by Kirk Russell
“Adult male Caucasian,” somebody said.
More Bu-cars—Bureau cars—and San Diego County Sheriff’s Department vehicles arrived. Our evidence recovery team did their initial survey as I searched upslope for an answer to why the driver banged off boulders and dug the wheels deep into sand trying to get higher. Several silvered timbers covering an old mineshaft had been pulled away, and looking down into the darkness of the mineshaft I guessed this was the goal. Dump the body down the shaft, maybe even the car. There was never a plan to get the Honda back out of the canyon. Another thought occurred: it wasn’t Hurin who had shot him and there must be other vehicle tracks, though there weren’t any in the canyon.
Radio responses from a San Diego County Sheriff’s Department unmarked carried into the canyon. I could hear as a dispatcher reported the Honda Civic was registered to a twenty-seven-year-old San Diego male named John Carl Delbo. In San Diego, police officers were already knocking on Delbo’s apartment door. Ten minutes later we heard Delbo’s account. He’d sold the car to a man named John Marco six weeks ago. Marco hadn’t haggled over the price, paid cash, and promised to register the car right away. Delbo had just assumed the buyer had followed through on the registration and hadn’t bothered to fill out the form DMV requires of the seller.
None of that was particularly surprising, but we needed the seller, Delbo, to look at photos, as soon as possible. Did Hurin buy the car? Was he operating independently with a contract to produce the bombs but on his own to find a place? It was possible. We knew his predilection was to work alone.
An hour and a half later, ERT was ready to move the body. It was quite hot now in the narrow canyon. The bomb dog was panting when they brought her back one more time. Then ERT moved the body. The smell was awful as more fluids leaked out. One of the bullets had exited the right eye on an upward slant and taken out a good-sized piece of bone at the brow, but there was no doubt.
“I know him,” I said. I’d already figured out it was him and was debating how he got here and why. “His name is Denny Mondari. He’s from Vegas. He’s worked as a CI for us for a decade.”
“What’s he doing here?”
“Don’t know yet.”
It was a sad ending for anyone, but honestly, I didn’t feel as much for Mondari. Somehow he’d earned his way here. An hour and a half later I caught a ride back from Nogales and called Venuti as we reached an area with better cell reception. A plane left Vegas soon after to retrieve me. Nogales drove me to the Borrego Valley Airport. We shook hands and he left. I was on the phone with Venuti and the ASAC when the FBI plane landed.
“Make your best guess,” Thorpe told me.
“Mondari didn’t know he was delivering explosives. He thought he was trading his way out of his computer-hacking problem by delivering drugs, and the cartel wanted a disposable deliveryman to bring in the C-4, so they used him. They probably trailed him to keep an eye on the delivery then executed him after. After his cyberthieves broke into their manager’s computer and they got tracked down and kidnapped, you can bet they gave up Mondari’s name. Mondari was walking dead. They just put him to work first. That’s what fits for me.”
“And Garod Hurin?”
“He built the next bomb or bombs, got warned or picked up on us, and then closed down the shop and left.”
“Meaning he guessed we’d find it.”
“Sure. We were already in his neighborhood.”
“Call as soon as you land,” Thorpe said. “Stay with your bomb maker. He knows you’re coming for him. Figure him out. You just found where he worked. As the media gets this he’ll know you’re right behind him. Stay with him. Where would he go now, Grale?”
47
From the plane, the Anza-Borrego looked sere, stark, and cathedral. It was beautiful country in its own way. Sometimes I couldn’t help thinking about the beauty on earth in contrast to the life’s work I’d chosen. But I wasn’t going there today.
What could motivate a freelancer like Hurin to work for Al Qaeda or ISIS? The answer could only be the old one. Money. He wouldn’t care about their religious zeal or vain certainty their interpretations were the only true ones. Those would be abstracts to him. Maybe there was a thrill in striking at the country whose law enforcement had hunted him for a decade, but most likely it was a big payoff that brought him here. Hurin, if we could find him, would have a lot of information we needed. We definitely wanted him alive.
At the office I walked into another conference room meeting, only this time with more buzz and excitement and Washington brass piped in to listen. We started without any delay. Like me, a CIA analyst conferenced in doubted Hurin had shot Mondari. Their profile showed him as reclusive, careful, and physically withdrawn.
An hour-long debate began about what else might be in play here. Into that mix someone threw Beatty’s name. Beatty had bought yet more throwaway phones and his whereabouts were unknown. Also, the phone Juan Menderes used to confirm his coke deliveries was on the short list for the cell phone that detonated the Bar Alagara bomb. I hadn’t been briefed on that yet, but it offered another explanation for his murder.
An agent summarized Beatty’s confrontation with police officers at a scenic overlook northwest of Vegas, saying a patrol officer found him sleeping in the back of his pickup and Beatty was hostile, so he’d called for backup. He was not charged or held but was aggressive on leaving.
“He tried to call me from there,” I said. “What did he do that was aggressive?”
“Lowered his passenger window to flip off an officer. You can read their report. The GPS tracker attached to the underside of his pickup was found in a rest-stop trash can. He must have suspected he was being tracked.”
