“There were four airplane tickets from Las Vegas to Portland in the truck. The tickets were reserved under the names of some of their fake ID’s. I assume they would have taken 89A to Prescott Valley and driven to Las Vegas. It seems to have been well planned. There were even six cans of white spray paint in the truck. If they had used them to cover the truck’s markings before trying to set the fire, they’d have gotten away with it.”
My cell phone rang. It was Chad with the latest. He was heading to bed, but wanted to update me first.
“So what did you learn from Chad?” Margaret asked once the short phone call was over.
“There’s a press conference at one tomorrow, and the sheriff would like both Chad and me to be there a half hour before it begins,” I said.
“I’ll go too,” she said. “I want to see you get recognition for solving this case. We can pick up Chad and drive up right after church.” I knew that I would be very tired and sore in the morning, but I also knew that I needed to go to mass to thank the Big Guy.
“They secured a warrant to search Ali’s store, and found a place where two tapestries had been taken down. The brackets left on the wall exactly fit the poles we found at the Khans’ murder site. He also had a number of ornate swords in his inventory.”
The next morning at St. Paul’s, several people asked why Margaret and I stood at the back of the church rather than our normal pew. It was a delicate subject to explain in a church. News of last night’s apprehension of the Saturday Night Arsonist hadn’t been made public, but everyone’s mood was elevated by the rain and this morning’s spectacular rainbow that seemed to terminate on Capital Butte. We’d received more than an inch in forty-five minutes in Sedona, and the rain had been even heavier in Oak Creek Canyon. The Happy Jack fire was now seventy percent contained, and I-17 had been opened for normal traffic at 9:00 this morning. The massive traffic jam in Sedona was now just the normal snarl associated with a small town that has over four million tourists pass through each year.
Margaret had prepared a nest formed with our down comforter in the back seat of her Maxima. Chad rode up front with her. The usually clear and placid Oak Creek was a rushing river of red-brown water, and several low water crossings were closed, blocking access to vacation homes along the creek. The rain had completely cleared the haze, and the beauty of the canyon was a reminder of what we had almost lost last night. I knew that the fire risk would return next summer, and from a long-term perspective, fire was a normal part of the environment. I only hoped that Oak Creek Canyon would keep its dense stand of hardwood and evergreen trees during my lifetime. With my new job, I might be driving this route almost every day.
Once we reached the Law Enforcement Administration Building, we ran into Meg, a reporter for the Sedona Red Rock News. Margaret went to have a cup of coffee with her while Chad and I went to meet with my boss. Sheriff Taylor was in good humor and explained that the governor had come up this morning to celebrate the apprehension of the Saturday Night Arsonists. He had promised a special allocation from her administrative budget to help the county’s expense in dealing with the Happy Jack fire. The budget would not need to be cut nearly as drastically as the county commissioners had expected.
The sheriff updated us on the latest on the case so we’d be prepared at the press conference. The FBI believed that we had uncovered a well-organized Al Qaeda sleeper cell, some of whose members had been in the United States for five or six years preparing for the terrorist actions. The group lived as normal citizens in Arizona and avoided any overt connection to radical groups until it was time for them to carry out their assigned actions. The FBI thought that the arson project was only one of many terrorist actions they’d been preparing. It was the same sleeper cell strategy used by the KGB to plant agents during the cold war.
The FBI was handling the interrogation of Muhammad exclusively for now based on my commitment to Linda Surrett. His father had arranged for a lawyer to meet the ambulance that brought Muhammad to Flagstaff Medical Center, and there had been no discussion without the lawyer present. No one knew how he had gotten involved with the radical Islamic fringe group, but I suspected that Mr. Ali had recruited him last summer.
The big surprise was that Muhammad seemed to not understand English. He would speak exclusively in Arabic and ignore anything said in his native language. The FBI interpreter said this was a major problem in Muhammad’s legal situation and medical treatment. Muhammad’s Arabic was heavily accented, and his vocabulary very limited. He had only been studying the language to read religious texts and didn’t know words important to his medical treatment or legal situation. It was too early to tell if he was faking it or the disability was a result of the lightning hit and a prolonged period of low oxygen. There were a number of recorded cases of the loss of a first language through trauma where a second language learned as an adult remained intact. When we learn a language as an adult, the information is stored in a different part of the brain.
“What does the county attorney say about it?” Chad asked.
“It may be a real problem with the prosecution. It’s too early to tell,” the sheriff said. He was clearly annoyed and thought the guy was faking it. The other three terrorists had not yet been identified. None of them were in the fingerprint registration of foreign nationals, and the man who was using the name Mr. Ali was certainly not the same Ali Jumblatt who became a naturalized American citizen. It was a stolen identity.
“What did they have in mind for Ashley Campbell? There were no travel documents for her in the van,” I asked.
