Locked On Part 13

"Cool," said Dom. "Who is he?"

"Gavin," said Wills. "You have the con."

"Well"-Gavin Biery made his way through the scrum of men in the cubicle and sat down at Wills's chair-"the software has narrowed Cairo man down to two probables." He worked the keyboard for a moment and one of the pictures taken by Dom's covert camera in the caravanserai in Cairo appeared on one half of the twenty-two-inch monitor.

Gavin said, "Facial recog says there is a ninety-three percent chance that this guy is . . ." He clicked his mouse. "This dude." A picture appeared next to Dom's photo of the man. It was a shot of a Pakistani pa.s.sport for a man named Khalid Mir. The man wore gla.s.ses with round frames and had a trim beard, and he appeared to be several years younger than he looked in the Cairo photo.

Immediately Caruso said, "He's changed a lot, but I think that's the same guy."

"Yeah?" said Wills. "Well then, your boy is a Khalid Mir, aka Abu Kashmiri, a known operative for Lashkar-e-Taiba over in Pakistan. They are nasty, and Khalid Mir used to be one of their big shots."

"Used to be?"

Ryan answered before Wills, "One of Kealty's drone attacks supposedly took him out in Pakistan, about three years ago. That was about the same time LeT started branching out and sending its operatives against Western targets. Before that they had been almost exclusively a Kashmir-based terror group who struck India and only India."

Dom Caruso spun around and looked at Ryan. "No offense, Junior, but aren't you supposed to know all these guys on sight?"

Jack shrugged. "If this guy was LeT fighting against India, and he died three years ago, he wasn't exactly on my threat matrix for dangerous Western terrorists."

"Makes sense. Sorry."

"Not at all."

Granger looked at Driscoll now. "Sam? You aren't saying anything. Dom thinks this is the guy you saw in Cairo."

Dom answered for his partner: "Sam pegged the guy at the time as a military officer."

Driscoll nodded. "I was sure of it, but this photo does look like it could be the same guy."

Gavin Biery smiled. "You thought he was a military officer, huh? Well the recog software says there is a ninety-six percent chance you are right." He made a few more clicks of his mouse. The photo of Khalid Mir's pa.s.sport disappeared and was replaced by a grainy photo of a man in an olive green uniform crossing a street, carrying a briefcase and papers under his arm. This man looked older and fuller in the face than the pa.s.sport photo of Khalid Mir.

Driscoll nodded forcefully. "That is the guy from Cairo."

"I'll be d.a.m.ned," muttered Sam Granger. "Who is he, Tony?"

"He is Brigadier General Riaz Rehan."

"General of what?"

"He's in the Pakistani Defense Force. He is also the current director of Joint Intelligence Miscellaneous of the ISI. A shadowy figure, even though he's a department head and a general. There are no known photos of the man other than this one."

"But wait," Clark said. "If this is Cairo guy, can Khalid Mir be Cairo guy, too?"

"Could be," said Biery, but he didn't clarify.

Tony Wills admonished him. "Gavin, we talked about this. No dramatics, please."

Biery shrugged. "d.a.m.n. We IT guys never get to have any fun. Okay, here's the thing: Both of these pictures, the ISI guy and the LeT guy, have been in the database the CIA uses for facial recognition for a long time, but they were never matched with one another."

"Why not?" asked Clark.

Gavin seemed glad to be asked this question. "Because facial-recognition algorithms aren't perfect. They do better when the faces being compared are photographed from the same angle with the same light values. By using facial metrics, that is to say the distance between key landmarks, like eyes and ears and such, the software determines a statistical probability that it is looking at the same face. If there are too many anomalies, either because the faces don't match very well or because the photographs are taken at different resolutions or one of the pictures is registering some movement of the subject, then the match probability goes down precipitously. We can solve for these external discrepancies somewhat by using something called the active appearance model, which removes the shape of the face and only uses the texture as a comparison."

Dom Caruso said, "Sorry, Gavin, but we have to be back upstairs in ten minutes. Can you cut to the chase?"

"Dom, let's indulge him for another minute, okay?" asked John.

