Direct Action

by John Weisman

  He was interrupted by urgent knocking on the library door. One of the 4627 security people opened it. “Mr. Wyman? There’s a Roger Semerad downstairs asking to see you.”

  Wyman’s face lit up. “Please—escort him up here right away.” He turned toward the others. “Roger’s retired FBI. He was their top explosive forensics guy until he contracted multiple sclerosis just over six years ago. He’d always been something of a maverick—and his wisecracking got on Director Freeh’s nerves. So Freeh eased him out—right into the arms of Deutsche Telecom. Now he’s based in Bonn as DT’s head of technical security. I called him last night—asked him to make the drive over, just in case.”

  “Isn’t it a long way to come on spec?”

  “Not for Roger. He drives a Bentley turbo. Believe me—he looks for just about any excuse to make a road trip.”

  9:28 A.M. Roger Semerad was a big guy with a voice to match, a face full of salt-and-pepper beard, and a bone-crushing handshake. He got around in a small black electric cart equipped with a clip-on headlight, an old-fashioned bulb-powered bicycle horn clamped to the handlebars, and a bumper sticker that read EVEN MY DOG IS A CONSERVATIVE.

  He high-fived Tony Wyman then gave Tom and Reuven, whom he’d caught staring at him out of his peripheral vision, a penetrating second glance. “Here’s the story in a nutshell, fellas,” he said. “I’m Roger. I got MS. Can’t hardly feel my legs anymore, so I need the scooter, and which is also why I’m driving an automatic Bentley instead of a Ferrari. And just in case you wanted to know, frigging MS screws with you worse than a cheap gin hangover.”

  There was a moment of self-conscious silence as Tom and Reuven suddenly found the pattern on the rug hugely fascinating.

  Semerad cocked his head at Tony Wyman. “Think they got it, Tonio?”

  “Hope so.”

  “Me, too,” Semerad growled. “That said, let’s get to the problem solving.”

  He scootered across the room to eyeball the display on the library table. “You guys gonna compete with the Cameroonians at the marché puces?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Well, you ain’t gonna go very far on that slim inventory, Tonio. Kinda meager.”

  “All depends how it’s used,” Tom said. “We think it’s enough to bring down a couple of planes, maybe more.”

  “Tell you what.” Semerad took a quick turn around the library then parked himself in front of Wyman. “I’m gonna set up in that there corner.” He pointed toward the map table and its magnifying light. “Alls I need is for someone to unstrap the case off the back of this contraption and I’m happy to go to work.”

  Tom gave him a skeptical glance. “Don’t you want to know what we’re looking for?”

  “Nope. I kinda like to find out for myself.” He steered the cart over to the table and plucked a detonator off the green felt, hefted it, then looked it up and down. “Nice,” he said. “Whose work?”

  Tom stood with his arms crossed. “We’ll let you tell us, since you like to find things out on your own.”

  Semerad laughed. “Touché, kiddo.” He tooted his horn twice and wriggled his eyebrows in a passable Harpo Marx. “Gangway, gents. The cavalry has arrive-ed.”

  11:55 A.M. “Frigging incredible.” Roger Semerad raised the jeweler’s loupe on its headband and wiped perspiration out of the corners of his eyes with a huge blue-and-white handkerchief. “This guy’s a genius—if he weren’t a frigging criminal, I’d hire him.” When his remark was greeted by silence he waited until the others had gathered around him. “He’s managed to miniaturize a SIM card and a PDA processor and use ’em to create his detonator package.”

  Wyman said, “SIM card like in a cell phone?”

  “You got it, Tony. A Subscriber Identity Module. In technical language it’s the thingy that stores all your subscriber info like your account number and your phonebook. Can’t use a phone without a SIM card these days.”

  “So basically what we’ve got here is a cell phone without the phone.”

  Semerad nodded. “In a way.”

  “So how does it become a detonator? Don’t you need a ringer to trigger the explosion?”

  “That’s how it’s commonly done. Like the car bombs and IEDs we’re seeing in Iraq now. ETA—the Basque separatists—and the IRA have been using cell phones for years. They wire cell-phone ringers to detonating caps. Place a call or send an instant message to the doctored phone and kablooey. Believe me, it’s not rocket science. But there’s no ringer here. That’s the creative part. He’s replaced the ringer with a computer chip.”

