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

by Fritz Galt

  There was a very long pause, fraught with emotional turmoil and confusion. “How do you know Merle?”

  “He was at the resort in Hainan. He confessed the whole thing to me.”

  Sean’s voice quavered. “If Merle was there, then he’s the one who left me the message.”

  “What message?”

  “Saying that my family is still alive. He’s the only one who would know.”

  “The bastard.”

  Sean returned with a note of awe. “Who are you anyway?”

  “I work for the Chinagate special prosecutor. I tracked you down to Hainan Island for information you had on the oil deal in Beijing. You are the chief witness in our case against the president.”

  “Then why am I being held?”

  “You’re being held by the military as a terrorist. I have been searching for legal means of reaching you, Sean, but the president apparently wants you there, safely out of sight from public scrutiny, as well as out of the special prosecutor’s hands.”

  “I don’t care about the president,” Sean’s voice came back, suddenly choked with tears. “All I want is my wife and kids.”

  Lieutenant Colonel Rodriguez, the Camp Delta commander, gently returned the telephone receiver to its cradle. It was tough listening to a man confess, no matter how hideous the crime. A true confession came from deep within the soul.

  But Sean Cooper had something other than a confession. Some jerk had told him that his family was dead. Sean’s true heartache only became apparent when he was faced with confirmation that they were still alive.

  He had to bring this to Ivan’s attention. Within a minute, he had the Defense Secretary’s General Counsel on the line.

  For some reason, Rodriguez found himself talking in lowered tones. “Cooper just got off the phone. I heard the whole thing.”

  “Who did he call?” Ivan asked at once. His voice was also a near whisper.

  “He talked to the investigator for the Chinagate special prosecutor!” Rodriguez related. “I didn’t catch her name.”

  “Sandi DiMartino. I know her,” Ivan said. “I’ve been trying to keep her out of the loop. And if my instincts are correct, she doesn’t have either the guts or the pull she needs to get Cooper’ testimony.”

  “Sir, if I’m not mistaken, he called her at the White House.”

  “Good God. What is she doing there?”

  Lieutenant Colonel Rodriguez set down the phone. “Have a nice day,” he said with a smile. It was becoming clear to him that Sean was something of a hero, if not a national icon, and anyone who wished him ill was not only malicious, but downright unpatriotic.

  Chapter 27

  The Secret Service checked their guest list at the White House gate, and Sandi DiMartino’s name was on it. Lori Crawford had the place running like a well-oiled clock.

  The terse guard confiscated Sandi’s cell phone and handed her a numbered tag to retrieve it later. Then he gave her a visitor’s badge and sent her on her way up the circular drive. It was supposed to be the official entrance to the home, and must have been so in the days of horse and buggy. But with the advent of helicopters, the president seemed to come and go mainly from the South Lawn.

  How was Lori going to do her grocery shopping…by Huey?

  A Marine stood by the front door. Despite the fact that he stood in his full dress uniform with no overcoat, he was not shivering in the cold. He glanced at her badge and jumped to open the door for her.

  She would have found the gesture charming, had it not been for the pistol in his hip holster, the heavy-duty black boots and the brisk efficiency of his manner. Instead of being welcomed into the executive mansion, she felt ushered into a high-level meeting of the government.

  It took her breath away to consider that if the Chinagate affair played out correctly, she would be ousting the president from that very house, thus changing the makeup of the most powerful government of the world.

  Maybe she’d just stick with her social engagement with Lori that day.

  Directly inside the door, the receptionist told her that Lori was already at the cafeteria.

  “The White House has a cafeteria?”

  “It’s a functioning government office as well as a house,” the lady reminded her. “Shall I have a guide take you to the cafeteria?”

  “Sure.”

  The way there was labyrinthine, and she was glad she had a guide. Otherwise, she might have found herself wandering through the kitchen.

  “Sandi!” came an excited voice from across a long room full of tables.

