The Deceivers

by Alex Berenson

  “Mighty impressive, those Pyramids. Saw a Nat Geo special on them. You got papers?”

  “We’re legal.” Though Shakir wasn’t sure about Rashid and Nassir.

  “Carrying anything in this vehicle I should know about? Narcotics? Weapons?”

  “Of course not.”

  “You don’t mind if I search it, then?”

  I’ll blow his head off, el-Masry muttered.

  “Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to speak English and step out of the vehicle—”

  Behind him an engine roared.

  And a black Nissan 370Z with tinted windows blew past, at least a hundred miles an hour, clearing the deputy’s ample backside by no more than a foot. The deputy’s head swiveled as the Nissan disappeared south.

  “Your lucky day, boys. Not even going to bother to tell you to wait.” He lumbered back to his Suburban and kicked on the sirens. Shakir didn’t think he had a chance. The Nissan was flying, and the Interstate 20 interchange was only a couple miles south.

  “Allah is with us today,” el-Masry said, as Shakir eased his Hyundai onto the blacktop.

  Yeah, Allah and the FBI. Apparently, Agent Reed didn’t want anyone searching Shakir’s trunk either.

  They took a break from the range and Van Zandt County to scout targets. They spent a day looking over Dallas/Fort Worth Airport, checking the terminal entrances and the check-in counters. The airport’s great advantage was that they could park close, hide the AKs in bags, walk to the terminals and come out shooting. Rashid suggested that they could cook up homemade explosive and pack it in luggage. But, ultimately, they decided against DFW. Police and Transportation Security Administration officers were everywhere. Each terminal had dozens of doors and emergency exits. Lots of ways to escape. Mateen, the Orlando shooter, had been able to cause so much carnage by herding his victims into corners.

  The Cowboys were another possibility, a symbolically important target, playing in front of a hundred thousand people. “America’s Team,” el-Masry said. “At AT&T Stadium. Everyone knows AT&T spies on Muslims.” The security checks at gates created choke points, long lines of ticket holders waiting to be screened. But after scouting a home game, they decided against AT&T. Driving close to the stadium was near impossible on game days. They’d have to park hundreds of meters away and try to approach without being noticed. Their rifle bags would stand out. And security was nearly as heavy as at the airport.

  So they turned to the American Airlines Center, where the Mavericks played. The Mavs weren’t the Cowboys, but the arena’s name would resonate. More important, security there was notably lighter than at the airport or stadium. Instead of hundreds of police officers, the arena had a couple dozen. Even better, they could drive almost to the gates on the west side of the arena, which offered the same security checks as at AT&T Stadium and created the same choke points.

  Best of all, if they could get inside, they could create panic. The arena’s corridors were relatively narrow and encircled the seats that surrounded the floor. Two shooters could move in opposite directions and stampede victims toward one another. Meanwhile, the other two could mow down people inside the main seating area. With each minute, they would kill dozens more. Five times they went to games, scouting the screeners, walking the arena’s halls to look for hidden security posts, checking sight lines.

  They saw no obvious hurdles, nothing to dissuade them.

  The American Airlines Center it would be.

  The body armor was legal and easy to come by. To avoid arousing suspicion, Shakir ordered online from four different companies. The plates were military-grade, capable of stopping assault rifle rounds. Standard subsonic pistol ammunition would barely dent them. The armor made the plot feel more real to Shakir than the AKs had. The AKs were toys, somehow. The armor wasn’t. When Shakir slipped it over his shoulders, its weight shocked him.

  They wore the armor for their suicide videos. They made those at the range, in front of a black cloth emblazoned with the Shahada, the Muslim profession of faith. El-Masry spoke first. In English, and then again in Arabic, he explained that he was a soldier carrying out this attack as revenge for the way the United States treated Muslims. The Americans kill innocent women and children. It’s only right that people here feel the same pain. We are the proud soldiers of Islam . . . Rashid and Nassir followed.

  Then Shakir’s turn came. As he stared at the camera, he wanted to laugh. Thank God, this isn’t real. He knew the United States better than these men. This attack would backfire, making Americans even angrier. Anyway, he didn’t see his cousin running to Raqqa to live under the caliph.

