The Intercept (3 page)

Chapter 5

F
isk was at his desk later in the day when an attractive young woman tapped the top of his monitor. She had short, dyed black hair that looked like she had trimmed it herself: a note of harshness in contrast to the soft features of her face. Still, he bought the screw-you, punk look. It must have served her well, passing as a hardcase radical in neighborhoods where it looked good to be Caucasian and pissed off at the United States. She had spent the past seven months talking revolution and seeding dissent in order to draw out others eager to make such talk a reality.

“Krina Gersten,” she said, introducing herself. “I was told you asked to see me?”

Fisk nodded, thrown off by what looked to him like a hickey on the side of her neck, just above the collar of her military-style jacket. He felt his eyes flash to it, and then, rather than pull back guiltily like a kid caught staring at cleavage, he squinted, getting a closer look.

“Snakebite?” he said.

She smiled, touching it gently, like a burn. She had a fine neck, which was why the mark stood out so vividly. And her smile showed a tiny space between her two front teeth, giving her face a little extra character and attitude. “You’re the first person rude enough to comment on it.”

“I make an incredible first impression,” said Fisk. “You see, the trick is to suck out the venom without swallowing it and becoming poisoned yourself.”

“You’ve had experience with this?” she said.

“With snake venom?” he said. “Just ask my ex.”

Gersten smiled at that—not amused, necessarily, or even impressed, but rather appreciative of the banter. Intrigued. Fisk could see that, to her, flirtation was less an invitation than a challenge. “ ‘Ex’ as in ex-wife?”

“Ex-fiancée,” said Fisk. “She was a snake charmer.”

“Right,” said Gersten. “Sounds like a fun gal.”

Fisk held out his hand. “Jeremy Fisk.”

Gersten made a point of giving him a good, firm, professional squeeze.

“Easy there,” he said, pulling back his sore hand. “Death grip. Dad in the military?”

“Not the military,” she said.

“Uh-oh,” said Fisk, knowing what was coming next.

“That’s right,” she told him. “A cop.”

“Christ. Second or third generation?”

“Me? I’m the fourth.”

“Gah. Okay. Thanks very much for the warning.”

“You have no idea,” she said. “What about you, Detective Fisk? What’s your story?”

“Me? Just your run-of-the-mill first-generation public servant.”

“Yeah? So where’d you draw the cop gene from?”

“Mutation,” he said. “A defect.”

“Okay,” she said, sizing him up, deciding. “You’re interesting.”

Fisk liked her immediately. Later he would learn that her father had been a sergeant in charge of one of the department’s scuba squads when he suffered a heart attack underwater. Gersten had been thirteen at the time. She still lived with her mother across the Narrows over on Staten Island, which was like a ghetto for New York cops and firefighters. She had also done a tour in Iraq with a national police transition team, following college at CUNY. So for her the cop life had been the one and only course on her life menu.

The big dance was bad business with another cop, but immediately they had that undercurrent of attraction that kept things fun and interesting. Gersten came recommended to him from street raking for her skills, her work ethic, and the fact that she took shit assignments without complaint and wound up excelling at them.

“Did I see you limping?” she asked.

“You might have. Basketball.”

“Hurts getting old, huh?” she said.

He smiled at her insolence. “Maybe you can make heads or tails of this. I had this dream last night. I was at a cocktail party at the police academy, which also resembled my high school. Anyway, I watched as the bartender planted a bomb beneath the bar. I saw all this from across the crowded room . . . but I couldn’t get to him, all because of this limp.”

“Was he Middle Eastern?” she interjected.

“Of course he was,” said Fisk. “You make pizzas all day, you dream of pizzas. You work mosques and shawarma shops all day, you dream of Middle Easterners.”

“Tell me about it.”

“So finally I get near the bar—I’m the only one who can hear this thing ticking—and I go around the end and dive underneath . . . and there’s nothing there. Just the tanks for the soda taps. I look up—and now the room is in flames all around me. Drapes on fire, walls melting—but people still socializing and chatting.”

