“You are circling the same over and over. That you keep saying it does not make it true.”
A long silence followed with Smith staring at me. Outside, watching the video feed, they must see it too. He was debating, weighing options, gauging what we had learned, what we would learn, and then made some internal decision. He wore his face like a mask when he spoke again.
“Ozan talked always in ways to provoke me. For years and years he is like this, so I do not take him seriously. I didn’t believe he would know how to find the people and sell the information. He always talked about jihad, but all fools talk in a loose way about life and death. It is a characteristic of fools, and what they say doesn’t mean anything. All people know this.”
“We want to know what you did when Ozan brought the offer to negotiate back to you.”
“You’re not getting this from him. I want you to say this.”
“We’re not getting it from Ozan,” I said, then paused before trying a different lie. One I thought was plausible.
“Ozan didn’t like you any more than you liked him. He didn’t trust you. He was afraid of you and what you might do, so who do you think he told? He told someone he knew you wouldn’t kill. Your sister is who he told. She went to the Turkish police.”
“That is another lie. She despised her husband.”
“Yes, she has said so, but he did tell her because he didn’t trust you. There’s no way out of this, Omar. The cards are falling. It’s all coming down around you. This Mansur coming to the Alagara is you wanting to be paid in person. You made it a condition. You wanted to be paid in person if a deal was made. You were surprised they agreed. You gave them access during the day when the building repairs were under way. You were told they wanted to learn the layout. You didn’t know they were planting a bomb. You were right to be worried when Mansur moved the meeting time from 10:00 p.m. to just before the party. And you couldn’t know he’d leave behind the pickup he’d arrived in.”
He didn’t acknowledge or answer any of that. He said, “I was trying to save the girls.”
“What do you mean?”
“The deal was made and the girls would be released, but not until July 5. I was warned they would be killed if I said anything about the kidnapping to the police. Today, I find out they’re dead, so I came here.”
“Okay,” I said, as if that made sense, but was asking myself again, What is the real reason he came in today? A New York Times reporter covering the bombings had followed our tracks and gone business-to-business along Lake Mead and wrote that sources said the FBI knew when the pickup carrying the secondary bomb arrived at the Alagara lot. That article ran this morning. It was true. Was he reacting to that? I nodded, then went there.
“From various external video cameras at businesses along Lake Mead Boulevard and from interviews of neighbors, including a neighbor with a third-floor condo on the other side of Mead, we know when the pickup with the bomb arrived. We know the driver pulled into the lot, parked in a slot left for him, and then came inside and met with you. We believe that man, Mansur, is part of a sleeper cell here.”
We had a screen in the room and I pointed at it.
“Let me show you some video.”
I played the video. There were two short segments of footage of the pickup with the bomb driving along Lake Mead. The first was at 5:40, the next, 101 seconds later. Both caught the driver’s head, but all efforts to enhance the face and make the driver identifiable had failed. Working with facial recognition software, we’d tried to match the driver to the man Smith had met with. The probability was 83 percent, but who knows with these software programs. And 83 percent wasn’t going to get us anywhere in court. Yet Smith must have met with the man who had delivered the pickup bomb. He would likely claim not to have known what the man calling himself Mansur was driving, but that didn’t really matter.
If this Mansur delivered the pickup and then met with Smith, we had a link from him to terrorists. If I were given that foothold, I could get there.
With some drama, I opened a manila folder and removed one of the copies I got from the facial-recognition guys. It was one where they had just overlaid the profile of the man Smith met with on the profile of the driver of the truck. The truck and the profile of the man were easy to read.
“I’m going to let you see what we have. I’m not supposed to, so it’s going to be a quick look.”
I showed him the images the facial-recognition team overlaid, but I didn’t hand it to him. I held it in my left hand out toward the middle of the table. He got a clean five-second view. Long enough to recognize Mansur. Not long enough to see this was facial-recognition techs’ experimenting. I slid it back into the file folder and looked at him.