Intercept (7 page)

“And this right would be given to Ibrahim?”

“By the look of this document,” replied Kaiser, thoughtfully, “this right has been given to everyone being detained at Guantanamo under U.S. law.”

“But surely the judge will listen and then send them right back for what they call crimes against humanity?”

Shakir Khan interjected. “Maybe five years ago,” he said, “when President Bush was furious with the entire Muslim world. But not now. Times have changed. The Americans have grown tired of the conflict. And their politicians must listen to the people. They just want it all to be over. And they’re starting by getting rid of the prisoners.”

“You mean they will just send Ibrahim and Yousaf home?”

“It looks like it. But before they do so, we have much work to do. They need lawyers. American lawyers. And we must make arrangements, both to hire them and then pay them. It must all go through Osama’s highest command.”

“Can we work directly by phone and e-mail?”

“I don’t think so,” replied Khan. “Because if they trace us, the Americans will have the government arrest us. It’s always better to remain concealed and to move our orders and operational documents on foot. It takes longer, but it’s much better.”

By now the clerics’ call to the faithful was echoing from the minaret high above the glowing white walls of the Mosque of Mahabat Khan, north of
Andar Shehr
. All five men hurried from the courtyard and joined the throng that moved in great droves of devout Muslims preparing to prostrate themselves before their God.

For the next hour Shakir Khan and his men would cast aside the possible release of their heroic brothers from Guantanamo and concentrate on their midday prayers.
Allah is great . . . there is no other God
. There would be time enough to set free Ibrahim and Yousaf during the long hot afternoon.

 

SHAKIR KHAN
outlined his suggestions in carefully coded Arabic and summoned a messenger to transport them on the next camel train leaving the city, laden with the bountiful fruit crops from the lush Vale of Peshawar—apricots, peaches, plums, pears, lemons, and oranges. The communiqué was delivered after a two-day journey to Pakistan’s green, leafy new capital of Islamabad, ninety-four miles to the east of Peshawar.

The recipient was a Pakistani government official who kept a private office on Market Road a few hundred yards from the Parliament building. This is the center of the business district, known, curiously, as the Blue Area. Western Intelligence services are unwelcome here, for Islamabad represents the very heart of Islam, as its name suggests.

Shakir Khan’s recommendations were e-mailed in private to the most militant group of Sunni Muslim clergy in Saudi Arabia. These were the men who had financed the gigantic Faisal Masjid, the world’s biggest mosque, which stands on the outskirts of Islamabad, a religious fountain-head of Muslim learning and history.

From these powerful clerics Shakir Khan sought approval, both financial and spiritual. His message to them read:
New U.S. Supreme Court decision regarding
habeas corpus
for detainees opens the gates of freedom to our brave fighters. Please appoint Washington attorneys to represent them in U.S. Appeals Court. Particular interest Yousaf Mohammed, and Ibrahim Sharif. There may be others.

From here the words of Shakir Khan were faxed from the frantic offices of one of the world’s great oil shipping terminals and lost in the daily maelstrom of international tanker communications. When that fax arrived in a small law firm in the City of London, it was utterly untraceable.

Which was how the law firm, Messrs Howard, Marks, and Cuthbert of London Wall came to appoint Epstein, Myerson, and Marsh, of 296 12th Street, Washington, DC, as the legal representatives of Yousaf and Ibrahim.

The senior partner of Epstein’s, as it was normally known, was a shrewd and legally savvy graduate of Harvard Law School, who had worked for several years as legal counsel to the Texas and Gulf Oil Corporation, based principally in Riyadh and Galveston.

Josh Epstein was sixty now, a big, fleshy man with dark hair and thick spectacles, who had somehow retained an aura of respectability despite grave suspicions among the politicos that he had a stupendously profitable sideline representing some of the most brutal jihadist killers on the planet. Worse yet, his paymasters were Saudi. In a city almost disappearing up its own backside with political correctness and adherence to the most lunatic human rights issues, Josh was, shall we say, a bit of an outsider.

