The Intercept

by Dick Wolf

  Nouvian raised his hand like a child who had to go to the bathroom. “What if I just want to go home?”

  The others turned toward him, surprised. Except for Jenssen, who crossed his arms and awaited the answer.

  The publicist looked at Gersten.

  Gersten said, “Going home at this point would be impossible.”

  “Impossible?” asked Nouvian. “Why? I am a free man.”

  “You are material witnesses to an attempted terrorist act, one that is still under active investigation.”

  “First of all,” said Maggie, “we’re not witnesses, we are participants. We have a say in this. Second—how is it still active? The hijacking is over.”

  Gersten said, “I have no say in this matter. I am following orders.”

  “And so are we,” said Jenssen. “Or so we are expected to.”

  Aldrich squinted like he smelled something funny. “What’s going on here? Are you telling me that if we stood up, the six of us, and walked to the door and out of here, we would be arrested, or detained?”

  Gersten smiled. She did not want to say yes.

  “Really,” said Maggie, shocked.

  “Under whose authority?” said Aldrich. “Is this Obama’s doing? Is that dismantler of the Constitution pulling another fast one?”

  “Under the law,” said Gersten, “the Patriot Act gives us broad powers of investigation.”

  “You mean ‘detention,’ ” said Frank. He turned to Aldrich. “It’s not Obama. You can blame Bush for this one.”

  Aldrich didn’t like that. He turned an angry red, but could only say, “This is utter bullshit.”

  Jenssen said, “So we are detained, we are prisoners here. Except where you want to trot us out on television to smile for the cameras?”

  Maggie turned to them. “Come on,” she said, “don’t blame her.” She was defending Gersten. “It’s obviously not her fault. She didn’t volunteer to give up her Friday night to take our abuse.”

  Gersten smiled, saying nothing.

  Frank rubbed his unshaven face and said, “Look. Let’s all play the game for tonight. It costs us nothing. The fact remains that we did do something remarkable, and we are, quote-unquote, heroes. So let’s not overthink it. I feel a certain sense of obligation, but even if you don’t—then look at it as a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Television is fascinating from the inside out. We’ll go tell our story tonight, then get some much-needed rest and figure all the rest of it out tomorrow.”

  The publicist clasped her hands. “I think that’s an excellent solution.”

  Sparks turned around to Jenssen, still sitting with his arms crossed. She squeezed his knee in a teasing manner. “What do you say, hero?”

  Gersten smiled at how ironic it was that the most naturally photogenic person among them was also the most reluctant to go on television.

  Jenssen slowly smiled, some of it for Sparks, the rest releasing considerable wattage into the room. “I guess I have nothing better to do this evening.”

  The mood lifted considerably. The publicist said, “We can tape at eight P.M. in their Times Square studio. To do so, we need to be in cars and moving at seven thirty, and until then you will have private time or a chance to connect with your families. Room service has been alerted to our schedule and will serve full dinners on dining tables in your suites at six thirty. Everybody clear on that?”

  Nods and smiles all around.

  Jenssen said, “Is there a gymnasium in this hotel?”

  Gersten said, “There is, but we can’t give you access today.”

  The publicist said, “We can try to build some time into the schedule tomorrow.”

  Nouvian said, “Wait a minute. We already have a schedule for tomorrow?”

  The publicist realized she had said too much. “Maybe,” she answered, as one of her assistants approached her with a piece of paper.

  Maggie said, “If I’m going on national television tonight, I need some beauty work. And I mean, pronto.”

  “Seconded,” said Sparks. “How about clothes that haven’t been stuffed in a suitcase for two days?”

  The publicist finished reading the page she had been handed and looked up, smiling. “Then you will love this. Barneys New York has offered free shopping sprees for all of you. We’ll get the website up, you can plug in your sizes, place your orders online, and two of my assistants will have it here for you by six P.M. As to makeup, there will be professionals at the television studio tonight. Does that get you ladies where you need to go?”

