Free Intercept by Patrick Robinson Page B

of the terrorists’ names. James said flatly, “First we have to identify them. Then get them to understand that they cannot set foot in a U.S. courtroom without a goddamned name and address.”
    “You sure you want them to be in the courtroom?”
    “Hell, yes, Tom. We want them in there, dressed like businessmen, looking like responsible citizens.”
    “What about the friggin’ manacles?”
    “The military will insist they wear them. And they’re still prisoners of the military. But I still want them in court.”
    “Well, I guess if they won’t reveal their names, there isn’t going to be an appeal, so the ball’s in their court.”
    “They either announce their identities or the service chiefs will keep them in prison forever. They don’t have any choice.” James Myerson had it simply worked out.
    “Guess not,” said Tom. “And that will apply to any other clients we pick up in there. Josh has got his big, flabby hands in that Arabian pot of gold. And he ain’t going to let up on these cases, not now, not ever.”
    “Yup. He got a green light from Riyadh. And we have to maximize the billing. That list of fourteen in your briefcase. They’re the ones to sign up. Then we just bang the court with the ole writ of habeas corpus— and stand back while the judiciary falls over backward to please the president.”
    Two cars behind them on Virginia’s Hirst-Brault Expressway, the two agents in the Mossad tracking car were listening intently to the conversation, thanks to the bug Bob Birmingham’s agents had so carefully fitted inside the roof of Epstein’s office car. As the CIA director himself had so shrewdly observed, the Mossad usually seemed to know a whole lot more about the business of the USA than the USA itself. And right now there was living proof of this, moving at seventy miles per hour along the highway to Dulles, transmitting the details of Epstein’s bid to set the villains free.

    STAFF SERGEANT BIFF RANSOM was hotter than hell, standing out on the sweltering tarmac of Mariana Grajales Airport . Biff, a thirty-five-year-old native of Dallas, Texas, was a guard supervisor at the Navy base on his second tour of duty in Cuba on behalf of the U.S. military.
    For an ex-auto worker in one of the General Motors plants in Detroit, Biff was a very smart man. He deliberately tried to befriend prisoners, sucking up every scrap of information, and then reporting it in carefully written e-mails to his colleagues. Ben al-Turabi was as close as he ever got to a friendship with a prisoner, and even Biff did not know the big goalkeeper’s name.
    Right now he was waiting for a small, private Cessna bringing a couple of Washington lawyers down to talk to a few prisoners regarding legal appeals to free them. And at this particular moment, he was certain of only three things: one, that the lawyers had no right to be fucking around down here and ought to be in the slammer themselves; two, that Justice Kennedy was plainly out of his mind; and three, that if he, Biff Ransom, had been in charge, both these legal nutcases would have been made to walk the five hundred miles from Havana. Also the sons-of-bitches were an hour late, and Biff had a major interrogation in sixty minutes.
    “Jesus Christ,” said Biff, peering into the crystalline blue skies. “Where the hell are they?”
    He would have been slightly more comfortable waiting in the military airport, but that was where the Navy had drawn the line. They could not refuse to cooperate with the State Department, but they could obstruct the forthcoming legal process by refusing to allow a civilian landing, by Cuban pilots, on the military base. “Obvious security reasons,” the signal had read when it arrived in the Pentagon.
    Which was why Sergeant Biff was hanging around, sixteen miles north of the camp at the little local airport that served the town of Guantanamo, waiting for the two men he sincerely believed were traitors to the United States of