Dom nodded, and Biery addressed Clark directly now, as though the other men were not in the room. "Anyway, the picture of Khalid Mir on his pa.s.sport and the picture of Riaz Rehan crossing the street in Peshawar are just too different for current facial-recognition software to connect, because there are too many variances in angle, lighting, type of equipment used for the photograph, and of course Rehan is wearing sungla.s.ses, which is not as much of a problem as it used to be before a newer software design began being used, but it sure doesn't help. So these two pictures"-he drew his cursor back and forth between the two older pictures on the monitor-"do not match." Then he took the cursor over to the Cairo picture taken three days earlier. "But both of these two pictures do match this picture, because it retains just enough of the characteristics of the other two. It's in the middle, so to speak."

Chavez asked, "So all three shots are definitely the same guy?"

Biery shrugged. "Definitely? No. We don't like to use that term when discussing mathematical probabilities."

"Okay, what is the probability?"

"It's about a ninety-one percent chance Cairo dude, general dude, and dead dude are all the same dude."

All eyebrows in the room raised high. Ryan spoke for the group: "Holy s.h.i.+t!"

"Holy s.h.i.+t indeed," said Wills. "We have just learned that a known terrorist for LeT is not only not dead but is now a department chief for Pakistani intelligence."

And Granger said, "And this department head for the ISI, who is, or was, an LeT operative, is now meeting with a known bad guy in Cairo."

"I hate to state the obvious," Dominic said, "but we need to learn more about this Rehan guy."

Granger looked at his watch. "Well, that was the most productive lunch break we've had in a while. Let's head back up to the conference room."

Back upstairs, Granger filled Hendley in on the developments. Immediately the discovery made by Tony Wills and Gavin Biery superseded the Paris operation as the main focus of the meeting.

"This is big," said Hendley, "but it's also all very preliminary. I don't want to jump the gun on this and leak intelligence to CIA or MI6 or anyone else that isn't one hundred percent solid. We need to know more about this general in the ISI."

Everyone agreed.

Hendley said, "How can we check this out?"

Ryan spoke first. "Mary Pat Foley. The National Counterterrorism Center knows as much about Lashkar as anyone. If we can find out more about Khalid Mir, before he became Riaz Rehan, maybe we can use that to link the two guys together."

Hendley nodded. "We haven't paid a visit on Mary Pat in a while. Jack, why don't you give her a call and take her to lunch? You can run on down to Liberty Crossing and show her the Mir-Rehan connection. I bet she'll find that very interesting."

"I'll give her a call today."

"Okay. Keep our sources and methods under your hat, though."

"Understood."

"And Jack? Whatever you do, don't mention that you just got back from Paris."

The conference room erupted in tired laughter.

Sixty-one-year-old Judith Cochrane's rental car came with in-dash GPS, but she did not set it for the forty-mile drive down from Colorado Springs. She knew the way to 5880 State Highway 67, as she had been here many times to visit her clients.

Her rented Chrysler pulled off South Robinson Avenue, and she stopped at the first gate of ADX Florence. The guards knew her by sight but still they looked over her doc.u.ments and identification carefully before letting her pa.s.s.

It wasn't easy for an attorney to see a client at Florence; it was harder still for an attorney to see a client housed in H Unit, and a Range 13 client was nigh on impossible to meet with face-to-face. Cochrane and the Progressive Const.i.tution Initiative were in the later stages of drafting a lawsuit to address this issue, but for now she had to play by the rules of supermax.

As one of the most regular visitors to ADX Florence, Judith had come prepared. She would carry a purse with nothing of value in it because she would have to leave it in a locker, and she would not bother entering with her laptop or cell phone, because these would be taken from her immediately if they were on her person. She knew to wear comfortable shoes because she would be walking from the administration unit to her prisoner's cell, a journey of hundreds of yards of hallways and covered outdoor walkways, and she made sure to dress in an especially conservative pantsuit so that the warden would not refuse her entry due to the preposterous accusation of provocative attire.

She also knew she'd be going through X-ray machines and full-body scanners, so she followed prison rules for visitors and wore a bra that was free of underwire.

She drove on past the guard shack, past a long, high wall. She looped around to the south and went through more remote gates, and as she drove slowly she encountered more guard towers, shotguns, a.s.sault rifles, German shepherds, and security cameras than she could possibly count. Finally she pulled into a large, half-empty parking lot outside the administration wing. Behind her, at the entrance to the lot, a row of bright yellow hydraulically operated spikes rose from slats in the concrete. She would not be leaving until the guard force here was ready for her to leave.