  Maggie and Sparks looked at each other in silent celebration. Even Nouvian grinned.

  Aldrich said, “What the hell’s ‘Barneys’?”

  The others all laughed.

  The publicist said, “I’ll get that website up for you right away.”

  Chapter 23

  Coyote” was the tactical field operation code name randomly spit out by the computer. Still, it struck Fisk as somehow appropriate. Every e-mail and piece of paperwork would be slugged with it. He started with a sketch of his action plan for Dubin’s data files. How he planned to organize his people, his search and ID parameters, information security. Best to get the bureaucratic stuff out of the way early.

  He held off putting his head down on his desk until the photographs came in. Dubin had ordered him to take a few hours in a duty bunk, but this wasn’t Fisk’s first long weekend, and he had an athlete’s knowledge of his own capacity for fatigue.

  His computer pinged the summons he had programmed for urgent e-mails. The photographs from the overhead Stockholm jetway camera materialized on his screen.

  A collage of six black-and-white images showed a slim man in a dark suit, pointedly looking down as he passed under the camera. At one point, the morning light through the jetway window had startled him into looking up. That was the best shot.

  He was a classically handsome Arab. Dark eyebrows across the top of an angular square face, broad shoulders. The body of a man who would get heavy later in life, but who now radiated strength and confidence.

  The image improved upon Bin-Hezam’s four-year-old passport photo, in which he sported a beard. But Fisk hoped Newark ICE would do better, and decided to wait for those before releasing these to the Intel machine.

  The Newark customs hall photos came in on another computer chime. There were a dozen, most of them showing the Saudi at the baggage carousel. While the other passengers were visibly excited or relieved that their interrupted journey had come to a peaceful end, Bin-Hezam appeared like any arriving passenger disembarking from any airplane in any airport in the world. No expression, no pacing, no stretching. Head down, ignoring the exhilaration around him.

  The shot from the eye-level camera at the immigration booth was the best of the bunch. He looked no different from any of the hundreds of young Arab men Fisk had known, though—unless he was reading too much into it—the man’s desert-black eyes looked darker than most, borderline supernatural.

  Fisk magnified the image 150 percent. The Saudi had a nickel-size mole at the left end of his jawline, looking like a dark welt. The mole gave them a little bit of an edge, as an identifying mark—but the haystack was still absurdly big.

  Fisk ordered fifty prints each of the enlarged full-face photograph and the full-color, full-body shot from the baggage carousel. His action plan was uncomplicated and, he was afraid, potentially hopeless. He had to pull every raker and mosque crawler off whatever they were doing to canvass the Muslim neighborhoods in Queens and Brooklyn, betting everything on the Saudi’s likelihood of surfacing there.

  Bin-Hezam had to know somebody in New York. He had to stay someplace. With friends or family? The Analytic Unit had come up with no domestic relatives, but in many of these cases a fourth cousin twice removed demonstrated the fidelity of a parent or sibling. Still, a hotel was not out of the question, and D
ubin had forwarded Baada Bin-Hezam’s credit card information to the FBI.

  Fisk’s best friends now were shoe leather and blind luck. He pulled up the informant tracking sheets and dispatched e-mails to the detectives running each of the thirty or so men and women out on the streets of New York, with strict caution against further dissemination. Then, like a patient taking his medicine, Fisk forced himself to go head-down for a while, sleep taking him almost instantly.

  Fifty minutes later he popped back up, briefly disoriented, waking out of a dream in which a coyote was loose inside the Intel Division’s offices. He stood, needing to get his blood circulating, and inside of a minute felt alert and refreshed. He got a candy bar out of the break room vending machine and guzzled a caffeinated diet soda.

  The day shift had handed their consoles off to the middies who would work until midnight. Dubin had turned the overtime spigot wide open and put everybody willing to work on the streets. That meant there were three times as many cops looking for Baada Bin-Hezam as there would have been on an ordinary shift.

