by Kirk Russell
Maybe we would. Most likely we’d never get the chance, but it was good to know Brady was still there.
Midmorning, Venuti asked me to sit in on a meeting with Dr. Frederic, the psychologist for the VA who had treated Beatty for PTSD. Frederic chose a seat at the end of the table and pulled two files from a briefcase. He consulted notes as he recalled Beatty as a paranoid, angry patient suffering from alcohol dependency. He talked about the letter he’d copied Venuti, and then told us he’d agreed to this meeting because of what he called “the very real possibility that Jeremy Beatty was capable of violence.” His notes included the Hakim Salter drone strike, which he termed the precipitating incident and Beatty’s account of it as delusional, so I had to ask.
“Did you ever talk to an Australian drone pilot named Phil Ramer?”
“There is no Phil Ramer. There never was. He existed only in Jeremy’s mind. Stress can create events that have the quality of reality. We can carry them as memories.” He tapped the file in front of him and said, “I have notes on this.”
He read aloud from notes he’d made after a conversation with an air force officer at Creech Air Force Base who had told Frederic that he didn’t know of a pilot named Philip Ramer. The officer hadn’t denied Ramer’s existence, but Frederic heard it that way. I could tell him I was trading calls with Ramer but didn’t see the point, and Frederic had already moved on.
“Let’s talk about the present,” he said. “Jeremy Beatty lives in a remote corner of a trailer park. He has covered the windows of his trailer in heavy black plastic and gutted the interior to reshape it to a militaristic fantasy. This is classic withdrawal from society, provoked by an anger catalyst. It’s a foretelling, a kind of preconfession, if you will. View the events through that prism, and the timing makes sense. Getting from here to a confession is what you’re wrestling with.”
He was authoritative and certain, and when it was clear he wasn’t finished with his lecture, I made a show of checking my phone, and then shook my head as if time had slipped by and I was late. I gathered my things and stood. As I went out the door, an agent apologized for not quite grasping the prism concept. The last thing I heard was Dr. Frederic say, “Perfectly understandable. Let me put it in simpler terms.” No doubt he did.
21
At noon my phone rang. The front desk said a Laura Cotter was holding and asking to talk to me. I said, “Put her through.” I hadn’t talked with Laura for a year and a half, but her heartfelt sympathy for my loss reconnected us. The compassion in her stood out. Some have to work at it, but a few like Laura are born with generosity wired in. I’d forgotten how much I liked the timbre of her voice.
“Two FBI agents came to see me,” she said, “and I’m not going to draw you into it, but they want dirt on Jeremy. They asked about the letter Dr. Frederic asked Jeremy to write when he was being treated for PTSD. They shouldn’t even know about that. It wasn’t supposed to be mailed anywhere. It was part of his treatment. He was supposed to express all of his anger toward the air force. How did the FBI get a copy?”
“It’ll end, Laura. We’re looking in a thousand directions right now.”
“But Jeremy of all people—”
“I know.”
“The agents were after any incident I can remember where Jeremy was unstable. There’s only one, and I didn’t tell them. Is that bad? That was when he burned his uniforms. He said, ‘Let’s go see the sunset in the desert.’ We stopped at a Chevron for gas on the way out of town. I thought it was for his pickup, but it was to fill up a two-and-a-half-gallon gas container. Did he ever tell you about this?”
“No.”
“We went out on this dirt road to the base of some mountains, and he dug a pit. He had a crazy look in his eyes. He told me it was a celebration. He had ice in a cooler and a bottle of tequila and had packed everything else into a duffel bag of his father’s. In it were his air force uniforms, his letter of acceptance into flight school, commendations for performance as an RPA pilot, photos with friends who flew remotely piloted aircraft, and other things. He emptied everything into that pit and poured all the gas on it. It made a huge ball of flame. He was crying and laughing and drank most of the bottle of tequila alone. I drove us home. Before he passed out, he said some things that were way out there. Way beyond that letter. Should I have told the agents who came to see me?”
“What did he say?”
“Crazy, drunk things. Have you seen what the media is doing to him?”
“It’s hard to miss.”
“But you’re not doing anything about it.”
“There’s nothing I can do. He’s getting looked at, and then the investigation will move on.”
“Really, you’re just watching too?”
The line clicked as she hung up, disappointed in me. I couldn’t get the conversation out of my head all afternoon, and didn’t lose it until trolling through Jane Stone’s computer files downloaded from the flash drive. I opened one labeled Vacation Ideas.
Some were vacation spots—Tulum, Mexico; the Fiji Islands; touring the fjords of Norway; a spa in France; skiing at Val Gardena. I went from one to the next. Most predated Jane’s February transfer to the DT squad, but not the last four. The first of those was titled Hong Kong. I scrolled through typical tourist stuff, Victoria Heights, Kowloon.
I opened Argentina next and looked through the photos and places to stay. Jane made notes on where to eat in Mendoza and hike in Patagonia. I read a restaurant menu, then backed out and opened the second-to-last travel file, New Zealand. In New Zealand were trout streams to fish, hiking routes on the South Island, mountain-biking tours, and after the cycling tours came a file with snippets of conversation captured in a chat room by the NSA and forwarded to the FBI.