  It was easy to spot Lori, a profusion of red lipstick and bouncy red hair in a sea of black suits. Sandi had wondered if their reunion would be stiff and clumsy. She was immediately set at ease by the future First Lady, who bounded across the room and threw her arms around her.

  Within seconds, they were perched together on the bench of a cafeteria table sharing their life stories. Sandi decided to leave out the fact that she was working for the special prosecutor who was on the verge of kicking Lori’s future husband out of the White House and into jail.

  And somehow, that seemed irrelevant at the time. Renewing a lost friendship was one of those moments that made life worth living.

  A dapper man in his mid-fifties joined Lori with his lunch tray. Sandi recognized him at once as the president’s chief of staff.

  She supposed that even busy chiefs of staff had to eat lunch. But it was no ordinary school lunch. It looked like the chefs had been slaving away over his chicken parmesan for hours, arranging the sprigs of parsley just so.

  “Chuck,” Lori said. “I’d like you to meet my old pal Sandi. Sandi will be coming to the wedding.”

  She expected indifference, but the guy’s previously huffy demeanor changed radically.

  As soon as he heard the word “wedding,” he turned effusive and extended his hand. “We’re arranging seating today.” He pulled a piece of paper from his coat pocket. It was a series of circles with people’s names printed around their circumferences. “Who would you like to sit beside?”

  They poured over the names for several minutes, the chicken crying out to be eaten. It was just Sandi’s luck that Lori was on a diet and forgot to offer her food.

  Sandi pointed to the chart and picked a seat at the same table as the President of South Africa, and Lori clapped with joy. “Now I’ll have you meet another charming buddy of mine. Here’s the attorney general.”

  Sandi raised her eyes, and there stood Caleb Perkins. This was like a kind of country club. Only it wasn’t like some small town’s pretentious country club. This was the country club.

  “Hello, Mr. Attorney General,” she said, standing and taking his proffered hand. “I’m honored to finally meet you.”

  “You know him already?” Chuck Romer asked, his political radar apparently picking up suspicious signals.

  “Only by reputation,” she said, trying to gloss over the fact that Caleb Perkins had called her personally from his ivory tower at the Department of Justice to propose a détente and to offer information leading to Sean’s whereabouts in the South Seas.

  “Oh, by reputation,” Chuck said, and resumed talking business with the president’s fiancée.

  Sandi turned to the slightly rotund, but formerly athletic attorney general, and they moved away from the others.

  “So, Caleb,” she said, and suddenly wondered where along the line she had gone from a fledgling federal prosecutor-turned special investigator to being on a first name basis with the chief lawyer in the land. She checked his blue eyes that nearly matched her own. He didn’t seem to mind the informality. In fact, his smile appeared to encourage it. “You won’t guess who I just talked to.”

  “Who?” he asked, as if unable to solve a riddle.

  “Sean Cooper,” she said, keeping her tone low.

  He didn’t look fazed in the least. If anything, he seemed on top of the situation. “I just sent a private contractor named Harry Black down to Gitmo to int
errogate Cooper,” he offered.

  “And why might you do that? To shut him up?”

  “On the contrary, young lady,” he said, his voice gruff when he whispered. “With the intention of exposing the story and getting Cooper’ Chinagate deposition.”

  “You wouldn’t,” she whispered back in disbelief. “That’s exactly what I’m trying to do. Have you had any success?”

  “He’s down there right now. I don’t know if he’s getting anywhere, but he has every opportunity to do so.”

  She lowered her voice even more. “Isn’t that a bit underhanded?” she asked, looking around the white-walled edifice in which they stood.

  “On the contrary. I am a patriot. Learn the truth, and the truth shall set you free.”

  “And the truth shall make you the next president.”

  Suddenly Caleb Perkins took on a whole new aura of desirability.

  Sandi looked across the room at Lori, who was bubbling over with excitement as she discussed her future with the rest of the White House’s inner circle. A fantasy momentarily took hold in her imagination.

