“I remember him. And you saw him dropped at sea?”
“I believe I did. One of the aircrew said the practice has been going on for months. Later, I met the base chief, who confirmed it. And when he showed me around the detention facility, some of the women I saw were clearly U.S. citizens. Young radicals from Virginia, apparently. Suspects in the Richmond courthouse bombing.”
He held back Carol’s name intentionally.
“But why would DHS be holding American citizens at their offshore transit center? That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Unless they were sent there to be disappeared. According to news reports, the FBI lists the women as fugitives. In any event, I suggested the base chief return them for trial.”
“Do you think he’ll do it?”
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Zorn answered with a shrug before raising his wine glass. “Could you check on it? Maybe through your friend Audrey at DOJ?”
Slattery drew a deep breath.
“Yes, I suppose I could. Audrey has serious concerns about detainee removals since Middleburg. But it could be risky. What if she insists on details?”
“Just tell her that the women were spotted at a Caribbean transit facility operated by Tetra and ask her if they’ve been returned for prosecution.”
“I’m having lunch with Audrey tomorrow,” Slattery volunteered, a lump rising in her throat at the idea of sharing the information with Lamb. “I’ll ask her. But what are you going to do about what you’ve seen? Will you be reporting it to Pat Craven at DHS?”
“At some point. But not quite yet. Look, Margaret, Pat can’t possibly be ignorant of what DHS is doing with those detainees. It may be legal, but it’s wrong. And now that I know what’s going on down there, I refuse to be caught up in it. This morning I asked outside counsel to draft termination notices for Zorn Security’s DHS contracts. As soon as I review the drafts, I’ll be returning to France to seek the board’s approval to execute them.”
“If Pat knew that detainees were being disappeared, why would he let you go there? Did he trust you that much?”
Zorn shrugged.
“Pat and I used to work together back when we were in the Agency. And, with me being my father’s son, he and Larry Lawless probably thought they could trust me not to freak out at whatever I saw.”
But even before the words left his mouth, Zorn realized that his behavior at Corvus Base must have shattered whatever remained of that trust.
“Lawless?” Slattery interrupted with wide eyes. “Did Lawless know you’d be going to the base?”
“It’s a Tetra facility. So I asked Larry about going there. He said he’d talk to Pat. In fact, Pat was originally scheduled to be my traveling companion. But he never showed up. Now that I look back on it, I think the main reason the two of them allowed me to visit the base was to make me complicit in whatever they were doing down there. And to blackmail me if I didn’t go along.”
“Blackmail you? But how?”
Zorn ran his finger around the rim of his wineglass while he considered how best to answer. After a moment’s pause, he exhaled deeply and went on.
“They have a sort of initiation ritual, or rite of passage, for highly placed people in the ESM program. It involves tricking the new boys into taking a hand in dumping detainees. So they can’t speak out against it later.”
Now it was Slattery’s turn to hesitate. She bit her lip before speaking in a hollow voice.
“And did you take a hand in throwing anyone overboard?”
“Not intentionally,” Zorn answered with a half-truth to avoid the need to justify himself. “But I was there when it happened. So I’m getting out of the program before anyone can claim that I was a witting participant.”
“Wait a second,” Slattery interrupted. “If you have evidence of abuse, you can’t just sit on it. Why not report the abuse and terminate your DHS contracts at the same time?”
Zorn looked at Slattery as if she had landed from Mars.
“Do you take me for an idiot? Listen, if I blew the whistle about what I saw on that trip, DHS would claim that I breached my NDA and pack me off to solitary confinement before I could say 'Fort Leavenworth.'”
“But I’m not asking you to talk to the media. If DHS or Tetra is breaking the law, why not turn over your evidence to DOJ and let their prosecutors prepare a case?”
“Because Craven and Lawless would know right away that the evidence came from me. Then they’d come after me with every weapon they had. Even telling you is a risk. That’s why we’re sitting here between two blaring radios.”
