Chapter 14.
It was totally unexpected: Yesterday David got an email from a man named Mark Larsen, he said they were first cousins and he found his name/email somewhere on a UTA Engineering School message board when he searched for people with the same last name.
That email triggered memories David completely forgot during college.
David recalled Mark and his parents when they were in grade school then without explanation they never heard from them again and he forgot they existed. Mark's father and David's father were brothers, they lived west of Austin Texas.
Because of what we did for a living we used the US citizen ID database (it went back to the year 1810) at work to investigate Mark Larsen and found six men with that name in the United States, only one of them lived near Austin. He had no arrest record and according to our database was a law abiding citizen, married with no children, not much debt, and a decent credit score around 790. David emailed Mark back after a few days and was surprised by their email conversation.
Mark said he was doing genealogy research on the Larsen Family so David contributed all he learned about their grandmother, she was 100% Native American, the tribe was called Atakapan and were from the gulf coast area (Port Arthur to Freeport Texas today). And David sort of summarized his life (and his parents) and gently hinted he was married to his best friend from UTA and now we were also work partners and my name was Ryan.
We heard back a couple days later with more info about Mark, his wife (Sandra), career, home, etc. Mark said he'd already gone to a genealogy research place in Indiana to look for records on the Larsen Family back to the 1880s. They sent many emails back and forth and shared things they had in common since they were branches of the same genetic tree. They both had a thing for technology and computers, Mark owned two drones and loved to fly in competitive games, and said they had no kids but wanted to someday.
David told him about the research he did into their grandmother during college. She was descended from one of the few survivors of the Atakapan tribe. They caught diseases from the Europeans that arrived on big wooden sailing ships in the 1800s and spread diseases which killed off most of the Atakapan tribes but their grandmother's grandmother fled the coastal area with her children to avoid small pox and 'Consumption.'
After dozens of innocent emails they decided to meet in downtown Dallas, we'd fly in and they'd drive in. We'd get a hotel room and they would too, they planned to spend a weekend in Dallas doing sightseeing and checking out some BBQ places.
Mark explained his wife was back in college full-time and couldn't take time off school so he'd drive up alone. He sent us pictures of him and his wife, David sent him pix of us at our annual marksmanship quals at McGregor Range where I took some shots of us in fatigues (pickle suits), sitting on display tanks from the Vietnam Era, sun glasses, but no shirts. The shot he sent was us in the shade so it didn't emphasize his tits much but with a close examination you could see they were big and I looked like a dorky high school kid.
Since Mark was a relative I wondered if he had big flat ones too. I could never get David to tell me which parent he inherited his tits from.
I asked David if he remembered seeing Mark shirtless when they were kids but he said he totally forgot everything about him and his parents. The pictures we sent Mark made me look like I was David's little brother because of how my upper body looked.
Eventually they set a date and the countdown started, two weeks to their reunion. David thought about calling his mother to see if she had any information about his cousin but decided that would open Pandora's Box of Shit and never contacted her. He really felt abandoned by his mother and was badly abused by his vary large father (when they figured out he was queer). So his attitude towards them was usually best summarized by the phrase: You can pick your friends but not your relatives.
We discussed riding the Goldwing there but decided to fly commercial so we'd be home in time to not miss any work. We'd leave ELP Friday night and return late Sunday just in time to confirm our availability via the alert box Sunday night before midnight.
We had one mission just before our family visit but like one of the others it got resolved before we arrived. That time they were able to turn the jet around before it landed in Bismarck North Dakota.
We'd had a few of them lately and it's never our fault, it was just the way stuff was going in the major crime industry. It seemed everyone was in a hurry lately, especially bank robbers and kidnappers.
Earlier in the week State Police in Kansas tried to get us involved in one case they described as child abduction, we even flew to Topeka and met with the police but when we pressed them for information about the kidnapper we found out it was actually a custody case. The alleged kidnapper was the biological father but the mother was on the Topeka City Council. After we learned that the child was in no danger whatsoever we packed our stuff and left during their dishonest presentation.
We've learned over the years that most child abductions were actually visitation disputes between the bio parents.
