The Intercept (17 page)

Chapter 32

S
ome street cameras look like radar guns or radiation detectors. Those stationary cameras are primarily traffic cameras, useful for capturing license plates, car makes, and drivers’ faces.

Others are rotational, operated by remote control. Usually these are placed in high pedestrian traffic areas, such as Times Square, around major landmarks, and at Ground Zero.

The third kind of New York Police Department surveillance camera is the globe. These resemble the shoplifting deterrent bubbles descending from store ceilings. On the streets of New York, they are most often suspended from streetlamp posts like shaded eyeballs.

Fisk stood looking at the one hanging over the intersection of Thirtieth Street and Ninth Avenue, near Penn Station. The globe hung there in plain sight. He glanced down at the color printout in his hand, with the NYPD shield in the lower left-hand corner and a time stamp along the bottom. He looked again at the street around him.

Baada Bin-Hezam had stood in this exact spot less than three hours ago.

No question. Fisk had a zoom-in of his face as well. No disguise. Fisk could just barely make out the dark spot that was the mole on the left edge of his jaw. Bin-Hezam wore a dark blue or black Windbreaker, blue jeans, and black Adidas sneakers. He carried a large plastic generic store bag in his hand, the printed words
THANK YOU
plainly visible.

Fisk distributed a packet of images, including one of just the bag, and dispatched twelve Intel officers to canvas the immediate neighborhood in an ever-expanding grid. They were to show store workers the image of the bag, and if they got a positive match, then and only then Bin-Hezam’s face. He expected to get a lot of bag matches. He hoped to get at least one face match.

But he never expected to be the one to score the positive identification. It did not come from the shop that was the source of the bag, but rather from a store owner who remembered a man matching Bin-Hezam’s description carrying such a bag.

It happened at a small hobby shop called To the Moon, sandwiched between an Irish pub and a Thai food takeout restaurant, mere steps from the surveillance camera. The proprietor, a burly man wearing a black-and-white-striped railroad engineer’s cap over a bush of white hair, looked up from his steaming bowl of noodles and his open copy of
Model Railroad News
and nearly stabbed at the enlarged image of the
THANK YOU
bag with his chopsticks.

“The Saudi,” he said.

Fisk’s eyes widened in surprise. “Come again?”

The man looked at Fisk’s shield. “Aw, shit. Tell me he’s not a bad guy.”

The hobbyist confirmed the full photo of Bin-Hezam. He even claimed to know what was in the plastic bag: “A satchel or shoulder bag of some sort. I think it was imitation leather, though. I could see right down into it. Please tell me this guy’s not a mad bomber or something.”

“I don’t know what he is, sir,” said Fisk, “I’m just trying to identify him.” Fisk excused himself for a moment, calling in support, then returned to the man. “When would you say he was in here?”

“Oh, I’d say, about three hours ago? Soon after I opened. That’s usually at nine but I got in a little late today—I was up late watching junk.”

This guy wasn’t a kook. Fisk now had a positive ID on Bin-Hezam.

“Sir, I need to know, to the best of your recollection, everything he said, touched, and bought.”

The hobbyist took another mouthful of noodles. “Bought is easy.” He came down from behind the high glass counter and walked Fisk to the back wall rack of rocket kits. “He picked up one of these big boys. The full kit. Said it was for his son.”

The kit the hobbyist was referring to was to construct a rocket approximately three feet long by three inches in diameter.

“I went over the safety key for him, on account of his kid. He didn’t seem to want to talk much otherwise. Well spoken. Paid cash. Hundreds.”

Fisk stood before the display of rockets, running various scenarios through his head. One word kept recurring to him: “fireworks.”

The hobbyist said, “This guy didn’t have a kid, did he.”

Chapter 33

I
n her Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, apartment, Aminah bint Mohammed sat watching her cellular phone vibrate on the kitchen table. She stared at it as though it were a giant mechanized roach, summoned to life.