We should also say, perhaps, that Josh did not give a two-cent damn for all that. His God was money, and he was surely in the right profession for
that. Dollars, euros, pounds, yen, rupees, rubles, sheqels, Josh loved them all in equal measure. But the sacks full of Saudi riyals were his favorites. Because those could be hidden away from the IRS.

And he could hardly disguise his joy when that e-mail came ghosting in from London’s cyberspace, appointing him to head up what might be a truly lucrative appeals court team. Hundreds of hours, all billed at a premium thousand dollars per hour, not the normal five hundred, because of the risks to the firm’s reputation and all, plus expenses. Not to mention that there would be a massive bonus for success. Josh could barely contain his elation.

Never a man to give much thought to problems that did not directly concern either him or his family, Josh cast aside any flickering concerns about the moral issue of liberating known mass murderers. Outside in the parking lot of the building, a dark blue turbo-charged Bentley bore testimony to the skill and ruthlessness of the senior partner of Epstein, Myerson, and Marsh.

Josh opened up his computer and clicked into Google Instant Messaging:
Thank you, Keith,
he wrote.
I’m sending two appeals court specialists to Cuba tomorrow. Access no problem. We’ll file on Monday.
Five seconds later came a one-word reply:
Perfect.

Josh Epstein summoned his two closest terrorist lawyers into his office. Then he reached across his desk and started the time-clock that counts off the billing hours, per lawyer, per case. In this case, a thousand dollars a tick. Times three.

 

 

THE ONLY MINOR
blot on the horizon of Epstein’s new case was a big Chevy transit van, parked right on 12th Street, maybe forty yards up the sidewalk from the firm’s main entrance. On the driver’s side was a small decal, two inches across, which bore the unmistakable insignia of the Central Intelligence Agency, with its white battleshield inscribed with a red compass rose. A thin, white line beneath it confirmed this was an operational vehicle, which may not be disturbed. Every cop in Washington recognized that insignia, and the unspoken message:
If we need you, you’ll hear, real quick.

Inside the van, four operatives sat before a bank of computer screens. Each man wore a slim-line headset and a wire-thin microphone. It was stifling hot in their ops-room, and they wore only T-shirts, shorts, and sneakers. And they all spoke in a completely foreign tongue.

They were hooked into the law firm of Epstein, Myerson, and Marsh, through a clandestine network of telephonic wires and carefully planted listening devices, situated throughout the law offices. It had taken months to set it all up, wire by wire, bug by bug, office cleaner by office cleaner, mole by mole.

But now the system was on stream. And the CIA, which had been subversively, and probably illegally, involved in making it possible, had stepped back. The four men in the van worked for the Mossad, Israel’s ruthless Secret Service. They were controlled by the vast Intelligence operation that works from the deep basement of the Israeli embassy, three miles north of the city of Washington.

Cooperation between the CIA and the Mossad began to intensify during the first Gulf War and it had, if anything, grown stronger with each passing year. The Israelis have never dropped their guard against the growling threats of Iran, never forgiven Iraq for unleashing Scud missiles at Tel Aviv in 1991, and never forgiven any Western power that offered even the remotest support to the Palestinians.

Since President Bush declared vicious and open war on terrorists, the Israelis, and especially the Mossad, had stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the United States. No country, no organization has ever been braver or more loyal to Uncle Sam.

The CIA trusts, admires, and uses the Mossad on a daily basis, both in terms of information and direct action. Only rarely is a favor judged too great to be asked or granted. The secretive pact between two of the world’s greatest Intelligence Services is binding, one to the other, essentially because their interests are usually identical.

The big blue van represented the explicit wishes of the Mossad, wishes honed over decades of study. That van represented conclusions reached after hundreds of hours pouring over court cases and identifying lawyers who had fought for the freedom of jihadists and terrorists, killers who had attacked, London, New York, Madrid, and countless targets in Israel.

The Mossad were the world experts on the links: those in Afghanistan between al-Qaeda and the Taliban; between Hamas and al-Qaeda; between Iran and al-Qaeda in Iraq; between Hezbollah and Tehran. The men from King Saul Boulevard knew beyond any doubt that there were certain law firms, in the United States, the UK, and Riyadh, that specialized in fighting for the liberties of such men. The Mossad had deep files on all of those law firms. Especially Josh Epstein’s.

