“I never told you why I left.”
Aloa suddenly felt like she needed air. If they started talking about his leaving, there was no guarantee it wouldn’t lead to what had been between them . . . and the aftermath of that. What happened was her secret.
“It doesn’t matter. It’s the past; let it lie,” she said.
Michael opened his mouth, but she lifted a hand.
“How about if we keep this professional? Just tell me why you wanted to see me.”
“All right. If you want. Let’s get to it,” he said, and came over to the couch. He cleared his throat and checked his phone. “We’ve got a few minutes,” he said, and lowered himself onto the cushions.
She could feel the heat coming off him. “A few minutes before what?”
“I’ve got a friend. He’s going to leave his access open for a few minutes while IT does its weekly backup. He told me what to look for.”
“And who’s this friend?”
“It’s better you don’t know.”
“I’m not doing anything illegal. I’ve already had my professional ass kicked once and I’m not wild about having it kicked again.”
“That’s why I’m going to do it,” he said. “Your fingerprints won’t be anywhere near this thing.”
“Michael,” she said, and started to rise. “You know why I can’t do this.”
“Wait.”
He touched her arm and she pulled away.
“Listen, Aloa, I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t think we needed to. My friend called it a ‘smoking gun,’ some kind of report the government wants buried.”
“Why can’t we just file a FOIA?”
“I’m not sure you could get what we’re going to see. If we need to, we can go back and do FOIAs to back up what we already know, maybe get someone to comment on the record.” He turned to her. “I think the boyfriend, Ethan, might have been mixed up in something.”
Once, when Aloa was eight, her father had caught her on the upstairs extension listening while her mother complained to one of her friends. “I don’t know what I did to get such an ugly thing for a daughter,” her mother had said. “Lord knows I’ve tried, but when God hands you a turd, you can polish it all you want and it’s still a turd, if you know what I mean.”
Her father had gently hung up the phone, wiped Aloa’s tears, and told her that curiosity was a fire for some people, but that they needed to be careful not to get burned. He’d been right, of course. Aloa’s intense curiosity had made her good at her job but had also gotten her into more than a few scrapes.
Slowly, she sat back down.
Michael picked up a tablet from the table and tapped a few instructions into it. A television screen above the fireplace came to life. “OK. So here’s a map of Africa, and there’s Chad smack in the middle of it. It’s a pretty rough place. Infrastructure is bad, water is scarce, the average age at death is forty-nine. They’ve got oil but not much else, and there’s a lot of disputes over that.” He was businesslike now.
“They’ve also got political trouble all around them,” he continued. “Sudan, Nigeria, Libya, Mali. But one of the things Chadians are good at is fighting. Back in the eighties, their army took on Muammar Gaddafi with pickup trucks and machine guns. Beat his ass. Some historians call it ‘The Toyota War.’” Another tap of the tablet screen. “Now, there’s this: the Chadian army’s Special Anti-Terrorism Group. It’s called SATG. The US gives it money to help secure their borders, catch terrorists and prosecute them, spy.”
“And that’s what this document is about?” Aloa leaned toward the screen.
“I think so. When I started digging around for the background you said you wanted on Hayley’s boyfriend, I came up with an obscure reference to SATG and the Tibesti Mountains. It rang a bell so I got in touch with a friend who owes me a favor from a long time ago.”
“Homeland Security? CIA? State?” Aloa asked.
“Better not to know.”
“But if I need to know later?”
“We’ll figure something out.”
Michael swiped his finger across the tablet. A map, this time of Chad, appeared with a dotted black line running jaggedly through it. “That’s part of the path Ethan took. It’s an old trading route, developed by Idris Alawma in the 1500s. He was a devout Muslim, a smart ruler, and a brutal war commander. Some people call him the godfather of the scorched-earth policy.” Another image rose, that of a rugged mountain range lifting from a desolate landscape. “And that’s the Tibesti. There’s talk of terrorists being trained there. From what I can tell, Ethan and his partner went straight into a region where certain cells are suspected of operating.”
