“Do you know a Washington lawyer by the name of Dan Alexander?”
“Yes. He is the director of TTIC.”
“You don’t like Mr. Alexander, do you?”
“No. He has been very mean.”
“But you work for TTIC and he runs that agency, does he not?”
“Yes.”
“So he’s your boss and he can tell you what to do?”
“Yes.”
“And you and your friend George decided one day to get rid of him for a while, right?” Turbee did not answer. “Right, Mr. Turbee?” Very softly Turbee said he did.
“And why don’t you tell the jury how you did that.”
“He had been humiliating me. He called me retarded. He called me stupid. All the time—”
“Mr. Turbee, I didn’t ask what you think he did, or what paranoia you might be harboring. I am asking you how you and George got rid of Dan Alexander for a while.”
“Okay. But he was really wrecking TTIC and he was threatening to shut it down. And he imprisoned Admiral Jackson. And Liam Rhodes. And all he does is play golf and do stuff with women.”
“No, Mr. Turbee. Please answer the question. Listen to me. What did you do?” Sheff’s eyes had turned cold and deadly. Turbee could only glance at them every now and then.
“He left TTIC one day, he had been really awful. He had fired me at one point and—”
“Mr. Turbee, answer the question.” Sheff was ordering him to answer. It was no longer a question.
“Okay, okay okay okay. He left TTIC by cab. Before he reached the airport, I had found the seven credit cards he had with him and canceled them all. Then I accessed the no-fly list database and put his name in there. Then I got into the FBI’s most wanted list, and put him at the top, saying that he was wanted for terrorist activities.”
“Go on . . .”
“Apparently when Mr. Alexander reached the airport, there was a tremendous scene.” He could see a number of jurors nodding and smiling. Dan Alexander’s tantrum at Reagan National Airport had made headlines in a number of newspapers.
“So this is the background to that story, is it?”
“He resisted arrest. There was a bit of a fight. At the end of it, he was shipped to Guantanamo Bay. He stayed there for a few days.”
Sheff asked a few more questions and moved on to something he found even more entertaining. “You have a criminal record, don’t you?” McSheffrey slowly went over every assault and every unlawful escape charge. The question led to Turbee’s ultimate incarceration at St. Elizabeth’s, a hospital near Washington, DC, that was reserved for the criminally insane. “That would mean,” McSheffrey asked, “that you were both a criminal and insane? Both of them together? At the same time?” He repeated the questions slowly, and had Turbee say “yes” to each one.
“But, Mr. McSheffrey, I am not insane. I am not retarded. I am autistic. I have a hard time talking to people. This process is really, really tough for me.”
“You don’t deny that you were in trouble with the law, and charged with assault, escaping custody, resisting arrest, assaulting police officers, a whole slew of things, right?”
“Yes but—”
McSheffrey didn’t give Turbee any room to explain further. He turned to some of Turbee’s more amazing hacks. He began with his invasion and takeover of America’s Milstar satellite system, his takeover of the drones, and his hacking into and use of three very complex satellites, the Orion System, and virtually any computer on the planet.
“On the planet?”
“Yes,” said Turbee. “And off the planet, too.”
“How is that, Mr. Turbee?”
“I hacked into the Mars Rover once,” Turbee replied, brightening up a little. “I had it write the words ‘To infinity and beyond’ in the sand on Mars.
Then I had it sign it as Buzz Lightyear.”
There were smiles from all the jurors.
“You just hack into all of these systems when you want?”
“Yes, but I never do anything destructive. I never shut down programs or make demands for money or put a million emails from some database or other onto Wikileaks. I never do those things. And most of the time, I do it at the direction of Liam Rhodes, the deputy director of TTIC.”
“Who, by the way, is imprisoned right now for treason of some kind?” “Sort of, I think,” Turbee answered.
“The fired deputy director of TTIC, that Liam Rhodes?”
“Yes. And most of the time, when I do that, I’m working to solve a case. We have blocked many terrorist attempts because of this.”
“Most of the time? Does that mean that some of the time, you do it for, for fun?”
“Yes, I do. But I never hurt anyone, or steal anything, or wreck anything.”
McSheffrey played around with the concept of unauthorized access to any system for an hour or so. Then he switched track. He attacked Turbee’s view of the Colorado terrorist attack inquiry and brought up the fact that Turbee had, through websites, created the “conspiracy theory” version of the Glen Canyon Dam attack. This point of view, McSheffrey noted, was contrary to the inquiry’s findings, but, in spite of warnings, Turbee kept the conspiracy theory alive.
And that was it. Sheff didn’t bother to attack anything that Turbee had said about Lestage’s computers or the phony emails. Not one question was devoted to that. He was using a stunt that any trial lawyer employs from time to time. If you can’t attack the case, attack the person. If you can’t destroy the evidence, destroy the witness.
It was 3:30 in the afternoon before Sheff finished what he considered a triumphant cross-examination, a work of art for which he was heartily congratulated by Archambault, Danson, and McGhee. He was about to say, “Bring on the next witness,” when he noted that the courtroom’s attention seemed to be focused on the witness box. Sheff followed the jury’s gaze. There was Turbee, arms resting on the lip of the witness box, head resting on his arms, quietly sobbing. Several jurors glared at McSheffrey in a hard, lizard-like way.
50
As the Cessna Citation was