They had been parked in various locations on 12th Street for weeks, ever since Justice Kennedy’s ruling. And with CIA backing, they could find out
anything
—particularly if Epstein’s men were representing terrorists who had killed and murdered in Israel.

For a start they could trace every incoming e-mail or instant message to its source, because electronic passage through the Internet leaves a trail, which traces Internet activity from the recipient to the user. And the information can be gathered covertly. These techniques of Internet tracking and tracing enable authorities to pursue and identify anyone and anything. The CIA and the Mossad were masters.

As a point of interest, the FBI was not far behind them with a tracking program called “Carnivore,” capable of scanning thousands of e-mails with the speed of light. Which was why Josh Epstein could hardly make a move without a red-alert sounding in faraway King Saul Boulevard. It was easy to understand why bin Laden’s high command infinitely preferred camels for transmitting sensitive communications.

Within moments, the men in the blue van were able to record that Epstein had just been appointed to represent, legally, inmates of Guantanamo Bay. And a split-second more to learn that he considered that appointment to be “perfect.” This caused four wry smiles of amusement, because everyone in the mobile ops-room knew there was a similar blue van parked in a side street off London Wall, conducting an identical operation on the heavily bugged offices of Howard, Marks, and Cuthbert.

There was one big difference: The Mossad guys in London knew the original fax had come from Saudi Arabia, though not the precise location.

There was however one aspect of the operation that bound both mobile ops teams together, and that was the sudden identification of the two men Josh Epstein was charged with freeing—the hitherto nameless Yousaf Mohammed and Ibrahim Sharif.

The Mossad had their names and sketchy biographies because they had wrung the information out of three other terrorist “suspects” before coldly executing them in Syria shortly after their release. They also knew that these two villains, Ibrahim and Yousaf, had befriended two other inmates inside Guantanamo.

They had descriptions and smuggled satellite photographs of the Guantanamo goalkeeper, Ben al-Turabi, and of his fellow Palestinian killer, Abu Hassan Akbar. Only the Mossad knew for certain that these four men were bound together, and that they were all on the CIA list of fourteen lethally dangerous jihadist hardmen.

Now the men in the blue van fed their new information back to the Mossad cell beneath the Israeli embassy as fingers flashed over the computer keyboards, matching the information, fitting names to the images.

Their expressions were grim. Six people in that embassy basement had friends, acquaintances, or relatives who had been killed as a result of Ben and Abu’s crimes—at the Park Hotel in Natanya, and the bar mitzvah in Be’er Shiva. As far as they were concerned, Yousaf, Ibrahim, Ben, and Abu, were all the same, and ought to be executed, not standing before a U.S. Court of Appeals.

Tomorrow morning Josh Epstein’s legal jackals would begin circling the Guantanamo compound, making their plans, dreaming up well-rounded reasons explaining why the four prisoners had never done anything wrong in their lives, and how American justice had dealt them the cruelest of hands.

There would be countless reasons why poor Yousaf, broken-hearted Ibrahim, blameless Ben, and innocent Abu should be freed instantly, with massive apologies from the White House, and sufficient reparation money to keep them living like rajahs for the next ten thousand years.

At 4:15 p.m. Joshua Epstein summoned his team into the inner sanctum of his office, the most secure room in the entire building—except for the listening device that had been planted in the base of his desk lamp—a mini-bug powerful enough to re-route U.S. baseball scores to the International Space Station, never mind the blue van parked outside the front door.

James Myerson, a thirty-five-year-old New Englander from Gloucester, Massachusetts, would head up the operation. Myerson had been made a partner after a sensational two years of almost superhuman billing that averaged seventy-eight hours a week, putting him at close to $40,000 a week, or $2 million annually. The incredible ambition of this unmarried graduate of Yale Law School placed him a cut above his peers, and the most important briefs from the Arab world were always offered first to him.