by Kirk Russell
“You think I got you fired?” Bahn asked.
“No, you’re a loyal guy. You wouldn’t do a thing like that unless it was going to make you some money. But, congratulations, you found a replacement for me on short notice. Good for you, Eddie. It probably was a fucking scramble to find somebody. Don’t forget your money when you leave. I’m calling it a night.”
As Beatty walked away, Bahn said, “You’re making a big mistake.”
“Good to know. Now, fuck off.”
25
“Grale, it’s Mike Staley. We found him. He’s in a hotel room with a young woman about a hundred yards from us. How do you want to do this? We could bring him to you. Do you want us to bring him into the office?”
“I’ll come to you and I’m walking out the door right now. Don’t let him leave.”
“Leaving isn’t what’s on his mind right now. We’re almost to the Hoover Dam. Sure you want to make the drive?”
“I’ve got to be the first to talk to him.”
Staley was at the gas station below the hotel. The agent with him was parked farther up the slope, keeping watch from a dirt lot, where drivers staying at the hotel left their big rigs parked for the night. We sat in Staley’s SUV and looked upslope at the hotel’s dimly lit backside while we talked. The two upper floors had decks on this side. The bottom level had the same sliding doors but concrete patios and white plastic chairs. A rental car was parked just this side of the patio of the unit Mondari and the woman were in. We needed to watch both sides. Hardly a big deal, but really, I didn’t want to lose him.
José Chou, the other agent, stayed on this side, and Staley and I went around to the front and knocked on room 113. The shades were drawn. I heard bedsprings rocking slow and steady inside, not loud but familiar. Staley’s hard smile said he heard it, too, and that he carried disdain for Mondari. Many in our office viewed the CI, the confidential informant, Denny Mondari, as a mathematically gifted pathogen.
I rapped on the door again and it quieted. A few seconds later, a gruff Mondari yelled, “Wrong room.”
“FBI. Paul Grale. Open up, Denny.”
No response, then whispers and footsteps, and I heard the worn-out sliding door to the patio dragged open. Staley was on the phone with José, and Chou pulled up to the patio of the unit with his brights on.
“Patio door just shut again,” Staley said.
As far as I knew, Mondari didn’t own a weapon or know how to fire a gun, but we stood to the side as the lock snicked open and closed several times before the door opened a crack.
“FBI,” I said, and held my creds up.
“Pleased to meet you,” and the door opened wide enough to show a young naked woman. She was long-legged and well built. Behind her, Mondari tripped pulling on his underwear. I saw a mole that looked like a tarantula on his lower back.
She asked, “Can’t it wait five minutes?”
“Not this time. We’ve been looking for your friend here.”
“Wouldn’t you rather look at me?”
“Anyone would, but I’ve got to talk with Denny. I’m sorry, but the party is over.” Then to Mondari, “I’ve been leaving messages for you.”
The young woman swung the door wide open and walked over to the lone chair in the room and picked up her clothes. She pointed a finger at Mondari and said, “Get your wallet out,” before walking into the bathroom and shutting the door.
“I’ll wait for you outside, Mondi,” I said. “Make it fast.”
I left the door ajar. Mondari was a bright guy. Buy him a mixed drink, a Manhattan is his preference, and he’ll tell you how high his IQ is. Not that you asked, but as a reward for buying him a drink. We know he’s into cybercrime, and if we looked hard we’d find something, but for a decade he’s fed us tips on his competitors. It’s not a healthy relationship, but he’s delivered other information as well. His mother died violently, and any casino rumor of a hit man or killer in Vegas he’ll pass on. At least two of his tips netted arrests. One was a hit man we’d been after for years.
He refuses to be paid for tips. The Bureau pays little anyway, so we go for drinks with him. We take him to dinner. I ran him for a number of years before Jane Stone took over. Basically, we quit fighting the tape. Mondari likes women more than men. He once told me they’re more sophisticated. That might be true. It was Jane who nicknamed him “Mondi,” for no other reason than she liked the sound of it. She put a droll spin on it. Jane had had a wicked sense of humor.
