by Kirk Russell
Only then did I realize it would be the passenger door not the driver’s door that needed to be wide open to examine the ammunition box. From the driver’s seat I leaned across the box to check the storage slot on the passenger door.
Nothing but a package of tissues. I pulled that out then felt something hard nestled in the Kleenex. It could be a coin that had somehow slipped in. Maybe a quarter, but no, it was too thick. More like a small round battery. I eased it out and was looking at a round stainless steel object similar to but not a battery.
I stared. I remembered the Bomb Data Center e-mail: “A cell phone will not detonate these.”
I took a breath, then a photo, and sent the photo and a message marked high priority to Mara and the Bomb Data Center. A confident FBI tech on the other side of the country identified the detonator type. By then I’d backed away and was with Jace, and we weren’t there when the Yukon was blown up. The Sacramento FBI bomb squad debated opening the ammo box, then took the more cautious course and blew up the vehicle with C-4.
A rancher outside Roseville heard an alert on the radio. He knew helicopters. He’d flown them. A Bell 505 Jet Ranger had passed over his fields and crossed the highway no more than two hundred feet off the deck. He matched five of the numbers given in the radio alert.
“It’s black,” the rancher told me. “There were two occupants. I may have seen where it landed.”
“We’re on our way,” I said. “We’ll be there soon. Tell me where you are.”
He did, and I laid my phone down. Neither Jace nor I said anything for several minutes then Jace summed it up.
“We had him and we fucked up.”
33
Northeast of Roseville, May 3rd
May was the anniversary month of Jace’s fiancé’s accident, so maybe that was why she started talking about it. But not before asking me more than she ever had about my bomb injuries and the months healing in a Frankfurt hospital.
“Yet you still work bombings,” she said. “You got in that Yukon and held the detonator in your hand. After what you’ve been through I have to ask why.”
“Back then, the Army was just looking for help clearing Bagdad of IEDs. It meant more after I got hurt, and more again when my sister, brother-in-law, and nephew died in the Alagara bombing. Bombings affect me. The cowardice and indiscriminate cruelty may not be any worse than other ways of killings, but I’ve figured out I don’t want to be a witness to a bombing. I want to be the guy that stops it from happening.”
“I get that,” she said and was quiet for a while, then said, “This is the day of the accident. In my head, today is the day Gene died. We both had bikes. I had an old BMW. He had a Harley. He liked to cruise along, and sometimes I just wanted to roll harder. Gene was more peaceful than me. In many ways he was gentler.”
Her voice broke then steadied, not unlike a suspect resolved to confess.
“He was catching up to me when he got hit. He was happily going along looking at the country, but I’d speeded up and pulled ahead. It was how we always rode, except that day we’d argued. It was a stupid argument, and we would have laughed about it later, but we never got the chance. I speeded up because I was angry. I didn’t want to ride near him, and Gene being Gene was already over the fight. He was catching up to let me know that.”
“You’re not the one who was texting, drifted over the line, and hit him.”
“It wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t pulled ahead. I’ll never get over that.”
“Maybe not, but it’s in your voice that you loved him. You didn’t get him killed, Jace. A driver texting crossed the line and hit him. You didn’t cause that,” I said.
“I speeded up because I was angry.”
“We all get angry.”
“I know we’re flawed and all that, but it shouldn’t have happened.”
“But it did and you loved him. Maybe it’s time to forgive yourself.”
“If we hadn’t argued . . . or if I’d had a chance to say I was sorry.”
“You loved him. He loved you.”
Tears ran down her cheeks. “I loved him so much.”
“That will always be, but you’ve got to move on,” I said.
“I don’t know how to.”
“You got shot once and had trouble with your right arm, didn’t you?”
“How does everybody know about that?” she asked.
“I don’t remember who told me, but like me, you had to fight to get back to active duty.”
“It hurt. That’s all. It doesn’t compare.”
