London Bridges: A Novel (11 page)

“The others are clearly members of al-Jihad,” I was told by Angela Bell, the information analyst assigned to the counterterrorism squad in New York. She said that the decrepit, three-story structure where the cell was holed up was shared by a Korean import-export business and a Spanish-translation business. The terrorist cell was posing as a relief charity called Afghan Children Assistance.

Based on the surveillance reports we had in hand, there were several indicators of terrorist planning and activity around New York. Chemicals and mixing apparatuses had turned up in a self-storage space in Long Island City. The place had been rented by an occupant of the property near the Holland Tunnel; a pickup truck owned by a cell member had been modified with heavy-duty springs to handle a very heavy load. A possible bomb? What kind of bomb?

That morning plans were being coordinated for raids on the Long Island storage facility and the walk-up near the Holland Tunnel.

Finally, about four in the afternoon, I was driven to TriBeCa to join the strike team.

We had been warned not to do this. But how could we obey? What's more, how could anyone expect us to obey when so many lives were in danger? And maybe we could argue that the raid was solely a hit on al Qaeda and had nothing to do with the Wolf. Hell, maybe it didn't.

The apartment where the terrorists were staying, and where Geoffrey Shafer might still be, was a fairly easy one to monitor. The front of the redbrick building had only a single entrance. The rear fire escapes emptied onto a narrow alley where we had already put closed-circuit wireless cameras. One side of the building abutted a textbook printer; the other opened onto a small parking lot.

Was the Weasel still inside?

An HRT assault force and a SWAT team from the NYPD had taken over the top floor of a TriBeCa meatpacking plant a couple of blocks from the Holland Tunnel. We assembled there, fine-tuning the assault, waiting for word to come about whether the attack would happen or not.

HRT wanted a go, and they were pushing hard for an assault between two and three in the morning. I didn't know what I would do if it were my call. We had a cell of known terrorists, and possibly Shafer, in our sights. But we'd been warned about the consequences. It could also be a setup, some kind of test for us.

At a little before midnight word began to circulate that HRT surveillance had turned up something else. About one in the morning I was called in to a small bookkeeping room that was serving as headquarters. It was getting close to put-up-or-shut-up time.

Michael Ainslie from our New York office was the senior agent in charge. He was a tall, reed-thin, good-looking man with loads of experience in the field, but I had the distinct impression he would have been more comfortable on a tennis court than in the middle of a dangerous mess like this one.

“Here's what we have so far from surveillance,” Ainslie told the group. “One of HRT's snipers picked up a couple of images and then we shot some more. We think it's all pretty good news. Take a look for yourselves.”

The visual images had been downloaded to a laptop, and Ainslie played them for us. The video stream was a series of wide and tight shots showing half a dozen windows on the east side of the building.

“We were concerned that these windows haven't been covered up,” Ainslie pointed out. "These little shits are supposed to be smart and careful, right? Anyway, we've identified five males and two females inside the building. I'm sorry to say that Colonel Shafer hasn't shown up on any of the surveillance tapes. Not so far, anyway.

“We don't have anything on him leaving the building, either, just going inside. We're using thermal imaging to see if we might have missed him or any others.” The Washington PD hadn't been able to afford thermal, but I'd seen it work since coming to the Bureau. It picked up heat variances, hot spots, which allowed surveillance to see right through walls.

Ainslie pointed to the close-up shot that was on the laptop screen now. “Here's where it gets interesting,” he said, and froze a shot showing two men seated at a small table in the kitchen.

"On the left is Karim al-Lilyas. He's number fourteen on Homeland Security's hit list; he's definitely al Qaeda. Suspected of involvement in the 'ninety-eight bombings of our embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi. We don't know when he arrived, or why, but he sure as hell is here now.

"The man beside al-Lilyas, Ahmed el-Masry, is big number eight on the list. He's hot. He's also an engineer. Neither of these bastards was on earlier surveillance tapes.

