“Good work, Burt.”
“Timothy says Samara was overseas all week. Not in Bakersfield at all.”
“So I heard.”
“I wouldn’t expect a beheader to drive a Range Rover,” Burt said. “Too showy and easy to remember. And they break down every other week.”
We watched the too-showy SUV trundle down the rain-pocked dirt drive toward the gate. A flock of starlings lifted off from a flat tan puddle.
Burt and I collected the breeze-blown contract pieces and covered the Ping-Pong table. I put the hundred-dollar bill into my wallet, wondered if I should mail it to him. I looked again at Samara’s contract signature, picturing the ugly threat that Caliphornia had so beautifully written to Lindsey. I thought of what Samara had said about Lindsey’s beauty and power, and how I must have wanted them for myself.
A few minutes later Burt came from his casita and loaded his golf clubs into the trunk of his car. Perhaps because of his shortness, Burt drives an enormous old Cadillac, a red Coupe deVille convertible with majestic fins, a white interior, and white sidewall tires. He could stretch out and nap in that trunk, no problem.
I watched him drive away, thought of another red convertible that had gone down and up that driveway so many hundreds of times. Until that day in April when it left here and didn’t return. A Porsche Boxster, music blaring, a redhead at the wheel, her hair in a black scarf. That car was still out in the barn, washed and polished and under its cover. But impossible for me to drive or sell.
I got another cup of coffee and sat upstairs in my office, checked my messages. Fielded a worried call from Tammy Bellamy, who had received a text about a gray cat seen walking along Stage Coach Road, not far from the high school. Less than half an hour ago. Tammy asked if I could please go find the cat, and, if it was Oxley, “save” him. I explained that I could not. But I felt the need to apologize and did. Hung up feeling like a heartless son of a bitch.
I did have my reasons. I was just a few hours from my noon rendezvous with Joan Taucher in the Horton Plaza parking lot and our planned journey to Los Angeles. Where we would interview two adult children of slain Doctors Without Borders physician Ibrahim Azmeh. Dr. Ibrahim Azmeh, accidentally blown into eternity by Lindsey’s Headhunters.
No sooner had I forgotten my heartlessness than my friend at the San Diego Sheriff’s Department called with news of the 4Runner’s license plate check. The plate had last belonged to a vehicle totaled in a collision, and had likely ended up in a scrap yard. Salvage operators were required by law to return currently registered plates, but . . . I thanked him and told him I owed him one.
I sat awhile, contemplating through my western window the pond, the long drive leading down to the gate, the rain-greened hills. Possibly the same flock of starlings that had flown up when Rasha Samara drove past now came back to land around the same puddle.
I saw the black Ford Expedition turn off the road and stop outside my gate. Saw its exhaust lifting slowly in the still cool morning, and a hand reach for the keypad.
I answered the intercom but said nothing.
“Mr. Ford? This is Directing Special Agent Darrel Blevins of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. We need just a few minutes of your time. Now.”
My good mood was being shot to hell. First by Rasha Samara, then by Tammy Bellamy, and now by the FBI.
“Badge, please,” I said. “Hold it up to the camera by the speaker button.”
He did, sighing. My security video streams into my house with a one-second delay but is state-of-the-art compared to Kenny Bryce’s.
The gate rolled open and the Expedition surged onto my property in a way that could only be federal. Feds surge. They always surge. Directing Special Agent Darrel Blevins didn’t need no stinking badge.
23
IN THE SUN-DAPPLED BARNYARD: four suits, three hastily flashed FBI badges, one handshake from Directing Special Agent Darrel Blevins. Tight faces for concealing thoughts, loose coats for concealing guns, polished dress shoes flecked with moisture from the dewy grass, young agent Mike Lark trying to shake the droplets off. Patrick O’Hora was white and built, Darnell Smith black and trim.
“We need to talk to you about your relationship with FBI Special Agent Joan Taucher,” said Blevins.
“I’m innocent,” I said. “And I have an appointment soon.”
