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
