The Intercept (2 page)

Chapter 3

J
ust under an hour later, Jeremy Fisk limped into the Intelligence Division office in Brooklyn. The building was almost all the way out to Coney Island, a long D train commute from Park Slope. Surrounded by automobile junkyards, the unmarked one-story brick building gave no indication of the important work going on inside.

Not only were the windows made of bulletproof glass, but the entire building was sheathed in ballistic Sheetrock. Cars moved in and out of the lot all day, the electric gate in the fence sliding open and closed, yet strangely no one else on the block questioned it.

Fisk made it to his cube, the ankle tender but not bad, wrapped tight in an Ace bandage. He settled into his chair, switching on his computer—then sat back a moment and closed his eyes. Awaiting the boot-up of his computer was the most restful interlude of his day. He heard the day shift ambling in, listened to coffee cups being set down on desks, chairs being rolled back, jackets being shrugged off. Then for a few moments the symphony of the office faded away and Fisk drifted beneath it, clearing his mind for the day’s challenges.

The NYPD’s Intelligence Division had grown out of the New York City terror attack of September 11, 2001. After being rehired as police commissioner four months later, Ray Kelly determined that federal law enforcement communities had failed New York. He could not understand how every law enforcement and security agency missed a plot involving dozens of people taking flying lessons, crossing borders, shipping money all over the place. Nobody was going to take care of New York, he realized, except New York’s Finest themselves.

A great many police forces across the country had traded on the emotion and fear of 9/11 to bolster their budgets and departments—from large cities to small towns, law enforcement expenditures rose precipitously throughout the first decade of the twenty-first century—but only one municipal agency created its own mini-CIA.

The Counter-Terrorism Bureau of the NYPD and its partnership with the JTTF was the public side of the NYPD’s efforts. The true face of counterterrorism, the Intelligence Division, was rarely seen. As such, the often controversial details of Intel’s inner workings were closely guarded secrets.

Just weeks after the last fires were extinguished at the newly christened Ground Zero, Commissioner Kelly hired David Cohen, a thirty-five-year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency, to become the NYPD’s first civilian intelligence chief. His job was simple and yet chilling: defend the preeminent city in the world from attack.

At that time, the Intelligence Division was primarily used for escorting various visiting dignitaries around the city. Cohen, with the commissioner’s full support, transformed Intel from a cushy preretirement assignment into a specialized unit that analyzed intelligence, ran drills and undercover operations throughout the five boroughs, and cultivated a broad network of informers to feed the division its insider data. While undercover work is a staple of big-city police departments, no other urban law enforcement organization in the nation worked as aggressively to infiltrate potential terror cells.

To do so, Cohen brought over various former espionage colleagues, first to screen and hire officers, and then to educate those officers in the tradecraft of information gathering, interdiction, and threat assessment. The goal was to locate and neutralize pockets of militancy before they became fully radicalized terror cells.

Fisk had been a detective bureau investigator for two years before being promoted for a spot in Intel. Being fluent in Arabic certainly helped. Fisk’s mother was Lebanese, hailing from a wealthy family who had openly despaired when she married his father, a Texas-born diplomat. While Fisk’s salary remained the same at Intel—he was Detective Two, no matter where he worked inside the NYPD—he wasn’t hampered by budgetary concerns as he had been on regular duty. No hassles about buying or repairing equipment: funding was available and easily procured. What he had not been prepared for were the opportunities for travel, with assignments taking him to London; Lyon, France; Tel Aviv; Toronto; Egypt; even Iraq.

He was, for all intents and purposes, an intelligence officer inside the NYPD.

Covert intervention was equal parts art and science. The adrenaline flowed differently when you were investigating crimes before they happened, rather than reacting to immediate and developing crises. The Tantric anticlimax of serving search and arrest warrants—of taking the puzzle apart before it was quite put together—was the only drawback to Intel.

Success meant that nothing happened. No bomb detonated, no bridge collapsed, nobody screamed in the night. It meant that the city kept moving. Keeping men and women going to work, children playing in parks, elderly people complaining about the weather: this was his job.

F
isk opened his eyes, returning to full consciousness. The office buzzed around him. The city sentinel rested but never slept.

His computer had booted up. The wallpaper on his monitor was a spectacular view of Manhattan looking north from Governors Island.

He dug in right away, scanning reports from his rakers. They had been busy yesterday; they would be even busier today.

Rakers were real cops, undercover, many of them new to Intel. The term came from a controversial remark an NYPD spokesman once made about sending ethnically matched agents into neighborhoods to “rake the coals looking for hot spots.” Most Intel cops got their start as rakers, including Fisk. Those vans that pull up outside a New York deli or convenience store at ten thirty at night, their drivers dollying in racks of soda and candy—for eight months that had been Fisk, delivering goods throughout the five boroughs . . . but mostly listening and watching.

So-called mosque crawlers were civilians on the payroll who hung around, watched, and—when they thought they had something—reported. Some were motivated by ancient hatreds. Some had had relatives killed by the Taliban or Al-Qaeda. Some needed the money. And some—many—had chosen informing as a lesser evil over arrest.

