Again I wondered how they knew this. Her office landline? Her cell? Did it matter? Like anyone — from model citizen to terrorist — I was pleased to know that the self-destructing video had left no trace in my phone.
But I clearly remembered Joan’s words about agents handing out FBI property, and I knew what Blevins was thinking. Joan allowing me to view the Kenny Bryce video was comparable to her smuggling papers out of JTTF headquarters in her briefcase. Or a video stick in her purse. As she had said: That’s physical FBI evidence. They’d have my head.
It looked to me like they were trying to do just that. I saw no choice in what to say. “No. I’ve gotten no Mission: Impossible Telegrams.”
Three of the men sat back, as if on cue, exchanging glances, sighs. Only Lark, the young upstart, remained fixed on me.
“Think about that again,” said Blevins. “I’d like to give you the opportunity to remember correctly.”
“No. Final answer.”
“We have what we need,” he said, looking past the pond to the green hills beyond. “Is that where you guys shot down the helicopter with Briggs Spencer in it?”
“The very place.”
He nodded. The violent death of psychologist Briggs Spencer here at Rancho de los Robles had made headlines across the nation.
“Spencer was a complicated man,” said Blevins. “And part of a complicated chapter in our history.”
“I’ve heard those platitudes before.”
We stood. Blevins clicked off his recorder but he didn’t put it back into his briefcase. I walked them past the Ping-Pong table and the barbecue, toward the railroad-tie steps that lead down to the barnyard.
Silence. Sweet smell of grass in sunshine. Agents two by two, PI Ford leading the way, listening for the click of the recorder’s “on” button. Heard it just before we started down the steps. Blevins the crafty.
“You sure you didn’t see that Bakersfield surveillance video, Ford?” he asked from behind me.
“I’m very sure.”
“Lying to a federal agent is a crime.”
Zeno had left a sizable pile in our way. I stepped around it, turning as Blevins walked straight toward it. I slowed and held his look and let him continue on his course.
“Oh, shit,” he said, stopping.
Everyone else stopped, too.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Ford,” said Lark. “But may I use a restroom before we leave?”
“Christ, Mike, can’t you just hold it?” asked Blevins. His face was florid and he had both hands out for balance, sweeping one shiny cap-toe dress shoe across the slick, unhelpful barnyard grass. Raising an invisible mountain of stink.
“I can’t, sir,” said Lark. “And it looks like you might be a minute.”
I led Lark across the damp grass and into the barn, pointing out the bathroom back in the corner behind the tractor and the Bobcat. Clevenger’s worktables had their usual collection of drones and drone parts, cameras and monitors. The agent stopped and stared at them before turning to me.
“Blevins doesn’t work with us in San Diego,” he said. “He’s from Washington. Where he and his people want to transfer Joan. Where they’ll hold a pillow over her face and call it a promotion. Joan and I work together. I’ve tried warning her. I’ve tried talking to her.”
“And?”
“She doesn’t listen to me.”
“Sounds like her.”
“She’s a great agent,” Lark said. “I want to help her but I don’t know how. I’m not even sure there’s anything I can do.”
“I hope you think of something,” I said.
He looked at me for a beat, as if waiting for a suggestion. “Me, too. I’m twenty-four. The same age as Joan was when she first started here in San Diego. Just before Nine-Eleven. I was seven when I saw those planes coming down.”
The moment of silence we all know.
“God, that was funny,” said Lark.
“Nine-Eleven?”
“No. Darrel stepping in the dog shit.”
24
In the expected privacy of my pickup truck, I told Joan Taucher everything that had happened two hours earlier. The Saturday traffic was light and we were almost to Camp Pendleton by the time I’d finished.
Taucher sat hard-faced, looking out the windshield through aviator sunglasses, her makeup heavy and her white bangs trimmed bluntly at her brow. No hematoma in sight. Black suit with a flag lapel pin, black blouse, gun and holster temporarily on her lap for comfort. A charmless black purse on the floorboard in front of her.
“I know all about their crude tricks,” she said. “Frosts my balls. Lark’s a good kid. He tries to help me, but I see through him like a window. I don’t know about my office being miked, but I know the work phones are monitored. Randomly, they say. Policy. It just piles up in the Cloud. Metadata. Useless mountains of crap in the Cloud, generated by us. Nobody can listen to it all. Hell, we can’t even keep up with the domestic terror tips. You saw my walls. I watch what I say, wherever I am. The stuff I shared with you was small potatoes. They haven’t written me up for anything. Yet.”
“I’m surprised you take it so well.”
“And my choice is what?”
I thought about that and saw her point. I couldn’t picture Taucher doing anything other than what she was doing here and now in this city. Guarding the citadel. Tracking the ghosts. She was where she belonged. By fate, luck, or design. Blessing and curse.
As if at a loss for meaningful law enforcement activity, Taucher removed her gun, looked at it for a moment, then pushed it into the holster and snapped it shut.
Marah Ibrahim Azmeh was twenty-four years old and single and lived in Torrance, southwest of L.A. She worked for the County of Los Angeles Public Social Services Department, in payroll. She wore a yellow dress, yellow flip-flops with white daisies on them, and a pretty smile as she welcomed us to her small tract home. Taucher had told me that Marah meant “happiness,” and that Marah had been born to Madiyah and Dr. Ibrahim Azmeh while he was a resident at Centinela Hospital Medical Center in Inglewood. Dr. Azmeh himself had helped deliver her. She was a graduate of Cal State Northridge.
Waiting for us in the small living room was her older brother, Alan Ames. My quick IvarDuggans.com search revealed that he had been born in Inglewood as Alim Ibrahim Azmeh, and changed his name when he was eighteen. He was twenty-six years old, married, and a father of two. Employed as a surgical nurse at the UCLA Medical Center, where — I noted — his father had studied. Arrested for aggravated assault three years prior, charges dropped.
He sat at one end of a white couch, looking calmly over his teacup at us when we came into the room. He stood briefly, nodded without speaking as Taucher and I introduced ourselves, then sat back down. He was husky, dressed in jeans, a rugby shirt, and white athletic shoes.
“Tea?” asked Marah. “Juice?”
Taucher and I declined and Marah settled onto the couch opposite her brother. Their blood relationship was easy to see — slender faces, expressive brown eyes, coffee-with-cream skin. Their hair was black and straight, Marah’s streaked with henna. They both resembled their father in the one picture of him I’d seen. Not striking similarities, but even so. Different degrees of his aquiline nose.
The house was small, mid-fifties, probably three small bedrooms and two baths. Built in the era of Eisenhower, Elvis, and Khrushchev. Black-and-white TVs, green front lawns. Sears and Roebuck, Briggs & Stratton. Skinny ties and showing-top flattops. My grandpa Dick as a boy, playing catch in the street, Liz jumping rope.
Now a sun-filled living room. Polished windows. Facing the couch sat two wooden armchairs with red-and-gold Arabesque upholstery — one for Taucher and one for me. Persian rugs on a dark laminate floor. An entertainment center along one wall, a few CDs and DVDs and a modestly sized flat-screen TV. Bookshelves on another walclass="underline" college textbooks, sociology, psychology, American history, economics, art. More art. For the serious reader, I thought. For the searching young mind of Marah Azmeh. The other wall was densely hung with framed photographs — family and friends, at a glance.