Page 128 of Grave Danger
“It doesn’t matter what you offer,” said Jack. “The US government won’t buy it.”
Nouri answered in a calm but threatening voice. “They’ll buy it, because you’re going to sell it, Jack. Sell it like your client’s life depends on it. And your own.”
The threat had a certain cadence to it, and the proverbial light bulb blinked on in Jack’s head. “We met before you testified in the Hague proceeding, didn’t we, Nouri?”
Nouri didn’t deny it.
“That night outside my office,” said Jack. “You had a mouthful of cotton or something to disguise your voice. But that was you sitting on my kidneys, wasn’t it?”
Still no denial.
“Let’s go inside,” said Nouri. “We have some rehearsing to do.”
Chapter 47
Jack rehearsed his sales pitch at the kitchen counter. Nouri was his coach. Zahra was his test audience.
Practice was important. Jack had to present Zahra’s demand in a way that was satisfactory to Nouri—that “sold it.” At the same time, he needed to signal to Andie that he wasn’t speaking of his own free will. And then there was the wild card in all this: if Jack played it just right—“With feeling,” as Nouri put it—he might finally find out the truth about Ava Bazzi.
After a couple of trial runs, the third time was the charm.
“That was impressive,” said Nouri. “Let’s do it.”
Zahra laid Jack’s phone on the granite countertop, equidistant from Jack on one side and Zahra and Nouri on the other. Jack speed-dialed Andie, and she answered.
“Is Zahra ready to surrender?” she asked.
“We’re ready to make a deal,” said Jack.
He’d caught her off guard. “A deal? Jack, we’re not going to—”
“Please, just listen to me, Andrea.”
There was silence on the line. He never called her Andrea.No onecalled her Andrea. She seemed to take his cue.
“Okay, got it,” she said. “I’m listening.”
“Zahra has specific conditions of surrender, but first it’s important for you—for the FBI—to understand where she’s coming from. I’m not speaking to you husband to wife. I’m speaking criminal lawyer to FBI agent.”
Criminal lawyer.He hoped it registered with Andie—that term he never used, that he always corrected to “criminaldefenselawyer.”
“Understood,” she said.
“Let’s go back in time to when Ava Bazzi was arrested and ‘disappeared’ in the custody of the Tehran morality police. The Iranian government claimed that she escaped and fled the country. Human rights organizations all over the world listed her as another victim of the regime. The US State Department never took a public position one way or the other. The question is: Why?”
“Are you expecting me to answer that, Jack?”
Jack ignored the question, sticking to the presentation Nouri had approved.
“Fast forward to when I became Zahra’s lawyer. The State Department still had no official position on Ava Bazzi. But behind the scenes, it used all the leverage of the federal government—mostly through you—to make me stop trying to prove that Ava was murdered by the regime. Again, the question is: Why?”
“You’re asking questions I can’t answer,” said Andie.
“There’s more,” he said, adding his code word for good measure, “Andrea.”
“I’m listening,” she said, still with him.
“At the child custody hearing in state court, Farid showed up with an order from Iranian family court granting him full custody of Yasmin on her seventh birthday. It was a fake, but the judge enforced it because the State Department issued a certificate saying it was authentic. Same question: Why?”