The Intercept (18 page)

Chapter 35

F
isk badged his way up to the twenty-sixth floor of the Grand Hyatt only to learn that The Six were down in one of the second-floor function rooms doing a lunchtime presser.

He headed back down, finding Gersten, Patton, and DeRosier drinking coffee inside the high-ceilinged room, the heroes seated along one side of a long table, answering questions from a half dozen reporters scribbling notes and aiming their recording devices back and forth among speakers. The ballroom curtains were drawn and servers stood at either end of the table, attending to the diners’ needs.

Fisk said, speaking quietly, “Still complaining about this assignment?”

The Intel detectives turned. Patton and DeRosier smiled and shrugged, Gersten holding her reaction in check.

DeRosier said, “The superheroes are eating Smith and Wollensky. Filet mignon and creamed spinach. And special Scandinavian dishes sent over from Restaurant Aquavit. Jenssen requested lingonberries and meatballs and herring.”

Patton said, “And the
New York Times
is eating hotel scampi and pasta.”

Gersten held out her cup. “We get coffee.”

Fisk shared a quick smile with Gersten before he got serious. “It looks like you guys might actually start earning your paychecks now.”

“What’s up?” asked Gersten, all three of them ready for action.

Fisk ran down the Bin-Hezam news from that morning. Some of it had come across in action reports, but he wanted them to have the full account. He gave them hard copies of the new photos, and told them to keep them private.

“Twenty dollars says it’s anthrax,” said DeRosier, in regard to the rocket purchase.

Patton said, “Remember that scenario we drilled on, maybe two years ago? The guy who contracts genetically engineered smallpox and hops over here on an airplane, then just starts walking the streets and eating in restaurants. Not washing his hands. That could be this guy.”

Fisk said, “I have a side theory—and it’s just a theory now.” He talked about the hijacking, and the generally accepted fact that Abdulraheem’s chance of success had been practically nonexistent. “Not only was it a distraction, maybe it had a second function.”

“What second function?” asked Gersten.

“You don’t have to take out the president to shock the country. You don’t have to blow up a landmark. You only need to hit people on a gut level. That’s what bin Laden was about.” Fisk pointed to The Six. “Everyday people. Citizens, like anyone else. These people are the feel-good story of the year. You create heroes? You can wipe them out too. The ultimate sucker punch.”

Gersten’s mouth hung open. “That’s a real high-wire act.”

“Here’s the thing. They didn’t need the hijacking to get this guy in country. Bin-Hezam was not on the no-fly. He was good to go. Now—maybe they didn’t know that. Maybe they wanted extra insurance. Or . . . maybe the hijacking was just the magician’s puff of smoke, while the real trick was going on in his other hand.”

DeRosier was nodding. “I can see that.”

Fisk said, “We have zero evidence of this, but I bring it up so you guys will stay on your guard. Don’t get comfortable here. This USS
Intrepid
thing, with the president? Play it smart. I know it’s only recently scheduled for them. I know it’s a highly controlled setting. I’m saying, don’t rely on that.”

Gersten said, “Obviously, you don’t want us to tell them.”

“Certainly not. I heard what that guy Jenssen said on the
Today
show.”

“About the Patriot Act,” she said, nodding. “Yeah. Now there’s pressure to let them spread their wings a little. From the mayor’s office. He can’t be seen as the bad guy. They want to avoid the impression that we’re holding them under lock and key.”

Fisk said, “Find a way to keep them out of trouble. Come up with some other kind of activity for them.”

“Most of them are down with anything,” said Patton. “But not all.”

Fisk crossed his arms. “Here’s the thing. We need to see them through the ceremony tomorrow morning, like six fragile eggs. We get through that, we’re good. If this Bin-Hezam starts knocking off the group next Thursday, one at a time like an Agatha Christie villain, it loses impact. He needs to get them this weekend, if ever. Bottom line—we’ve added them to the target list. The target list of a man we cannot find.”

Gersten said to the others, “How about we collapse our shifts. Two of us on at all times. One down in the lobby watching for Bin-Hezam.”

Fisk said, “That works.”

