by Kirk Russell
“That’s our guy.”
“I get people regularly going twenty to thirty miles over the limit, and they still argue with me. He was barely ten over and apologizing. I don’t usually ticket for ten over, but he had a taillight out, and to be honest I’d had a slow night.”
“Can you remember anything about his face?”
“Only that it matched the driver’s license. He told me he hadn’t had a ticket in twenty years. He was surprised about the taillight, so surprised he didn’t believe me and got out and looked.”
“Any idea where he went after you gave him the ticket?”
“None. I watched him drive away, and then he was gone.”
“Any chance anyone was following him?”
“Funny you say that, there was a pickup I’d seen earlier that I’d tailed. It came by again right after he pulled out. The pickup should have been miles away by then. I remember wondering about it.”
“Do you remember the make?”
“Not really. It might have been a Ford F-150, but I’m not sure.”
I thanked him for calling back, and he asked if my questions had anything to do with the bomb investigation. “They do,” I said.
“Could these be pleasure trips?” Lacey asked. “Or going to visit somebody in the area. Girlfriend? Boyfriend? Going back there twice, it could be something like that. I mean, he’s not hiding where he’s been. He’s using the same Visa. You say he’s always after the next new woman. Maybe he went to Arizona, picked up the new girlfriend, and they drove to the Anza-Borrego. How much do you really know about him? He wasn’t paying cash and hiding his tracks. Walks like a duck, talks like a duck, and all that. Maybe it is what it looks like.”
“Why would he go to the Anza-Borrego Desert when he already lives in the desert and prefers living in casinos? Mondari likes a roof over his head and air conditioning.”
“You think you know him, but maybe he likes wildflowers.”
I tried to get my head around Mondari hiking out into the desert to look at flowers and said, “Wildflowers are in February.”
“Well, hiking or wildlife then.”
“Hiking for Mondari is crossing the street to another casino. Wildlife is two-legged with a short skirt.”
I worked the Arizona end of Mondari’s trip and confirmed the hotel in Scottsdale, which led to more calls to confirm wherever possible that it was Mondari who had come through, not someone else. On each trip he did a lot of driving, and with both he made no effort to cover his tracks, which raised Shah’s question again. Were we investigating a vacation?
I switched focus when an update on Omar Smith’s financial situation was posted in a JTTF report. Smith was in arrears on a high-interest loan made by private investors in Istanbul three years ago and was being sued in Turkish court. Smith had told me about a loan payment but said nothing about a lawsuit. The loan in arrears was 2.3 million American dollars and it was not news in Istanbul. The lawsuit was filed a year and a half ago. Maybe there had been some form of settlement, and this was the urgent payment he’d needed to make.
Lacey made a late afternoon run for sandwiches. I kept making calls and the feeling grew stronger we were onto something with Mondari. As she returned with the food, Beatty called.
“Hey, Grale, I’m up on Spring Mountain where the road ends at the ski resort.”
“The lookout.”
“Yeah, it’s too gusty today for the drones, and the new flight instructor clocks in tomorrow, so I got out of there for a few hours.”
I looked at my computer screen while I listened. We’d been on Mondari for hours. I could take a break.
“Hang out there for a little while and I’ll come on up and talk.”
I talked to Venuti first. I got the gear for the wire I’d wear today and had to laugh when he suggested testing the equipment during the meeting with Beatty. No way would I do that.
“When you come off Spring Mountain, we’ll get the van rolling toward Smith’s house,” Venuti said. “I agree it’s worth a try.”
I left the highway and started climbing with two agents in a black Suburban a third of a mile back and keeping pace with me. Venuti didn’t want me alone with Beatty. The road went right up and the air got cooler. I killed the air conditioning, lowered a window, and took in the clean cool air. Thousands of feet higher, just beyond the ski resort where the road ends and there’s parking near a trailhead, I spotted Beatty’s pickup with his motorcycle tied down in back. A few minutes later the agents crept into a slot down the slope.
“Tell them in your office, I lost my job,” Beatty said. “Tell them mission accomplished.”
“The Bureau was never targeting you.”
“No, they’re friendlies.” He laughed at that. “This radio dude I used to listen to has me running a sleeper cell for ISIS and Al Qaeda. This is going to chase me the rest of my life; you know it will. Is that black SUV down there with you?”
“It is. Talk to me about the airfield. You said they modify the drones at night. I’ve been thinking about that. Where do they do that work?”
“Sometimes at the airfield, but they’ve also trucked them out to a warehouse. I don’t know where the warehouse is. Ask Strata.”
“We did.”
“And?”
“Almost all modifications are done on-site, and the drones have only left the site once.”
“Not true, G-man. They’ve left twice. I’ve watched them hauled away and brought back in the morning. Strata is out of touch.”
“Where do they go?”
“I don’t know, but it wouldn’t be too far away. You know, Bahn signed off on the pilots without knowing shit about them. What’s that tell you about how Strata operates?”
We lingered a little longer looking down and out over the desert. Standing there he looked thinner and older. He turned to me.