  It was a Friday night just after 6:00 P.M. The Jumu’ah weekly prayer was over. Many observant families stayed close to home in the evening, except for the Westernized young who were in the streets like the rest of New York on this hot summer night. Crowded avenues made it easier for his people to browse among the throng. They also made it potentially easier for Bin-Hezam to hide. But the heat generally brought people outside, so the odds were in his favor.

  The agents at their computers flicked through screens of alternating text messages and GPS tracks, showing the locations of their people, passing on updates and summaries to Fisk. In the neighborhoods, years of sidewalk surveillance had given the rakers a sixth sense about who belonged there and who did not.

  So far, no one reported any activity out of the ordinary.

  Nearly one million of New York’s eight million residents were Muslim. One in eight. There were 130 mosques in the five boroughs. Fourteen Islamic schools. Special parking rules in some neighborhoods for religious holidays. Shops and restaurants mimicked those in Baghdad, Jakarta, Riyadh, Kabul, Karachi, and thousands of other settlements around the world in which there is no god but God.

  The search on the street was a standard neighborhood canvass. Smartphones had rewritten the rules of surveillance. Gone were the days of clandestine meetings between spies, informants, and handlers. The reports flickered across Fisk’s screen from Muslim communities in Brooklyn, Queens, and lower Manhattan.

  All the same. Negative for contact.

  The demographic landscape of New York is forever shifting. The neighborhoods change as constantly and steadily as the ancient glaciers that shaped the terrain under the city, their ethnic blends transformed by migration, fear, whim, and greed. Bay Ridge, Boerum Hill, Cobble Hill, Flatbush, Sunset Park, and Greenwood Heights in Brooklyn were home to vibrant cloisters of Arabs and Turks, further refined by tribal and family connections. Afghans and Pakistanis had settled in outer Queens, most around the two mosques in Flushing. Bosnians and Indonesians claimed Astoria.

  Fisk toggled his computer keyboard, bringing up the surveillance camera feeds. Five hundred digital video cameras fed images into a control center in the old Brooklyn Navy Yard. The two photographs of Bin-Hezam had gone to the control center slugged with a national emergency priority, but no additional information. Only the most senior of the camera techs had ever seen a national emergency priority request. The order meant they had to drop everything except violent-crime-in-progress alerts to turn the cameras’ attention to look for a single suspect.

  None of them had been told why. None of them would ask. Everything they did was need-to-know.

  For any pair of human eyes working a camera sweep like this one, the level of concentration was similar to that of air traffic controllers during rush hour. One of the center’s software programmers extracted the eight facial characteristics from the Newark Airport close-up that the computer needed to screen raw images from the cameras. The resulting filter algorithm was then applied to all incoming video. This action cut down the number of possible images of a known suspect by a factor of ten thousand to one.

  The possible photos were pumped to duty agents at Intel by the dozens. Those screeners forwarded along any likelies to Fisk, who expected to see three or four faces an hour.

  None of the first batch belonged to Bin-Hezam. No surprise. Success was never that easy.

  Fisk felt himself slipping into the patient, confident rhythms of intense surveillance, digesting input from multiple sources all over New York. It was pleasurable, the familiar exhilaration of the hunt. These were impulses he associated with Krina Gersten, and he realized that he owed her a call. He speed-dialed her cell.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey-hey,” she said, a bit of relief in her voice.

  “Everything good?”

  “Fine here.” He heard her walking, and pictured her looking for a quiet, confidential spot to stand and talk. “They’re in with friends, family, their thoughts, or the TV. We’re packing them up soon to head over to Times Square to do Nightline. There was a mini-revolt, or the seeds of one, but they’re all going along with the game plan for now. I don’t suppose you’re calling to get me off this day care detail.”

  “On the contrary,” he said. “The commissioner likes you there. He knew you by name. I didn’t know you were wired in with the deity.”

  “Lotta good it’s doing me,” she said. He heard her move the phone away from her mouth and tell someone, “Just a minute.” Then she was back. “Yeah, him and my dad ran around a little bit. Staten Island back in the day.”

