“May it please the court,” McPhail began.
“It doesn’t,” Mordecai responded.
McPhail ignored him and began reading his brief to the court. Dana was scribbling furiously, trying to follow the brief while looking up cases. He was over an hour with it. Judge Mordecai began playing pinball on his smartphone. McPhail motored along until 5:10, finishing with a flourish. “Those are my submissions, my lord.”
He sat down, looking expectantly at the bench. Other than his thumbs, Mordecai was not moving. Dana got up, cleared her throat, and began. “This is a—”
“I don’t need to hear from you, Ms. Wittenberg,” said the judge.
“But I’ve reviewed a lot of law and I am ready to go, m’lord.”
“Ms. Wittenberg, the phrase, ‘I don’t need to hear from you’ is code for ‘you win.’ Take the win before I get pissed off and change my mind. The application is denied.”
“What an asshole,” McPhail announced to his partners in a voice that was noticed by all. “We should report him to the Judicial Council. Playing a phone game while he’s supposed to be listening to the flow of the argument.” “He wasn’t listening,” Dana said with a twinkle, packing up her computers. “You really think you’re something now, don’t you?” McPhail scoffed. “You’re so dense you don’t even know when you’ve won.”
Dana ignored the remark and kept packing up. McPhail, however, wasn’t finished. “Here’s the notice of appeal.” Dana knew it was coming, but she still despaired. Her last trip to the Court of Appeal had been more unpleasant than Mordecai at his nastiest.
“And here are the appeal books, our factum, and a brief summary. Have fun.”
Penn-Garrett had been pushed to counsel table by one of the sheriffs. He rolled past Inverness McPhail International and company. “Hey, Dana, I’ll do the Court of Appeal hearing for you.”
McSheffrey looked at Penn-Garrett. “Should we have a trauma team standing by for you?”
“You’re okay to do it?” Dana was worried about her mentor’s health.
“I’m fine, kiddo,” he said. “Just fine.”
George, Turbee, and Khasha were seated in the courtroom gallery. Richard was patrolling the foyer area. Zak was in the Wall Centre guarding Kumar. “You know,” said George to Dana as Dana came up the stairs with her briefcases, “I’m beginning to like this judge. Not nearly as dumb as he looks.”
“I don’t know, George,” said Turbee. “The longer Dan Alexander stays in jail, the more enraged he’s going to get. That’s the thing with people like Dan. They’re ‘get-even’ type of guys. At some point, we’ve got to get back home to the states, and then . . .”
“You worry too much, Turb,” said George. “Look at what we’ve done, and Kumar hasn’t even taken the stand yet.”
52
It was 9:00 p.m. in the central lounging area of the Wall Centre suite of rooms. Rather than room service, they had ordered pizza and beer (in Turbee’s case, root beer), and in the course of eating, the conversation turned once again to the Colorado attack and what was, with every passing day, more obviously looking to be a cover-up created by CJ’s inquiry and subsequent report.
“Maybe,” ventured Khasha, “rather than looking at how they did it, we should focus on the ‘why’ of it. Why cover up the fact that Yousseff was the chief architect of the attack?”
“Khasha, that’s obvious,” said Richard. “It’s geopolitical. Afghanistan is in the center of Asia, and we have a massive airbase—Bagram—there. If Yousseff kicks us out, either the Chinese or the Russians will get in. On the same day. It’s probably a question of whoever pays Yousseff the most, which means it will likely be the Chinese because they have money to burn.”
“Yousseff does not want his name associated with that terrorist attack,” added Zak. “I knew him well. He does not want to be branded by it. He made a few billion dollars and got out. He doesn’t want the name recognition of, say, bin Laden or Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. He’s basically a businessman. If a few people die here and there, it’s not that big a thing. He just wants to do deals. You can’t do deals if you’re al-Baghdadi. If he thinks you’re in breach of a contract, he’ll burn you alive. Businessmen don’t like those kinds of implied terms in their contracts.”
“A few people dying here or there, Zak?” said Dana. “Come on. Twenty thousand died in that attack.”
“That’s exactly my point. It’s horrific. He does not want his name associated with it,” Zak responded.
“But the responses by Dan Alexander and the president still seem disproportionate,” Khasha continued. “The truth about Yousseff is bound to come out sooner or later, and when it does, the president and everyone around him will go down. Who takes that kind of risk for a ‘geopolitical’ reason? You know this president doesn’t give a damn about geopolitics. He has said as much. He’s almost pulled out of NATO, he’s flipped the bird to most of our major allies, like the UK, Germany, and Canada. Why risk a presidency over this? We’re missing something, Zak.”
The conversation was, as most beer conversations go, elliptical, drifting in and out of the question that Khasha posed. Why indeed.
Kumar had been sitting on a bar stool at the far side of the room. He had found the minibar and had been drinking. “He has a stake in it. That’s why.” The words were spoken softly and slightly slurred. Only Turbee heard him, but he did not want to interrupt the discussion. Twenty minutes went by and Kumar repeated the sentence.
Turbee walked over to Kumar. “What do you mean by that, Kumar? Who has an interest in what?”
“There is a company. The Afghanistan Development Corporation. We call it ADC. It has been given huge concessions by the government in Kabul. Oil. Gas. Uranium. Rare earth metals. Afghanistan is potentially a very wealthy little
