“I’ve heard you do some business at the airport now and then,” Julio said quietly.
Hardaway nodded. “That’s right. I do. If the job is right for me. Come on. What’s this job?”
The man held his right hand up to slow Hardaway down.
“I’ll get to the job soon enough,” the man said, and Hardaway decided the guy must be South American. Those Colombians did lots of drug deals, right? Maybe this guy was part of some cartel down there.
“First, I want to know if we can trust you,” Julio said.
Hardaway laughed nervously and pointed to himself. “Trust me? Look, boss, if the money is paid up front, I’m good as gold for you. I’ve been doing this for years. Ask anyone I’ve worked with – you can trust me.”
The waitress came over with a bottle of Miller Light and set it in front of Hardaway. They stopped talking until she left again. They were still the only ones in this part of the establishment. The Wizards basketball game played on a TV mounted in the corner.
“I understand you have some money worries,” Julio said quietly when the waitress was gone. “Sounds like you could end up in jail if you don’t pay up.”
“Look,” Hardaway said, a cold feeling spreading inside. “I don’t know how you know that, but I don’t see why it matters. Yeah – I’ve got some problems. OK. That’s why I’m here.”
“This is an important job,” Julio said, changing the subject. “Have you ever handled weapons?”
“You mean have I ever shot a gun?” Hardaway asked. “Sure I have – I just got back from some deer hunting in Virginia--”
“Keep your voice down,” Julio said quietly but firmly. “You didn’t understand what I said. I don’t give a damn if you ever shot a gun. I want to know if you’ve ever handled them.”
“Oh, I see what you mean,” Hardaway said slowly, feeling a bit sheepish – not a common feeling for him. “Well sure, yeah – I’ve done that before.”
That, of course, was a lie. He’d never placed a weapon on a plane. He’d always done his jobs on the condition that no one gets hurt. He was just out to make a little side money, not to get blood on his hands. But this time was different and he was pretty desperate. So these drug guys needed some guns transported somewhere. So what? As long as no one was getting shot on the plane, he couldn’t care less. The less he knew about this job, the happier he’d be. He always tried to maintain a comfortable distance from his clients. He had enough problems of his own without getting emotionally involved with the scum he was helping out.
“I understand you and your people have special access,” Julio said, and Hardaway nodded. “But I don’t want anyone but you involved with this job. If you tell any of your friends, we don’t pay you anything beyond the upfront cash, get it?”
“Yeah, sure,” Hardaway replied. He could handle that – he’d done jobs on his own before. It just took a little extra care to make sure he could spend a little time on the bird before the luggage was finished loading. On some of his previous jobs the clients had specified where they wanted the materials left – a specific overhead bin or seat pocket. He supposed this would be the same. But if the guns were really big, space could be an issue.
“These items you’re talking about, Julio, are they large or small?” Hardaway asked.
“I don’t see why that’s any concern of yours,” Julio said. Again his eyes went up and down Hardaway’s face, an uncomfortable feeling. Hardaway took a quick sip of his beer.
“Yeah, well, what I meant was, I need to know because that affects where I can store them, you know what I mean?”
“I’ll get to that,” Julio said. “First you need the flight number and date. It’s Tuesday, Jan. 9. The 9:11 a.m. Southwest flight to Boston.” He took out a piece of paper and wrote down the info, then passed it across the table to Hardaway. “The items are small – they’ll fit in the overhead bin.”
“I’m your man, boss,” Hardaway said, pocketing the note. “What’s the pay and where do I pick up the materials?”
“What do you usually charge?” Julio asked.
“Depends on the job,” Hardaway replied, taking another sip of beer to brace himself for the negotiation. This job was on his back alone – that meant a higher fee. And it involved weapons – ditto. This might be just the job he needed and just in time. “For something like this, it takes $10,000 up front and another $12,000 upon delivery. I have to charge more for certain items, you know.”
“Agreed,” Julio said, reaching across the table to shake Hardaway’s hand. Hardaway shook back, a bit surprised that the deal was wrapping up so quickly.
