Burying the Past Read online

  “I’ll do my best, Ma’am.”

  “Ok, well, I just wanted to give you a warning of what’s heading your way.”

  “Kara’s at home alone while Loretta and I are out here working on this thing, do you think you could...”

  “Yes, of course. We’ll take her in until you get back.”

  “Do you think it’d be better if she stayed with you until this blows over?”

  “I don’t know, but I’ll think about it and talk to some of my people about it. I promise I’ll do whatever I can to help her.”

  “I know you will, Ma’am. We trust you.”

  “I know for you that means a lot more than when someone in my profession says that. I’ll try to live up to your faith in me. Well, I need to get back to things here and see about getting Kara picked up. Good luck out there.”

  “Thank you, Ma’am.”

  She said goodbye and hung up. Taylor set the receiver down and leaned against the desk, thinking. He really was out of his depth and would have to trust the Senator to protect them as best she could. He wasn’t worried so much about Whitaker or himself, but he could just imagine what reporters would start hitting Kara with if they found out about her. If it came to that, he wasn’t sure he’d be able to hold onto his temper.

  Since there wasn’t anything he could do about it now, he pushed the thoughts aside with a shrug and walked back out into the main room, flagging down one of the agents Crawford had indicated. The younger woman led him through a series of corridors to a conference room with several laptops sitting open on the table. There were four other people in the room beside Whitaker and Crawford, all staring intently at their computer screens.

  Whitaker gave him a questioning look when he came into the room, but Taylor just shook his head. She gave a slight nod, understanding he’d talk to her about it later. Taylor did notice that Crawford hadn’t missed the byplay, but thankfully he didn’t ask any questions.

  They walked Taylor through several of the databases they were looking through. Travel schedules, records on the vetting that had been done for their student visas, DMV records, School records. Pretty much anything that involved these kids that ended up in a computer was looked at, down to their Amazon purchases.

  Two of the people Taylor hadn’t been introduced to were looking at videos running facial recognition. He didn’t recognize any of the places in the video, but if he had to guess, it was places they knew Ali or one of his roommates had passed through, probably looking at people they connected with.

  Taylor stared at a wall, leaning back from the laptop Crawford had set in front of him, his breathing slowing as he focused.

  Crawford stood to one side, arms folded on his chest, and stared for ten full minutes, his foot slowly tapping. Eventually, he backed up to the other side of the room where Whitaker was working.

  “What the fuck is he doing? He hasn’t touched the computer and hasn’t moved in forever. I thought he was some kind of hot-shot private detective or something. I was hoping he’d help at least sort through some of this stuff.”

  “Leave him be. He’s terrible at this part anyway. He gets the need for meticulous record searches, but he doesn’t have the patience for it.”

  “Then what the hell good is he?”

  “You’ll see. Trust me, the first time we worked together, I doubted him, but I’ve seen him do this a bunch of times. He calls it ‘Working the Problem.’ He’ll sit there for a while, just staring, and then sit up and say ‘I need to see this thing,’ and it’ll turn out that was the key to getting to the next step.”

  “So he just thinks his way through it?”

  “Pretty much. When he explains his thought process, it seems simple in retrospect, but it’s one that would take me weeks of digging through the clues piece by piece to get to.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “Just let him do his thing. I promise you it’ll be worth it. We’ll just keep doing our thing, and see if we can beat him to the punch.”

  Crawford frowned at her choice of wording, but went back to what he was working on, glancing up from time to time at Taylor, who was sitting still, thinking.

  After about an hour, Taylor sat up and turned to Whitaker, who had looked up when he'd moved.

  “We need to look at their school schedules.”

  Whitaker came over to him and started to type on the laptop in front of him, pulling up the records he’d asked for.

  “Why?” Crawford asked.

  “Because whatever their connection to Qasim’s plan is, it’s there.”

  “How in the hell do you know that?”

  “It’s the only place where they’d have anything Qasim would need,” he said as if it was obvious as saying what time it was.

  “Again, how the hell do you know that? You haven’t looked at a single thing since you walked in here.”

  “Look, it’s simple. Anything from their time in Yemen that the State Department had, wouldn’t be terribly useful. The places that would really interest us aren’t covered by video, probably have no human assets, and pretty much anything they did there, won’t be in any databases. There are a lot of places, places preferred by terrorists, that are practically throwbacks to the middle ages. They make sure it stays that way cause they know it’s a key to doing an end-run around our technical advantage.”

  “I get that, but we have records from their schooling in Yemen, their visa records, their interviews for visas...”