  She snagged Caleb’s arm and escorted him back to the aromatic lure of the food line. “Would you be free for drinks tonight?” she asked.

  “I think I could arrange that.”

  Later that afternoon, Sandi returned to her office in Rosslyn, only to find the place lifeless and demoralized.

  “Where have you been all day?” demanded one of the researchers as Sandi entered the large open room of desks.

  “Oh, first I had to visit the Pentagon’s General Counsel.”

  “Whoa. Stop right there,” came the voice of their congressional liaison. “What does the Pentagon have to do with this?”

  “They’re holding him,” she said. She began to advance on her desk, throwing comments over her shoulder. Stanley Polk was hunkered down in his office and hadn’t appeared before his staff, much less the public, in days.

  “As a matter of fact, the military is holding him on terrorism charges. It appears that Sean is also mixed up with al-Qaeda.”

  A general groan rose from several corners of the room.

  “So I went over to the White House.”

  She heard the staff perk up at their desks. A book fell to the floor.

  “Did the president talk?” came a voice.

  “No,” she said with a self-effacing laugh. “But the attorney general did.”

  She could sense the staff moving in closer.

  “And what did he say, pray tell?”

  She felt their breath against the back of her neck and spun around. They all fell into the nearest place of repose. Some found an empty spot on a desktop, a chair or a comfortable location by the water cooler.

  Her eyes roved from face to face. She seemed to be offering their doomed case its only ray of hope.

  “Well, he acknowledged that the Justice Department is aware that Sean is in the hands of the military at Guantánamo Bay. And he has sent an interrogator down there to take Sean’s deposition.”

  The room erupted with a scream. She instinctively ducked, only to realize that it was a scream for joy. She had managed to unleash their energy and renew their sense of purpose.

  “But,” she cautioned, trying to quiet them down. “We’re not one hundred percent sure this will work.”

  “Let’s go to the press with it!” the public relations man shouted.

  “Don’t let a word of this leak out,” she returned with a savage snarl. “The attorney general’s interrogator has to do his work in utter secrecy, otherwise he’ll never get within a hundred miles of the prison.”

  The group of lawyers and clerks looked at each other in sudden realization. They were entering a very crucial phase that demanded their complete confidentiality.

  “All we can do is wait and hope that the attorney general can get word out of Guantánamo,” Sandi said.

  “The attorney general is part of the Administration.” It was a basso voice, one the average citizen knew from television coverage of the case. It was Stanley Polk. “How can you be sure that he’ll share the information with us?”

  Sandi looked into the red-rimmed eyes of her boss.

  “Because I have a date with him tonight.”

  Harry Black peered at his watch in the glaring mid-afternoon light. It was fifteen hundred hours, the time the camp commander had appointed for him to visit Sean Cooper.

  Approaching the heavy security at Camp Echo to interrogate Cooper, he felt ill equipped. He didn’t have a pen or tape recorder. He had no way of taking down Sean’s testimony, much less a sworn deposition.

  And what incentive did Cooper have to talk? Certainly Harry wasn’t going to beat it out of him. The most Harry could say was that he’d do everything he could to get him released from prison.

  Lieutenant Colonel Rodriguez was standing beyond the guard booth waiting for him.

  Once the lieutenant colonel led him past the razor wire and double guards posted there, Harry was startled to be looking at a set of one-story tract houses. The camp had none of the bluesy Folsom Prison ambience, the Leavenworth institutionalism, or the desolation of San Quentin he had expected. But what did he know?

  “What is this place, a halfway house?”

  It looked like they were in a tidy working class neighborhood. Each bungalow had large windows and a gently slanting roof.

  “Once the President of the United States has selected a detainee for the Military Commission,” the lieutenant colonel explained, “we take him here where he is allowed access to his attorneys.”