Staley tapped me on the shoulder.
“Once he’s in your car, are you good? We’ll follow if you want.”
“No need. I’ve got to take him somewhere to talk. I’ll Uber him back here when we’re done.”
The young woman left first. She looked me in the eye as she walked past. Mondari came out talking.
“Sorry Jane got killed. I should send flowers.” He mulled that over in less than half a second. “I gave her bad information. I would have followed up otherwise. The casino-extortion plot turned out to be bullshit. There was no bomb maker. I got taken for a ride on that one, and you just fucked up my night, Grale. Donna, the girl I was just with, would eat you alive. You wouldn’t even know what to do with her.”
This from a pudgy guy close to my age, with a bleached-blond, rock-star haircut. Wearing his Brioni or Canali suits with high-polished Gravati shoes, he threaded casino crowds dressed in T-shirts and shorts. Safe to say, Mondari was watching a different movie than the rest of us. He was a five-foot-seven James Bond leaning over a craps table and living proof we make our own reality. But he was brilliant with computer systems and uses, brilliant and inventive.
He made another semipolite run at dismissing the bomb-maker tip he had given Jane, then got pissy when I said we’d come back for his car later. I drove to a new steakhouse a couple miles up the road, but it wasn’t until we were inside in a red leather booth and he had a drink in his hand that he started talking again. Across the room, a woman played old jazz on a piano by the bar. Mondari kept his eyes on the woman playing as he talked with me.
“I can’t help the Bureau this time.”
“I’m not looking for you to solve anything. I want what you told Jane Stone. Start at the beginning. Tell me the story you heard.”
“I think I’m going to introduce myself to the piano player and get another drink first.”
He did that, and I checked my messages. I’ve learned to let him feel like he’s in control. He returned and started chatting about how the piano player found him very attractive.
“I can feel it,” he said. “You can leave me here. I’ll talk with her. I don’t have anything to say to you.”
“What did you tell Jane about a bomb maker?”
“That I’d heard one was hired and brought to Vegas to set off several small bombs, glass breakers that wouldn’t kill anybody but would scare the public away from the tables. After those would come the threat of a much bigger one and a ten-million-dollar demand.”
“Why would anyone give you this information?”
“Someone who heard about it and didn’t want it to happen, because her kid works at the casino.”
“She heard about it how?”
“I don’t know.”
“I need her name.”
“I can’t do that.”
“You told Jane you saw the bomb maker.”
“I did, but from across the room, and I don’t have a description. Three guys were with him, supposedly taking him up to a meeting. I never got a good look and he was gone. He left.”
“How do you know he left?”
Mondari shrugged. Jane could do a killer imitation of that shrug. What a sad, terrible thing to lose her.
“Was he there to scout the Bellagio?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah, that’s right I told Jane the Bellagio. Forgot all about that. I lied. Had to. I was going to tell her at the right time that it was the Wynn.”
“Finish your drink. We’ll eat at the Wynn after you show m
e. I’ll put you in a cab or Uber to get you back to your car later.”
When we got to the Wynn, Mondari claimed he’d looked across the pits toward the elevators. He saw the bomb maker accompanied by three men turn into the corridor toward the elevators. He turned and pointed at an older Asian gentleman in a cream-colored suit at a blackjack table.
“He was about that tall and kind of that build.”
“The bomb maker looked like that guy over there, and the bodyguards were Hispanic. You’re making this up on the fly, aren’t you? I have Jane’s notes. I know from reading them you told her something different.”
“What I told Julie was wrong.”
“Julie?”
“Right, Jane, what I told Jane was wrong. I got burned with that story. I think someone was checking to see if I’m feeding information to the FBI. Fed it to me, I fed it to her, and someone inside the Bureau fed it back to the source.”
“No.”
