“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 Zak 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.”
“Well, what about Kumar?” pushed Zak.
“Here’s the problem,” Dana began, lowering her voice. Kumar was sitting by himself in the living room, just a few feet away. “He says he was part of all of it. He can describe what he saw and did. If the jury does not believe him, he will make no difference. If a jury does believe him, okay, but he’s a drug runner and a terrorist. He will have admitted to being instrumental in the worst terrorist attack in history. He had a hand in murdering 20,000 people. It doesn’t matter so much that now he’s got a conscience and wants to come clean. He had a choice. He could have walked away and he didn’t.”
“And if you ask me,” said George, “I call bullshit on how he didn’t think that 20,000 people would die. He’s a smart guy. With how the Colorado River was managed, he knew there was a likelihood of multiple downstream dam failures. He didn’t stop to think that there were multiple cities at river level? Laughlin? Havasu City? Yuma? I think he knew about the profit Yousseff was planning