“Good booze,” she surmised. “Open bar, I take it?”

“I was hoping for a little more insight than that, Doctor.”

Gersten said, “In my dreams now, I am always aware that I’m dreaming. Never used to be that way before I switched over to Intel. Now I’m always conscious that it’s not really real. That I have to be in control, even in my sleep. Takes all the fun out of it, don’t you think?”

“Ever vigilant,” said Fisk. “The nature of the job.”

“The nature of the beast. Not fair, though. I can’t even get away from this stuff in my downtime?”

“No such thing as downtime,” said Fisk. “Remember, you’re not paranoid, you’re
alert
. I go to movies now, I can’t stop thinking about all the people in the dark around me—who are they, what are they doing.”

She nodded. “They’re enjoying the movie.”

“The way it’s supposed to be. That’s our job. Allowing them to do so.” He sighed. “I used to like movies.”

“And I used to like sleep,” said Gersten.

They caught themselves bitching. Fisk said, “Okay, now that we’ve had our cry . . .”

He brought her up to date on the Shah situation. Just the highlights, for the time being.

“You know the imam who runs the funeral home in Flushing?”

Gersten nodded. “Samara Abad Salame.”

“The FBI’s had him in their pocket for a while. Got into a bit of trouble last year with his taxes. Not enough to get him hauled in, but just enough to soften him up for a visit.”

Gersten got it. “They went salivating,” she guessed.

“Exactly. Now, Salame has given them the goods so far. And they’ve made him available to us, and he’s been on target, so much as we know. But his loyalty is ultimately neither to the FBI nor to us. So I don’t think it’s too much of a leap to consider the fact that he might not be telling the FBI everything. Now, Analytic got me lineage charts on a guy currently in Gitmo who is apparently Salame’s brother, though maybe by a different mother.”

Gersten said, “Family concerns trump all.”

“Exactly. And Shah is also a cousin of his.”

Gersten said, “Let me ask you this. Do you think Shah was baited in Denver?”

“You mean, was he encouraged or otherwise coerced to act? Probably.” Fisk waved it away. “I can’t care. That’s the FBI’s problem. This is our job here. Actual lives are at stake. No matter what brought him to this point, there is absolutely no question he is planning and preparing a terrorist act. He’s a dictionary-definition terrorist.”

“Sounds to me like I’m getting off the street,” said Gersten.

“For now,” said Fisk. “See, they—the FBI—they wanted to let this guy run some more, see who he meets here in New York, gather up more intelligence crumbs.”

“You think it’s not worth it.”

“Nope. Not since Shah shook free of surveillance three hours ago.”

Gersten’s mouth hung open. “Holy shit.”

“We’ve got people who knew his family. I’ve got a bead, not on where he is, but where he might go. The FBI might have this information too.”

“Good,” she said. Then, reading his face, she reconsidered. “No?”

“This is Intel’s turf now. I need someone like yourself. Someone who doesn’t look cop. Somebody who can dupe not only a terrorist, but perhaps the FBI as well. What I need to know right now is, will that be a problem for you?”

Of all the answers he could have received, Fisk did not expect her to smile. She said, “Now things are getting interesting.”

“P
eavy?” said Fisk. “Where are you?”

“The studio.” Peavy was a military sharpshooter, a veteran of four tours of duty over the past decade with eighty-five confirmed kills to his credit. He taught at a Krav Maga studio on the Lower East Side. “I’m in.”

Fisk said, “You don’t even know what it is yet.”

“It’s either a job or tickets to the Yankees.”

“The Yankees are out of town,” said Fisk.

“This official or not?”

“Depends.”

“On what?”

“On how it comes out.”

Peavy said, “Let’s not do this over the phone.”