Friday evening we left El Paso on a flight to Dallas and arrived at DFW at 8:15pm and got a taxi ride to downtown Dallas to the Hyatt Regency beside Reunion Tower. (Reunion Tower was functionally like the Space Needle in Seattle.)
It was amazing to see how sprawling DFW metro was. We'd really only been downtown once before seal school, but we've been to the airport which was about halfway between Dallas and Fort Worth, not too far from the stadium in Arlington where the Cowboys played.
To many Texans the Dallas Cowboys were a great source of pride and a sense of ownership was common for most Texans. In other words, football and the Cowboys were a big fucking deal in Texas.
David said it would be funny if we learned his cousin was also staying at this hotel too.
We got a call from him the next day at 9am and decided to meet at Dealey Plaza which was within walking distance of our hotels.
We met outside on the plaza and shook hands, they hugged briefly and sat on the benches overlooking the grassy park (where JFK was shot) and talked about what few memories they had from when they were little kids. Mark explained why they fell out of contact, but it had nothing to do with the kids.
Mark was nearly the same height and weight as David but his upper arms were bigger. He was nicely dressed and had a Texas accent and pronounced the city correctly (the H in Houston was silent). That was clearly a signal Texans from around these parts used to check each other. I took a few pictures of them side by side, you could see it in their faces they were cousins, same eyebrows lines and noses.
Mark kept checking his watch and said we needed to be at the restaurant for our lunch reservation or we'd lose the booth. It was a deluxe steakhouse downtown called: McCarthy's on Main.
The place opened in 1936 and fed every senator and congressman in the state, many of them had pictures on the wall. They had a huge B&W portrait of LBJ and Ladybird, I think David liked LBJ because of the sexual overtones in his name.
David avoided any discussion about the big falling out between him and his parents but said it was probably easy to figure out, he looked at me and smiled back at Mark. Mark said he was happily married and had no interest in LGBT affairs and felt sex should be a private matter, and that was the end of that topic. We felt perfectly comfortable around him after that. We both felt after listening to him talk he meant what he said.
We had a great meal, two smaller eight ounce ribeye steaks with the salad bar and steamed veggies. We drank wine and then decided to walk around the downtown area and talk some more. There was a park down the street we could walk to and sit and chat for a while.
We found out he was at a hotel nearby, about four blocks away. He said he wanted some feeling of family other than his parents. The cousins decided to stay in touch.
We sort of explained what we did for a living while keeping the secret stuff secret, but it always sounded like we were hiding something when we discussed work.
The problem was there was no good way to answer work questions without sounding like liars.
Mark told us about his job while we walked to a park down the street and sat in the gazebo in the shade and sipped our bottled waters. Our job descriptions sounded like carefully crafted dialog from a public relations expert and not an honest answer, to most people it was obvious and somewhat insulting to some.
It was illegal for us to say we worked for a secret crime fighting organization the government didn't want the civilian population to know about. We ended up giving vague answers and half truths. Captain Jones said it might be illegal to say the name National Security Service out loud around civilians.
Late in the afternoon we decided to take naps after the long day and decided to meet at the bar up in Reunion Tower at 8pm. We walked all the way back to the hotel (11 blocks) and took a nap, I set an alarm on my cell. We got up at 7pm and took showers. We went down to the hotel lobby to watch for Mark.
He arrived by taxi at 8:05 and walked in glancing around the spacious lobby, David stood up and waved then we all walked to the elevator and rode up into the tower and got a booth and ordered nachos with cheese, peppers, and salsa and drinks.
We ended up eating two orders of nachos and moved to a small table with a view of the city from 470 feet up. We stayed at that table by the windows and had lots of drinks and had a great time. I think our bar tab ended up being $260. We got Mark into a cab just before midnight then went to our room and passed out on the bed. Mark told us he didn't care for the price of drinks (we paid the bar bill) and would probably never go back, despite the fantastic view.
Sunday morning was quiet, we walked to a restaurant for breakfast then back to the room and took another nap. The phone buzzed with a text at 10:55am, it was Mark apologizing for missing the morning and arranged to meet us for an early dinner at 5pm, we decided to meet at the same place we had lunch yesterday.
