“Dude, sometimes I wonder how you got this far. They’re not against you. They’re trying to figure out what happened with those bombings, and they don’t know who you are yet. Park your bike in the barn and come on in. I’ll be in the kitchen.”
He rode the bike to the barn and rolled it in. The smell of horse urine lingered, but the horses were long gone, the barn floor dry as sand. Two fluorescent lights hung from roof trusses and looked new, so maybe she was going to stay for a while. This ranch used to be in her mother’s family and they had once talked about living here after they were married.
In the kitchen, he looked at her and wondered how he’d screwed up so bad that he lost her. She reached across the table and took his hand as they talked about the Kerns getting killed. Laura cried and they ate and talked and took a walk before he left. Laura believed in him, or maybe he just needed to believe that. Either way, on the ride back to Nevada and the airfield, Beatty felt calmer. It wasn’t until later when he checked news stories online that the feeling went away. When it did, it went a long way away and he came down hard.
16
July 6th, early afternoon
At 12:01 p.m. Vegas time, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula uploaded a video to their website with an English speaker talking about a corrupt American army officer at Kandahar Airfield in Afghanistan who had sold them the C-4 they’d used to strike against the devil. They outed an army warrant officer named Lansing Guthrie. The spokesman ranted about how easy it was to bribe an American soldier, as if that proved the West was corrupt—this from a culture where bribes were the norm. The rest of it was the usual crap, but I listened to all of it.
In an early afternoon briefing, we learned details of the sale of C-4 to the Haqqani network. The CIA had obtained the information about this and the secondary sale to AQAP from its sources. No real details were divulged of how they tracked it from that point. They never informed the army, but via a separate theft the army picked up on Guthrie and a second warrant officer, as yet unnamed, who was now cooperating.
There was additional information uploaded to the JTTF site on how the C-4 crossed into the United States. According to a still heavily redacted report, it came in a routine shipment of household-cleaning products from the manufacturing plant of a well-known US corporation. At the border an intentional spill of chemicals in the cargo area blunted border dogs’ ability to detect explosives. Many salient details were missing, including how the C-4 left a Phoenix warehouse without being detected. I reread this information and was still skeptical about the Phoenix disappearing act. I leaned back in my chair mulling that over.
“Get what you wanted from the briefings?” Venuti asked me.
“Not really.”
“Talk to me.”
“How did the C-4 leave the Phoenix warehouse if the warehouse was under constant surveillance?”
“A mistake got made somewhere. That happens. What else?”
“How do we know they weren’t watching boxes of detergent, and the C-4 crossed the border a different way?”
“How do we know anything? How do we know the earth is round? We know because a CIA team tracked it from Afghanistan to Phoenix. Why do you do this? Why can’t you take things at face value?”
“How did they confirm the poundage of what was actually delivered? Did they just assume that what was stolen got delivered?”
“Okay, that’s a good question.” Venuti wrote a note to himself and said, “There’s another shorter briefing this afternoon. I’ll find out what I can. What else?”
“Beatty. How did the interview with him go?”
“He answered all questions. He was alternately combative and contrite. People who know about these things say he exhibited paranoid tendencies.”
“But he answered all questions?”
“Yes, and you can watch the tape and draw your own conclusions.”
“We owe him a public response if we’re satisfied he had no direct involvement in the bombings.”
“He’s still under investigation, and we have follow-up questions he’s evading.”
“But so far, nothing ties him to the bombings other than the imagination of the DOD investigators.”
Venuti lifted a hand to stop me.
“I don’t want to sound condescending, especially with what you’re going through, but I doubt you can keep an open mind about Beatty’s motives.” He tapped his desk. “And he’s not your problem to solve. Just let him go for now, Paul. I mean that.”
“Are we leaving him dangling because we don’t have anything else? We’re going to let the media feed on him to buy us time to come up with better leads? Is that the plan?”