At first she was paralyzed by a mixture of fear and surprise. Twice before she had been instructed to clear her weekend for an opportunity to be of service. Twice before she had done so, remaining indoors and alone with the phone they had given her, waiting for it to ring.

Twice before, the weekend had passed with no contact whatsoever.

But, far from becoming complacent, in fact she was confident that this third weekend alert would be fulfilled. She had been given explicit instructions earlier in the week. Still, with the phone now lighting up and moving, she fought back panic.

She only hoped she was worthy of the trust they had placed in her.

She was under strict orders not to answer the phone. She was to wait for a voice mail to be recorded, and access that.

The phone stopped moving, but Aminah’s hands remained gripping the edge of the table. She watched the device.

A minute or so later a blue light began pulsing, indicating a voice mail.

She stood and wrung her hands, pacing out of the kitchen and then back in. The windows were open, and her fans moved hot air through the apartment. City sounds floated in over the whirring. She had been uncomfortably hot all weekend; now she felt only chills.

She rummaged in a drawer for a pen and paper so as not to make any mistakes, then thought better of it. She closed the drawer, wiping her clammy hands on her long robe.

She went to the telephone, picked it up. She unlocked the screen and dialed voice mail, her fingertip leaving a wet smudge on the touch screen.

It rang, asking for her pass code. She entered the six digits that corresponded to her first name.

It was a male voice. He spoke in English, no words, only a return number. She listened to the message twice, but did not bother to memorize it. The device did that for her.

She redialed the number from her call register. It was the only call she had ever received on this phone.

The call rang once.

The same male voice answered. “You are prepared?” he said. He spoke with a directness of purpose, and the reverence of a prayer.

“I am prepared,” she answered. American English was her native tongue.

“The Hotel Indigo, West Twenty-eighth Street. Between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, Manhattan. Top floor, penthouse suite A. Do not come veiled. Not even a hijab. Speak only English. And bring what you have.”

She was searching for an appropriate response when he hung up. The line was dead, the call ended.

She pulled the phone away from her ear, amazed. It had started.

Chapter 34

F
isk spoke with Intel Division chief Barry Dubin via a secure link from the Midtown South Precinct on West Thirty-fifth Street. He swallowed his food quickly, tucking the rest of his turkey club sandwich out of view of the camera.

His monitor showed a view of the Intel briefing room from one corner of a table. There were others in the room with Dubin, who sat comfortably in his high-backed seat as though conserving energy for the rest of the weekend.

“So what do we know?” asked Dubin, the former spook. “It’s real-world now. We’ve got a hot situation.”

Fisk said, “Bin-Hezam is in Manhattan and on the move. Likely staying here somewhere, since we’ve turned up nothing off the island. Either a cash customer at a hotel, or else he’s being put up by associates.”

“I would think he’s got to have associates. But so far nothing on that front?”

“Nothing,” said Fisk.

They had scrutinized snoop cameras in a three-block radius, searching for more images of Bin-Hezam. They had picked him up on two cameras, but in terms of information, learned nothing more. He was the same Saudi Arabian carrying a plastic bag.

What it did show was that the technology was not infallible: face recognition programs had failed to filter the images and push them to Intel. Nobody wanted to talk about that, though. Sometimes the sentinels wanted to believe in the magic of ultimate security as much as the people they sought to protect.

The other issue was that, despite rumors to the contrary, many of the thousands of Manhattan’s city blocks were not yet wired with surveillance cameras. Camera location maps, drawn and maintained either by hobbyists or First Amendment activists, were available to anyone with an Internet connection—making it easy enough for an undesirable to select a hotel or host apartment on a residential street without electronic eyes.

Dubin said, “We swept up all our questionables in the past week, in advance of the Fourth and the One World Trade Center ceremony. I wonder if maybe we cleared out some of his help? Sure hope so. Maybe this is why he’s moving around doing errands on his own? Because otherwise why risk that when he should be laying low? All the effort that went into inserting him here . . . I don’t see how he can be a lone wolf.”

