The Broker

4

Fortunately for Backman, though he had no way of knowing and no reason to care, at the eleventh hour President Morgan also pardoned an aging billionaire who’d escaped prison by fleeing the country. The billionaire, an immigrant from some Slavic state who’d had the option of redoing his name upon his arrival decades earlier, had chosen in his youth the title of Duke Mongo. The Duke had given trainloads of money to Morgan’s presidential campaign. When it was revealed that he’d spent his career evading taxes it was also revealed he’d spent several nights in the Lincoln Bedroom, where, over a friendly nightcap, he and the President discussed pending indictments. According to the third person present for the nightcap, a young tart who was currently serving as the Duke’s fifth wife, the President promised to throw his weight around over at the IRS and call off the dogs. Didn’t happen. The indictment was thirty-eight pages long, and before it rolled off the printer the billionaire, minus wife number five, took up residence in Uruguay where he thumbed his nose north while living in a palace with soon-to-be wife number six.

Now he wanted to come home so he could die with dignity, die as a real patriot, and be buried on his Thoroughbred farm just outside Lexington, Kentucky. Critz cut the deal, and minutes after signing the pardon for Joel Backman, President Morgan granted complete clemency to Duke Mongo.

It took a day for the news to leak — the pardons, for good reason, were not publicized by the White House — and the press went insane. Here was a man who cheated the federal government out of $600 million over a twenty-year period, a crook who deserved to be locked away forever, and he was about to fly home in his mammoth jet and spend his final days in obscene luxury. The Backman story, sensational as it was, now had serious competition from not only the kidnapped Danish tourists but also the country’s largest tax cheater.

But it was still a hot item. Most of the major morning papers along the East Coast ran a picture of “The Broker” somewhere on the front page. Most ran long stories about his scandal, his guilty plea, and now his pardon.

Carl Pratt read them all online, in a huge messy office he kept above his garage in northwest Washington. He used the place to hide, to stay away from the wars that raged within his firm, to avoid the partners he couldn’t stand. He could drink there and no one would care. He could throw things, and curse at the walls, and do whatever he damn well pleased because it was his sanctuary.

The Backman file was in a large cardboard storage box, one he kept hidden in a closet. Now it was on a worktable, and Pratt was going through it for the first time in many years. He’d saved everything — news articles, photos, interoffice memos, sensitive notes he’d taken, copies of the indictments, Jacy Hubbard’s autopsy report.

What a miserable history.

In January of 1996, three young Pakistani computer scientists made an astounding discovery. Working in a hot, cramped flat on the top floor of an apartment building on the outskirts of Karachi, the three linked together a series of Hewlett-Packard computers they’d purchased online with a government grant. Their new “supercomputer” was then wired to a sophisticated military satellite telephone, one also provided by the government. The entire operation was secret and funded off the books by the military. Their objective was simple: to locate, and then try to access, a new Indian spy satellite hovering three hundred miles above Pakistan. If they successfully tapped into the satellite, then they hoped to monitor its surveillance. A secondary dream was to try to manipulate it.

The stolen intelligence was at first exciting, then proved to be virtually useless. The new Indian “eyes” were doing much the same thing the old ones had been doing for ten years — taking thousands of photographs of the same military installations. Pakistani satellites had been sending back photos of Indian army bases and troop movements for the same ten years. The two countries could swap pictures and learn nothing.

But another satellite was accidentally discovered, then another and another. They were neither Pakistani nor Indian, and they were not supposed to be where they were found — each about three hundred miles above the earth, moving north-northeast at a constant speed of 120 miles per hour, and each maintaining a distance of four hundred miles from the other. Over ten days, the terribly excited hackers monitored the movements of at least six different satellites, all apparently part of the same system, as they slowly approached from the Arabian Peninsula, swept through the skies over Afghanistan and Pakistan, then headed off for western China.

They told no one, but instead managed to procure a more powerful satellite telephone from the military, claiming it was needed to follow up some unfinished work with the Indian surveillance. After a month of methodical, twenty-four-hour monitoring, they had pieced together a global web of nine identical satellites, all linked to each other, and all carefully designed to be invisible to everyone except the men who launched them.

They code-named their discovery Neptune.

The three young wizards had been educated in the United States. The leader was Safi Mirza, a former Stanford graduate assistant who’d worked briefly at Breedin Corp, a renegade U.S. defense contractor that specialized in satellite systems. Fazal Sharif had an advanced degree in computer science from Georgia Tech.