Of course he did. The agent must have read my face. He stared before continuing.
“There’s been no credit card activity. Why is he still calling you?”
“Maybe because I believe in him.”
“And why is that?”
“A better question is why not.”
Venuti cut it off and we moved back to Garod Hurin. One of those conferenced in from headquarters, a heavyweight in domestic terrorism investigation, John Saran, asked me, “Do you have anything resembling hard evidence that Garod Hurin has returned to the Vegas area?”
“None.”
“So some good guessing, good tracking, but really nothing.”
“Correct.”
“And Mondari’s cybercriminal crew is still missing?”
“They are. They could be sitting on a beach somewhere.”
“Do you believe that?”
“No.”
“Why haven’t we found them?”
“We haven’t put much effort into finding them.”
“You haven’t or we haven’t?”
“We work for the same agency, sir.”
I got a few smiles at the table for that. Saran was a ball-breaker with the nickname “Sarin,” for the nerve gas.
“Tell me why we should find them, Agent Grale, and we’ll do it. All I’ve heard so far is they were scamming a cartel and got discovered. How do they tie in?”
“This will be speculation on my part.”
“Well, you’re on a streak. Let’s hear it.”
“Mondari’s cybergeeks are dead. Sinaloa soldiers kidnapped and interrogated them. They’re lying in shallow graves in the desert. Before they died they gave up Mondari’s name and everything else they knew.”
“That’s believable.”
“But if they’re not dead, they can validate what Mondari told me and they may know more. We need to look for them.”
“Okay, but get on with what you think has happened.”
“Cartel operatives sat down with Mondari next and laid out their terms. Maybe he made a large restitution payment and agreed to do cyberwork for them, something like that. Something that made him believe there was a way out. But another piece was doing deliveries, some finite number, two of which were C-4. Why use Mondari for that? The reaso
n is, he was disposable. They wouldn’t want any kind of trail tying them to a terrorist bomber. The Sinaloa cartel is who the CIA says moved the C-4 up from southern Mexico. As long as I’m speculating, I’m going to say it never delivered to the warehouse where it allegedly disappeared from.”
“Really?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Okay, now I’m all ears.”
“It’s too improbable that it was stolen out from underneath us. I read the report. There was backup on the backup surveillance. I think the cartel picked up on CIA surveillance. Then they thought about it and decided it had just gotten more expensive to deliver. They told whoever was communicating with ISIS or AQAP that they had a problem and it was going to cost more money. They did have a problem and came up with a more profitable way to deal with it. I’m going to say they faked the delivery the CIA was tracking and brought it in through another route. Maybe they split the delivery in half.”
“Why split it?”
“So they wouldn’t lose it all if the courier got busted crossing the border, as well as it got the size down to where it could easily be moved with two car trips. Maybe Mondari thought it was drugs he was ferrying. You know what, I take that back. I don’t know what he thought, but I’m sure he thought he was squaring the books with the cartel over the theft of data his cybergeeks pulled off.”
“You’re saying this Denny Mondari drove the C-4 to the bomber’s shop?”
“No, I’d guess a neutral point is where it was off-loaded. Mondari went home after the first load. After the second he wasn’t needed anymore, so they took him out in the desert and put him down. They would have lost the body and the car carrying him, but the car got wedged between rocks and stuck in sand in a desert canyon. Mondari was killed for leading his cybercrooks into the Sinaloa manager’s e-mail. He was walking dead as soon as that was discovered. They just found a use for him first and let him think he was trading his way out. He came to us with the bomb-maker story because he was scared, but he couldn’t tell us the truth. He probably figured we were his only hope, or let’s say he knew that by the time he told me about seeing the fabricante de bombas e-mail.”
“You don’t think he was part of the plot?”
“No.”
“Do you have any proof?”
“I have little pieces. Do you know Mike Sulliver, a former detective here in Vegas?”
“I know of him. We worked with him on several cases. He was damned good.”
“He’s got a private investigative business now. He’d also heard rumors that the Sinaloa cartel had some talk with Mondari. Mondari talked to a casino-bartender friend when he was drunk and Sulliver got it from him.”
“You first said we should look at Mondari’s crew and then you said they’re likely dead.”
“My guess is dead, but what if they’re alive? If they’re alive, we need them.”
“All right, point taken, we’ll look for them. Now tell me why this drug cartel or any cartel would want to have anything to do with an attack on the US government? Last time it led to a whole lot of smoking coca fields. The CIA maintains the C-4 crossed the border in an 18-wheeler carrying cleaning products. Why don’t you believe that?”
“Because I read the report where the drug dogs got fooled and the C-4 was stolen out from under joint CIA-FBI surveillance. But I think the CIA got fooled.”
Saran chuckled and said, “Keep going.”
