Well, Rhyme was impatient too. He wanted intriguing.
Laurel displayed a picture of a handsome man in a white shirt, sitting before a radio microphone. He had round features, thinning hair. The ADA told them, “A recent picture in his radio studio in Caracas. He held a U.S. passport but was an expatriate, living in Venezuela. On May ninth, he was in the Bahamas on business when the sniper shot him in his hotel room. Two others were killed, as well — Moreno’s guard and a reporter interviewing him. The bodyguard was Brazilian, living in Venezuela. The reporter was Puerto Rican, living in Argentina.”
Rhyme pointed out, “There wasn’t much of a splash in the press. If the government’d been caught with their finger on the trigger, so to speak, it would’ve been bigger news. Who was supposedly responsible?”
“Drug cartels,” Laurel told him. “Moreno had created an organization called the Local Empowerment Movement to work with indigenous and impoverished people in Latin America. He was critical of drug trafficking. That ruffled some feathers in Bogotá and some Central American countries. But I couldn’t find facts to support that any cartel in particular wanted him dead. I’m convinced Metzger and NIOS planted those stories about the cartels to deflect attention from them. Besides, there’s something I haven’t mentioned. I know for a fact that a NIOS sniper killed him. I have proof.”
“Proof?” Sellitto asked.
Laurel’s body language, though not her facial features, explained that she was pleased to tell them the details. “We have a whistleblower — within or connected to NIOS. They leaked the order authorizing Moreno to be killed.”
“Like WikiLeaks?” Sellitto asked. Then shook his head. “But no, it wouldn’t have been.”
“Right,” Rhyme said. “Or the story would’ve been all over the news. The DA’s Office got it directly. And quietly.”
Myers: “That’s right. The whistleblower capillaried the kill order.”
Rhyme ignored the captain and his bizarre language. He said to Laureclass="underline" “Tell us about Moreno.”
She did, and from memory. Natives to New Jersey, his family had left the country when the boy was twelve and moved to Central America because of his father’s job; he was a geologist with a U.S. oil company. At first, Moreno was enrolled in American schools down there, but after his mother’s suicide he changed to local schools, where he did well.
“Suicide?” Sachs asked.
“Apparently she’d had difficulty with the move…and her husband’s job kept him traveling to drilling and exploration sites throughout the area. He wasn’t home very much.”
Laurel continued her portrait of the victim: Even at a young age Moreno had grown to hate the exploitation of the native Central and South Americans by U.S. government and corporate interests. After college, in Mexico City, he became a radio host and activist, writing and broadcasting vicious attacks on America and what he called its twenty-first-century imperialism.
“He settled in Caracas and formed the Local Empowerment Movement as an alternative to workers to develop self-reliance and not have to look to American and European companies for jobs and U.S. aid for help. There are a half dozen branches throughout South and Central America and the Caribbean.”
Rhyme was confused. “It’s hardly the bio of a terrorist.”
Laurel said, “Exactly. But I have to tell you that Moreno spoke favorably about some terrorist groups: al-Qaeda, al-Shabaab, the East Turkestan Islamic Movement in Xinjiang, China. And he formed some alliances with several extremist groups in Latin America: the Colombian ELN — the National Liberation Army — and FARC, as well as the United Self-Defense Forces. He had strong sympathy for the Sendero Luminoso in Peru.”
“Shining Path?” Sachs asked.
“Yes.”
The enemy of my enemy is my friend, Rhyme reflected. Even if they blow up children. “But still?” he asked. “A targeted killing? For that?”
Laurel explained, “Recently Moreno’s blogs and broadcasts were growing more and more virulently anti-American. He called himself ‘the Messenger of Truth.’ And some of his messages were truly vicious. He really hated this country. Now, there were rumors that people had been inspired by him to shoot American tourists or servicemen or lob bombs at U.S. embassies or businesses overseas. But I couldn’t find one incident in which he actually said a single word ordering or even suggesting that a specific attack be carried out. Inspiring isn’t the same as plotting.”
Though he’d known her only minutes Rhyme suspected that Ms. Nance Laurel had looked very, very hard for any such words.
“But NIOS claimed there was intelligence that Moreno was planning an actual attack: a bombing of an oil company headquarters in Miami. They picked up a phone conversation, in Spanish, and the voiceprint was confirmed to be Moreno’s.”
She now rifled through her battered briefcase and consulted notes. “This is Moreno: He said, ‘I want to go after American Petroleum Drilling and Refining, Florida. On Wednesday.’ The other party, unknown: ‘The tenth. May tenth?’ Moreno: ‘Yes, noon, when employees are leaving for lunch.’ Then the other party: ‘How’re you going to, you know, get them there?’ Moreno: ‘Trucks.’ Then there was some garbled conversation. And Moreno again: ‘And this’s just the start. I have a lot more messages like this one planned.’”
She put the transcript back in her case. “Now, the company — APDR — has two facilities in or near Florida: its southeastern headquarters in Miami and an oil rig off the coast. It couldn’t be the rig since Moreno mentioned trucks. So NIOS was sure the headquarters, on Brickell Avenue, was going to be the target.
“At the same time, intelligence analysts found that companies with a connection to Moreno had been shipping diesel fuel, fertilizer and nitromethane to the Bahamas in the last month.”
Three popular ingredients in IEDs. Those substances were what had obliterated the federal building in Oklahoma City. Where they also had been delivered by truck.
Laurel continued, “It’s clear that Metzger believed if Moreno was killed before the bomb was smuggled into the United States his underlings wouldn’t go through with the plan. He was shot the day before the incident in Miami. On May ninth.”
So far it sounded like, whether you supported assassinations or not, Metzger’s solution had saved a number of lives.
Rhyme was about to mention this but Laurel got there first. She said, “It wasn’t an attack Moreno was talking about, though. It was a peaceful protest. On the tenth of May, at noon, a half dozen trucks showed up in front of the APDR headquarters. They weren’t delivering bombs; they were delivering people for a demonstration.
“And the bomb ingredients? They were for Moreno’s Local Empowerment Movement branch in the Bahamas. The diesel fuel was for a transportation company. The fertilizer was for agricultural co-ops and the nitromethane was for use in soil fumigants. All legitimate. Those were the only materials cited in the order approving Moreno’s killing but there were also tons of seed, rice, truck parts, bottled water and other innocent items in the same shipment. NIOS conveniently forgot to mention those.”
“Not intelligence failure?” Rhyme offered.
The pause that followed was longer than most and Laurel finally said, “No. I think intelligence manipulation. Metzger didn’t like Moreno, didn’t like his rhetoric. He was on record as calling him a despicable traitor. I think he didn’t share with the chain of command all of the information he found. So the higher-ups in Washington approved the mission, thinking a bomb was involved, while Metzger knew otherwise.”