“Thank you for making time for us on short notice, Mr. Ford.” Blevins smiled. All implants, perfect and white. He had downy white hair and a fissured face. “We’ll be as brief as possible.”
We sat beneath the palapa, where Rasha Samara had fired me a little more than one hour ago. Blevins removed a small digital recorder from his briefcase, set the briefcase on the ground and the recorder on the table between us. He clicked it on, ran a quick test, then stated the time, date, and players. Asked each of us to confirm when he spoke our names.
Dale Clevenger rolled up the drive, parked his van in front of casita two, finally home from his night of filming. He waved at me, pulled one of his drones from the van, and went inside his home. In a charged silence, all four agents stared at him and his camera-armed aircraft.
“Who’s that and what’s with the drone?” asked Blevins.
I explained.
“You rent those cottages?”
Explained again. Liz and Dick sat on Liz’s porch, apparently arguing, both dressed for tennis, gear bags at their feet, cups of coffee steaming. Dick looked our way with exaggerated nonchalance.
I was hoping I could hustle this thing along. “What can I say about Joan Taucher that you don’t know already?” I asked.
“Well, let’s see,” said Blevins. “Did you have a personal relationship with her in 2010 and 2011, when you were part of the San Diego JTTF?”
“Not personal, no,” I said.
“Tell me what you did for JTTF,” said Blevins.
I filled him in on my duties, sure he already knew.
“Was Joan a good superior?” asked Blevins.
“All business.”
“What do you mean by ‘all business’?” asked Mike Lark. He was young, square-jawed, boyish.
“No, Mike,” said Blevins. “No.”
“Sorry, sir.”
“Where were we?” Blevins asked, turning back with another flash of his flawless substitute teeth. I wondered what had destroyed the originals.
“All business,” I said.
“Did she ever bend the rules or overstep her boundaries?” asked Blevins.
“Taucher was scrupulous. We had lunch a few times. I remember her counting out the pennies and nickels for her exact portion of the bill.”
Blevins nodded. “How would you describe Agent Taucher’s attitude toward her job? Her attitude toward terror?”
“Loved her job. Hated terror.”
“Did you ever hear her referred to as Joan Wayne?” Blevins asked.
“Everyone called her Joan Wayne.”
“Ever see her in an MMA cage bout?”
“No. I saw pictures of her in her fighting gear.”
“The online stuff that got her so pissed off?”
I nodded. “She wasn’t happy about that.”
“Did Joan ever share information with you?” asked Blevins.
From his poor attempt at sounding off-hand, I knew Blevins was finally getting to his real point.
I had to think about that for a moment. To the FBI, information is the Holy Grail, and despite post-9/11 “changes,” sharing intel outside the Bureau can be a mortal sin.
“Share information?” I asked. “Isn’t that what everybody does at the JTTF?” I’m sure they heard the sarcasm.
Blevins stared down at his recorder as if expecting it to say something. When it didn’t, he picked it up, seemed to examine it, then set it back down.
“Let’s bring this narrative up to date,” he said
. “Five days ago you brought us the Lindsey Rakes threat. You bypassed the San Diego agent-in-charge and went right to the FBI Special Agent Joan Taucher. I understand that. You had worked with her before. You had a relationship. A business relationship. On Monday, according to Joan, she agreed not to interview Lindsey Rakes personally. This because of some legal entanglements regarding the custody of Lindsey’s son. Correct?”
It was up to me to separate what Joan had told Blevins from what Blevins was claiming she’d told him. I drummed my fingertips on the old wooden table, gave Blevins my weigh-in stare. “Yes.”
“Again from Joan,” said Blevins. “She admitted that we, the Bureau, were looking at one Rasha Samara as a person of interest in the financing of terror.”
“She didn’t use the words financing or terror,” I said. “She said you were looking at him and that was all.”
“Oh,” he said curtly. “Not quite the story we got.”
“You might run it by her again,” I said.
