Turbee, like many others in the intelligence community, was perplexed by the Colorado Commission report. Yousseff Said al-Sabhan was clearly the directing mind of the attack. Why had his name not been mentioned?
Why was Yousseff suddenly a great friend of the administration, opening Afghanistan to American corporations?
With Zak and Richard safely back in Islamabad, Turbee, now bored but unable to sleep, began flipping through a number of video feeds and YouTube channels looking for anything of interest. He paused for a few moments when a complex search bot that was crawling through cyberspace looking for connections to the Colorado attack led him to Trial TV, an Atlanta-based courtwatching cable channel. The station was replaying a video segment from a courtroom in Vancouver, Canada. Five seconds stretched into minutes. The trial being replayed had some passing interest to him. Leon Lestage, familiar to the TTIC analysts, was fighting a lifetime in a Canadian jail for his role in the Colorado River terrorist attack. Initially it was the subject matter that locked his attention, but it was the actors that kept him there. Four razorsharp lawyers against one pale, inexperienced, stumbling attorney, mumbling through a trial in front of a cantankerous crank of a judge. Turbee recognized the chord.
7
Sheff’s opening statement was so brilliantly developed and nuanced that Dana was ready to throw in the towel right there. Leon was obviously guilty; just give him life without parole and be done with it. The day was a nonstop death spiral for Leon, whom the jury detested more by the minute. She loathed him, likely more than the jury did.
Leon stood charged, in a Canadian courtroom, with conspiracy to murder more than 20,000 people in the US by destroying the dams on the upper Colorado River. Part of the crime had in fact taken place in Canada. Leon possessed, among other things, a coal mine called Devil’s Anvil in the Canadian Rockies, nestled near the junction of the Alberta, BC, and Montana borders. The mine had been built by his grandfather, and some of its lower tunnels meandered below the US/Canada border. Leon had extended those tunnels, and one of them resurfaced in the Flathead Valley, several miles south of the border. Leon had extended a railway track system along the southernmost tunnel.“Product,” i.e., heroin, was brought into BC along the unpatrolled northern mountain fjords along the Pacific, taken through the mine and into Montana. To double his already staggering profits, he brought guns and cocaine north and sold those in the lucrative Canadian markets.
Leon’s key connection was an Afghan drug baron by the name of Yousseff Said al-Sabhan. Yousseff had cornered the opium—and through it—the heroin markets in Afghanistan. He shipped into the American marketplace via Devil’s Anvil.
One day Yousseff approached Leon with a new product. It was still heroin, he said, just manufactured a little differently, and packaged a little differently. It made no difference to Leon what it looked like. Drugs were drugs and money was money and he had both in abundance. It was a large load, and Yousseff paid him a $25 million bonus to pull it through the mine.
Leon was a thoroughly despicable, scum-of-the-earth drug dealer with few redeeming characteristics. The FBI had fingered him within hours of the investigation of the terrorist attack. They had uncovered who the suicide bombers and the planners were and had gained access to their computers. The data trails all seemed to point in one direction—to Leon Lestage. He was picked up by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police within hours, and the legal war that was now raging had begun, first with the simple possession and trafficking charges, then with the unsuccessful attempt by the Americans to have him extradited, and now, the charges he was presently facing. He had already set a number of legal records. No one in Canada (or in the US, for that matter) had ever been charged with conspiracy to murder 20,000 people. The indictment itself was 330 pages long.
While Leon would not be facing the death penalty, his fate, if convicted, would not be pleasant. He would be placed in permanent solitary confinement, in a concrete tomb of a cell, with one hour each day permitted for exercise. He would soon be wishing for death. The evidence against him was staggering. The emails from multiple sources pointed to him as the primary operator. One brick of Semtex, the explosive that was used in the terror attack, was found at Devil’s Anvil. There was even a motive. He did it for money. The day of the attack, $25 million, was deposited in the International Bank of Barbuda. Prosecutors presented incontrovertible documents from the bank and placed them in front of the jury.
All of this was laid out in beautiful prose, shored up by photographs and charts and diagrams in just such a manner that Leon’s guilt, beyond a reasonable doubt, was clearly established before the trial even began. Many on the jury had expressions on their faces that said: So why exactly are we here? Isn’t it obvious that this guy did it?
Certainly Dana was of that opinion. Her client was so obviously guilty that she would play the role the system required of her, the evidence would be presented in a few weeks, there would be a guilty verdict, and that would be the end of that. Just a few weeks of hell, no more, she swore.
8
The sleek Gulfstream G650 came to a halt in front of the control tower at Bagram Airfield north of Kabul, Afghanistan. Yousseff Said al-Sabhan nodded as he noted the many construction projects now underway at the base. A third runway, 12,000 feet in length, was under construction. A 1,200-acre extension had been added to the base. There were excavators, bulldozers, and trucks everywhere. The permanent population of the base now exceeded 15,000 people. Large American mining companies and engineering firms maintained offices and storage facilities at the base. There were
