Swift Vengeance

3

Special agent Joan Taucher had an athlete’s build, lithe but solid. Short white hair, bangs to her eyebrows. Some years ago, I’d seen an article and pictures of her in an amateur MMA fight. She looked lean, muscle-plated, and lethal. A winning record. She’d filled out some since then. Whether wearing her fighting garb or a trim gray suit like she did today, her facial expression remained constant: humorless and unconvinced.

Her shake was very firm and her hand notably cold, as I remembered. “Nice to see you again, Joan.”

“Of course it isn’t. That was quite a shootout on your property up in Fallbrook last year. Helicopters and escaped mental patients and everything.”

“One helicopter and one patient,” I said.

“Made you famous again for another day or two. You do have a way of getting into the news.”

More than I like. A long story, that — the helicopter and who was flying it and why — and Taucher of course knew most of it. What she didn’t know was how close her own federal government had come to killing innocent people in my very home. No one, except those of us who were there that day, really knows that ugly truth. Sometimes the truth has to step aside so life can go barreling along.

“Do you miss the MMA fighting?” I asked.

“No. Even then I was too old for that nonsense. It was supposed to be fun, anyway. You boxed, right?”

“One pro fight a long time ago.”

“One. Well.”

“It taught me the value of survival.” I’ll always remember looking up at that ref and those lights and realizing I could beat the count, get up and keep fighting, and maybe find a way to win. Or I could stay where I was and live to fight another day.

She drummed her fingertips on her desktop. It was glass-covered and pin-neat. Taucher had light brown eyes and went heavy on the makeup. Always heavy on the makeup, I remembered. Just a hint of anger in those eyes now. “So what’s this about a death threat against someone you know?”

“These are copies,” I said, setting the handwritten threat and the typewritten envelope on her desk. I’d made them in my office just two hours earlier, along with copies of the thank-you card and envelope. I’d also printed out a four-year-old article and picture of Rasha Samara from the Las Vegas Sun newspaper.

Taucher’s Joint Terrorism Task Force office was a sixth-floor corner in an older downtown building, formerly a bank. Good views west and south — the Embarcadero, cruise ships at dock, the bow of the USS Midway jutting into the harbor from behind a row of restaurants.

While she studied the photocopied death threat, I studied her office walls. Every single square inch had a face on it. Floor to ceiling, left to right. Part of the ceiling, too. I figured that was where the new ones went. I could barely spot the doorknob and light switches. The pictures were mostly of Middle Eastern men and a few women, most of them dark, young, and unsmiling. Most in Western clothing, many in varying Middle Eastern attire — Arabian, Persian, Turk. Scores of them. A clear push-pin positioned top-center in each. Curled at the edges. Some wallet-sized, some larger. Some were police booking mugs. Others taken inside homes. Some had been shot outside, with law enforcement vehicles in the backgrounds. Most were stills extracted from video, grainy and vague. Not just scores of them, I thought, turning around to see the back side of Taucher’s office door plastered with more. Hundreds.

“Who is Lieutenant Lindsey Rakes and how did you get this?”

“She’s a friend and former tenant. She lives in Las Vegas now. She overnighted it to me.”

A skeptical consideration. Taucher had no doubt noted the postmark, estimated the day of arrival, and come up with barely enough time for an overnight delivery to me. I skeptically considered her in return.

“Is Rakes law enforcement?” she asked.

“Former lieutenant, U.S. Air Force. She flew drone missions out of Creech. She operated the sensors.” Joan Taucher’s eyes locked on to mine as if acquiring a target. I told her what years Lindsey had flown, and what little I knew about her missions.

She sat back and stared at me for a long beat. “That makes this threat more than just interesting.”

“I thought so, too.”

