The Intercept

by Dick Wolf

  He quickly inventoried the rest of the contents of the Duane Reade shopping bag delivered to him by the woman. He examined a Ziploc bag of gauze impregnated with plaster of paris. When wet, it would be formed into a new replacement cast for his arm.

  Next, a box of rolled cotton batting.

  Then a sheet of fine plastic a foot square. It could be cut and shaped, forming a partition between the explosive and the gauze. The new cast would be damp for a few hours before drying. But if the TATP became wet, the explosive would have only half its potential force as when dry.

  Then the pellets wrapped in tissue paper, from which protruded the vinyl-covered antenna wires. The twin igniters.

  And a wireless trigger the size of a can of sardines.

  Everything he needed.

  He stood and disrobed, throwing the exercise clothes into the corner of the room. He went into the bathroom and turned on the ceiling fan and the shower. He then pulled the sharp steak knife he had purloined from their lunchtime interview from its hiding place beneath the bathroom sink, and went to work cutting his cast. He worked from his arm out. The hardened batting sliced cleanly, but the blue exterior proved a much more difficult task. His wrist ached as he went at it savagely.

  One thing they had not accounted for was the color of the cast. Jenssen had requested plain white, but the orthopedist only brought blue. It was an anomaly that would have to be accounted for.

  The hard blue casing flaked shavings onto the vanity as Jenssen sawed away, nicking his forearm six or seven times but drawing little blood. When he got half of it cut, he placed the cracked cast against the edge of the vanity and pushed down on it.

  The only result was pain.

  Jenssen felt the husk give a little, and so grabbed a fresh cotton hand towel and stuffed it into his mouth. He positioned the open seam of the cast against the counter’s sharp edge, and on the count of three thrust down against it with all his weight.

  The cast cracked open with a shocking crunch. Jenssen’s scream vanished into the baffling of the towel, which, after a few moments of lingering agony, he then spit onto the floor.

  His wrist throbbed. He thought he might have refractured the bone and feared it would swell anew. He held still, holding it, hoping the noise of the cast breaking did not raise any alarms.

  Jenssen remembered meeting the doctor in the hours before the departure of Flight 903. A tourniquet was applied to his arm just below his shoulder, rendering it numb in minutes. He remembered the doctor—assuming he was in fact a licensed physician—lifting his dead arm and laying it atop the heavy workbench with his hand dangling over the edge. “Avert your eyes,” said the doctor, with more than a hint of a smile in his bespectacled eyes. Perhaps the man was in fact an experienced torturer. Jenssen had turned away and closed his eyes. He heard the crunch and felt the workbench shudder, but he felt nothing. A local anesthetic was applied by syringe. Again, he felt nothing, and in a few more minutes, with his fingers swollen and red, the tourniquet was released. The dark anticipation of the pain had left him drenched in sweat, but once the pins and needles faded the anesthetic worked effectively. He was given anti-inflammatory medication for the swelling, and had his sleeve rolled back down and buttoned for him. Then he walked out to the car that would transport him to the airport.

  When the renewed pain receded, Jenssen grabbed the trash can and dumped the broken cast inside, sweeping the blue shavings off the counter. He stepped into the shower and washed himself gingerly but quickly, the jets painful against his swelling left wrist.

  He focused his mind away from the pain by mentally rehearsing the next few hours. He ticked off various potential disasters that might bring down the plan, anticipating them and preparing himself to avoid them.

  I am safely concealed, he reminded himself. I will not fail.

  Insha’Alla.

  Chapter 57

  Fisk had spent a fair amount of time as an Intel cop in Bay Ridge. The streets there were as bucolic as any in the five boroughs. A light night breeze off the Verrazano Narrows was the only relief from the lingering heat of the day. This corner of Brooklyn had absorbed waves of Irish, Italians, and Norwegians—and, more recently, Arabs.

  The address was only fifteen minutes away with lights and sirens, in a neighborhood that had recently been christened “Little Palestine.” The JTTF called ahead to the Sixty-eighth Precinct station house, which had two units idling at Seventy-ninth and Shore Road, just a block away. No lights, no show. Not sealing off the area, but present and available if needed. Reg arrived with an interdiction team of his own, four SWAT-trained tactical officers in full extraction armor, two FBI agents, and a linguist.

  The location was a converted brownstone, lights in the windows on the first and second floors. The front door was unlocked. The listing on the lobby plate for the third-floor apartment in question read “bint Mohammed,” not Burnett.

  Fisk waited while Reg and the FBI agents went around with the linguist, rapping on the doors of the three ground-floor apartments, then the two on the second floor. The only person who gave them trouble was an elderly woman who refused to be forced outside unveiled. She took her place sullenly on the sidewalk in front of the stoop with the other families, pointedly turning her back on the FBI agents and police detectives.

  Reg said to Fisk, “What do you think? Pick it or kick it?”

  Fisk said, “If she’s home, there’s a good chance she knows we’re here already. Bin-Hezam wanted suicide-by-cop and got his wish. So kick it. Hard.”

  Reg gave the signal, and the four-man interdiction team then went up the stairs in close-quarters combat formation, advancing and covering two-by-two. Boots soft on the wooden floor, commands mimed in silence. Fisk and Reg and one of the FBI agents went up one floor behind them, the linguist remaining on the stoop with the other FBI agent.