When we asked if he had time to hang out during the day he said he felt hung over and needed to sleep, which was half our fault so we laughed about it and said we'd see him at 5pm (sharp) outside the front door of the restaurant on Main Street.
That evening we met on the sidewalk outside the steakhouse and walked in together, we apologized for pushing too much alcohol last night and he laughed. David invited him to visit us in El Paso, there was even less to do there than here, maybe a quick trip to Juarez, or maybe a jeep ride in the desert but El Paso was not a sightseeing destination.
Most of the time people came to El Paso to visit someone they ended up leaving El Paso to find something to do.
If you polled El Pasoans where they liked to take visitors most of them would say: The Tramway, Scenic Drive, Transmountain Road, then somewhere up in New Mexico.
You can't show them the mighty Rio Grande River because most of the year it only has a trickle of water running in it. Ever see a trickle of water running along the curb when a neighbor is washing his car? That's what the Rio Grande looked like most of the year now.
We had some small historical museums but nothing fancy. There was a famous steakhouse east of town that served huge steaks from locally raised steer. We could run him up to White Sands (New Mexico) to see the park (not the missile range), Cloudcroft was up in New Mexico too, it was mildly interesting and their antique wooden train trestle if that sort of thing was interesting.
Ruidoso was sort of a theme town like the ones in Disneyland but mostly not worth the two+ hour drive just to see a theme town and pine forests. Ruidoso was mostly known for a large old horse race track (Ruidoso Downs) and some nice ski resorts.
We could take him to McKelligon Canyon Park but that wasn't always safe since the gangs sort of took it over at night. There were three parking areas in the mountains overlooking the city but they were often crowded and sometimes too rowdy to bring grandma or the kids. Like I said, most of the time visitors came from out of state to visit in El Paso the thing to do was drive north into New Mexico. In the old days the main tourist destination was Juarez, but that stopped in the 1980s.
After several beers Mark confided in us that he was afraid his marriage would not survive his wife's degree program at UTA. He said she was hanging out with a group of butch lesbians that were turning her against him and men in general. He said she's cheated on him and was only coming home now five days a week but claiming to be doing homework and research near the campus with classmates, staying on campus saved her a two hour round trip commutes three days a week.
We asked him questions about her like where they met, when, and about her family. We asked about school, her major, and other changes he noticed after things changed at home. He showed us about thirty photos of them at parties, bars, on vacation deep sea fishing off Galveston, etc. David whispered that it was all typical hetero stuff, but he'd like to see the images again and count how many images had no smile on either of them.
Mark said she was a business management major, a bachelor's degree, same university we went to. She was almost done and should graduate this December and had taken out student loans for almost forty thousand bucks. I told him we had twice that amount at the same school for two master's degrees but we lived on campus.
We sat in that large mahogany booth for almost three hours drinking and laughing and telling stories and had a great time and ran up one helluva bar bill, which we paid (in cash) and left a nice tip for occupying their booth for that long, but the place never got more than half full, if they'd been busy we would have left. He mentioned it to the waitress and she said it was fine, stay as long as we wanted. This was a slow time of the year for them.
Our conversation also included gay life, he was surprised to learn we still had to keep our marriage a secret in a few specific situations. At work the fact that we were married was kept very quiet when military dignitaries visited the office and asked to meet the crime fighting duo.
It actually didn't bother us much, we learned it was easier to not talk about it than deal with the lame comments most people made when they were told about us being married. The number of times we've actually been discriminated against for being a gay couple was a very short list. It was most commonly an issue for insurance companies or government agencies.
Most of the people we knew acted like they didn't care. If anyone we met was offended by that we simply never saw them again, end of problem!
Mark said he never asked his friends what kind of sex they had. He said he enjoyed sex as much as the next guy but he felt it was a private matter and he didn't want to discuss it among friends, and he wasn't into porn either. Then he oddly boasted that he `didn't need no Viagra neither!'
When Mark got buzzed on tequila shots he told us about his work, he was a district manager for a company that sold supplies to dairy farms and dairy product manufacturers. We chuckled when he said that, but Mark defended his company saying that we'd be surprised how many dairy related businesses there were in the US.