The third and youngest member of the Neptune gang was Farooq Khan, and it was Farooq who finally wrote the software that penetrated the first Neptune satellite. Once inside its computer system, Farooq began downloading intelligence so sensitive that he and Fazal and Safi knew they were entering no-man’s-land. There were clear color pictures of terrorist training camps in Afghanistan, and government limousines in Beijing. Neptune could listen as Chinese pilots bantered back and forth at twenty thousand feet, and it could watch a suspicious fishing boat as it docked in Yemen. Neptune followed an armored truck, presumably Castro’s, through the streets of Havana. And in a live video feed that shocked the three, Arafat himself was clearly seen stepping into an alley in his compound in Gaza, lighting a cigarette, then urinating.

For two sleepless days, the three peeked inside the satellites as they crossed Pakistan. The software was in English, and with Neptune’s preoccupation with the Middle East, Asia, and China, it was easy to assume Neptune belonged to the United States, with Britain and Israel a distant second and third. Perhaps it was a joint U.S.-Israeli secret.

After two days of eavesdropping, they fled the apartment and reorganized their little cell in a friend’s farmhouse ten miles outside of Karachi. The discovery was exciting enough, but they, and Safi in particular, wanted to go one step further. He was quite confident he could manipulate the system.

His first success was watching Fazal Sharif read a newspaper. To protect the identity of their location, Fazal took a bus into downtown Karachi, and wearing a green cap and sunglasses, he bought a newspaper and sat on a park bench near a certain intersection. With Farooq feeding commands through a ramped-up sat-phone, a Neptune satellite found Fazal, zoomed down close enough to pick off the headlines of his newspaper, and relayed it all back to the farmhouse where it was watched in muted disbelief.

The electro-optical imaging relays to Earth were of the highest resolution known to technology at that time, down to about four feet — equal to the sharpest images produced by U.S. military reconnaissance satellites and about twice as sharp as the best European and American commercial satellites.

For weeks and months, the three worked nonstop writing home-brewed software for their discovery. They discarded much of what they wrote, but as they fine-tuned the successful programs they became even more amazed at Neptune’s possibilities.

Eighteen months after they first discovered Neptune, the three had, on four Jaz 2-gigabyte disks, a software program that not only increased the speed at which Neptune communicated with its numerous contacts on Earth but also allowed Neptune to jam many of the navigation, communications, and reconnaissance satellites already in orbit. For lack of a better code name, they called their program JAM.

Though the system they called Neptune belonged to someone else, the three conspirators were able to control it, to thoroughly manipulate it, and even to render it useless. A bitter fight erupted. Safi and Fazal got greedy and wanted to sell JAM to the highest bidder. Farooq saw nothing but trouble with their creation. He wanted to give it to the Pakistani military and wash his hands of the entire matter.

In September of 1998, Safi and Fazal traveled to Washington and spent a frustrating month trying to penetrate military intelligence through Pakistani contacts. Then a friend told them about Joel Backman, the man who could open any door in Washington.

But getting in his door was a challenge. The broker was a very important man with important clients and lots of significant people demanding small segments of his time. His flat fee for a one-hour consultation with a new client was $5,000 and that was for those lucky enough to be looked upon with favor by the great man. Safi borrowed $2,000 from an uncle in Chicago and promised to pay Mr. Backman the rest in ninety days. Documents in court later revealed that their first meeting took place on October 24, 1998, in the offices of Backman, Pratt & Bolling. The meeting would eventually destroy the lives of everyone present.

Backman at first had seemed skeptical of JAM and its incredible capabilities. Or perhaps he’d grasped its potential immediately and chosen to play it sly with his new clients. Safi and Fazal dreamed of selling JAM to the Pentagon for a fortune, whatever Mr. Backman thought their product might fetch. And if anyone in Washington could get a fortune for JAM, it was Joel Backman.

Early on, he had called in Jacy Hubbard, his million-dollar mouthpiece who still played golf once a week with the President and went barhopping with big shots on Capitol Hill. He was colorful, flamboyant, combative, thrice-divorced, and quite fond of expensive whiskeys — especially when purchased by lobbyists. He had survived politically only because he was known as the dirtiest campaigner in the history of the U.S. Senate, no small feat. He was known to be anti-Semitic, and during the course of his career he developed close ties with the Saudis. Very close. One of many ethics investigations revealed a $1 million campaign contribution from a prince, the same one Hubbard went skiing with in Austria.

Initially, Hubbard and Backman argued over the best way to market JAM. Hubbard wanted to peddle it to the Saudis, who, he was convinced, would pay $1 billion for it. Backman had taken the rather provincial view that such a dangerous product should be kept at home. Hubbard was convinced he could cut a deal with the Saudis in which they would promise that JAM would never be used against the United States, their ostensible ally. Backman was afraid of the Israelis — their powerful friends in the United States, their military, and, most important, their secret spy services.