  “Ready?” el-Masry said.

  “I’d rather let you speak for me.” But el-Masry pressed him. Finally, Shakir choked out a few sentences.

  Two days later, Shakir passed Reed and Mercer a copy of the videos.

  “We’re close. We’ve picked a date.” He told them. They already knew the location.

  “We’ll step up the surveillance. Though you may not see us. The day of, we’ll have helicopters and drones besides the on-the-ground stuff.”

  “Can’t you make the arrests now?”

  “It’s America. Anybody can make a video. The lawyers will say they were puffing their chests, supporting the jihad symbolically—”

  “We spent all this time scouting sites.”

  “You went to a few basketball games.”

  “Practicing with AKs.”

  “Which you provided, Ahmed.”

  “I’ll testify.”

  “They’ll say you’re a liar. Hint at the drugs, even if we try to keep them out. Say you have a hero complex. I want these guys to spend fifty years in prison, and that only happens if we nail them right before they start shooting.” Reed leaned in. “Your job is to keep them calm until we snap them up. No more getting pulled over, no dumb mistakes.”

  “What about when they see you? They’ll start shooting.”

  “You tell them you’re keeping the guns in the trunk when you drive to the arena. Easy enough to get them out when you get there. Eleven a.m., day of the attack, leave your car at Southwest Center Mall again, give us a couple hours. We’ll pull the firing pins. The AKs will look exactly the same. Just be sure no one tests them after the switch.”

  “I’ll tell them that I’ll pick them up at Gamal’s house, we’ll go straight to the arena.”

  “And checkmate. Very good, Ahmed.”

  They went twice more to the range, examined maps, watched one final game at the arena. The day came. Dallas Mavericks versus Oklahoma City Thunder, 7:30 p.m. A full house expected. Eighteen thousand five hundred fans.

  Shakir left his Hyundai at the mall as Reed had instructed. When he came back, he found a note on his seat. See you tonight. Almost done.

  The weight of what Shakir was doing to his cousin descended on him. Fifty years in prison, Reed said. A life sentence, really. El-Masry would emerge stooped and old, if he came out at all. He would never touch his wife again, hardly see his daughters. All along, he would know that his plan had failed, that the enemy he’d hated had won.

  Thanks to his own cousin.

  Shakir wondered if he ought to tell el-Masry the truth, let him run. But he didn’t need to guess at the FBI’s reaction. Reed would be furious. Shakir would face the original drug charges, along with new ones, for compromising the investigation.

  Anyway, the FBI had been right. His cousin wanted to shoot up a basketball game. He should be in prison. No, Shakir had to see the plan through.

  As he drove home, el-Masry called. “Come over, Ahmed. Pray with us this afternoon. A mouth that prays, and a hand that slays.” An old Arab saying. “Make sure we’re ready for Allah.”

  Shakir couldn’t face spending hours with men who were about to go to prison because of him. “You get ready for Allah however you like, Gamal. I’ll see you tonigh
t.”

  The afternoon passed excruciatingly slowly, but at 6:20 Shakir strapped on his vest, pulled on a sweatshirt to hide its bulk, headed for el-Masry’s house. Along the way, he saw a Tahoe following. Reassuring. He pulled up to el-Masry’s house at 6:35, five minutes late. His cousin and the others stood outside, fidgeting.

  On the drive over, they hardly spoke. Shakir wondered if the others were having second thoughts. He drove carefully, wanting to make sure the FBI stayed close.

  The arena lay west of the downtown skyscrapers and north of Dealey Plaza, where Oswald had shot Kennedy. At 7:03, Shakir turned north on I-35E. He spotted the Tahoe once more in his rearview mirror. It seemed to be a long way back. The others murmured prayers in Arabic. Shakir wished silently for a quick, clean arrest.

  At Exit 429, Shakir turned onto Victory Avenue. The arena stood close, a handsome building with a redbrick façade and a white shed roof. The pregame traffic was heavy but moving.

  Then they were there.

