I nodded, cleared my throat, and kept going.
“Brady. I heard something while I was watching Jad’s tapes. It was Joe’s voice. He was talking to those kids over the computer. He asked them if they’d picked up anything on a plane from Beijing. They said they hadn’t. But still, the CIA knew something about a plane, maybe WW 888, before the crash.”
Brady voiced some colorful curses that I was pretty sure Julie wouldn’t understand, and after the stream of disbelief and fury subsided, I continued.
“So this morning, I went to the CIA office on Montgomery. Joe was there,” I said. “I saw him.”
Brady is a pretty good listener, and although he said, “You shittin’ me?” he let me speak without further interruption. I described my visit to the NR office, saying that while Joe hadn’t told me much, he had confirmed that Michael Chan was a spy for the Chinese. And that Alison Muller was a CIA operative, now missing in action.
“The CIA will deny knowing anything about that plane, right, Brady? But they can’t stop us from working our case. And I think, but cannot prove, that Alison Muller either did the shooting or saw it go down.”
Brady raked his hair back, stared out the window for a long minute, and said, “What do you want to do?”
I told him.
He said, “Boxer. Do you really want to take on the CIA?”
“I don’t see any other way to close this case.”
“OK,” he said. “I’m on board.”
CHAPTER 82
BRADY PUT OUT a BOLO for the driver of a black Lincoln Town Car with a dragging muffler before I got out of his car, and by three the next afternoon, a young man named Jeffrey Alan Downey, aka Jad, was in our interrogation room.
According to his driver license and the answers he gave to the uniformed officers who brought him in, Downey was twenty-two years old, a recent graduate of a computer sciences program at Berkeley. He worked as a freelance computer tech and lived with his grandmother in Oakland.
He did not volunteer who he worked for, but from the sketchy knowledge I’d gathered, he perfectly fit the profile for a low-level recruit for our local branch of the CIA.
Brady and I watched through the glass as Conklin went into the interrogation room with Jad. The young, sweaty owner of a beat-up Lincoln in violation of the city’s noise ordinance told my partner that he’d pay the fine, but there was no way, no reason to hold him. He knew his rights.
Conklin asked mildly, “Where were you last night, Mr. Downey?”
The young man who called himself Jad said, “Really? I don’t have to tell you that.” He looked mad and scared enough to pull his I’m-under-the-protection-of-the-CIA card. But he hadn’t played it yet.
Brady said to me, “If he says the L-word, let him go.”
“No problem, boss.”
Downey looked up when I entered the box. “You.
You’re the reporter from the Chronicle. What is this?”
I asked Conklin if I could have a private word with Mr. Downey. After Conklin left the room, I took a chair, introduced myself, and said, “Sorry we had to pull you in, Mr. Downey. But if you answer my questions truthfully, you’ll be free within the hour. No one will ever know you spoke with the police.”
“Am I under arrest? Because either way, I’m not telling you anything,” he sputtered. “You played me, lady. I think you violated some code or something.”
I got up from the chair, opened the door, and shouted, “Everyone, take a walk. And no cameras. I mean it.”
I winked at Conklin; then I slammed the door. I went back to my seat across from Downey and leaned over the table so that we were nose to nose.
“Mr. Downey, please pay close attention. You have held back information about the WW 888 disaster that cost over four hundred people their lives. You will either tell me what you know and when you knew it, or I will turn you over to Homeland Security. I don’t care who you think has your back, you are a coconspirator in a hellacious act of terrorism. Do you want to spend the rest of your life in a federal prison?”
Downey’s face turned red and tears flew out of his eyes.
He said, “Wait a minute, wait a minute. You think I know something about that airplane? I don’t. I called Cindy Thomas because I was sick about those dead people in the hotel room. But I had nothing to do with them, or that airplane—which hadn’t gone down when I made those surveillance videos. You don’t know if that guy, Joe, was talking about that particular plane. How could I know? I’m a geek. I signed on to do surveillance, period. I’m not even cleared for this stuff.”
He put his hands over his eyes and sobbed noisily.