Jihad (34 page)

“Is there anything we can connect here to Asad’s murder?” Rubens asked.

Telach shook her head. “They haven’t paid their property taxes in two years,” she said.

“I hardly think that would justify a raid. We’ll have to use the imminent danger clause in our finding,” Rubens told Telach. “I will handle the legal end. Get a force in place.”

“Right away.”

When Telach had gone, Rubens picked up the phone to tell Bing and, through her, the president. Using the finding—the formal document authorizing the Deep Black mission—as the legal authority for the search was not a panacea. It greatly complicated the prosecution of anyone who might be apprehended at the site, since citing it at trial might open a legal Pandora’s Box exposing covert operations around the world. It was one thing to do so in the case of someone like Asad bin Taysr, one of al-Qaeda’s most important leaders. Here, they were likely to capture mere foot soldiers, if they captured anyone at all.

On the other hand, Rubens couldn’t allow whatever Asad had been planning to proceed. If he had a chance to stop it, he had to take it.

He used that exact phrase to explain his reasoning to Bing. Uncharacteristically, she didn’t criticize his decision—in fact, she was so quiet that he almost asked if she was still on the line when he finished.

“You’re proceeding on your own authority, then,” she said finally.

In other words, if something goes wrong, I’ll hang you out to dry.

“Yes,” he told her. “That’s right. We’re following the finding and I’m proceeding as I see fit.”

“Very well,” she said, promptly hanging up.

CHAPTER 107

CHARLIE DEAN MET Elsa Williams, the detective from the murder investigation assigned to dig up information on Kenan, at the college dormitory building where Kenan had supposedly lived. Elsa’s loud voice boomed in the small dorm suite, and even Dean felt a little intimidated as she pressed the roommate for information.

“You didn’t think it was
strange
that he disappeared?” Williams demanded.

“He was kind of a strange guy. Disappearing is like, his M.O. I roomed with him a couple of semesters ago. Kind of, you know, cool to have a roommate who’s never around.”

“Strange how?” asked Dean.

“Just, you know. Strange.”

“Who were his friends?” asked Williams.

“Didn’t have any.”

Williams reared her head, as if she had to move it to process what the roommate said. “Now I find that
hard
to believe. No friends? None?”

“Well, I was kind of a friend.”

“Were you a good enough friend to lend him your credit card?” asked Dean.

Williams gave him a sidelong glance, but said nothing.

“No,” said the roommate.

“You think he might have used it?”

“No.”

“You sure about that?”

The kid gave him a shrug.

“I’d like to check it,” said Dean.

“Well, like, um, my mom gets the statements.”

“So you don’t really know if he used it,” said Williams.

“I mean—”

“It’s okay,” Dean told him. “Give me the number and I’ll do it for you.”

The young man dug the card out of his wallet and Dean read it as he wrote it down on a piece of paper, allowing the Art Room to hear.

“Just one?” Dean asked.

“All I need. We pay it off every month.”

Williams went back to asking about possible friends. Dean looked again at Kenan’s things, collected in a small pile on his bed. There were no books and only a few clothes; no papers, no pens.

“This is all he had here, huh?” Dean asked the roommate.

“He had more, books and stuff, but he took it with him.”

“And you don’t know where.”

“Nope.”

“You got a lot of stuff,” said Williams, taking a long glance around the room. “Computer, books—what’s your major?”

“It’s chemistry.”

“Tough subject.”

“You bet.”

“He ever borrow money?” asked Dean.

“A couple of bucks, maybe.”

“He pay you back?” asked Williams.

The roommate shrugged. “I guess.”

“You’re a Tiger fan?” Williams picked up a coffee mug with the baseball team’s logo.

“Nah. That’s just for loose change. Half of it’s pennies. And change for the laundry. That’s what Kenan mostly borrowed for. Quarters. Half dollars.”

Williams shook the cup. “You use slugs, huh?”

“No way.”

She picked out something and flipped it at the roommate.

The roommate looked at it. “Well, it’s like Mexican. Pesos.”

“Isn’t worth a dime, I’ll bet. But it fits right where a quarter would.”