  Shakir stopped beside the bollards that protected the emergency entrance to All Star Way, a few feet from the line for the security checkpoint. He killed the engine, popped the trunk, flipped on his hazards. The others opened their doors.

  “Coming, cousin?”

  Shakir stepped out, looking for unmarked SUVs. For Reed and other men wearing FBI jackets. He saw only the usual security guards. The nearest Dallas police officers were a hundred feet away and paying no attention to the Hyundai.

  “Can’t park there,” a security guard shouted.

  “Ahmed!” el-Masry yelled. Shakir came to the open trunk. The other men grabbed for AKs. He reached down but didn’t touch his. He didn’t want to be holding an assault rifle, even if it couldn’t really be fired. If the cops didn’t know about the sting, they might start shooting.

  But why wouldn’t the cops know? The cops had to know, even if they weren’t taking part in the arrests.

  Something was wrong.

  No.

  Everything was wrong.

  “Now.” El-Masry and the other two lifted their AKs—

  “GUNS!” yelled the security guard—

  The AK came alive in el-Masry’s hand. The guard’s head exploded.

  The pins . . . The firing pins—

  The two cops turned, but even before they could pull their pistols, Rashid dropped them both. “Allahu akbar!” he shouted.

  “Please—” a woman screamed.

  An AK burst from el-Masry silenced her. The security line dissolved. The ticket holders ran along the arena’s outer wall or forced their way through the checkpoint. El-Masry and the Fardous brothers stepped forward and strafed the crowd, moving with purpose and precision toward the gate.

  Shakir watched in bewilderment. Then, too late, remembered what Jake had said the night they’d arrested him. Don’t be a peasant.

  In all his years in the United States, he’d never heard an American use that word. Never.

  He’d been so happy at the get-out-of-jail-free card that he’d ignored all the warning signs. Why hadn’t they brought him to the main FBI office and given him a written cooperator’s agreement? Why had he only met two of them? Most of all: Why hadn’t they made the arrests in a controlled setting?

  Bursts of rifle fire. Shrill screams of the dying. Thumps of bodies falling.

  Shakir knew, couldn’t avoid the answer. Because they weren’t FBI agents. Whoever they were, they’d set this up. They’d found him. Then tricked him into leading his cousin into a fake terrorist attack that wasn’t fake at all. And far deadlier than anything el-Masry could have pulled off on his own. Shakir tried to scream, found he couldn’t move. What to do? Shoot his cousin? Run—

  He’d never escape. But maybe he could surrender, explain the truth. He didn’t have much to back his story. But he had a little. He could take the real FBI to the shooting range. Dale had seen Jake at the Dirt Hole. The mall must have security cameras.

  A beeping from the trunk. Shakir looked down. The AKs had been wrapped in blankets. With them gone, Shakir saw that someone had moved the mat that covered the Sonata’s spare tire. He lifted it—

  The tire was gone.

  In its place, whitish gray blocks in clear plastic, shaped to fill the hole. Three detonators were stuck in the blocks, connected with red and yellow leg wire that ended in a black box the size of an iPhone.

  “No.” A wish. Shakir reached down—

  A light on the box flashed red.

  The world went white. He felt everything. And then nothing.

  The explosive was C-4, rarely seen outside military arsenals. Bombmakers prized the stuff for its power and stability. It wouldn’t blow up if it were dropped. It required a sizable priming charge that itself had to be triggered by an initiator. C-4 was a professional’s weapon.

  But the team that had set Ahmed Shakir up was as professional as any in the world. It had made no mistakes with the four-hundred-pound bomb in the Sonata’s trunk. The explosion vaporized Shakir so completely that investigators couldn’t find enough of him for a DNA sample. Its overpressure wave and shrapnel created a kill zone that stretched a hundred fifty feet. Two hundred ninety people were in that space, hiding against the arena’s walls or running for safety. Most of them died, along with others farther out.

  El-Masry and the Fardous brothers just missed their goal. They killed one hundred forty-five people before SWAT teams pinned them down. Even then they didn’t stop shooting. Police snipers had to kill all three of them. In all, the C-4 and the bullets killed three hundred eighty-five civilians and thirteen police officers in twenty-eight minutes, more than any terrorist attack since September 11.