Every state had them (except Alaska) and they all needed throw away items used in cleaning equipment like detergents, wipes, disinfectants, hoses, solvents, safety gear, and insect control. He'd been with them for six years and liked sales and drove around the six counties outside Austin and Travis County five days a week taking orders. He stopped talking as if he expected us to tell work stories but we both sat there staring at him waiting to hear more funny cow stories.
Just to get a chuckle, David asked him if he ever got chased by a Longhorn and Mark laughed and said that was a male, not a female with udders. He said most milk came from Holstein cows, those were the ones with black and white fur but no horns. David acted like he didn't know that.
The conversation unexpectedly turned dark when he told us about what he feared was a looming divorce and how much wealth he'd lose. David said something that surprised me.
"I hope it works out for you, but if it happens remember you have family in El Paso, you should keep us in mind."
"Thanks Cuz, that's nice to hear. Around home everyone loves my wife and cannot imagine how dark she became in college and how her butch girl friends turned her against me."
"Did she ever show an interest in women in the past?" David asked.
"Well, not that I ever noticed. I mean all women are interested in other women, it's how they get motivated. Women react to other women in ways men will never understand. Hell, the more I got to know her the more I realized I didn't understand her at all. The longer we lived together the more I realized I was living with a stranger. After her first year at UTA it became noticeable and friends whispered to me about things they thought I was ignoring, like warning signs. She started dressing different and even cut her hair short and got a tattoo and some other stuff."
I interrupted, "Okay, let's not turn this into a negative evening, I think the point David made was after you go home please remember you have family and you are welcome to be a part of our lives. You're family, that's important to us."
Mark looked like he was getting emotional and looked away and whispered "Thanks Ryan, you're very kind, I'm glad you married David .
Mark (clearly drunk) kept going and told us how his wife started spending weekends with classmates on campus in a student dorm, she said she slept on the floor (which was probably another lie). And he found out she stayed in a dorm room with two butch chicks that probably licked her clit all night and that started her conversion to the dark side.
Not too long after his descriptions we parted after hugs and handshakes and we went back to the hotel and packed and left for the airport, last flight of the day to El Paso. We got home at 11:49pm and changed the alert receiver back to On-Duty.
David confided in me he remembered that when they were little kids, like 2nd grade, that Mark goosed him and rubbed his crotch almost every time they were outside together playing in the woods. Of course that was about 25 years ago!
We had a discussion in bed that night wondering if Mark never gave his wife proper oral sex and that was their downfall. Then he said he thought Mark was a year or two older than him.
The next day (Monday), late in the day we were alerted about an actual terror alert in Minnesota in the Twin Cities. The jet was on the way, we were to leave immediately in our Batsuits with our standard gear. At the office the OD told us details were incomplete but it appeared a group of Middle Eastern extremists had blown a large glass skylight above the food court in a busy indoor mall. It dropped tons of glass and steel framework onto innocent shoppers seventy feet below the skylight. They sent an email taking credit to a local TV station and called for their brothers to continue attacks against non-believers.
Local police had some leads but needed more info, needed our sleuthing skills and our ability to infiltrate, eavesdrop, and capture.
The best lead so far was an elderly woman parked her car outside the mall moments before the blast and when she got out of her car she overheard men talking in Arabic inside a full-size van parked next to her car. She heard a countdown and shouting in celebration even before the smoke cloud was visible above the mall. She memorized the license plate and color of the van.
Police ran the plate and it showed an apartment complex in a part of Saint Paul known to be home to lots of Arabic speaking immigrants and to the oldest Mosque in the Twin Cities. All that information was kept secret by the police.
Our flight touched down one hour fifty minutes after the alert and we were picked up by St. Paul Police and taken to their downtown station and office complex.
During our meeting I whispered to David that it seemed odd that the FBI wasn't very well represented here, only one agent and he was semi-retired and drove into the station from home.
We sat down with the lead investigator to review what they had so far which included the list of all apartment renters at that address.
We requested they get permission to install surveillance gear in and outside their apartment and get basic floor plans for the building. While they obtained that information we used our computer to access the DOD files on the people in the apartment and found out there were three men. All of them came to America from Saudi Arabia and were locally known as Muslim extremists, the kind that swore death upon all non-believers and were asked to stop attending prayers at some local mosques. Some of them had long postings on Facebook with anti-capitalist rhetoric and fully supported attacks against all non-believers, including women and children.
