the mountains and into the Wakhan Corridor and export a hundred million people to Afghanistan. They would take it over by sheer force of numbers and Yousseff would let them.”

  “Yousseff wouldn’t give a damn,” Richard added. “So long as they paid him enough money and gave him a big enough piece of any action, he’d do what they want. Remember, he doesn’t think of himself as Afghan. He’s from the tribal lands between Afghanistan and Pakistan. He’s Pashtun.”

  “What do we do?” asked Turbee, his brow wrinkled and his mouth turned down. “Are we now going to be Chinese spies?” Khasha spoke. “We do the right thing. This geopolitical stuff is beyond us. The right thing is that the truth behind the Colorado attack comes out. That the world knows it was Yousseff Said al-Sabhan who orchestrated this attack. That the reality of the attack was covered up. That we are not conspiracy theorists and that all we want is for the truth to come out. I say we carry on doing what we’re doing. We call up Dana and get her to the Wall Centre. Then we work all night to get her nicely armed up for cross-examining that idiot Dan Alexander when he takes the stand tomorrow. If we go to jail for wanting the truth to come out, well then we go to jail. Are we all on the same page here?”

  Everyone nodded their approval, other than Turbee.

  “Turb, what’s the problem?” asked George. “Aren’t you on board here?”

  “Now we’re working for the People’s Republic of China. Now we really are spies. George, I’ve been to jail. I’ve spent a few days there, remember? And then in a hospital for the criminally insane. I can’t go back there.”

  “But Turbee, we need your skills here. We need to get into the Antigua bank, and go wherever that leads us. You’re the only one who has the skills to do that.”

  “George, you guys can survive jail. I can’t. I would be dead within two weeks. Beaten to death, probably. Vicious, violent people are in jails. They would beat me to death just for being different.”

  Khasha, sitting beside Turbee, placed a hand on his knee. “Turbee,” she said quietly, “every one of us here, every one of us, would go to the grave for you. Every one of us would give every penny that we had, use every breath in our body to help you if troubles like that come. We are your family, and I, for one, would rather spend my entire life in jail than to see any harm come to you. We all feel that way. Turbee, we love you like a brother. But we can’t not do this. If we leave things as they are, we will be arrested the instant we cross the American border. Right now we’re the crazy disloyal conspiracy people. But if we show that we are right, we will be cleared. In fact, we will be heroes. But you need to be on board here.”

  Turbee sighed and placed his hand on top of Khasha’s. “Okay, Khash. I’m with you guys. But if we fail, you won’t be able to help me. I will get at least sixty years in either Gitmo or the Denver Supermax.”

  “Okay,” said Richard. “Let’s do it.”

  Khasha called Dana and filled her in on what occurred. “Can you do an all-nighter, Dana?”

  Dana chuckled. “I haven’t been away from university all that long. I remember final exams, and, in fact, the bar admission exams. I can do an all-nighter.”

  “Okay,” said Khasha. “Come on down.” “I have a favor to ask her,” said Turbee.

  “What?”

  “Ask her if she can bring Bam-Bam.”

  Half an hour later Dana, Chris, and Bam-Bam arrived. Between the seven of them and a 185-pound Saint Bernard, the suite was becoming crowded.

  “We may as well start with the Antigua bank,” said Turbee. “There will be a lot more information there. What was the SWIFT code again?”

  Using the SWIFT code as the spear tip, Turbee went on a hacking bonspiel, cracking into banks, law firms, and investment companies in Antigua, which led to similar institutions in Luxembourg, Monaco, Kazakhstan, and even more obscure African and southeast Asian jurisdictions. The twisting, intersecting threads of international money laundering led back to the same Karachi law firm that had stymied him earlier, and now, knowing which names, accounts, and companies to look for, an overall pattern began to emerge.

  64

  Asurly Daniel Alexander had been taken from cells and placed on the witness stand. Judge Mordecai, looking more grim than usual, entered the courtroom. In spite of three days of stubble and bags under his eyes, Dan still cut a handsome figure. His angular jaw and tackle-block shoulders had opened many a gate for him. His political cunning and the sly use of his family fortune had brought him to the center of the corridors of power. He was director of TTIC, but had his sights set much higher. But first, there was this little obstacle, this pesky little trial to take care of.

  “Are you ready to proceed, Ms. Wittenberg?” came the raspy voice of Jud
ge Mordecai.

  Dana nodded. “Yes m’lord.”

  “Madam Clerk, please swear in the witness.”

  The clerk proceeded to do so, placing a Bible before Dan, asking him to place his right hand upon it. “Do you swear to tell the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?”

  “No.”

  McGhee snickered and McSheffrey chortled.

  “No?” repeated Dana.

  “You catch on fast, sweetheart. No.”

  Judge Mordecai leaned forward over the bench. “What did he say?”

  “He said no, my lord,” responded the clerk, not quite sure what to do next.”

  “The part after that. The part after he said he was going to perjure himself. Madam Reporter, please read the ‘sweetheart’ sentence back.” The court reporter promptly did.

  “That’s your mulligan, Mr. Alexander. Next time you’re back in cells. Now do you swear to tell the truth?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe he’s one of those godless guys,” Mordecai said. “See if he will affirm.”

  “Yes, my lord.” Turning back toward a smirking Dan Alexander, she attempted version two. “Do you solemnly affirm to tell the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “Damn you’re bright.”

  “What did he say this time?” Mordecai was again leaning over the bench.

  “He said no again, my lord.”

  “Look, Mr. Alexander,” began Judge Mordecai, knowing that this day was going to be a challenge. “Now the defense has called you and you have submitted to the jurisdiction of this court by entering it and seeking to drag a witness off the stand. Now I want you to swear or affirm, or you’re in contempt.”

  “Judge,” began Dan, “you are not getting this. I am the director of the Terrorist Threat Integration Center. I travel under a diplomatic passport. You have no jurisdiction over me. Now have the sheriffs take this iron off me, and I will just grab that urchin Turbee over there and George, who seems to be his instigator-in-chief, and Khasha, who apparently is the drug supplier, and we’ll be out of your hair. You have no jurisdiction over me.”