by Kirk Russell
A local reporter was on the scene at the pumping stations near Tracy and she was doing her best with the information she had so far, but it was sketchy and confused and the early information got repeated and repeated. Still, you could hear in her voice that this was the big story of her career and she knew it.
‘Significant pieces of two major pumps supplying water to southern and central California have been severely damaged this morning in explosions that may be terrorist related.’
The report was live and as he worked through the different stations word seemed to be getting out that the FBI had some prior knowledge, though no one at the Bureau was commenting yet. Marquez clicked the radio back to the first station.
‘Patty, are the pumps shut down?’
‘Yes, and I’m hearing that the damage is extensive, but they don’t know how extensive yet.’
‘Was anyone hurt?’
‘Bob, we’re not hearing any reports of any injuries.’
‘Is the FBI calling this a terrorist act? Does this mean Al-Qaeda?’
‘It could mean that, Bob. We don’t know yet. We’re waiting for more information now, and at this point we can only say that whoever is behind it is endangering thousands if not millions of people.’
‘Thank you, Patty, and we’ll stay with this live throughout the day. For those of you who haven’t heard yet, terrorism reached California this morning . . .’
Marquez clicked the radio off, took the call from Desault.
‘Where are you?’
‘On my way in, I just heard the news.’
‘Jane Hosfleter is looking for you. You got the right island.’
‘I gave her three islands.’
‘Well, it’s the one with the apple orchards that you emphasized and she’s there now. They found a shed where he assembled what they think were very sophisticated self-propelled mines. Think missile underwater with onboard GPS guidance. The first mines blew the grills over the pumping stations and the follow-up mines blew the pumps. The Navy disarmed one that didn’t detonate and they’ve pulled it out of the water.’
Marquez called and left a message for Hosfleter. She called back fifteen minutes later and he learned more about the unexploded mine. She wanted to meet with him and she wanted to talk to Maria immediately.
‘How do I reach her?’
‘Let me see if I can get her for you. I’ll call her right now.’
Maria picked up on the first ring. ‘Jack did it,’ she said. ‘I bet they have other things planned.’
‘Did he talk about anything else?’
‘No.’
‘Call Hosfleter.’
‘OK, I will.’
Governor Schwarzenegger was on his way to the pumping stations, as was an elite Navy team of divers and dozens more FBI agents. In the San Francisco Field Office agents watched CNN in the conference room, but Marquez and Desault moved to where they could talk.
‘The design for these torpedoes probably came off the Net,’ Desault said. ‘Nowadays, you buy everything like this online. Our friend Stoval has sold US military blueprints to several countries. Through a wealthy Chinese businessman he employs a team of hackers in central Asia and another in Taiwan. You hack into the right computer and you’ll find plenty of buyers out there. Plans for the current US military helicopters got hacked into and forwarded to Taiwan, and then probably on to China. Shit is flying all around the world over the Internet.’
He shook his head.
‘This is a sophisticated terrorist event. What they found on the island is forward-thinking prototype stuff the military couldn’t figure out how to get into production. This isn’t two guys with bad teeth mixing fertilizer and diesel out back in the barn. This is money, connections, skill, training, the whole ball of wax.’
Marquez left for the delta a few minutes later. He was nowhere near a TV when the website went up. He was with Hosfleter. They heard it on a car radio, sat in the car and listened together.
FORTY-EIGHT
‘Two hundred thirty-four years ago in Boston a tea party got thrown for a government that wouldn’t listen to the people. We claim and accept responsibility for the fire at the Wonder Rock Condominium Complex and for the Tracy Pumping Station bombing. We will continue acts of violence against property aimed at bringing down those who have turned America into a country whose morals are based on economics. This is a revolution of values. This is a start of the Second American Revolution.
‘The entrenched powers will label us terrorists, but our goal is to return the United States to the principles on which it was founded. We believe in the Founders. We believe the issues confronting the United States of America are so significant they can no longer be left to politicians and those who stand to profit from the status quo. We believe it is urgent to combat global warming. We believe it is urgent that America move away from further military-industrialization and relentless conspicuous consumption. We believe if the People act the government will follow. We believe the time of debate has passed and the time of action has arrived.’
All major media had simultaneously received the same email with the website address. In minutes it bounced around the world, but it carried a personal immediacy for Marquez and Hosfleter. He walked the island with her, showed her the rotting dock where he and Shauf pulled in with the DBEEP boat and where he’d found the bucket of bait and the fishing pole. From the top of the levee he saw all the vehicles parked in the apple orchard and the crime tape perimeter around the shed. The trail through the dry rye grass had long since been trampled.
‘Is this water running free a good thing for the delta?’ Hosfleter asked. ‘Is it good for the river systems, the wildlife, the fish, all that?’
‘Sure.’
‘Are you secretly glad nature has been liberated?’
‘Do you really want to do this?’
‘I’m just asking.’ She held out her hands. ‘It’s done. There’s nothing we can do and now the rivers will all run to the sea again and all that crap. Excuse me, the water will flush out the delta and save the midget fish whose name I can’t remember and the salmon which I do remember because I love to eat them. I’m just asking what you really feel, coming over from Fish and Game, and all.’