Judith Cochrane was met at her car door by a female guard, and together they walked through a series of secure doors and hallways in the administrative wing of the prison. There was no conversation between the two, and the guard did not offer to help the much older woman carry her briefcase or pull her laptop bag.

"Lovely morning," Judith Cochrane said as they marched down a clean white pa.s.sageway.

The guard ignored her comment but continued to lead the way with professionalism.

Most guards at ADX Florence didn't think much of the attorneys who defended the prisoners incarcerated here.

Cochrane didn't care, she could schlep her own bags, and she'd long ago decided that she much preferred the company of the inmates of supermax prisons to the guard force, who were, as far as she was concerned, just uneducated thugs.

Her worldview was as bleak and cruel as it was simple. Prison guards were like soldiers who were like police who were like any federal agent who wielded a gun. They were the bad guys.

After graduating and pa.s.sing the bar in California, Judith Cochrane was hired by the Center for Const.i.tutional Rights, a legal advocacy group that focused on civil rights cases. After a few years of this she went into private practice, and she'd worked some high-profile cases, including serving as a junior lawyer on the legal team that defended Patty Hearst on bank robbery charges.

After that, she worked for the ACLU for a dozen years, and then Human Rights Watch for several more. When Paul Laska funded the development of the Progressive Const.i.tution Initiative, he'd recruited her personally to join the well-bankrolled liberal judicial advocacy group. He didn't have to work too hard at getting her; Cochrane was thrilled to take a job that let her pick and choose her cases. Almost immediately after the start-up of the organization, the attacks of September 11, 2001, occurred, and to Judith Cochrane and her coworkers, that meant something truly terrible. She knew a witch hunt by the American government was on the horizon: Christians and Jews against Muslims.

For more than half a decade Cochrane was asked to appear on hundreds of television programs to talk about the evils of the U.S. government. She did as many appearances as she could while still defending her clients.

But when Ed Kealty was elected President, Judith Cochrane suddenly found herself blacklisted. She was surprised that the networks didn't seem to care as much about civil rights when Kealty and his men ran the FBI, the CIA, and the Pentagon as they had during the Ryan years.

These days, with Kealty in the White House, Cochrane had as much time as she needed to work on her cases. She was unmarried with no children, and her work was her life. She had developed many close personal relations.h.i.+ps with her clients. Relations.h.i.+ps that could never lead to anything more than emotional closeness, as virtually all of her clients were separated from her by Plexiglas windows or iron bars.

She was also married, in the figurative sense, to her convictions, a lifelong love affair with her beliefs.

And it was these convictions that brought her here to supermax to meet with Saif Yasin.

She was led into the warden's office, where the warden shook her hand and introduced her to a large black man in a starched blue uniform. "This is the unit commander for H. He will take you to Range 13 and to the FBI detail in charge of your prisoner. We don't have actual custody of Prisoner 09341-000. We are essentially just the holding facility."

"I understand. Thank you," she said as she shook the uniformed man's hand. "We'll be seeing a lot of each other."

The unit commander replied professionally, "Ms. Cochrane, this is just a formality, but we have our rules. May I see your state bar card?"

She reached into her purse and handed it over. The unit commander looked it over and handed it back to her.

The warden said, "This prisoner will be handled differently. I a.s.sume you have a copy of his Special Administrative Measures, as well as the directives for your meetings with him?"

"I have both of those doc.u.ments. As a matter of fact, I have a team of attorneys preparing our response to them."

"Your response?"

"Yes. We will be suing you shortly, but you must have known that already."

"Well . . . I-"

Cochrane smiled thinly. "Don't worry. For today, I promise to oblige your illegal SAMs."

The unit commander was taken aback, but the warden stepped in. He'd known Judith Cochrane long enough to remain unfazed, no matter what she said or accused him of. "We appreciate that. Originally we had planned to have you meet with him via 'video visiting,' like our other Special Housing Unit inmates, but the AG said you absolutely refused that arrangement."