“I didn’t use it.”

“Relax,” said Williams, putting the cup back. “We’re not going to bust you for putting slugs in the condom machine.”

“I THINK I’D LIKE to call it a night,” said Williams after they finished. It was a little after five.

Dean shrugged.

“You disagree.”

“I want to talk to his professors,” said Dean.

“The religion one especially.”

“Him especially.” Since it was Saturday, the teachers weren’t on campus, but the police had obtained a list from the school, along with home addresses and phone numbers.

“Suit yourself,” said Williams.

The religion professor was just leaving his house for dinner. Williams told him they were investigating a murder; he shrugged, but still seemed reluctant to answer their questions.

The man was more than a little full of himself and somewhat contemptuous of his students. He had had Kenan Conkel in two classes: Comparative Religion, an introductory class where “he didn’t rise above the herd,” and Christianity and Western History this semester.

“How’s he doing?” Dean asked.

“Not particularly well, I don’t think. I can’t recall the specifics, which leads to my conclusion.”

“Does he attend class regularly?” asked Williams.

“I don’t bother taking attendance. I’d rather that someone not interested in learning stay away.”

“Does he ever argue with you in class?” Dean asked.

“How so?”

“He’s a Muslim. He must have disagreed with some of what you said.”

“This is a history class and my approach is neutral,” snapped the professor. But then, in a less confrontational voice, he added, “Why do you think he’s Muslim?”

“He is.”

“He never identified himself as one. I do have Muslims in my class,” the professor added.

“Can you tell me who they are?” Dean asked.

“Really, I can’t believe you’re asking me to discuss my students’ private religious beliefs like this.”

“Who did he hang out with?” Williams asked.

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Kareem Muhammad,” said Rockman from the Art Room. “There were only twenty kids in the class. That’s got to be one of the Muslims.”

“What about Kareem Muhammad?” asked Dean.

The professor made a face. “An African-American Muslim with, I must say, many misconceptions.”

“Adam Binte,” said Rockman.

“What about Adam Binte?”

“I’m not going to discuss my students’ religions with you,” said the professor. “I really must be going.”

“Binte was a friend of his?” Williams asked.

“For your information, Mr. Binte is a Syrian Christian,” said the teacher.

“Mr. Dean, please ask the professor if he ever arranged for Asad bin Taysr to talk to a class,” said Rubens, suddenly popping onto the line.

When Dean did, the teacher frowned, though Dean couldn’t tell if it was because he recognized the name or not.

“Three years ago,” said Rubens. “When Mr. Conkel was a freshman.”

“Asad bin Taysr was on campus three years ago, wasn’t he?” said Dean.

“I often have guest speakers, and I encourage students to seek out other points of view”

“Even al-Qaeda’s?”

“I won’t dignify that with an answer,” said the man. “It’s time for you to leave.”

“Thank you, Charlie,” said Rubens. “Most likely the professor is just an idiot, but we’ll look into it further.”

“How’d you do that?” asked Williams as they walked back to her car.

“Do what?” said Dean.

“The friends’ names. Did you come here with them?”

Dean shrugged.

“Why didn’t you tell me about them before? We could’ve checked on them in the dorms.”

“It just kind of came to me,” said Dean.

“The speaker he had here—he was from al-Qaeda?”

“Yeah.”

“What a jackass.”

“You think we can track down some of the kids in his classes? College hangout or something?”

“Sure. But first, we eat,” said Williams. “My stomach’s startin’ to rumble. And you don’t want to be in the car with me while that’s happening.”

CHAPTER 108

“SOMEBODY WHO’S SPENDING that much money subscribing to sports websites is probably betting online,” said Robert Gallo, squatting next to Angela DiGiacomo as the Desk Three analyst double-checked the charges on Kenan’s roommate’s credit card.

“He may have another card to bet,” said DiGiacomo. “Check for other accounts while I finish going through these.”

“Yeah, sure.”

