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Chapter 69
TO CATCH A PIRATE
All rise,” the clerk bellowed again. “This court is adjourned.” Ross was led out of one door of
the courtroom, heading to his holding cell. A few feet away Jared walked out of another door,
past the court officers, and into the marble lobby on the fifteenth floor. Jared needed a place to think,
and he knew exactly where he was going to go: Ground Zero, the place the towers fell.
Jared had been pummeled on the stand. He was accused by Ross’s lawyers of screwing up the
case in every way possible. The lawyer painted a portrait of Jared as a young agent who was under
so much pressure to capture the Dread Pirate Roberts that he and his buddies at the FBI had
apprehended the wrong man. The questions lobbed at Jared grew so contentious that every query was
met with a loud and vociferous “Objection!” from the prosecution.
The media lapped up the drama, volleying Dratel’s theories out to the world, noting that Jared
had, at different times in the case, “alternative perpetrators” in his sights. After days of being pelted
and accused by the defense, Jared finally heard seven words that relieved him to no end. “I have no
further questions, your honor.”
Now, as he walked toward Ground Zero, Jared played back the last few years in his mind. What
a country, he thought as he walked down Broadway, away from the courthouse. One minute you’re the
nobody son of an Armenian immigrant, working in a movie theater, applying over and over for a
dozen jobs in government, each of which you are denied. They say you don’t have a degree. You’re
too abrasive. You didn’t answer my question correctly. No. No. No. And then finally, after years of
trying, you get a job stamping passports. You try and you try and you try, and eventually you become
an agent with the Department of Homeland Security. Then the call comes in from a thankless
employee in a humongous government mail center at the airport about a single tiny pink pill. And then
here you are.
As Jared entered the site of the Trade Center, he was surrounded by construction equipment
beeping and digging, hardhats yelling, the roar of giant trucks and cranes as tourists peered up through
their phones and cameras to capture the new, almost finished One World Trade Center. He thought
about the Silk Road. He had set out to try to stop what he saw as potentially devastating to the fabric
of this country on his own, and he had ended up doing just that, but he had needed the assistance of so
many others, each of them bringing a single piece to one giant puzzle.