“But it could have gone either way, right? I was told there was a lot of pain involved,” I said.
“There was pain.”
“And every day you worked through it. You made yourself do it. I think it’s a little like that.”
She didn’t answer, so maybe she’d just suffered more advice from yet another person who doesn’t really know. But I lost my wife. I do know some things. She turned back to the view. Twenty minutes later we were standing with a rancher named Ned Geist on a dirt road running through pasture. He pointed toward the mountains.
“See that V notch there?” he asked.
“Give us a little more,” I said. “I see five or six V notches.”
“With the black rock face on the left.”
“Okay, I see that.”
“There’s a road that runs out there, but you have to know where to turn off to catch it. Nothing is marked. That’s where I think he may have landed. There’s a flat area big enough. I saw a copter come down fast like he knew where he was going.”
“How far is that from here?” I asked.
“Three and a half, maybe four miles out. I could take you there.”
I glanced at Jace and then said, “Take us, but we’ll drive.”
Geist was in his late sixties, maybe older. He was big, lanky in worn jeans and boots, with a sweat-stained hat lodged on his left knee as he sat in the back seat giving directions and talking about the long years of drought and the forgiving year of heavy rain.
We turned down a dirt track where the weeds were already high in the middle hump. It’s unlikely Jace and I would have found it on our own. It ended near a small meadow bordered by oaks. Before we parked, Jace was on her phone calling for backup. We could see the helicopter and someone sitting in the trees near it.
As Jace made calls to say we’d found the helicopter, the man stood and started toward us, raising his right palm to say hello as if expecting us. We walked to the helicopter. I could read the call numbers and smelled fuel. Then I saw other damage.
“Your helicopter?” I asked him.
“Yeah.”
“Where’s your passenger?”
“Gone with the guy who was waiting here. Who are you?”
“FBI,” I said, then showed him my creds.
“The guy waiting here threatened to find me later if I talked to you,” he said.
“I’d worry more about us than him if I were you.”
“Look, I’m just an air taxi. You can check me out. I’m not flying drugs. I don’t do illegal. You can check me out.”
“Start with your passenger, how you met him, how he hired you, and a very clean description of him and the other man. What name did he use?”
“Jacob, and he paid cash.”
That Corti hadn’t used an alias disturbed me in some way. To rent the American River cottage he was Eric Wright. I saw Jace react as well. It could mean he was moving into a different space with new goals, possibly an endgame where he was going to stand and fight us. I’ve seen it before.
“I’ll do whatever you need, just don’t trash my business because I carried the wrong client. I don’t know diddly about who he was.”
“Tell us how you got the job.”
“It was all short notice and cash. I don’t usually take those. Check out my copter. They trashed it.”
“Did you get paid?”
He shook his head. We were there until dark. A hound pick
ed up Corti’s scent and followed it to close to where we’d parked. We found tire tracks but not deep enough to cast. We received some varying tip calls, but no real leads. The helicopter pilot identified Corti’s photo, but the pilot knew we’d seen him pick up Corti. He was squirrely on the other description to the point where Jace challenged him and said, “That’s who hired you, right? The other guy, not Corti.”
We were much closer to the Sacramento office but took him to San Francisco, where Jace’s domestic terrorism supervisor was waiting for us. Before the pilot passed through the scanner, he had to empty his pockets. In his wallet was a thick wad of cash with a rubber band around it. I called him on it.
“You told us you didn’t get paid.”
His forehead broke into a sweat and his story changed, though not enough to get us any closer today. Tracking Corti and losing him took me away from worrying about Julia but that all flooded back in the late night. There was no word from her, and the Verizon recording said, “The caller you’re trying to reach is out of the area.”
I checked into a hotel and talked a long time with Jo.
“You sound down,” Jo said.
“We missed a chance with a suspect today and I’m worried about Julia. I’m going to go find her.”
“Are you worried about her or worried she’s getting in deeper?”
