by Kirk Russell
Mara is strict on FBI procedure, so it wasn’t worth arguing. During the TDY, the temporary duty, I’d report to Rodrigo Fuentes, who runs the domestic terrorism unit in the LA office, rather than to Mara here in Vegas. I’d have a desk in the bullpen of the LA office and a place to bed down on government per diem. How the rest of it was going to work was unclear.
When another call came in, I told Mara, “That’s Hofter, I’ve got to take it. Talk to you tomorrow from LA.”
“Two of the bombed substations, Anza and Olin, have fires,” Hofter said. “The fire department is on one of them and about to get on the other. All three substations are gone. They’re do-overs, and the basin is on rolling blackouts.”
“The city is, or everywhere?” I asked.
“The whole basin.”
“Okay, I’m on my way soon. I’ll call from the road.”
I looked at Julia’s heaving shoulders and again at my sister’s former car. In the first year after her family was killed, I’d sometimes find Julia sitting outside in the car crying. She’d told me that when she sat in the car, she could feel her mom and her little brother, Nate.
“I’m headed to the Anza substation,” Hofter said. “Look for me there.” And then almost in a stream of consciousness, he added, “My wife is freaking out. She heard one of the explosions, and there’s no rolling blackout in our neighborhood. The power is out, and the kids are scared.” He laughed an odd way. “We’re still in America, right? Call me when you cross into California, Grale.”
JULIA
Julia heard Uncle Grale talking quietly to Allred. In her head she saw Nick scurry away ratlike, then pull out his phone. He must have called somebody for a ride. She didn’t know anything about different IDs and credit cards in different names the detective had asked her about. She was still getting her head around Nick as a credit-card scammer. She had no idea, and the detective didn’t believe her. She’d had more drinks than she’d said, but that was going to change tonight. She was going to be different about a lot of things.
Detective Allred had said, “Your boyfriend was drunk, wasn’t he?”
“He doesn’t drink much, so I doubt it. He smokes a lot of weed.”
“So he was high?”
“I didn’t smell anything tonight,” she said.
“You’re saying he could have been high.”
“I’m saying I don’t know because I didn’t see him much at the party.”
“Do you know where he is?” Allred asked.
“I still don’t, and we did break up. I don’t know if he’ll call me.”
“You don’t seem upset that he left you here to deal with this.”
“I hope I never see him again.”
She said that last bit in such a hard way the detective took a step back. He left her and started talking with UG as she thought about her friend Sam, Samantha Clark, who had told Nick last September, “Go to Spring Mountain Organic Ice Cream and meet Julia Kern. You two are made for each other.”
That was nine months ago, and it turned out Nick was phony, yet Sam had vouched for him. Sam didn’t really know Nick. Just thought she did.
Allred jabbed a finger at UG, who shook his head. Julia watched that and remembered Nick making fun of UG. UG was here. Nick ran. That kept going through her head. Nick ran. She looked across the intersection at the two police officers who’d found Nick’s wallet and showed her the different driver’s licenses almost as though they thought it was funny, asking her what her favorite name for Nick was.
UG started toward Jo and her. When he arrived he said, “Let’s go through your car and clean it out before we leave.”
“Really, right now?”
“Yes, right now, and let’s talk because I’m headed to LA. The car is going to go to a yard and sit. Everything valuable should come out.”
“Why?”
“Things get stolen. I’ve got a bag in my trunk you can put the smaller things in. I’ll get it. What’s the box in the back?”
“Nick’s stuff. It was in the garage of the house where we went to the party,” Julia said. “He had some stuff stored there that the people who own the house wanted to get out of their garage. It was one of the reasons to go to the party, but I don’t know what’s in the box. Just some crap of his, I guess.”
“Have a look in it before we do anything. Maybe it can stay in the car.”