‘You’re not asking anything, you’re making a statement.’
Gutierrez had sworn him in this morning with Desault standing behind him. It took less than five minutes. His new creds and passport were with him and Hosfleter probably knew that. Maybe it made her angry. Maybe she believed Maria knew more and he was coaching her. Or she was frustrated to get to the island too late and blamed him. Either way, she had crossed a line.
‘I am coming over from Fish and Game, and it’s temporary, but what you might not know is that I was a Federal agent once before, right about the time you were lying in bed hoping you’d get the third grade teacher you wanted. My career has been in law enforcement and one thing I swore I’d never do is be a Fed again. But here I am.’ He offered his hand. ‘Good luck. I’m not sure we’ll be meeting up again.’
‘Marquez, wait, don’t go yet, and I apologize, I’m sorry. I’m frustrated. The National Security Agency came close to tracking our tipster’s email, but it turns out he has very sophisticated computer defenses that detected the probes and he’s gone quiet. He’s gone, probably forever, and I don’t know where to look for Gant next.’
None of what she’d just said made much sense to him. He knew someone tipped the FBI to a San Francisco link that included Gant, but that was about it.
She continued.
‘Gant scares me. Truly scares me. Come look at what’s in these sheds. Let me show you why we need to find this guy and now. I know Maria is not involved. I do know. But come look at why I’m leaning on her for help, and don’t get me wrong about you. I’ve got nothing but respect for you signing on with the task force. Please come look.’ She paused. ‘I’m really asking because I need help. I don’t know where they’re going to hit next.’
FORTY
-NINE
‘Ever think about Jim Osiers anymore?’ Sheryl Javits asked when she called him that night. She sounded like she’d been drinking. He was reading Stoval files and stepped away from them to talk with her. Desault’s idea of taking Stoval down on animal trafficking charges or illegal trophy hunting had gotten a tepid response from the rest of the task force and skepticism from himself initially, but the more he learned the more it seemed possible. Katherine was in San Francisco at dinner with Maria so he’d read into the night and he was seeing patterns in Stoval’s habits. He felt the first thread of excitement and got how Desault came up with the animal angle.
There were gaps in the reports, but also stretches where they knew where Stoval hunted grizzly in Siberia and Canada, and a recent entry suggesting he might have been in Alaska with a Chinese businessman named Xian Liu. The files had sketchy info on legal boar hunts in Italy in September, repeated visits to a bird market in Mexico City, details on a trawler owned and sailed under a Liberian flag and working off the north coast of Africa catching illegal tuna to feed the EU markets, and a lot of wing hunting of the kind Billy Takado had talked about.
Stoval owned thousands of acres south of Bariloche. He had residences in Argentina, Capri, Barcelona, London, Hong Kong, Zurich, and Cape Town. He had pieces of hotels and of hunting preserves in Africa, Chile, and Poland. He was building a new residence in Mexico on the Baja peninsula. But if there was a pattern it was that every month or so he got himself out in open country and hunted.
Sheryl’s call disrupted his concentration and he talked reluctantly at first. Then, as she revealed more, he listened closely.
‘I should have told you before now. I don’t know why I didn’t, except that I thought it would all go away. I’m being investigated by Internal Affairs. Jim Osiers’ oldest son, Daren, persuaded them to reopen the investigation. Daren went to work for the DEA five or six years ago. He’s out of San Diego. He’s got a theory going where the La Paz bank account was mine and that I framed Jim.’
‘You’re kidding.’
‘No, really, he got his SAC to persuade Internal Affairs to reopen an investigation and Internal Affairs up here has interviewed me three times this week. The agent in charge is a woman named Beth Murkowski. You may hear from her as early as tomorrow. She’s got a story Rayman fed Daren Osiers about me taking bribe money to pass information to the Salazars. He claims he helped feed information to the Mex Feds and frame Jim Osiers and now with the Salazar brothers dead he’s free to tell the truth.’
She exhaled and muttered something he couldn’t hear.
‘Another thing you don’t know is that I went to several of Rayman’s parole hearings after he’d served most of his sentence for the KZ Nuts deal. He was a model prisoner and they were thinking of letting him out early, but I fought it because I always thought he had something to do with Jim getting killed. I wanted him to do his full sentence.’
‘Did he?’
‘Yes, I made sure. So he’s got it out for me.’
That last didn’t quite ring true and Marquez sat down. He jotted Beth Murkowski on the pad where he’d made Stoval notes. He wrote Rayman underneath it.
Marquez remembered the three Osiers boys at the funeral. The oldest, Daren, had looked the most like Jim and was dressed in a black suit too small for him. Unlike the other two boys he’d held his grief inside. It was Daren that Marquez had given the letter and flowers to at the Osiers’ front door. Clea, Jim’s wife, hadn’t come to the door, and later Marquez learned that Clea believed that he and the rest of Group 5 had known about Jim’s girlfriend in Loreto and that he’d assigned Jim there so he could be with her. She wouldn’t talk to him at the memorial service and he understood. He tried six months later and there was no response, but he would never hold that against her.
