The Intercept (21 page)

Chapter 44

F
isk had made Bin-Hezam instantly. It took everything he had to suppress his astonishment at seeing the Saudi walk directly into his path.

Had he not seen the helicopter? Bin-Hezam did not run. Nor did he hesitate.

Fisk did not like the bag of imitation leather across his back. No disguise, nothing in his hands.

Fisk had made a split-second decision to turn back to the desk. He allowed the Saudi to pass. He wanted him outside the hotel. The arrest team was in position outside, the street was sealed. The desk clerk and the hipster guest behind him were directly in the line of fire if something happened inside the hotel.

Fisk stared at the clerk, fearing he would look up at the exiting guest and point him out to Fisk as the man from the scanned photograph in front of him. The moments moved in slow motion, Fisk listening to the terrorist’s footsteps crossing the lobby behind him.

Once the Saudi was past, Fisk glanced over his shoulder. He focused on the bag across the man’s back. Could be anything in there, starting with the handgun he had acquired from the murdered Senegalese. Bin-Hezam wore a jacket as well, enough to conceal a weapon.

Fisk slid his phone out of his belt.

The subject pushed open the door to the sidewalk.

The door eased shut behind him, and Bin-Hezam was out on the sidewalk of the oddly quiet street.

“This is him exiting,” said Fisk. “I repeat—mark is exiting.”

The clerk looked up at him, puzzled. “Excuse me . . . ?”

“Get down on the floor now!” said Fisk. He turned and grabbed the hipster’s shoulder, throwing him down to the floor. “Down!”

The hipster’s phone never left his ear as he looked up at Fisk with great offense. Into his phone he said, “Some asshole just shoved me to the floor.”

“Stay down!” said Fisk, already rushing to the door.

Chapter 45

B
aada Bin-Hezam walked out of the Hotel Indigo into late-day heat. He noticed instantly how quiet the canyon of West Twenty-eighth Street was.

Silence in the valley. He savored it.

All for him.

Racked plants and flowers stood along on the sidewalks, but the vendors were all gone. Hose water trickled into the gutter.

Bin-Hezam muttered a prayer of gratitude at that moment, only his lips moving.

Then he sensed another body moving through the glass door behind him.

“Bin-Hezam!”

They knew his name. The voice behind him—surprisingly, given what Bin-Hezam had seen of his face inside the hotel lobby—yelled at him in Arabic, ordering him to lie facedown upon the burning sidewalk.

Joy flowered in Bin-Hezam. He stepped off the curb and stopped.

There, across the street to his left, in an alcove in the front of one of the shops, appeared two men in black jackets and helmets. And from behind a parked car to his right. Rising like spirits, greeting him.

He heard the policeman’s voice again behind him, instructing him to lie down before them. Yelling at him now. Commanding him.

Bin-Hezam raised both of his arms in the universal gesture of surrender.

The man behind the car straightened, aiming a large automatic weapon at Bin-Hezam. The two from the alcove slowly advanced.

Bin-Hezam recited his prayer. He knew he would be forgiven for standing.

Chapter 46

F
isk saw Bin-Hezam’s arms go high, the messenger bag shrugging up his back. He had stopped and surrendered, but he had not begun to lie down.

“There is no god but Allah,” said Bin-Hezam. Not a yell, just a statement. An assertion.

Fisk repeated his orders. The crouching black-armored tac team cops moved a few more shuffle steps toward the opposite curb, their footsteps like drumbeats on the pavement.

“Get down!” Fisk yelled, this time in English.

“Mohammed is His prophet!” called Bin-Hezam, now yelling in reply. Fisk didn’t like this.

Bin-Hezam was lowering his hands. Fisk instinctively started toward him from behind.

In a single motion, Bin-Hezam lifted the messenger bag off his shoulder and reached across his chest. He drew something from within his jacket under his left arm. Fisk saw it was shiny, nickel-plated.

Fisk yelled, “No!”—both at Bin-Hezam and the tac cops.

Bin-Hezam pointed the weapon first at the cop coming from behind the car. He squeezed the trigger, the handgun leaping in his hand.

He barely got off a second shot before a single 7.62 full-metal-jacket, boat-tail sniper bullet exploded in his brain.

Concurrently, the other tac cop had opened up on the Saudi. The twin impacts drove Bin-Hezam back and down against the sidewalk, collapsing him in a quivering heap. He resembled a pile of rags more than a human being.

What was left of Bin-Hezam’s life flowed from the gaping wound in the back of his head, his blood joining the water trickling in the gutter, turning it crimson.

The messenger bag, having jumped from his hand, lay a few feet away.

Fisk stood stunned. Only later did it occur to him that he had unwisely been standing opposite the tac teams’ lines of fire. Had they missed Bin-Hezam by just a few inches to the right—unlikely at close range, but possible—Fisk too would have gone down on the pavement in a bloody heap.