“You’re not telling me Ethan was CIA or something, are you?” Aloa remembered stories of the agency trying to recruit aid workers as covert operatives, of spies posing as journalists.
“I don’t know,” Michael said. “I do know there was some activity in that area around this guy, Amine Mokrani, at about that same time.” Michael flashed an image on the screen of a man in fatigues with a black headscarf. The man was bearded with a narrow face and gray eyes. “He ran a terrorist faction. An extreme group of Wahhabi Muslims who called themselves The Bloody Hand Brigade. They attacked a couple of hotels, killed an aid worker, then started kidnapping Westerners for ransom. His group was thought to have a training camp in Mali and then in Chad. There’s another group in play, too, one that’s even worse. They’ve named themselves the Holy Army. Besides blowing up a couple of gas plants and slaughtering a convoy of UN observers, they’ve kidnapped and sold girls as young as ten as sex slaves. They’ve cut out women’s tongues if they weren’t submissive enough, put out their wives’ eyes if they caught them even glancing at another man.”
Aloa shook her head at the barbarism.
“They’ve called for holy revenge against anything Western.”
“You’re talking about Ethan being killed by terrorists?” Aloa asked.
“I don’t know. My friend said the document we’re going to see is very interesting. Something that either fell through the cracks or was deliberately hidden.”
The old reporter who had taught her about knock-and-talks also told her that if something smelled fishy, you’d better look around for sharks. Why had Ethan decided to climb in a place haunted by terrorists? Had no one bothered to warn him about that? Or was that the reason he’d gone?
Michael glanced at his phone. “Time to see what we’ve got.”
“So he lied,” Aloa said, leaning back in the webbed chair in Michael’s office. On the wall behind her were photos of turquoise waves, a misty jungle, a Japanese shrine. In front of them was a long cherrywood table that held a quartet of computer screens.
Michael swiveled his chair toward her and steepled his fingers under his chin. “Tell me.”
Aloa recounted the story Combs had reported: How robbers had sliced the throats of Ethan and the Teda guide as T.J. Brasselet watched in horror. Then, how T.J. said he had managed to make his way through the desert to safety. But the document they’d seen, which appeared to be a report from two SATG operatives, told a different story.
Combs would freak out when he discovered he’d fallen for a lie, Aloa thought.
The spies detailed how they’d stumbled on two bodies while checking out a report of suspicious activity in the area and began following the tracks of two camels and three men.
By 1:00 a.m., they’d located the three men at a makeshift camp. Two were in headdresses and combat gear while the third appeared to be a foreign male with his hands bound. The spies believed they’d come across kidnappers working with either the Holy Army or The Bloody Hand Brigade. They’d hoped the men would lead them to a camp belonging to one of the groups, but a hyena pack arrived and spooked the camels, which sent the kidnappers scrambling after the escaping animals. Their captive ran, and the operatives decided it was more important to discover a terrorist camp than save one guy and went after the men in headdresses. The report never said wh
ether the suspected kidnappers were arrested or whether a terrorist lair had been discovered, but the bodies of the two men were later identified as Ethan Rodriguez, thirty, of California, and Atahir Hassan Bello, age approximately thirty-four, a native of Chad, which meant the kidnapped foreigner had to be T.J.
Aloa tapped her pen against her teeth. “The big question is why the government never said anything about an American being killed by suspected terrorists.”
“Probably because they don’t want us to know the extent of our involvement in the area,” Michael said. “Boots on the ground but not really on the ground, if you know what I mean.”
Aloa nodded, remembering covert operations the US government had undertaken: Iran-Contra, Operation Fast and Furious. Playing dangerous games without rules. She knew there were scores of these secret actions that had never come to light.
“And the second question is, why would T.J. lie to Combs for the article? Why didn’t he say he was kidnapped?”
