WASHINGTON DC: The Sadir Affair (The Puppets of Washington Book 1) (37 page)

Sitting now in the front row and beside Samuel, Talya was watching Mark being sworn in. A wave of apprehension ran through her. She knew he was in for a hard time.

“He’ll be fine, don’t worry,” Samuel whispered in her ear. Talya nodded.

“Agent Gilford,” Billycan began as he approached Mark, “you have been an agent for CSIS in Ottawa, Canada, for many years, have you?”

“Yes, I have been with them for nearly ten years now.”

“During that time did you have occasions to work with Ms. Kartz?”

“Yes, I have been assigned to Ms. Kartz’s protection on and off for nearly three years.”

“And on one of these occasions did you travel with her in a launch in search of the fishing trawler, the Marianne, along the Jackson River, in Florida?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Could you describe for the court the events that occurred on that evening?”

Mark went on to explain what happened in as many details as he recalled until the moment he heaved the victims overboard. Billycan then asked, “Could you now tell the court why you threw the two men overboard?”

“Yes. I had kept Ottawa informed of what we were doing. Yet, we needed time to bring proof of Mr. Slimane being involved in the shipping of drugs to West Africa. By my way of thinking, if we alerted the local authorities of what happened that night, we would possibly be arrested and questioned, which would have put the people held captive in Guyana in danger. We needed time to gather evidence before we would inform the local police of what we were doing.”

“And what happened after that?”

“As we were about to start searching for evidence of drugs aboard the trawler, we heard the radio in the wheelhouse crackle and a man call for a reply.”

“What did you do then?”

“I sat at the radio desk and talked to the guy.”

“What language did this man speak?”

“He spoke Arabic.”

“And you know the language?”

“Yes, I’ve spent a few years in North Africa and had to learn Arabic, yes.”

“And what did the man ask?”

“He asked me if I had seen Ms Kartz, and I told him that I hadn’t seen her all day.”

“What did the man say to that?”

“He said to call him back when I saw her.”

“Did you agree to do that?”

“Yes, I did.”

“And what happened after that?”

“Dr Hendrix and I went down the hull of the boat and searched for traces of drugs.”

“Did you find any?”

“No, we didn’t. The hull was empty.”

“What did you do next?”

“When Ms. Kartz told us that she found some bills of lading regarding frozen crates being shipped from that boat, I decided to call it in. I contacted Ottawa, told my boss what happened and asked him what we should do with the evidence.”

“And did your boss make any suggestions?”

“Yes; he said that he would call the FBI and the Florida authorities to take care of the clean-up and that we were supposed to go back to Miami to take a flight back to Canada as soon as we could.”

“When your boss said that he would ask the FBI and the Florida police to ‘take care of the clean-up’, what do you think he meant by that?”

“Objection, Your Honour,” Simmons blurted. “This would be pure conjecture on the part of the witness. How would Agent Gilford know what his boss thought at the time of this conversation?”

Silverman stared at the defence attorney. “Sustained!” Then he turned to Billycan. “I’m sorry, Counsel, but I’ll have to ask you to rephrase this one. Mr. Simmons seems to dislike the fact that we could offer opinions in my court.”

Billycan bowed to the judge. He knew Simmons was going to try to delay the proceedings with unnecessary objections to confuse the issue in the minds of the jurors.

“I’m sorry, Agent Gilford, but would you explain to the court if the phrase ‘taking care of the clean-up’ has any general meaning in your circles?”

Mark raised an eyebrow. “I don’t know about it being a phrase used in ‘my circles’ in particular, Mr. Billycan, but to me the ‘clean-up’ of anything means just that: ‘clean-up’ whatever needs it.”

A smile registered on many of the faces in the audience—but Silverman’s travelling stare told everyone to leave it at that.

“And in this instance what would the clean-up entailed?”

“That meant Chief Gibson was going to brief the FBI and the Florida police of what happened that night and asked them to get the men out of the water and survey the scene of the crimes.”

“So, you admit that crimes were committed aboard the Marianne?”

“Yes, I do. If I hadn’t killed Mr. Nadir as soon as I boarded the trawler, he would have eliminated Ms Kartz on sight.”

“What about Mr. Abib? Would you have eliminated him also?”

“I had no idea that there was somebody else on board. When he came at me from behind, if Ms Kartz had not knifed him down, I would have fought with him, probably with the same result, yes.”

“So, when you were told who Mr. Nadir was, you climbed aboard with the intention of killing him, is that correct?”

“No. I only wanted to put him to sleep in a choke-hold, but then he said something that indicated to me that if he saw Ms Kartz he would eliminate her, so I maintained the hold and broke his neck.”

“Could you tell this court what Mr. Nadir told you that made you react the way you did?”

“He said, “You better kill me now or someone else will.” I didn’t understand it at first, but then he repeated what he had said and told me, that we all knew too much to let us live.”

“Thank you, Agent Gilford. Would you now confirm for the court that you have been granted full immunity against prosecution for the crimes you have committed on the Marianne?”

“Yes, sir, I have.”

“What, if any, were the provisions associated with obtaining full immunity?”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Billycan, but what did you mean by ‘provisions’?”

“Sorry. Were there any conditions attached to granting you full immunity?”

“None other than telling what happened on board the Marianne and what went on the next day.”

“You mean the morning after the Marianne incident?”

“Yes.”

“Could you then describe what happened the next day?”

“Yes…, well...” Mark hesitated and shifted in the chair. “The next morning, we—I mean Dr Hendrix, Ms Kartz and I—were about to check the only ice factory on Front Street, near our hotel when we got a call from Prince Khalid telling us that Slimane—that’s Mr. Assor—was definitely behind the abduction of Carmine’s geologists in Guyana and that Ms Kartz was still in danger.”