The reporters had pushed back their chairs, standing, collecting their notebooks and voice recorders, as the presser broke up. They were all shaking hands.

DeRosier and Patton checked their wristwatches. “We leave soon for the aircraft carrier.”

“Okay,” said Fisk. “Keep them together, keep them moving.”

DeRosier and Patton tossed their coffee cups into the trash and went to escort The Six back upstairs. With a quick tip of his head, Fisk stepped out into the hallway, Gersten just two steps behind him. He walked to the far end, turning a corner and ducking in at a little alcove that once held pay phones, near the restrooms.

They hugged there, nothing too physical. It never felt right while they were on the job.

“Honest appraisal,” he said.

“Far-fetched,” she said, looking at his hand holding hers. “But—so was flying airplanes into buildings ten years ago.”

“Exactly,” he said.

“Just don’t lose sight of the fact that the hijacker got into the galley with a knife. He slashed at the throat of a flight attendant. That was real. He wasn’t faking anything. Not so far as
he
was aware. Abdulraheem believed he was taking that plane down. And these people risked their own lives to stop him.”

Fisk nodded. “You’re right. Good point going forward. I’m not trying to rewrite that. I’m just trying to understand this whole thing. It’s something bigger, right? I mean, tell me I’m not just off on a wild-goose chase, overthinking this.”

“You’re not. What does Dubin say?”

“Hard to tell. He’s throwing everything at this. I guess that says it all.”

“You okay?”

“I’m better now. This morning, before we’d heard anything and still had no trace of Bin-Hezam, I was not too pleasant to be around.”

“Is that why you never got in touch with me overnight?”

He winced. “Yeah. That and . . . you know how it gets.”

“I know exactly how it gets,” she said quickly, hoping to neutralize the shrill, one-word text she had sent him that morning. “Just feeling stranded here.”

“I get it. Wish I had you out there, believe me.” He checked his watch. “Speaking of which . . .”

“I know,” she said.

“Anything looks hinky here, do not hesitate,” said Fisk. “I mean anything. Everything’s still up for grabs.”

“I’m on it,” she told him, as he pulled away from her.

“Sunday night. When all this is behind us, God willing. A bottle of red, right?”

“A big bottle,” she said. “But let’s get there first.”

He blew her a kiss before hurrying out into the main hallway, turning the corner, disappearing. Gersten remained behind a few moments longer, partly so they wouldn’t be seen together, partly because she wanted to be alone.

Maybe The Six were the target. Security at the Hyatt was meant to keep away the press and fame seekers, not terrorists. The twenty-sixth floor was basically secure, in that everybody on or off the elevator was eyeballed. The hotel location was an open secret, however. They had been outside at the
Today
show that morning, vulnerable to the enthusiastic crowd surrounding them. The group was easy to spot.

She felt better knowing that she could do something proactive now. She felt like maybe something was finally coming her way.

G
ersten rode up to 26 with a bickering family of German tourists staying on one of the higher floors. She walked into hospitality and immediately Patton gave her a strange look, as though surprised she was alone. She assumed he was expecting Fisk.

“Where’s Nouvian?” asked Patton.

Gersten said, “How would I know?”

“He didn’t get on my elevator. I thought he was with DeRosier, but no.”

DeRosier came over. “Nouvian isn’t with you?”

“Where’d you go?” asked Patton.

Gersten stepped back toward the door. “You’re sure he’s not up here?”

Patton gave her a look that showed her his concern was not misplaced.

“Shit,” she said, angry with these guys as well as herself. And just after Fisk’s warning. “I’ll hit the lobby. Try his cell phone.”

“Already did,” said DeRosier, his voice following her out to the elevator. She pressed the call button and waited an unusually long period of time. The door opened on the same German family, who had apparently returned to their room for a forgotten item. They rode down in a glum silence, Gersten’s foot tapping.

She jumped out on 2, the floor the ballrooms were on, and strode quickly back and forth along the ornate hallway, just shy of jogging. She returned to the side hall where she and Fisk had spoken, near the restrooms. She knocked on the men’s room door and checked inside, then the women’s room, leaving nothing to chance. No Alain Nouvian.