“Agree in principle,” said Fisk.

“So.” And here Dubin looked at the others in the room, people Fisk could not see. Fisk assumed there were federal agents among them and was glad he was participating in this meeting via remote. “The big question is, do we take the hunt for Bin-Hezam public? Do we saturate the airwaves this afternoon and evening and put the city to work for us?”

“Or does that start a panic and work against us,” said Fisk.

“This is the swaying tightrope we’re on now,” said Dubin. “Do enough, but don’t do too much.”

“Not my call,” said Fisk, “but I think going to TV does not materially improve our chances.”

“What does materially improve our chances, Fisk?”

Fisk shrugged, conceding the point. “Indeed.”

“That said,” continued Dubin, “I lean your way as well. There’s a line of thought that says that if we even introduce this idea into the ether, that compromises the entire fireworks show tonight and becomes the focus. If we scare people away and there’s no actual threat or arrest at the end of it, that becomes the story. The fireworks display is a big fucking deal, symbolically.”

Fisk nodded. Reading between the lines, he was now certain there was someone from the mayor’s office there, perhaps even the governor’s. Fisk had spent enough time around Dubin to know that he would pay lip service to his political overseers if need be—but then turn right around and do whatever he needed to do to get the job done right.

“Bottom line,” said Dubin, “we put this guy’s face on TV, we give him oxygen, we wind up creating a supervillain. We give terror a platform and a voice in tonight’s show. We mint an archenemy—and I just don’t think we’ve crossed the fact threshold on that just yet.”

Fisk agreed. “We’ve got nothing from cell phone surveillance?”

As with the camera screening, the NSA cell phone monitoring was being performed by computer. The court order granting permission to digitally monitor cellular towers came with specific conditions, some of which were even honored. But the sheer quantity of Arabs speaking via cell phone at any given minute in the five boroughs was staggering. Each of the five major providers serving those areas had received the judge’s surveillance order electronically through a crisis link established after the communications chaos during the World Trade Center attacks.

Dubin told Fisk what he already knew. “No leads. Lots of garbage. I’ve asked them to slow it down, go back through records from the morning hours before and after we have him on camera. In case we missed something. Which is entirely possible, even for the best computer systems in the world. I wish we’d gotten a picture of him talking on a phone, so we could zero in on a time. I should tell you, Fisk, there’s been some talk about imposing federal priority, but I think you agree, we are best equipped to handle this.”

Again, playing to the room. Fisk’s role was to be the straight man. And so he nodded yet again.

Dubin was a master at this. When it came to deflecting pressure or criticism, even in the hottest of circumstances, the man was 100 percent Teflon.

Fisk said, “In many ways, this is a statistical exercise. If we keep at it long enough, chances are good we’ll get a hit.”

“But long enough doesn’t get us through tonight, Fisk. Nor through tomorrow morning. Now, what’s with this rocket talk?”

“He dropped three hundred fifty cash on a kit. And he was carrying an imitation leather bag or satchel.”

“Is this a kid’s toy or are we talking air attack?”

Fisk answered, “Yes and I don’t know. It can get height. Launch it from the top of a building, you’ve got true elevation, though not enough power for aim.”

Dubin winced. “Air delivery says biowarfare agent to me.”

Fisk said, “A small bomb is going to go bang, and that’s it. So I agree.”

“We’re going to have millions of people lined up along a two-mile stretch of the West Side tonight, from nine o’clock until about nine twenty-five. Sitting ducks. It’s a massive task just securing the ground on a normal July Fourth, now we have to think air? He launches it from a window or a roof, one of those parachute floaters riding the breeze off the Hudson?”

“It’s tough to defend.”

“Or is he looking at Sunday morning down at Battery Park? Ground Zero? Dropping a toy rocket full of who-knows-what over the ceremony?” Dubin was getting angry now.

Fisk said, “As an attack tool, it is not precise. It can’t travel far, though it doesn’t have to. It does seem to indicate some high-altitude interest. If it indicates anything.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means what we know is that we still don’t know much. We don’t have any bioagent yet.”

