by Jeff Siebold
Martin Burton looked questioningly at Fredricks. He clearly was unsure about the workings of the US legal system. Fredricks looked unsure, too.
“Or, we can move forward with the arrest and indictment. But, the anti-terrorist sentiment in this part of the country is pretty strong. You may find that the press will have a good time smearing your reputation, even before any trial. They’ll call you a gunrunner and anti-American. Basically, your life will be changed forever, even before you go to prison.”
Fredricks’ face looked pale.
“Mr. Fredricks will tell you that we can take you and process you, and you’ll be held in jail as a possible terrorist until the trial, in what, a year or so?” asked Zeke. “Six months, earliest, if your attorneys are ready by then.” Zeke looked at Fredricks, who looked embarrassed. “Right?”
“Well, technically…”
Martin Burton looked at his attorney. “Jail? What are you talking about? This is a misunderstanding, and we all know it!”
Fredricks was looking down at his notepad.
“No, no, no,” continued Burton. “You’ve got to get me out of here. Now, today!”
Zeke looked at Martin Burton. “Then tell us what you know about the gun buyers,” he said simply.
“No,” said Fredricks, “not until we have an agreement with the prosecutor. In writing.” He was obviously grasping, not certain what his client was going to reveal.
“No, I don’t want to stay here any longer,” said Burton. He looked at Zeke. “If I tell you what I know, will you release me?”
“Probably,” said Zeke, reassuring. “I don’t think it’s you we’re really after.”
Chapter 13
“Look,” Martin Burton said, “I know some people. And I know these guns. What I know is that I’ve sold a few guns to those men, the ones at the gun show.”
“A few?” Zeke asked. “How many?”
“Well, this was the last of them,” said Martin. “I was only getting rid of my samples, my stock from when I was selling these to the government. But I know some people,” he repeated. “They’re the ones you want.”
“What people?” asked Zeke.
“We have a deal, right?” asked Martin, looking at his attorney.
Fredricks nodded, looking at the signed document in front of him. “It looks like it’s all in order,” said the attorney. “I think it’s the best you can hope for, Martin.” The prosecutor had joined them and, after some haggling, agreed to some leniency in light of Martin Burton’s cooperation.
“So, what people?” asked Zeke, again.
“H&K automatic weapons, a lot of them, they’re being purchased by a group in Canada,” he said. “It’s called Petit Ferme. Well, Petit Ferme, Ltd. They’re based in Montreal.”
“The little farm?” asked Zeke.
“Yes, and they have purchased many guns from Heckler and Koch. Automatic weapons, the G36’s,” said Martin Burton. “They buy from the manufacturer in Germany. They buy from the manufacturer’s excess inventory.”
“How do you know this, the details?” asked Robert Ewing, the prosecutor.
“I was approached by the buyers from Petit Ferme, after I lost my job with H&K. I still know the people there, in Germany. So the buyers, they hired me to coordinate the purchases, to help set up the pipeline. Sort of a consultant,” said Martin.
“You helped them plan the acquisition and distribution of automatic weapons?” asked Zeke. “You have to know that the end users would likely be terrorists.”
“Well, no, I didn’t know that,” said Martin. “They didn’t have any customers yet, when I was involved. I just helped with the logistics.”
“So you’re the Fedex of automatic weapons,” said Zeke. “Nice.”
* * *
“So walk me through this again, Martin,” said Zeke. He was tired of sitting on the hard metal chair, across the table from Martin Burton and his attorney. Tom Fredricks was sitting next to his client, taking notes on a yellow legal pad. That’s what attorneys do when they’re uncertain, thought Zeke. They write everything down. He glanced at the video camera on a tripod in the corner of the room behind him. The red light was on, the camera recording.
“Again?” asked Martin Burton. He was dressed in the orange jumpsuit and shackled by his wrists to the table. He took a sip of water from a plastic bottle, dipping his head toward the table in order to reach his lips. He sighed. “OK.”