“Both. How about you? How are you doing with the outages?”
“I’ll call Julia,” she said. “Here they keep tinkering with the hospital backup power. One of the diesel generators has a problem, and a charge nurse here was badly hurt in a car accident where the stoplight was out. There’s no fresh food in the stores. I don’t like coming home to no lights. It’s wearing. I’m more and more on edge, but I guess that’s the story with everyone. Have you watched any news tonight?”
“No.”
“Lights are out in Miami and New York again. They’re flickering in DC. Check out the National Mall. They say LA is barely sustaining rolling blackouts.”
“I know about LA.”
“And Palo Verde is getting scarier. The cooling towers are heating up again. How can this be happening so quickly? I feel like somebody was asleep at the wheel. I thought we were the ones with all the cyberprowess.”
Neither of us said anything for a moment, then Jo asked, “Do you know what would make the dark much better?”
“What?” I asked.
“Holding you.”
“And me you. I’ll look forward to that. See you soon.”
But I didn’t know when that would be. In dreams that night I heard sounds from other places in other centuries. I heard the creaking of wood and the singeing burn of lines pulled taut as the canvas sails of a ghost ship filled with air. I called to my sister, Melissa, as I followed her down into a cave filled with thousands of bats with human faces. They watched me descend along slick limestone onto rocks grown over with mold. When I turned back, the limestone was too slippery to climb. I heard the chirr of wings and felt a stinging bite and another and another and woke drenched in sweat.
34
Near dawn, Samantha Clark called and said, “You wrote your cell number on the card you gave me. I hope it’s not too early.”
“What’s up, Sam?”
“Julia freaked out two nights ago. I just want to make sure someone told you. She cooked her phone and laptop in the fire pit in the backyard of the house, then told her roommates there were bugs in them that she had to kill. They didn’t know if she meant computer bugs or bugs from the garden. Her face was shiny with sweat and her eyes crazy when she left.”
“Were you there?”
“No, they called me. They know I know you and you’ve helped me with the Signal Hill thing,” she said.
“How have I helped you?” I asked.
“Your advice was good.”
“I don’t remember giving any. Where’s Julia?”
“They don’t know. They thought she was high on something. Does she have addiction problems? Or maybe you don’t know. Does she take any prescription drugs?”
“Who called you?” I asked.
“Her friend from Las Vegas, the mousy girl who wants to be famous. I always forget her name. That’s embarrassing, but not, you know what I mean? Dora, Dorothy, something like that, but it doesn’t matter. I was at the house twenty minutes ago. I just left there. Mousy found her. She heard sounds outside and went to check. Julia was holding herself and rocking back and forth. They think she snapped.”
She paused. She waited. She wanted a reaction, but I wasn’t going to give her one. I’d be back to LA later this morning. I’d change my flight to Long Beach and go by the house. I didn’t have any of the phone numbers of her roommates, but I might catch someone there. I’d lean hard on Mara and Fuentes for names and phone numbers. I was out of the loop but had learned enough to believe those in the house had become persons of interest.
“What can I do to help?” she asked.
“Give me phone numbers you have for the roommates.”
“I’ll do that, but I’ve got a question for you first, and kind of a problem. I’ve been getting calls from an FBI agent out of your Los Angeles office. He wants to interview me, but he’s not saying about what. I told him I’m not going to be reinterviewed about the shootings. I mean, no more. I’m done. So what’s he calling me about?”
“If it was something new on the officer shootings,” I said, “it would be the LA County Sheriff’s Department calling.”
But she knew that.
“Let’s do this,” she said. “I’ll try to find Julia, and you find out what’s up with the FBI and call me. I realize I’ll have to get interviewed, but I want to know what it’s about first. Tell whoever it is if they just show up and arrest me they won’t get a word out of me.”
“Why would they arrest you?”