“Don’t try to negotiate with me,” Blevins snapped. “We do not negotiate. Now—again according to Joan—that same day she told you about Samara, she also suggested you do some background on one Hector O. Padilla. This because he had been behaving oddly at a San Diego mosque and was a regular customer at World Pizza in Ocean Beach—the alleged return address on Caliphornia’s threat letter to Lindsey.”
I nodded, wondering exactly what these esteemed colleagues of Joan Taucher’s were looking for.
“And she allowed you to photograph Padilla’s picture with your phone, inside her JTTF office,” said Blevins. “Correct?”
“I shot pictures of the photograph.”
“With Joan’s permission?”
“She allowed me to,” I said. “So I could see what I was doing, so to speak.”
“And maybe as a thank-you for bringing her the Lindsey Rakes situation?” Blevins asked.
“I doubt that.”
“Because of the personal relationship you and Agent Taucher do not have,” said Blevins.
“Precisely.” I wondered if these fine gentlemen had bugged her office, or if Joan had already told them all this. The best thing I could think to do was to let Blevins throw his net. See where it landed.
“Now, later—this from Joan again—she told us she shared FBI lab results with you. Specifically, that the signatures on the Caliphornia threat and the Rasha Samara note were probably from two different writers. That would have been Monday night.”
While I was driving home from my stakeout of Hector Padilla, I thought. Which meant either Joan had told them about our conversation or these guys were monitoring her cell phone—probably SOP for agents’ work-issued smartphones. I looked at each of Blevins’s underlings in turn. Three faces, bland and unreadable.
I wondered, if they knew all this, why did they need my recorded corroboration? The answer hit me hard: so I could help them throw Taucher under whatever bus they had in mind. In their eyes, I was a high-value asset—a private contractor who had come forward because Joan Taucher was leaking information. Information on terror. Which made her a danger to our national security.
“She gave me the documents examiner’s opinion of the signatures,” I said. Wondering again exactly what Blevins had in mind for Joan Wayne. The Bureau. Suspicion wrapped in suspicion. Cunning wrapped in cunning. While Caliphornia moved through their defenses like a ghost.
“We’re almost done here,” said Blevins. “Just a few more questions. Now, moving along to two nights ago, Thursday, you were contacted by an officer of the Bakersfield Police Department regarding surveillance video taken at Kenny Bryce’s apartment complex. You were sent a self-destructing Telegram video. Six and a half seconds, Joan said. Did you in fact receive and view such a video?”
Again I wondered how they knew this. Her office landline? Her cell? Did it matter? Like anyone—from model citizen to terrorist—I was pleased to know that the self-destructing video had left no trace in my phone.
But I clearly remembered Joan’s words about agents handing out FBI property, and I knew what Blevins was thinking. Joan allowing me to view the Kenny Bryce video was comparable to her smuggling papers out of JTTF headquarters in her briefcase. Or a video stick in her purse. As she had said: That’s physical FBI evidence. They’d have my head.
It looked to me like they were trying to do just that. I saw no choice in what to say. “No. I’ve gotten no Mission: Impossible Telegrams.”
Three of the men sat back, as if on cue, exchanging glances, sighs. Only Lark, the young upstart, remained fixed on me.
“Think about that again,” said Blevins. “I’d like to give you the opportunity to remember correctly.”
“No. Final answer.”
“We have what we need,” he said, looking past the pond to the green hills beyond. “Is that where you guys shot down the helicopter with Briggs Spencer in it?”
“The very place.”
He nodded. The violent death of psychologist Briggs Spencer here at Rancho de los Robles had made headlines across the nation.
“Spencer was a complicated man,” said Blevins. “And part of a complicated chapter in our history.”
“I’ve heard those platitudes before.”
We stood. Blevins clicked off his recorder but he didn’t put it back into his briefcase. I walked them past the Ping-Pong table and the barbecue, toward the railroad-tie steps that lead down to the barnyard.
Silence. Sweet smell of grass in sunshine. Agents two by two, PI Ford leading the way, listening for the click of the recorder’s “on” button. Heard it just before we started down the steps. Blevins the crafty.