"Both must have just snuck into town. For what reason? Under ordinary circumstances we'd be in that kitchen with them right now, making mint tea for everybody, getting ready for a nice long chat.

“They have these same pictures downtown and in Washington right now. We ought to hear something soon, one way or the other.”

Ainslie looked around the room and finally cracked a smile. “For the record, I recommended that we go in, make some tea, have that chat.”

The small room broke into loud applause. For a brief moment there, it was almost fun.

Some of the more devil-may-care, gung-ho guys from the Hostage Rescue Team, which is just about all of them, call this kind of dangerous operation “five minutes of panic and thrill. Their panic, our thrill.” The very personal thrill for me would be bringing down Geoffrey Shafer.

HRT and SWAT desperately wanted to go into the building and were at the ready. Two dozen heavily armed, state-of-the-art warriors were strutting around the wooden floor of the meatpacking plant; they were pumped up and supremely confident in their ability to do the job right and very quickly. Watching them, it was hard not to be, and even harder not to ask to be included in the raid.

The real problem was that if they succeeded, we all might lose. We had been warned and been given dramatic lessons about what would happen if we disregarded the orders handed down by the Wolf. And yet, the men under our surveillance might be his attack team in New York. So what did we do?

I knew every detail about the job. Taking down the building would involve full-team deployment of the group, including both HRT and NYPD SWAT. There were six assault teams and six sniper teams, which HRT believed was two too many. They didn't want help from SWAT. The HRT sniper teams were called X-Ray, Whiskey, Yankee, and Zulu; each included seven members. One FBI team was assigned to each side of the building; SWAT would assist on the front and rear only.

The interesting thing for me was the certainty that HRT was the superior assault team, the opposite of what I'd felt when I was with the D.C. police. The HRT snipers were disguised in “urban hide” kits, individualized bunches of black muslin, rope, dark PVC tubing, and the like. Each sniper had a specific target, and every window and door in the building was covered.

The question remained: were we going in?

And was Shafer still there? Was the Weasel in that building right now?

At 2:30 in the morning I joined a two-man sniper team in the brownstone directly across the street from the targeted one. This was starting to get very intense and very hairy.

The snipers were holed up inside a ten-by-ten room. They had made a tent out of black muslin set back about three feet from the window. The window itself was kept closed, and I was given an explanation by one of them. “If we get the signal to go, we'll use a lead pipe to knock out the windowpane. Seems kind of crude, but nobody's come up with a better option.”

There wasn't too much small talk in the cramped, hot room, but for the next half hour I got to watch the targeted building through a sniper scope from a backup rifle. My heart was starting to race pretty good now. I was searching for Shafer in the scope. What if I saw him? How could I stay up there?

The seconds were ticking away and I could just about measure them with my own heartbeats. The assault team was the “eyes and ears” for Command, and all we could do was wait for our official orders to come down.

Go.

No go.

I finally broke the silence in the small room. “I'm going down on the street. I need to be down there for this.”

This was more like it.

I set up with an HRT assault team just around the corner from the terrorist hideout. Technically I wasn't supposed to be there—so officially I wasn't—but I'd called Ned Mahoney and he smoothed the way for me.

Three o'clock in theA.M. The minutes passed very slowly, without more news or clarification from Command in New York or FBI headquarters in the Hoover Building in Washington. What were they thinking? How could anybody make an impossible decision like this one?

Go?

No go?

Obey the Wolf?

Disobey and take the consequences?

Three-thirty came and went. Then four o'clock. Still no word from the higher-ups back at headquarters.

I got strapped up in a black flight suit with full armor and was given an MP-5. The HRT guys all knew about Shafer and my personal stake in this.

The senior agent in charge sat down beside me on the ground. “You okay? Everything all right?”

“I was D.C. Homicide. I've gone into a lot of places, lot of hot spots.”

“I know you have. If Shafer's in there, we'll get him. Maybe you'll get him.” Yeah, maybe I'll blow that creep away after all.

