She put the transcript back in her case. “Now, the company—APDR—has two facilities in or near Florida: its southeastern headquarters in Miami and an oil rig off the coast. It couldn’t be the rig since Moreno mentioned trucks. So NIOS was sure the headquarters, on Brickell Avenue, was going to be the target.

“At the same time, intelligence analysts found that companies with a connection to Moreno had been shipping diesel fuel, fertilizer and nitromethane to the Bahamas in the last month.”

Three popular ingredients in IEDs. Those substances were what had obliterated the federal building in Oklahoma City. Where they also had been delivered by truck.

Laurel continued, “It’s clear that Metzger believed if Moreno was killed before the bomb was smuggled into the United States his underlings wouldn’t go through with the plan. He was shot the day before the incident in Miami. On May ninth.”

So far it sounded like, whether you supported assassinations or not, Metzger’s solution had saved a number of lives.

Rhyme was about to mention this but Laurel got there first. She said, “It wasn’t an attack Moreno was talking about, though. It was a peaceful protest. On the tenth of May, at noon, a half dozen trucks showed up in front of the APDR headquarters. They weren’t delivering bombs; they were delivering people for a demonstration.

“And the bomb ingredients? They were for Moreno’s Local Empowerment Movement branch in the Bahamas. The diesel fuel was for a transportation company. The fertilizer was for agricultural co-ops and the nitromethane was for use in soil fumigants. All legitimate. Those were the only materials cited in the order approving Moreno’s killing but there were also tons of seed, rice, truck parts, bottled water and other innocent items in the same shipment. NIOS conveniently forgot to mention those.”

“Not intelligence failure?” Rhyme offered.

The pause that followed was longer than most and Laurel finally said, “No. I think intelligence manipulation. Metzger didn’t like Moreno, didn’t like his rhetoric. He was on record as calling him a despicable traitor. I think he didn’t share with the chain of command all of the information he found. So the higher-ups in Washington approved the mission, thinking a bomb was involved, while Metzger knew otherwise.”

Sellitto said, “So NIOS killed an innocent man.”

“Yes,” Laurel said with a flick of animation in her voice. “But that’s good.”

“What?” Sachs blurted, brows furrowed.

A heartbeat pause. Laurel clearly didn’t understand Sachs’s apparent dismay, echoing the detective’s reaction to Laurel’s earlier comment that they’d be “lucky” if the shooter was a civilian, not military.

Rhyme explained, “The jurors again, Sachs. They’re more likely to convict a defendant who’s killed an activist who was simply exercising his First Amendment right to free speech—rather than a hard-core terrorist.”