The Wrong Man (Complete 3-Book International Thriller Box Set)

by Fritz Galt

  In the end, he had to fall back on an old international legal loophole. “Take him straight to Guantánamo,” Kenneth said.

  “Roger that.”

  In the oblique light shed from the corridor, Kenneth contemplated his next call. He didn’t want to hold the political hot potato for long. At the very least, he needed political cover. He groped in the dim light for the White House button on the dial pad. Within seconds, he was connected directly to White House Chief of Staff Chuck Romer.

  “Chuck,” he said at once. “We’ve got Cooper.”

  “Are they lilac?”

  “What?” Had the guy gone insane? How could he joke at a time like this? Here a Marine helicopter was transporting the Chinagate special prosecutor’s key witness that could bring down the entire Administration.

  “I had hoped for mauve, but lilac would do,” Chuck said.

  Kenneth couldn’t think up a reply, witty or otherwise.

  “Lori wants purple, so I think I’m leaning in her direction.”

  “Chuck, will you get a hold of yourself? This is the DoD, not the FTD. We’ve got Sean Cooper in our custody in the Pacific Ocean.”

  “Oh, that kind of Cooper,” Chuck said, seemingly unfazed. “You didn’t sink his boat?”

  “That wasn’t an option. We wound up with him in our hot little hands.”

  Chuck paused, then came back in a severe voice. “You do know what to do with him, don’t you?”

  “He’s an American citizen. He does have rights, you know.”

  “Fewer rights if he’s not around.”

  Kenneth couldn’t believe his ears. “Are you talking about eliminating him?”

  “Did I say that?” Chuck replied testily.

  “Oh, you mean keep him off American soil? Well, I’ve directed to have him flown to Guantánamo Bay.”

  “That should work. But I’m no lawyer. You work out the details.”

  “I’ll consult my General Counsel.”

  “You do that. And no leaks. No press visits to the base. I want a complete information blackout.”

  “We can ensure that.” Was Chuck asking too much?

  “Now one more question. Do you think the president would look good in a lilac cummerbund? That would go with Lori and the bridesmaids’ bouquets.”

  Waiting for his General Counsel to arrive from the Defense Legal Services Agency, Kenneth Spaulding sat back at his desk and reflected on what he had just done.

  He had just ordered his troops to place Sean Cooper in the Joint Task Force GTMO’s detention facility. The idea was to isolate suspected terrorists off American soil, to deny them the protection of American law, specifically the Bill of Rights, which granted detainees a speedy trial and the right to an attorney.

  The Administration’s policy in that case was to purposely ignore the Geneva Convention for the treatment of prisoners of war, based on a Department of Justice finding that terrorists weren’t combatants of a state that was a signatory to that convention. This policy enabled the military interrogators and the private contractors they hired to use more coercive methods than were normally possible to elicit information. He knew well, as he had personally authorized the use of threats such as drowning and attack by dogs, as well as approved stress position, loud music, strobe light and sensory deprivation techniques on the least forthcoming unlawful combatants.

  However, one thing bothered him greatly. It was his understanding that the U.S. only sent foreign nationals to Guantánamo Bay detention facilities. And Cooper was an American citizen.

  There was a polite knock at his door and Ivan Nemroff entered. Ivan’s agency, the DLSA, provided legal advice and services to the defense agencies and could get Kenneth out of just about any pickle.

  “Mind if I turn on the lights?” Ivan asked as he entered.

  “Fine,” Kenneth said with a wave of the hand.

  Ivan flipped on the overhead lights, revealing a fit man with a thick brown mustache and goatee. Kenneth offered him a seat, which he took.

  “Today’s problem,” Kenneth said, sitting back behind his massive desk, “is Sean Cooper.”

  He looked at Ivan, who nodded, already well aware of the problem with which Kenneth was wrestling.

  “The White House wants him out of sight, which means detained somewhere off American soil…indefinitely.”

  “So you told me.”

  Kenneth admired Ivan’s circumspect approach to ticklish political matters that frequently cropped up in the secretary’s office. After all, they were forging a new way to prosecute a war, as their enemy had shifted from conventional armies to slime bucket individuals wielding an inordinate amount of power.

  “I’m not sure we can intern Cooper at GTMO because he’s an American,” Kenneth explained. “So far, we’ve transferred all American terrorists to military bases in the States where they are on trial for treason by military tribunals. I see you shaking your head. Is that not the case?”

  “Not exactly, Mr. Secretary. There are two conditions that must be true in order for us to transfer a prisoner to Guantánamo and detain him there. First, he must be a foreign national, and second, he must have received training from a terrorist group such as al-Qaeda or was in command of three hundred or more enemy soldiers.”

  “Start with the first condition. Clearly Cooper is an American citizen,” Kenneth said.

  Ivan hesitated. “We do have ways of changing that.”

  Kenneth frowned. “I thought the Supreme Court upheld a person’s right to citizenship. We can’t just take it away.”

  “That’s absolutely true. But I’ve checked out Cooper. He is an orphan, and many details that automatically confer citizenship onto a child are unknown in his case. For example, was he born on American soil? Were his parents American citizens? Did he spend at least five years of his youth in America? Unless he can prove at least one of these things, he may not be an American citizen.”