  Tom shook his head. “I don’t get it.”

  “This guy, he pulled the processor out of a PDA—like my Palm Tungsten over there, but a much older model. You know that all computer chips create heat, right?”

  Tom nodded.

  “Most of the newer chips have what you might call a throttle control on them. They’re programmed to shut down if they get too hot.”

  “Understood.”

  Semerad held up the detonator. “Well, there’s no governor on the chip in this doohickey.”

  Wyman popped the monocle out of his eye. “Which means…”

  “Which means when the cell-phone component responds to a call and a specific code is keyed in, it sets the chip running. And the chip keeps getting hotter and hotter. And I mean hot. Red-hot. Fire-in-the-hole hot.”

  Wyman shook his head. “But heat alone doesn’t set plastic explosive off, does it, Roger?”

  “You need something that produces energy to set off your explosive—like a percussion cap or even the cell-phone ringer. In this case, your bombmaker has been real inventive. First he slipped some explosive into the body of the detonator—that way, when the bomb goes off the detonator itself is destroyed, leaving very little in the way of forensic evidence. And then he’s managed to create a brief but powerful electrical charge by combining the technologies in the SIM card and the PDA chip.” He shook his head in amazement. “This guy is incredible. He’s transferred all the elements—even the carbon fiber antenna—onto some sort of flexible membrane to cut down on weight and signature. He’s miniaturized the equivalent of an electric blasting cap, a remotely operated blasting machine, and a self-destruction device and fit everything into a package that weighs, what? I’d venture less than fifty grams.” He gestured toward the Vuitton knapsacks, then looked over at Wyman. “Tonio, I’d wager a big pile of dinero that this damned thing is completely undetectable passing through airport security.”

  Reuven looked at the detonator components. “Time frame?”

  “To explosion from the time the sequence is initiated? Maybe five seconds.”

  The Israeli frowned. “Range?”

  “Worldwide. You could place the call from anywhere—even do it online.”

  “Jeezus H.” Tom shook his head. “Can you tell us what telephone number has been assigned to this particular SIM card?”

  “Sure—if I had the right equipment.”

  “Which is where?”

  “Well, they’d have it at Verizon, or Sprint.”

  Tom’s eyes widened. “The U.S. cellular companies?”

  “Yup. This isn’t a European SIM. All the local SIM cards are GSMs. This one is CDMA. Which means it’s Verizon or Sprint.” Semerad backed his scooter up. “You guys got broadband?”

  Tom nodded. “Sure.”

  “You let me plug my laptop into your connection and I’ll pull down what you need in a matter of minutes.”

  1:21 P.M. Roger Semerad squinted at the computer’s screen. “The detonator SIMs are all for Los Angeles–area numbers.”

  Tony Wyman looked at Tom. “What were the dates of those flights?”

  Tom checked his notes. “Outbound Wednesday, November twenty-sixth; returning Friday, November twenty-eighth. Outbound Wednesday, December tenth; returning Friday the twelfth.”

  “I think,” Wyman said, “we can rule out an attack over Thanksgiving.”

  “Why?” Tom
asked. “He’s scheduled himself to be in Los Angeles over Thanksgiving. What better time for an attack than during the peak holiday travel time.”

  “No,” Reuven said. “The al-Qa’ida model is to stage simultaneous attacks, not a series. They carried out the operations against your embassies in Kenya and Tanzania within minutes of each other. On 9/11, they hijacked four aircraft almost simultaneously. It’s the AQN pattern.”

  Wyman played with his monocle. “You read it as attacks on Flights 068 and 070, and attacks on Flights 069 and 071 all on one day.”

  “Two days,” Tom said. “All of Ben Said’s tickets were for a Wednesday and a Friday,” Tom said. And then he clapped his hand over his mouth. “Oh, my God—it’s Christmas. It has to be Christmas.”

  Wyman pulled a pocket secretary out of his jacket pocket and flipped through it. “Tom’s right. This year, Thanksgiving and Christmas both fall on Thursdays.”

  He paused. “Fits the al-Qa’ida pattern of scoping out the flights first-hand. Satisfies the simultaneous-attack criterion, too.”

  “But that’s not enough.”