Only then did it hit him that telling Slattery might be as much a risk to her as it was to him. Because, while he had no intention of talking to anyone besides her about the dumpings, once Slattery conveyed his information to Audrey Lamb, DHS and Tetra would do all they could to make her recant, or failing that, to discredit her. The thought of it sent a shiver up Zorn’s spine.
“But how can we stop DHS from dropping detainees out of airplanes without taking our evidence to law enforcement?” Slattery persisted. “At the very least, you’ve got to swear out a statement for Audrey detailing what you saw.”
“Oh, no,” Zorn demurred, shaking his head vigorously. “No statement. Not yet, at least. Once I’m back in France and I’ve given notice on our contracts, I’ll do what I can to help. Until then, I’d rather go on collecting evidence and keep it between us.”
“But I’m seeing Audrey tomorrow. At least give me some names or other details that I can give her right away,” Slattery urged. “I promise not to tell her they’re from you.”
Zorn lifted his wine glass by the stem, gave it a quick swirl, and drank deeply.
“Okay, I’ll tell you the name of the kid I saw dumped. And that of the base chief. And the base’s location. But I won’t identify the aircrew I flew in with.”
No, not the aircrew employed by Zorn Air Logistics.
“That’s it? So you’re just going to resign your contracts and go? After everything we heard in Middleburg, you’re going to look the other way and let DHS and Tetra commit the biggest mass lynching in American history?”
“I never said I was going to let them off the hook. I want to end the abuses, too. And I realize that you and Audrey are sticking your necks out to clean up this mess. But I’m not a high-powered government lawyer like you, with all the built-in protections of working for the White House counsel. I’m just a private contractor, and a French one, at that. Which makes me a prime candidate for scapegoat.”
“Oh, so we’re playing the poor foreigner now? What was that you once said about being one hundred percent American?”
“At this point, I’ll settle for being one hundred percent alive. Besides, I knew nothing about the dumpings until I boarded that damned removal flight. Isn’t it enough that I’m getting out of ESM as soon as I knew what was going on? You were at Middleburg, Margaret. Nobody there gave a rat’s ass about excesses except for you and Audrey.”
Slattery reached for the wine bottle and moved to refill Zorn’s glass.
“Well, if you’re not willing to record an affidavit or meet with Audrey before you go, would you at least consider an off-the-record conversation with Nelson Blackburn? If anyone in the White House has the clout to straighten things out quietly behind the scenes, Nelson does. And he’s not a lawyer, if that’s your concern.”
“From what I’ve seen of your friend Nelson, I think he’s closer to the problem than the solution,” Zorn observed, gazing into his glass. “So, no, I won’t talk to him. But you can, Go ahead and tell him everything I’ve told you. Just don’t attribute it to me until I’ve signed those termination letters.”
“So, does that mean we won’t be seeing each other any more? Funny, I thought we were in this together,” Slattery answered, looking away with a hurt expression.
“But we are, Margaret. It’s still the two of us against the lot of them. I haven’t given up the fight at all. It’s just that I h
ave my obligations and you have yours. And at the moment, mine take me back to France.”
Chapter Seventeen: Renditions Branch
“Those who are kind to the cruel will end up being cruel to the kind.
–The Talmud (Midrash)
EARLY JUNE, WASHINGTON, D.C.
Zorn did not feel particularly proud of himself as he drove away from Margaret Slattery’s apartment. While pulling Zorn USA out of the ESM program was the right thing to do, he couldn’t forget that he and his company had played a central role in that program for nearly three months. And, now that he had revealed to Slattery what he knew about the DHS’s abuses, he would be leaving her exposed to the wrath of Tetra and DHS should the Justice Department or Nelson Blackburn move against them.
