by Kirk Russell
Between Buckhorn Ridge and us was a valley green with the spring. A creek curled through a meadow, and a red-brown ribbon of dirt road cut across it. Snowfall in California was heavy this past winter, and the Sierras looked like a white cresting wave in the sunlight.
The anonymous caller—who we were also looking to identify—had reported a Jeep coming down off Buckhorn Ridge after the shooting. That didn’t prove anything but might corroborate Farue’s conclusion that the ridge was the shooting platform. Farue’s coming out alone yesterday to examine the damage followed a pattern we’d seen with several tower companies. Many insurance policies excluded terrorism coverage, so the tower owners sent their consultants first with the unspoken goal of finding damage to be vandalism.
That wouldn’t work here. With his “five minutes” comment, Farue had acknowledged that, and up here it was hard to miss the repeaters and transceivers with the two-shot pattern, one bullet hole with another bullet hole very nearby, as close as an inch or less.
When we finished at the tower, we drove down to meet the Butte County sheriff, John Callan, and a deputy of his in the valley below. Farue followed and wanted to come with us up Buckhorn Ridge, but the sheriff said no.
“What’s your problem with him?” I asked as we drove away.
“He shows up uninvited at crime scenes. I don’t like him.”
We bounced through the meadow ruts and then rattled over a narrow wooden bridge before switchbacking up on a dirt road through trees. Branches dragged along the Toyota 4Runner’s sides. Above the trees the slope turned to loose rock, and the narrow track made a steep climb over a hump onto the ridge. Farue was right. The ridge was a well-positioned shooting platform.
Ninety percent of ex-military, law enforcement officers, hunters, and criminals are mediocre shooters. Some hunters can hit a rabbit running through grass at a hundred yards. TV and movie actors can hit anything. And then there are the truly gifted who have also been trained. That training is, as Farue had said, most often military.
Callan got on his radio, and Jace and I walked the rocky dirt track that ran out the spine of the ridge. We scoured the area for any signs of where the sniper might have shot from along the brushy rock face looking west at the gray cell tower.
Jace pushed on ahead, and I studied the brush. I wasn’t pretending to be a buckskin scout down on one knee reading the signs, but the three small broken branches—twigs, really—could mean our shooter pushed through the brush here to get into the open.
When I caught up with Jace she said, “If we’d found a pile of shell casings, that would be one thing. We’re wasting time here.”
“Let’s walk it once more. I found a broken manzanita branch and a few twigs recently snapped.”
“Awesome. Snapped twigs. We’ve got him cornered now.”
“He’s carrying a gun, ammo, a tripod or some stand, and he’s going to leave a mark wading through brush.”
My opinion: FBI agents depend too much on computers. They were a mainstay when I joined the FBI and have become more and more important. I love mine. Whole investigations take place in front of a computer screen. But when you add something, you usually take something else away. What I see diminishing are the powers of observation in investigating agents.
Somewhere here in the early morning quiet the sniper had waited for the sun to rise. He’d want clear light, no sun on his scope. Sunrise was close to 6:30 a.m. The tower equipment went offline at 7:46 a.m. That marked the general timing and said something about where he chose to set up.
I looked out at the tower, then back at the rocks and turned as Jace called, “Hey, come take a look at this. Those two spots right there.”
I walked over and agreed they could be tripod legs.
“And the gun would be here,” I said.
The more I looked, the more I believed. I looked downslope where a shell casing could have bounced down.
“I’m going to take a look,” I said.
I had the sun overhead, so I might see the reflected glint of a shell casing between rocks. I tried to be patient and started low and worked my way up.
“I see one,” I called up to Jace.
“Deer hunter,” she yelled back.
Nope. Too big for that. I took photos, bagged it, and half an hour later we recrossed the wooden bridge into the meadow. When we had cell reception again, a string of texts and voice mails came in. I scanned texts and reread one several times, then showed it to Jace.
Farue was one of ours. Got unhappy. Blamed equipment. Applied for something else.
“Okay, so Farue was good but not good enough,” she said. “That’s pretty much what he told us. What’s the next step?”
“We get a short list of who is good enough, and we make no assumptions.”
We pulled into a mini-market, and I gassed the car as Jace went in to buy a couple of coffees and something we could eat. Most likely peanuts—that’s what she liked with coffee, that and a piece of chocolate. As I finished filling the tank, Farue pulled up.
“Small town,” he said.
“Looks like it.” I pushed the button to get a printed gas receipt and added, “Let’s keep talking, and thanks for all the help today. I appreciate everything you did to get us pointed the right way. I wish you’d called the day before when you realized you were looking at a top sniper. But we’ll let that go.”
“I had to sort it out myself,” Farue said.
“I can understand that. I like to do things my own way first. I’ll call you in the next few days. What’s up with you and the sheriff?”
“Aw, it’s a long story. He’s a territorial fucker. I’ll tell you over a beer sometime. Watch your back, G-man. If I hear anything I’ll call you.”
“We’ll be calling you.”