As it was, Fisk walked to Bin-Hezam, standing over the dead terrorist. They would get no further information from him. Bin-Hezam had wanted to die. The only consolation was that he never would have consented to be taken alive.

The helicopter reappeared overhead. The tac agents joined Fisk at the curb. They looked down at the Saudi, whose eyes were beyond seeing.

Part 7

Double-Speak

Chapter 47

T
he cab crawled uptown on Sixth Avenue in the thick of early evening traffic.

It hit every light because of the snarl of pedestrians crossing against them on this late Saturday afternoon. The driver had the radio on, 1010 WINS New York. All talk. Traffic on the ones.

The announcer cut in with breaking news. A police barricade in Chelsea had resulted in a shooting. Early reports indicated that it was an antiterrorist operation, but it was unclear at that time whether they were reacting to a confirmed threat or the actions of an unbalanced individual. The announcer issued a traffic alert for the area around Twenty-eighth Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues.

“This heat make people crazy,” mumbled the driver.

In the backseat, Aminah bint Mohammed felt herself regressing into Kathleen Burnett. As completely as she had pledged her word and life to Allah, her meager training had not prepared her for this.

The man she had met that afternoon had died. He had been martyred on the field of battle—this she knew. Baada Bin-Hezam had known he was walking into death. She realized that now. He went bravely. He went unquestioningly.

As she must now.

This was how she had come to work in the emergency room. Nursing the sick and dying. So much like what she was doing now: saving the world from godlessness and the torture of innocents.

For some time, she had passionately tended her secret life as an Islamic jihadist. That had been enough to soothe her insecurities and fears. But the bottle in which she contained herself cracked now as she understood that she had left a man to walk to his death.

She was his last human contact. She carried the things he provided in the bag he had given her. She was acting for him now.

He had accepted his death. He had passed along his strength to her with the bag and the assignment. She was, as she had never seen herself before, a sacred messenger.

Sacred, yet still scared.

The cab turned right onto one of the larger east-west thoroughfares, then left on Madison Avenue for the run up to the park. She had given the driver the Metropolitan Museum of Art as her destination. The museum was a short walk from the fenced hundred-acre pond officially known as the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir.

Aminah glanced at the red LED digits of the clock on the cab’s meter, then her eyes fell to the driver’s ID placard below. Aaqib bin Mohammed. “Follower Son of Mohammed.”

In the mirror, she saw the eyes of a fiftyish man whose face had seen sorrow and grief. His eyes flicked up into the mirror and noticed hers staring at him. She wondered what he saw in his passenger. One of those typical New York white women slipping uncomfortably into middle age. Unaware of the simple privileges of birth and geography.

“Can I help you, miss?” he asked. “You are crying?”

Aminah had not been aware of this. She swept away the tears rolling down her cheeks. “No . . . I’m fine. Really.” She played at looking out the window. So many people, so many buildings and doors. So much life. “Maybe . . . maybe you can help me. You are a Muslim?”

He glanced at her again, this time with suspicion. “I am, miss. As much as I can be, which is not much these days. It is worse now that everyone mistrusts us. But I . . . I have lost my faith in the heat of its violence.”

Aminah felt cold. “The world is violent,” Aminah said, reciting one of the most primitive truths. “Is it not?”

“It is. But I remember a time when religion brought us peace without violence. It is so much easier not to believe now. Easier and saner. So I close these windows and I drive.” He laughed, a tired smoker’s hack all too familiar to Aminah from her nursing days.

“You should have your lungs checked,” she told him.

“Yes.” He honked twice at a slow passenger vehicle in front of him. “Yes, I know.” He glanced back at her again. “You would be surprised how many people cry in taxis. Very surprised. But no one worries about my cough, until you. No one cares.”

“Then, may I ask you one more question?” She struggled to get this out. “If you have lost your faith, as you say, then have you also lost God?”

“I have not lost God, miss. What I have lost is the idea that I can ever know what God is. That is why religion has become a curse on the earth. Nobody can know. But everybody presumes. Many are willing to kill without knowing. Without even thinking.”

She felt sickened by his blasphemy, because it touched the doubts crowding her mind. She went deeper into herself for strength.

Prayer was like a fence, expanding outward. Protecting her faith.

Obviously, this taxi driver was a test sent by God at her moment of truth. She rejoiced that Allah would strengthen her resolve in this way. So important was her mission.

“The museum,” said the driver, crossing both lanes of Fifth Avenue from East Eighty-sixth, pulling up at the curb in front of the massive temple to art.

Aminah reached into her skirt pocket. She carried no identification, only cash, as instructed. She handed a twenty over the seat. The fare was twelve dollars. “Six back,” she said to the infidel, a knowing lilt to her voice.

He nodded, perhaps aware of how abruptly she had ended their conversation. He made change, retaining his two-dollar tip. “Thank you, miss.”