Zorn longed to protect her, but what could he do from France? He also felt under a duty to report all he knew about detainee abuses to the Justice Department, but dared not contact them until the ESM contracts were no longer in effect. Until then, the most he felt he could do was stay in touch with Margaret and supply her discreetly with any new evidence he could gather from Jack Nagy or elsewhere
Zorn pulled the Volvo over to the curb on Rhode Island Avenue and parked long enough to send Nagy a text on his burner phone to confirm his estimated time of arrival at Tysons Corner, where they had agreed to meet. Zorn felt good that he could offer the retired spy some news about his missing daughter. Not the best news, as she was being held abroad in a secret government facility and faced federal prosecution. But at least she was alive and relatively unharmed. And she had a fair chance of being sent back to the mainland, where it might be possible to render her some legal assistance. All the same, Zorn couldn’t shake the fear that Carol’s captors would never allow someone who had been held at Corvus Base to speak out in open court.
Though the sun had been down for half an hour, the night air was thick with moisture and the Volvo’s air conditioner was laboring hard as Zorn joined westbound I-66. A few minutes later, he turned on the car radio, which was pre-set to an all-news station. He listened to the weather and traffic report for little more than a minute before the radio suddenly switched all by itself to another station where the pulsating beat of a hip-hop tune played at full volume. A moment later, the climate control system turned from cool to hot, blasting him with steamy air. Overhead, the sunroof opened of its own accord and dispersed the heat with turbulent gusts of wind. Out in front, the Volvo’s headlights blinked off and on in rapid cadence.
But worst of all, the car shot ahead like a slingshot, though he hadn’t touched the gas pedal. Zorn tapped the brakes, then stomped hard on them. No effect. Sixty-five, seventy, seventy-five, eighty, eighty-five miles an hour. He gripped the steering wheel firmly with both hands and changed lanes to pass the car directly ahead, and then wove back into the right lane to pass another. Before him was a gathering of vehicles too dense to snake through. He tapped the brakes again, without result. Racking his brain for some other way to slow the car, he grabbed the shift lever and tried to shift from drive into neutral. It wouldn’t budge.
The Volvo was barely five car lengths from colliding with the car ahead when Zorn felt the acceleration abruptly slacken. He tried the brakes again. Still no effect, but the car continued to slow. Except now the steering wheel locked up and the car started veering slowly to the right. At nearly sixty miles per hour, he would be off the shoulder and into the trees in a matter of seconds.
Then, just as the Volvo’s wheels edged off the pavement onto the gravel-strewn shoulder, the brakes suddenly worked again. The car skidded, went into a fishtail, and then righted itself before coming to a halt off the gravel shoulder. At that moment the radio went quiet and the air conditioning turned off. Zorn’s hand darted out to kill the engine.
Through the open sunroof Zorn could hear the roar of traffic speeding past. The car’s interior was dark except for illumination from powerful halide streetlamps flooding in through the open sunroof. For the first time during the brief ordeal he noticed his heart pounding hard and felt short of breath. What on earth had happened? Had the car gone berserk all of its own? Or did it have help?
With the transmission in park, Zorn re-started the engine and closed the sunroof. The engine idled at a low hum and all seemed normal. He set the climate control to seventy degrees and felt a cool breeze pour out of the dashboard vents. Next he turned on the radio and heard the same announcer from the same news channel as before the incident. He checked all the dashboard settings, even looking beneath the dash, before detecting a black thumb drive plugged into the USB port inside the car’s center console.
He’d never seen the thumb drive before. He pulled it out, gave it a close look, and slipped it into his shirt pocket. While he doubted being able to trace the device’s software back to its source, he knew now that the Volvo’s shenanigans had been no random malfunction. Most likely, word of his visit to Corvus had made its way back to Tetra Corp. And someone there, no longer assured of his unqualified support, had sent him a warning. But rather than intimidate Zorn, it outraged him. He would not be silenced so easily.
Zorn pulled out his burner phone and texted Jack Nagy one more time.
“Same plan as before. Except now you will be picking me up in your car instead of me taking you in mine. And add ten minutes to my ETA.”
