Rule of Law

by Randy Singer

  After a pause, the Patriot asked, “Did you know who Patrick and Troy were working for when they conducted Operation Exodus?”

  Nobody answered. It seemed like an obvious question to Paige, but she didn’t want to sound stupid.

  “SEAL Team Six,” Bill Harris eventually said. “The United States Navy.”

  “Not that night,” the Patriot answered. “Our country has no authority to wage war in Yemen. The Authorization for the Use of Military Force Act that was passed right after 9/11 only allows us to conduct traditional military activities in declared war zones, or against al Qaeda and its affiliates anywhere in the world. Yemen and the Houthis don’t qualify. So in order to send Special Ops troops inside Yemen, they had to be deputized by the CIA under Title 50 of the U.S. Code. That way they would be performing covert action, not military operations. They call it being sheep-dipped as spies. It’s the same thing they did with the bin Laden raid in Pakistan.”

  The shadowy figure on the screen leaned forward. He lowered his voice to a metallic whisper. “That’s one reason the president didn’t want to send in another sixty men to retrieve the bodies until she had the support of the American people. She couldn’t make it look like an act of war.”

  All of this information began scrambling Paige’s thinking. It seemed that the Patriot knew precisely what he was talking about, but what could she do about it? And why did it matter? Patrick was dead and he wasn’t coming back.

  “I want to show you one more thing,” the Patriot said.

  His image was replaced by a picture of several men in battle fatigues in the middle of the rubble of a destroyed building. The oldest man, a slim and intense-looking figure, was kneeling over a lamb, preparing to slit its throat.

  “This is a United States military officer sacrificing a lamb at a house in Yemen,” the Patriot said. “Do you know who that officer is?”

  The Patriot’s silhouette appeared back on the screen. “That’s Admiral Paul Towers, the former commanding officer of the Joint Special Operations Forces. He’s sacrificing that lamb as an apology to the family whose loved ones were mistakenly wiped out by a CIA drone strike. A copy of that picture is in the top desk drawer in the room that you’re in now.”

  Paige was stunned by the image. A high-ranking U.S. official engaged in an Islamic ritual to apologize for an act of war? What if this got out?

  To Paige’s surprise, Wyatt Jackson didn’t seem that intrigued by it. “Why does it matter?” he asked, his voice skeptical.

  “It shows the connection between the CIA, who supervises the drone strikes, and the Special Forces in Yemen,” the Patriot said. “It shows that our Special Forces were involved in that country long before the Easter weekend mission.”

  “What are you asking us to do?” Bill Harris asked. “I trusted the military to do what’s right by my grandson. I would have preferred to leave it that way.”

  “The reason I chose the three of you is because I know you have integrity and will have credibility with the public. All I am asking is that you think about the evidence I’ve provided and, if it seems like the right thing to do, take it to your congressmen or senators. Ask them to launch an investigation and get to the bottom of it. I can’t do this directly, but America will listen to the voices of gold-star family members. If I were sitting in your seats, I would want to know the truth.”

  “I’ve tried a lot of cases,” Wyatt said, his arms crossed. “And they usually hinge on the credibility of the witnesses. I’m not going to recommend that Kristen take this anyplace unless we can meet with you in person and weigh your motives and access to information.”

  “I can’t do that,” the Patriot said. “I wish I could. But I’ve given you everything I have. Now, you might want to back away from that computer because it’s going to self-destruct.”

  Surprised, Paige and the others slid their chairs back from the table.

  “Just kidding,” the Patriot said. “In truth, if you want to go to the police and take that computer with you—go right ahead. There will be nothing helpful on it. All I want is for someone with authority to look into this.”

  With that, the screen went dark, and the four people in the room stared at it for a very long time.

  26

  Smooth. That’s the way people described Dylan Pierce. Smooth. Brilliant. Sophisticated. Philip Kilpatrick would add one more descriptor: expensive.