“Here’s what we do know,” said Dubin, sitting forward. “We’ve got a ceremony this afternoon on the USS
Intrepid
with the president. We’ve got the fireworks tonight, setting potential victims out along Eleventh Avenue like a human buffet. Then tomorrow morning, the dedication of One World Trade Center, with not one but two U.S. presidents in attendance, the sitting president and his predecessor, also the vice president, the governor of New York and
his
predecessor, the mayor and
his
predecessor, foreign dignitaries, nine-eleven families, an audience of millions. At oh-eight-hundred hours tomorrow. That’s about twenty hours from now.

“We’ve spent the last ninety minutes debating how to call these things off gracefully if we don’t get this Saudi before then. That is—how to call it off without appearing to call it off, because as you know, neither the president of the United States nor his staff would ever go for it. It’s not his job to make our job easier, it’s the other way around. So we’re trying to come up with ways to tighten up security today, tonight, and tomorrow, whether we get this guy or not. But guess what? Security is already as tight as can be going in. So we need ideas.”

“We need to get this guy,” said Fisk. “And you left someone off that list.”

“Who’s that?” said Dubin.

“You forgot The Six. The ones who foiled the hijacking that was meant to distract us from Bin-Hezam in the first place.”

Dubin said, “What about them?”

Fisk saw himself in the smaller monitor window. He checked his logic first, wanting to make sure he didn’t come off as crazy. But no—it was just occurring to him now, and it made sense. “What if it’s about them?” he said. “What if . . . think about this for a moment. Look at where we are. They are, what—this symbol of hope. Of resilience, of heroism. It’s a long shot, but—bin Laden wanted symbolic targets. He was looking to do something big and new. So what if the hijacking was not only a distraction . . . but a ploy?”

Dubin grew impatient. “Not following.”

“The hijacker had a weapon, he had wires and a trigger but no bomb. Because he’s a nut, right? And he is. But all that gave the passengers time and opportunity to jump the guy. To overpower him. To save the plane.”

“You’re not casting aspersion on them?”

“No. I’m saying this botched hijacking allowed these heroes to be created. What if that was the plan? Maybe they—I’m talking about Al-Qaeda here—assumed it would be one or two or at most three passengers who acted. Probably not six. But no matter—all they needed was one. One brave citizen to be lauded, celebrated, made famous on this celebratory weekend of fireworks and rebirth. Guaranteed maximum publicity.”

Dubin was getting it now. “They wanted to create a situation where a hero would rise . . .”

“. . . specifically so they can bring him or her—or them—down. What better way to undermine confidence? By providing a symbol of triumph . . . and then to snatch it away.”

Fisk felt like this held water. Dubin was less convinced, but giving it thought.

“We have a lot of odd angles on this,” said Dubin. “Rockets and heroes and hijackers. A weekend full of potential targets. What’s next for those six?”

Fisk said, “Not sure. I don’t have their minute-by-minute schedule. Gersten’s on it.”

Fisk, after answering, realized that Dubin had actually been speaking to someone else in the room with him. That voice answered, “They’re doing the
Intrepid
thing this afternoon.”

“Holy shit,” said Dubin.

Fisk said, “What’s that?”

“They are special guests of POTUS aboard the USS
Intrepid
this afternoon. A military salute.”

Dubin said, “If it’s military, it’s going to be tight already. Gangway metal detectors, canine sweeps, random pat downs.”

“We’ll have Gersten, Patton, and DeRosier there. We’ve got to get Bin-Hezam’s new photo out to the Secret Service. The pictures from this morning.” Fisk checked the clock on the wall. “I can get over to the Hyatt now and brief Gersten’s team in person.”

“Do that, Fisk. Look, there’s no way around it. We have to get this guy. We need to get very lucky very soon.”

Fisk nodded, grabbing his sandwich for the ride. “He’s shown himself once. He’ll do it again.”