by Randy Singer
Those samples were entered into an enormous CIA database at Langley and cross-referenced against the DNA of known CIA targets. The program, code-named Operation Harvest, had produced more than its share of drone targets in the last two years.
During the same week that Taj Deegan was promising judicial restraint and equal justice to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Operation Harvest yielded another hit. And this time, it was a big one.
In one of the remote villages in the northeast corner of Yemen, doctors had immunized two boys whose DNA suggested they were the sons of Saleet Zafar. Excitedly, Marcano directed as many assets as possible into the area. They would immediately begin creating a matrix of satellite images and drone surveillance footage, using facial recognition technology to find the imam when he went to visit his sons.
He had slipped through their net before. This time, they would bring him into the boat.
58
VIRGINIA BEACH, VIRGINIA
For Paige, there was nothing quite like running the Cape Henry Trail at First Landing State Park early in the morning. One of the perks of being self-employed was that she could come back to her apartment sweaty and take her time starting her work.
In many ways, her morning run was the most important part of her workday. It gave her a chance to think, the endorphins triggering an ability to focus and be creative in ways that she found impossible when sitting behind her desk.
Paige was running hard, lost in her thoughts, her playlist pushing her forward, when she noticed a man in her peripheral vision. He startled her. Instead of running by, he fell into stride.
“Good morning,” he said.
Paige left her earbuds in and nodded. She hadn’t seen another runner in several minutes, and she was alone in the middle of a large swampy park with a strange man whom she could clearly not outrun. Her heart started beating faster, and she picked up the pace.
“Mind if I run with you for a bit?”
She glanced over and immediately recognized him. Handsome face, short dark hair, a strong jawline, and dark-brown eyes. He was wearing a T-shirt that was too tight only around the arms, showing off biceps and a V-shaped torso.
Daniel Reese.
“This is a pretty mean pace,” he said. “About seven and a half?”
Paige took her earbuds out. What was he doing here?
“Something like that,” she said. “Why are you following me?”
“I thought this might be a good place to talk. Someplace where we wouldn’t be seen.”
“Seems like a phone could have done the trick,” Paige said. Her breath was coming in short, labored bursts.
“Can we walk awhile?” Reese asked. “I think if you let me explain, you’ll understand why I chose to do it this way.”
Paige shook her head and looked down at her watch as if she were gunning for a personal record. These military guys sure loved the cloak-and-dagger stuff. But she still didn’t know what to make of Reese. The sooner they got to the end of the trail, the better she would feel. “I’ll tell you what, Mr. Reese. If it’s all the same to you, you can talk while we’re running.”
“Okay,” Reese said. “But please call me Daniel.”
Paige decided she would push the pace as much as she could and at least get Daniel breathing hard. If he wanted to talk, he would have to do it while running these 7:30 miles.
Over the next few minutes, she found that he was entirely up to the task. He stayed step for step with her for the next mile while telling her more about his lifelong dream of being a Navy SEAL and how he had served four tours in Iraq. Then he had met Admiral Towers and was assigned administrative responsibilities, eventually becoming chief of staff. He missed the combat missions but felt a real sense of purpose serving his country.
He admired Patrick Quillen and the other members of SEAL Team Six, an elite team that he had never qualified for himself. “Everybody loved and respected Q,” Reese said. “He was cut from a different cloth.”
By the time they reached the large pavilion at the end of the trail, Paige felt more comfortable with her new running partner. Nevertheless, as she turned to head back, running another three miles to her car, she decided to push the pace even more.
Reese kept up and continued to talk. He told Paige that at first her lawsuit had made him angry. He thought it was a publicity stunt and a money grab by Wyatt Jackson. But the more he watched Paige and Wyatt, the more he became convinced that they might actually have a chance. At the very least, he knew they weren’t going down without a fight, and he wanted to help.
Paige immediately thought about the Patriot and wondered if she was perhaps running next to him at that very moment. The Patriot had expressed the same kind of thoughts. But Reese had turned against them with his affidavit. “You’ve got a strange way of helping,” she said.
“I know. But everything I said in that affidavit is true, and they could have proven it a thousand other ways. I had to earn their trust.”
Paige didn’t know if she believed him. Maybe he had been sent by the CIA to gain inside information about her case. There was so much misdirection going on. She decided she wouldn’t give anything away. Besides, she didn’t have the breath to talk much right now.
“I’m about to tell you some things that could get me in a lot of trouble,” Reese said. “I’m doing this for Q and the rest of his team. But I need you to understand that we never had this conversation unless the case goes to trial. If you get that far, I’ll come in and testify to everything I’m about to tell you even though it will put my career at risk.”
He paused for a moment to let that sink in and to catch his breath. “I won’t share classified information, but I can point you in the right direction to get everything you need.”
Paige took off her sunglasses, wiped the sweat from her eyes with her shirt, and kept running. She put her shades back on. “I can keep a secret. And I could really use the help.”
Reese began by confirming the news accounts about the night of the raid. He had been on video conference with the Situation Room. Towers and President Hamilton had always had a rocky relationship, but that night it exploded.