“You sure you didn’t see that Bakersfield surveillance video, Ford?” he asked from behind me.
“I’m very sure.”
“Lying to a federal agent is a crime.”
Zeno had left a sizable pile in our way. I stepped around it, turning as Blevins walked straight toward it. I slowed and held his look and let him continue on his course.
“Oh, shit,” he said, stopping.
Everyone else stopped, too.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Ford,” said Lark. “But may I use a restroom before we leave?”
“Christ, Mike, can’t you just hold it?” asked Blevins. His face was florid and he had both hands out for balance, sweeping one shiny cap-toe dress shoe across the slick, unhelpful barnyard grass. Raising an invisible mountain of stink.
“I can’t, sir,” said Lark. “And it looks like you might be a minute.”
I led Lark across the damp grass and into the barn, pointing out the bathroom back in the corner behind the tractor and the Bobcat. Clevenger’s worktables had their usual collection of drones and drone parts, cameras and monitors. The agent stopped and stared at them before turning to me.
“Blevins doesn’t work with us in San Diego,” he said. “He’s from Washington. Where he and his people want to transfer Joan. Where they’ll hold a pillow over her face and call it a promotion. Joan and I work together. I’ve tried warning her. I’ve tried talking to her.”
“And?”
“She doesn’t listen to me.”
“Sounds like her.”
“She’s a great agent,” Lark said. “I want to help her but I don’t know how. I’m not even sure there’s anything I can do.”
“I hope you think of something,” I said.
He looked at me for a beat, as if waiting for a suggestion. “Me, too. I’m twenty-four. The same age as Joan was when she first started here in San Diego. Just before Nine-Eleven. I was seven when I saw those planes coming down.”
The moment of silence we all know.
“God, that was funny,” said Lark.
“Nine-Eleven?”
“No. Darrel stepping in the dog shit.”
24
IN THE EXPECTED PRIVACY of my pickup tr
uck, I told Joan Taucher everything that had happened two hours earlier. The Saturday traffic was light and we were almost to Camp Pendleton by the time I’d finished.
Taucher sat hard-faced, looking out the windshield through aviator sunglasses, her makeup heavy and her white bangs trimmed bluntly at her brow. No hematoma in sight. Black suit with a flag lapel pin, black blouse, gun and holster temporarily on her lap for comfort. A charmless black purse on the floorboard in front of her.
“I know all about their crude tricks,” she said. “Frosts my balls. Lark’s a good kid. He tries to help me, but I see through him like a window. I don’t know about my office being miked, but I know the work phones are monitored. Randomly, they say. Policy. It just piles up in the Cloud. Metadata. Useless mountains of crap in the Cloud, generated by us. Nobody can listen to it all. Hell, we can’t even keep up with the domestic terror tips. You saw my walls. I watch what I say, wherever I am. The stuff I shared with you was small potatoes. They haven’t written me up for anything. Yet.”
“I’m surprised you take it so well.”
“And my choice is what?”
I thought about that and saw her point. I couldn’t picture Taucher doing anything other than what she was doing here and now in this city. Guarding the citadel. Tracking the ghosts. She was where she belonged. By fate, luck, or design. Blessing and curse.
As if at a loss for meaningful law enforcement activity, Taucher removed her gun, looked at it for a moment, then pushed it into the holster and snapped it shut.
* * *
—
Marah Ibrahim Azmeh was twenty-four years old and single and lived in Torrance, southwest of L.A. She worked for the County of Los Angeles Public Social Services Department, in payroll. She wore a yellow dress, yellow flip-flops with white daisies on them, and a pretty smile as she welcomed us to her small tract home. Taucher had told me that Marah meant “happiness,” and that Marah had been born to Madiyah and Dr. Ibrahim Azmeh while he was a resident at Centinela Hospital Medical Center in Inglewood. Dr. Azmeh himself had helped deliver her. She was a graduate of Cal State Northridge.
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