Directed Verdict (44 page)

46

THE OBJECT OF THE U.S. MARSHALS’
manhunt cursed the traffic as his vehicle approached the Hampton Roads Bridge Tunnel. Barnes kept his expletives to himself. They had entered the span of the bridge that snaked out over the Elizabeth River inlet of the Chesapeake Bay separating Norfolk from Hampton. The cars, SUVs, and trucks lined up bumper-to-bumper, barely inching along, as far as Barnes could see.

The bridge accommodated two lanes in each direction, with separate spans for the northbound and southbound traffic. There were small shoulders between the outside edges of the two lanes heading northbound and three-foot-high, two-foot-wide concrete abutments on each side of the bridge. The span hovered about thirty feet above the water when the river was at high tide, and it was undergirded at regular intervals by bundles of huge concrete pillars that supported the road surface and ran deep into the river bottom below. The bridge spanned about two miles of the river, then disappeared into a tunnel that took it below the river’s surface. If Barnes and Ahmed could make it to the other side of the tunnel, they would be in Hampton and well on their way to the waiting jet.

“Do something, you fool!” the Saudi shouted from the backseat of the Lincoln. “We’re losing valuable time.”

Spurred by Ahmed’s anger, Barnes turned on his flashers and rolled down his window. He moved from the left lane partially onto the left shoulder, but the big Lincoln could not maneuver past the car ahead, and so it straddled the yellow line marking the outside of the left lane. He pulled the vehicle as close to the concrete abutments as he dared, yelled out his window, and blew his horn. Slowly the drivers in front of him pulled partly into the right lane, allowing him to pass on the shoulder of the roadway.

* * *

Less than a half mile back, Nikki mimicked Barnes’s driving strategy and gained the right shoulder of the roadway. The narrow frame on her Sebring made it much easier to get by, and she had a good alibi. She stuffed a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt from her gym bag inside her blouse. She then hit the flashers, leaned on the horn, and yelled that she was on her way to the hospital.

“My water broke! . . . Thank you! . . . I’ve got to get to the hospital! . . . Baby! . . . Thanks!” The cars parted like the Red Sea, as she advanced up the right-hand shoulder.

Her phone rang. “What?” she yelled. This was no time for a call. She had Barnes in sight no more than fifteen car lengths ahead.

“Ichabod issued a bench warrant for Ahmed,” Bella yelled into the phone. “Don’t let him get away.”

“I won’t; he’s within sight. . . . Excuse me, sir—got to get to the hospital! Thanks, so much. . . . How far back are you? . . . Hey! Get out of the way! I’m going to the hospital. . . . Hurry up, Bella. . . .”

Nikki needed a break and found one just a few hundred yards from the tunnel. Barnes was wedged behind a pickup truck, and the two bubbas inside looked like they had no intention of letting him by. Barnes leaned out the driver’s window and yelled at them over his hood, commanding them to move out of the way because he was on official government business.

The bubbas gestured and moved farther onto the shoulder to block the path of the Lincoln. The bigger of the bubbas even got out of the truck, stood on the shoulder, and asked Barnes if he wanted a piece of that action. Barnes continued to yell at the man but stayed in his car.

On the opposite shoulder, Nikki glided past the Lincoln and the pickup.

Suddenly the traffic began to pick up speed. Nikki glanced over her shoulder to see that the pickup was moving and that the Lincoln was cruising along behind. Traffic was only rolling at about fifteen miles an hour, but Nikki knew the fickle nature of the tunnel snarls and estimated that in no time the vehicles could be moving at close to normal speeds.

If Barnes and Ahmed made it to the other side of the tunnel, they could not be contained. Several quick exits led to hundreds of roads, and Nikki was sure she would never see them again. They had to be stopped now.

She pulled her Sebring squarely into the right lane of traffic. There traffic moved at about twenty miles an hour. She was about four car lengths in front of the pickup and the Lincoln, which were moving slightly faster in the left-hand lane. Nikki said a quick prayer for forgiveness, then made her move.

She cranked the wheel hard left, broadsiding the car next to her and wedging him at an angle into the concrete abutment at the left-hand edge of the road surface. Then she swerved hard to her right, forcing her car perpendicular to the traffic, turning straight toward the concrete abutment on the right side of the road. She slammed on her brakes.