ACLU-style activists railed against perceived abuses of privacy by the Intel Division’s secretive surveillance methods. It was profiling, pure and simple, they charged—something cops had been doing for centuries. Show me a better way, Fisk always thought. But as the saying went, there were no liberals in a foxhole.

Fisk sifted through the reports, keeping track of what amounted to gossip from Muslim neighborhoods. Whose brother was in town from overseas? Whose friend wasn’t around suddenly? Why were these two men and a woman having coffee at that bookstore in Astoria where nobody ever went?

Before Intel, most cops working terrorist cases didn’t even know that Muslims prayed in congregation on Fridays. Intel’s special Analytic Unit, comprising experts from both academia and intelligence, figured out things like why a man whose family had been wiped out by a drone in Afghanistan a week ago might be somebody to look at closely. One of the many lessons of 9/11 was that there needed to be a central brain trust to process all incoming data, to interpret what the rakers were seeing and hearing. The AU tracked the big picture, the nuances and connections that were beyond the ken of each individual shoe-leather Intel cop.

Much of Fisk’s daily work involved slogging through reports from his informants and reading memos that the FBI decided to share. Days like this one were few and far between. This thing with Bassam Shah was hot.

Fisk walked to the heart of the Intel building, known officially as the Global Intelligence Room, though nobody ever called it anything other than The Room. It was a sunken pit roughly the size of an Olympic swimming pool, open on one side where a wide three-step staircase led up to cubicles and offices.

A dozen flat-screen televisions hung from ceiling mounts on the side walls, broadcasting Al-Jazeera and every other foreign news service from big satellite dishes set next to the backup generators outside. Headlines from the world’s news sources ticked in red across LED displays under the TVs. On the front wall, an electronic world map tracked threats with coded lights for New York, Tel Aviv, London, Riyadh, Islamabad, Baghdad, Manila, Jakarta, Tokyo, and Moscow.

On the floor beneath the map were banks of consoles with computer screens rivaling NASA’s Mission Control. Linguists in headphones, fluent in Arabic, Pashto, Urdu, Fujianese, Spanish, French, and other languages, tracked and logged pertinent items coming across the newswires and broadcasts. They fed useful information to the officials in perimeter offices who maintained the threat board. Those officials briefed response teams and field agents who followed up on the ground in New York City.

Fisk sat in on an Analytic Unit meeting updating Shah’s progress. Intel Division was shoe-leather detective work and big-picture tea-leaf reading.

“How’d the briefing go?” asked Louise, a language tech who was an expert on Arabic dialects.

“Wonderful. A lovefest.”

“Did they kick you in the shins again?”

“Basketball injury,” said Fisk, smiling. “But, yes.”

“You ask for it.”

“Listen, I want somebody the JTTF doesn’t know. A fresh face.”

“Uh-oh. What are you going to do?”

Fisk feigned offense. “My job. Any recommendations?”

“Depends. Are they going to get in trouble for you?”

“That depends.”

“On what?”

“On Bassam Shah.”

Chapter 4

B
assam Shah left his Ford Taurus in a mall parking garage, taking only his laptop bag from the backseat. Before leaving the car, he fished the detonators out of the air-conditioning vents, leaving them on the floor in front of the passenger seat. He left the car keys in the cupholder and the driver’s door unlocked before walking away.

The detonators were removed almost immediately, just minutes before an FBI surveillance car secured a spot within eyesight of the Taurus. The runner, who was unaware of the larger plan, quickly slipped into another vehicle two flights down and drove away.

Shah hurried through the shopping center, hopping a taxi that took him to a prearranged address. He entered the front door of the high-rise apartment building and immediately went to the basement below, utilizing an old tunnel known to drug dealers and illegal immigrants. It delivered him to a second building, where he exited at the rear and crossed backyards to a bus stop.

Gone were his laptop and one of his phones.

Shah entered the subway, riding for an hour. He sat in a corner seat, placidly but carefully watching riders get on and off.

He switched trains twice, watching for familiar faces, seeing none. Still, he could not relax. He tried to tell himself that this was normal. He boarded a 7 train, wearing ear buds whose plug end was tucked into his empty pocket. His jaw was trembling and there seemed to be nothing he could do to stop it. Anticipation and adrenaline had set his muscles to shaking. He wished he had a player into which he could plug the ear buds, only to counter the alarms going off inside his head.

He was finally able to soothe himself by focusing his thoughts on the task at hand. He imagined the subway car filling suddenly with a blast of orange flame. The shock wave tore the steel hull apart as it blasted through the underground tube, obliterating every human in its wake. His mind went further, well beyond the blast radius, into the fear that would ripple throughout the city and the country at large.

Paralysis would ensue. Then necrosis. Then death.

No one and no place is safe. Not in New York City, not anywhere.

That was the message.

Physical exhaustion caught up with him, coupled with the rocking of the subway car, lulling him to sleep. He awoke fighting, wild-eyed, when a Transit Authority driver shook him from his slumber. As the uniformed woman bustled off to call the authorities, Shah rushed out of the car and up an out-of-service escalator and quickly onto the street, chastened by his own inattention. Too much was at stake.