“The government has ways of persuading people to keep quiet: threats by the IRS, plant a pound of cocaine, and, boom, it’s jail time.”
Aloa knew the Beltway had a way of turning regular people into power-hungry hucksters. “OK, here’s another thing. If those guys were really terrorist kidnappers, why would they kill Ethan? Wouldn’t they get more ransom for two people than for one?”
“Maybe Ethan fought back or something.”
“I guess that’s possible. Right now, I don’t know what’s the truth and what isn’t.”
“I’m sure you’ll figure it out.” He smiled. “You’ve got what others don’t.”
“A star on journalism’s walk of shame?”
He shook his head. “You’ve got tenacity, Aloa. I saw it the minute I met you.”
“We’ll see about that. Right now, I should be going.” She pushed herself out of the chair.
“Stay for coffee? We could catch up.”
“It’s late,” Aloa said, although it wasn’t.
“Maybe another time?”
“Sure,” she said, despite the fact she had no intention of ever coming back. “I’ll show myself out.”
“Vincent will meet you at the end of the hall. He’ll get you home safely,” he said.
CHAPTER 19
Gray tendrils of fog fled past the towers of the Bay Bridge as Aloa jogged toward the Embarcadero. The day was going to be warm. She’d slept surprisingly well the night before, but then, her insomnia had always been a trickster, striking without reason or pattern as if daring her to figure out how to stop it.
She breathed in the salt air, lengthening her stride down the nearly empty sidewalk. She thought of the questions that swirled around this case, of Michael and what had happened between them a long time ago. A mourning dove moaned its song from a window ledge above her.
Early on, her father had taught her the difference between birdsong and call. Calls were the exclamations of life: Hey! Hawk! But songs were the stuff of sex and territory. Birds sang for courtship, for attraction. They sang to mark real estate: I am here.
It was what all living things had in common, her father had said: the need to affirm their presence in the world. It was what Aloa had lost, what her mistake had stolen from her. She picked up her pace, straightening her back, pumping her arms, trying to erase the list of her regrets. This was no time for a pity-fest.
At the waterfront, she turned toward Cupid’s Span, the giant bow-and-arrow sculpture that evoked the god Eros who ruled this city, interspersing her sprints with breath-returning jogs. The HardE app on her phone recorded her workout. By the time she climbed the steps back to her house, she was drenched in sweat and her legs quivered. “Eight hundred calories! Keep moving!” the app proclaimed.
“Screw you,” she said.
She took a long shower, soaping herself from head to toe and letting the hot water pound her skin. She toweled off, catching a glimpse of herself in the mirror: small breasts, long legs, a slight washboard of ribs under her skin. She turned away and dressed quickly.
A shaft of sun fell from the kitchen skylight, leaving a rectangle of brightness against the dark wood floor. Aloa made her coffee and ate a toasted bagel standing at the counter. Her laptop was live-streaming NPR’s Here & Now. Exactly where I need to be, she thought.
She wiped the counters, swept the floor, stowed the French press and the coffee grinder, and went to her desk to work.
She looked through her notebook, found the info she needed, and phoned the lender that held the papers on Hayley’s truck.
“It’s perfectly legal. She knew what it meant,” said the man in answer to Aloa’s request for confirmation that he’d installed a Dauntless M750, serial number 04756GA, in Hayley’s truck.
“How about if you tell me what it meant,” Aloa said. “It’s not exactly a feature, like leather seats or cruise control, is it?”
“It meant if she missed a payment, I could shut down her vehicle until she paid me. I got the right to make a living.”
“Would you know if she took the device out of her truck?”
“Sure I would. I’d get a signal telling me the thing was off-line. I always tell people not to try it ’cause if they do, I send the tow truck. Boom, the car is gone.”
Which meant that since Hayley still had her truck, she’d either asked Calvin to remove the device and rabbited before the lender could repossess her vehicle or that the nasty little piece of technology had still been in her vehicle when she died.