Gallo got up and went to the computer station next to her, bringing up a tool that allowed the NSA to access credit reports with similar characteristics to any known account. The results were presented on tabbed pages behind the main screen, with different tiers of matches represented by each tab. The top tab showed all accounts tied to the same social security number; the next one down matched addresses, then came names. The matches quickly became esoteric and the results more extensive. Gallo could see, for example, the account numbers of every card used to subscribe to MLB.TV the same day that Kenan’s roommate did.

He didn’t have to go that far, however.

“Look at this—same social number, different spelling of the last name,” Kenan said over his shoulder to DiGiacomo.

“Good.”

“And ten bucks says that address isn’t his, either.”

It wasn’t, but finding the phony credit card turned out to be only the first step. The card had been used only once, to buy an unrestricted round-trip ticket to Los Angeles a month before. The ticket had never been used—instead it had been exchanged for two other flights, with the difference made up in cash.

Gallo and DiGiacomo discovered that both of those plane tickets had also been exchanged, this time for round-trip tickets between Chicago and Houston. One of these had been used two weeks before.

Tracking down the user was more detective work than computer hacking, and Gallo let his workmate handle that part of the job. Intrigued by the pattern of ticket exchanges, he sifted through airline records to see if he could find other flights that had resulted from a similar series of exchanges. He found several, and once more handed off the information for DiGiacomo to develop while he examined the transactions that had started the trains, trying to find a pattern that he could use to develop more information.

An hour later, Gallo got up from his computer station and lay down on the floor, flooding his bloodshot eyes with eye-wash. The only thing the transactions had in common was that they were made with someone else’s money.

“WE THINK THIS is Kenan Conkel,” Marie Telach told Rubens, pointing at the monitor. “The computer matched it against the feeds from Detroit and the parents’ photo.”

Rubens leaned close to the machine, studying the slightly blurred video. It had come from a security network used at an airport in St. Louis. The researchers had taken Gallo’s information about airplane tickets, coordinating the flights with their arrival times and accessing the airport records, trying to match the flights with information about Asad, al-Qaeda, and other known terrorists. Not all of the airports had computerized video surveillance available, but for those that did, a face recognition tool was used to try to find matches. The tool had found Keenan near the gate where the plane landed four hours ago.

Or maybe not. The face had been caught at an extreme angle, and even the computer had its doubts.

“The computer says it has only a seventy-six percent confidence that this is Kenan Conkel’s face,” said Rubens.

Johnny Bib began bouncing behind him. “Seventy-six percent confidence is a
significant
level. The formula is based on the standard deviation between the overall match points. More than twenty percent are obscured and therefore the computer scores the points based on a formula developed by—”

Sensing a complicated mathematic dissertation looming, Rubens cut Johnny off.

“It’s a guess, whether the computer does it or not. But assuming this is him,” Rubens said quickly, “what did he do next?”

“His face doesn’t show up on the surveillance tapes at the exits, so it’s likely he took a flight out,” she said. “Eliminating the gates we have good views of, there are nine flights he could have taken over the next four hours. Passengers on the planes were eliminated for various reasons, if someone was making a connection with the same name, if someone used a credit card, wrong gender, known age—”

“We’ve narrowed it to thirteen people,” said Johnny Bib, for once cutting to the chase. “Thirteen—
thirteen.”

Thirteen, of course, was a prime.

“There are four flights I think we should concentrate on,” continued Telach, doing her best to ignore Johnny Bib. “Houston, two to New York, and one to Mexico City.”

“Mexico,” said Johnny Bib.

Telach, probably nearing the end of her patience with the eccentric analyst, sighed. “Mexico was mentioned in several of the intercepts relating to al-Qaeda two months ago, and there have been a number of money transfers routed there. But—”

“And the flight number is 7-3-3,” added Bib.

More prime numbers. Rubens shuddered to think what Bing would say if she thought he committed Desk Three resources based on a crazy mathematician’s mystical appreciation of numbers.

“We need something better than that,” Rubens told Johnny Bib. “Keep working on it.”

ORDINARILY, RUBENS DIDN’T answer his personal phone when it was forwarded down to the Art Room, which it was programmed to do automatically when he was there. But it happened that he was near the phone set when it rang; glancing at the caller ID panel, he saw that the caller was Irena Hadash.