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San Francisco, California
Their third meeting at Eddy’s penthouse apartment took place two days later. Alice Linda and Joe McRory spent the previous day in San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley. They both were tracking Todd Adams’ former roommate, Achmed Al Hami.
Unlike Adams, Al Hami proved more challenging to trace. Adams deliberately torpedoed his academic career, burning bridges everywhere. Once they convinced people they interviewed to talk about Adams, it was difficult to get them to stop. Adams’ personal drama played out in a small community where everyone knew, knew about, or knew someone who knew. Each person they spoke with added a twist or two in the story. Undoubtedly the result of one person telling the story to the next and adding a personal embellishment along the way.
Al Hami—the good, loyal friend—lived quietly in the University Village, the roommate’s drama notwithstanding. Many people seemed to know Adams bailed from UC-Berkeley to work at Apple. They didn’t know anything beyond that point. Al Hami was another matter altogether.
Following the end of his postdoc appointment, Al Hami vacated his spot in university housing and spent time at a number of short term rentals in and around Berkeley. It was the sort of place where landlords didn’t expect a full year commitment or a prospect to present a fair, or better, credit rating. Rent was paid in advance on a monthly basis. And, when a tenant left, they disappeared without a forwarding address. So, the landlords were of no help.
Making the investigation more challenging was the fact that Al Hami didn’t possess a credit card or use a commercial bank. He cashed his university paycheck at the local student run food co-op at a time when students extended trust to one another—a practice long since discarded. Getting his social security number out of the university proved impossible. He didn’t have a driver’s license. He didn’t own a car. His preferred method of transport was the official transportation of the People’s Republic of Berkeley: A two wheeled bicycle.
Nevertheless, Linda and McRory managed to trace his continued residency in the general Berkeley area for a period of almost a year after he and Adams went their separate ways.
Then they caught a break.
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McRory’s contact at Apple called him two days after his visit to Cupertino, Apple’s World Headquarters. The contact remembered something really odd about Adams that he hadn’t witnessed before or since.
Most large organizations require new employees to complete a biographical demographic form with their personal information. One of the common form elements is the information about an emergency contact. What distinguished Adams in the view of the contact was Adams’ refusal to provide the information. At the outset of his employment at Apple, there was no one the company could contact in the event Adams was involved in some sort of emergency circumstances.
At the time, the contact was a low-level employee in Apple’s HR department. Apple was a big business at the time—not as successful then as it is today—but even then, the HR department had its rules. One of them was that every employee and contractor on the premises had to specify an emergency contact.
Getting a job at Apple was hard enough. Keeping a job at Apple could be even more difficult. So, when McRory’s contact was ordered by his supervisor with the seemingly simple task of obtaining Adam’s emergency contact information, he knew he had to succeed.
He remembered he started by sending Adams an email request. The first was opened and read, but didn’t merit a response. Succeeding emails were never even opened. In fact, the email server reported each email was promptly deleted.
Next, he walked to the nearby building where Adams had his office. His desk was pristine. It looked unused, because it was. Adams had the habit of camping out wherever he pleased on the Apple campus to do his work. His laptop was tethered to the campus’ secured Wi-Fi network permitting him unlimited mobility.
Chasing Adams around the campus proved fruitless. Adams’ sightings were frequent. Every time the HR representative went where Adams was last reported he came up empty. Trying to be helpful, co-workers where Adams had been suggested other places to look. Usually they suggested campus locations where they’d seen Adams hard at work on his laptop.
The poor HR drone was getting desperate. His supervisor failed to understand why it was proving so difficult to find Todd Adams and obtain his emergency contact information. It was mentioned that failure at a task so simple did not suggest an extended career at Apple HR.
One day, just as the drone was about to accept his fate—that he would never find Adams, that he would never obtain his emergency contact information—he found a postcard on his own desk. The postcard was purchased and mailed from the small marketplace store on campus that sold personal products, snacks, drinks, and so on.
The postcard was addressed to the drone. The message on the postcard contained the information for Achmed Al Hami. Mr. Al Hami was Adams’ emergency contact. McRory was impressed his contact could recall Al Hami lived, at the time, in Las Vegas.
At the very least, it was a jumping off point.
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“Al Hami left Berkeley to crash with a friend who lived in Las Vegas. Las Vegas was a boom town before the Great Recession. Companies were desperate to find employees. Everyone had a job. So, when Al Hami showed up at Safety-Keep with a doctorate in physics, the regional manager wouldn’t even let him leave the building without a commitment to start work the next day. Money wasn’t a problem. Housing wasn’t an immediate issue since he was crashing with a friend.”
“Al Hami and Adams kept in touch?” Eddy asked.
“They must have. That’s probably how the folk at Apple finally obtained his emergency contact information.” McRory closed his notepad and allowed himself to sink into the overstuffed chair.
“Now we know their motive, right?” Both Linda and McRory nodded their agreement. “Between the two of them, they certainly have the education and training to build a dirty bomb.” Another set of nods. “And Al Hami can provide the expended material courtesy of Safety-Keep. The company probably didn’t realize he was helping himself to their product.”
“If you want to make a big splash, then you detonate the bomb in a big city. What better place to do that than Las Vegas? The sin and fun capital of the desert southwest.”