The Intercept (28 page)

Chapter 69

F
isk went into every room on the western half of the floor, finding no one and nothing having to do with the disappearance of Krina Gersten. He then moved on to the other half of the hallway, which was closed for renovations, inspecting each room and each half-finished bathroom with the same results.

No sign of Gersten, no sign of anything amiss.

Another, more senior security guard was in the hallway now, as was a uniformed cop. Fisk returned to one of The Six’s rooms, the one with the cello inside, belonging to the musician. Nouvian had left his television on with the sound muted, and Fisk stared absently at CNN’s coverage of the hour leading up to the memorial ceremony at Ground Zero.

He checked his phone again, wishing she would just call and end this thing—thought he couldn’t for the life of him imagine where she could be. He backed up his thought process again. What did it mean that she was gone?

If the threat involved The Six, nothing had been accomplished here at the hotel. They had all gotten into the cars and were en route to the ceremony, no problem. So—why would someone, anyone, need to put Gersten out of the way somehow? As the group’s shepherd, she posed no direct threat to anyone trying to harm them . . .

Unless the threat was from within.

But that defied logic. What would be the point? One of The Six? Or—even Patton or DeRosier?

Never mind the fact that they had their chance to do great damage yesterday, when they shook Obama’s hand. No Al-Qaeda agent would have passed up an opportunity like that . . .

Unless the sitting president wasn’t his or her target.

On the television screen before Fisk, former President George W. Bush and his wife, Laura, descended from a private jet at LaGuardia Airport. They shook hands with greeters at the bottom of the stairs, waved at the cameras, then disappeared into a waiting limousine with U.S. flags fluttering on the rear bumper.

Fisk stared. He thought way back to Ramstein, to the discovery of Osama bin Laden’s directive, discussed in the months before his assassination. Bin Laden of course did not know he was going to die as a result of a special military operation initiated by President Barack Obama. His prime antagonist at that time was perhaps the sitting U.S. president. But his sworn enemy was the man who, in his eyes, had conducted a crusade of brutality on the Islamic world for the previous ten years.

Bin Laden’s number one target was George W. Bush.

Fisk’s mind reeled. The Yemeni hijacker, the elusive Saudi art dealer, and the fundamentalist convert sleeper agent in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. All participants—and all decoys.

Maybe the hijacking had been ordered to insert, not Baada Bin-Hezam into the United States, but one or more of The Six. The weakness they had chosen to exploit was the American celebrity machine, and its love for ceremony.

Fisk looked around the cellist’s room. He had gone through each of the heroes’ rooms, but quickly, searching just for clues to Gersten’s disappearance—not for indications of the presence of a terrorist.

He went back through them now, tearing through each room, looking for something—anything—that could support if not confirm his theory.

Security guard Bascomb followed at a distance, as Fisk went rifling through rooms without explanation. Overturning mattresses, emptying out luggage. Ordering that each room safe be opened.

Bascomb said, “We’re not allowed to do that without a specific search warrant.”

One hard look from Fisk persuaded him otherwise.

Only a few were locked. Fisk was standing next to Bascomb in one of The Six’s rooms, watching him key in a master code on yet another empty safe, when Fisk noticed a stain on the top of the table he was leaning against.

Closer inspection revealed that it was more like a burn in the veneer. He ran his fingers over it, feeling the roughness. He bent down and sniffed the oblong mark.

It smelled vaguely chemical.

“Whose room is this?” Fisk asked.

Bascomb did not know. While he called into his shoulder microphone to find out, Fisk went into the bathroom, checking it again, but more closely this time.

In the corner of the floor underneath the ledge of the vanity, he found a dusting of blue-colored flecks, accumulated there as though brushed away by hand.

He touched them with his fingertip. They felt hard, almost plastic.

He knew whose room it was even before Bascomb reported the answer. Fisk remembered the Swede’s blue wrist cast.

“Magnus Jenssen,” said Bascomb.

Blond, blue-eyed Scandinavian. Schoolteacher, was it? Fisk couldn’t remember anything more specifically about Jenssen. He knew that none of the passengers had self-declared themselves as Muslim. He also knew that the Islamic population of Sweden stood at a little more than half a million, approximately 7 percent of the population—up from nearly zero just thirty years ago. The trend was similar throughout Scandinavia and Europe.

Still, religion was only an indicator. Rarely was it the sole factor in profiles of terrorists.

His mind raced. Had the Swede truly fractured his wrist during the attempted hijacking? Or earlier, before he even boarded the aircraft?

