The Accused (11 page)

That plan, though, like any other plan, was based on uncertain assumptions. The logistics presumed there were no guards and they would meet no initial resistance.

But when the assault team members had taken up their positions about five meters apart—behind some cover approximately thirty meters in front of the house, the door suddenly swung open.

A man stepped out quickly with what appeared to be an automatic weapon. He glanced around and then turned as if he were going to walk back inside. But he suddenly whirled and fired a short burst in the direction of Thompson, who was prone on the ground. Over his headset, Marlowe heard him give a guttural groan. He had been hit.

The colonel clicked on his thermal-imaging scope and directed it at the house. He saw several blurred human images running within the building. As he finished adjusting the scope he could distinguish four stationary figures in seated positions.

Rockwell whispered frantically, “Colonel, have Thompson take him out with one shot and then let's do a close-up recon of the house.”

“Negative,” Marlowe replied. “Open fire! Take this guy down and put everything you have into that house—I'm assuming the risk of collateral damage here—fire!”

The guard was still standing with his gun pointed toward Thompson when a blast of buckshot ripped into him. Weapons fire began to rake through the masonry walls, the front door, and the closed window shutters from different angles so as to cross the pattern being stitched by the machine gun. Thompson managed to fire a grenade through a ragged opening in a front shutter, and the house trembled with the explosion. Meanwhile, Rockwell opened up an M72 LAW and fired a rocket at the lower-right front wall of the house, opening another hole with its shaped charge but also releasing a lethal spray of masonry fragments in the interior. Thompson managed to empty his M16 through the new opening, his angle of fire sweeping through any remaining dead spaces.

After a couple of minutes of intense fire, Marlowe determined that nothing could possibly still be alive inside and ordered, “Cease fire!

“Mike one, Mike two—go!” he commanded as he jumped to his feet and ran toward the corner of the house. Rockwell and Baker were
close behind him. Charging through the door opening, the colonel jumped over the body of the dead man, a beam of light from his weapon illuminating the gloom within.

But then his brain went numb. His body, though, through years of training, did all the right things—he checked immediately to his left and right to make sure the room was secure. He could hear the other two men approaching from behind.

In a flash his eyes had fixed on the four bodies on the ground. They had been tied to chairs, which had toppled away from the table as their occupants had been hit by the terrible rain of bullets, grenade fragments, and masonry chips. But these were not enemy combatants lying on the ground, their bodies ripped and shredded by flying metal. Marlowe was sickened. A child…two children. There was blood on the floor, blood spattered on the walls. And a woman…a beautiful young woman…it was Linda, Carlos's wife. As her body lay on the floor in its chair, little recognizable was left of her torso or below…though, dreadfully, her face was perfectly intact. Little was left of Carlos's face. His bound body had been ripped apart. Conspicuously tied around his neck was his CIA identification tag.

Marlowe whirled as Rockwell entered the doorway and put his hand in front of the other man's face.

“Out! Out now! This has gone down bad!” As he shoved Rockwell and Baker out, they could hear sirens coming—several of them—and could glimpse perhaps five or six flashing lights in the darkness. The Mexican police—they were racing down the dirt road toward the house. How had they found out? Who had tipped them off?

Marlowe barked commands to head for the assembly area at Chichén Itzá, where they were to be picked up.

Rockwell—the biggest and strongest of the group—had Thompson in a fireman's carry as they double-timed through the thick tangle of Yucatán jungle. No one spoke. But Marlowe could hear the huffing and puffing of each of the men through his headset. He switched the channel and gave a command for the navy helicopter to meet them in five minutes.

By the time the team had reached the pickup zone, the helicopter was already there, sitting on the grass with its blades whirling. They loaded Thompson in first and the other four men jumped in.

As the helicopter took off, Rockwell leaned forward and peered at his leader. Then, tearing off his Kevlar vest and his headset, he threw them to the deck and then leaned forward again, staring at the colonel, wanting—wishing for an answer on what had happened—why things had gone so bad so quickly.

But Marlowe said nothing. He leaned his head back against the metal skin of the helicopter and looked down through the open door—down onto the towering stairs, illuminated by moonlight, that led to the pyramid erected to the bloodthirsty gods of the Mayans. The multistaired stone structure was getting smaller…until it started to disappear into the dark expanse of the jungle as they sped away.

Off in the distance, north of Chichén Itzá, the colonel could see flashing lights penetrating the night. The squad cars had ringed the small house. And the federal police were now entering…beholding the massacre.

He was already thinking ahead. About what this would mean for his men—and for the United States government. He was already thinking about how he, and he alone, would insist on shouldering responsibility for this special operations catastrophe…

And that was it. As Marlowe finished his narrative, Major Hanover and Will Chambers were eyeing him without speaking.

Will broke the silence.

“You say they were all tied to chairs. If the police report—”

“Sir, the federal police diagram of the scene—” Hanover interjected, “it didn't show that.”

“In fact,” Will added, “it shows the outlines of the bodies on the floor in positions that are inconsistent with being tied to a chair. Further, the chairs don't appear in the photographs, nor do they appear in the diagram.”

The colonel cocked his head again and looked at Will—as if he was losing patience with the lawyer's inability to understand the deeper secrets of this dark tragedy.

“Of course the police report didn't show that,” he said. “And did you look at the autopsy report?”