“I’m going to the men’s room and will be right back,” Julio said, withdrawing Hardaway’s hand. Julio got up and walked to the back of the place, where he disappeared into the bathroom. Hardaway glanced up at the TV. Gilbert Arenas had just made another three-point shot.
Julio returned from the bathroom a moment later and shook Hardaway’s hand again, slipping something into it as he did. Hardaway knew to pocket the money before looking. He’d count it in the car. If the pay wasn’t right, he wouldn’t do the job. That’s how he operated.
“The package will be in a gray duffel bag,” Julio said quietly as he sat back down. There was still no one nearby. “I’ll drop it off at your home tomorrow night. I want the package placed in the overhead bin above seat 2A and 2B. First class. Understood?”
“Yeah, boss,” Hardaway replied. “Sounds easy enough. You know my address?”
“I do,” the man said, looking at him again with those piercing eyes. “I know a lot about you, Jack. And if anything slips up, you’ll be hearing from me again.
“Hey, no slip-ups,” Hardaway said, holding up his hands as if to show he was too competent to ever let such a thing happen. “Never have been. Just ask any of my customers.”
“I have,” Julio said. “That’s why I came to you.’
“OK. Good night, I guess?” Hardaway said. He wanted to get away from this guy. Julio gave him the willies.
“Good night for now,” the man said. “Your doorbell will ring at 9 p.m. tomorrow with the package. Be there.”
“Yep, you can count on me,” Hardaway said. “See you around.” He hurried to the door, eager to light a cigarette. This was the first drug dealer ever to really intimidate him, and he couldn’t understand why he had this feeling of dread. But the money was real; he counted it as soon as he got into his car. A smile slowly appeared on his lean face.
Jarrah sat back in the booth for a while after Hardaway left, declining the waitress’s offer for another beer. Normally, Jarrah liked a good beer as much as anyone. He’d started drinking a few years ago, against Islamic practice, to better fit into his American mission and found he liked it. But he didn’t feel much appetite for it or for anything lately. The operation was getting very close, and he didn’t feel the same fire in the belly as last time. It felt like he was going through the motions. Having the Director in charge instead of Atta probably was part of it. Although Jarrah and Atta hadn’t always gotten along, he’d admired Atta for his powerful leadership. The Director just got on his nerves.
He also ruminated about what the government might know. The whole Chicago thing left a bad taste in his mouth, and Hanjour – much to the Director’s frustration – hadn’t come up with a way to eliminate the enforcer. They simply couldn’t penetrate the Cook County Jail – where the man was being held – without blowing their cover. Even the Director had ultimately accepted this, albeit with a nasty glance at Jarrah. The enforcer’s continued presence, and the likelihood that he’d given descriptions of Jarrah and Hanjour to the police, forced them to make some changes to their plans. For instance, now they only went out at night, stayed in disguise and avoided public places. Even a hotel desk attendant could potentially give them away.
And now Jarrah had to deal with an unfamiliar airport, try to rush the job and put his trust in this Hardaway guy, whom he wasn’t completely sure they could count on. There was no doubt the government w
ould be more alert now, after the thing in Chicago. They’d been monitoring the news carefully and hadn’t seen anything, but that didn’t mean much. If the security apparatus was going to take additional measures to combat terror in the skies, it probably wouldn’t advertise it to the world.
Jarrah knew this Hardaway guy hadn’t believed the “Julio” alias. Jarrah was the least Middle Eastern looking of the three plotters, and the one most accustomed to working with Americans, which was why the Director had chosen him for this particular assignment. But he still didn’t fit a Mexican profile. He sighed. Didn’t really matter what the guy thought. He had their money and it wasn’t a difficult job. The guns were small; they only needed handguns. There were three weapons, one for each plotter. The strategy would be similar to last time. Wait till the plane was up in the air, storm the cockpit and kill the pilots and have Hanjour fly while the other two plotters handled the passengers. Although there’d been some added security measures over the last five years to protect cockpits, they weren’t too worried about gaining access. They could put a gun to a flight attendant’s head and demand entry if it came to that.