“Julia used to love ice cream. Does she still?”
“She does.”
“I know where to buy the good stuff. I’ll bring her some. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
37
From the first night, it was clear Omar Smith ran two economies, one with cash, the other a more normal business standard. He owned liquor stores, gas stations, various properties in the valley, and had done well with short sales and flipping houses as the real estate market recovered from the recession. He used his buildings as collateral for short-term, high-interest bridge loans, as the money sharks call them. Paying them off depended on cash flow. With the terrorism investigation, a lot of Smith’s cash flow had ground to a halt. Hullabaloo cancellations were over 90 percent, according to Smith’s lawyer. This morning an aspiring local politician proposed a public boycott of everything Smith owned.
I called Venuti as I came down Spring Mountain. “I’m five minutes from 95, then headed to Smith’s house. Are we ready?”
“We’re ready on this end. Are you ready?”
“I’ve got the wire on, everything is working.”
“Why didn’t you test it when you were talking with Beatty?”
“I wanted to talk alone with him.”
“What did he say?”
“Congratulations to the Bureau for getting him fired, and Strata is out of touch with their operations. He’s seen the drones leave the site twice.”
“So he says.”
“Yeah, so he says. All right, Dan, let’s hope this works.”
I knocked on the tall oak door to Smith’s big house in Summerlin. The housekeeper frowned but took my card. Minutes passed and then Smith padded down the long tiled hallway dressed in loose pants, a sport coat, and slippers, looking defeated and withdrawn, yet offered his hand before leading me to the open room with the TV. He gestured at a couch. The housekeeper brought a tea tray and set it down between us.
When she left, Smith poured, looked at me, and said, “I have some serious problems, Agent Grale. Are you here about the money in my safe?”
“In a way I am.”
“What the FBI did was
very unfair. You knew the building was released to me that afternoon. You knew I would go there, and you hid like a criminal to watch me. You took money that was very important. You don’t understand what you did.”
“You’ll get it back any day now.”
“You don’t understand.”
“Well, then tell me. Where was the money going?”
He shook his head, gave a rueful smile.
“Where did the money come from?” I asked.
“From different loans. I borrowed from everyone who had money they could lend me. Now they see what’s happening and want the money back. The FBI is destroying everything I built. The FBI is good at catching a businessman who does not run and opens his home and businesses to them, but not so good at catching terrorists.”
“I’m not here about money,” I said. “And I wish I had news for you on it, but I don’t. I have a photo I want to show you.”
From an envelope I pulled the photo the Mex Feds had sent of Juan Gutierrez and handed it to him.
“It’s Juan Menderes,” he said. “What is this?”
“When this photo was taken, he was Juan Gutierrez, who’d been arrested in a drug raid and would go to prison. In prison he bought Juan Menderes’s ID and became him. Did he ever talk with you about any of this?”
“No, I am shocked. He was a good driver. He had all the required papers in the name of Menderes. I did not understand why he ran.”
“He was making drug deliveries in the Hullabaloo van.”
“That is not possible.”
“For some customers he would deliver a cake with a side order of cocaine. The van had a secret compartment.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“We don’t understand how you wouldn’t know.”
I thought I’d said that without being confrontational, but from his reaction I saw he was debating whether to end the conversation. He stared at me as he debated.
“I look in the vans only to see they are clean. They are serviced twice a year. I can ask the shop where they are serviced if they saw the compartment. I can call them now if you want.”
“We’ve already talked to them. The question to you is whether you were aware of the compartment.”
“I wasn’t.”
“Are you certain?”
“Do my other vans have this compartment?”
“No.”
He shrugged and said, “I am very surprised about Juan.”
He poured more tea for both of us, then took a delicate sip. I waited until he cradled the cup in his hands before changing up on him.
“I’m sorry for the delay in getting the money back to you,” I said. The true delay was that we intended to track the bills returned to him, and it took a few days to get that set up. “I’m sorry I had to take it from you. You have to understand that I had no choice.”
He said nothing to that. His eyes narrowed as he sipped again. The tea was quite fragrant and perfumed the air of the room.
“Did you supply phones to your drivers?”
“Yes, I buy phones on the secondhand market and have a good price with the carrier. It is for security and for a record of calls and to collect the phone number of clients for the database.”
“Are the drivers allowed personal calls?”
“This has already been asked, and the FBI has seen the phone records. Only if the calls are local and short can they use the company phone. I tell the drivers this. I am very stern on this point.”
“Do they keep the same phone?”
“As long as they are drivers.”
“If they need a replacement, how is that done?”
“They tell me and I give them a new phone. When they get dropped and lost or broken, they tell me and I give them a new phone. It is a cost of doing business.”
“Did Juan get a replacement phone on July 3?”
“This was asked the first night.”
“And you answered you were in Houston July 3, and no one else is authorized to activate a phone. But you knew Juan would be delivering cakes on the Fourth.”
