I told Beatty, “I’ve got the file you sent me. You’re okay.”
But he couldn’t seem to get that into his head. Later, he left me a message that he’d met up with Laura in Big Pine and gone up to the Bristlecones. They took her jeep and rode up the alluvial plain and into the winding canyon on the eastern slope of the Whites. Once, long ago, they’d made a game of finding the Methuselah tree. It was all there in a long message that rambled near the end about everything coming apart, but that he was fighting it.
“I’m pretty down,” he said. I picked that message up when we landed in Borrego Springs. When I called him back, he said he was with Laura on the highway running through the Owens. That was good to hear.
“What is it about these drone pilots, Jeremy? What’s your problem with them?”
“They don’t care.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know how I like Willie McCool and flying remote-controlled aircraft?”
“Sure.”
“That’s about flying. It’s the same with the drones, you have that or you don’t. The three pilots I was training, even in those few days, I could tell it wasn’t in them. They don’t have flying in them. It’s just a job. If it was just one of them, then okay, I’d get that, or even two of them just looking at it as a good opportunity in a new market. But all three? That’s hard to believe. You know what I mean?”
I did. That resonated. I thought about it for a long time after hanging up with Beatty.
40
A San Diego County Sheriff’s Department deputy named Pete Nogales was waiting in the Borrego Valley Airport. He was chatting with the staff inside. They all seemed to know him. Two women were laughing at some joke he’d just told.
“Seven years since I’ve seen you,” Nogales said and took in the changes in me as I did with him.
Nogales was moving into middle age, hair thinning on top, face fuller, a little more around his middle than he probably wanted. But he seemed much more confident and at ease. I could tell that the women he’d just told the joke to liked him and were waiting for another laugh.
Years ago he wanted to join the FBI. He’d filled out an application and been interviewed, but it didn’t happen and I’d barely talked with him since. I’d done everything I could for him and called several times after he was rejected. The disappointment hit his pride hard. It stripped away a dream.
“Are you acting on a specific tip?” Nogales asked.
“All I have are grainy photos from the terrorism database and some correlating info.”
“Correlating info?”
“I’ll go over it with you.”
“What do you want to do with the photos?”
“Come up with a cover story, drive around with you, and talk to people.”
Anza-Borrego was desert country. A wide swath was state park. In winter and sometimes into early spring, people came for the wildflower bloom, but even in the summer heat like today, there were hikers and off-roaders. The café we’d just passed was packed. In the sheriff’s office, I shook hands with Nogales’s captain, Tim Albrecht, and as Nogales had predicted, Albrecht wanted something solid before Nogales toured with me.
“I’m looking for the bomb maker,” I said. “I don’t have evidence, but I have things that say it’s possible he could be in the Anza-Borrego area.”
“Where are you getting that from?”
“Some of it from a tip through a CI.”
“Where did your confidential informant come up with that?”
“From a cartel manager’s laptop.”
“Is that right?”
“It is.” We looked at each other as I opened the manila envelope with the grainy photos, slid them across, and said, “I can tell you more if it stays in this room.”
Nothing ever stays in the room, but I needed the San Diego Sheriff’s Department to be completely onboard and could feel the clock running. Nineteen years of doing this had taught me that if you want local support, you never talk down. You don’t hold back unless you have to.
“Some on the Joint Terrorism Task Force think AQAP and ISIS each trained their own teams and sent them separately over time. Some think it’s a combination of a sleeper cell in the Vegas area and more crew smuggled in over the Mexican border. My focus is the bomb maker. I think we’re looking for a tested pro hired for this who has a place to build bombs far enough away from Vegas to be outside the main law enforcement search. That’s part conjecture, part what I’ve seen in my career, and what we’re putting together with the little we’ve gotten so far. This area could fit.”
“What about the guy you’ve been questioning, the ex–drone pilot?”
“Not a shred of anything connects him to the bombings. Air Force OSI and a DOD criminal investigative unit were tapped into his communications for six months and came up with zero.”
“We’re three bombs in,” Captain Albrecht said, “and the estimate I hear is that’s only half of the C-4.”