Chapter 6

A
t eight o’clock the next morning, Shah entered the unlocked door of a house in Flushing, a residential neighborhood of single-family homes. Majid Kazir arrived less than ten minutes later, looking dazed and dark-eyed from having stayed up all night. He pulled a can of Diet Coke from the refrigerator and sat down at the table, plucked open the soda can tab with a long thumbnail, and drank as though to wash away a bad taste in his mouth. He badly needed the caffeine.

Kazir smelled of bleach. “Mother is finished,” he said.

This was Kazir’s mother’s house, but Kazir was not referring to her. The beauty salon attached to the structure belonged to his mother, was staffed by his two sisters, and was managed by Kazir. Kazir’s hair was kinky but flat. He had no use for beauty products himself, but the shop did a steady business and his mother and sisters were always pleased.

The shop had been closed for four days. Their trip to visit relatives in Pennsylvania had been arranged by Kazir to take place this week. He needed the house to himself.

As the manager, one of his responsibilities was to procure supplies used in the treatments. He had been patiently amassing a modest stockpile of hydrogen peroxide, acetone, and acid from various beauty supply stores over the past eight months. The three ingredients in acetone peroxide, or triacetone triperoxide, could form a primary high explosive. The compound’s notorious sensitivity to impact, heat, and friction earned it a nickname among the Islamist underground organizations.

Mother of Satan.

Shah said, “Mother is packed and ready?”

Kazir nodded, suppressing a carbonation belch. He looked at his still-trembling hand. Kazir had been heating and mixing the ingredients all night. “Mother was a bitch tonight, my friend.”

Kazir finished his soda and tossed the empty can into the sink. Shah had been put in contact with him through the network. Kazir did not come to him espousing jihad and anti-American sentiments—which was good, since those are all hallmarks of a law enforcement plant. Kazir was serious, and he was quiet. His only hot point of anger was the place of women in American society. He detested their independence, which he claimed was the reason he had so much trouble finding a wife. Indeed, his own mother and sisters venerated him as the man of the household, so much so that he was required to contribute very little to the family business. Even this, he resented.

He believed that he was meant for bigger and better things. This was his first stride toward greatness, following in the footsteps of his Moroccan countrymen, who had orchestrated the Madrid commuter train bombings. Outwardly, he appeared to pay Shah’s bid for martyrdom much respect, but Shah suspected that Kazir would never exhibit the same level of commitment as Shah—that is to say, the ultimate commitment. In this endeavor, Kazir had taken great care that his participation not be discovered.

Kazir had been trained as a chemist in the same camp Shah had attended, in the high mountains of Waziristan on the Pakistan and Afghanistan border. Shah had confidence that the explosive would not fail him—nor he it.

Shah pulled the cell phone from his pocket. “Here.” He placed it on the table before Kazir, who regarded it as one might regard a cockroach.

“What is this?”

“A telephone,” said Shah. “It contains my statement. My video. You will upload it precisely at eleven
A.M
.”

Kazir looked at the flip phone. “You videoed it yourself?”

“Of course.” It was an older device with the chipset of a pay-as-you-go convenience store phone. He had used its low-res camera to record his final words while locked in the bathroom stall of a Middle Eastern restaurant on Twenty-eighth Street. His other phone, his public phone, he had “lost” along with his laptop. Those devices could not be trusted.

“Dispose of this when you are done,” said Shah.

“I do not like handling electronic devices,” said Kazir.

High-impact explosives, yes. But smartphones, no. Shah shook his head. This man refined hydrogen peroxide and acetone into explosive crystals as powerful as C-4. But he was paranoid about handling a microprocessor. Shah was not unhappy to leave this world.

“I have been very careful, I assure you,” said Shah. “Where is it?”

Kazir nodded to the back entrance. Shah rose and found a gym bag there, a small duffel. He lifted it, tentatively at first. It was heavy, but not prohibitively so.

He thought to say something more to Kazir, who remained slumped in a chair in the kitchen. But there were no words.