  At forty-five, Pierce was one of the top litigators in the country’s largest law firm. He billed at $1,500 an hour. He once told Kilpatrick that he wanted to raise his rate to $2,000—“five hundred for each of my ex-wives and five hundred to live on.”

  Pierce was everything Kilpatrick was not. He had a full head of jet-black hair, movie-star good looks, and Ivy League credentials: Harvard undergrad, Yale law, Supreme Court clerkship, and now a corner office in Washington, D.C. He also had a photographic memory. Pierce had argued five times at the Supreme Court and had never taken a single note to the podium. He had only lost once, and he still wouldn’t concede that the justices got that one right.

  He showed up in the West Wing in a formfitting Brooks Brothers suit and made himself at home sitting at the polished conference table in the Roosevelt Room. One of the clerks brought him a bottle of water without even asking. Pierce and Kilpatrick traded barbs for a few minutes before they were joined by Vice President Frazier, CIA Director Marcano, and Attorney General Seth Wachsmann.

  In any other administration, this would have been the AG’s show. But Seth Wachsmann disliked these meetings and had delegated most of the heavy lifting to Pierce. Seth was introverted, melancholy, and a stickler for details. His grandfather had been a Holocaust survivor, and that heritage had colored nearly every aspect of Seth’s worldview. He was sixty-one with a receding hairline, a long sloping forehead, an oversize nose, and a closely cropped gray beard.

  The whole concept of a “kill list” had always bothered Seth, and in the first months of the administration he had worked hard to narrow the parameters. Amanda Hamilton had inherited a kill list of thousands from the Obama administration and some fairly loose criteria for inclusion.

  What really grated on Seth were the so-called “signature strikes” based solely on the intelligence signatures of the targets. In much the same way that cops could recognize drug-running houses by the traffic patterns of people visiting, the CIA could establish that the occupants of a certain building were assisting terrorist organizations by looking at patterns of behavior established through aerial surveillance, cell phone signal intercepts, and other nonspecific sources. Drone strikes could be authorized based on such profiles even if the occupants’ identities weren’t known—wiping out not just the persons assisting the terrorists but everyone in the house.

  Seth had argued that the new administration should go back to a rule that allowed drone strikes only against known terrorist leaders. He had eventually convinced the president but used a lot of political capital in the process.

  That’s when the senior leadership team had brought in Dylan Pierce. He’d put together a ninety-page document called the “Authorization Memo” that justified the continued use of drones under both domestic and international law. He now attended these meetings as a counterbalance to Wachsmann—one lawyer justifying the nonjudicial killings intellectually, the other serving as the country’s conscience so that things didn’t get out of hand.

  The president arrived last, briskly shook hands, and took her place at the head of the table. Pierce and Wachsmann sat down opposite each other, and Philip Kilpatrick settled in for the show. The issue today was whether they should add a Muslim cleric from Iran named Yazeed Abdul Hamid to the list.

  According to sources that John Marcano called “eminently reliable,” Abdul Hamid was scheduled to deliver a sermon at a mosque in Aden. It would be a rare trip inside Yemen, and the CIA had the capability to take him out using drones or Special Forces on loan from JSOC. It could be done at night and be made to look like a highway bomb or an
attack by coalition forces from northern Yemen. All they needed was the green light.

  The problem was that Abdul Hamid could not be connected to al Qaeda or ISIS in any operational sense. His hate-filled sermons had inspired many suicide bombers and terrorist attacks. But was that enough?

  Dylan Pierce had already circulated a lengthy memo to everyone in the meeting arguing that Abdul Hamid fit the established criteria. He went through the high points now, using the factors that had been established under the Obama administration. The capture of Abdul Hamid for detainment and trial was not feasible or politically wise. The operation to take him out would be conducted in a manner consistent with applicable law-of-war principles. He posed an imminent threat of violent attacks against the United States. This last point, Kilpatrick knew, was quite a stretch.