With care, he could have hidden such an injury. The backscatter scanner at airport security would not have revealed it. The terahertz photons used in those machines were just below infrared on the frequency spectrum, and well below true X-rays.

There was no time to pursue this theory now. Fisk had to work with what he had in front of him.

A chemical in Jenssen’s hotel room, staining the furniture. What could it be? Had he hidden it inside his cast?

TATP. More boom.

He wondered what sort of scrutiny the heroes would face inside the Ground Zero security bubble. The answer was: once they were inside, very little, if at all.

And, by his clock, they were already inside.

Fisk had to get down there. He had to leave this place, even with Gersten still missing.

He went to Bascomb. “Give me your phone.”

The guard started to ask why, then instead simply pulled it from his belt. He turned it on and thumbed in his pass code, then handed it to Fisk.

Fisk quickly went to his contacts and punched in his own cell phone number, and his last name in all caps. So that there would be no mistakes. He thrust the phone back at Bascomb.

“I could give this to the cop, but I’m giving it to you. If they find anything about the missing detective, you call me right away. It’s critical, understand?”

Bascomb responded with a trembling nod.

Fisk ran to the elevator.

F
isk had left his car at the cabstand with his grille lights flashing. He realized he didn’t have DeRosier’s number, so he first tried Dubin.

Immediate voice mail. Fisk dialed Intel directly.

They told him that Dubin was down at Ground Zero. Cell phone service within the bubble had been jammed in order to prevent any remote control bombs being detonated using cellular technology, a favorite tactic of terrorists and insurgents.

Fisk informed them about Gersten’s apparent disappearance. He said that The Six had to be sequestered for their own safety—phrasing it that way because, without Fisk there personally, if they tried to collapse on the heroes with force, Jenssen could detonate immediately, killing everybody within range.

If, like Bin-Hezam, he had a half pound of TATP on him, the death toll would be incredible.

He told them to do everything they could to get the message out, then asked to be patched through to DeRosier’s cell phone. That call also went immediately to voice mail—confirming that The Six were already inside the security bubble, and Jenssen with them.

Fisk leaned on his horn, grille lights flashing, willing the traffic to move. He was now in a race against time and gridlock to get from midtown down as close to Ground Zero as he could.

Chapter 70

H
oly shit!”

Flight attendant Maggie Sullivan came bursting into the hospitality trailer where the rest of the group, as well as their minders, Detectives DeRosier and Patton and Secret Service agent Harrelson, were waiting with some other VIPs.

Maggie held up her hands as though about to burst into song. “Paul Simon just shook my hand on my way back from the Porta-Potty.”

A woman from the mayor’s office said, “He’s here to sing ‘The Sound of Silence’ at Mayor Bloomberg’s request.”

“He recognized me,” said Maggie, amazed. “Me! He said, ‘Great job.’
Great job!
I was tongue-tied.”

Sparks said, “I hope he washed his hands.”

Jenssen sat deeply at the end of a suede-covered couch. A flat-screen television played on the opposite wall, above a small buffet with chafing dishes of Vermont maple bacon, a strata with sausage and egg-soaked bread, hash brown potatoes, and French toast. Carafes of coffee and orange juice were set before trays of cardboard cups.

The pain in his arm was intense. He had neglected to take any ibuprofen, and now the swelling beneath his bomb-laden cast was radiating pain into his fingertips. Droplets of blood appeared from the seam of his palm, which he was discreetly swiping onto the suede fabric beneath the sofa.

The pain was a significant distraction, forcing him to retreat into prayer. It was his sole consolation, yet it isolated him from the rest. He felt their scrutiny and wondered how much of it was mere paranoia on his part.

He focused also on the television images. The Americans had memorialized their own defeat with two giant holes in the ground at the foundations of the destroyed Twin Towers. The inside of each was sheathed in black stone, the names of the dead etched into panels at waist level along their perimeters. Water ran down all four sides of each hole, emptying into reflecting pools at their bottoms.

The view shifted to show the new tower, rising into the sky. Jenssen, for his part, saw it as a headstone.

The camera panned a surrounding garden of oak trees and pathways to the ceremony dais. Tiers of platforms were flanked by a pair of giant broadcast screens like those seen in sporting arenas. Panels of bulletproof glass walled the speaker’s podium at the center. A choir of singers attired in long blue robes stood in ranks to the left and right of the podium.

Jenssen shivered once, due to both the pain and the profundity of the moment. The spirit of hundreds of millions of American viewers would be shattered forever after the live television assassination of their former leader. Obama and the rest were in play as collateral damage, but not necessary. Jenssen had shaken the man’s hand yesterday. He had looked into his eyes and smiled. He had done all this with murder in his heart.

