“No, I don’t.”
Jack rolled his eyes toward the one-way mirror and shook his head. “Okay. Tell us everything you know about Frank Newhouse.”
The story Marks told started out familiar to everyone who had seen the CIA file. Newhouse had been born in Glendale, Arizona, when that part of the country was sand and sage brush. He’d joined the army at eighteen and re-upped three times, finding a home in Special Forces. He’d seen action in Grenada and Panama. He was in the middle of the ugliest part of Somalia.
“So far you’re not telling me anything I can’t read in the newspapers,” Jack said acidly.
“Then you must know about the friends he made in Iraq,” Brett said.
Everyone perked up at this. Brett Marks was a good storyteller, and they listened breathlessly as he described Newhouse’s experience during Operation Desert Storm. “Frank was one of the first in. He dropped behind enemy lines as a forward observer, calling in coordinates for the Air Force. He was nearly caught by the Republican Guard. In fact, they did capture him. They were torturing him, but he was rescued.”
“That’s not in the file,” Jack said.
“Because he wasn’t rescued by our guys. He was rescued by Iranian agents working inside Iraq.”
“Bullshit,” Jack said.
“Is it? You know Iran wanted Iraq destroyed. They made a lot of noise in public about U.S. aggression, but Iraq was also their mortal enemy. They were happy to see us blow up Saddam Hussein. They’d been sneaking in agents from the beginning. Most of them got caught by Saddam’s police, but a few made it through. One of the Iranian agents rescued Frank and helped him finish his mission.”
“Did this Iranian agent have a name?”
“Babak Farrah.”
Jack slammed his reaction down, keeping Marks from reading him. “Why didn’t Frank tell anyone about this?”
“As far as I know, he did,” Marks said. “But if he didn’t, I can’t blame him. Desert Storm seemed to have made Frank lose his taste for government work. He was pissed about everything: soldiers who came back with Persian Gulf Syndrome and weren’t treated for it, lies the government seemed to tell about why we went. He had already left the Army. He kept working for the government, but in his heart he’d already joined the Greater Nation by the time the second Iraq War happened. You can imagine how that put him over the edge. He was doing consulting work for Homeland Security. With his record, he easily passed all the security checks. He and I were careful not to expose his connection to the Greater Nation. Eventually he was put on a task force to investigate us, which was perfect. For us, I mean.”
“Something’s not making sense to me,” Jack probed. “You say Frank Newhouse had Iranian friends. But you also say that he was part of the Greater Nation plan to stop the Iranians. Those two things don’t add up.”
“Our information about the terrorists didn’t come from Frank,” Marks said. “We have other friends that let us know what’s going on.”
“Names,” Jack demanded.
“That’s not part of this deal.”
Jack glowered, but said nothing. Marks continued.
“I assumed that Frank didn’t want to see the terrorists succeed. Frank joined us because he’s anti-Federalist, not anti-American. To be an anti-Federalist is a noble cause, Agent Bauer. We are fighting for the freedom of the states and the freedom of the individual. We are not un-American. When we heard that there might be some Iranian terrorists entering the U.S., I assumed he had heard something from old friends and wanted to stop it.”
“Maybe he’s still doing that,” Jack suggested.
“Then he’s doing a lousy job, especially considering that he seemed to know the guys that are behind it.”
“He’s a good storyteller,” Jack growled, walking into the conference room behind Chappelle and Sharpton.
“You don’t believe him?” Chappelle said. “It makes sense to me.”
“We need to get background on Babak Farrah,” Jack said.
“Already on it.” Kelly tossed a file to Jack. The manila folder was thicker than the sparse paperwork inside. Jack thumbed through it as Kelly spoke. “We don’t get much out of Iran. What we have is innocuous enough — the CIA says he was a sergeant in the Iranian army, owned a small computer store, that’s pretty much it. He might have been the President of Iran before coming here, for all we know.”
Jack rubbed his eyes. He hadn’t slept in a very long time. “So Frank Newhouse plays the Federal government but secretly works for Greater Nation. Then he plays Greater Nation but secretly works for Iranian terrorists. That’s our theory?”
“I’ll listen to a better one,” Chappelle said.
Jack didn’t have a better one. He tried to isolate his own concern, and that came down to only one thing: Brett Marks. He didn’t like him, he didn’t trust him, and he didn’t want to listen to him anymore. The idea that some of the evidence was coming from Marks— not to mention the fact that the nutcase would walk because of it — made him furious.
“I still have a problem,” he said at last. “Marks didn’t give us anything. We’re not any closer to finding the terrorists. We’re not any closer to finding Newhouse.”
Jamey Farrell walked in on the middle of his sentence. She had a huge grin on her face. “Who says we’re not any closer to finding the bad guys?”
Without a word, they followed her back to the conference room where she’d set up yet another display.
“I expect a raise after all this,” she said. “Just follow the pictures.” She pressed a button and a slideshow played for them. The pictures were all different angles — sometimes straight on, sometimes downward angles. Sometimes the objects seemed very close, more often they were far off, and always they were blurred and black and white. But one thing was obvious in all of them: the blue van. The slideshow was a pictographic recreation of the van’s journey, and it ended at a private hangar at John Wayne Airport in Santa Ana.
Kelly Sharpton whistled. “Now that is good detective work.”
“We checked the logs at John Wayne,” she went on casually, as though it was all in a day’s work. “Only two flights left from that hangar or the one next to it that evening. One was a hobby flier who flew to Santa Barbara. She checks out. The other logged a flight plan for San Diego, but didn’t go there.”
“How do we know?” Chappelle asked.
Jamey said, “According to FAA records, it never landed there. We just got off the phone with the traffic controller who was on duty yesterday. He recalls tracking that plane and asking why it had veered off its course. They didn’t answer. He didn’t think much of it because hobby fliers take joyrides all the time.”
Jack asked, “Did he have any idea where it was going?”
“East.”
“Nice of you to come back,” Brett said. “Are we finished here? Can I go?”
“I’m not sure,” Jack said. He hadn’t turned the camera back on. “You haven’t really given us anything. I mean, you told us a great story about Frank Newhouse. You gave us an explanation for the terrorists. But we didn’t get us any closer to finding anyone. If you want to walk, you better do more than just tell a good story.”
He turned the cameras back on. “You said that Frank Newhouse didn’t give you information on the terrorists, but you won’t tell us who tipped you.”
“No.”
“What did Frank do when you learned the information?”
“First, we called the FBI and Homeland Security. They didn’t seem to believe us. Frank, who was our inside man, said that it was because some government agency had already botched some Iranian investigation.” Marks let that sink in. Jack could tell by the grin on his face that he knew of Jack’s involvement there. “Anyway, you may not agree, but we know that we have the right as citizens to act in defense of our country, so we took it into our own hands. Frank led our investigation.”
“You let him do that even though you knew he had Iranian friends?”