“But this time, reverse the order,” said Zeke.
“What?” asked Tom Fredricks, looking up from his pad. He was wearing an off-the-rack business suit in navy with a very light brown woven stripe pattern. Beneath it was a plaid shirt and a tie that looked like raw silk, but wasn’t. Dressed for the camera this morning, Zeke thought.
“Tell me about it backwards,” Zeke repeated. “Start with the destination, the crossing of the US border with the weapons, and work backward to the guns’ origins.”
“This is ridiculous,” started Fredricks. “My client has told you what he knows…”
“No, I don’t think he has, not everything,” said Zeke. Next to him at the table, Ewing, the DOJ prosecuting attorney representing the ATF, picked at an invisible piece of lint on his sleeve.
“He most certainly has.” Fredrick tried to sound outraged. “He’s done nothing but cooperate, all in accord with his leniency agreement.”
“We’re not done with this yet, Tom,” said the DOJ attorney, Ewing. He was an older man, perhaps in his late fifties, with wiry gray hair, cut to accent his aggressive features. He had a large, fleshy mouth and beady eyes that showed no expression. “Unless you want to adjourn, in which case we can tear up the agreement.”
Tom Fredricks tried to look exasperated.
He needs to practice that look a bit more to be convincing, Zeke thought.
“Telling it backwards” was a counterintelligence tactic Zeke used for spotting lies. Relating events in chronological sequence easily allows for omissions, exaggeration, over emphasis and other deceit. Telling the story backwards forces the witness to reevaluate the story as he goes, which is much more difficult if you’re being dishonest. It also demands much more attention, which typically allows the questioner to watch posture, movement, and other signs of possible lies.
“Go ahead, tell it backwards, then,” Fredricks said to Martin Burton, who seemed anxious, leaning forward on his forearms. They had been in the interrogation room for three hours, breaking only for attorney-client conferences and bathroom breaks. Martin had been answering questions the whole time.
“Ahh, all right,” he said with a slight German accent. “Backwards. Let’s see. I’ll start with the smuggling of the weapons, then, from the crossing of the U.S. Border?”
“Sure,” said Zeke. “We can pretty much guess how they get from there to the final destination. Or destinations.”
Martin sat back in his chair and breathed out, thinking. “OK, there’s a road in Canada that dead ends at the U.S. border. The road is all closed off, like a cul-de-sac, with no outlet to the south. It’s named Chemin Bradley, after the family that owned the farm it runs through. The only vehicles that usually travel that road are private vehicles, farm vehicles, and delivery vehicles on occasion. Mostly the local farm hands drive their pickup trucks to and from the work areas at the end of the road.” Martin paused, thinking about what to include in his description.
“The compound at the south end of Chemin Bradley is a horse farm built around the cul-de-sac, and it includes a pole barn, two quonset huts that look as if they were surplus from the war,” Martin looked at Zeke, “a low barn, a farmhouse with an incongruous tennis court, and a second, smaller farmhouse close to the border. This was most likely built for farm hands or some of the Bradley’s adult children. This compound is surrounded by acres of crop land, and the Rock River is located to the west.” He paused.
“That’s where they cross?” asked Zeke.
“Yes, sure,” said Martin. “At the end of that road is a fen
ce gate, with a hand painted sign that reads, Chemin Ferme. Road closed. Beyond this single metal gate is the United States of America.”
“How did your group find it?” asked Robert Ewing.
“After the old man Bradley’s death, most of the remaining Bradley clan dispersed to larger cities in Quebec. Although the farm and the buildings were still owned by the Bradley family, they were leased several years ago by a Canadian corporation.”
“What corporation?” asked Ewing, looking directly at Martin.
“The Petit Ferme, Ltd. I told you that.”
“Then what?” asked Zeke.
“They use a brown delivery truck, drive it to the end of the road and park it in one of the quonset huts until after dark,” said Martin.