  Even before the suicide videos went online, no one doubted Muslim terrorists had committed this atrocity.

  ONE

  1

  COLUMBUS, GEORGIA

  The Waffle House lay on Victory Drive, close by Commando Military Supply and the gates to Fort Benning, the two-hundred-eighty-square-mile base where the Army made soldiers into Rangers. John Wells remembered the restaurant from his own training, more than two decades before.

  Back then, he’d still basically been a Montana boy. He’d come to Dartmouth for college, been shocked by the superior attitude so many East Coast kids put on. But Georgia had held its own surprises. At least Montana and New Hampshire both had mountains, even if the Bitterroots were bigger. Down here, the land was slap flat and swamp-cut.

  Anyway, as far as Wells could tell, the Waffle House hadn’t changed. Not the waitresses, not the plastic booths, maybe not the fryer grease.

  The Ranger instructors eating one booth over looked the same, too. Square-jawed and narrow-eyed. Mostly white. Maybe a few more tattoos. They shoveled scrambled eggs in their mouths like they were machines for the ingestion of food. Cut, chew, swallow. Cut, chew, swallow. Wash it all down with the black liquid that Waffle House called coffee. They were almost too tired to speak, Wells saw.

  Though not as tired as the soldiers they were training. Nothing in peacetime replicated combat, but Ranger School tried. Rangers lead the way, the unit’s motto went. The training program was meant to weed out any soldier who couldn’t. It was famously tough, especially at the beginning. Candidates were deprived of sleep and food while facing timed marches and the Darby Queen, a barbed-wire-studded obstacle course. Soldiers qualified through airborne training and a four-week starter course before they even had a chance at Fort Benning. Still, about sixty percent failed. Many who did pass had to repeat at least one part of the three-phase program.

  Not Wells. He’d gone through in the minimum sixty-two days. He was made for soldiering. Not just because he was strong and lean and quick. Because he knew intuitively how to survive, to narrow his focus. Not to think ahead, not to promise himself that he’d get through this day or week but simply to get through.

  A most un-Buddhist form of min
dfulness.

  So Wells went from Dartmouth to the Rangers, the Rangers to the Central Intelligence Agency, Langley to the Hindu Kush, the Kush back to the United States. Only the start of his travels. Two decades of spying and fighting, killing and not quite dying. He’d resigned from the agency but discovered he needed it as much as it seemed to need him. He’d become a Muslim, too, finding comfort, of sorts, in a faith not his own. And why not? All faiths were foreign in the end, walks through dark woods.

  Had he changed? He supposed he must have. From the start, he’d been unafraid to kill, to take what he could never give back. Yet his dreams troubled him more than they once had—

  “Need anything?” The waitress’s smoke-roughened voice. Meaning: You’ve been sitting in this booth a while, time to order more or move on. Hungry soldiers waited by the door. Wells hadn’t woolgathered this way twenty years ago, that he knew.

  “Scrambled eggs with cheese. Triple order hash browns.”

  “Triple? Coming up.” She offered him a broke-down smile and turned away. The United States had two thousand Waffle Houses, not one in the Northeast or on the West Coast. Places for working people who needed quick food cheap and cheap food quick. The eggs were iffy, but the hash browns were delicious, as long as Wells didn’t think about what they were doing to his arteries.

  He was waiting for his son. Evan. Though Evan didn’t think of Wells as his father. Another man had raised the boy while Wells snaked the world’s drains. Yet Evan, a grown man now, had decided to become a Ranger. Wells wasn’t quite sure why. He was proud, but he feared Evan didn’t understand the choice he’d made.

  Evan had been one of the first-week Fort Benning failures. Not his fault. He’d blown his Achilles tendon eleven miles into the twelve-mile road march, the week’s concluding exercise. Twelve miles didn’t sound like much, except the candidates carried close to a hundred pounds of gear. Because Evan had failed for medical reasons, he could rehab here while he waited for another chance. If he wanted.