What the fuck? What’s this, Jane?
I backtracked through the previous files, then returned and read transcripts between a Lebanese businessman with ties to Hamas bomb makers and another as-yet-unidentified man within the United States, intercepted in Mexico City in mid-May. A transcript excerpt read:
“Is it on?”
“Yes.”
“Are you certain?”
“Yes, we helped with things.”
“And they are safe?”
“Everything is waiting. If everyone does their part the events will be spectacular.”
“Good.”
“If this is successful, this will be the new way we do business.”
“I will pray that I do my part.”
Jane had moved this into her Vacation Ideas file under New Zealand. I didn’t know what to make of that. She had a labyrinthine, borderline paranoid way of coding information when she worked a case. She tucked investigative pieces away in places seemingly with no connection. Maybe the key here was travel or route of travel or something else she heard that tied an aspect of this to New Zealand. But I couldn’t get there by guessing. All I knew was that the intercepted conversation mattered to her and that New Zealand tied in somehow.
I took a late afternoon sip of cold coffee and made a call to Metro detective Perth and left another message for Philip Ramer as I turned the NSA intercept in my head. The word events was used, not event. When I hung up, Venuti was standing in front of me looking haggard.
“Hey,” I said, “I just found something in Jane’s files. Do you know anything about an NSA intercept of a Lebanese businessman in Mexico?”
“She mentioned something. She said the date of it fit with a comment your informant made.”
“Mondari wasn’t mine anymore. He was Mondi by then and Jane’s and had been for months. Do you remember exactly what she said?”
“No.”
“I don’t know how you could forget if you knew what was on the transcripts.”
“I track a lot of things, Grale. I see a lot of transcripts from the NSA with suspicious conversations. You made a run at supervisor and you went back to being a GS-13, and you’ll probably retire a 13, but you were there long enough to know you can’t rea
d and absorb everything.”
“I’m not holding your feet to the fire. I’m just trying to get my head around Jane’s notes. She thought that transcript was important.”
Most agents retired at the higher pay level of a GS-14, and Venuti was right in saying I wouldn’t. It was typical of Dan to get defensive then aggressive if challenged. Yet I needed to know what Jane had told him. Instinctively, I knew it tied with taking me to her condo to find the memory stick. He’d set me up to discover these files.
“Look, if I missed it or dropped the ball, I’m sorry,” Venuti said. “Jane never said what was on the memory stick. That’s where you’re going with this, right?”
“Yes, and she must have said something.”
“If she did, it wasn’t definitive, but I’ll try to remember. The reason I’m here, though, is that ISIS has posted a new video. Bring it up on your screen. Let’s have a look.”
The video started with an American ISIS spokesman. Venuti said softly, “This kid is from Minneapolis. Disappeared a year and a half ago. He’s barely nineteen.”
The young recruit said, “Unbelievers, who shower us with bombs and kill our innocents, be fearful. Prepare to lose many more of your own. We are only beginning. We will strike again soon in your desert city.”
“It’s time we take out all of these people,” Venuti said. “They couldn’t invent a pair of pliers on their own. They use our technology to proselytize and attack us. How about we show them another higher level of technology and take them back to the Stone Age?”
22
Late in the day I watched the reinterview of the plumber who’d worked on the Alagara men’s room urinal and a bar-sink leak on the Fourth of July. Every time he answered a repeat question from the first interview, he sounded annoyed. An agent standing next to me said quietly, “What a prick.” The plumber was hard to like, but a surprise was coming his way. The two agents interviewing him were nearing that point.
“I got there at 10:50 a.m.,” the plumber said. “I was supposed to be there at 11:00, but I always get to a job ten minutes early. That’s just the way I work. I left at 4:20 that afternoon.”
“Are you certain it was 4:20?”
“Same time I gave you last time. You should take notes.”
He was there when the wine refrigerator was swapped out. Video cameras at the bar area filmed that. Total elapsed time for the change-out was seven minutes, thirty-two seconds. Two weeks prior, Omar Smith had requested a new refrigerator be installed in the first few days of July. E-mails between Smith and the sub supplying the new wine refrigerator put the install date at July 3.
That changed. Late afternoon on July 2, the install date got pushed to July 5. The supplier notified the installer and Omar Smith that they wouldn’t have the refrigerator in stock until the morning of the fifth due to a combination of a shipping problem and the holiday. On the same e-mail thread multiple exchanges followed between Smith, the refrigerator supplier, and the installer. Smith pushed the supplier to find another way to get it there and installed on the Fourth, when other repairs were occurring. Other refrigerator manufacturers were discussed. The size of the new refrigerator got reconfirmed. Smith made it seem urgent to get the new one installed on the Fourth, though it wasn’t clear why. Smith’s e-mails verged on angry, and the supplier stopped responding by midday on the third.
The installer’s last e-mail affirmed that if it reached Vegas on the third, he would pick it up and install it the next day. Installing meant delivering, unwrapping, sliding it in behind the bar, then plugging it in. Maybe twenty minutes max. Smith in his last e-mail said he did not want the plastic wrapping removed. He wanted it slid into the slot and left there. He would cut the wrapping off and plug it in himself, when he was satisfied with it.