In the very next instant, a millisecond of time, she felt the jolt of her own sudden stop, her head jerked about like a rag doll. She heard the sound of crunching metal and broken headlights, the squeal of tires, and the blaring of horns. She braced herself to be hit broadside. The second collision, however, never came. The cars behind her miraculously came to a stop just short of her Sebring.

Nikki jumped out of the car and surveyed the damage she had caused. The car she had forced into the abutment had been hit in the rear by another at a low speed. That fender bender, coupled with her car angled across the right shoulder and right lane, brought traffic to a complete stop. There was no room for even one lane to get through. The occupants of the other cars appeared to be fine. For a split second, Nikki flushed with pride at her accomplishment.

Her pride quickly gave way to fear. Barnes and Ahmed came sprinting toward her, Ahmed wielding a large black pistol. Other drivers also alighted from their cars and were now yelling at Nikki. In the chaos, Ahmed ran ever closer, then crouched.

Nikki moved toward the concrete abutment behind her Sebring. She pointed at Barnes and Ahmed. “They’re trying to kill me!” she yelled as she backed toward the edge of the bridge.

As Ahmed crouched, he extended both arms, steadily taking aim. He was no more than fifty feet away. The barrel of the gun looked huge. She could dive behind her vehicle, but if she hit the ground, Barnes would be on top of her in a second.

She felt the concrete behind her, turned, placed both her hands on the abutment. She heard Barnes yell “Stop!” as he closed on her.

Nikki glanced in fright at the choppy water below, then thought about the gun. She took a deep breath and swung her legs out to the side, jumping over the top of the abutment and pushing off with both hands. She brought her legs together so that she would knife into the water.

She held her breath and prepared herself to plummet through thirty-three feet of air. As she closed her eyes, she heard the pop of Ahmed’s gun.

* * *

“Let’s go back to the beginning,” Brad suggested. “Why don’t you explain the circumstances leading to your first contact with Mr. Aberijan on this case.”

Leslie looked at the back wall, collecting her thoughts, then turned to Brad. “The day that I learned Mr. Strobel was trying to have this case dismissed on a technicality, I had a long talk with Sarah. I remember that I was filled with anger about what the defendants were doing, but she was so forgiving and accepting. She told me that she harbored no hatred toward either Mr. Aberijan or Mr. Strobel. She said that hate only consumes the person who hates.”

She looked admiringly toward Sarah and continued. “The night after we had that conversation, I couldn’t sleep and could only think about losing my own husband and about Sarah’s loss. That night I decided to take matters into my own hands.”

“What did you do?”

“I had been working on a document called ‘Preliminary Game Plan for
Reed v. Saudi Arabia
.’ It had lists of witnesses, exhibits—those types of things. Frankly, it was all the kind of stuff that the defendants would be entitled to obtain through the normal discovery processes, but I knew that Mr. Aberijan wouldn’t know that. So I took that document and edited out any confidential stuff I didn’t want the other side to see, like the fact that we would be calling Rasheed Berjein as a witness, and I mailed a sanitized version to Mr. Aberijan along with a letter demanding fifty-thousand U.S. dollars and containing wiring instructions for a Cayman Island bank account.”

“Did Mr. Aberijan know who you were at this time?”

“I don’t think so. The letter was anonymous.”

“Okay,” a curious Brad said. “When did you contact Mr. Aberijan a second time?”

“The second time was after I met with and prepared a potential expert witness for us named Alfred Lloyd Worthington—”

“I should have known,” Brad mumbled.

“What was that, Counsel?” Ichabod asked. She was leaning forward now, her scribble pad sitting untouched in front of her.

“Nothing, Your Honor.”

Leslie continued. “Mr. Worthington was a Washington lobbyist and former congressman who served on the House Foreign Relations Committee. He was going to testify about how the nation of Saudi Arabia sanctioned the actions of their religious police, the Muttawa.”

“Your Honor, this is ridiculous,” Strobel interjected. “They did not call Worthington to testify. They should not be allowed to put in his testimony by proxy through this witness.”

“I agree,” Ichabod said. “Ms. Connors, refrain from discussing the proposed testimony of Mr. Worthington.”