* * *
“I think you’ve got what you need here,” said Zeke. Dan Wheeler and Clive stood with him in the hallway outside Martin Burton’s interview room.
“Seems like we do,” said Wheeler. “Appreciate your help with all of this.”
“Sure,” said Zeke. Then to Clive, “Roger Taylor is next. I’m going to take a couple days off, wrap things up here and head to Miami this weekend, when Venture of the Seas is back in port. I’ll talk with the witnesses there, the cruise ship staff.”
Chapter 14
In a nondescript warehouse in the western suburbs of Oberndorf am Neckar, Germany, one hundred seventy-seven kilometers west of Munich, a fork lift operator was loading pallets into a shipping container. The container was one-third full and the remaining boxes, arranged into several large squares 2.3 meters tall and 2.3 meters wide, were wrapped tightly in shipping plastic. Within the package, each individual box was equipped with a Radio Frequency Identification chip that reported its location, temperature, pressure and humidity along with other security data whenever it was electronically queried. The radio signals were programmed to report this cargo as metal materials and auto parts, and the point of origin as Stuttgart.
Once fully loaded, the container would be placed on a tractor-trailer that would drive southwest through Germany and France to the south coast of Spain, and then it would follow the E-15 along the coast to the Port of Valencia. After being off-loaded and kept in a secure area proximate to the container cranes, the container would be loaded onto a freighter and would spend 24 days at sea before arriving at MTR, the Port of Montreal. There, the container would again be offloaded and stored in a secure area.
A seemingly authorized Canadian tractor-trailer cab with its paperwork in order would roll into the secure area a day or two later and, with clearance from Port Security, it would attach the container and exit the facility heading south to connect onto Route 35. A short distance after that, the truck would continue southeast on Canadian Route 133. Still in Canada, at Iberville, the truck would exit the highway and wind through an industrial park on the east side of the roadway. The truck would stop at a large distribution warehouse there, enter a fenced area and back up to a dock-height bay door. It would be greeted by several men in blue overalls and a forklift.
Four hours later, a brown UPS-sized delivery truck would drive out of the front gate of the distribution warehouse, find the on ramp to Route 133 and continue south, then east, and then south toward the U.S. Border and US Interstate 89. As it approached the border, the truck would turn east on Chemin de Saint Armand, moving away from the Border Crossing at the Interstate, and toward much less populated areas of Quebec and upstate New York.
Two miles later, the brown truck would turn south on an asphalt covered two-lane road in the small village of Saint Armand, a farming community of 1,250 people. The nondescript road taken was named Chemin Bradley or Bradley Path, after the family that built the road and settled at the end of it, immediately north of the US border.
A large truck driving along the dead end road of Chemin Bradley would register as an unusual sight, if anyone had been watching. With no outlet to the south, only smaller vehicles travelled this route. But the brown delivery truck was a good disguise. At the south end of the two-lane road, after circling the cul-de-sac, the driver pulled the truck into one of the two quonset huts and turned off the ignition. Two farm hands, already in the hut, immediately closed the large metal sliding doors and turned on the overhead lights. Then they left the building. The driver jumped down from the cab and walked to a wooden table positioned against one wall. He poured himself some water from the waiting thermos, and then he napped on the nearby cot while waiting for darkness to fall.
* * *
For Henri Turbon, this would be the seventh time he had illegally crossed the U.S. Border with a cargo of automatic weapons. Oh, he thought to himself, they think I don’t know what I’m carrying here. Mais oui, I do. On one of his first runs, over six months ago, he had pulled the truck to the side of the road under a bridge and climbed into the cargo area. Opening one of the boxes with a claw hammer, he wasn’t at all surprised to find a rifle, with an etched HK logo above the designation, “G36”. So here we have it. This is why they are paying me so much to make this run, he thought.