Julia’s right knee hurt. Her shoulder was sore and her face stung where she’d hit the window. The driver’s door was open and the window broken on the passenger side. She was careful about glass fragments as she felt down along the floor and under the seats. UG reached and handed her the bag through the broken window. He was on the phone when she emptied everything out of the glove compartment. She finished with under the seats as UG raised the rear door and slid the cardboard box toward him.
“I’ll take a look in Nick’s box,” he said.
“Go for it.” A moment later she said, “We were arguing when we drove back. We’re over with. We were over with before they found his wallet and the false IDs.”
UG didn’t say anything to that. He opened the box.
“Nick said we were being followed. I didn’t believe him, but when we got to Las Vegas this other car jumped out and was chasing us.”
“Are you sure the driver was chasing you?”
“He was right on us.”
“That doesn’t sound like an undercover cop or any law enforcement I can think of. Are you sure it wasn’t just another driver who got angry over something?”
“No, it wasn’t like that. I told Detective Allred, but I don’t think he believed me. He thinks Nick was high or drunk or both and speeding.”
“Was he high?”
“I don’t think so.”
“I’m glad you’re okay and that the guy that got hit will make it.”
He said that, then peeled the tape off the box. It made a ripping sound, and UG reached in and pulled out a carton of something. He put on glasses and read the label on the carton. He pulled one, then another, then another. It didn’t make any sense. What was up with the cartons? UG looked inside three or four, then put the one he was holding down and straightened.
He glanced at Detective Allred like he wasn’t sure, then took photos she could see he was zooming in for, so something in the writing on the boxes. He texted the photos to someone, then typed something longer and turned toward the detective again, who was talking with Jo. UG raised his right arm. Her heart skipped a beat as he waved for Allred to come over.
I knew Allred would want to leverage anything found in the car, so I had some hesitation, but there really was no other way. But I was also close to telling him that if he kept pushing Julia to admit colluding with Nick, I’d make sure she lawyered up tonight.
As he walked up, Allred said, “I’ll be straight with you, Grale. I don’t buy the breakup story. Most likely—”
“Let me show you what’s in this box. It’s full of bullets. Three types. The bottom two layers of cartons are armor-piercing bullets. Sniper ammo. Military grade. Those will punch through a half inch of steel from a mile away. There’s no legitimate way for Suthers to have them in his possession. I’ve texted serial numbers to our office and asked for a run on these. The others are standard, 5.56 × 45 and 7.62 × 51 millimeter. Do you remember a hijacking of an ammunition shipment two months ago outside Grand Junction, Colorado?”
“I was aware of it,” Allred said.
“It was a shipment of ammunition, bullets, and an interstate hijacking, so we got involved. That and they were military grade, and some of those bullets started showing up here on the black market. I’ve texted one of the agents working that hijacking. She’s on her way here. If the bullets check out, our agents will take them as evidence and you’ll get a lot more help locating Julia’s ex-boyfriend. They’ll go out with a fugitive warrant as early as tonight.”
“I’d like that. But with what name?”
“We’ll list them all and go out with his face.”
He nodded but was silent, which in truth was a relief.
“Some of that hijacked ammunition was offered to a Las Vegas gun dealer who then called us,” I said. “We worked with him to set up a buy, but whoever was selling got spooked, so it never went down. I haven’t heard of any arrests, so if these bullets trace back to the hijacked truck it’s a big deal. But it’ll be our investigation, not yours.”
“Your niece is involved, so you’re out.”
“No argument there, I’m not part of it.”
My phone buzzed. I read the text message and showed him.
“That’s Sue Egbert, one of the agents working this. She’ll be here in fifteen minutes, and I have to leave soon. There were three bombings in Los Angeles tonight at electrical substations. I’m headed there and will be working out of the LA office for several months. I’ll be in and out of here as well, and I don’t want to leave tonight until I know Julia is going from here to home. Something else you need to know is that Julia may have a job offer in LA. She’s already had one phone interview.”
“Don’t try ‘she’s got a job’ bullshit with me, Grale.”
“I’m not bullshitting you, and the problem you’re going to run into is that Julia was a passenger not the driver.”