She cut back out to the stairs, running down one flight to the lobby. From the top of the escalators, near the construction, she saw down to the street entrance and its revolving doors. No Nouvian there either.

She hustled up into the bar area, which jutted out from the façade, one floor over the sidewalk. The walls, the ceiling, and even the floor were made of glass, affording her a decent view of Forty-second Street, half a block each way. No sign of a fifty-one-year-old cellist with a dyed black comb-over.

Then back down to the reception area, searching the lines of arriving guests waiting to register. The small shop that sold coffee and candy was not busy at that hour, and he was not there. She turned behind the elevator bank, past a few other small hotel retail shops, trying to figure out what her next move was. Call Fisk? Not first. Not if she could help it. But he was her superior, and the point man for this case.

They had talked about things like this, once upon a time. How he might have to ask her to risk her life in the line of duty someday. She told him then and she felt it now: she wouldn’t hesitate to make the difficult decision, and neither should he.

And now she supposed that went for fuck-ups too.

Just as she was giving up, and about to head back up to 26 to eat shit, she saw Nouvian walking toward her. He recognized her and there was a moment of surprise in his face—nearly panic—but a split second later it was gone. She wasn’t sure what it meant. It could have been pure embarrassment at getting lost.

“What happened?” she said, trying not to sound too angry or relieved.

He was flustered and immediately defensive. “I guess I got on the wrong elevator or pressed the wrong button or something.”

“Well . . . you know how hotels work, right? You go back up.”

“Of course. I just . . . the door opened on the lobby, and I didn’t know where everybody else went . . . and so I thought I’d stretch my legs a bit.”

They were directly behind the elevator bank now. A small concourse of shops. “Shopping?”

“No, no. Clearing my head, mostly.”

“Stretching your legs, clearing your head.” She took his arm and started back around to the elevators. “We tried calling you.”

“My phone is still upstairs. Didn’t need it for the interview.”

Gersten pressed the up button. She quickly called DeRosier’s cell, hoping they hadn’t called in this mishap. When he answered she said, “Found him, coming back,” then hung up. She went quiet then, waiting to see what Nouvian would say next.

“I didn’t mean to . . . I hope I didn’t alarm anyone.”

“Little bit,” she said, as an empty car arrived.

They entered and stood on opposite sides as the elevator rose. She glanced at him in the reflective golden doors, sweating him a little. Trying to figure out whether he was just odd or if there was any more to it.

He kept his eyes on the floor as though they were strangers—indeed, they weren’t much more than that—and when the doors opened he waited for her to exit the car first, in the most automatically cordial way. She did the same for him at the turn into the corridor, passing the two NYPD cops. She saw him into the suite, watching him enter past Patton and DeRosier, neither of whom addressed him, letting him pass without a word into the adjoining room. Gersten gave them each a tiny shrug that said, “I don’t know,” then turned and went back to the elevator.

She rode back down to the lobby, turning the corner and returning to the small concourse behind the elevators where she had found him. He had appeared near a small jewelry shop catering to midrange tourists and a souvenir shop with the usual “I ♥ NY” kitsch, tiny Lady Liberties, and New York Yankees gear.

Across from the store was a pair of pay telephones—only, unlike the ones upstairs near the ballroom, these still contained actual phones. A rarity in modern Manhattan—if they still worked.

Gersten picked up each receiver. Both phones gave her a dial tone.

Chapter 36

D
o not come veiled. Not even a hijab.

Aminah bint Mohammed pulled the twin loaves from the refrigerator. Each was wrapped in wax paper and clinging plastic. She padded the bottom of a large Macy’s shopping bag—blue with a big red star—with cotton dishcloths, laying the chilled cakes on top. She covered them with a brown cardigan sweater from the plastic storage bin at the back of her bedroom closet, about five years out of fashion and three months out of season.

Aminah prayed as she packed, giving thanks that the wait was finally over. She continued her prayers while she undressed. She had grown so comfortable with the black burka she had been wearing daily for almost three years that—with the exception of her nursing scrubs—she felt nude in ordinary Western clothes. Especially with her head uncovered—without a hijab, or head scarf.