  Wyman turned toward Tom. “Why not?”

  Tom looked at his boss. “Wheelbarrows, Tony.”

  “What?”

  “Roger said the SIMs all came from phones registered in the Los Angeles area. Now, you can make a call from anywhere to anywhere on a cell phone. What this tells me is that Ben Said bought his cell phones in Los Angeles because that’s where he’s going to use them.”

  Wyman frowned. “That’s awfully thin, Tom.”

  “Maybe. But it’s what I think.”

  Roger Semerad wheeled his scooter next to Tom and said, “Wasn’t al-Qa’ida going to strike at LAX during the Y2K New Year celebration?”

  Wyman nodded. “The guy coming from Canada with the explosives in his car, right?”

  “That’s the one.” Semerad played with the handlebar of his scooter. “Isn’t one of AQN’s benchmarks that they like to hit targets more than once?”

  Wyman spent half a minute in silence. “If we go ahead, we’re doing so on very circumstantial evidence.”

  Tom said, “That doesn’t make it any less valid.”

  Finally, Wyman turned to Reuven. “You head back to Tel Aviv and get the DNA work done.”

  The Israeli saluted.

  “And make sure your man Salah gets us copies of everything he pulls out of Hamzi.”

  The Israeli nodded in agreement. “Will do.”

  Wyman cocked his head in Reuven’s direction. “By the way, what do you guys call your company?”

  Reuven didn’t hesitate. “Hawkeye.”

  “Well, next time—if there is one—we operate jointly, Hawkeye’s going to split the expenses. I can’t afford to float you people.”

  “What about seventy–thirty,” Reuven said. “You’re established. We’re just starting out.”

  “Half and half, Reuven, it’s the American way.” He paused. “But you get to use our facilities here and in Washington—not that you haven’t been doing that already.” Wyman turned to Tom. “Write this up. You know what to leave out and what to include. I’ll check it over. Then we’ll head for Washington. I want you and MJ with me when I present this package to CTC.” He caught Tom’s look of amazement. “Your fiancée had a lot to do with this,” he said. “If she hadn’t had the grit to bring the Gaza material to Paris in the first place, we probably wouldn’t be standing here.”

  Tom beamed.

  “You work with her.”

  “I’m on it.”

  “Good. We’re handing them twenty-four-karat material, Tom. And I can assure you they don’t get twenty-four-karat very often these days.”

  VIII

  CHANTILLY, VIRGINIA

  41

  18 NOVEMBER 2003

  3:04 P . M .

  14528-C FLINT LEE ROAD, BUILDING 42, CHANTILLY, VIRGINIA

  THEY WERE EARLY for the 4 P.M. appointment with representatives from CTC because Tony Wyman always liked to be early, and besides, like all good case officers, he preferred never to go anywhere he hadn’t scoped out in advance.

  They’d driven out from the 4627 corporate offices in Rosslyn in Wyman’s big, gray Suburban. Tom found the venue bothersome. A proposed meeting at CIA headquarters had been summarily rejected by the CTC chief, who hinted that Wyman and Tom were unwelcome presences at Langley. Wyman had suggested as an alternative one of CIA’s Rosslyn satellite offices because of their proximity to 4627. That, too, had been rejected. Instead, CTC had dictated the Chantilly site, just short of an hour’s commute west of Rosslyn through the crowded Dulles corridor and along the perpetually gridlocked Route 28.

  14528-C Flint Lee Road turned out to be an anonymous shoe box of a one-story building set among scores of identical one-story shoe-box buildings that lined both sides of a potholed, four-lane road that ran on an east–west axis half a mile south of Route 50 and six-tenths of a mile due south of Dulles Airport’s barbed-wire-topped outer perimeter fence.

  As they turned onto Flint Lee Road, Tom, who was riding shotgun, said, “I don’t like it, Tony.”

  “Why?” Wyman flicked a glance in the rearview mirror then turned toward Tom.

  “Just gives me bad vibes. And why the hell did they make us drive an hour? You know as well as I do they have plenty of suitable sites in McLean or Vienna.” He stared through the windshield. “Plus, there’s only one way in and out.”

  “Amen.” Wyman drove past the turnoff to 14528, turned left into a cul-de-sac warren of warehouses, and pulled over. He turned to MJ, who was riding behind him. “What about you?”

