Raveneau was groggy as he answered the phone. He recognized Secret Service Brooks’ voice and looked at the time, 5:30 on a dark cold morning.
‘Hope I didn’t wake you up,’ Brooks said. ‘Special Agent Coe called me.’
‘Good.’
‘But why didn’t I hear from you?’
‘Why would you?’
‘Those weapons are for targeting vehicles. They were sent here for the President’s visit.’
‘You’re good at big leaps, Nate.’
‘I wish I was. It’s just a different business, Inspector. In yours you like to have a body to work with. Then you can sit around and try to figure out who killed the victim even if it takes twenty-two years. In ours the game is keeping everybody alive so that means we have to work a little harder.’
‘Sure, that’s why you brought two other agents to the meeting with me.’
‘Are you talking about the meeting where you went out for coffee in the middle of it?’
‘It was either that or watch you read. I’m still waiting by the way for a copy of your file on Alan Krueger. Remember, you were going to messenger it over the next day’
‘I want to meet with you this morning.’
‘So you’ll bring the personnel file with you. Is that what you’re saying? In that case, let’s meet. What’s convenient for you?’
He met a different Nate Brooks at ten that morning and by then he had also cooled down. Brooks alluded to the pressure on him and Raveneau wasn’t sure about himself. He was surprised he’d gotten into it with Brooks earlier this morning. Could be that the bomb casings troubled him on a lot of levels. He knew the investigation would go full-throated at Khan’s roots. Ortega told him this morning the FBI was forming a task force and sending two teams to Pakistan.
Brooks held his hands out in front of him, palms down, fingers spread wide.
‘I can feel it coming,’ he said. ‘I can feel something is going to happen. It’s getting closer and closer and I’m not getting anywhere. The only thing I’m getting is more worried. Let’s take a drive and I’ll show you what I worry about. Come on, let’s go. We’ll get coffee and I’ll show you.’
In the car Brooks wanted to hear about yesterday. ‘What did you think when you slid the piece of plywood off and saw them?’
‘I thought about San Francisco and how small it is and how powerful they looked. I figured no one would ship something like those casings without planning to assemble and use them here.’
‘Welcome to my world.’
‘Is that your world, Nate? Have you seen a lot of bombs go off?’
‘They are what I worry about most and look at all the people who hate us. I grew up in Baltimore. I learned to watch everything and everybody. That’s how I ended up in the Secret Service. But you’ve been in homicide a long time and I want your opinion. Why kill the employees and bring the TV vans and everything that comes with it? Did they know too much?’
‘Someone saw it as a lesser risk to take them out.’
‘That’s how you see it?’
‘It’s one possibility.’
‘Was it Khan’s decision?’
‘I don’t know but the plywood delivery was to him and the window of time he was gone and the employees murdered was so narrow it’s hard to believe it was coincidence.’
‘That he just happened to be gone?’
‘Yeah.’
‘So, Raveneau, you think Khan is in on it.’
‘That’s not quite what I said.’
‘But you’re just dancing around it, and if he’s involved, he’s just one of others. Conspiracy, an organization that knows what it’s doing is my nightmare. Weapons like these can take out a motorcade without having to be perfectly placed, and they don’t have to get the President to change the country. Kill enough others and a motorcade will never be the same again. You hear that, right?’
‘If you’re about to start selling me on how you’re saving the country then drop me off at the next corner.’
‘I’m not.’
‘Why did you want to talk this morning?’
‘I want to talk because I’m scared of the kind of violence those weapons represent. I’m afraid we’re on the edge of this being the new normal. I want to talk because these cabinet shop murders are ground zero right now and you’re a homicide inspector and I want to know what you think.’
Brooks pointed in the distance at the Golden Gate Bridge.
‘We can close a bridge as the President’s motorcade crosses, but we can’t clear every corridor, particularly in a smaller city like this one. The Presidential limo is a battering ram but there’s a nightmare scenario where the motorcade enters a street without many side escape routes. Let’s say a vehicle rigged with an IED like these detonates ahead and pieces of motorcycle cops and fragments of vehicles go flying. At that point we’re just trying to get the President out any way we can with as much speed as possible.
‘Of course, the other side has thought about side streets too. They have a secondary plan. They’ve designed for overkill. I’m talking about something planned like a military operation.’
‘But you vary your routes. You take precautions.’
‘There’s only so much you can do in a smaller city.’
‘Where are you going with this?’
‘Once we have coffee I’m going to take you on one of the routes that could get used when the President is out on this next trip. He’s going to give a speech about the subway system San Francisco has started work on. I read they’re going to work eight years, twelve hours a day, seven days a week. But you’re from here so how many years will it really take?’
‘Twelve.’
They picked up coffee and drove toward Union Square, Brooks at the wheel of a new government car.
‘Presidents are fatalists. They know the risks can be overwhelming, but it’s the tradeoff for an open society. The President is going to give a speech here in Union Square and then go down to Embarcadero and ride the light rail with the mayor and at least one senator.’
He pointed out tall buildings, alleys, bottlenecks the construction was going to cause, the places that worried him most. He doubled back and picked up Grant Street and started through Chinatown where the streets were narrow.
‘Bad street but many voters and it’ll make people feel good.’ He pointed at a car. ‘Say there is a bomb in that car but it doesn’t go off until the last car in the motorcade is through. It detonates simultaneously with one ahead of the motorcade.’
‘How many times are you going to blow us up out here today?’
‘As it goes off, we’re going to get him the hell away from here, right? What are we going to do? We turn down one of these steep narrow streets and now we’re really vulnerable.’
They followed it to the end, to where the President, the mayor, and the senator got on the light rail system built after the Embarcadero Freeway came down. Brooks pulled over and they watched the rail cars slowly go by and Raveneau knew in Brooks’ head the President was riding on it. He waited for what he guessed would come next.
But Brooks surprised him, pointing toward the Ferry Building and saying, ‘That’s where Krueger was shot, a little bit back from the near corner of the Ferry Building.’
‘That’s right.’
‘I’m going to tell you more about him. I’m going to tell you some things you don’t know that I’m now authorized to tell you.’
‘Why are you going to do that?’
‘Because your friend Coe at the FBI has convinced me that the problem is even worse than we thought.’