He moved on to Eddie Bahn. I remembered Bahn as a talkative sales guy with ten to fifteen jokes he played like cards. Same deck every time, but with the cards reshuffled and fun at first, then tiring like a tape played over and over. Beatty had introduced us in a Vegas bar last fall. Bahn was dressed that night in a rose-colored silk shirt, elk-skin boots, jeans with a sharp crease, and a belt buckle probably worth ten grand. His talk was all about the money to be made in drones. He’d been a Navy recruiter, then worked other sales jobs, and as the Bakken shale took off, got into finding engineers for the fracking industry. When fracking slowed down, he slipped out the side door. Now it was drones that were going to change the world, and he was an instant expert.
It sounded that night like he’d found another sweet spot, and until we started digging deeper into him, it probably felt pretty good riding along in his big new pickup on his way to the next pitch. From the agents looking into him, I’d heard he had both IRS and Canada Revenue Agency problems. He had too much money in the bank for what he’d reported in earnings for the last decade. Bahn was a little careless, but he wasn’t stupid. He had a Panamanian shell company with bank accounts we might never find.
Beatty showed me the drones, shiny and silver, in a temporary hangar. He said the mechanics worked on them every night and made modifications based on sensor data the drones gathered while flying. These were prototypes. He pointed at dry, gray mountains behind as he described the survey routes they were flying.
“It looks like Strata has put some money into this airfield,” I said. “At their Houston office, they’re telling our agents they have long-term plans for drones. Looks like that’s what you’ve got here.”
I nodded toward a drone pilot who’d come out of the flight trailer and was standing on the landing looking at us. “What do you know about him?”
“Next to nothing. Eddie claims he vetted them, but he didn’t. He got a good fee to hire from a consultant that approached him. He’s tried to pay me to say I vetted them.”
“When did he do that?”
“He’s been doing it. That guy over there you’re looking at, there’ll be a hundred thousand pilots like him in a few years, and all they’ll need for skills is to be good gamers. Then what will you do to check them out?”
“Good question.” But the least of my problems this morning.
“When I started flying, we flew like we were in a cockpit. We literally flew the drone. We moved the flaps. We landed and took off. If you’re military, you’ve got to know the communications and how to talk to people on the ground, but these dudes will just move the paddles.” He paused. “I need to get back to the flight trailer.”
“I want to sit in there and listen for a little while before I leave.”
I sat behind the pilots for twenty minutes, then slipped out and had just climbed over the first low range of rocky hills when Venuti called.
“Another bombing,” he said. “A car bomb at rush hour, just north of the Sahara on-ramp. It killed two men inside and left four others dead in adjacent cars. Do you know the name Raj Nasik?”
“I do. He’s an aeronautical engineer, big in the drone program.”
“That’s right. The car was a Hertz rental and in his name. Based on videotape, as he and the other man left a casino garage this morning, he was the driver. Both were due at Creech this morning. Casino garage videotape shows them getting into a white Kia that matches the bombed vehicle. The man with him was an engineer named Mark Statham, who may be an even bigger deal than Nasik in drone technology. Most likely, the bomb was planted yesterday after Nasik picked up the car. I want your thoughts on the bomb maker when you get back here. No more airfield trips. Nothing but the bomb maker from here on, Grale, nothing else.”
27
I was in the office when AQAP and ISIS both claimed the car bombing. They posted within minutes of each other, ISIS from an encrypted phone app that then populated other sites, and AQAP with their website. Nobody reacted. Shah got up to go retrieve a list she had left on her desk. Venuti used the moment to say, “The ASAC is a big believer in you, Grale.”
“Even bigger than you?”
“I know you better.”
“You’re a cold bastard when you get crossed. It was a short trip to the airfield just for a look.”
“Was it worth four hours?”
“Couldn’t tell you yet.”
“But you could tell me that you haven’t put any time into Mondari this morning. Yesterday, he was urgent. You rousted him out of a hotel and got zip. Does that mean we’re done with him as a lead?”
“We still want what he told Jane. He had a bomb maker tip she believed in. It’s in her notes. I need what Mondari didn’t tell her.”