“Yes, Your Honor,” Leslie said, without missing a beat. “In the course of preparing him for his testimony, I learned that Mr. Worthington had pleaded ‘no contest’ to a misdemeanor charge that resulted from beating his wife. I was not about to put a wife beater on the stand as an expert in a case alleging police abuse by Mr. Aberijan. I also believed that the defendants would uncover this information too, so I decided to use Mr. Worthington’s testimony as my second piece of bait.”

“Then how did you think we were going to make that part of our case?” Brad’s frustration was beginning to show. He didn’t like hearing his expert witnesses referred to as “bait.”

“I knew,” Leslie said, “that if this sting worked, we wouldn’t need Worthington. And if it didn’t work, all the Worthingtons in the world couldn’t help us. I knew it was a huge gamble, but it seemed like a chance I had to take.”

No it wasn’t,
he wanted to say.
You didn’t need to resort to this to win this case.
But he would admonish her later.

“How did you use Worthington’s testimony as bait?” Brad asked, getting back on track.

“I sent a second anonymous letter that explained that Worthington had an Achilles heel that could be exploited. I basically told Mr. Aberijan about the no-contest plea of Worthington in Alexandria General District Court. I told him that information would cost one hundred thousand dollars.”

Brad could feel the heat rising on his neck. It was a wonder he had any case left at all. “What happened at Worthington’s deposition?” he asked.

“Mr. Strobel asked him a few questions about whether he had ever abused his wife, and Worthington withdrew as an expert,” Leslie summarized.

Judge Baker-Kline eyeballed Strobel. She was not content to let this go. “Do you have any information to suggest that Mr. Strobel was part of this conspiracy?” she asked Leslie.

Leslie looked hard at Strobel and then furrowed her brow as she considered her answer. The man’s reputation hung in the balance, and Brad could sense that Leslie was wavering. If the shoe were on the other foot, Strobel would hang them out to dry in a heartbeat. What did Leslie know? And what would she tell?

“No, none at all,” she said at last.

Other than a slight relaxation of his shoulders, there was no visible reaction from Mack Strobel.

“What happened next?” A safe question to ask, as Brad had no idea where the witness was heading.

“I decided it was time to bring Mr. Aberijan to the trap,” Leslie answered coldly.

“How did you do that?”

“Well, I figured the best place to meet a man as dangerous as Mr. Aberijan would be a public place with lots of police officers. So I picked General District Court in Norfolk. I sent him a letter and told him to meet me there alone on a certain date. I told him to bring some transmitters so I could bug our office.”

“You did what?” asked an astonished Brad, eyebrows raised in disbelief.

“You’ll remember that after the Worthington incident, we were all paranoid and decided we would not use our office phones for any confidential communications. We hired a private investigator, Patrick O’Malley, to check for listening devices. He would come by the office and do that every morning. I believed that I needed something to cement Mr. Aberijan’s trust so that he wouldn’t think he was being set up. I knew that if I placed some bugs on our office phone lines, he wouldn’t hear anything more than harmless information. I also knew that he would no longer have any suspicions about a setup. And finally, I knew that I could simply reattach the transmitters every morning after O’Malley left and take them off every night.”

“I thought you said O’Malley already knew.”

“Now you’re getting ahead of the story.”

“Then tell us what happened at this meeting.”

“We had a very short conversation. When I invited Mr. Aberijan to the meeting, I told him that I had a plan for knocking out our best remaining expert, Dr. Nancy Shelhorse. I told him the price would be one hundred thousand dollars. At the meeting, he delivered three shortwave radio transmitters. He told me he actually thought it was a bad idea. I think his words were something like, ‘Do you really think these are necessary?’ But I assured him I knew what I was doing, then left.”

Brad was having a hard time believing what he was hearing. From the moment he saw Leslie at the Marriott the prior night, he assumed that she had been responsible for keeping Shelhorse out of the case. But he allowed himself to hope otherwise. Now the reality of it was sinking in, and he was numb.

“But you still didn’t talk to me about this.”

“I started getting nervous, realizing I was in way over my head. I was playing an awkward game of espionage with a cold-blooded killer. A part of me desperately wanted to tell you everything that was happening, but it was more important for me to protect you and keep you out of this nightmare I had created.” Leslie bit her lower lip and paused. “I didn’t want to lose you.”