"I did. This man is in a cage, I understand that. But I need to have some rapport with him if I am to do my job. I can't communicate with him on a television screen."

The unit commander said, "We will take you to his cell. You will communicate to the prisoner via a direct phone line. It is not monitored; this has been ordered by the attorney general himself."

"Very good."

"We have a desk for you outside his cell. There is a part.i.tion of bulletproof gla.s.s; this will serve as an attorney/client visiting booth, just like if you were meeting with one of your other clients in the visitation center."

She signed papers in the warden's office, putting her name to agreements that had been worked up by the Justice Department and the Bureau of Prisons regarding what she could and couldn't say to the prisoner, what he could and couldn't say to her. As far as she was concerned it was all bulls.h.i.+t, but she signed it so she could get started on the man's defense.

She'd worry about it later, and she'd violate her agreement if it was in the best interest of her client. h.e.l.l, she'd sued the Bureau of Prisons many times before. She was not going to let them tell her how she would represent her client.

Together she and the unit commander left the administration building, walked under a covered walkway to another wing of the prison. She was ushered through more locked doors, and on the other side she walked through an X-ray scanner just like those at airport security. On the other side of the scanner a set of doors opened, and here she was met by two men in black body armor and black ski masks, with rifles.

"Oh, dear," she said. "Is all this really necessary?"

The unit commander stopped at the door. He said, "I have my responsibilities, and they end right here at the threshold of Range 13. You are now in the care of the FBI, who are operating the annex that houses your prisoner." The unit commander extended a polite hand, and she shook it without really looking at him. Then she turned away, ready to follow the federal officers.

The FBI escorted her inside, and here they put her purse in a locker on the wall of the stark white room, then walked her through a full-body scanner. On the other side of this she was handed a legal pad and a single soft-tip marking pen, and then led through two sets of security doors that were monitored by closed-circuit cameras. Once through these, she found herself in an anteroom outside the recently modified cell. In front of her were four more armed HRT men.

The lead FBI SWAT officer spoke with a thick Brooklyn accent: "You understand the rules, Ms. Cochrane. You sit in the chair at the desk and talk on the phone to your client. Your conversations will be private. We will be right outside that door, and we can watch you on CCTV, but there is no microphone in this room or in the prisoner's cell." He handed her a small b.u.t.ton that looked like her garage door opener. "Panic b.u.t.ton," he explained. "The prisoner couldn't get through that gla.s.s with a Gatling gun, so there's nothing to worry about, but if he does something that makes you feel uneasy, just press that b.u.t.ton."

Cochrane nodded. She hated these smug men with their dehumanizing rules, their heinous weapons of hate, and their cowardly masks. Still, she was professional enough to feign kindness. "Wonderful. Thank you for your help. I'm sure I'll be just fine."

She turned away from the guard and looked around the room. She saw the window that looked into the cell, and she saw a wheeled desk had been put there, on this side, for her benefit. A telephone was on it. But she was not satisfied. "Officers, there should be a pa.s.s-through slot in the Plexiglas in case I need him to look at doc.u.ments or sign something."

The HRT officer in charge shook his head. "Sorry, ma'am. There is a hatch for us to send his food and clothing through, but it is locked up for your visit. You'll have to talk to the warden about that for next time." And with that, the HRT men, all four of them, backed through the door and shut it with a loud clang.

Judith Cochrane stepped to the little table by the gla.s.s and sat down, placed her pad in her lap with her pen, and only then did she look into the cell.

Saif Rahman Yasin sat on his concrete bed, facing the portal. He'd been reading from a Koran that he gently placed on the desk at the foot of the bed. When Cochrane looked to him, he took off his prison-issued eyegla.s.ses and rubbed his eyes, and Judith immediately thought of a younger Omar Sharif. He stood and crossed the small cell toward her, sat down on a three-legged stool that had been placed next to a telephone on the floor. Judith noticed the red phone had no b.u.t.tons or dials; it would connect him only with the receiver in her hand. Yasin lifted the telephone off the cradle and held it to his ear tentatively. He kept his face impa.s.sive, looked the woman in the eye, as if waiting for her to speak.

"Good morning, Mr. Yasin. My name is Judith Cochrane. I am told you speak excellent English, is my information correct?"