We crossed the casino and took seats along an open stretch of bar, and Mondari got very specific with the bartender about how he wanted his vodka. His precision with the drink order was similar to the accuracy that showed in some of his tips. Sometimes he was worth the effort. I watched him sip his drink, testing it, his lips extending almost sexually to the rim of the glass. I was disappointed and borderline angry, but then realized that whatever Mondari had told Jane and wouldn’t repeat to me worried him. I pushed him harder and the vodka loosened him. I listened, watched his body language, and there it was again. Mondari was scared and wasn’t going to say anything tonight. It wasn’t just spite for ruining his good time, though that would be like him.
I paid the bill, leaned in and said, “We’re picking this up again in the morning. If I have to look for you, I’ll ask for a warrant. You clear?”
He nodded, and I walked out and drove to the hospital.
26
That night at the hospital I stayed late, sitting in a chair in Julia’s room. At 3:30 a.m., the first of several calls from Beatty that I didn’t take came. I’d also had a string of texts from him that were confusing and hard to follow. I answered an e-mail from a bomb tech in DC before dozing and dreaming of Melissa and me as kids, hiking through the woods behind our house. At dawn, I called the ASAC. Thorpe was an early riser. From years of watching him arrive at the office, I knew we had that in common. I also knew he arrived most mornings with a full agenda and wouldn’t want to be sandbagged with an issue that should fall to my supervisor to solve.
“I’m getting calls from Beatty,” I said. “He thinks I should take a look at the drone pilots he’s teaching and the whole setup at the airfield. He’s talking like something is wrong about it all, and I don’t know how to evaluate that without taking a look. The three drone pilots he’s training are all foreign nationals, which he thinks is odd, though the company says it’s exactly what they’re building, an international multilingual team of drone pilots.”
“Is he saying these things to deflect our interest in him?”
“Not to me.”
“You’re talking about an out and back for a look around?”
“Well, to get a look at the pilots and a feel for where Beatty’s at.”
“How’s your niece?”
“Devastated. All she knows right now is what she lost.”
“And you?”
I didn’t want to talk about myself this morning. “I’m working.”
“Does nursing Beatty’s psychological problems or seeing the pilots-in-training get us closer to the bomb maker?”
“No.”
“But he’s reaching out to you, and you think it’s a worthwhile trip?”
“I do.”
“Make the trip and I’ll talk to Dan, but make it a quick trip. By the way, I did look into Beatty’s military record. You were right. He was top drawer at Creech before he went out. I also looked at what the DOD has and agree there’s not much there.”
I was 2.2 miles past the Mercury exit when across the highway I spotted the sun-bleached 6 × 6 post marking the unpaved road to the airfield. It cut straight as a knife into the desert. I made a U-turn and picked it up. After 1.7 miles, the road crossed a rocky wash, then skirted low barren hills. It was a place of implacable, relentless heat. If I saw one of NASA’s Mars rovers climbing a rocky slope out here, it wouldn’t surprise me. Another mile in at a narrow valley, there was a fence. I used the combination Beatty gave me to open the gate and rose over a rocky crest of dry hills and saw the black strip of airfield in the hot, flat valley below. A wide graded road ran down to it. It did look like they were thinking long term here.
Ten minutes later I parked on gravel and climbed steel stairs and knocked on the door of what had to be the flight trailer. A young guy who couldn’t be more than twenty, but must have been one of the pilots in training, opened it. He was broad shouldered and tall, olive skinned and green eyed, wearing a thin leather jacket and black pants, as if the heat outside meant nothing. He waited for me to explain myself, before Beatty waved from a table and stood up. He got the pilots working on something, pulled the door shut, and we walked out onto the airfield.
“What were you trying to communicate about the drone pilots last night?” I asked. “What I got was that you were worried about how legit they are. Today you seem okay with them.”
“They’re real. They can fly these things. They’re not going to need much instruction. They’re experienced.”
“Is that bad?”
“No, it’s good.”
“Then what is it?”
“Maybe they don’t fit with what I’m used to, but I’m pretty spun out right now. Did you see where the manager at Wunderland is giving tours of my trailer?”