“I take it very seriously,” she said. “Even if it runs contrary to the current terror model. No group affiliation. No political message — jihadi or other. In fact, the opposite — he says personal. The letter claims no credit and is not intended for the public. It wasn’t Tweeted, Facebooked, Snapped, or posted on any social or media network I watch — and I watch them like a hawk. Instead, this threat was sent discreetly to its target. Privately. Almost intimately. Islamic State has threatened specific former U.S. military personnel with death. Of course they have. However, this letter was composed by an English speaker — very rare for foreign terrorists. And it was handwritten by someone with knowledge of Arabic-style calligraphy — a relatively unusual skill in the U.S. But if you put those last two elements together, you come up with Caliphornia. As in Californian. As in caliphate. As in terror. As in our worst nightmare — homegrown actors with outside sponsors. We call them homegrown violent extremists, HVEs.”

“He says vengeance.”

“Right,” said Taucher. “So what did she do to this guy?”

I liked the way Joan Taucher’s mind was working. She was an original member of the San Diego FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force. That meant approximately six federal, six state, and thirty-seven local bureaus, departments, agencies, patrols, authorities, commissions, centers, and offices dedicated to counterterrorism in San Diego. Depending on how you count. And, depending on who you talk to, the combined might of the JTTF is either a security dream team or another expensive, inefficient, self-perpetuating federal bureaucracy. Its finest moments — the JTTF is quick to note — are ones that we citizens never hear about. Which of course makes citizens like me wonder how many and how fine these moments really are.

I’d first met Joan in 2010, when I was an SD sheriff’s deputy assigned to the — get this — Law Enforcement Coordination Center (LECC), which, in tandem with the sheriff’s Regional Terrorism Threat Assessment Center (RTTAC), comprises the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) “Fusion Center,” which is “co-located” with the FBI/JTTF, though subservient to it. It’s complicated only if you try to figure out who does what. Or if you wonder how long it must take for a nice fat piece of intel to get from one end of this acronym-gorged python to the other.

Joan and I had worked as part of that team but never closely. My job was to go into the mosques and Muslim centers, poking around for sympathetic eyes and ears. I soon learned that my JTTF supervisor, Taucher, had been a freshman FBI agent here in 2001, when the towers fell. And though that event had left its scar on all Americans, it had — according to law enforcement rumor and legend — cut with particular depth into yearling agent Joan Taucher. Stories and gossip flew, not all of them kind.

“I need to see Lindsey Rakes immediately,” she said.

“She doesn’t want to be interviewed.”

“Would she rather be decapitated?”

“She asked me to assess the threat,” I said. “That’s your world, so I came to you.”

“Where is she?”

“A motel in the Las Vegas area. She didn’t tell me which one.”

“Tell her I need to see her immediately,” said Joan. “If she won’t submit to an interview I’ll get a subpoena and we’ll make her talk. I will not negotiate. I mean, really, Roland — why doesn’t she want to talk to us? She’s obviously scared or she wouldn’t have gone to you. She sure as hell ought to be. Somebody put some time and skill into this threat.”

“She’s a young mother,” I said. “Petitioning the court for shared custody of her son. He’s nine. She’s had some personal issues and she’s resolving them. She’s afraid that if the death threat came to light, she would be putting her case in jeopardy.”

“Tell Soccer Mom she’ll be a better mother with her head attached.”

“She’s willing to talk to you by phone.”

“Do you know the ex?”

“Not yet.”

Taucher jotted down his name, then shoved herself away from the desk, hard. Rolled backward all the way to the window, reached over her head without looking, and yanked a dart from the dartboard hanging behind her. She reversed the missile with two fingers and flung it hissing past me, flat as an arrow. I heard it hit.

“I can get a subpoena and make enough noise to get her blown right out of that courtroom,” she said.

“We all know that, Joan.”

I turned. She had skewered a young man with a head of bushy black hair and a two-day growth of beard. When I looked again at Taucher, she had glided back to her desk and was staring at the threat letter.

“I’m asking you a favor, Joan. To keep Lindsey out of this for a few days, if you can.”

She glanced up at me, then went back to the letter. I could not see the special agent’s wheels turning. But I did know that Joan Taucher carried a very large and heavy cross on behalf of the San Diego FBI, which had failed to question two of the 9/11 hijackers who were living, worshiping, trying to take flying lessons, and visiting strip clubs in San Diego, almost right up until the time they boarded Flight 77 out of Dulles. The CIA was partially to blame. Not only that, but Taucher’s bureau had also failed to act on the violent encouragement issued by San Diego imam Anwar al-Waliki, just prior to 9/11, from a mosque not ten miles from where we now sat. Al-Waliki was an American-born radical Muslim who had been spewing anti-American venom for years. As I mentioned, Taucher had been a yearling agent in 2001. Twenty-four years old, assigned to San Diego.