Jarrah was pretty convinced that the passengers wouldn’t fight back, especially if they were told the plane was being diverted to another airport. They would tell the passengers a bomb was on board, keep them calm and keep flying the plane on its same flight path from Baltimore to Boston. The passengers wouldn’t suspect they planned to make the jet into a suicide bomb, because no one had ever done that before – not to anyone’s knowledge. Jarrah wasn’t sure the passengers would go exactly like lambs to the slaughter, the way the Director characterized it, but he wasn’t worried about an onboard rebellion getting in the plotters’ way.
They also could learn from some of last time’s mistakes, Jarrah thought. They’d studied the type of airplane involved, a 737, very carefully on the Internet, and had booked simulator time as well. They knew the proper button to push to talk to passengers, so there’d be no repeat of Atta’s screw up in broadcasting information over the radio to controllers. Oh yes, the Director knew that had happened. How he knew, Jarrah had no idea. It certainly hadn’t appeared in any press coverage he’d seen at the time, but the Director just had a way of knowing things.
Jarrah wasn’t worried about accessing the plane, either. The three of them had booked their flights in a couple of weeks ago under their assumed names, which had served them well for several years now. The names weren’t linked to any criminal activities or to anyone associated with Al-Qaeda. They’d used the names many times on past flights they’d taken to get familiar with the interior of the 737 – the type of plane Southwest flew from BWI to Logan.
He was more concerned with Hanjour’s piloting and the Director’s ability to control his temper. Hanjour hadn’t been behind the controls of a real jet plane in five years, and had only gone up about half a dozen times in small planes that he had rented. But flying a single-engine propeller plane couldn’t compare to flying a fully-loaded 737, and all three of them knew it. Hanjour was the only “real” pilot among then, in that he’d been through an actual pilot training program, but that had been many years earlier. He’d spent a lot of time flying simulated 737 flights on the computer, but they’d decided against trying to get him flight lessons. A man with a Middle Eastern accent applying for flying lessons would have brought attention, even from the most oblivious Americans.
At least Hanjour had the even temper needed on an operation like this one, but that certainly wasn’t true of the Director. The man had no ability to keep his head when things went wrong, and Jarrah was sure at least one or two things wouldn’t go according to plan the day of the attack. He’d tried to discuss this with the Director, but the man had waved him off.
“I’ve dedicated the last decade to this operation,” the Director had told Jarrah haughtily last week, when Jarrah mentioned his concerns. “I should be the least of your concerns. You concern yourself with getting things right and not fucking things up like you did in Chicago.”
Still, the Director remained a concern. It’s true he’d become a bit easier to work with in the last weeks since announcing he’d participate. He’d given Jarrah more autonomy than he’d expected, and he’d agreed without much fuss to Jarrah’s logistical plans. It seemed that the Director had begun to absorb what all this meant, now that his own life was about to end, and, aside from lashing out at Jarrah when asked about his temper, had taken a calmer, more thoughtful approach.
But this new, subdued Director might not last. What if they reached the date of the operation, boarded the plane, and got sidetracked by the Director not handling himself appropriately? The man could fly off the handle at the slightest thing. Even a flight attendant telling him to make sure his seat back was straight might set him off. Jarrah’s blood pressure went up just thinking about the possibilities.
But the worst thing was, Jarrah didn’t know if he could go through with it. He just didn’t.
After living for five years in the United States, Jarrah had – despite himself – grown fond of the country and its people. There was something innocent about the men and women here; most of them had never tasted fear and want. And the way they showed affection for each other in public, which had seemed so alien at first, now tugged at his heart, like the elderly couple he’d carried in his cab a few days before Alev’s arrival.
Driving a cab, he had spent many hours in close proximity to all sorts of Americans from different racial and ethnic backgrounds, and he was more and more impressed, and also puzzled, by how they all seemed to get along. Even the ones who were obviously Jewish had treated him with respect. He’d never known a Jew could act remotely human. He’d grown up believing Jews were devils. And yet in his final week driving a cab in Chicago, an obviously Jewish man had asked him so politely about his life in the United States, and then left a generous tip. Could they all be that way? He thought again about Alev’s question, ‘What do you think of Jews?’ “ He hadn’t answered then, and now he was more confused than before.