In the end, he tucked the pack beneath his arm and simply headed out the door. His farewell would be one not of words but of deed.

Chapter 7

F
isk looked through the high-powered monocular spotting scope mounted on a tripod resting on the rubber-coated roof of the Marriott Marquis hotel in Times Square. The scope’s end was topped with a nylon visor to eliminate any telltale glints of sunlight.

He was set up between the blowing strands of hair of a model’s image atop a giant Victoria’s Secret billboard advertising their newest padded bra.

Next to the scope was a tented monitor showing a shaky, human’s-eye view of the Crossroads of the World below. Fisk was connected to the monitor by headphones.

He bowed toward the spotting scope, panning the square at late morning. Tourists in pairs and in groups, hundreds of cameras going—both 35 millimeter SLR and phone-based—and signboard walkers working to push passersby into comedy clubs, tour buses, and restaurants.

Fisk looked back up. He did not want to loosen the hinge that would allow him to use the monocular to scan the other rooftops, only to have to reset on his target on the square. But he guessed that the FBI had their own people at vantage points around Forty-fifth Street. As usual, he wondered what they were waiting for. Were they still relying on Shah’s supposed three-day timeline?

For that matter—what was Shah waiting for?

Fisk returned to the scope, trying not to get antsy. He eyed the Naked Cowboy posing for pictures with tourists near the bleacher seats at the TKTS discount tickets booth. He watched a walking blue-green Statue of Liberty working the ticket sale lines. He scanned the knot of potential shoppers surrounding a pair of giant M&M’s in white gloves and shoes, one red, the other yellow. He looked at the tables of knockoff handbags and cheaply made souvenirs along the fringes, operated by nervous-looking black marketeers.

Then he went back to his target, the coffee cart owned and—today, at least—operated by Bassam Shah.

“Okay,” said Fisk, speaking into a small microphone jutting out of his earphones. “This is ridiculously dangerous. Enough waiting. Time to initiate contact.”

K
rina Gersten wandered the square with a map in one hand and a guidebook in the other. Somebody tapped her on the shoulder, an Asian tourist wanting to get a photograph with the mime dressed up as Lady Liberty. Everybody wanted their picture taken with the green-painted lady holding a foam torch. Gersten obliged and took the picture, watching the coffee cart out of the corner of her eye.

Tourists everywhere. Gersten played her part, accepting every flyer offered her for discount pizza and free stand-up and strip club admission and bus tours.

She wore a Bluetooth headset on her ear. The call was open. She could hear Fisk, and he could eavesdrop on her in real time.

In the
Y
in the insignia on the front of her stiff new New York Yankees ball cap was a tiny pinhole camera, relaying her perspective to Fisk.

“Time to initiate contact,” Fisk said.

“On my way now,” she muttered.

She walked to the coffee cart, waiting behind a hassled office worker on a break who was arguing into his cell phone. Shah worked the carafe, squirting in flavored creamer and two Splendas. The customer slipped him three one-dollar bills and walked away yammering.

Gersten stepped up. She could see the sweat on the Afghan’s brow. He looked at her strangely, distractedly. He looked ill.

“Hi!” she said brightly. “Do you have any hazelnut decaf?”

He appeared puzzled. Then he checked the labels on his own carafes.

“No decaf.”

“Okay, I’ll take the caffeine, I guess. I’m on vacation, right? Probably need it anyway.”

He did not respond or acknowledge. She didn’t believe he even heard her. He lifted a thick paper cup from the tower on the cart spike and filled it.

“Black, please, with two Splendas,” said Gersten, once he finished the pour. She watched him tear open the yellow packets of artificial sweetener. “Sorry to intrude, but . . . are you okay? You don’t look so hot right now.”

Shah looked at her briefly, hard. Part of it was an ethnic predisposition against independent women, perhaps. But part of it was certainly suspicion.

He did not answer, swishing a thin wooden stirrer through her coffee.

