by Bob Blink
Karl was getting a little annoyed at his former partner, but he had to admit he'd already fled the crime scene with the items he'd taken before ever contacting his friend, so that really was on him. It was just that he'd been counting on official blessing for his actions by now."
"Let's see what you've got," Kevin said.
Karl hauled the heavy Ruger out of the case he was carrying. He handed it across along with the zip-lock bag filled with the six cartridges he'd taken from the gun.
Kevin looked the weapon over, noted that it hadn't been fired since its last cleaning, and wrote the serial number down in the small notepad he carried.
"I was careful with the cartridges," Karl said. "If the guy was careless when he loaded them into the gun, we might be able to pull a print or two from them."
Kevin nodded.
"What about the rest?"
Karl handed over the fat wallet with the credit cards and Texas driver's license with the Fatani name.
"I gather this isn't the name he was using when he traveled and killed the woman?"
"I don't know if this is any more real than the name on that phony business credit card, but it sounds more like the real thing. I'm hoping it checks out, and we can pull prints off of some of this that confirms that's who he is."
Finally Karl handed over the two phones. Kevin looked them over, and verified the only numbers stored in the devices were the three numbers that Karl had told him about. He wrote those down, and then slipped the phones into an official evidence bag."
"Okay. I'll get this stuff into a guy at the lab and we'll see what develops. Now tell about the rest of what you have discovered."
They talked through what Karl had learned, with Kevin asking a great many questions before they finished.
"It sounds like you really tumbled onto something here," Kevin agreed. How about you get a room here, and tomorrow we'll get with management with the results of what the lab guy comes up with."
"Good," Karl said, pleased that things were going to move forward. "Mr. Craig will be happy to hear that this is going to get passed on to the highest level of the Bureau."
"He knows about all this?"
"All but the recent complication in Vegas. He's paying the freight. We agreed he would be the first to know anything. No secrets."
"I know, but this is turning into something that might be a lot bigger than I thought. I doubt the Director will be happy that a civilian is this clued into our investigation."
"It's not an FBI investigation at this point," Karl corrected. "This is a freelance investigation being conducted by a private investigator, and until the Bureau picks it up again, my client has every right to know what I learn."
Kevin held up a hand t ward off further argument. "You check in. I'm going to Headquarters and get things moving on this."
The next day Karl climbed into the car when Kevin pulled into the small drive in front of the hotel just before noon. They pulled out and Kevin worked his way through traffic until they were headed out of town.
"We aren't going to Headquarters?" Karl asked.
"NSA," Kevin replied. "We have a meeting with a contact of mine."
Karl sorted that through in his mind and said, "You didn't tell them, did you?"
"Not yet," Kevin admitted.
"Why in hell not?"
"I'm not certain we are ready or that this is the right time," Kevin mumbled.
"Okay, what happened?" Karl asked.
"Think about this for a minute. What has been going on the last few years? The Bureau has really gotten slammed for interring with elections by releasing sensitive materials just before voting day. The FBI has lost a great deal of trust and respect as a result, something every agent has felt and had to deal with. This is exactly the same thing. The election is only a few weeks away, and if the public were to learn that someone not only tried, but in fact did, meddle in the election to alter the likely outcome, who knows what might happen. For certain, many people would be upset, and the voting could realistically be changed as a result. Democratic turnout could swell, or Republicans could elect to stay home, resulting for a loss for the incumbent contrary to what is being predicted. There would be finger pointing and questions for years afterwards. And the FBI would be in the middle of the issue once again."
"That doesn't change the fact the Director should know about this," Karl said. "He doesn't have to make it public at this point."
"There's more," Kevin said. "I just learned from my contact that the Director is a close personal friend of the President. I never knew that. They are both from Texas. He wouldn't allow anything to upset the way things are going, so it's almost a given this would be squelched, temporarily for sure, and maybe buried for good. That's unless we had an overwhelming case, which I don't think is our current situation."
"So what do you plan to do?"
"This needs to be investigated, but maybe not now. There's more we can do to produce an iron-clad case for reopening the investigation. That's why we are going to the NSA. The guy there can give us some of the ammunition we need."
"Okay? Maybe you are right. But what do we actually have so far. You haven't told me what you learned."
"Fair enough," Kevin agreed, satisfied that Karl was accepting his current position on the situation, although he had little doubt his former mentor wasn't pleased.
"The handgun was purchased in Arizona a little over five years ago. The man who bought it was killed two years ago while hunting, clearly a homicide but no one was ever charged with the crime. The pistol was not found on the body, nor in the man's gun safe at his home. You can guess who the killer probably was as well as I. There were a couple of partial prints on both the firearm and a couple of the cartridges you saved, enough that a match was found in our database. The name on the prints matches that on the credit cards and license, suggesting that is the man's name, or at least the one he has been living under. The address in our database agrees with what is on the license. Once we make this official we can send a group of agents to search the premises."