  “I’m not his attorney,” Harry objected. “And I’m sure the president wouldn’t select him for anything. I just want to interrogate him in private.”

  “You’ll get to interrogate him,” the lieutenant colonel assured him. He said nothing about privacy.

  They approached the first house in the camp and mounted the three steps. From there, Rodriguez opened the front door, leading him into a place that was subdivided into two rooms.

  One room was for Harry and the other clearly was a prison cell, guarded by an alert-looking MP.

  Through the steel mesh, Harry made out a recently shaven prisoner garbed in orange. His light brown hair with receding hairline and his squinting light brown eyes contrasted sharply with the swarthy, wild-eyed features he had come to associate with terrorists.

  He was looking at a family man from Middle America, someone he might meet at the hardware store, except that his hands and feet were shackled and bolted to the floor.

  “How about some privacy?” he requested, indicating the military policeman standing beside Sean’s cell.

  “He’ll come with me. You have half an hour.”

  Harry checked his watch again. What could he say in half an hour?

  “Fall in,” the lieutenant colonel ordered, and the guard marched with him out the front door.

  Harry studied the man behind bars, the half-blind guy he was supposed to pistol-whip into submission and from whom he was supposed to extract a confession.

  After recent cases of prisoner abuse, the heavy metal gate seemed more to protect the prisoner from him than the reverse. He knew that the prison scandals had forced the Pentagon to revise its doctrine and rules of interrogation. But making him talk to Cooper through bars was going a bit too far.

  He glanced around the room and looked for surveillance devices. Alas, there were far too many pipes, cracks, nooks and crannies where such a device might be hidden. He had to assume that they were being closely monitored, if not recorded.

  This was going to be one useless meeting. He could not press Sean with important questions, much less have the answers written down and signed under oath as an affidavit.

  Damn, he was two feet away from Cooper, but couldn’t get the information he needed.

  He thought of shaking hands, but that, too, was not possible.

  In the end, it was Cooper who made the first move, whispering tentatively, “Glasses.”

 
“Huh?”

  “They’ve got my glasses.”

  “Oh,” Harry said. That explained the squinting. “I’ll check on them.”

  “Are you my lawyer?” Sean asked, as if afraid to open his mouth.

  “No. I’m the guy who’s going to spring you free.”

  Sean took a deep breath and his rigid shoulders fell into a more relaxed position.

  The images and voices of Harry Black and Sean Cooper came crisp and clear under the lawn through a wire onto Lieutenant Colonel Rodriguez’s computer screen.

  From there, the images and voices continued over a cable and were transmitted by satellite to the Pentagon, where Ivan and his team of Judge Advocate General Corps lawyers were recording every last word.

  Rodriguez nodded as he watched the conversation unfold. It became clear to his discerning eye that Harry Black suspected that the interrogation was being recorded, so he remained tight-lipped except to gradually fill Cooper in on what charges he faced.

  “They tell me you got picked up on an al-Qaeda ship in the Pacific,” Harry began.

  Rodriguez recognized the deliberate approach to interrogation, whereby the interrogator befriends the detainee.

  “Not really,” Sean’s voice came from behind the bars.

  “So you’re denying the terrorism charge?”

  “They’re charging me with terrorism?” Sean let out a laugh that seemed to dispel the anxiety in his previous demeanor. “If that’s all it is…”

  “Terrorism against America is a serious charge and can result in capital punishment.”

  Rodriguez continued nodding. The switch to dire threat. By this point Cooper would have to cling to Harry Black for help.

  And, true to the interrogation manual’s prediction, Cooper came forward, entreating his new friend for help.

  “You gotta get me out of here,” he pleaded. “I’ve got a family that I haven’t seen in over a year. I thought they were dead and buried. I can’t go on like this. I’m not a criminal. I never harbored the slightest intention of harming America. I only got kidnapped by some terrorists and they used me. I tried to resist, but they made me pose in a videotape to the White House. I swear, I was under duress.”