And then, amazingly, we got the order to go. Green light! Five minutes of panic and thrill.

First thing, I heard the snipers breaking windows across the street.

Then we were running toward the hideout building. Everybody was strapped up for war, all in black flight suits and armed to the teeth.

Two eight-passenger Bell helicopters suddenly appeared and veered in toward the roof of the brick building. They hovered and assault specialists began to “fast-rope” down.

One team of four was climbing up the side of the building, an amazing sight in itself.

Another of HRT's “go to war” slogans flashed through my head— speed, suspense, and violence of action. It was happening just like that.

I heard explosive entry charges blasting out doors, three or four different blasts within seconds. There would be no negotiating as part of this assault.

We were in. This was good—I was in.

Gunshots echoed through the dark halls of the building. Then machine-gun bursts came from somewhere above me.

I made it up to the second floor. A male with wild, bushy hair came out of a doorway. He had a rifle.

“Hands in the air!” I yelled at him. “In the air. High.”

He understood English—he put his hands up and let the rifle drop.

“Where's Colonel Shafer? Where's Shafer?” I screamed at him.

The man just shook his head back and forth, back and forth, looking dazed and confused.

I left the prisoner with a couple of HRT guys, then hurried upstairs to the third floor. I wanted the Weasel so badly now. Was he in there somewhere?

A waif of a woman in black suddenly ran across a large living-room area at the head of the stairs.

“Stop!” I bellowed at her. “You—stop!”

But she didn't—she went right out an open window in the living room. I heard her scream, then nothing after that. Sickening to watch.

And finally I heard “Secure. The building is secure! All floors secure!”

But nothing about Geoffrey Shafer, nothing about the Weasel.

The HRT and NYPD SWAT teams were swarming around the building. All the doors had been blown off their hinges, and several windows were shattered. So much for “knock and announce” protocol, but the plan seemed to have worked well from what I could see so far. Except for finding Shafer. Where was that son of a bitch? I'd missed him like this a couple of times before.

The woman who'd gone out the top-floor window was dead, which is what happens when you plunge headfirst three stories down onto a sidewalk. I congratulated a few HRT guys as I made my way through the top floor; they did the same for me.

I met Michael Ainslie on the stairs. “Washington wants you involved with the interrogations,” he told me, not seeming too pleased. “There are six of them. How do you want to handle it?”

“Shafer?” I asked Ainslie. “Anything on him?”

“They say he isn't here. We don't know for sure. We're still looking for him.”

I couldn't help feeling a letdown about the Weasel, but I sucked it up. I walked inside a workspace that had been turned into a quasi-apartment. Sleeping bags and a few stained mattresses were strewn across the bare wooden floor. Five males and a woman sat together handcuffed like prisoners of war, which I suppose they were.

I stared at them without saying a word at first.

Then I pointed to the youngest-looking male: small, thin, wire-rimmed glasses, scruffy beard, of course. “Him,” I said, and started to walk out of the room. “I want that one. Bring him now!”

After the young male was taken from the main living area to a smaller adjoining bedroom, I looked around the main room again.

I pointed to another youngish male with long curly black hair and a full beard. “That one,” I said, and he was also escorted out. No explanation.

Next I was introduced to an FBI interpreter, a man named Wasid who spoke Arabic, Farsi, Pashto. We entered the bedroom next door together.

“He's probably Saudi, possibly all of them are,” the interpreter told me on the way in. Wherever he was from, the small, thin young man seemed extremely nervous. Sometimes Islamic terrorists are more comfortable with the idea of dying than with being captured and questioned by the Devil. That was my leverage here: I was the Devil.

I encouraged the translator to engage the terrorist suspect in small talk about his hometown and then his difficult transition to life in New York, the Devil's den. I asked that he slip in that I was a fairly good man and one of the few FBI agents who wasn't inherently evil. “Tell him I read the Koran. Beautiful book.”