“I didn’t mean anything,” she said. “Just concerned. Hey, can I take . . . ?”

She went around the side of the cart, trying to get a full view of it. She was reaching for a coffee lid, but Shah quickly stepped in her way, blocking her with his body.

“I get!” he said. “I get!”

“Okay, jeez. Sorry.”

He handed her the coffee. Gersten juggled her maps and travel guide, taking out a few dollars, which she straightened out and handed to him.

“Thanks,” she said. “Have a great one.”

She walked back toward the TKTS ticket booth, her map tucked beneath her arm. The coffee cup was not warm in her hand. She sipped it immediately and found it tepid—and horrid. The worst cup of coffee she had ever had.

“I think it’s happening,” she said.

P
eavy, the sniper, lay atop the third-story theater marquee and watched the coffee vendor through his scope. They had set up overnight, erecting a low, tented roof for cover, draped in the same obscuring fabric as the advertising material that covers transit bus windows. Peavy and his spotter could see out, but no one could see in.

Times Square was a great spot for a high hide. If people looked up, they looked way up. Probably no more distracting location in the world.

Wally, his spotter, had trained in from D.C. the day before, no questions asked. Wally’s talent had been forged in urban situations overseas. The FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team—Fisk said they were possibly perched nearby—was very good at range shooting, famous for their vaunted “aspirin” test, the ability to hit a baby aspirin at one thousand meters. Not so much in urban landscapes.

HRT used .308 sniper rifles. Peavy’s weapon was a Barrett M82A .50 caliber semiautomatic. Fifty-seven inches long, weighing thirty pounds when empty.

It was not empty now. Peavy was loaded and locked over Times Square.

No question Fisk was a dedicated mofo, borderline insane, Peavy thought. But not as insane as posting up for a kill shot in the middle of Manhattan, going up against the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Which made it fun.

He had a nice 240-degree angle. The coffee vendor was far right. Wally kept him updated on wind changes. Buildings made it tough. The BORS ballistic computer on top of his Leupold scope eased the level of difficulty. This computer, the size of a pack of cigarettes, factored distance, trajectory, and barometric pressure automatically, rendering an accurate firing solution in seconds. He had already zeroed for elevation.

Right now the target was out at six hundred yards. Peavy relaxed his shoulders, waiting for Wally to relay Fisk’s order.

S
hah unhooked the canvas covering from its grommet on the roof of the cart, draping it over the service side. He eyed Lady Liberty walking past, then the Naked Cowboy on the corner, posing. A person dressed like a 1950s Puerto Rican gang member in skinny jeans and a T-shirt with a pack of cigarettes rolled under one sleeve was trying to interest tourists in a revival of
West Side Story
.

They all looked suspicious to him. And every customer that morning seemed like a plant. Anxiety was sapping his determination.

No more. There was no perfect time. He had to do it now.

He dropped the canvas covering on the other side and unlocked his wheels. He pulled out the wooden wedges and started rolling the cart, pushing it south through busy Times Square toward the subway entrance.

F
isk saw two male “tourists” fold their maps and start moving in the same direction as Shah moved with his cart. The FBI was stirring, but still not pouncing.

Fisk said to his Intel cops, “Stay close.” He said, “Peavy, you tracking?”

“Don’t worry about me,” came the sniper’s voice.

Fisk had watched the entire exchange with Shah from Gersten’s point of view. He saw the nervous anticipation in Shah’s face. Most of all he wondered what Shah had in the bottom of his cart. What Shah didn’t want Gersten to see.

“Stay close, everyone,” said Fisk, pulling down his headphones. He pivoted too quickly, forgetting his sore ankle, and started off at a limp. “I’m coming down.”

G
ersten trailed Shah from a distance, still pretending to be following her map. He was pushing the cart along with his head out to the side to avoid oncoming tourists. He crossed Forty-fourth and kept going south.