  “We killed Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen with a drone strike for motivating and recruiting terrorists, and he was a U.S. citizen,” Pierce argued. “Is a man like Abdul Hamid, who inspires thousands of terrorists, less dangerous than a soldier who sets off a single bomb? We have verifiable intelligence that he met with ISIS leaders shortly before three terrorist attacks. Just because he’s a cleric doesn’t disqualify him from the list. Otherwise bin Laden would still be alive.”

  “You can’t compare Hamid to bin Laden,” Seth Wachsmann contended. “Bin Laden planned the attacks, recruited soldiers, and ran a terrorist organization. He was the leader of a terrorist group and just happened to be a cleric. Hamid is an imam whose sermons we don’t like. But every time a drone takes out a leader like Hamid, ten thousand others take his place. This is dangerously close to assassinating someone for free speech.”

  That comment got an immediate rise from several others, and the argument escalated. Free speech didn’t include inciting terrorist activity. Besides, Abdul Hamid was doing more than preaching sermons and spewing hate. He was meeting with terrorist leaders shortly before known terrorist actions. How much more evidence did they need?

  Philip Kilpatrick watched the president’s face as the debate intensified. This was exactly what Hamilton wanted—the best thinking of smart people with the freedom to speak their minds. And as a former prosecutor, she was perfectly equipped to make the final call.

  But she also had a schedule to keep, and it was Kilpatrick’s job to make sure she did.

  “Madam President,” he interrupted. “The senators have been waiting for ten minutes.”

  She frowned, resentful that she had to bring the meeting to an end. “It’s a close call,” she said. “Whenever I’m tempted to say no, I think about the innocent lives that will be lost because a man like Abdul Hamid recruits and inspires terrorists. But when I think about saying yes, I go back to this nation’s core principles. Anwar al-Awlaki was an American citizen whom we killed in Yemen. But he had been tried in absentia by the Yemeni courts and found guilty of being a member of al Qaeda. A Yemeni judge ordered that he be captured dead or alive. We don’t have that same kind of judicial basis for taking out Hamid.”

  She surveyed the men at the table, cognizant that Dylan Pierce and John Marcano would be the most disappointed. “As you know,” she said, “on close calls we err on the side of restraint.”

  “I understand,” Director Marcano said quickly. “But I would assume there is no objection to our sharing intelligence with the coalition army in Yemen.”

  Kilpatrick watched as the president thought about this for a moment. Could they do indirectly what she had chosen not to do directly?

  “They are our allies,” the president finally said. “Let’s treat them like it.”

  Later that day, there was a meeting between Philip Kilpatrick and John Marcano on a park bench overlooking the Potomac River. It was a beautiful spring day, but Marcano was not in a chatty mood. From start to finish, the entire meeting lasted fifteen minutes.

  Less than forty-eight hours later, on the other side of the planet, Yazeed Abdul Hamid delivered a stem-winder of a sermon at a mosque in Aden, calling on Shia Muslims to join the jihad against the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Israel. The sermon was immediately posted on the Internet and distributed throughout the Arab world. The tall cleric cut an imposing figure with his long black beard and blazing eyes, speaking with a cadence and conviction that his followers found mesmerizing.

  That night, as Hamid’s caravan traveled along the bumpy roads of a mountain range near the Yemeni coast, it was ambushed by a group of eighty soldiers who gunned down everyone in the entourage. One of the men, who had been shot and feigned death, survived. He would later describe the attackers—men wielding AK-47s, their faces hidden by black scarves. They had on the telltale garb of the coalition Yemeni forces—khaki pants, broad belts, and aviator jackets.

  But it was dark, and the survivor didn’t notice the feet of his attackers. If he had, he would have seen the black low-top Salomons worn by nearly every one of the men who had killed Abdul Hamid.

  27

  After their meeting with the Patriot, Paige Chambers and Bill Harris agreed to spend a few days researching the matter. If the information the Patriot had given them checked out, they would return to Washington and approach Congressman Mason from Virginia’s second congressional district. Paige also agreed to meet with Wyatt Jackson, though she wasn’t happy about it.