  “None of which will tell us why Qasim needed them. I’m certain the bombs they were building weren’t connected to Qasim. His plans would be bigger than a couple of kids wearing suicide vests. Since all this cell seemed to be involved in was the explosive making, I’m betting that was their initial mission here. Qasim came along later and drafted off of them for logistical support.”

  “Then why at the school?”

  “Well, what bothers me is I can’t figure out what support they’d actually be able to offer Qasim. He wouldn’t have used them in any operational capacity, I’m certain of that. A bunch of kids who all came in around the same time, on student visas, from a middle eastern country; and all ended up at the same school, living together no less? That's the wet dream of what you guys would be looking for. One false step that brings them any scrutiny, and warning bells would go off from their profile alone. Qasim would have known that, and wouldn’t have risked using them in any significant way.”

  “I guess.”

  “So the question remains, why did Qasim need them. It wasn’t for financial support. Qasim has great financing. If anything, part of the reason he was allowed to use cells already in the US, was that he could give them additional financing. It seems pretty obvious that these kids weren’t well financed. If they were, they wouldn’t have held onto the card that they’d used to buy the rental in Tucson. I mean, that or they’re just idiots. While these kinds of kids aren’t picked for their brains, they’ve managed to operate for almost a year in the US. If they were just dumb, they wouldn’t have made it this long. So he needed them for something else. These kids do nothing but go to school and go back to their apartment from what I was able to see in the initial intel we had on them. Since Qasim isn’t interested in their little bomb factory and he didn’t need their money, then what’s left is something at their school.”

  “Maybe he just needed someone to help him across the border?”

  “Maybe, but I don’t think so. These guys are based half way across the country from where Qasim crossed, and there are plenty of mercenary types on either side of the border that would have done it for just money. Sure, once he had the contact with them Qasim decided to use them instead of paying some coyote to get them across, but I don’t think he contacted them solely for that. He wasn’t big on supporting other groups without it benefiting him, but he also wouldn’t burn a cell already in place in the US just for something like this. No, I’m betting he was already working with them and decided to use them for two purposes.”

 
“So what are you looking for at their school then?”

  “No idea, but I’ll know it when I see it. Something at their school is notable.”

  “You hope.”

  “No, I know. Qasim is connected to them for some reason, the only thing they have that isn’t ruled out is at their school, so something at their school is needed by Qasim.”

  “That simple, huh?”

  “I told you,” Whitaker said.

  Taylor waved her away and said, “We still need to find out what that thing is.”

  “Here are their class schedules,” Whitaker said, pointing at the screen.

  “They don’t have any classes together,” he said after clicking through a few screens.

  “What about sports or clubs?”

  He paused and looked through more of the information on the screen, “They don’t seem to be in any sports. I’m seeing a couple of clubs. These two are in an engineering club. This one’s in some kind of ESL club thing.”

  “What about that,” Whitaker said, pointing at the screen.

  “Huh, seems a bit on the nose. These guys have managed to stay underground for a year, and yet joined a club that basically says ‘hi, we’re potential terrorists’.”

  “Maybe if they were at a major university where people keep track of group membership, but the University of Tennessee isn’t particularly high profile, which is most likely why they chose to go here. We can’t ignore it though. Ali and all of his roommates are in it. Saeed too.”

  “What?” Crawford asked.

  “It’s called Justice in the Middle East. Meets every Thursday night.”

  “You’re right, that’s a little bit on the nose. We should pull everyone in that group in.”

  “No,” Taylor said.

  “What do you mean no? You just said the connection was at the school and here’s some Middle East peace thing, just about screams connection.”

  “Yeah, but we don’t want to spook anyone until we know more. It might be someone on the periphery of the group. All we have are the names of kids signed up to a school-sponsored club, and a faculty sponsor. We don’t know enough to say it’s someone actually signed up for the group that’s the connection.”

  “How about we go talk to the faculty sponsor,” she said, having pulled Taylor’s laptop in front of her and quickly tapping out a bunch of commands.

  “He’s never traveled out of the country, went to college in Georgia, and other than this group doesn’t seem to have any leanings that suggest he’s involved. Odds are he’s just what he seems to be, the person who sponsored the group.”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  “Fine,” Crawford said, not happy about being teamed up on, “but I’ll do the talking.”

  “Sure,” Taylor said, obviously not meaning a word of it.

  Chapter 7

  University of Tennessee

  It was still early enough in the day when they were able to track the sponsor down at his office on campus. Taylor started getting an itch that this meeting was going to be annoying when they found the man's office in one of the buildings that housed most of the humanities department. That feeling just increased when he saw that the professor’s class list screamed ‘activist’.