Our research added more names to our suspect list, some of them also lived in that one apartment complex. We sent a message to our boss to request a Stingray box from Washington. He replied with a message that said he'll notify us how and when it'll arrive.
In the past when we used a Stingray it was sent from Chicago in a checked aluminum brief case on a passenger flight. Checked luggage was how it was returned to Chicago too. We've also requested a basic Stingray should be built into our pelican cases.
We learned there was a cheap hotel less than a block from the apartment building and got a room there right away, with a balcony that had a view of their apartment down the block.
That was basically our first day. We left the police building at 7pm and went to the hotel and got a text that the Stingray was on the way, it would arrive in a suitcase on American flight 755, and had a photo of the claim ticket we could put on our cell to claim the case. Since we were on a mission the same rules applied to this bag as our pelican case. Any interference may be considered an act of treason.
We've found one of the best ways to deal with airport security people was to not attract attention or act desperate or aggressive.
We grabbed a taxi to the airport at 12:20am for the flight then we stood in baggage claim and watched for the case to arrive. They mounted the Stingray inside a silver-aluminum case with a pink plastic hand grip. We showed the guard the photo of our baggage claim ticket then stood by the carousel as the first bags started to move down the belt to the oval carousel. We recovered the case and grabbed a taxi back to the hotel and unpacked our stuff and showered.
David got in bed and I plugged in the Stingray and attached the antennas so it could start marking a record of local cell phones. That evening I suggested we should put pairs of old hospital scrubs inside the uniform case for the next time we stayed the night during a mission, he agreed.
David said he had the feeling this was not just a couple guys that were angry at America, there was something much larger going on. He said, "I mean why immigrate to the country you hated so much?" He said we should learn who funded their attack.
The next morning we linked it to the computer and saw the list of nearby cell phones grow and grow, we knew at least two or three of those numbers were involved in the attack on the mall. The death count grew overnight, now it was eight dead with more anticipated over the next few days.
We were shown photos of the attack scene in the mall. The food court shops sat around a wide open area with two floors of stores above it but the bottom floor was an open courtyard surrounded by specialty food shops, some were national chains. In the center was a dining area with tables and chairs, trees and lots of plants, it was a very lush green area indoors that felt like summer all year. Roughly 70 feet above the dining tables was a large rectangular glass and steel peaked window to let in sunlight.
According to witnesses the blast damaged the glass and steel frames. At first some glass fell, which got some people up and running then seconds later the steel framework collapsed and fell in sections all the way to the food court dining area but most people already ran for cover. Most of the dead died from the initial shower of plate glass that fell like enormous daggers.
The falling steel framework snagged on 2nd and third floor railings and cut people leaning over the railings to watch the chaos down on the first floor. Most people in the area did not realize it came from the large skylight above them.
Most of the initial deaths bled out on the food court floor. Two deaths occurred on the 2nd floor balcony after they were smashed by falling steel framework. That entire section of the mall would never re-open they said, we declined a tour of the site after seeing dozens of coroner photos.
Both of us got angry at the senselessness of the attack. Acts like that usually propelled us to advance the perps to immediate execution because they were gravely mentally ill and too dangerous to be alive on the planet.
At 8am I went to the police station for updates while David worked the Stingray and hand checked each number it recorded.
I reviewed the building's plans and saw their apartment was on the second floor and faced the same street as our hotel room, they were about 120 feet down the street near an intersection. Directly across the street from the apartment balcony was a middle eastern deli so I decided to have a falafel for lunch and sit there and sip coffee and read the paper on one of their tables and attempt to drive two spiders across the busy four lane street and up the outside of their building. I'd have to carry our case with me to the deli to eat lunch and stay within range of the spiders once they penetrated the building across the street.
Each apartment had a window air conditioner that went through the wall and would likely be our entry point. It was not likely to be in use this time of year. We modified two spiders with 2nd batteries to give us extra operating time. The distance from their apartment to our hotel room might be too far unless we put our pelican case outside on the balcony, then it might work.
