by Kirk Russell
27
I was in the office when AQAP and ISIS both claimed the car bombing. They posted within minutes of each other, ISIS from an encrypted phone app that then populated other sites, and AQAP with their website. Nobody reacted. Shah got up to go retrieve a list she had left on her desk. Venuti used the moment to say, “The ASAC is a big believer in you, Grale.”
“Even bigger than you?”
“I know you better.”
“You’re a cold bastard when you get crossed. It was a short trip to the airfield just for a look.”
“Was it worth four hours?”
“Couldn’t tell you yet.”
“But you could tell me that you haven’t put any time into Mondari this morning. Yesterday, he was urgent. You rousted him out of a hotel and got zip. Does that mean we’re done with him as a lead?”
“We still want what he told Jane. He had a bomb maker tip she believed in. It’s in her notes. I need what Mondari didn’t tell her.”
“Why would a casino rat have any information relevant to this investigation? I’m sure you’ve wondered if he strung Jane along and is dodging you because he lied to her. Here’s what we’ll do. I’ll give you forty-eight hours to come up with something credible. After that, we’ll sit down again with the ASAC and talk about moving you onto one of the teams.”
Venuti left, and when Shah returned I told her we had two days. It was melodramatic, but I figured she may as well know. I also showed her a new report analyzing the build of the man videotaped switching out the wine refrigerator in Bar Alagara. It put his height at six foot two. He wore overalls that covered his arms and legs. He wore steel-toed boots—we’d identified their maker. He wore reflective sunglasses and Beats headphones over a bandanna and under a billed cap. Not much of his skin showed, but some people wear sweaters in summer and don’t get hot. He was Anglo. Little could be said about hair color. A computer program had read his body as if he were unclothed and put his weight at 185 pounds.
We talked through that and as Lacey turned to her computer screen, I called Detective Perth and left the message, “We’ve got a match. It is Menderes’s body. I just forwarded you the e-mail and am mailing a paper copy. Let’s talk.”
Then I hurried downstairs to watch the latest Omar Smith interview, though as it turned out there was no rush. Smith’s lawyer was on his feet making a statement and a threat. Treasury and the Secret Service had yet to respond on the impounded cash. If Smith lost his business due to inability to make the payment, they would sue.
The agents ready to interview Smith commiserated. They were just as interested in the money as Smith and his lawyer, though for different reasons. One got up to ostensibly make a call to check with the Secret Service. He probably used the bathroom then checked his messages instead. He came back with no new news. The interview started with Smith frustrated and angry.
“Mr. Smith, we want to revisit the Fourth of July. With as much detail as you can give us, take us from when you awakened on July 4 in Houston until our agents arrived at your house after the bombing.”
“With as much detail as I can give you?”
“Yes.”
“Everything I remember?”
“Yes.”
“Is this not a waste of everyone’s time?”
“Please proceed.”
As he did, his anger crystalized. He recalled waking, yawning, using a toilet, shaving, brushing his teeth, showering, choosing the clothes he would wear, then dressing and eating breakfast of yogurt, tea, and fruit. So it went, item by item. He talked about checking out of the hotel, gave details of the cab and the black mole on the cab driver’s right temple, and the number of stoplights on the way to the airport as he left Houston. He detailed people in the airport security line and names on the badges of the TSA security officers. He described the sink with the faulty handle in the restroom and where he sat to wait for the plane. He demonstrated a remarkable memory, and did it aggressively.
A half hour passed and his plane wasn’t even in the air yet. He continued with even greater detail, pausing occasionally to let them interrupt him and end the interview. Agents watching the feed got restless, but in the interview room they rode him out. They waited. The more detail, the better. When he was done, Omar Smith would own the timeline.
He grew hoarse as he told how he took a seat in 3A on the flight home. The plane was twenty-two minutes late taking off. He declined alcohol and drank water, and now started into the people who had sat next to him on the plane. He described a chicken salad lunch and the color and taste of the things he ate and drank. The agent next to me tapped my arm and said, “The guy’s making me hungry. I’ve got to go get something. Think you could text me when his plane lands?”
“Sure, but maybe you want to wait until he picks up his luggage.”
Finally the plane landed, and he retrieved his luggage. He hadn’t been able to carry anything on, so we were off to carousel 7B, where he described each piece that came up on the conveyor belt ahead of his bag, and then wheeled his luggage out of McCarran Airport.
Then came the late afternoon and his stop at the Alagara. Videotape from an adjacent camera put him in the area of the Alagara at 5:13 p.m. on the Fourth of July. Smith said the Alagara stop happened at 5:27 and lasted less than ten minutes. But no one interrupted as he detailed his drive to the Alagara and his brief stop there. Only after Smith’s recounting moved on did the agents interrupt to bring him back.
“What else did you do inside the Alagara?”
“I looked in the restrooms at the repairs. I wanted to see everything was clean and ready for the party.”
“Describe the tile repairs.”
He described the seventeen pieces of tile installed and his issues with the grouting. He described flaws in the caulking around the urinal.
