Most agents retired at the higher pay level of a GS-14, and Venuti was right in saying I wouldn’t. It was typical of Dan to get defensive then aggressive if challenged. Yet I needed to know what Jane had told him. Instinctively, I knew it tied with taking me to her condo to find the memory stick. He’d set me up to discover these files.
“Look, if I missed it or dropped the ball, I’m sorry,” Venuti said. “Jane never said what was on the memory stick. That’s where you’re going with this, right?”
“Yes, and she must have said something.”
“If she did, it wasn’t definitive, but I’ll try to remember. The reason I’m here, though, is that ISIS has posted a new video. Bring it up on your screen. Let’s have a look.”
The video started with an American ISIS spokesman. Venuti said softly, “This kid is from Minneapolis. Disappeared a year and a half ago. He’s barely nineteen.”
The young recruit said, “Unbelievers, who shower us with bombs and kill our innocents, be fearful. Prepare to lose many more of your own. We are only beginning. We will strike again soon in your desert city.”
“It’s time we take out all of these people,” Venuti said. “They couldn’t invent a pair of pliers on their own. They use our technology to proselytize and attack us. How about we show them another higher level of technology and take them back to the Stone Age?”
22
Late in the day I watched the reinterview of the plumber who’d worked on the Alagara men’s room urinal and a bar-sink leak on the Fourth of July. Every time he answered a repeat question from the first interview, he sounded annoyed. An agent standing next to me said quietly, “What a prick.” The plumber was hard to like, but a surprise was coming his way. The two agents interviewing him were nearing that point.
“I got there at 10:50 a.m.,” the plumber said. “I was supposed to be there at 11:00, but I always get to a job ten minutes early. That’s just the way I work. I left at 4:20 that afternoon.”
“Are you certain it was 4:20?”
“Same time I gave you last time. You should take notes.”
He was there when the wine refrigerator was swapped out. Video cameras at the bar area filmed that. Total elapsed time for the change-out was seven minutes, thirty-two seconds. Two weeks prior, Omar Smith had requested a new refrigerator be installed in the first few days of July. E-mails between Smith and the sub supplying the new wine refrigerator put the install date at July 3.
That changed. Late afternoon on July 2, the install date got pushed to July 5. The supplier notified the installer and Omar Smith that they wouldn’t have the refrigerator in stock until the morning of the fifth due to a combination of a shipping problem and the holiday. On the same e-mail thread multiple exchanges followed between Smith, the refrigerator supplier, and the installer. Smith pushed the supplier to find another way to get it there and installed on the Fourth, when other repairs were occurring. Other refrigerator manufacturers were discussed. The size of the new refrigerator got reconfirmed. Smith made it seem urgent to get the new one installed on the Fourth, though it wasn’t clear why. Smith’s e-mails verged on angry, and the supplier stopped responding by midday on the third.
The installer’s last e-mail affirmed that if it reached Vegas on the third, he would pick it up and install it the next day. Installing meant delivering, unwrapping, sliding it in behind the bar, then plugging it in. Maybe twenty minutes max. Smith in his last e-mail said he did not want the plastic wrapping removed. He wanted it slid into the slot and left there. He would cut the wrapping off and plug it in himself, when he was satisfied with it.