“If these bullets are what you think they might be, then they were being transported in her car. How could she not see the box? She’s protecting her boyfriend. Most would.”
“She told you she broke up with him.”
“A half an hour before the accident they broke up? I’m supposed to believe that?”
“Do you know the defense lawyer Erica Roberts?”
“Really, Grale?”
He shook his head and looked past me into the night.
“I never liked Suthers,” I said, “and I tried. I really did. She was so head over heels in love I tried hard. I’m telling you Julia’s world got flipped over tonight. If she said she broke up with him, she did. She will help you, and Roberts is no showboat. She’s real. And our agents will work with you. You’ll like Egbert.”
“Aw, fuck me,” he said.
I shook his hand to make peace for now. Half an hour later, the serial numbers on the bullets were matched to the stolen shipment, and I was running hard toward LA.
5
Los Angeles, April 19th
In east LA, down the street from the Anza substation, I pulled on a HAZMAT suit and was back in my role as a bomb tech. I’m good at it, although the LA FBI bomb squad was close to finished here. I took in downed electrical lines, transformers shattered and leaking oil, rows of broken windows blocks away, fragments of glass in the street reflecting morning sunlight. A few transformers might get salvaged, but Anza substation was otherwise a toxic mix of oils, downed wires, and torqued metals.
The prelim was ANFO. A dog had scented Tovex, a common igniting primer. Ammonium nitrate, an oxidizer used as fertilizer, was the major ingredient in these bombs. The fuel-oil component may have been something more stepped-up than diesel. From the look and a faint acrid odor, my guess was that it was.
DHS, the Department of Homeland Security, was here as well and not happy with their role. Like ATF—Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives—they had a good bomb investigative unit. The problem was we all had different techniques and labs. Mixing it up on the same bomb site led to problems, but something would get worked out with Homeland.
Employing decommissioned Southern California Edison trucks sold at auction then repainted and cleaned up was a clever idea, although maybe too clever. Even assuming false buyer names or shell companies, money changed hands. So, as Hofter suggested, there’ll be a trail. We could trace bomb ingredients and pull DNA even after the blast, something bombers often didn’t realize. We had surveillance video from the substations.
Somewhere in the neighborhood, a video camera on a business or apartment may have captured the getaway car. An Edison truck lumbering through a neighborhood didn’t go unnoticed. People would call. Tips would come in, and evidence would accumulate.
When Mark arrived, I was out of the HAZMAT suit, and we left soon after to interview a witness named Alicia Juarez, who’d seen the bomb truck delivered and “a skinny white dude doing a cameraman thing.”
Her apartment was on the third floor of a four-story apartment complex two hundred yards from the substation. Ahead of the blast, an evacuation order went out. Juarez ignored it, and turned her lights off and stayed in her apartment. It was all over the news that the bombers claimed three bombs would detonate at 11:59, so she got well away from the windows before then.
Residents still weren’t allowed to return home until the buildings were declared safe. Hofter found two structural engineers walking the perimeter of Juarez’s apartment building and was told the building was safe and we could go up. We stepped through broken glass to where Juarez had stood with a glass of wine, looking out the windows. She saw the bomb truck arrive.
“This truck drives past with two people in it, stops at the gate, and one of them gets out on the passenger side. I can’t see him very well. I’m not even sure it was a man. He messed around with the gate for maybe five minutes, then they left the truck where it was. It didn’t make any sense to me because the utility people must have seen them on their video cameras. But then, no one really works there. They run it all from somewhere else.”
Hofter tapped at his phone and then held up an image of an Edison truck for her to verify.
“Same as that one,” she said.
On a side street but within her view, a car had slowed to a stop. The pair left the truck, crossed the street, and hurried to the car. Alicia watched them get in and go. We went through every detail with her several times, and I liked her all the more for her patience and effort to get her facts right.
“The car left with the two who’d been in the truck, then I saw a man with what looked like a big video camera filming. He made me think he was making some documentary-type thing.”