  “What if he has a valid U.S. passport?”

  “You need to be a U.S. citizen to obtain a U.S. passport, but possession of a U.S. passport is not sufficient proof of U.S. citizenship.”

  Kenneth felt a chill in his veins. This guy was good.

  “How about the second condition, the terrorist connection?”

  “We’re on more solid ground there, Mr. Secretary. According to the White House, he has been acting in collusion with terrorists.”

  “And how can they prove that?”

  “I haven’t seen their evidence. But Cooper was picked up during a terrorist strike on Purang. Guilt by association is adequate grounds to put him away.”

  “Okay,” Kenneth said, trying to sum up. “So given that he needs to be detained indefinitely for the good of the American people, what are our options?”

  “Under our current policy, you have two options,” Ivan replied, as if reading from prepared notes. “Number One, if you are unsure of the legal grounds for holding him, you could render him to a foreign power, say Egypt or Morocco, where the authorities could interrogate him using their own methods and therein detain him. Or, if you are more comfortable with the legal grounds that I have just enumerated, you could order him detained at Guantánamo, which is the legal equivalent of outer space.”

  “Okay,” Kenneth said, making a snap decision. “On the basis of his disputed nationality and terrorist connections, let’s stick him in Guantánamo. Maybe we can force some al-Qaeda names out of him while he’s there.”

  “That would be most appropriate, Mr. Secretary. This is America, but we do have ways of making people incriminate themselves, or at the very least discredit themselves.”

  “Guantánamo Bay?” Sean repeated to himself, incredulous. Why were they sending him to Guantánamo Bay? There wouldn’t be any press corps waiting to take down his story.

  Perhaps it was just a normal debriefing location, sort of like how they took former hostages from Beirut to U.S. Army hospitals in Germany for mental and physical checkups.

  The government had learned
from Vietnam not to dump released POWs back on the streets of America without significant psychological help with their adjustment.

  He had to laugh. On the whole, the terrorists had treated him humanely, even courteously. It was the Americans who were shooting back and throwing knives while he was holed up in the government palace. They weren’t afraid of spilling his blood. What more impersonal acts were they capable of? Then the images of bloody, tortured and sexually humiliated prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad came to mind. Americans could dehumanize and put the screws to prisoners as well as anybody.

  Did the guy really say Guantánamo?

  He recalled images from the Chinese press of Taliban and al-Qaeda detainees wearing blacked-out goggles and kneeling in cages in the brutal sun. Hadn’t several of them tried to hang themselves in captivity? And hadn’t the U.S. Army court-martialed prison chaplains who were trying to assist them?

  Thank God, he was an American. The military would never pull such a stunt on him.

  And thank God that they weren’t taking him as a prisoner of war. After all, the Marine onboard the chopper had given him a cup of coffee and made him feel as comfortable and welcome as one could aboard a noisy, vibrating military helicopter.

  Yeah, it was good to be one of the boys again.

  As he contemplated the calm ocean surface below, his mind drifted into the future. In the end, he didn’t want to testify against the President of the United States. Why bring down the leader of a proud nation, who fostered such a genuinely moral army? After all, the machine gunner was a fine reflection of the American people. Sean was proud to be American.

  If he could avoid a subpoena by the Chinagate special prosecutor, he’d do so. Deals were always being struck in Washington. Some smart cookie would think up something. Maybe even that Sandi DiMartino would materialize again. She seemed interested in his case. Whomever she worked for might be sympathetic to his cause. Heck, it might have been she who had called in the cavalry to rescue him.

  He shifted in his thinly cushioned seat. Yup, his wallet was still there with her business card. He pulled it out and examined it with its Global Oil Incorporated logo and address. He had to laugh. She was no corporate lawyer. She had real connections.

  He examined her telephone number. It was a Houston number, probably fictitious. Then he noticed her cell phone number. It was all sixes followed by all ones. How coincidental could that be? Clearly another fake number.

  The helicopter gradually pitched back, unsettling a circular area of waves. They were approaching a landing pad.

  Boy, he could use a little less sea and a little more terra firma. A cottage along the Chesapeake would do him just fine.

  Chapter 22

  Harry Black was a frustrated man on his flight from Atlanta to Washington. His men had been tearing Nairobi apart, unable to find any trace of Sean Cooper.

  Badger had sounded both puzzled and angry over the phone. “Just show me one line of computer data placing him here,” he had said. “Without a byte trail, I don’t believe a thing. Just get me my computer back.”

  Harry had done his best to assure him that the attorney general himself had given him the tip.

  “But the field agents don’t know a thing about it,” Badger had retorted. “If they don’t know, how does the freaking attorney general know?”

  At that point, something had snapped in Harry. He had gone from defending his source, namely Caleb Perkins, the Attorney General of the United States, to siding with his crew.

  “I’ll go to Washington and work on the problem from there,” he had assured Badger.

  “Great, because this new Embassy here in Nairobi is giving me the creeps,” Badger had said. “The terrorists bombed the last one off the face of the earth.”