Fortunately, Henri Turbon was a resourceful man. He was small, quick and wiry, and he wore his hair long, in a ponytail that his girlfriend said she liked. He felt that it made him look younger, and sometimes sexy. At fifty-three years old, he had already spent six years in jail in Montreal for larceny and theft, and did not intend to return there. His philosophy, the philosophy that underlined his life choices, was that ‘one is responsible to watch out for oneself.’ He had closed up the wooden box and continued on his delivery, as planned.
This trip was to be his last before a well-earned vacation. After returning to Montreal, he planned to take his girlfriend on a trip, perhaps to Ottawa, or maybe Prince Edward Island with its red sand beaches. Somewhere in Canada, he thought. No need to cross the border again.
* * *
As soon as dusk had turned to night, Henri Turbon climbed back up into the delivery truck and started the engine. The two farm hands had returned after dusk, and without a word they opened the wide doors to the quonset hut so that he could exit the building. He had not turned on the headlights. One block south he paused at the gate with the Chemin Ferme sign on it, put the truck in park and jumped out. Someone had removed the chain, so he opened the well-oiled horse gate, jumped back into the truck and quietly drove across the border. Facile, he thought in French, it’s as easy as that.
Drones, satellite images, heat sensors, seismic sensors and sensitive listening devices were all rumored to be in play along the U.S.-Canadian Border. There were stories of high-speed drones taking 24 megapixel photographs from 30,000 feet in the air. Henri knew that MALE drones, medium altitude, long endurance drones, had a range of about 125 miles and were designed for military reconnaissance activity in war zones, but the rumor was that they worked well domestically, too. Satellites could be a problem, but not at night, of course. Henri had heard other drivers at the warehouse in Iberville talking about all of this, but he felt that their stories were probably exaggerated by half.
From what Henri had learned, seismic sensors were unreliable and prone to false alarm, and listening devices weren’t much better. Even if those two detection devices worked, they could only set an alarm, and by the time the Border Patrol arrived, he would be long gone, well into the United States.
I’ve made this run seven times, thought Henri, to seven different destinations. And never a problem. The trick is to go about your business quietly, and ferme la bouche. Keep your mouth shut.
Henri crossed the small field and in about 200 feet he bumped up onto a semi-paved access road, passed a barn and continued straight south onto Ballard Road, an asphalt-paved two-lane. From there, Henri continued southwest on secondary roads until he reached the Town of Swanton, and the first access ramp onto Interstate 89 south of the US Customs and Border Protection crossing into Canada.
Interstate 89 would take him south, he knew, to the New Hampshire state line, where he would turn and continue south along the Connect
icut River and into Massachusetts, heading toward Hartford, Connecticut. The route would take about four and a half hours, carefully maintaining a moderate speed in the delivery truck. By then, dawn would be approaching and Henri planned to power through Hartford before the rush hour hit, then stop for an early breakfast at a small diner that he knew. Des Oeufs et bacon canadiens, he thought.
Chapter 15
The girl, Gabby, sat straight and quiet, without animation, as was the proper posture and respect in this situation. The men conferred in low voices, discussing various safe houses on the Turkish border, discarding some and nodding in approval at the mention of others. They knew that a key factor was the ownership, the sympathizers who bought and ran these hostels that housed future terrorists waiting to enter Syria.
Gabby was elegant. She sat quietly, her dark hair and eyes complimenting her olive skin. Her round face was partially covered by a small, purple veil, which was held in place by several decorative silver chains that wrapped around her head. Silver medallions that looked like coins hung from the chains. She was dressed in a long, matching wrap.
“We must be careful, now,” said Asad. He was the tallest man and was older than his youthful appearance would indicate. “There is little time left. We cannot risk being found out.”
“No, we can’t,” said another man, Sammy Patel. “I suggest that we stop our activity after these next two are relocated.” He was one of the youngest of their group, still in his teens, and he looked it.
“Should we stop now?” asked another man, Fakhir, sitting with them in the living room of the duplex.
“We have the tickets already, and they’re ready to go. Let’s complete this work, and then we’ll stop and focus on the strike,” said the first man.