And the phones?"
"My friend contacted the telephone provider for the four phones and requested a history on all of them. Their databases record what towers the phones have been using, and when and how long calls are made, but can't tell us anything about the nature of the conversations."
Karl knew this, and was impatience for Kevin to get to the crux of the matter.
"The phone your killer was using was activated in the vicinity of a small town in New Mexico, traveled to the vicinity of the address where we have just confirmed he lived, and then to the Las Vegas area. It has been in that area for many weeks, only recently making the trip to Washington, D.C., then New York City, and back again to southern Nevada. The date and times of the phone's movement correspond to the times of Cindy Moore's killing."
"Calls?"
"Only a couple of calls have occurred, and all of those to one of the numbers in the address book. The phone was called the same day Ibrahim left Vegas for the East Coast and he used it to call back to the same number from New York City after Moore had been killed. He received another call from the same number after he was back in Vegas. Other than those three exchanges, the phone has never been used."
"What about the phone that he called?"
"That phone has only had three calls also. The same three exchanges as Ibrahim's phone. It was activated in the same area, moved a couple of hundred miles to the El Paso area, and has sat there ever since. It remains activated at the moment, although when the word of Ibrahim's death becomes known it might very well go silent."
"El Paso?"
Kevin shrugged. "There's more, but at least three of the four appear to all come from that area."
"Not all?"
"One of the phones, also activated at the same time and place, went silent about six hours later and has never been detected again. The assumption is the person who has it, or had it, pulled the battery and either disposed of it, or is keeping
it deactivated. We have no idea where it is currently, or where it might have gone during the weeks since it was turned off."
"An the last one"
"No calls, and in a fixed location since moving to the Fort Worth area. It is likely that the phone is simply sitting in a drawer somewhere as it doesn't move between access towers at all."
"So we know the area, but not the people, and with Ibrahim dead we can't question him," Karl said. "Don't you find it interesting that all of these folks come from the same state as the President?"
"Political supporters of his?" Kevin asked.
"I don't know, but it is interesting. It's also interesting that the Special Agent that triggered the Vice President to call me not only comes from the state, but is also a friend of the President."
"From what you told me, that exchange wasn't overheard, was just an impression, and took place a considerable time ago, long before the agent was even assigned to Mrs. Craig's protection detail. My thinking is that the woman was more than likely passing on something for the President. As you said, they were friends, and he'd even been charged with overseeing the construction of the President's pistol range."
"Maybe it's nothing, but it's certainly a coincidence. It would be informative to question the agent, but until we get the case reopened with official FBI approval, I can't see how we could do that."
"What is this NSA guy going to do for us?" Karl asked.
"I'm not certain, but I'd very much like to be able to get a transcript of the calls, and even more, an audio recording." Kevin replied. I couldn't really ask him what can be done when I set up this meeting.
"That seems like a bit of a reach," Karl said.
"You've been out of the loop for a while," Kevin grinned. "Cellular phones are not as secure as people like to believe. The NSA has massive stores of the calls being made."
"I'm very aware of the controversy that developed a couple of years ago over the NSA recording calls of your average American. As I recall, they were ordered to terminate such programs, at least for anything they didn't have a specific court order to pursue."
"And you believe they would do so. It's more likely that they agreed, and then proceeded to continue as before, perhaps being a little more circumspect about where they stored the data they acquired."
"And this guy is going to be able to recover our specific calls from a database the NSA isn't supposed to have. Won't he be taking a significant risk?"
"I doubt he'll give us a copy, but he might be able to find the calls, we have a record of the specific dates and times and locations after all, and let us listen. That gives him deniability, but might give us a crucial lead."
Karl shook his head. "We should be doing this the proper way."
"This would likely all get buried," Kevin objected, as he pulled into a shaded parking lot next to a gray Toyota. "Here we are."
The NSA guy was older, a few years younger than Karl and clearly closing in on retirement. He didn't appear particularly nervous, and greeted Kevin like there was not unusual about this type of meeting.
"I can't help you," the man said after Kevin gave him a complete run down of what they had and were hoping to get from the NSA files.
"Are you saying the NSA doesn't have this stuff stored somewhere?" Kevin asked, clearly surprised and disappointed by the answer.
"Probably not," the NSA technician replied. The chances these conversations were stored is very small."
"I was under the impression the NSA collected and stored all cellular calls, just didn't monitor them unless a need arose."
"Not any more, and probably never for everything. We collect massive amounts of data, but there are filters on what is actually retained."
"What kind of filters?"
"I'm not saying that the Agency doesn't bend the rules a bit on what it is supposedly authorized to gather, but there is a practical aspect to this much data. There are lists of names, and phone numbers. A lot of phone numbers, that have been formally submitted as items that are to be tracked, recorded, and made available upon request. Those are always saved. Then there are the vast majority of calls. These are scanned by computer programs as they come in. There are certain names and key words, that if detected elevates the priority on a call and can get it archived. Calls made in certain languages pass a filter for archiving. There are other things. But Joe calling his wife Mary is just so much junk, and there simply isn't the storage capacity to save all such stuff, plus it would make retrieval that much slower for the important stuff."