“You tell me. I have no idea. I like Julia. A lot. I’ll help find her. I hate to think of her crying herself to sleep in her car out on some empty road just because her ex-boyfriend thinks she’s a slut.”
“Do you mean Nicolas Knowles, the guy with a fugitive warrant out on him?” I asked. “Or maybe you know him by a different name.”
“There we go. That’s more like it. I knew you had your doubts. I knew you had it in you. Talk to you later, Agent Grale.”
I flew into Long Beach and caught the roommate, Dora, at the house. Her version of what happened was similar to Clark’s. Then, without me asking or saying anything about it, she brought up the video Knowles had posted.
“It’s no big deal,” she said. “No one is going to watch it. It’s grainy and dark and you can’t tell it’s Julia. She should watch it. She’d feel better. I’m moving out of here. It’s gotten strange. I’m sorry I got Julia into this, really sorry.” She touched a grocery bag on a kitchen counter that was folded shut. “Her laptop and phone are in here. Do you want to take them?”
“Yes.”
I looked at the fire pit and in her room. Her bed was unmade. Her mother’s silver talisman that Julia never went anywhere without lay on the small table. Dora watched me slide it into my palm.
In the LA field office, Fuentes was waiting.
“Mara is on his way. He’ll be here in half an hour. We’re going to meet with you about your niece, so stay in the office and stay available. If she’s gone somewhere it’s in her interest to return here. But we’ll get to that when your supervisor arrives.”
“Has something happened I don’t know about?” I asked.
“I have to make a call, Grale. Make sure you’re in the bullpen where I can find you. Don’t go anywhere.”
35
Los Angeles FBI Field Office, May 4th
Mara is lean and hawkeyed with black hair cut short. He uses the gym at the field office religiously and has little fat. Some believe he lives on coffee and gingerbread. No one cares about the gingerbread. It’s the coffee that’s a problem.
On the DT squad, domestic terrorism, there’s a code for it. Before lunc
h, there’s five-cup Mara and three-cup Mara, but rarely four-cup. If there’s something you need that is also a budget consideration, you want three-cup Mara. Five-cup never approves spending or any changes to an agreed-upon plan.
The coffee codes are real enough but pale next to the drive of a late-thirties supervisor with the ambition to go up the ladder all the way to headquarters in DC. That’s the real fire in him. He wants to make a difference and leave a mark. That’s a good thing, but a source of tension when things don’t go as planned. I like Mara. I like him personally and like working with him. That said, he shares with other supervisors I’ve known the illusion that because he oversees so many investigations, he knows more. That’s just not how it works.
Put two supervisors together and you get yet another mix. That’s what I had when I walked into the conference room, Mara and Fuentes, the Las Vegas and LA domestic terrorism squad supervisors. I met their confident stares with a hard look and sat down.
“We aren’t going to waste time here,” Mara said. “So let’s just get to it. Here’s what we know, Paul. There’s an offshoot to Witness1 that Samantha Clark is part of. We believe Nick Knowles is as well. There are others, and they may be sheltering him.”
“And you’ve known this how long?”
“We’ll get to that,” Mara said.
“Is this coming from multiple undercover agents?”
“From one,” Fuentes said. “A very good one.”
“Any proof on Knowles’ participation?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“I’d like to see that too.”
“You will,” Fuentes said. “Two of your niece’s current roommates appear to be members of the offshoot.”
“What is this offshoot called?”
“They’ve left it unnamed. Cathy Ruiz and Jill Hogue are the roommates suspected of being part of it. Your niece wrote a check to Jill Hogue for $15,000 recently. Did she say anything to you about that?”
“No. Do you know why she wrote it?”
Fuentes contemplated that a moment, then gestured to Mara to take it from there.
“We’re having this conversation because we believe Julia delivered stolen ammunition from the Colorado hijacking to Samantha Clark in Needles, California, on March 12 of this year,” Mara said. “I’m sorry, Paul, but that’s how it looks.”
