“Left of the shed!” I said.
George was back at the wall in a second. There was a moment, then, “I don’t have it.”
“Where the fence starts. Nothing moving there, but there’s a really dark spot right next to the shed…”
“Yeah…” From the tone of his voice, I could tell George still hadn’t located the object.
“Just wait. If it’s really something, it’ll move again.”
We waited. When you stare at an area in the dark, if there are variations in the shadow, you’re eventually going to see something move. Whether it does or not. I was just beginning to get the feeling that my eyes had been playing tricks, when a figure suddenly stood, right where I’d seen the movement, and a very loud voice called out.
“Fuck you! Fuck every one of you!”
Then he was gone. Just like that.
We in the barn looked at each other. “What the hell,” said Sally, “did he do that for?”
“They’re trying to provoke us,” said George.
I laughed. “Too fuckin’ late.”
CHAPTER 15
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 20, 2001 19:30
Seven-thirty in the evening isn’t a really good time to start a meeting. Nonetheless, there we were, once again crammed into the kitchen of the Nation County Jail. The attendees of this second meeting of the day were considerably more upscale than the first. There were people representing the FBI, DOJ, CDC, FDA, DEA, ATF, OSHA, and the NSA. Iowa had sent command level people from the DCI and DNE, as well as the EMD. I felt like I was watching CNN.
It all hardly seemed real, the unreality enhanced by the faint strains of Christmas music coming from the adjacent dispatch center.
FBI was represented not only by George Pollard, but also by our old acquaintance Special Agent in Charge Volont. We’d had some, well, difficult times with him in the past, but nothing horrible. Volont was a good agent, just a bit Bureau-centric, as they say. This time, he seemed genuinely happy to see us. With him were two others: Special Agent Gwen Thurgood, a counterterrorism specialist, and one super special sort named Special Agent Milton Hawse. Hawse was younger than Volont, but obviously someone of great importance in the Bureau. All the other federal employees deferred to him. It wasn’t a respect sort of thing, so much as just really lots of rank. Well, that’s the way it looked to me.
The Department of Justice had sent a deputy U.S. attorney from Cedar Rapids, named Harriet Glee. She’d been working out of the Cedar Rapids office long enough to be known to most of us as “Dirty Harriet.” It was a compliment, and a heartfelt one at that. She was hell on wheels, and one of the best prosecutors in the business.
The Centers for Disease Control had sent a team of three; the Food and Drug Administration, one.
The Drug Enforcement Agency had hustled two of our old friends up from Cedar Rapids, one of whom was Katie Martinez. I was particularly glad to see Katie, as she had worked both L.A. and San Diego for DEA, and we were going to be in dire need of a Spanish-speaker we could trust absolutely.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms had also sent somebody I knew and respected, Agent Brian Chase. I didn’t know the two Occupational Safety and Health Administration people, but they both looked pretty intense. I like to see that in somebody who’s been sent to help on a case.
The National Security Agency was just so far from my experience, I wasn’t even really sure what they did. They’d sent two people, though, both of whom were about as un-spy-looking as anybody I’d ever seen. All the feds treated them with great deference, though. Unlike the FBI’s Hawse, these two were treated that way from pure respect. One of the NSA men was introduced to me as Edward Peasley, an expert in biological warfare. Cool. The other was Herb, no last name, who simply said he did “some code work.”
Present from Iowa’s Division of Criminal Investigation was Hester’s boss’s boss, Special Agent Barney England. Iowa’s Division of Narcotics Enforcement had sent Bob Dahl, who’d worked closely with us when one of his fellow agents had been killed on a dope stakeout back in 1996. Sitting next to him was a guy from Iowa’s Emergency Management Division. He was going to be a critical player, as all requests and demands for emergency management were going to have to go through him. I thought that, with the rather bizarre health hazard that was being revealed, he was going to be one busy man.
Present from Nation County was County Attorney Carson Hilgenberg, along with Deputy Mike Connors and Dispatcher Sally Wells. Sally was key, as most of the communications were going to have to be coordinated by her.
I tried to count heads, and got at least twenty-one people in a room that should have held ten. With only sixteen chairs, including the ones from Dispatch, all the Nation County personnel were seated on the kitchen counter. We were the hosts, after all. George gave Hester his chair, and joined us.
Lamar and Volont threaded their way over to the refrigerator, where they called the meeting to order and made brief statements about cooperation and common goals. Volont explained that those present were part of a newly constituted team that had been assembled at very short notice by Special Agent Hawse, under the new multiagency mandate that had occurred after 9/11. Volont told the assemblage that Hester, Lamar, Sally, and I had worked with him before, on a fairly well-known case against an extremist called “Gabriel.” He said that we were to be trusted. Thank you, Agent Volont. Then he tossed me a real curve.
“I’ve checked, and the ricin didn’t come from our U.S.-based right-wing extremists.”
The “What? “just sort of came out of my mouth unbidden. “I never knew that they were into that.”
“Oh, yeah,” said Volont. “It was my assigned area when we worked our last case together. The extreme right had a strong interest in ricin at that time.” He shrugged. “You just didn’t have a need to know.”
That sort of pissed me off, since the case he referred to had been a major terrorism investigation we’d worked. Together, supposedly. “I sure could have come up with one, if you’d asked me,” I said. I shrugged. Volont was a bit of a jerk sometimes.
Hester and I briefly outlined our cases to date, Hester doing Cueva, and then me with Gonzales. Sally’d made copies of the case file, and passed them out to everybody present. We’d managed to wangle the use of the super- copier at the Nation County Bulletin, and were therefore able to pass out good copies of the photos from Linda and Rudy’s album. As I got to those, we got two instant hits.
Katie Martinez’s hand shot up. “Katie?”
“Hell, this is Rudolpho Orejuela,” she said, holding up her copy of Rudy Cueva’s photo. “We associated him with the Cali cartel in Colombia, a couple years ago. He was busted by the Colombian authorities. He escaped from the Cathedral a while back, along with a whole group. I know this man.”
“Past tense, Katie. And what’s the ‘Cathedral’ thing?”
“Oh, right,” she said, and laughed. “Knew. Sorry. The Cathedral is a Colombian prison. Orejuela broke out the same time as some of the Medellin cartel people, you remember Pablo Escobar? Rudolpho Orejuela, he got his start with Escobar, and then got hired by the Cali people. After that, he was identified as a FARC associate. We I Ded him in a surveillance in San Diego last year.”
“FARC?” I asked.
“Big-time bad,” said Katie. “That’s the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarios de Colombia. A guerrilla organization, terrorists, based in Colombia. Hates the U.S. Strong drug ties.”
“Oh,” I said, thinking, Jesus Christ! “So, what did he do? Sales?” I asked. Hopefully.
“Oh, no. Not smart enough. Orejuela was muscle. He killed people for hire, or burned down their houses, or friendly little things like that. He was only fair at it, though.” Katie tapped the photo with a forefinger. “I heard they tossed him out, but I can’t say for sure.”
“So, he would have been…what? Working for the cartels?”
“Oh, no,” she said. “He screwed up enough to get caught for offing somebody, they didn’t want to use him much after that. He was known to the cops. They busted him out along with the rest, to send him back into the hills where he could just work inside cartel territory. That’s where we think he hooked up with FARC.”