“The answer is creepy. Ashley said they held a mock tribunal with everyone speaking Arabic and Muhammad serving as her defense. Mr. Ali, who they referred to as the holy Imam Islam, condemned her to death for harlotry. She was accused of seducing Zayd from the divine faith. They planned to stop somewhere between here and Las Vegas and stone her to death. Ashley insisted that she was a virgin, and Zayd was converting out of divine grace. That was when they taped her mouth shut to prevent further blasphemy. ”
After thirty years in law enforcement, I had some experience with guilty men going free on technical issues, and Muhammad’s partial amnesia bothered me. If I’d waited a little longer to give CPR, but no, I wasn’t going to think that way; I was doing my job.
The sheriff said it was time for the press conference, and we walked to the auditorium. I was shocked at the scene when the door opened. Clearly the press conference had been going on for some time without us. The governor was at the podium. He is generally very supportive of law enforcement. When I entered she said, “And here are our heroes now.”
The room was jammed with law enforcement people as well as the press. My administrative assistant Rose Rios was in the front row with half a dozen others from the Sedona office. The whole group, including the press stood and applauded as Chad and I looked around baffled. Sheriff Taylor led us to the stage where Margaret had suddenly emerged from one side and the Campbells from the other. I was not a true hero, and I certainly would not have succeeded without help from the storm, but sometimes society needs heroes whether they deserve it or not, and in this case Chad and I got more credit than we deserved.
It would be too vain for me to spend more time describing what happened at the ceremony, except to say a photo of Margaret kissing me appeared in the Sedona newspaper on Wednesday, and the one of Ashley Campbell kissing me appeared on the front page of Monday’s Flagstaff paper. The photos showed the silver medal that the governor had hung around my neck. The articles mentioned both my promotion and Chad’s.
EPILOGUE
Three months after his apprehension, Muhammad al-Mukhtar still seemed not to understand English. Although one of the jail guards claims that he spoke normally to his mother on one of her visits. His parents sold their house in the County Club neighborhood and moved to a low income rental property in Siler Homes. They used the proceeds to retain a notoriously successful San Francisco lawyer.
The FBI thinks t
hat the man we knew as Mr. Ali was actually an Egyptian who used so many aliases that no one knows his birth name. He was part of a Muslim Brotherhood cell in Egypt that had executed many terrorist acts in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. Detailed blueprints of the Palo Verde Nuclear Power Plant located northwest of Phoenix were found on his laptop computer. The computer also held elaborate drawings of Glen Canyon and Roosevelt Dams. Mr. Ali had rented a small house in a neighborhood directly below Sky Harbor Airport’s flight path, perhaps to use it as a launch point for Stinger missiles.
The other two dead terrorists have not been identified nor has their method of entry into the US been traced. Seven members of the Scottsdale mosque that Mr. Ali attended disappeared within days of his death. The FBI is engaged in an extensive search for them.
The accident on the switchback leading down to Oak Creek Canyon is still being investigated. Special Agent Timber suspects that an accomplice caused the SUV to crash and stall traffic. A Saudi national who attends ASU in Tempe is being sought. NAU has six fewer foreign students because their student visas were revoked.
The Forest Service has removed the grove of bark beetle damaged trees from the east wall of Oak Creek Canyon, but millions of other dead trees remain in Arizona forests and current forest thinning projects will take a lifetime. Oak Creek Canyon is gorgeous with autumn color, and I enjoy the daily drive to my office in Flagstaff. After a month, I moved from the Sedona office because too many people brought issues to me rather than their new boss, Lieutenant Chad Archer. He’s doing a great job now. I’m working on three interesting cases, and Margaret and I have never been happier.
THE END
Books by Charles Williamson on Kindle https://www.amazon.com/author/c.d.williamson
Mysteries:
The Dead Priest of Sedona: Book One of the Mike Damson Mysteries The Dead Chef of Santa Fe: Book Two of the Mike Damson Mysteries The Murders at El Tovar: Book Three of the Mike Damson Mysteries The Victim at Vultee Arch: Book Four of the Mike Damson Mysteries The Arson at Happy Jack: Book Five of the Mike Damson Mysteries The Dead Man at Doyle Saddle: Book Six of the Mike Damson Mysteries Time Travel:
Temporal Foam: A Novel of Accidental Time Travel
The Argonauts of Phoenix: The Second Adventure in the Temporal Foam Science Fiction:
Black Dot: Jack Dunn, Cyber-Detective Volume One
Green Glow: Jack Dunn, Cyber-Detective Volume Two Fantasy:
The Pogrom of Mages: The Healers of Glastamear, Volume One
Coming in the winter of 2015 or the spring of 2016:
Blue Haze: Jack Dunn, Cyber-Detective Volume Three The Winter of Death: The Healers of Glastamear, Volume Two The Mauling at Kinnickinick Pueblo: Book Seven of the Mike Damson Mysteries Oil Town: Book One of the Howard McAlester Mysteries
The Arson at Happy Jack Page 20