At the office I walked into another conference room meeting, only this time with more buzz and excitement and Washington brass piped in to listen. We started without any delay. Like me, a CIA analyst conferenced in doubted Hurin had shot Mondari. Their profile showed him as reclusive, careful, and physically withdrawn.
An hour-long debate began about what else might be in play here. Into that mix someone threw Beatty’s name. Beatty had bought yet more throwaway phones and his whereabouts were unknown. Also, the phone Juan Menderes used to confirm his coke deliveries was on the short list for the cell phone that detonated the Bar Alagara bomb. I hadn’t been briefed on that yet, but it offered another explanation for his murder.
An agent summarized Beatty’s confrontation with police officers at a scenic overlook northwest of Vegas, saying a patrol officer found him sleeping in the back of his pickup and Beatty was hostile, so he’d called for backup. He was not charged or held but was aggressive on leaving.
“He tried to call me from there,” I said. “What did he do that was aggressive?”
“Lowered his passenger window to flip off an officer. You can read their report. The GPS tracker attached to the underside of his pickup was found in a rest-stop trash can. He must have suspected he was being tracked.”
Of course he did. The agent must have read my face. He stared before continuing.
“There’s been no credit card activity. Why is he still calling you?”
“Maybe because I believe in him.”
“And why is that?”
“A better question is why not.”
Venuti cut it off and we moved back to Garod Hurin. One of those conferenced in from headquarters, a heavyweight in domestic terrorism investigation, John Saran, asked me, “Do you have anything resembling hard evidence that Garod Hurin has returned to the Vegas area?”
“None.”
“So some good guessing, good tracking, but really nothing.”
“Correct.”
“And Mondari’s cybercriminal crew is still missing?”
“They are. They could be sitting on a beach somewhere.”
“Do you believe that?”
“No.”
“Why haven’t we found them?”
“We haven’t put much effort into finding them.”
“You haven’t or we haven’t?”
“We work for the same agency, sir.”
I got a few smiles at the table for that. Saran was a ball-breaker with the nickname “Sarin,” for the nerve gas.
“Tell me why we should find them, Agent Grale, and we’ll do it. All I’ve heard so far is they were scamming a cartel and got discovered. How do they tie in?”
“This will be speculation on my part.”
“Well, you’re on a streak. Let’s hear it.”
“Mondari’s cybergeeks are dead. Sinaloa soldiers kidnapped and interrogated them. They’re lying in shallow graves in the desert. Before they died they gave up Mondari’s name and everything else they knew.”
“That’s believable.”
“But if they’re not dead, they can validate what Mondari told me and they may know more. We need to look for them.”
“Okay, but get on with what you think has happened.”
“Cartel operatives sat down with Mondari next and laid out their terms. Maybe he made a large restitution payment and agreed to do cyberwork for them, something like that. Something that made him believe there was a way out. But another piece was doing deliveries, some finite number, two of which were C-4. Why use Mondari for that? The reason is, he was disposable. They wouldn’t want any kind of trail tying them to a terrorist bomber. The Sinaloa cartel is who the CIA says moved the C-4 up from southern Mexico. As long as I’m speculating, I’m going to say it never delivered to the warehouse where it allegedly disappeared from.”
“Really?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Okay, now I’m all ears.”
“It’s too improbable that it was stolen out from underneath us. I read the report. There was backup on the backup surveillance. I think the cartel picked up on CIA surveillance. Then they thought about it and decided it had just gotten more expensive to deliver. They told whoever was communicating with ISIS or AQAP that they had a problem and it was going to cost more money. They did have a problem and came up with a more profitable way to deal with it. I’m going to say they faked the delivery the CIA was tracking and brought it in through another route. Maybe they split the delivery in half.”
“Why split it?”
“So they wouldn’t lose it all if the courier got busted crossing the border, as well as it got the size down to where it could easily be moved with two car trips. Maybe Mondari thought it was drugs he was ferrying. You know what, I take that back. I don’t know what he thought, but I’m sure he thought he was squaring the books with the cartel over the theft of data his cybergeeks pulled off.”