‘Supposedly, I used Jim’s face and a fake ID and the banker did what he was told to do by the Salazars. I was the woman behind the fake man. Funds went from the La Paz bank account to a fictitious corporation called ALCRON that was really me in an offshore account.’
‘A-L-C-R-O-N?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Sounds like an insecticide.’
She drew a deep breath and from her voice he knew there was something else, another reason why she was calling tonight.
‘I got grilled a couple of days ago on how I afforded the down payment on my house in San Francisco. I told them the truth; I got the money from my ex-husband when we divorced. I got it from Pete. It has nothing to do with Group Five, the DEA, or anything that happened eighteen years ago.’
‘How much money?’
‘Two hundred thousand dollars.’
‘They must have asked Pete Phelps. He’s not denying he gave you the money, is he?’
‘He is and he signed an affidavit. He lied.’
Sheryl did something he’d never heard her do. She choked up and wept, wracking sobs that the phone carried easily.
‘I married him,’ she eventually got out. ‘I’ve made such a mess of my life. I’ve made such a mess. I’ll call you tomorrow.’
She hung up.
FIFTY
Sheryl called the next morning and Beth Murkowski, the agent from DEA Internal Affairs that Sheryl called Murky, showed up with another DEA agent in tow. Murkowski didn’t come to his house. She came instead to the FBI San Francisco Field Office. That she came here surprised Marquez and made him wonder if the DEA had a tail on him, or a phone tap in anticipation of Sheryl’s arrest.
Murkowski stood about six foot two with pale blue eyes and a hard face. The male agent’s name Marquez didn’t catch and didn’t need to. He was there to carry her briefcase. In a conference room Murkowski laid it out for him in a very deliberate voice.
‘The Mexican Federal Judicial Police have turned over previously withheld documents to the US State Department. Copies of those documents are in my possession. I’m going to show them to you. I don’t have any problem showing them to you, but I’d like to record your answers if that’s all right with you.’
‘That’s fine.’
The male agent placed a tape recorder on the table.
‘We’re going back to 1989 to the bull ring.’ She watched his eyes as she said that. ‘This is the testimony of a Tijuana police officer who was in the bull ring when you were there.’
She slid it over and as Marquez picked up the Mex Fed document it felt for a moment as if he was in the Cadillac again, rolling through the dusty lot with Billy sitting next to him.
‘There’s a translated copy underneath the one on top.’
‘I can read this one.’
‘Agents at the San Diego Field Office discovered that your former SAC, Jay Holsten, suppressed information that the Mexican Federal Judicial Police had provided the DEA. He buried it or destroyed it, but the Mexicans kept their own records. This is a copy they made from their records. Agent Marquez, if this account is accurate you made a choice in the bull ring about your future.’
‘You’re right, it was a big day, and a sad one.’
‘It’s going to get sadder, I think, but you may feel better when it’s over.’
Marquez didn’t answer that and read the Spanish account rather than the translated. When he finished he laid it down and asked, ‘Where do you want to start?’
‘With Sheryl Javits, ALCRON, the money in the La Paz bank account, and how Jim Osiers got framed. If you help us, I can pretty well guarantee you’ll get a deal.’
‘I don’t need any deal,’ he said quietly, ‘and I’ve made plenty of mistakes myself in investigations. I have to tell you you’re making one now.’
Marquez had been part of operations where a few early conclusions cascaded into a series of mistakes. He’d been in her shoes. He knew how it could go. You get going the wrong way and everything seems to fit and you get more and more pumped up as you build to a confrontation like this.
They went through his version now, the bull ring, the drive back with Billy’s body, the copies o
f the Fed form, the 52s, and Jim Osiers’ murder. She slid him another document, a signed statement by the same Tijuana cop, as well as one from a Mex Fed who had witnessed Marquez meet Miguel Salazar outside a restaurant in Tijuana.
‘It wasn’t a meeting and it cost me my career. You could check that with my former SAC, Jay Holsten.’
‘Your former SAC is in a nursing home with Alzheimer’s. He can’t remember his name or how to use a toilet.’
Now she handed him her final document, or at least the last of what she’d brought with her. This one got his interest, a single page with all lines blacked-out except for a lone paragraph at the bottom. Someone had written the word Stoval in blue ink at the top of the page. Marquez’s guess was that this page was a CIA document passed to her through the State Department. That could mean someone wanted her to have it. Maybe Kerry Anderson could explain that to him. The paragraph at the bottom recounted a bull ring meeting between Miguel Salazar and the DEA agent the Salazars paid to deliver Billy Takado to them.
‘Emrahain Stoval gave that account to a CIA officer eight years ago. I know you’re on a Stoval task force and I’m very clear who Stoval is, but as you also know, he has a relationship with the CIA. Regardless of what anyone thinks about that relationship, it exists. What you’re holding in your hand is his testimony. Tell me why he would lie.’
‘Tell me why he wouldn’t.’
She didn’t really like the look of the document any more than he did and he doubted she believed in it because as soon as he laid the document down she switched abruptly to talking about Jim Osiers. Still, the blacked-out page lay on the table as another layer. It troubled him.