That and Smith’s insistence it be installed on the Fourth made him suspect. It was what the agents interviewing the plumber were circling. This because Smith had also e-mailed the plumber’s boss asking that he have his plumber help get the refrigerator into its slot if Smith was able to find a different refrigerator rather than the delayed one. When asked about this, Smith said it was exactly what it sounded like. Told he couldn’t have the wine refrigerator he’d ordered installed on time, he’d tried to find a replacement. Alagara had another rental scheduled for the night of the fifth where the client wanted to chill white wines ahead of the party. Smith said he tried hard but wasn’t able to find another refrigerator, and yet, the plumbing company had received a follow-up e-mail from Smith late the night of the third saying he’d found one after all. It would be delivered during the afternoon of July 4.
Agents had interviewed the client who wanted to chill wines for her party on the July 5, and she backed Smith’s story, but none of that lessened suspicion of Smith—in part because Smith had wanted the plumber’s help only as far as getting it into the cabinet slot and texting him that it had arrived. He would personally do the rest of the install, cut away the wrapping, and plug it in. That was too unusual a request to pass over. Then there was this: the final e-mail to the plumbing company owner from Smith, saying that he’d found one after all and it would be delivered on July 4, was an e-mail Smith claimed he didn’t send. Yet he was very happy to walk in on the holiday and find a new wine refrigerator installed.
Our computer techs backed Smith’s claim that someone had access to his computer. They didn’t say he was hacked but agreed it was possible someone with access to his computer sent the final e-mail confirming delivery and installation of a new wine refrigerator the afternoon of the Fourth. That’s where it got spooky. All of the refrigerator talk had started less than three weeks prior to the Fourth. Notice of the delay was just a few days before. If Smith was telling the truth, the bombers conceived and executed the wine-refrigerator-bomb concept in a very short time. That implied a high level of sophistication and coordination. It supported the theory of a capable sleeper cell in the Vegas area. It was also hard to believe the bomber didn’t have prior knowledge of the refrigerator’s size.
A complicated story, I know, and after all the questioning we probably now had three or four agents who could install wine refrigerators in their sleep. But this recalcitrant plumber in for a reinterview could have information that mattered. While I watched, the plumber, Rick Alpert, changed his story.
“I talked to the guy who brought it in and told him I would help him if he needed it.”
“In the last interview you said you didn’t talk with him,” an agent of ours named Korb answered.
“Well, yeah, because he didn’t say anything to me when I said that. I offered and he just sort of fucking nodded.”
“Did you try to talk to him again?”
“Naw, I went back to work.”
“Why didn’t you tell us that last time?”
“Because it doesn’t matter.”
“Why don’t you just tell us exactly what happened, and we’ll decide what matters. Since we last talked, we recovered videotape we’re going to show you. We’d like you to tell us what you were doing. These are short takes. Here’s the first one.”
In the first one, he squatted down in front of the refrigerator after the installer left. One of the agents interviewing asked, “What are you doing there?”
“I was trying to look inside.”
“Why, if it was wrapped in plastic?”
“My wife wants a wine refrigerator. I was thinking about cutting the wrapping off.”
They had him pictured from another angle, and that did seem to be all he was doing. He’d jerked on the door several times.
Korb, the agent questioning, had a face and head like a Marine sergeant and didn’t cut him any slack.
“How do we know you weren’t arming a bomb?”
“Ask my wife.”
“Did you just say, ask your wife? I’m asking you. Here’s the next clip. What are you doing in this one?”
What he was doing was fixing himself a drink behind the bar. He rejected ice cubes for the drink un
til he found three he liked, and that had gotten some needed laughs in the office. He also chose the most expensive bourbon. When the plumber didn’t respond, Korb asked, “Were you testing bourbons for your wife?”
Outside the room that got laughs. Inside, the plumber’s brow knotted up.
“I was working the holiday. I figured the owner would be okay with me having a drink.”
“Rick, are you saying you stole liquor from the bar and thought the owner would approve of that?”
“I’ll pay for it.”
“You have a problem with the truth?”
“None.”
“Did you steal liquor from the bar?”
“I had one drink.”
“Why don’t you just say, ‘I stole a drink of high-end bourbon’?”
The plumber didn’t answer.
“We need to know that we can trust your testimony. Can’t you just call it what it is?”
“I have.”
“‘I stole a drink of high-end bourbon from Bar Alagara.’ Is that so hard?”
“I don’t steal.”
The agent alongside Korb shifted in her chair. This was making her nervous. The plumber was a piece of work, but so what? We didn’t view him as a suspect, and we needed him as we put our case together. Still, I knew Korb wasn’t doing this for entertainment or to humiliate. He was calling him on his bullshit as a kind of reality check to bring him around.
“If you didn’t pay for it, you stole it.”
“The owner was supposed to have met me. He didn’t show up and I figured it was a trade.”
Korb rolled with that.
“What were you going to talk about with the owner? And don’t give me any shit about having already told us.”