"So the calls our suspects made on these burner phones most likely isn't stored in your system?" Karl asked, not particularly surprised. He was becoming a bit disillusioned about his former partner's adeptness.
The NSA guy nodded several times. "Unless something in the call triggered one of those computer filters I mentioned, it's not gonna be there."
"Can't you look?" Kevin asked, a bit dismayed by what they were being told.
"Not a chance. Any access to the database requires a very closely defined process, and while there are those that might be willing and able to risk covert access, it is clearly beyond my skills. It is unlikely that we'd find anything, and very likely the probing would be uncovered."
"If we had a formal request from the FBI Director?" Karl asked.
"So long as it was legally approved by a qualified judge, no problem," the man answered.
"What a waste of time," Kevin groused as they drove back to the hotel.
Karl was silent for a moment, then suddenly said, "You can't keep this silent until after the election even if you want," he said.
"What do you mean?"
"The Vegas police are going to fingerprint Ibrahim. You found his prints in the FBI database, so he's going to get identified very soon. Once they have his information, someone is going to want to have a look at his home, and we can only guess where that is going to lead, but I'll bet it is going to become known that someone, meaning us, have been poking into this guy already. I think you'd better be thinking how you are going to raise this to Bureau management."
Chapter 28
Reluctantly, Special Agent Kevin Martini had contacted the Assistant Director of the FBI and asked for an urgent meeting. Karl had needed to prod his former partner to make it happen, but once the request was submitted there was no turning back. Something had clearly happened to Kevin over the years they had been separated. Karl hadn't figured out just what that was, but this version of his old friend was a pale shadow of the man he'd known before. That Kevin would have seen what needed to be done and charged ahead, damn the torpedoes. Of course, the issue they intended to bring up was one that three organizations had jointly signed off on, and had sworn to the President that there was no political motivation behind the killing and that they were certain that Bud Marshall was the killer. Now they wanted to turn that all around.
The Assistant Director was shocked by what he'd been presented with and quickly decided that the meeting was going to require the presence of Brad Crampton, the current Director of the Bureau. So here they were, all together. Six people were in attendance behind the closed doors of the Director's office. In addition to Kevin and Karl, two other Senior Special Agents who had been instrumental in closing the investigation into Nancy Craig's death had been called in. They were expected to have a few things to answer to as the meeting progressed.
The Director and former agent Karl Baxter examined one another carefully. Crampton hadn't been the Director at the time Karl retired from the organization, but they knew one another. There had been no love lost between them back then, and clearly it didn't seem like there was going to be any change to that situation now. The Director was clearly disturbed by the little bit he'd been told so far, and sat tight lipped as a nervous Kevin walked the group through what they had learned and suspected, occasionally turning to Karl to augment his explanation with key details.
Before the revelation was complete they had summarized what had thus far transpired and suffered
through almost an hour of very pointed questions on the events. Now they sat silent as the group digested what had been revealed, the two Special Agents particularly uncomfortable as the senior members of the organization frowned and struggled with the unfortunate turn of events. Kevin squirmed, knowing that the Director was pissed at him and uncertain what the fallout from this meeting was going to be. To minimize the impact of the unauthorized investigation in the murder of the candidate, Karl had suggested that they sort of overlook and not reveal the single detail that it had been Kevin who had pushed Mr. Craig to hire him.
"I thought it was completely understood that this matter was closed and that no agency personnel were to pursue the investigation further?" the Director finally said, starting angrily at Kevin. The question was counter-productive and totally ignored the fact that a major flaw had been uncovered and revealed that a major conspiracy had been discovered.
Karl was far more immune to reprisal than his former partner, and spoke up, drawing the fierce look from the Director as he spoke.
"This wasn't an agency investigation," he said calmly. "Mine was an independent, private investigation into matters, prompted by the husband of the deceased who wasn't fully convinced that justice had been fully served. Special Agent Martini, my former partner, became involved only recently, and somewhat reluctantly, when I discovered the likelihood that the official conclusion was erroneous."
"Mr. Craig hired you," the Director said, something that had been stated several times earlier. "How did he know about you, and find you?"
"I don't know. The man is an accomplished researcher, especially in the areas of our various criminal agencies. He writes fiction novels on the subject and is the kind of author that prides himself on getting the key facts about such organizations correct. Someone he has relied on for information in the past probably suggested my name when asked. Mr. Craig made it clear when he hired me that he wanted someone who would pursue the matter diligently and who had a working knowledge of how the earlier investigation would have been pursued. Once he had my name, finding me wouldn't have been difficult. I'm a legal, registered private detective and a simple Internet search would have turned up my name."