Aloa doodled little squares in her notebook as she thought. “Was the starter interrupter still tracking on July 16?” she asked.
“What?”
“I said, was the device still tracking on the day Hayley Poole died? July 16.”
A pause.
“That’s confidential information.”
“Let me ask this then: Did you trigger the device on July 16?”
“Like I said, that’s confidential.”
“You know I could file a complaint with Consumer Affairs, don’t you? You’d have to disclose the information,” she said.
“Be my guest,” the man said. “And give me a call in five or six months when they finally get around to what you want.”
Aloa knew the guy was right. Like most watchdog groups, the agency was overburdened and understaffed.
“It will look worse if you don’t answer my question. Like you have something to hide,” she said.
“And here’s my answer to that,” the man said. He hung up.
Aloa flipped her pen onto the table and ran a hand through her hair. At times like these, she wished she were a cop with real threats to issue and the power to back them up. Even though she’d confirmed the Dauntless device had been installed in Hayley’s truck, she was still no closer to answering the question of why Calvin had had it in his shop. Or why he had wanted her to have it.
Aloa waited for her frustration to cool and then dialed an old source in the State Department. A burst of staticky buzz made her hold her cell phone away from her ear. Was her phone dying now? Of course it was. If there was one thing you could count on, it was that technology was about as hardy as a head of lettuce when it came to shelf life and that your equipment would die at the worst possible time.
She was saved from considering the prospect of shelling out cash for a new phone, which then required the purchase of a charger, a protective case, and a doomsday lecture from a sales clerk on the need for insurance because, who knew, you could drop your expensive new phone into a puddle the minute you walked out the door, when her source, a data-recovery expert named Steve Porter, came on the line.
“How’s it hanging, girl?” he bellowed.
“It’s hanging, Steve,” Aloa said.
A forty-year-old desk jockey with a degree from Harvard, Porter always sounded like he believed himself to be a twenty-year-old street tough. He’d been devoted to Aloa ever since she’d written a story that helped exonerate him from accusations he’d cyberstalked a woman who was later foun
d murdered. It turned out Porter’s identity had been stolen, a case of a savant being so sure of his security skills he’d forgotten to lock his own back door. The real perpetrator had used Porter’s identity to lure the woman into a false relationship that ended with her money gone and a bullet in her brain.
Aloa told Steve she was looking into the death of an American who’d possibly been killed by terrorists in Africa.
“That’s some serious shit, man,” Steve said.
“I know.”
“I gotta tell ya, I just ain’t comfortable in front of that particular eight ball,” he said.
Aloa knew better than to push and lose a source forever. “What can you give me, then?”
A run of computer keys. “I could give you his tax info for the last five years, travel records, his birth and death certificates.”
“I’ll take all those. Thanks.”
“You stay cool now,” Porter said.
Aloa promised she would.
The tax records and travel records revealed nothing unusual for a guy in Ethan’s line of work, but the death certificate made her hesitate. From her time covering murder trials, she knew the law required a doctor’s presence or some kind of concrete evidence, like a photo, in order to make a finding about a cause of death. But Ethan’s body had never been recovered, so how had the medical examiner concluded that an incised wound to the neck was what had killed the climber?
She copied down the medical examiner’s name from the certificate, found he lived near the Canadian border in Maine, and gave him a call. No strange noises this time. Maybe her phone would be all right after all.
The doctor was just readying himself for his postlunch walk but said he would help Aloa when she told him she was researching the death of a climber named Ethan Rodriguez as part of a story for Novo.
“Ah yes,” he said, his voice a melodious blend of countries she didn’t recognize. “I have enjoyed that website very much. Just a moment,” he said, and Aloa listened as he clumped into another room and awakened his computer. There was a rustle of papers, the opening of desk drawers. “Just a moment. I need my glasses.”
See Her Run Page 10