  She shrugged. “You guys are the operators. You tell me.”

  Tom said, “I think we position ourselves in a standoff position and see who arrives.”

  Wyman nodded. “I agree.”

  “What are you concerned about, an ambush of some sort?”

  Tom thought about Jim McGee riding in the front seat of the armored State Department FAV and said, “Nothing’s out of the question these days.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” MJ said. “Aren’t you two being just a little bit too much cloak-and-dagger?”

  Tom turned to face her. “Didn’t you see the T-shirt I put on this morning?”

  “T-shirt?”

  “It’s the one that reads PARANOIA: IT’S MORE THAN A FEELING, IT’SA WAY OF LIFE.” “Very funny.”

  “A little paranoia every now and then,” Wyman said, “can be a good thing.”

  MJ gave him a skeptical look. “Are we talking about now-now, or then-now, Tony?”

  “Both.” He swiveled toward her and deflected. “So, when’s the wedding?”

  MJ’s hand dropped onto Tom’s shoulder. “Day after Christmas.” She saw the crestfallen look flash across Wyman’s face. “It’s just us and my family, Tony—the ceremony at the local parish and a reception at my parents’ house in Great Neck.”

  “I understand.” He nodded. “Not to worry.”

  At 3:17 P.M., Wyman’s cell phone rang. He turned the radio down and plucked it out of the utility tray. “Pronto?”

  He listened for a quarter of a minute, his expression darkening by the second. “You told them they could shove it up their asses, right?” he growled. “Good. We’re on our way back.”

  Wyman slapped the clamshell phone shut, put the Chevy in gear, and wheeled roughly out of the cul-de-sac.

  “What’s up?”

  “This appointment was a ruse to get us out of the office. At three sharp, two Agency security types showed up in Rosslyn demanding all our files on Ben Said, as well as the transcript of your conversation with young Adam Margolis. Said we were in possession of illegally obtained classified materials and were obliged to turn everything over to them immediately.” He looked at Tom. “Oh, and by the way, your security clearance has been revoked.”

  “Oh?”

  “The reason given was that you compromised an Agency operation.”

  “What?”

 
“Liam McWhirter’s setup in Cormeilles-en-Parisis.”

  “When he was trying to compromise me.” Tom rolled his eyes. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “Dead serious.” He looked at Tom. “Don’t worry—we’ll deal with it.”

  Tom bit his lower lip. “What about the office?”

  “And Bronco asked them for their warrant. They told him they didn’t have one—this was just a friendly call. Bronco told them to get stuffed and they backed off.” He looked at MJ. “It was a bluff—for now.”

  “For now?”

  “Look,” Wyman said. “The seventh floor has a staff of lawyers and security investigators who just love to make things tough for certain people.”

  “They dress like the guys in Men in Black,” Tom said. “We used to call them the DCI’s gestapo.”

  “We still do,” Wyman snorted.

  Tom looked at his boss. “So, what’s the plan, Tony?”

  “It’s time to put a stop to all this crap.” Wyman flipped the cell phone open, punched up his phone book, scrolled down until he found the number he wanted, hit the transmit button, and waited for the connection.

  Then he said, “Porter? It’s Tony Wyman. I’d like to bring two of my colleagues for a meeting with you in the committee’s bubble room.” He paused. “I’m talking CRITICOM.” There was another pause. “Uh-huh. An hour and three-quarters.” Wyman checked the dashboard clock. “We can do that. I don’t want to talk on an open line, but let me say we have information relating to certain operations that would have resulted positively in the CT area, but which were blocked by the seventh floor. And we can document the fact that DO is so dysfunctional that private companies like mine have to perform CIA’s core missions and thus affect the national security of the nation with no oversight over our operations whatsoever.”

  Wyman listened. “Yes, I know there are no recruitments anymore. No risk taking. I know he said five years. But it’s been more than eight already—and there’s been no improvement since I pulled the plug. The DO is dead, Porter. A shell. Remember the nimble, flexible, core-mission-oriented enterprise where we used to work? Well, it’s a fleeting memory.” He listened some more, then nodded. “Yes, I’m convinced they have to go, Porter. It’s time to muck out the stables.” There was another pause. “We’ll be there. Thanks.”