“I’m not telling you anything that hasn’t already been reported,” Reese emphasized. “Towers wanted to send in the Quick Response Force to extract the bodies of the SEALs after the mission went south, but the president wouldn’t let him. There was a tense standoff, and she removed him from command the next day. Now he’s in an administrative position at the Pentagon.”
Paige could hear the frustration in Reese’s voice. Every SEAL and former SEAL knew the mantra: Nobody left behind.
“Admiral Towers is a good man, one of the most honorable people I’ve ever known. He deserves better,” Reese said.
They passed a runner coming from the opposite direction, and they both ran in silence for a few minutes. The only sounds were their running shoes hitting hard-packed dirt and their heavy breathing. To her satisfaction, Paige noticed that Reese was starting to have a harder time catching his breath as he talked.
“Is there any chance you could slow this down to a mere sprint?” he asked.
Paige suppressed a smile and backed off just a tad. “Thought you were a SEAL,” she said.
“A SEAL. Not a track star.”
They talked for nearly sixty minutes—thirty while running, five while gasping for breath afterward, and another twenty-five on a long walk. Reese had a disarming manner that relaxed Paige, and she found herself letting down her guard.
“You’re lucky I didn’t have a can of pepper spray,” she said after he apologized again for running up beside her earlier that morning.
“You didn’t seem like a pepper-spray kind of girl,” he said.
He helped Paige understand the relationship between the military and the CIA and how things generally worked on a mission like Operation Exodus. He reiterated that he would be willing to testify for Paige at trial “within lawful parameters.” Primarily, he said, he wanted to meet with P
aige and see if there was anything informal he could do to help—any questions he might be able to answer.
Paige asked a bunch of questions, but the main one she had—about the president’s and Director Marcano’s knowledge of whether the operation had been compromised—he couldn’t help her on. Still, she was starting to trust this guy. He was giving her too much information for it to be a setup.
“I’ve received a couple of phone calls from a drone pilot,” Paige told him just before they parted ways. “Claimed the CIA asked him to lie about how long they had conducted drone surveillance before a certain drone strike.”
This definitely piqued Reese’s interest. “Lie to whom?”
“Anybody who asked about it,” Paige said. She gave Reese the details of the phone calls. “If I gave you copies of the recorded calls, could you find out who it is?”
Reese said that he would try. They arranged a place where Paige would drop off a thumb drive later that morning.
She thanked him and they shook hands.
That’s when she asked him, watching carefully for the slightest flicker of recognition.
“Have you ever heard of a person nicknamed the Patriot?”
Reese didn’t blink, though he took a second to respond. “No. Who is that?”
“Good question,” Paige said. She turned and headed for her car. “See you in a couple of hours.”
Paige gave Reese the thumb drive later that morning and only then called Wellington to let him know what she had done. She knew Wellington would report to Wyatt, and she didn’t want the two men trying to talk her out of it.
The gamble paid off two days later when Paige received a call at nine o’clock at night.
“My name is Brandon Lawrence,” the man said. “I’m a drone pilot in the U.S. Air Force.” He hesitated and took a deep breath. “I’m the one who’s been calling you.”
59
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Fortune favors the bold, Philip Kilpatrick thought. And sometimes the cunning. And often those who have spent a lifetime nurturing relationships, never knowing when you might need someone to cover your back.
That was the case now, and for nearly a month Kilpatrick had thought it through like a grand master of chess, anticipating moves and countermoves and a decision tree of endless possibilities. It wasn’t hard with Wyatt Jackson and Paige Chambers—they were amateurs, street players against Bobby Fischer. But John Marcano was another matter. He was unpredictable and canny, an expert at using deception, and one of the most powerful men in Washington, D.C.
But he wouldn’t be ready for this. How could he be? Kilpatrick had played the scenario out many times, anticipating every reaction, and always came to the same conclusion. Checkmate. This was a way Kilpatrick could avoid testifying, put the Anderson case behind him, and get back to saving the country.
Four days before Labor Day weekend, Kilpatrick called Harry Coburn, a reporter for the New York Tribune, a man he trusted more than anyone else in the Fourth Estate. He couldn’t even count how many confidential tips he had given this guy over the past few years. In the process, Kilpatrick had been building up the favor chips one by one, and now it was time for a big withdrawal.
He got Coburn on the phone and told him the stipulations. You must be willing to go to jail before burning your source. If necessary to reduce the heat, you can make it look like the information came from the plaintiff’s lawyers. You must release the story on my timetable.
Coburn made every guarantee with the eagerness of a young child promising to keep his room clean in exchange for a trip to Disney World. Kilpatrick could almost hear it over the phone—the dreams of a Pulitzer Prize now within reach.
Kilpatrick said he wouldn’t send the document electronically. He didn’t want to leave a digital trail that would point back to him. If Coburn wanted the story, he would have to come and get a hard copy.
Coburn said he would arrive via Amtrak the same day. “How long is it?” he asked.
Kilpatrick had a hard copy of the document sitting on his desk. He checked the last page. “Four hundred eighty-two pages.”
“Wow! Are you sure no one else has access to it?”
Kilpatrick was sure. The court orders were very specific, the recipients were all classified, and the number of people who had access to this document could be counted on two hands. “I think you should shoot for the weekend edition,” he said.