I took two spiders and set them on the sidewalk outside the deli and watched them navigate the pedestrian crosswalk. They knew to watch for traffic and cross with the light, then run like hell and hope they didn't get picked off by an urban predator bird. Both made it across and up the outside of the building but I had to hand steer them to the correct AC unit and let them work out how to penetrate inside. Most larger AC units had air holes around knobs and fan housings that spiders could fit through. Luckily, the target apartment had a small balcony with a tiny charcoal grill which made it easier to identify.
The first spider appeared on my glasses as a green dot, then a couple minutes later the 2nd one appeared so I put one of them in standby mode (inside the AC unit) and used the other one to look around the apartment. I saw one person in the apartment, he was on the sofa watching a morning talk TV show. That man was later identified as Hassan Bilal. The AC unit was behind him so he wouldn't notice the spider.
I moved around on the ceiling and saw newspaper clippings for the mall attack and notes about explosives and remote detonator circuits. I also took lots of still photos of the papers and the man on the sofa.
Soon, he switched from Good Morning America to an online porn service and started wanking on the sofa but I didn't care to watch that show. He didn't appear to be well endowed and had very dark meat which made it hard to see on my screens. He obviously never trimmed the bush.
I texted David that a perp was wanking.
A while later David texted me and said he was going to try to place a camera in the hallway outside their door disguised as a smoke detector.
I parked the spider on top of a kitchen cabinet and put it into standby mode and left the deli for the hotel then tried to connect to them with our case outside on the balcony and found it worked marginally so I asked David to buy me an extension cord, like twenty feet and bring it here. When I added the external antennas the signals from the spiders got a lot stronger.
David spent most of the day at the police station situation room. Slowly they grew the list of suspects and evidence but David didn't tell them we were already inside their apartment. He took lots of notes from their meetings and had ten pages written so far.
We felt we had identified the three men that were inside the van during the blast and had warrants for all three and enough evidence to support convictions in court but hadn't started arresting people yet. He also brought home larger color hi-res facial photos from when they got driver's licenses in Minnesota.
While he was at the police department I moved the first spider to a corner of the ceiling in the living room that had a view into the kitchen and the front door. The spider was now programmed to take photos with movement but not send a live signal since that ran the battery down much faster.
At 2pm the second resident returned wearing the work uniform of a large local HVAC company which might be how he got onto the roof of the shopping mall. I texted him to confirm which HVAC company had the contract for mall maintenance, and they matched.
Something weird happened, we got a partial still photo that looked like the 2nd guy (later identified as Saad Hadi) carried a chair over to the corner and stepped on the chair with a spray can of something and killed our first spider. We knew regardless of what they did with it the self-destruct mode would run overnight and reduce it to ash (unless it was underwater at the time). It wasn't clear if they saw it as a real spider or a high-tech drone but we had to report it to the boss as a breach of security. That automatically put that guy on our kill list just as if he'd opened our case and examined our weapons.
About an hour later I activated the 2nd spider but kept it inside the AC unit and looked out through the front vent cover around the living room. They were speaking in Arabic which was foreign to us but it was recorded and shared with ELP and the Pentagon.
At 6pm the two perps left and showed up at the deli across the street for carry-out then came back and ate. I never saw anyone pray during the day unless they did it in the bedroom.
That evening we saw a third man arrive (later identified as Jabbar Asghar) but he had something in his hands (with an antenna on top) and looked to be checking the apartment for bugs or transmitters. The men stopped to look closely at the air conditioner with flashlights then removed the plastic front cover then we lost signal from the 2nd spider. Luckily we got good face photos of the men involved.
That night at 2am David walked over to the apartment building and mounted a smoke detector on the ceiling by their door that had a camera and microphone with wireless transmission to us. This would give us decent facial shots of everyone that left their apartment. Placing it was easy, the back of the detector was a big adhesive pad, all he had to do was peel off the paper and reach up and press it against the ceiling and pull the tab to activate it. Easy Breezy!
The next morning we readied one more spider for audio only use, we steered it inside their apartment using the sewer line vent pipe on the roof but hid under the kitchen sink. The cabinet sort of acted like a big ear that collected sound from the apartment.