  Taylor wasn’t particularly political, and he usually checked out when conversations turned to politics. He didn’t suffer fools gladly on most days, and when politics got involved, he found people became exponentially more insufferable.

  He caught a sideways glance from Whitaker as they walked into the humanities building and headed towards the man’s office.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Don’t look so annoyed, already. Maybe it won’t be all that bad.”

  “What are the odds a guy who teaches a class called ‘The Patriarchy of Western Government’ won’t be a jackass?”

  “You don’t think western governments are a patriarchy?” she asked

  A slight grin hinted that she was goading him for fun, rather than actually asking the question, but he decided to answer it anyway.

  “Even if they are, what’s the point in teaching a class like this? Anyone likely to take the class already believes they are, and that they’re a problem. Those who don’t think so, or don’t think it’s a problem; not only wouldn’t have their opinions changed by a class like this, they won’t even sign up for it. So what you end up with is a semester of telling people who completely agree with you exactly what they want to hear. It’s Socratic masturbation.”

  “Socratic?”

  “What … I read.”

  “I’ve seen what you read.”

  “Whatever. I was helping Kara study for the GED.”

  Her expression softened, and she rewarded him a warm smile, reaching out to lightly squeeze his hand. Taylor couldn’t help himself from smiling and giving her hand a squeeze back. As they reached the professor's office door, he released her hand, and shifted back to his 'game face,' a trick he’d learned from watching Whitaker work the first time they’d met.

  “Enter,” a voice from the other side of the door said after Whitaker knocked.

  The room was fairly small, making it clear this was one of the more junior professors in the department, with just enough room for a desk, a couple of chairs for visitors and three bookshelves. The desk was stacked with papers, behind which sat a fairly thin man with shaggy brown hair in a shirt and tie.

  “Professor Martin, I’m Agent Whitaker with the FBI. We have some questions if you have a few minutes.”

  The man shifted in his seat, his body stiffening and his arms crossing.

  “What kind of questions?”

  “We’d like to talk about one of the clubs you sponsor.”

  “I can just guess which one. You people can’t go around trying to silence groups that oppose U.S. military police. This isn’t Germany, and it’s not 1936.”

  Taylor had to physically keep himself from rolling his eyes, but he stayed silent and let Whitaker do this part, since there was little chance he could keep from calling the man an idiot.

  “We’re not trying to silence anyone, Professor. There was an incident yesterday, and we are just doing routine follow-up investigations.”

  “What kind of incident? We haven’t done any protests this semester, or anything else that should interest the Federal government.”

  “Did you hear about the standoff and explosion, yesterday?”

  Crawford and the locals had tried to keep details of what had happened out of the media, but an explosion followed by hordes of police and men in FBI windbreakers was bound to get attention. They’d given out a very limited press release and, while all the news stations were speculating about possible terrorist activity, so far they hadn’t confirmed anything.

  Taylor knew that wouldn’t last, and eventually the general details would get out. He also knew that Whitaker was aware that anything she said to this guy would end up on the evening news.

  “Five of the members of your club were preparing for a terrorist attack, and set off explosives when confronted by agents,” she said.

  Martin’s body language shifted again, his shoulders drooping and his eyes widening.

  “I can’t believe any of my kids would be involved with something like that. You must have made a mistake.”

  “It’s not a mistake, Professor. They had military-grade explosives and were building suicide vests, which they detonated during the apprehension. Saeed Antar was in a shootout with local police and his explosives-laden car led us to his roommates.”

  “Ohh, it was Saeed's group?”

  The man sounded less incredulous with the last question.

  “It sounds like you’re not so certain anyone from your group would be involved,” Taylor said.

  “It’s just … Saeed and his friends had come to a few meetings, but they weren’t really part of JITME.”

  Taylor suppressed a snort at the acronym.

  “They’re on the group roles you submitted to the administration.
”

  “Well,” he said, his eyes darting hesitantly to one side, “while it’s not really official, the administration decided which groups can use school resources based on the size of the groups. It’s not like they weren’t members, really. They came to several of our meetings, at least early on.”

  “But they weren’t active members?” Whitaker asked.

  “No, not really. They sat back and listened in the meetings they attended, but they never contributed, and always sat a little apart. I actually found them a bit troubling,” Martin said, and then held up his hands, fending off assumed protest. “Not because they were Muslim or middle eastern. They just … their attitude wasn’t very welcoming. We try hard to make sure we include everyone that wants to join JITME, but they could barely contain their contempt for us. I was actually glad when they stopped coming to meetings.”