“Were you alone there?”
“Yes.”
“When you entered the Alagara what door did you enter through?”
“The back door.”
He started to say something more and stopped. He stared at the agents.
“I am tired of this,” he said. “I am finished.”
“We’re all tired,” an agent responded. “Bear with us. When you came in through the rear door, did you lock it behind you?”
“It shuts on its own. I am nearly through speaking with you today.”
“Did the surveillance camera record you entering?”
“I don’t think it was on.”
He stopped again, and the agent asked, “Why wouldn’t the camera be working?”
“There was an electrician doing work on July 3. The alarm goes off if they’re not careful how they shut it down, so usually it gets disarmed. I wasn’t home to rearm it, so it was probably off. Do you know if it was off?”
“We don’t. It’s why we’re asking.”
“Please describe in as much detail as you can why you’re lying to me.”
“We’re not lying, Mr. Smith.”
Smith’s response to that was a very detailed accounting of what he did in his office once inside the Alagara, starting with sorting the mail that had arrived while he was gone. Junk mail, everything, a remarkable memory for each piece, if accurate. He ticked through everything that had to do with the party, which was scheduled to start in less than half an hour. He checked the back bar and recounted the bottles on it row by row. He recalled the new wine refrigerator and described the face of it, plastic not yet removed, and the deal he made with Melissa Kern allowing the pilots to bring their own alcohol.
Hearing Melissa’s name was like a hot stone dropped in my gut, but I listened as he described the children’s party table with a red, white, and blue paper tablecloth. He had checked the air conditioning and lowered it one degree, then readied to leave.
“I wanted to see Melissa Kern. I liked her very much. I assumed she would come early with her family.”
“Why did you assume that?”
He stared in disbelief at the agent who was asking wh
y Melissa would arrive before guests to her party.
“When you were in your office, did you open your safe?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Surely, Mr. Smith, after all the detail you have remembered . . .”
“I don’t trust you. Is that better? I have no reason to trust the FBI and many reasons not to.”
Smith turned to his lawyer who lifted a briefcase onto the table, opened it, removed a file, shut the briefcase, and set it back down on the floor. The lawyer looked to Smith for approval before sliding the thin file across the table. In it was a list of scheduled repair work, including the wine refrigerator.
“Here is another copy of the work done. Most of it was in June. There was only a little left, and it was not the time to check everything. I was tired from traveling and only there to make sure the building was ready, and to make sure the children were not forgotten and the table was ready for them.”
“Did you turn the alarm on when you left?”
“No, it was too close to the time of the party.”
“Could somebody have come in after you?”
“They would need a key.”
“There was a man waiting for you earlier. Did you meet with him when you were there?”
“He was a salesman peddling trash. I sent him away and forgot about him.”
The agents didn’t answer that. Instead, one asked, “Would you mind sharing the code to the alarm with us?”
“With your prejudices, that is a bad idea,” Smith said. “The code will frighten you. It will frighten you, and you’ll keep holding my money.”
“Why would an alarm code frighten us?”
“Through your prejudices.”
“Giving us your alarm code won’t affect the release of the money.”
“You think not?” Smith looked from one interrogator to the other. “The code is a very simple code. The code is ‘God is great.’”
He tapped with his right index finger into his left palm as if tapping on the alarm keypad.
“All capitals. G-O-D-I-S-G-R-E-A-T. God is great. I say this to myself many, many times every day so I always remember. It is short and I never forget. On our money it says ‘In God We Trust,’ but that is not the same. Even as you ask questions here, I say inside, ‘God is great.’”
To the left of me, an agent said, “There you go. Right in our face, this is our guy. He just told us. Come on! Get it out of him! He’s on the edge. Get him to talk.”
The agent was still coaching the interrogators when I concluded nothing was going to happen here today and walked out.
28
After leaving a message for Mondari, I opened a file on Umar Patek, the bomb maker in the 2002 Bali bombing that killed 202 people. Patek’s file included his apprehension in the town of Abbottabad, Pakistan, on January 25, 2011. Other arrests in northwest Pakistan occurred close to the same time. Four months later, a raid in Abbottabad killed Osama bin Laden. Did Patek give up bin Laden’s location? I’ve pinged different intelligence officers I know who might be aware of the truth, but I’ve never gotten a definitive answer.
When the name Abbottabad faded from the news, the gathering of bomb makers there stuck with me. Perhaps subconsciously I was trying to connect the chatter about a Lebanese financier’s successful Mexico meeting to the C-4 allegedly tracked as far as a warehouse in Phoenix and the rumor passed by Denny Mondari of a bomb maker smuggled into the country.
Somewhere near Las Vegas was a bomb maker. Right or wrong, that was my conviction. If the target is the drone program, what’s next? More than enough agents had been and still were looking at Strata Data Mining. I had called one of them earlier and she downplayed any worry about the pilots in training. Find the bomb maker, I thought. Find the C-4 and we’ll shut them down. But nothing is as simple as that, and what began as a nagging worry was morphing into the very real possibility that with the help of a trained sleeper cell, the goal might be to wage a much longer campaign.