Never too religious to begin with, Jarrah had entered Al-Qaeda as a young man with a chip on his shoulder about the Israeli treatment of Palestinians and illusions of grandeur. That was more than half a decade ago, and even then, it had taken Atta and others in Al-Qaeda a great deal of effort to get him to come back from Germany and go through with the Sept. 11 plot. Alev and her family had tried to talk him into staying, but he’d found the willpower to overcome the comforts of home and family.
Jarrah hadn’t mentioned any of this to the Director or Hanjour. But he sensed that the Director suspected his heart wasn’t in it. The conversation in the taxi that night in Chicago was proof that the Director, always extremely capable of reading people,had his doubts about Jarrah. In a way, that conversation had redoubled Jarrah’s efforts to engineer a successful outcome, because if there was anything he didn’t want, it was for the Director to doubt his capabilities. Rejecting Alev’s plea to come back to Germany was part of proving himself to be reliable, he realized.
Then came the failures with the spy. Though the Chicago malfunction wasn’t completely Jarrah’s fault, it was the first time the Director had expressed lack of respect for Jarrah and his many abilities. That ate into Jarrah at a very deep level, deeper, perhaps, than the part inside of him that had grown used to America and respectful of its people. In the end, the need to please the Director, something that had been building in him for so many years, was winning out. But the process wasn’t linear. Some days he wanted to kill the man and get on with his life. On those days, visions of Alev kept creeping into his mind.
He’d thought about discussing all this with Hanjour, and had even begun a conversation with him earlier today as they sat in Jarrah’s anonymous hotel room. But talking to Hanjour was like talking to the Koran. The man was always so quiet, and when he did speak, it tended to be in platitudes.
“All praise is due to Allah who has given us life after our death and to him is the resurrectio
n,” Hanjour had replied when Jarrah asked if Hanjour was truly ready to die.
“You have no doubt, then, that what we’re doing is right?” Jarrah had asked.
“I’ve asked Allah for guidance, and I’ve put myself in his hands,” Hanjour had replied. “This is the destiny he has guided me toward.”
“I wish I could be that sure,” Jarrah had said.
“Why? Do you doubt our mission is holy?” Hanjour asked. “Surely you still feel now as you have in the past?”
“Yes, yes,” Jarrah had replied quickly, not wanting to get Hanjour worried enough that he might discuss the conversation with the Director. “I believe in the rightness of the mission to highlight the plight of our brothers in Palestine and Iraq, but I just don’t know if I’m ready to die.”
“Remember, Ziad, when you have questions like this, do what I do. Put yourself in Allah’s hands. The prophet said, ‘In the name of Allah, I trust in Allah, for there is no power or might but with Allah,’ Come now, Ziad, you seldom pray. Join me in prayer.”
Hanjour went to the closet, brought out two prayer mats and placed them on the floor in front of the television. The two men washed their hands and then knelt on the rugs and began the morning prayer. Jarrah tried to focus on it, but found his mind wandering, as it always did when he prayed. He glanced over at Hanjour, who seemed to be in another world, completely absorbed in what he was doing. Jarrah felt a pang of jealousy. How pleasant it must be to know yourself so well and to have so few doubts.
Now Jarrah finished his beer, taking care to only have one. He needed to keep his wits about him this final couple weeks. With Jan. 9 getting so close, he felt like a man on death row who knew his execution date. He’d even gone to the local mosque a few times recently, trying to reconnect with his boyhood religion that had once seemed so important. And he spent hours reading through Internet accounts of Palestinian and Iraqi suffering, trying to remind himself of why he was going through with this, of the message they would be sending to the world. The strike against the Trade Center, he told himself, using language he’d heard many times from the Director, wasn’t a strike against ordinary Americans; it was a strike against the American financial system that drove financial and military payments and assistance to the criminal governments of Israel, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Egypt. The Sheik would make that clear in a speech he’d already recorded, which would be released immediately after the attack.
The Towers Still Stand Page 23