Within two days we had hours of recordings, audio video and listened to them discuss the mall explosion operation, who designed the blasts to shatter the glass and frames, best times to blow it, and justification. We basically had admissions recorded by three of the four suspects.
Based on what we heard so far they felt the blasts were a partial failure and had intended to kill lots more people than the ten that died so far.
The spider under the sink ran for two days and only sent us sound recordings when its memory was full, then went back into standby mode but continued sound activated recording.
On the evening of the third day it sounded like there was a lot of activity in the apartment then it got quiet. Referring to photos from the hallway camera we saw them all leave with suitcases and boxes. It appeared they got enough information from the first spider to identify it as manmade and felt their apartment was 'bugged' so they left.
City police had identified them as being at the mall prior to the blast based on cell phone records. Service records placed the HVAC repair guy we photo'd in the apartment as being at the mall the day before the blasts servicing equipment on the roof. He was identified on mall security video as being Saad Hadi.
The next morning David disclosed what we'd done to the police and they immediately accused us of ruining the investigation but he reminded them none of our intel was gathered by police, we didn't ruin their investigation, we only pushed them to move to another location but they had to sleep somewhere and wherever that was we'd find soon them.
I knew David was about to say we could find them because the trio of idiots always used cell phones and those were easily traceable, but all of the cops carried them too. So he declined to say the obvious, which was smart.
The FBI agent at the meeting called us careless idiots and told us to go back to El Paso and ruin police investigations in some other state.
David was immediately furious so he got up and walked out after being stared at by twelve angry men. Nobody spoke as he walked out of the room. We never gave the cops the names of the perps but they had their photos and could identify them in a few hours if they wanted.
Back at the hotel we called our office and updated our boss on what happened and sent him photos of the guys that saw the spiders close-up, he told us to come home. We packed our stuff and took a taxi to the airport and flew home after waiting four hours for an actual direct flight from MSP to ELP.
The only thing we left behind was the locally store bought smoke detector wifi camera in the hallway.
On the way home we took turns recording our notes into the tiny recorder and transferred the file in the computer at the OD desk. At almost any boarding gate in El Paso airport it's only a 300 foot walk downstairs to our office. But this time one of us had to wait in baggage claim for our stuff to show up, three cases this time.
The boss was upset but supportive, after all we used up three spiders. Twenty minutes later David walked in the office with our bags. He left the case with the Stingray with the OD to return to Chicago.
We spent nearly four hours discussing the case and he said he disagreed with the FBI, we did not ruin their investigation or prosecution. We gathered valuable intel that could lead to three arrests. All the intel we collected would be used at their trials if they pursued the case.
David said, "What?"
"I said, if they pursued this case." The boss replied.
"What does that mean?" David asked angrily.
"It appears this is too hot for the local prosecutor and he put a halt to the investigation so for now they got away with killing ten innocent people, two of them were teens in middle school."
I asked, "How's that?"
He said, "The Twin Cities is a `defund the cops' place and they don't want to be seen as hostile toward Muslims or people with brown skin so they shut down the investigation."
David asked, "What about the three guys that saw the spiders? We have still photos of them up-close looking directly into the camera on the spiders, and that one guy reached his hand towards it?"
The boss sighed and said, "We can legally go after them ourselves but I am not going to make it a priority." They can't take spiders apart and if they tried the spider would self destruct before they found out what made them work. The worst part was the word probably got out that they were being spied on by tiny metallic spiders. The word would get out that the USA had miniature robot spiders used for spying.
He added a comment that over the past several years there had been several police killings of unarmed civilians around the Twin Cities and they were trying to improve their image.
After spiders were built and tested the inside of each aluminum spider body was filled with epoxy to make them impossible to dismantle, but they burnt-up completely to a spot of ash once the epoxy started to burn. It was potentially dangerous to be near one when it self-destructed, they could easily start a fire in a car or a house. Since we slept every day within 20 feet of two atomic bombs we changed our attitudes about risks in general.
For the next few weeks we kept an eye on the news online from Minneapolis because it was hard to forget the carnage we saw.
Note to readers: Just a reminder that this story is 100% fiction.