  A few days after returning to Virginia Beach, Paige went to see Kristen and the boys. It was sad watching the boys play without their father. Kristen seemed less patient with them and finally herded them back to the bedroom so that she and Paige could talk alone.

  They talked about the ceremony at Arlington, and both teared up. Kristen told a few more stories about Patrick’s and Troy’s exploits. She said that it if wasn’t for Patrick, Troy would never have made it through BUD/S.

  It didn’t take long for their conversation to turn to the Patriot. Kristen didn’t know what to think. Paige shared her misgivings about Wyatt Jackson. She told Kristen about the rape case and how little respect she had for the way Jackson went about his business. She tried to keep her remarks measured, but she knew she wasn’t hiding her animosity very well.

  “I hear you,” Kristen said, fiddling with her coffee cup. “But Troy loved Wyatt, and that man bailed Troy out on about three different occasions. I mean, you’re probably twice as smart as him, but the guy’s been around the block a few times, and I would just feel better with him involved.”

  Paige wrestled with whether she should push the point. She had talked with Kristen almost every day since Patrick’s death, and the friendship meant so much to her. She didn’t want to jeopardize it over the involvement of Wyatt Jackson.

  “Just think about it,” Paige said. “It’s fine with me either way, but I wanted to make sure you knew about my concerns.”

  Kristen seemed content to let it drop, and Caleb came running out of the bedroom crying. Between sobs, he claimed that Justin had hit him and knocked him down. Tiny was standing next to Caleb, his tail wagging as if he were vouching for the little guy’s story. Kristen hugged her youngest son, told him he would be all right, and called for Justin to come out and face his accuser. Under cross-examination, Justin claimed total innocence. It was just an accident, and besides, Caleb had hit him first.

  After she had restored some semblance of order and the two women were alone again, Kristen’s eyes filled with tears. Everything was still so raw. “I keep asking God why they have to grow up without a daddy,” she said.

  Nobody would confuse the three lawyers who gathered at the KOA campground on General Booth Boulevard in Virginia Beach with the high-powered crowd that had gathered two days earlier in Washington, D.C. A few years ago, Wyatt Jackson had sold his house in an upscale golf course community, socked some of the money away in an offshore account, and used the rest to purchase a luxury motor home. He took it on the road when he tried out-of-town cases and lived at the KOA campground the rest of the year. Tonight, he had suggested that Paige meet him and his associate at “his office,” and she had reluctantly agreed. />
  It was a chilly April evening the first time Paige met Wyatt’s associate—a pudgy young lawyer named Wellington Farnsworth. He looked all of nineteen years old, with soft, pale skin, light-blond hair, and a round face that looked like he hadn’t started shaving yet. He wore a hoodie as the three lawyers pulled up chairs around a campfire Wyatt had built.

  Despite Wellington’s boyish looks, Paige knew he should not be underestimated. He had graduated from Southeastern Law School at twenty-one at the top of his class. His job was to do Wyatt Jackson’s research, prepare outlines for Wyatt’s examination of witnesses, and compose legal briefs. In other words, Wellington did all the grunt work.

  The three of them were joined by Wyatt’s golden retriever, a friendly mess of a dog that Wyatt called Clients.

  “Clients?” Paige asked.

  “Yeah,” Wellington said. “My cell phone is the firm’s general number, and when people say they need to talk to Mr. Jackson, I tell them he’s meeting with Clients.”

  “And my RV is named Court,” Wyatt said.

  What a crew, Paige thought.

  Like Paige, Wellington and Wyatt had done some research on what the Patriot told them. Wyatt was convinced the information was legit. He lit up a cigar and puffed on it as they talked.

  “What makes you so sure?” Paige asked. It was seven thirty, and the sun had just disappeared behind a row of trees.

  “That stuff about the SEALs working for the CIA checked out,” Wyatt said proudly. He took a sip of beer and leaned back in his webbed chair, cigar smoke swirling around him. He was staring at the fire as he talked. “I had Wellington apply for some death benefits for Troy that are available only to CIA members. Sure enough, they confirmed that he would be eligible.”