He smiled at that, then waggled my card as if to say he knew how to reach me. I caught him looking in his rearview mirror as Jace came out of the store. She handed me a coffee. “I don’t know about that guy,” she said. “But we will hear from him soon and often.”
She couldn’t have been more right.
9
I flew back to LA midmorning the next day and got a call from Julia as I reached the FBI office.
“There’s something I should tell you,” Julia said. “It’s about Nick and it’s pretty random. You’re probably getting millions of tip calls, but do you remember when Nick and I stayed with friends of his in LA for a couple of nights at the start of March?”
“Sure.”
“We walked up Mount Lee while we were there, to the back of the Hollywood sign, but also up to the radio tower. There’s a way to walk up from Griffith Park that’s really pretty and not too hot. It was great, but then it got a little weird. At the radio tower he got super serious about taking photos, but he didn’t want it to be ‘all him on their surveillance cameras.’”
“His words?”
“Yes.”
“So you took photos?”
“I did, but lots of people take photos there. Where it got weirder was when he wanted to walk down the other side even though our car was parked near Griffith Park. Walking down he said we were on a scouting mission looking for security vehicles. I guess they go up and down to the tower from that side, though we didn’t see any. Nick also said the tower handles all radio traffic for LAPD. True?”
“Yes.” I paused a moment. “So what do you think now?”
“I didn’t know whether he was serious or not.”
“Is that true?”
She didn’t answer for several seconds, then said, “It’s not true. I knew he was serious, I just didn’t take him seriously.”
“Have you been around other talk like this?”
She was quiet again before saying, “I always leave the room.”
“But with the bombings you’re wondering?”
“Sure, I’m wondering about a lot of things and I’m angry. I’m really friggin’ angry, but the good news is Erica Roberts called today. She said since I wasn’t the drive
r and the bullets are an FBI investigation to go ahead and move but make sure I let Detective Allred know what address I’m at and how to reach me.”
“Good, I’m glad.”
“Got to get going, UG. Talk soon. Bye.”
I spent the next hour with the website the Bureau built to map the electrical grid and cell communication tower attacks in the US. It had been around less than a week but was already useful at tracking where, when, and method of attack. It gave us an overview and updated daily.
With the map we could see the cell-tower sniper with the one-two shot patterns had moved east to west. We had photos, videos, investigative notes, and interviews, but to see his movements on one screen made it easier to look at his patterns.
The most recent tower he’d attacked was a critical linking tower. Cell towers are like bubbles touching each other. Interrupt that in the right location where there’s no real redundancy and you create a gap. Our sniper was working through open country, rural areas where the county might be as big as an eastern state but the population less than a quarter million. He was systematically creating cell-network gaps.
We’d speculated the unpopulated areas were practice ahead of attacking cellular infrastructure in cities where millions would lose communication, but maybe that was wrong thinking.
His attacks shadowed electrical transmission pathways. Did his pattern have something to do with those? Astronauts can see those pathways from space. They cut through forests and over mountains. The National Academy of Engineering once termed the US electrical grid “the world’s largest integrated machine.” That’s still apt.
But there are really three grids. Some say four. In the west, dams generating hydroelectric power and long electrical transmission pathways to transfer it are the backbone of the grid. Could it be that decimating telecom communication near electrical transmission pathways was a way to soften them as targets?
I floated that idea late morning with Jace, Hofter, Fuentes, and Mara. Fuentes sat across from me in the conference room as we did the call. He was probably a decade younger than me, black haired, brown eyed, with an expressive face. They all deferred to him around here.
I watched Hofter nod as Fuentes said, “Millions of people in the LA area are dealing with rolling blackouts, so why, after wasting a day touring a dead cell tower, are you burning more time today on hypotheticals?”
I didn’t have a quick answer for that, nor did his tone bother me. We needed to think differently. Many were calling for a full rollout of the National Guard and US Army troops to protect the grid. That would happen. It was already happening, and an emergency war-funding bill was working its way through Congress, but the grid is too big to protect. That’s what I learned in my seventeen months on the grid task force. The grid can swallow an army. The only answer is to find the saboteurs.
Find the cells here, then confirm the enemy behind them, and even as they deny any involvement, hit them very, very hard. No calibrated response, no world court, no warning, no talk of sanctions that’ll end up watered down—just take it to them. They wouldn’t have tried if they didn’t think they could get away with it, so in turn we owe them a response they’ll never forget. Dark thoughts, but enough was enough.
10
Allred called early the next morning.
“Courtesy call, Grale.”
“Where are you?” I asked.
“I have a search warrant for your house, and we’re about to knock on the door. Is your niece home?”
“What’s the warrant for?”
“Possible storage of stolen ammunition and information leading us to Nicolas Knowles.”
“That’s an FBI investigation. How did you write yourself into it?”
“I have absolutely no quarrel with you, Grale, and I don’t like going into your home. At issue is whether your niece was manipulated by Knowles, helped him move contraband, and is storing stolen materials that could lead us to him. She might not even know she’s doing it.”