  “Maybe you can leverage that. Get a message to him, get off that hotel detail. Or I could try . . .”

  “First of all, my mom gets a Christmas card every year, but, I mean, that’s the extent of it. Second, going over Dubin’s head serves neither of our interests. I have to satisfy myself by living vicariously through you for now, and hope things change later. Where are you at? Pushing ahead with Bin-Hezam, I hope.”

  “Full speed ahead. The lid is off the box. Looking through city camera feeds and listening in on conversations. Nothing yet. Even given full access, we need to get so lucky to make this thing work.”

  “You’re doing all the usual stuff, I’m sure,” she said, thinking out loud. “Let’s think targets. Obviously, there’s this weekend. The fireworks.”

  “Three million people will be watching, spread out all along the West Side looking at the Hudson River. And then the dedication of One World Trade Center the next day.”

  “America’s brand-new tallest building.”

  “The president is in town for that. The ceremony is just thirty-six hours away.”

  “Fireworks display is spread out from Twentieth to Fifty-fifth Street. It goes for like twenty minutes.”

  “Twenty-five.”

  “That is a nightmare waiting to happen. By contrast, the ceremony’s going to have a thick credential zone. It’s going to be, what, a half mile around the site?”

  “Something like that. Two juicy targets. Or, think about this—wait for the ceremony and its dignitaries to draw all security on the island, leaving the rest of Manhattan unusually vulnerable.”

  “Jesus,” she said. “I’m sorry I asked.” She was thinking. “Has to be high value, high visibility. Yankee Stadium?”

  “Thank Christ, they’re out of town this weekend. L.A. Angels. But don’t forget—it’s going to be big impact, but not necessarily high body count. Bin Laden wanted to dazzle and do damage.”

  “The Statue of Liberty. It’s visible from lower Manhattan, from the Ground Zero area. Would be a huge fucking symbolic strike.”

  Fisk said, “That’s heavy. But then again, as a target, it’s as good as any. Let’s face it, we could probably spend all night running down New York City’s greatest hits. A tourist could. Righ
t now it doesn’t get us any closer to where and why. All we’ve got is who. Maybe who. We’ve got to go in that way. We’ve got to find some way to anticipate his movements and try to intersect with one of them.”

  “Anthrax,” said Gersten. “Or some other bio agent.”

  “Always a concern. But nothing from the airport sniffers. Now, if he’s got contacts here, and I assume he does—then it’s possible.”

  “He must have help, right? Is he bringing something to somebody . . . or is he here to take delivery? His luggage was searched, so that’s out. Is he here to facilitate something?”

  Fisk said, “You know I hate to play into the bubble paranoia.” He and Gersten had talked often about the skewed worldview that comes with hunting phantom terrorists seven days a week. “But maybe he’s here to awaken sleeper agents. That makes sense to me. I keep going back to the big beard’s words before his death. He wanted to implement a plan so clever we’d never see it coming. If bin Laden started turning the wheels on a major plan before he died, he would have wanted to use the best of everything. The deepest contacts, the brightest operatives. He would have burned his prime Al-Qaeda sleepers to make it work.” Fisk heard himself pontificating. “Or, and I haven’t taken this off the table yet, this Saudi is just some jet-setting art dealer, whose life is about to be temporarily ruined by one Intel agent’s paranoia.”

  “Don’t doubt yourself, Jeremy. Something’s brewing here, something is happening. Get inside this guy’s head. Do that by remembering that, if this is anything at all, it’s something big. Something hard. Everything on the line, nothing ordinary. Nothing small. That’s what bin Laden was planning, right? Something extraordinary. Taking this fight to the next level, the one beyond nine-eleven.”

  Fisk was nodding on his end.

  “Dammit,” continued Gersten. “I hate being on the sidelines.”

  “You’re not,” said Fisk. “This has been a big help. You’ve focused me. You sharpened my pencil.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” she said dismissively.

  “Keep thinking for me,” he said, and hung up.