  As soon as the commercial liner touched down at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, Harry hit the pavement. His first stop was to be an unannounced call on Caleb Perkins at the Department of Justice.

  The Diamond cab took him down Pennsylvania Avenue and detoured around Lafayette Park where a vocal mob of protesters was screaming “We can’t wait for Chinagate!” at the White House. Harry had to laugh. The Chinagate investigation would go nowhere if he was able to find Cooper and yank him off the streets.

  At the Department of Justice headquarters, he gave his name to the guard behind the security desk and waited as he phoned upstairs. A prominent display showed that the terrorist threat level was orange, “High.”

  What had caused the threat level to rise from yellow up to orange?

  The guard stepped around the desk and proceeded to pat him down and run a wand over him and under his arms and between his legs. If Harry hadn’t grown used to such treatment at airports, he might have felt more offended.

  The briefcase was next. It went through a bomb detection device. As if he wouldn’t have already exploded the bomb by then just standing in the lobby.

  “You may proceed, sir,” the guard told him, sliding an identification badge toward him over the counter. “Through that scanning chamber.”

  That was also new to Harry. He waited for the first door to slide open, then stepped inside. The door slid shut behind him, and he was shut into a small room.

  Some unseen machine zapped him with invisible rays, and some perverted guard behind the wall examined his physique.

  Harry waved at the blank walls.

  Then the far door slid open, and he stepped through.

  Wasn’t there something in the Constitution about being innocent before being found guilty, and a person’s right to privacy? It seemed as if recent security measures had encroached on those concepts. Perhaps those who decided such things had determined that it was time to cross out a few lines in the Bill of Rights.

  The elevator took him straight to the fifth floor, where another security guard greeted him, this one with an attack dog.

  A little paranoid, aren’t we?

  At last he was shown to the attorney general’s suite, an opulent use of space in a city that had little room to spare. But, overseeing the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Drug Enforcement Agency and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the Bureau of Prisons as well as all federal prosecutors did entitle one to some measure of grandeur.

  “Hi, Harry,” Caleb said, striding forward eagerly to greet him at the door.

  “What’s with the smile on your face?” Harry asked. “You know why I’m here. You deliberately misled me about Cooper’ whereabouts.”

  “Please, take a seat,” Caleb said. “I think some explanation is in order.”

  Harry remained standing.

  Leaning awkwardly against his desk, the rotund attorney general tried to ease the tension with a laugh. “It’s really quite embarrassing. The Marines have picked up Cooper on a small island in the Pacific.”

  “Not in Kenya.”

  “No. He turned up elsewhere.”

  “He didn’t turn up where you told me he would be. You sent my men on a wild game safari in Africa.”

  “Let me remind you that you’re under contract.”

  Harry stiffened. “I may be under contract, but only to see after America’s security needs. I am under contract the same way that you are under contract to see after the justice of the nation. As far as I see it, there is no distinction between civilians and government officials in this case.”

  “Yeah, but I put my hand on a Bible and swore an oath to office.”

  Harry bristled. “Religion and mere words are not thicker than blood. My men put their lives on the line every day, and I’m determined that it will not be for some political game played here in Washington.”

  “This isn’t politics, honest.”

  When the attorney general had to plead for someone’s trust, Harry knew there was big trouble.

  Now that Cooper was in the hands of the military, the operation was essentially over. And so was the secrecy. It was only a matter of time before the press and protesters would catch wi
nd of the military operation and demand that Cooper testify in the Chinagate case. “I’m curious where he goes from here.”

  The attorney general remained expressionless. “Why naturally, the Pentagon should hand him over to the special prosecutor.”

  “You don’t sound the least bit unhappy.”

  He caught the attorney general casting a glance down Pennsylvania Avenue at the White House.

  Suddenly Harry understood the change in tactics. With Cooper’ capture, the problem had turned from a security issue into a political one. “This is going your way, isn’t it,” Harry said. “It’s playing right into your hands. That’s why you had the CIA send me out to find Cooper. You want Cooper to testify. You want the president out of the race.”

  He looked around the spacious office, replete with sports trophies along with diplomas and pictures of the Administration with his face prominent among them. But there were no “Caleb for Prez” banners up yet.

  “It’s not exactly going my way,” Caleb said. “The Marines are taking Cooper to Guantánamo, and you know what that means.”

  Harry understood. That had been the plan all along, to muzzle him forever. “But if you want a different outcome, you’re still the attorney general. Can’t the Department of Justice demand his extradition to America?”

  “One can’t be that blatant in Washington,” Caleb said. “I don’t want to alienate the party and the voter base.”

  Harry was having a hard time keeping up with Caleb’s train of thought. Caleb Perkins had executed a complete about face. He wanted to turn the Cooper case into a political opportunity. And for that to happen, he needed Cooper freed and his testimony made public. Harry wasn’t so sure he saw Cooper’ testimony as a good thing.

  Perhaps sensing that Harry wasn’t completely behind him, Caleb circled his desk and produced another manila envelope marked “TOP SECRET.”

  What was this? A payoff?

  “Take it. This is another contract for your company.”

  It was a payoff.

  Harry made up his mind not to take it. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t curious. “Contract for what?”