She looked at him one more time via the rearview mirror, imagining she saw some evidence of the hidden God in his eyes. She nodded to him, charged by the exchange, feeling a surge of gratitude for God’s greatness. Aminah slid across the seat to the curb side of the car, the messenger bag still in her lap. She opened the door—but then hesitated, tapping on the Plexiglas that partially divided the front seat from the back.

In English, she said to the driver, “Peace be upon you.”

She exited and watched the yellow vehicle join the others, fading into the flow of traffic. Standing on the sidewalk in front of the museum, she felt her senses reawaken, following their momentary banishment by fear.

It was a beautiful evening, historic, holy. The sidewalk was full of people whose general good cheer was unmistakable. Conversations ricocheted off the stone bluff of the blocklong building as they passed her. The air was scented with the steamy hot dog and pretzel aromas from the vendors’ carts on the sidewalk—flavors of her youth. She saw God in the face of every person around her.

Aminah lifted the messenger bag onto her right shoulder like a handbag, turned right up Fifth Avenue, and started toward the entrance to Central Park just a few hundred feet away.

Chapter 48

G
ersten buzzed the third-floor apartment from the stoop. It was early evening in the city’s old Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Midtown West. She was just around the corner from the firehouse at Forty-eighth and Eighth, which, of all the fire stations in New York City, had lost the most personnel on 9/11.

She had two patrolmen with her. She motioned to them to stay tight against the prewar building, so as not to be viewed from above. There was no camera in the lobby.

“Yes?” came the male voice.

“Mr. Pierrepont?” said Gersten.

“Yes. Are you from Scandinavian Airlines?”

She said, “We spoke a little while ago?”

“Yes. Come on up.”

The locked door buzzed and Gersten pulled it open, the cops following her inside. She skipped the elevator—the wait in these old buildings could be an eternity—and instead used the carpeted staircase, climbing to the third floor.

The twentysomething man waiting at the door wore a cardigan sweater over a T-shirt and dress pants, and had a brown mustache. His smile faltered when he saw the uniformed police officers coming up the stairs behind her.

“Is there a problem, miss . . .?”

“Gersten,” she said, showing him her Intel shield. “Krina Gersten. Mr. Pierrepont, the truth is, I’m not with Scandinavian Air, but the New York Police Department.” The two cops caught up with her. “Mind if we step inside, out of the hallway?”

After a moment of held breath, he backed inside, allowing them to enter.

The one-bedroom apartment was a little jewel, with built-in bookcases, a rehearsal corner under a skylight with a sheet music holder set upon a small, round Oriental rug, and framed New York Philharmonic posters on the walls.

“I don’t understand what this is about,” he said, short of breath, pale.

“Are you alone, Mr. Pierrepont?”

“I am, yes.”

One of the cops poked his head in the doorway to the bedroom and around the corner into the kitchen, making sure. “You were a passenger on Flight 903, the airliner that was almost hijacked on Thursday?”

“Indeed I was,” he said. “You called and said you had a gift for me, for my inconvenience.”

“I actually have some questions for you about your seatmate on the flight.”

Pierrepont was slow to react, thinking it through. He shook his head, too casually. “I think I’ve answered every question about the flight already.”

“This is about Mr. Alain Nouvian. He was seated to your immediate left. He was one of the five passengers who intervened to stop the hijacker.”

Pierrepont swallowed. “Yes?” he said.

Gersten motioned to his rehearsal space. “I see you are a violinist yourself?”

“A violist. I play the viola. Bigger than a violin, smaller than a cello.”

“You play professionally?”

“Yes and no. I do, but not full time. I want to play full time.”

Gersten nodded. “And is Mr. Nouvian assisting you in that respect?”

Pierrepont began to answer, then stopped himself. “I’m not clear on what rights I have.”

“He tried to contact you earlier this afternoon. He left you a message, which you may even still have on your voice mail.”

She was wearing him down, but he did not yet give up on playing at incomprehension.

Gersten backed off a bit. “Would you please read Mr. Pierrepont his rights, officer?” she said.

It was painful watching the musician try to maintain his composure while the cop rattled off his Miranda rights.

“Yes,” he said, answering the question of whether he understood his rights. He said it in an exasperated why-me? tone.

Gersten said, “Mr. Pierrepont, I don’t want to arrest you.” In truth, she had nothing to arrest him for, just yet. “I don’t want to subject you to any unnecessary public scrutiny. I don’t even want to take up too much of your time. But I do want you to answer my questions.”

“This is exactly what he said he didn’t want,” said Pierrepont suddenly. “
Exactly
what he was afraid of.”

“Okay,” said Gersten. “Maybe you have heard about what happened to another of your fellow passengers? Less than an hour ago, down in the flower district?”

Pierrepont’s shocked expression told her that he had. “You mean, that man . . . he was on our flight too?”

“A second terrorist. I need answers, Mr. Pierrepont. I need to know what you two and Mr. Nouvian were talking about.”