He did not have to assassinate Obama. In the days and weeks and months to come, the photograph of the sitting U.S. president shaking the hand of an Al-Qaeda terrorist would be his undoing.

All he cared about was the infidel Bush. He was somewhere near Jenssen right now—perhaps already within blast range.

A new streak of pain up to his shoulder shook him, Jenssen going rigid and briefly leaning forward in compensation. He wished to leave the cramped trailer for fresh air, but he remained inside the trailer where it was safe.

Explosive-sniffing dogs concerned him. He needed to remain sheltered until the last possible minute.

There had been contingency plans. If Jenssen and other passengers on the plane had for some reason not achieved the celebrity status anticipated to get him onto this stage, then Jenssen’s orders were to get as close to the ceremony as he could and detonate. If, today, he had attracted too much scrutiny at the security checkpoint, he would have detonated immediately. Even if he had failed to get Bush, the explosion would have led to many casualties and reminded the United States that it was not invulnerable.

But everything had gone close enough to plan. All he had to do now was remain alert and focused in the face of increasing agony from his improperly cast arm—and he would succeed with glory.

“Magnus?” Maggie Sullivan sat next to him, on the edge of the couch in her uniform and blue cap and flag wings. “Are you all right?”

“Fine,” he said, a terribly incompetent response. “Overwhelmed.”

“Sure,” she said, understandingly. “You look ill, though.”

“Tired.” Go away, you heathen bitch.

She touched his knee gently. “Before things get too crazy and we go our separate ways, I just wanted to take the opportunity again to thank you for saving my life—for being the first to act. I really . . . I think you are an amazing person. Your courage, I’m in awe of it. And . . . as to what happened between us, two nights ago . . . I don’t regret it, I just . . . I don’t know if it’s complicated things, or what. But I want you to know that it hasn’t changed my opinion of what you did. I was feeling . . . well, I don’t know what I was feeling. It’s a little embarrassing, but I’m okay with it—I just hope you are too.”

He swallowed with difficulty, the throbbing of his arm accompanied by a kind of screaming in his head. “Yes, yes,” he said abruptly.

She nodded, waiting for more. “Are you sure you’re . . . ?”

He nodded quickly.

“Okay,” she said, offended—but done. “I’ll leave you alone then,” she said, and stood, stepping away from the sofa.

He resisted an urge to howl. He checked his left palm, and smeared a bit more blood on the underside of the sofa.

On television they were showing a child pointing up at the new monument of America. Jenssen had been the child of a pariah, a refugee woman who never ascended from the trappings of poverty, despised in a country where poverty was nothing less than a sin. Magnus grew up in the brick hives of immigrant ghettos, where every race hated every other race. His growth spurt came late, after years of childhood bullying. He knew what it was to live in constant fear. To escape further bias and beatings, he and his mother worshipped as Muslims in secret, alone in a largely Christian ghetto. After two years in a manual trade school, studying highway surveying and engineering, he instead pursued schoolteaching as his profession. It was a way to live quietly and at the same time pursue his own self-education—his true avocation—in solitude.

Removing this evil from the earth—Bush, the radical Christian leader of the American crusade against Islam, the unprincipled thug—was the greatest victory a martyr could claim. Taking Obama at the same time—were it to be God’s plan—was an added glory. The sitting president was a man who had heard Islam’s voice and turned from it. Curse both of them to hell.

Jenssen again trembled in pain. He had reviewed their approach on the way in. They would follow a pathway through the tree garden, over which a pipe scaffolding covered with blue tarpaulin had been constructed. This was so that during their walk to the stage, the president, former president, and fellow dignitaries would be shielded from potential snipers in any of the thousands of windows overlooking the Ground Zero construction site.

Jenssen reached into his jacket pocket, having transferred the trigger mechanism there. He fondled the small plastic rectangle, running his thumb over its simple switch.

The components were virtually foolproof. The trigger was a simple inertial generator, sending a single pulse of electricity to the wire antennae of the twin igniters. Only one of the igniters had to work. There would be a gap of about a half second between the trigger and the flash: a blue blast from his arm, then a rush of flame consuming all oxygen in the air.

In that split second, all would die.

His thumb pressed against the trigger, toying with it. The fire in his arm was such that he could not wait to detonate and be free of pain. His vision of becoming the most glorious religious martyr in the history of the world was the only thing that allowed him to rise above the weakness of his flesh.

The mayor’s office’s liaison entered. She was going over arrangements after the building dedication. Jenssen smiled grimly before tuning her out. There was nothing to arrange after the ceremony. Jenssen would take care of all that.