“He used his personal phone. He texted as he was supposed to that the cake was delivered. I told the agents on July 4 that he’d called from his phone. This is not a secret.”
“He didn’t use his phone. Did you supply him another phone?”
“No, as I said, I was in Houston.”
“Could somebody working for you have done that?”
“Only me.”
“And you were in Houston.”
“Correct.” He gave me a quizzical look and said, “You are repeating yourself, you are asking the same things again.”
In the long interview our agents had with him that I’d watched, he’d demonstrated a remarkable memory. We’d confirmed a number of things he’d recounted. He didn’t make them up. I unfolded a piece of paper and handed it to him.
“Do you recognize these numbers?”
He could say no, but that could get tricky. He could say yes and remember that Juan made a call to him on July 4 from the phone that was supposed to be broken. We hadn’t told anyone, but that phone was found in the pouch cut in the underside of Juan Menderes’s mattress. The drug dog found it, and I brought it to the office in an evidence bag. It was very unlikely he knew that. Why did Juan leave it there? Was he protecting himself in some way? Was it insurance?
“I don’t recognize them,” he said. “I don’t have the memory for phone numbers I have for other things.”
“Okay, thank you, that’s all. Thank you for the tea.”
I took the paper back and refolded it and let myself out the front door.
Late afternoon, I sat alone with Venuti and talked through my interview with Smith. Venuti, of course, had already heard the tape.
“What do you think, Grale? Did he recognize the number?”
“I think he did, and I think he’s always known we’d get there. It was just a matter of time before we reconciled the different phone numbers and matched that July 4 call to the allegedly broken driver phone. He was ready.”
“If he recognized it, then he recognized it was Menderes calling him and had a reason to answer. Do you believe he’s not good remembering phone numbers?”
“I don’t believe that. I’d guess he’s good.”
“I would too.”
The bigger question was why Menderes hid the phone. It had meaning, but whether it had bearing on the investigation, we couldn’t say yet. But safe to say, it was another thread needing chasing. We weren’t going to solve that sitting here guessing, and I moved the conversation on to the road trips Mondari made to Arizona then California. Before starting in on the next thing I wanted to talk about, I reached out and shut his office door.
“Mondari’s trips might tie in with a folder called ‘Vacation Ideas’ that Jane kept,” I said. “Inside that was a file called ‘Short Trips.’ This morning I looked at ‘Short Trips’ again. I couldn’t figure out what the ‘Vacation Ideas’ was doing with all these other work files, but I think you figure in.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You tell me, but here’s what I’ve got so far. In May, Jane was at a four-day conference in San Diego. So were you. It was joint with ICE and DEA. You flew back here from San Diego, but she drove back to Vegas and made an overnight stop in Borrego Springs. That might tie to the bomb-maker tip. She mentions DV in her notes, which sound to me like the initials of Dan Venuti. Were you with her, and do you know where she went?”
Venuti nodded and looked like he’d just taken a blow and was trying to get his breath back.
“I was with her in Borrego Springs for a night. She would remember the hotel. I don’t remember the name of it. There should be a room in her name and one in mine.”
“There’s one in her name, but I’m not asking about that. I want to know why else she was there. We believe Mondari was in Borrego Springs as recently as a few days ago. We’re trying to figure out what he was doing there.”
“It
could be about the airport. Mondari had said something to her. I don’t know what he said, some gobbledygook that made her want to go to the Borrego Valley Airport. She didn’t get anything from the airport staff and never said anything more about it. I’d forgotten about the airport visit. She did that on her own. I got there later that day and drove back to San Diego the next morning.”
“Mondari went from Vegas to the Phoenix area and then into California and possibly to the Anza-Borrego. We have a credit card trail and a traffic ticket from the CHP for a late June trip, and it looks like he went again. What was he doing there? Why would he make two trips to the area within two weeks?”
Venuti shook his head. “I don’t think her going by the airport had anything to do with the bomb tip.”
“I think it did. I think Mondari said something more to her.”
Venuti shook his head and said, “Jane concluded it was a waste of time. She was like you, she was close to giving up on him.”
“I’m going there. I know a San Diego County deputy in Anza-Borrego. I’ll connect with him so I’m not alone. Lacey is very good but for this to work, she needs to be in the office. It’s going to fall on you to find Mondari while I’m gone. We need him. I’m heading there today, inside of an hour if I can do it.”
Venuti didn’t argue. I was at my desk, getting ready to leave when the front desk transferred a phone call. I picked up and a deep male voice said, “G’day, mate, this is Captain Phil Ramer.”
38
RAAF Captain Philip Ramer had read everything he could find online. He’d seen the video of Beatty’s trailer. As he talked, I opened a computer file with a headshot of Ramer in uniform, stocky, solid chest, firm chin, straight-ahead look.
“I knew some of the pilots killed in the bombing. They were all good guys, and smart. They’re playing up the sleeper cell bit here, putting Jeremy in it. They don’t know him. He’d be the last one to help AQAP or the other bastards. Can’t believe you’re even looking at him.”