He walked the rest of the way to Times Square. The sunshine warmed him and he met no one’s eyes. The city planners had recently restricted traffic from the major intersection, setting up tables and chairs, in an effort to make the Crossroads of the World more of a plaza. Shah was looking for his family’s cart.

Until the 1970s, Greeks owned and operated most food cart franchises in New York City. The business had fractured throughout the 1980s into the 1990s. Most vendors still rented their carts from descendants of the old Greek owners, but now different nationalities specialized in certain products.

Fruit stands and downtown hot dog carts were manned by Bangladeshis. Dominicans ran the uptown hot dogs. Vietnamese ran smoothie carts citywide. Brazilians and Colombians operated the fragrant nut carts. And Afghans ran almost every coffee and pastry cart in town.

Shah’s father, a cabdriver, had purchased his cart in 1997, just before it became prohibitively expensive to do so. In May 2001, he left the family to attend a funeral in the Andarab district of Baghlan Province and never returned. The family’s search for him was initially confounded by the travel and information restrictions imposed after the 9/11 attacks, but he was never heard from again. His disappearance remained unsolved and festered like a wound in Bassam Shah’s mind.

Shah had, over the course of that decade, come to associate his father’s vanishing with the terror attacks. All this ruminating had led him to the certainty that his father had been somehow involved in the Holy War. He believed that his father was still alive and had been pulled into the resistance movements in the mountains, most likely crossing over into Pakistan.

At the training camp Shah had attended in Waziristan, his instructors hinted as much. Their discouragement of his desire to continue the search for his father served to confirm his thoughts. Cells must be kept separate for security reasons, and Shah pledged himself to the larger cause.

The coffee cart cleared thirty thousand dollars a year. Shah himself had operated the cart alone for much of the middle of the decade, his dependably friendly morning face for the arriving armies of financial district bankers and clerks masking the tumult inside. In those days, which seemed so long ago now, he had kept a stack of Korans in a box beneath the cart, and handed a copy to anybody who would take it. But when questions about his father’s fate took over his thinking, consuming his daily life, he realized he needed to leave the cart and seek his own path.

He moved to Denver for a year for religious observance in a mosque outside the city. Shah subleased the cart to a fellow Afghan, a cousin who was eager to work and who appeared content with his subsistence living, even happy—and essentially blind to the plight of his countrymen.

Shah returned to New York every few months to check on his cousin. His visits were always the same. Sell a few cups of coffee, greet the occasional old customer, and help his cousin tow the cart back to Greenpoint in Brooklyn for storage at the end of the day. But recently he had treated these visits as less than a courtesy call and more of a reconnaissance mission. Also, returning to the city recharged his resolve, erasing any doubts he had as to his duty.

He found Ahmed working beneath the cart’s faded umbrella just off Seventh Avenue, a strategic position equidistant from the many Starbucks around Times Square. Midafternoon was a slow period, when customers tended to be caffeine-craving tourists off their usual time clock or nearby office workers in need of a stimulant between meals. Shah plucked out his ear buds and greeted his cousin, who was excited to see him. He inquired about the business and made small talk, but not much more. He treated Ahmed coldly, which was not his intent, but Shah knew he was not himself. He saw that Ahmed noticed his lack of spirit, but Ahmed said nothing.

Under the pretense of examining the cart for possible repairs, Shah examined the area beneath the cart where he used to store his Korans. Ahmed’s Puma backpack was the only item there.

Ahmed brought up a problem he was having with the coffee distributor, and Shah nodded as though any of this mattered. An approaching man called his name—“Bassam!”—nearly sending Shah into a panic. But Shah saw that the old man was a former customer, recognizing his nicotine-gray face and the sneakers he wore with his suit like the female commuters.

The customer was effusive, wanting to know how he was, and Shah responded as though from the bottom of a murky pond. He was so many leagues away from any sort of common social interaction. And this man was a Jew, and Shah felt a sting of foolishness for allowing himself to befriend him so many years ago.

“Is anything wrong, are you all right?” asked the man. “You seem different.”

Shah shook his head or nodded, he did not even know which. No matter how he responded to the man, his mind was saying
Go away
.

And finally the man did, and Shah could tell Ahmed was looking at him warily. Shah told him they were packing up a little early that day. Together they pushed the cart two blocks through the square, then three blocks west to the parking lot on Forty-third Street. There they loaded the cart onto a rusty trailer hooked to a 1999 Toyota Camry and towed it back to the storage building in Greenpoint and locked up. Shah handed Ahmed his backpack and a wad of bills.

“Tomorrow is yours, cousin. Enjoy a day away. I would like a day’s work with the cart. Here is your day’s proceeds in advance.”

Ahmed leafed through the bills, less than one hundred dollars. He was more confused than grateful. To his credit, a day off meant nothing to him. He worked without complaint. But he was pleased to receive his pay. “Would you like me to help you in the morning, fill the dispensers—”

“No, I will do so myself.”

Ahmed wanted to insist. Routine was everything to him, and he seemed almost offended by Shah’s generosity. But eventually he took his backpack and, with a warm but uncertain nod, started for home.