“Special Agent Grale, I’d like to introduce you to Special Agent Jane Stone’s parents.”
I looked up and saw Jane in her dad’s face. Same clean cheekbones, strong jaw, and light in the eyes that even grief couldn’t extinguish. I saw where Jane got her easy rapport.
“We loved her,” I said. “I’ve been with the Bureau nineteen years and have never met anyone I liked and respected more than Jane. I’m very, very sorry for your loss.” As they started to move on, I said, “If you want to talk more, I’ll be here.”
Jane’s father did return. He was agitated and watching to make sure his wife didn’t follow.
“I’m hearing on TV that Jane made a mistake that got her killed. Is that true?”
I saw the agony the question brought him. The truest thing to say was, “Yes, Jane should have waited until the bomb squad cleared the vehicles,” but I couldn’t do that.
“Knowing her, I’m sure she had a very good reason to be where she was when it detonated.”
To me that sounded hollow, but it seemed to help him. He gripped my hand.
“Jane told me you never quit. Find them.”
“We will.”
I said it so easily, yet Venuti was right. So far I had nothing but disconnected facts, fragments, hunches, shadows of patterns, and news today of a June 17 plane crash of a four-seater Cessna hijacked from an American couple who’d been murdered on the airstrip of a ranch they owned in Mexico. A second look at the plane’s wreckage in the dry mountains at the edge of the Imperial Valley pointed to a bomb in contrast to the engine failure the FAA preliminarily cited. Lacey had found that out this morning and was awaiting a transcript of radio communication between the pilot and an air traffic controller as the plane had crossed into US airspace. No cargo and no other bodies were found in the plane. The pilot had radioed in an oil pressure problem, made an emergency landing, took off again, then crashed, all the same day the plane was stolen. According to the DEA, this pilot did occasional work for the Sinaloa cartel. Did he ferry someone from Mexico?
I left a message with the FAA and fielded a call from the DOD investigator Sarah Warner, who said, “Let’s meet and talk. I want to confess and repent, and we’ve got an overlap going you need to know about. Name a place for coffee.”
“Gaudi Café. Repent?”
“I’m serious.”
At Gaudi’s I bought two iced coffees and carried them outside to a table in the shade. It was pushing 105 degrees, but dry heat. Warner smiled and I leaned back against a smooth shaded concrete wall with the cold cup in my hand. I was tired and thinking about Julia and the memorial on the drive here, but trying to focus on Warner’s urgency. I took another swallow. Good coffee and much needed. Cold brewed forty-eight hours, I’d read inside.
She exhaled and sighed. “You’re not going to like this,” she said.
“What happened to repenting?”
“I’ll get there. Denny Mondari approached us in June about working as an informant. He told us about his relationship with the FBI and we made an inquiry, but we didn’t say anything about his offer to us. It was my responsibility to tell your office we were starting a relationship with him, and I held off because you were a question mark.”
“And now you’re over that, so that’s not why we’re meeting. Did Mondari call you today?”
“He did and asked me to find out through your supervisor if there’s someone else at the FBI he can work with other than you.”
“He asked that today?”
“Yes.”
“Let him know I was in tears when you told me.” Warner smiled her crooked smile. “What’s the Department of Defense’s interest in Denny Mondari?”
“He claims he’s tied in with some hackers we’d like to talk to.”
“Hackers are his tribe, so that might be true. But you need to be careful with him. He’s helped us, so we haven’t looked hard enough at his other activities. That’s changing.”
“Activities? Like what?”
“Like yo
u check into a casino and you’re up in your room on the twelfth floor and you want to go online and check out restaurants for tonight. You find out your room didn’t come with free Wi-Fi, but you don’t want to go down the elevator and wait in line again, so you boot up your computer and check for other strong signals in the area. You click on the one just below the hotel Wi-Fi. It gets you online and everything looks good, until a little box pops up and says you’ve got to pay. Good news is, it’s less than half the hotel rate. Bad news is, you’re giving your credit card numbers to the wrong people. That’s the kind of operation Mondari would have a piece of. He would never be one of the guys to get busted, but he’s in the background.”
“You’re saying he’s a scumbag.”
“He’s nuanced. Think of him as the venture capital guy who funds the little, dirt poor, garage-start-up cybercriminals. On the good side, he’s not violent and he’s bright. He’s a gamer, a schemer. He knows his casinos. His type probably didn’t exist before them. He reminds me of the guys who used to hang around horse racing when I was a kid. For some, it was their whole life and they were part of the juice and energy of the track. They knew every inch of it. Denny is that way about casinos and computers. Where are you meeting him?”
“The Bellagio, for dinner.”
“The Bellagio is one of his favorites. We’re talking about a guy who shops for just the right cologne, and shaves and dresses carefully before going out at night. He’ll be dressed when you meet him tonight. When he’s lucky, a younger woman goes back to his love pad with him.”
“Yuck.”
“Think period piece. It’s worth seeing.”