Later, during my year and a half working with the JTTF, I had never gotten to know her well. But I continued to hear things — namely, that Joan Taucher had gone from dedicated to “obsessive” in her quest to prevent another terrorist from so much as drawing a breath in San Diego. That she played loose with the rules. That she was rude, punitive, and secretive. That MMA fit her aggression and meanness perfectly.

So, yes, I was asking a favor of Joan Taucher, but I had already done one for her.

“Lindsey did some quick fact-checking,” I said. “And the return address on the envelope is World Pizza in Ocean Beach. That’s why I brought this evidence to you.”

“Rather than where?”

“Rather than to Las Vegas, where Lindsey resides.”

Instant ice age. “This is mine, kind sir. A San Diego postmark makes it mine. World Pizza makes it mine. It’s still Nine-Eleven here in San Diego, and that makes it mine.”

Taucher had a point. A good one. The al-Qaeda 9/11 cell had worked much too damned well here in San Diego. San Diego had always billed itself as America’s Finest City. And there was some truth to it. It was pretty to look at, and the weather was always good, and there were beaches and mountains and deserts and farms and ranches and nice big freeways to get you around. Not too many people and not too few. We got along, more or less. Good parks. Good music and theater. Good food, locally grown.

And power. Naval Base San Diego, the Pacific Fleet, Camp Pendleton, Miramar Air Station. Ships and jets and men and women in uniform everywhere you looked. Plus the thousands of draftsmen and engineers and technicians and contract specialists who kept it all humming along. We liked having them, those men and women, those huge warships and roaring fighter jets. And don’t forget the satellites orbiting high above it all, and the bristling antennas on the local mountaintops and all the SIGINT they harvested and stored by the second. All that, and we felt very safe. Who wouldn’t?

So we lived and let live. Ours was a sunny blend of tolerance and self-absorption that allowed diverse peoples with diverse ideas to live and work here together. Have a great day. Not a problem. Waves are three-to-five at Blacks right now. Padres and Chargers looking good. Later, dog. Mañana. Inshallah.

And because of this, we were suckers that day. We were on our way to the beach, the job, the restaurant. The classroom, the mountains, the mall.

Distracted by our fineness.

America’s.

We still are.

But now we know we are.

The ghosts of 9/11 are not just Taucher’s. They belong to all of us who got fooled. She’s just more tuned in to those ghosts than most. Sees them. Seeks them out. Surrounds herself with them.

“So this is mine and don’t you forget it, Mr. PI,” she said.

“You’re welcome, Ms. FBI Agent.”

“Special Agent. You know what I can’t believe? You know what pisses me off the most about this worm-bucket and his fancy calligraphy pen? Calling himself Caliphornia. California is my state. He can’t take that word. He can’t call himself that. It’s just goddamned wrong. Am I being ridiculous here, Ford? Am I?”

“I like our state, too, Joan. I was born here and they’ll probably bury me here.” I scanned the faces on the walls again. “Do they all live here, too?”

“Mostly. Why?”

“Persons of interest?”

She shrugged. “Some. Mostly from security cameras. Some from police and sheriff surveillance. We get hundreds of them every month. Along with thousands of tips. Just the spelling of names is enough to defeat you. Read that poster.”

I followed her eyes to a poster tacked over some of the faces:

She gave me a satisfied nod. “Not to mention Hussein, Muhammad, and dozens of other names with different spellings. It takes twelve agents just to surveil someone twenty-four/seven. Did you know that? How resource-depleting and expensive it is? I’m two months behind on my Wall of Fame — just hanging the faces. Let alone figuring out how to spell their names. Or if they pose a threat. Or if I should just take a little closer look.”

“I have one more for you,” I said.

“Another face?”

“Better.” I smiled.

“It better be better,” said Taucher.