At that time Backman, Pratt & Bolling represented many foreign companies and governments. In fact, the firm was “the” address for anyone looking for instant clout in Washington. Pay their frightening fees, and you had yourself access. Its endless list of clients included the Japanese steel industry, the South Korean government, the Saudis, most of the Caribbean banking conspiracy, the current regime in Panama, a Bolivian farming cooperative that grew nothing but cocaine, and on and on. There were many legitimate clients, and many that were not so clean.

The rumor about JAM slowly leaked around their offices. It could potentially be the largest fee the firm had yet seen, and there had been some startling ones. As weeks passed, other partners in the firm presented varying scenarios for the marketing of JAM. The notion of patriotism was slowly forgotten — there was simply too much money out there! The firm represented a Dutch company that built avionics for the Chinese air force, and with that entrée a lucrative deal could be struck with the Beijing government. The South Koreans would rest easier if they knew exactly what was happening to the north. The Syrians would hand over their national treasury for the ability to neutralize Israeli military communications. A certain drug cartel would pay billions for the ability to track DEA interdiction efforts.

Each day Joel Backman and his band of greedy lawyers grew richer. In the firm’s largest offices, they talked of little else.

The doctor was rather brusque and appeared to have little time for his new patient. It was, after all, a military hospital. With scarcely a word he checked the pulse, heart, lungs, blood pressure, reflexes, and so on, then from out of the blue announced, “I think you’re dehydrated.”

“How’s that?” Backman asked.

“Happens a lot with long flights. We’ll start a drip. You’ll be okay in twenty-four hours.”

“You mean, like an IV?”

“That’s it.”

“I don’t do IVs.”

“Beg your pardon.”

“I didn’t stutter. I don’t do needles.”

“We took a sample of your blood.”

“Yeah, that was blood going out, not something coming in. Forget it, Doc, I’m not doing an IV.”

“But you’re dehydrated.”

“I don’t feel dehydrated.”

“I’m the doctor, and I say you’re dehydrated.”

“Then give me a glass of water.”

Half an hour later, a nurse entered with a big smile and a handful of medications. Joel said no to the sleeping pills, and when she sort of waved a hypodermic he said, “What’s that?”

“Ryax.”

“What the hell is Ryax?”

“It’s a muscle relaxer.”

“Well, it just so happens that my muscles are very relaxed right now. I haven’t complained of unrelaxed muscles. I haven’t been diagnosed with unrelaxed muscles. No one has asked me if my muscles are relaxed. So you can take that Ryax and stick it up your own ass and we’ll both be relaxed and happier.”

She almost dropped the needle. After a long painful pause in which she was completely speechless, she managed to utter, “I’ll check with the doctor.”

“You do that. On second thought, why don’t you poke him in his rather fat ass. He’s the one who needs to relax.” But she was already out of the room.

On the other side of the base, a Sergeant McAuliffe pecked on his keyboard and sent a message to the Pentagon. From there it was sent almost immediately to Langley where it was read by Julia Javier, a veteran who’d been selected by Director Maynard himself to handle the Backman matter. Less than ten minutes after the Ryax incident, Ms. Javier stared at her monitor, mumbled the word “Dammit,” then walked upstairs.

As usual, Teddy Maynard was sitting at the end of a long table, wrapped in a quilt, reading one of the countless summaries that got piled on his desk every hour.

Ms. Javier said, “Just heard from Aviano. Our boy is refusing all medications. Won’t take an IV. Won’t take a pill.”

“Can’t they put something in his food?” Teddy said at low volume.

“He’s not eating.”

“What’s he saying?”

“That his stomach is upset.”

“Is that possible?”

“He’s not spending time on the toilet. Hard to say.”

“Is he taking liquids?”

“They took him a glass of water, which he refused. Insisted on bottled water only. When he got one, he inspected the cap to make sure the seal had not been broken.”

Teddy shoved the current report away and rubbed his eyes with his knuckles. The first plan had been to sedate Backman in the hospital, with either an IV or a regular injection, knock him out cold, keep him drugged for two days, then slowly bring him back with some delightful blends of their most up-to-date narcotics. After a few days in a haze, they would start the sodium pentothal treatment, the truth serum, which, when used with their veteran interrogators, always produced whatever they were after.

The first plan was easy and foolproof. The second one would take months and success was far from guaranteed.

“He’s got big secrets, doesn’t he?” Teddy said.

“No doubt.”

“But we knew that, didn’t we?”

“Yes, we did.”