“The C-4 was never in that truck and when twenty-four-hour surveillance was set up on the warehouse, the teams were watching detergent. Meanwhile Sinaloa is telling AQAP and ISIS or a Lebanese businessman the NSA tapped into in Mexico City that they needed more money. They had spotted CIA spies and were going to bring it in a different way. But they also knew if the C-4 was used for terrorism, it would ultimately get traced back to them, so they took very careful steps. They made the CIA agents believe it had been delivered with the semitruck full of detergent.”
“We believed,” Saran said.
“There you go. We believed, and meanwhile it came in a different way and got used while we were still watching the warehouse. The cartel worried about what they should worry about, the US government tracing a delivery of explosives used for terrorism here back to their smuggling pipeline. They still made good, but at a much, much higher price. That’s my guess. Maybe some hard-core Wahhabi Saudi prince paid the difference.”
“Do you think the final delivery has been made?”
Had to think a moment about what I wanted to say there, then said, “I guess this is how I see it. Hurin may have gotten wind of a search under way and left. A San Diego County deputy and I were making rounds with a story of a serial murderer allegedly working from the Anza-Borrego. Deputy Nogales is someone we ought to be working more, by the way. He’s very good. It’s possible Hurin put it together and closed up shop. More likely, he knew we were closing in and hoped to kill us. He finished the bomb making and set the booby trap.”
That was about all the speculation in one sitting that several in the room could take. I saw people shift in their chairs. The agent who’d sparred with me about Beatty leaned back and folded his arms. But John Saran on the conference call couldn’t see that.
“Is all of this about the drone program or is it bigger?” Saran asked.
“You’re asking my opinion.”
“I am because you’re getting results. If you weren’t, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. I want to know how you’re seeing this.”
“I see an enemy testing the viability of asymmetrical warfare inside the US.”
“Testing bringing the war to us?”
“Testing the viability.”
“And where do you think that probing goes next?”
“If the CIA is right, they still have enough C-4 for numerous smaller attacks, but we’re bringing more and more pressure to bear, and that’s got to figure into their thinking. They’ve shown us they’re sophisticated and have people here. They got the bomb into the rental car. Someone was ready when Nasik’s name showed up in the Hertz system. Maybe through a hacker. It suggests long-range planning. I’ve come around to believing in a sleeper cell and think that’s what we’re seeing.”
“So do I. Go on.”
“We’ve identified their bomb maker and asked the public to help find him. That intensifies the pressure. They know the clock is running down and I think they’ll go big. A grand finale followed by a promise to be back later with more.”
“That’s what I think too. They’ve got enough left to do that. I’d be emboldened if I were them. I’m with you on this and we’ll keep talking, Agent Grale. I don’t agree with everything you’ve said but I want to keep a conversation going. You’ve done some very good work. Anything else, anybody?”
Nobody said anything. They were just waiting for Saran to finish. The meeting broke up as soon as Saran signed off.
48
When I arrived at the hospital, a nurse flagged me down and said Julia was now down a floor in a shared room. Number 323. First thing I saw was that Julia was off the drips. The tubes were gone. The young woman who was her roommate was asleep, so I drew the curtain and carried a chair over. We talked quietly.
“Dr. Segovia stopped by,” she said. “I really like her. Mom liked her.”
“Yeah, and remember when I said Jo and I made a mistake? We’re not going to make the same one again.”
“Was it your fault?”
“Usually is.”
I saw the faintest glint of humor in her eyes.
“Your mom always nailed it.”
That brought her close to tears.
“I’m very glad you like Jo. You may get out of here tomorrow, Julia. It’s not certain yet. We’ll know later today. Have more of your friends come to see you?”
“Kylie and Cara came yesterday.”
I didn’t know any of her friends. I couldn’t put names to faces. That would have to change.
“One way or another we’ll keep you in the same
school,” I said.
“How?”
“I don’t know yet, but we will.”
I’d toyed more with the leasing-my-house idea and then renting a condo, but given the circumstances, maybe the school district would make an exception for her two remaining years. After she had a driver’s license, the logistics would get easier. Logistics were the easy part. I looked at black stitches on her right forearm and her bandaged left ear and the brace on her neck, and thought that all the worst is what no one could see.
Her dinner arrived as we were talking. She picked at the plate without eating. She needed someone she trusted deeply to hold her and tell her life would go on. I wanted to be that person, but that person should have been her dad. I was the uncle who worked all the time and joked and talked to her at family barbecues. I needed to step it up and be there always.
“We’ll figure it out, Julia. That’s what I can promise. There’ll be some hard days, but each time we’ll find a way through.”
She nodded and murmured something about the vacation her family would have gone on next week. Melissa had talked it up, Glacier National Park, Waterton, then Banff. No more family vacations. No brother teasing her or mother who loved her enormously and dad who would have done anything to protect her. All I could do was be there for her in a different way, but we talked about the planned vacation because it seemed to help her. She talked and cried and then smiled at a good memory.
“Julia, if you can, eat a little. You need it.”
She ate a few bites then I made her laugh with a story about her dad. She cut into the chicken and I told another, this one about Jim bringing a B-52 home on two engines and landing cleanly in a heavy storm. My phone buzzed several times and I looked at the number and guessed who it was but kept my focus on Julia.