He hung up the phone and smiled, then tucked the bound document into his briefcase and headed out the door to a local OfficeMax. He would handle the copying of this one himself, using gloves, so there would be no fingerprints on what he handed to Coburn.
The deposition of John Marcano, protected by court order under pain of fine and imprisonment, was about to hit the press.
60
VIRGINIA BEACH, VIRGINIA
As August drew to a close, Paige and Wellington spent every spare moment working on their Supreme Court brief and analyzing the justices. They researched prior decisions and backgrounds, looking for hints at how the justices might rule on the state secrets issue.
Some of them were easy. The three justices in the Court’s conservative bloc had never met an alleged criminal that didn’t belong behind bars. In the balancing act between security and liberty, they came down hard on the side of law and order. In this case, they would be reluctant to pull back the curtain on the CIA, even if doing so meant they could embarrass a Democrat in the White House.
Justice David Sikes, one of the younger justices on the Court and former White House counsel for George W. Bush, had defended the CIA’s interrogation program under Bush and would certainly defend the agency now. Justice Barton Cooper, a seventy-two-year-old conservative appointed by Bush Sr., was a former Texas judge who had affirmed the death penalty dozens of times. The only justice with facial hair, he had been dubbed “the Beard” by the creatively challenged lawyers who practiced before the Court. The Beard wasn’t going to be in Paige’s and Wellington’s camp. Nor was the woman who sat to his immediate left, closest to the chief justice because of her seniority. Justice Kathryn Byrd, gray-haired, thoughtful, and quiet, could be counted on to vote with the conservative bloc every time.
There were four liberals who would probably help Paige and Wellington despite the fact that a win for SEAL Team Nine would be a loss for the Democrats in the administration. Justice Augusta Augustini, a brilliant jurist who had taught at Harvard Law and managed to pump out a novel every other year, would be an outspoken ally. So would the two veteran African American justices—Reginald Murphy, a former Innocence Project lawyer, and William Martin Jacobs III, a large man weighing in at almost three hundred pounds who had made a career arguing civil rights cases. Jacobs had been appointed by President Clinton, and the word around the Court was that he never wrote a word of his own opinions but had a knack for hiring Ivy League clerks who shared his crusading ideology and did all the work for him.
The fourth liberal was less certain. Justice Evangelina Torres was the Court’s only Hispanic justice. A former senator from California, she had been nominated by President Obama during his last year in office and confirmed by a Democrat-controlled Congress in the months following Hamilton’s election. Philosophically, Paige and Wellington thought she would side with them. But she had served on the Foreign Relations Committee during her days in the Senate and might be particularly sensitive to exposing classified CIA information.
That left two potential swing votes—Chief Justice Cyrus Leonard and forty-five-year-old Taj Deegan. Wellington was about 90 percent sure that the chief, given his faithful adherence to Supreme Court precedent, would not be willing to overturn the 1953 Reynolds case. And if Wellington was right, they could only win if they carried the vote of every liberal justice, including former senator Evangelina Torres, and also won over Taj Deegan.
It was a monumental challenge, and it didn’t help that Wyatt seemed disinterested and unprepared during their prep sessions. He didn’t grasp the nuances of prior c
ase law and, in Paige’s opinion, kept making statements that sounded more like jury arguments than points of law that would sway seasoned judges.
The sessions became tense, and Paige exacerbated the problem by intentionally asking questions she knew Wyatt couldn’t answer. After one particularly poor performance inside his RV, Wyatt lit up a cigar, declared himself tired of the process, and said they should take a few weeks off so he could come back to the case with a fresh perspective.
“I think we need to practice every day,” Paige insisted. “There’s a lot to cover, and we only get one chance at this.”
Wyatt scoffed at the notion. “I work better under pressure. I won’t even remember anything I read a month ahead of time. Besides, I’ve got other cases.”
His attitude had long since worn Paige’s patience thin. It grated her that she and Wellington were working around the clock when the man who would actually argue the case had such a cavalier attitude.
“Have you even read these?” she asked, pointing to the black notebooks full of prior cases. She brushed away a stream of smoke from Wyatt’s cigar. She glared at Wellington for a second—I thought you said he never lit up inside. “Our entire case hinges on your argument, and you haven’t even cracked these notebooks.”
Wyatt shrugged and took another puff. “You don’t get it,” he said. “You actually think we can win this case?”
Wellington spoke up. “If we can convince both Justice Torres and Justice Deegan, we can win. Why don’t Paige and I just finish the brief and then you can read that and start there?”
“Because you don’t get it either,” Wyatt said. “I hate to break it to you two, but we stand no chance of winning this case.” He watched Paige swat away some more smoke, frowned, and snuffed out his cigar in a nearby ashtray. “We’re going to the Supreme Court, where we hope that we can somehow get five justices to say that we can take a few depositions. We’ll probably lose that argument, but even if we win, then what? Kilpatrick will deny and obfuscate and hide behind state secrets just like Marcano did. We’ve been at this for months, and we still don’t even have a clue whether the CIA told the president that the mission was compromised.”