Zorn arrived just ahead of the revised pickup time and parked outside a family restaurant two doors down from the one where he was to await Nagy. Fearing that whoever hacked the Volvo might also have tracked its location via GPS, he left his work phone in the car and carried only the burner phone. And as he made his way through scattered parked cars to the meeting point, he spotted no one following him.
“Thanks for coming on short notice,” Zorn greeted Nagy after hopping into the man’s aging Nissan Rogue.
“Not a problem.”
Nagy was dressed just as he’d been the last time Zorn saw him, in jeans and a smart-looking golf shirt. Though no longer new, the car was immaculately clean inside and out.
“Where to?”
“Turn left the next chance you get and enter the mall’s main parking lot. We’ll do a circuit around the perimeter a few times and come back to where we started.”
“Got it,” Nagy answered, his eyes fixed on the road. They crossed the main highway and headed toward the sprawling mall complex. Before the intifada, its parking lot would have been jam-packed all evening. But a recent suicide bombing had kept shoppers away.
“I have some news for you,” Zorn began. “But before we get into it, do you have anything to report? I’m leaving for France tomorrow and may not be back for a while.”
Without another word, Nagy reached into his jeans front pocket and pulled out a computer flash drive like the one he had given Zorn before.
“I’ve written up some more material about Renditions Branch. We’ve been making major inroads against jihadi networks in Northern Virginia, pulling in a lot of their key people. Rank-and-file operatives have gone to ground and fellow travelers seem to be pulling back, as well.”
“What kind of Triage scores are you seeing with the ones you’ve pulled in?”
“Mostly Cat Two, with maybe a third of them Cat Ones. But that’s still a slew of hard-liners we’ve taken off the streets,” Nagy remarked with a note of pride in his voice.
“How about non-Muslim support assets like the ones we talked about last time. Are you seeing more of them?”
“Too many. It breaks my heart to see these kids wreck their lives by teaming up with the jihadis. We’re going after them hammer and tong, and the Cat Ones get flown out the moment we catch them. I suspect they’re being sent offshore to keep them out of the court system. And it scares me to death to think that might be what’s happened to Carol.”
A pause followed while Zorn weighed his reply.
“Actually, Jack, that’s the news I wanted to talk to you about. I couldn’t find any record of your daughter in the Triage database. But I think I may have seen her
.”
Nagy took his foot off the gas and let the car slow as they circled around the largely empty parking lot. He cast a sidelong glance at his passenger with eyes on full alert.
“Last night I came back from a visit to a Tetra-run transit center in the Caribbean that they call Corvus Base,” Zorn went on. “I can’t be sure which island it’s on, but I’m pretty sure I saw her there. In one cellblock I spotted five American females suspected of involvement in the Richmond courthouse bombing. One of them resembled your daughter’s passport photo as well as a news photo I came across of a Richmond suspect. Do you have another image you could show me? On your smartphone, maybe?”
Nagy pulled the car into a vacant parking space and killed the headlights. Then he brought out his mobile phone and pulled up a series of photographs of his daughter, one of them taken at his townhouse shortly before Carol went missing.
“Yeah, I’m nearly certain that’s her,” Zorn said before handing back the phone. “Can you text a copy of that image to my burner phone? I’d like to show it to someone who may be able to help.”
Nagy entered a few keystrokes on the phone and returned it to the cup holder in the Nissan’s center console.
“Done. The girl you saw has to be Carol. Richmond is where they nabbed her.”
“Do you know of anything else that would link Carol to the courthouse bombing? Last time we spoke, you thought she supported the jihadis politically but not operationally. You didn’t believe she was Antifa, either. Do you still think that’s true?”
“I don’t know,” Nagy said with downcast eyes. “In my heart, I don’t want to believe she had anything to do with the bombing. But, then, maybe there are things about Carol I’m not aware of.”
“Well, whether she’s linked to the bombing or not, DHS ought not be holding American citizens at a foreign detention center, no matter what they’re accused of.”
Root and Branch Page 25