“I saw that. What else about these drone pilots?”
“They’re all from different places and supposedly they don’t know each other that well, but I’d say they’re tight. They stick together.”
“How can you know that already? You just met them.”
“I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong, but they look at each other and seem to communicate.” He looked at me and shook his head. “Who knows? Maybe it’s me. They’ve heard all the stories and know I’m getting fired, so they don’t want to get too close.”
“They cut you loose?”
“Yeah, my replacement is on the way.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“It pretty much had to happen, didn’t it? Just a matter of when, right?”
“What are you going to do next?”
“What am I going to do? Good question. I’ve got some strange ideas running through my head.”
“Like what?”
“Like you don’t want to hear about them.”
He moved on to Eddie Bahn. I remembered Bahn as a talkative sales guy with ten to fifteen jokes he played like cards. Same deck every time, but with the cards reshuffled and fun at first, then tiring like a tape played over and over. Beatty had introduced us in a Vegas bar last fall. Bahn was dressed that night in a rose-colored silk shirt, elk-skin boots, jeans with a sharp crease, and a belt buckle probably worth ten grand. His talk was all about the money to be made in drones. He’d been a Navy recruiter, then worked other sales jobs, and as the Bakken shale took off, got into finding engineers for the fracking industry. When fracking slowed down, he slipped out the side door. Now it was drones that were going to change the world, and he was an instant expert.
It sounded that night like he’d found another sweet spot, and until we started digging deeper into him, it probably felt pretty good riding along in his big new pickup on his way to the next pitch. From the agents looking into him, I’d heard he had both IRS and Canada Revenue Agency problems. He had too much money in the bank for what he’d reported in earnings for the last decade. Bahn was a little careless, but he wasn’t stupid. He had a Panamanian shell company with bank accounts we might never find.
Beatty showed me the drones, shiny and silver, in a temporary hangar. He said the mechanics worked
on them every night and made modifications based on sensor data the drones gathered while flying. These were prototypes. He pointed at dry, gray mountains behind as he described the survey routes they were flying.
“It looks like Strata has put some money into this airfield,” I said. “At their Houston office, they’re telling our agents they have long-term plans for drones. Looks like that’s what you’ve got here.”
I nodded toward a drone pilot who’d come out of the flight trailer and was standing on the landing looking at us. “What do you know about him?”
“Next to nothing. Eddie claims he vetted them, but he didn’t. He got a good fee to hire from a consultant that approached him. He’s tried to pay me to say I vetted them.”
“When did he do that?”
“He’s been doing it. That guy over there you’re looking at, there’ll be a hundred thousand pilots like him in a few years, and all they’ll need for skills is to be good gamers. Then what will you do to check them out?”
“Good question.” But the least of my problems this morning.
“When I started flying, we flew like we were in a cockpit. We literally flew the drone. We moved the flaps. We landed and took off. If you’re military, you’ve got to know the communications and how to talk to people on the ground, but these dudes will just move the paddles.” He paused. “I need to get back to the flight trailer.”
“I want to sit in there and listen for a little while before I leave.”
I sat behind the pilots for twenty minutes, then slipped out and had just climbed over the first low range of rocky hills when Venuti called.
“Another bombing,” he said. “A car bomb at rush hour, just north of the Sahara on-ramp. It killed two men inside and left four others dead in adjacent cars. Do you know the name Raj Nasik?”
“I do. He’s an aeronautical engineer, big in the drone program.”
“That’s right. The car was a Hertz rental and in his name. Based on videotape, as he and the other man left a casino garage this morning, he was the driver. Both were due at Creech this morning. Casino garage videotape shows them getting into a white Kia that matches the bombed vehicle. The man with him was an engineer named Mark Statham, who may be an even bigger deal than Nasik in drone technology. Most likely, the bomb was planted yesterday after Nasik picked up the car. I want your thoughts on the bomb maker when you get back here. No more airfield trips. Nothing but the bomb maker from here on, Grale, nothing else.”