“Did you abandon the investigation of the ice factory then?”

“Yes. It was essential that we returned to Canada as soon as possible. So, when we were on our way to bring back the launch, we realized that the second fishing trawler was chasing us and somebody was taking puck-shots at us. We tried to avoid the bullets, but we got hit anyway.”

“When you said that ‘we got hit anyway,’ did you mean bullets hit the three of you?”

“No, just me...”

“I’m sorry about that…”

“Me too!” Mark said, while the audience refrained from laughing outright under Silverman’s admonishing glare.

“So, you got hit...” Billycan didn’t appear compassionate at all. Mocking the famous marksman for getting hit was more like it. “And what happened after that?’

“We got the launch back to the rental place and Dr Hendrix rented a car—we wanted to drive to Miami.”

“But in the end you never did get back to Miami, did you?”

“No. When we were driving south, Ms. Kartz said that, because somebody had been chasing us since the night before, we would do well to go in the opposite direction and try to reach Canada by road.”

“Did you think she was right—I mean about you being chased?”

“I’d say so; I had a deep gash in my butt that hurt like hell to prove it!”

This time the audience couldn’t hold back the laughter. Judge Silverman once again had to restore some sort of order—with difficulty.

When the hilarity died down, Billycan went on, “Wasn’t there something else which convince you that Ms. Kartz was right in having you drive northward?”

“Actually there was something that bothered me about the radio call I got on the Marianne. I was asking myself why the guy at the other end—which I thought was Slimane—asked me to call him back if I saw Ms Kartz. See, if he wanted to kill her, why would he ask me to call back? It didn’t make sense. And then when I didn’t call back and he couldn’t reach anybody, whoever it was that called must have thought Nadir was dead and sent the other trawler to chase after us the next morning.”

“So all in all, you thought Ms Kartz’s idea was justified?”

“Yes, it made sense, yes.”

“Did anything else happen when you were driving north, toward the Canadian border?”

“Yes, quite a bit actually. First, we realized somebody was tailing us when we got to Atlanta. We had no idea how they would have found out where we were so quickly—I mean that was the following day…”

“You mean two days after the Marianne incident?”

“Yeah. We had stopped for the night in Hilton Island and we then took the road west to Atlanta. From there we had decided to drive to Detroit, where Chief Gibson had arranged for us to take a flight back to Ottawa.”

“And what happened when you got to Atlanta then?”

“I told Ms Kartz—she was driving—to pull in front of a residential house and make as if we were visiting someone in the house.”

“Did you visit someone then?”

“We sure did. The woman who answered the door was a retired teacher and after we told her what was happening to us, she told us to put the car in the garage and that she would drive us with her own car to her sister’s place in Raleigh.”

“And when you got to Raleigh, what happened?”

“Well, the sister was a nun actually, and she had a van that she used to transport wayward children; she had vacationing groups of kids in her house during the summer. She loaned the van to us and we drove for about fifty miles when we met Samuel here…” Mark beckoned in Samuel’s direction.

“You didn’t know him as Samuel then, did you?”

“No, he introduced himself as Isaac Whittlestein—supposedly going to visit his great uncle in Flint, Michigan. Apparently his great aunt had just died and he wanted to pay his respects.”

“I see, and when did you realize that Mr. Meshullam’s intention were quite different?”

“When I was told back in Ottawa that Slimane—I mean Mr. Assor—had been shot to death.”

“And how long was it between the times you met Agent Meshullam on the road in Georgia and you heard that Mr. Assor had been shot?”

“I’d say about a week.”

“And could you describe for the court what happened between those two events?”

“When we got to Ottawa, we learned that Prince Khalid had returned to Paris unexpectedly and the geologists in Guyana had been freed, but we didn’t know why the prince had gone without saying anything to anybody. We even suspected him to have a hand in all this. So, Ms Kartz and I made our way to Paris, France, under the pretext that she was going to join her boss, Mr. Flaubert, for a meeting.”

“And then what happened?”

“When we got to Paris, the night after we arrived, we met Mr. Slimane at the Hotel de Crillon and that’s when he said he was a CIA agent under cover. But when he said he wanted Prince Khalid to go to Zurich and confront his uncle, His Highness Prince Abdullah, I thought the man was not anything he said he was. I had no proof of any of this, but my job was to protect His Highness and Ms. Kartz, so I forced Agent Slimane to come with me to the French Bureau and surrender himself. Ultimately he’d be sent back to the States, and his keepers could do whatever they wanted with him then.”

“Thank you, Agent Gilford. Now, I have just a couple more questions. Did it ever occurred to you that Mr. Assor was pleading for your protection or was trying to be taken back to the States, as you said, by the authorities so that he could be protected when he got back?”

“No, not at the time. I never thought about it that way. Agent Slimane’s explanation of Prince Abdullah’s involvement in arms and drug trade sounded exaggerated, and all I really wanted was to get him out of the way—away from Prince Khalid and Ms Kartz.”

“And you didn’t connect your encounter with Agent Meshullam in Georgia to what happened when you met Mr. Assor in Paris then?”

“No, sir. No one knew Agent Meshullam’s real identity then, and we never thought for a minute that he was involved in any way.”

“Thank you again, Agent Gilford. I’d like to return now to the time you were in Vancouver with Prince Khalid. At that time, Agent Lypsick asked you and Prince Khalid to interview Mr. Sadir, is that correct?”

“Yes, sir, that’s right.”

“And what did you understand the purpose of that interview to be, Agent Gilford?”