This was the second time that week she had shed her comfortable current identity for her unfamiliar former one. When she had shopped for the ingredients three days ago, she wore blue jeans, a T-shirt, and a jacket. And it was as though she had disappeared. No suspicious looks on the sidewalks, for a change. No dismissive stares. No tiny pointing fingers from children. Her old style of dress had felt to her exactly like a disguise, symbolizing the completion of her three-year journey from Kathleen Burnett to Aminah bint Mohammed.

K
athleen Burnett had been born to a Methodist minister and his wife in New Bedford, Massachusetts. The youngest of five, she had an undistinguished public school education, trained at a community college, graduated with a nursing degree, and began working at a hospital there.

For twenty-nine years she was Kathleen Burnett. Thirty-two now, she was five feet, three inches tall, with a lifetime of trouble keeping weight off. She had dark curly hair that she believed was her best feature. She had never married. She was not a virgin, but only due to a traumatizing date rape in the summer between her junior and senior year of high school.

Following the death of her mother, less than twelve months after the initial diagnosis of kidney cancer, Kathleen scoured out-of-state employment opportunities and impulsively accepted a job as an emergency room nurse at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village. She had relocated to her Bay Ridge apartment five years ago and started her life over with great anticipation, becoming very passionate about saving lives. She was proud that, every time she went to work, someone who otherwise would have died without her did not.

Her first and best friend at the hospital was a physician’s assistant named Na’ilah Al-Mehalel, a Westernized Muslim with roots in Jordan. Kathleen experienced a kind of crush on the older, wiser woman. Accepting an invitation to accompany Na’ilah to the Masjid Ar-Rahman mosque on West Twenty-ninth Street had at first seemed more like fellowship than religion. The religious barriers between men and women startled her at first, but she quickly came to honor them as a matter of respect and protection, rather than repression.

What began as her half-earnest pursuit of Na’ilah Al-Mehalel—which was unrequited, and remained Kathleen’s secret, more unfocused impulse than reality—led to something much more profound. Two years later, she became a Muslim. The imam asked her three questions:

“Do you believe in one God?

“Do you believe that Jesus was a prophet but was not the son of God?

“Are you willing to accept Mohammed as a prophet?”

Kathleen Burnett answered yes to all three questions. She had joined the Islamic religion by repeating the imam’s next words:

“There is no god but Allah and Mohammed is His prophet.”

Like many Western converts to Islam, she took a Muslim name, Aminah—it meant “Trustworthy”—and bint Mohammed. “Daughter of Mohammed.”

For a small filing fee at the Department of Records, Kathleen Burnett’s transformation into Aminah bint Mohammed was legalized, and her rebirth complete.

A few months later, Na’ilah’s brother, Robeel, was taken from his Queens apartment by men claiming to be law enforcement, though without a formal arrest. Na’ilah was inconsolable, and Aminah sat with her day after day after day.

Six months later Na’ilah’s parents received a letter from the U.S. government asking them where they would like their son’s remains to be shipped. Robeel had committed suicide in the prison at Guantanamo Bay—or so the letter claimed.

Some months later the father of another of Aminah’s friends from the mosque disappeared without a trace. Vanished. Na’ilah grew paranoid and embittered, talking ceaselessly about the United States’ war against Islam. Aminah was devastated when Na’ilah and her family decamped for Jordan, leaving Aminah angry and alone once again.

She came to believe that the accident of her birth had placed her on the wrong side of this conflict. When another American woman from the mosque befriended her and offered her the opportunity to enlist in the army of God, Aminah knew that she could not refuse. She met secretly with this woman, who encouraged her to stay away from Masjid Ar-Rahman due to American law enforcement surveillance. She was told that she would be most valuable to jihad as a deep-cover sleeper agent, though not in so many words. She was to continue to live quietly and pursue nothing out of the ordinary until the moment came when her presence in New York could turn the tide of battle. Asked if she would be willing to give her life for Mohammed, she answered yes, but she was thinking not of Mohammed but of Na’ilah.