“Tell us everything you remember about him,” I said.
“Tall, skinny-armed, long, the kind that’s narrow from the side, all spidery with a little bit of pointy beard. A white guy.” She turned to me. “He was closer to here than they were with the truck. He came this way before he went up the sidewalk there. I saw him go under the streetlight.”
We’d get a sketch artist to sit with her. From this distance she didn’t see much of his face, but the body type was less common so worth a try, I thought. Looking at the destroyed substation I couldn’t help but think about a briefing on the US cyberattacks yesterday.
The attacks on the US power stations bore a striking resemblance to 2016 attacks in Western Ukraine. There, attackers overwrote firmware and were able to shut down substations one after another with the click of a computer mouse. Ukraine uses the same serial-to-Ethernet converters as US power stations and were susceptible same as ours to the malicious software, BlackEnergy3, that we’ve found here. BlackEnergy3 opens a backdoor that after a series of steps allows the overwriting of firmware, at which point they can do whatever they want.
No bombers and bomb trucks, an attacker thousands of miles away in front of a computer, perhaps with a cup of coffee, turning the lights off in a foreign city. I felt for a moment as if I was looking out Juarez’s shattered windows at the past.
When we left Alicia, I picked up a message from Julia recounting her interview this morning with Allred. I called her back.
“Julia?”
“Yes?”
“Did you call the lawyer, Erica Roberts?”
“Friends say I don’t need a lawyer.”
“They’re wrong. You need one, and Roberts is very good. I’ll help pay for it.”
“I’ve got to go, but I’ll call you later. I’ll think about the lawyer.”
I’d left a message for Roberts with Julia’s cell phone number as I’d driven to LA. It frustrated me that she resisted or didn’t grasp that Allred would have to go through the lawyer. Roberts was more
graceful than combative and, more to the point, she knew the rules of evidence cold.
Julia texted me later, Thank you, but you’re not paying for any of this. Also looking for another car. The insurance guy went by this morning. He’s going to call this afternoon, but it’s probably like you said, a total.
I texted back, Call Roberts. She’s honest. You’ll like her. We’ll figure out the rest.
The Los Angeles FBI Field Office, much like the rest of the LA Basin, was coming to grips with how important electrical substations were. I was coming off seventeen months of the grid-security task force, where I’d learned just how vulnerable the grid was, but what really woke me up happened in April of 2013 at Pacific Gas & Electric’s Metcalf transmission station along the outskirts of Palo Alto, California.
Metcalf supplies power to the Silicon Valley. Who attacked it is still unknown. It’s an open case at the FBI. What is known is the attackers knew their way around. They cut the telephone lines and followed with nineteen minutes of shooting that took out seventeen large transformers. PG&E averted a blackout by rerouting power, then spent nearly a month, twenty-seven days, getting Metcalf back on line.
Nineteen minutes followed by twenty-seven days. Fifteen million in damage and no suspects arrested. And that’s just one transmission substation. At Metcalf they’d used military-style weapons. They shot well. They left no fingerprints. No shell casings were recovered. No arrests made. No one was ever charged in the single most significant attack on the US electrical grid.
Or rather, used to be the most significant. The substation bombings in LA changed that. Another thing Metcalf taught me was how vulnerable electrical and telecom facilities were to bullets. I think about that a lot.
The bullets used at Metcalf were lightweight compared to the sniper bullets in Nick’s box in Julia’s car. When I see bullets like that or a Stinger missile that’s traveled halfway around the world to a closet in a house in Las Vegas, I have to remind myself that most people buying these things lack the skills to use them.
That said, the San Francisco FBI Field Office received a worrisome call yesterday about a shot-up cell tower in Northern California. Kristen Blujace fielded it and talked to a tower consultant who said he was looking at a shot-up cell tower where the shooter had used sniper ammo. Jace knew I’d investigated in March five cell-tower shootings in remote locations in Wyoming and Nevada where armor-piercing sniper bullets were used.