“You’re going into my three-bedroom, one-story ranch house looking for boxes of bullets?”
“I’ve talked with the agents working it. They don’t like the idea, but they acknowledge it’s cleaner than them entering a fellow agent’s house. Anything bullet related I find I turn over to them.”
I could understand that, but I knew he didn’t expect to find bullets. There was no basement or crawl space, just a concrete slab, no attic, and no room in the garage.
“Here’s what I think. You’re still trying to tie Julia to Nick Knowles’ criminal career.”
“No, I’m trying to find him,” Allred said.
“Julia was working in an ice-cream shop when he walked in and introduced himself last September. They went out for eight months. His criminal career predates that by you tell me how many years. You know better than I do. But okay, you’ve wrangled a warrant and you’re going in. Julia should be there.”
“We’ll leave the house the way we found it.”
“This is not right, Detective, and you know it.”
“Get her to talk to me and quit protecting Knowles.”
Julia was working two summer jobs when Nick walked in. He’d lived around the world and told jokes in four languages. He was handsome and funny. He came back the next day and asked her out. It was storybook stuff unless you looked at him as a credit-card scam artist using yet another false name as he dodged fraud investigators and preyed on younger women.
I stewed on it, then flew home that night. Mara wanted a follow-up meeting on some of the cases I’d handed off before starting the TDY in LA. We could do it over the phone, but he wanted to meet in person early tomorrow.
When I got home, the house was locked up and quiet. Julia probably heard me moving around but was in her room. I sat outside on the back patio in the cool of the night under the stars and unwound next to the lap pool. I slowly drank a beer and thought of Carrie, my wife, dead, gone for more than a dozen years, and how different life was before. There are times when I wake and forget she’s gone, as if part of me has never accepted it. I listen for her bare feet on the tile in the kitchen, thinking she’d gotten up to get a glass of water or walked outside into starlight.
Something in me died with her. It was the end of that and the start of something different. True loss changes you, but I know more and I’m more accepting, and life is even more precious.
My thoughts turned back to Julia. The east-coast insurance fraud investigator who’d identified Nick Suthers as Nicolas Knowles had connected Knowles to thousands of false credit-card applications and a hack into the Visa system, which Visa preferred to absorb rather than see publicized. That was the fraud investigator’s opinion; it was nothing Visa had confirmed.
I got that yesterday from the agents working the Colorado ammunition-truck hijacking. The fraud investigator called Knowles “highly skilled, a top hacker with conceptual vision,” whatever that is. “Knowles manipulated credit-card software and generated thousands of cash advances made to bogus cards that went undetected for six weeks.” The fraud investigator gushed at his ability to avoid detection.
And then there was something much darker. Knowles was the only child of two career US State Department employees who’d spent their adult lives abroad. They sent him to college, then retired to Malawi. In Malawi someone nailed the doors of their house shut and torched it with them inside. Locals saw a young white man, but a twenty-two-year-old black man who’d done previous jail time for theft was arrested and later released. A police request made to US law enforcement to interview the son of the murdered couple had gone nowhere. That request was still made yearly.
At dawn the next morning I made coffee, then heard rustling in the front room and walked out to Julia sitting on the couch with a blanket wrapped around her and her legs drawn up. The blanket was over her head, hiding most of her face as if she wished to disappear.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hi, UG.”
“How are you?”
“I
’m okay. I’m not really okay, but I’m figuring it out.”
“I’m making coffee. Do you want any?” I asked.
“Sure, I’ll come to the kitchen in a minute.”
“Stay there. I’ll bring you coffee and let’s talk. Did you sleep?”
“Not really, I keep thinking about everything.”
“Do you want milk?”
“I do, but I’ll get up,” she said.
She came into the kitchen, and we walked back with our coffees and sat across from each other, Julia on the couch again. The sun was still behind the mountains, but through the windows I saw the red-orange burn of dawn.
“Anything more changed since we last talked?” I asked.
“You mean with the bullets?”
“Yes.”
“Detective Allred says he has a witness who saw me help carry the ammo box with Nick to my car. Supposedly that person also saw me tape the box shut in the garage of the house. They said I was wearing plastic gloves. Why would anyone lie like that?”
“If they’re friends of Nick and he asked them to they might. It could just as easily be a mistake, and they saw a different woman wearing gloves helping carry the box. Didn’t you say you were with the same people the whole time you were at the party?”
“Not the whole time. I went to look for Nick.”
“Did you look in the garage?” I asked.
“I looked everywhere and couldn’t find him.”
“When you looked in the garage was anyone there?”
“No.”
“Who might have seen you look in the garage?”
“I don’t know. There were a lot of people at the party, the kitchen was crowded, I was angry Nick disappeared, and I had a couple of drinks in me. I worked my way through to a door off the kitchen into the garage. I didn’t move any boxes at the party. I didn’t even notice it when we drove away. It was dark. Why is this happening?”
“It’s not all just happening to you, though you make it sound like it is.”