She was screened by a cluster of tourists, and just as she got around them, she saw Shah looking back, spotting her looking his way.

Shit.
She had no other choice but to own it. Thinking fast, she waved her map and jogged toward him, catching up.

“Hey, hi, this coffee—it’s so terrible. Can I just get a refund?”

He stood very still. His eyes held the most vacant expression she’d ever seen. The brown pupils were glassy, looking dead from the inside out, and she recognized the stare of a true fanatic, someone in a self-induced psychotic trance. She knew then that she was looking into the eyes of a terrorist.

His skin had gone ash gray with blotches of red on his neck, like hives. He struggled to speak.

“Go away,” he whispered.

Gersten hesitated. She waited for Fisk’s order. Shah pushed his cart ahead a few more yards—then abruptly set it down.

He reached into the shelf beneath his cart, removing a gym bag, and started running.

F
isk finally got out of the hotel, dodging tourists and hawkers, and he hobbled across the crowded square. He hustled along on his bad ankle until he spied Gersten and her Yankees cap way down past Forty-fourth standing with Shah. Fisk raised his hand and waved, pointing his men to intervene—but they were already a few steps behind the FBI, closing in from four different directions.

P
eavy pivoted. Wally gave him a new range, which he punched into the optical ranging system computer. The mark had been moving right to left, pushing his cart, moving at a slow rate. When he took off running with the bag in hand, Peavy exhaled and kept him in his sights.

“Tell me,” he said to Wally, who was hooked up to Fisk.

“Nothing yet.”

The mark was darting in and out of people, and Peavy had him all the way. The sniper’s motto was “Don’t Bother Running—You’re Already Dead.”

Wally tracked him with the glasses. “What’s he got in the bag?”

“Nothing much,” said Peavy. “Just a few pounds of boom.” He watched the rabbit run, needing to rerange. “Dammit, Fisk.”

S
hah turned and took off, and Gersten broke into a run after him.

He hoisted the gym bag strangely, running with it held behind his head.

Gersten had just dodged a surprised and unaware cop when, all at once, two men in suits tackled her.

FBI agents, yelling that she was under arrest.

“NYPD!” she said, trying to kick the assholes off her.

Fisk arrived, grabbing the agents by their collars, waving his shield and yelling. Then he continued on, forgetting his pain now.

He looked beyond the intersection, searching for Shah’s target. When he cut to the right, staying on Seventh Avenue, Fisk knew.

“The Forty-second Street subway entrance!” he said into the small mic in his sleeve.

W
ally heard something. His head swiveled slightly, his right middle finger fine focusing the binoculars.

“Six eighty at the subway entrance . . .”

Peavy adjusted the scope one click without taking his eye off the target, who was running with the gym bag behind his head. A 400-grain solid brass 50 caliber round leaves a Barrett at 3,200 feet per second. Shock and blood loss make a hit anywhere on the body a kill shot, but only a head shot guaranteed immediate neurological and muscular shutdown. And Peavy was a perfectionist with 127 confirmed kills. Through the scope, he held Shah in the crosshairs as he sprinted toward the stairs. Wally gave the command.

“Send it.”

“I want the head.” Peavy’s trigger finger tightened with ball-bearing smoothness.

F
isk saw Shah knock over a child, running full-out for the subway entrance. His momentum caused him to stumble, reaching out with the hand that held the gym bag for balance.

Fisk heard nothing: no report, no echo.

At the top step, Shah’s head disappeared in a pink mist. The terrorist’s body twisted midstride and pitched forward headlessly, coming to a stop.

The gym bag landed near him—not softly, but softly enough.

Fisk stopped, stunned. He was estimating the blast radius of the explosive.

Gersten caught up to him, FBI agents passing them, rushing to the dead terrorist. She looked at Fisk. “How did you do that?”

Fisk turned and looked back toward Times Square. He did not know where Peavy was set up—only that he was probably gone from the firing spot already.

He said, “Friends in high places.”