In the swirl of this heady cause, Aminah bint Mohammed had found more purpose for her life than ever before. Saving the lives of the victims of street crime at St. Vincent’s paled by comparison with helping to bring God’s plan into this world. But St. Vincent’s Hospital closed in April 2010, and after Aminah’s unemployment payments ended, the woman from the mosque offered to offset Aminah’s lost salary so that she could keep her Bay Ridge apartment without concern. Most critical, said the woman, was that Aminah remain available and unencumbered for when the call to service arrived.

T
he first call had come earlier that week. A different man’s voice. A different code word.

He had instructions for her. She was to purchase six twelve-ounce bottles of hydrogen peroxide, six one-pint cans of acetone, and a gallon bottle of muriatic acid. Each item had to be purchased separately from different stores in different neighborhoods.

The voice had slowly recited the URL for an Internet site where she would find instructions for blending the ingredients. She wrote it down and read it back to him before ending the conversation and dressing in the strange disguise of her former life.

Chemistry lab had been Aminah’s favorite class in nursing school. Following procedures carefully and exactly was second nature to her.

Hydrogen peroxide was a common household antiseptic. The acetone was identical to nail polish remover. When mixed with water, and used carefully with rubber gloves, muriatic acid powder worked miracles on dirty stonework.

Mixing the explosive took her three days. On the counter of her tiny kitchen alcove, she laid out her tools. White, cup-shaped paper coffee filters. A measuring cup. A 60 ml syringe. A pint bottle of household ammonia. Two one-quart glass mason jars that had been in the freezer with her ingredients, as it was necessary to bring their temperature down to thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit.

Using the syringe and measuring cup, she mixed hydrogen peroxide and acetone in a 3:1 ratio in the large glass jar, then put the mixture in the freezer. She mixed the powdered muriatic acid with water in a jar to make 120 ml of a 30 percent solution, and put that in the freezer as well. A half hour later, she mixed the hydrogen peroxide, acetone, and acid in one of the jars, and set it in her refrigerator overnight.

In the morning, she saw exactly what the instructions said she would: fine white crystals in the bottom of the jar. She had derived approximately one-third of the amount required. She strained the liquid through a coffee filter into the empty jar, leaving a residue of white paste. That was the explosive, known chemically as triacetone triperoxide. Finally, she poured the ammonia over the white paste until it stopped bubbling and frothing, further purifying it. She repeated this process until all the liquid was out of the jar, then set aside the coffee filters with the TATP to dry on a newspaper.

The following day, and the next, Aminah repeated this careful process until she had derived exactly one pound. She disposed of the empty bottles and cans nightly in a gas station waste barrel, running fans in her apartment with the windows open to expel the scent. She carefully cleaned the jars, measuring cup, and syringe, but did not dispose of them, just in case she would have to repeat the process of mixing the explosives sometime in the future. She stored the cleaned equipment inside her refrigerator, on the same shelf with the twin loaves of explosive.

T
he woman Aminah now faced in her bedroom bureau mirror startled her. She wore a long skirt, a blue cotton wraparound that concealed her legs to the ankles, and another of her outdated sweaters, a mock-turtleneck beige pullover. Brown flats completed the disguise.

How odd it was to meet her old self on this fateful day.

She did not feel as brave or as holy as she had hoped. She knew nothing about the larger plan. Indeed, she believed that there were many links in this magnificent chain such as herself, none of whom knew anything other than their own blessed duty. And for some reason this reassured her.

Down on the street, shopping bag in hand, Aminah completed another of her tasks. She returned to the same gas station two blocks away and discreetly ejected the battery from her cell phone and disposed of both in the trash. Jettisoning that device was yet another profound moment for her, a no-turning-back display of conviction.

Two blocks on, she hailed a livery cab. She gave the driver the address of the Hotel Indigo in Manhattan, and as he pulled away from the curb, Aminah sat back against the firm leather upholstery and resumed her prayers. When the driver accelerated onto the Brooklyn Bridge, crossing into lower Manhattan, she closed her eyes, not wanting to view the city of infidels that rose like a fortress against the one true God.