Will nodded. “Yes—and there was no mention of any abrasions or cuts to the wrists of any of the victims that would be consistent with being tied with rope.”

“Of course,” Marlowe repeated. “The autopsy report was done by a local doctor under the jurisdiction of the federal police.”

“What happened to the rest of the terrorists?” Will asked.

The colonel's face tightened as he answered.

“There was a door.”

“A door, sir?” Hanover asked.

“A trapdoor in the floor,” Marlowe continued. But now he was clearly troubled as he went forward with his description.

“A small, square trapdoor in the floor, about two yards from where the bodies lay. It was pretty clear the terrorists must have exited down it—I'm sure it led some distance away from the house. By the time I noticed it, though, we could hear the sirens and the federal police were approaching.”

Will leaned forward. “So, you made a deliberate choice to avoid the federal police?”

Marlowe nodded.

Hanover picked up the thread. “Sir, was that a critical part of your mission—to avoid contact with the Mexican government or Mexican nationals?”

“Exactly. Don't ask me who gave me my orders—you know I can't answer that.”

Will was beginning to size up his client's defense—and the prospects were disheartening. His story about the four civilian victims being tied to chairs—like ducks in a shooting gallery—was contradicted by the report, the diagram, and the photographs of the Mexican police, who had arrived at the scene only moments after the team had abandoned the site.

Beyond that, the colonel had rejected Sergeant Rockwell's suggestion to kill the lookout at the front door quietly and then do a close-up reconnaissance before attacking. And then there was the matter of Marlowe ordering his unit to flee from the approaching Mexican police.

But there was something else. Something that troubled Will down to the pit of his stomach.

“Colonel, there's something else I need to ask you. Just moments before the attack you said that you would assume the responsibility for ‘collateral damage.' What did you mean by that?”

Marlowe took a few long seconds before he answered. And when he did, he was fingering the styrofoam cup on the conference table in front of him.

“I meant that if there was collateral damage to other persons, it was my call.”

“Sir, what other persons?” Hanover broke in, his voice tight.

“In the event there was a civilian noncombatant in the house.”

“You knew there might be a civilian noncombatant in the house when you ordered your unit to fire upon it?” Will asked. His body was tensing, and he was leaning forward on the table.

“I knew there might be at least one person inside…one civilian not formally associated with the cell group. I was aware of that.”

“Who?” Will and Hanover asked almost simultaneously.

But the colonel shook his head. “I cannot answer that.”

“Why not?” Will asked protestingly.

“It has nothing to do with the DOD directive,” his client barked.

“You've got to give that information to us. It's critical, ” Will shot back.

“Mr. Chambers,” Marlowe bulleted out, “I don't have to tell you anything. Now, this interview is over.” As his client stood to leave, as if on cue, Major Hanover jumped to attention, followed by Will, who stood there not knowing quite why he also had sprung up. The colonel gave a nod to them and quickly exited the room.

The two lawyers looked at each other with the same idea. Just when they thought they had been getting to the core of the case, they had discovered something very different…that they had been unwrapping a mystery, only to find another riddle.

16

J
ASON
B
ELL
P
URDY CLOSED THE
sliding French doors to the library of his Chevy Chase brownstone.

“Jason, I appreciate you inviting me out to Maryland.” Howley Jubb was at the bar pouring himself a drink.

“Hey,” Purdy responded, “like I said—I've been meaning to bring you out here for a long time. Things just got crazy. Real busy. Is your hotel room okay?”

“Yeah, nice suite. I appreciate it.”

Purdy plopped down on the couch, kicked off his shoes, and stretched out his legs.

“So, what do you have for me? What did you dig up south of the border?”

“I think I've got the whole package almost wrapped up for you.”

The seated man's eyes brightened, and he gave out a whoop.

“Hey—great work, Howley! Give me the details.”

“Well, first I was going to have Susie back at the office type up a report for you. But her kid got sick. So I didn't get a chance to have her do it before I flew out of Atlanta.”

Purdy's expression changed to a scowl and he straightened up on the couch.

“Hey—hey. Nothing in writing.
Nothing
. What's wrong with you, Howley? You're going to have some secretary type this stuff up? All this is
verbal only
.”

“Fine, fine. No problem,” Jubb said, sipping from his glass. “How dumb do you think I am? All the really sensitive stuff I was going to put in code.”

“Hey—forget the code stuff. I'm in Washington, DC. We've got guys walking around with badges who break codes all the time. We've
got people looking for paper on each other constantly. You get the point?”

“Sure,” Jubb said with a half smile, as he sat down in a chair opposite the couch. “So, like I was saying, things are looking very good. My contacts down there tell me that this group—al-Aqsa Jihad, the AAJ—has been operating in Mexico. Some of the folks in the Mexican government even know about it. They tell me there's been a change of attitude about the U.S. from bad to worse. There's a group down there called the Independent Revolutionary Party—the IRP—it's really building a lot of support. And of course the federal police and some of the judges and government folks in Mexico City have been playing ball with drug dealers for a long period of time.”

“Why would somebody in the government let the AAJ operate in the country?” Purdy asked.

“Can't figure that out yet. But it's apparently a fact.”

“So how about this massacre deal down at Chacmool?”

“Okay, you've got to go back to the kidnapping down at Cancún first. The way the Mexicans look at it, the American military and some sort of mysterious special ops group were already on their way down there—maybe even within the borders—when the kidnapping happened. Anyway, the commando unit was already close by.