  At the third-floor apartment door, one of the tactical officers unslung the heavy-weighted steel tube from his back, gripping its handles. Another man aimed a 12-gauge shotgun at the door hinges as backup, counting him down in silence.

  The officer swung the breach tube hard, striking the dead bolt above the door handle. The lock plate and the door frame splintered and the door whipped open.

  The other three men flooded inside. In a matter of seconds, they cleared the tiny apartment. The fourth officer signaled Reg. There was no one home.

  The team flipped on light switches. The main concern now was booby traps. They cleared the place for trip wires, and only then were Fisk and Reg allowed inside.

  Reg went immediately to a stack of mail upon a small corner desk. Fisk went straight to the bedroom.

  There, draped over a straight-backed chair next to a single bed covered with a paisley spread, he found a deep blue burka. The room was monastically tidy. At the foot of the bed, a worn red prayer rug was neatly folded.

  Fisk brought out his phone, dialing Intel. He realized he needed the spelling of her name, and walked out to join Reg.

  “I need you to access the city records database,” he told the agent who answered. He spelled the names “Kathleen Burnett,” confirming it from her cell phone bill, and, reading from a catalog label, “Aminah bint Mohammed.” “Assuming it’s a name change, but need to confirm they are the same person. I need a photograph ASAP.”

  He hung up and went looking for photographs. The single bed and Spartan appearance said single occupant, and those people rarely put out pictures of themselves.

  In the front room, between a pair of overstuffed chairs facing a small flat-screen television on a rolling table, he scanned a single bookshelf. Korans in English and Arabic, and a single photograph of a man and woman dressed for something formal standing next to a 1980s Buick sedan. Parents. Probably deceased.

  Two windows, one left open approximately eight inches. A stack of newsletters in Arabic, and some newspapers. Reg booted up a small netbook plugg
ed into the wall.

  Reg said, “What do you think? Girlfriend? Handler?”

  Fisk turned in a slow circle, taking it all in. He moved to the kitchen. No dishwasher, a drying rack in the sink. A short refrigerator.

  The interdiction team rigged up a bungee cord, opening the fridge from around the wall. No bang. Fisk went in, wishing he had gloves on. He tugged his sleeve down over his fist and moved containers of low-fat yogurt and a deli tub of dates.

  Two empty glass mason jars. He got down low, trying to see up through the wire shelf rack. He saw what looked like white crust residue in the lid threads.

  He moved everybody back. To Reg he said, “Get a dog over here stat.”

  Chapter 58

  Applying a cast to the arm of another person was a relatively straightforward procedure. Applying a cast to one’s own arm was as difficult as one-handed surgery. But Jenssen had trained for this repeatedly. Though only once with real explosive. And never with a broken wrist.

  He sat near the table. His swollen arm looked pinkish gray, like dead skin abraded with a square of fine sandpaper. He rubbed it gently, indulging himself in a moment of itch relief, tempered by the tenderness of his wrist and the clotting cuts where he had punctured his skin with the tip of the steak knife.

  The new cast would take three hours to fully harden. The first time he attempted this, he had applied the plaster gauze too snugly and could not tolerate the pain for even one hour before ripping it off. Now with his wrist and forearm swollen and already tender, he knew he had to be careful.

  On the other hand, he would only have to stand the throbbing ache for a few short hours.

  Jenssen addressed the moment of greatest peril first. He unwrapped the roll of TATP and held it in his good hand. In practice, he had used ordinary putty of a similar consistency, and once a professionally firm slab of the real thing. This substance was gummier and stickier. It clung to his fingers.

  He cleared his mind and went to work. A mistake could ruin months of preparation and devotion by many people in a fiery instant.

  Using both hands, though generously favoring his left, he began to work the half-pound roll of whitish-gray explosive. He stretched the substance to roughly the distance from his thumb joint halfway to his elbow. Too much squeezing with his left hand produced a stabbing pain, and he stopped, calmed himself, focused, and continued.

  With the heel of his good hand, Jenssen gently and patiently flattened the explosive to a thickness of about a quarter inch. He had seen what the TATP could do, detonated by a gunshot in an abandoned barn in a field in Sweden. The image of the structure splintering in a dynamic blast of flame still made him flinch, his body remembering the shock wave from 250 meters away.

  Halfway done.

  The explosive clay sweated moisture as Jenssen manipulated it. He had not anticipated this. The mixture was damper than expected, weeping a substance that smelled like chemical sweat.

  Did this mean that the mixture was no good? More unstable? Less effective? He wondered: Was the woman in Central Park the chemist? Had she prepared this like shortbread in her kitchen, and mismeasured an ingredient?

  He couldn’t concern himself with that. He continued to mold the TATP, using bathroom tissues to soak away the moisture. What had been a loaf no larger than the cardboard tube of a roll of toilet paper was now a trim sheet that would cover the heel of his hand, his wrist, and his lower forearm.

  Jenssen took a break to clean up the tabletop. In the bathroom he splashed cold water on his face.

  Next, he removed the cotton batting and wound a thin layer over his tingling arm, securing it with a small steel clip at the end. He had almost forgotten the fabric softener sheets, and rose to remove them from his luggage. They were to aid in masking the scent of the explosive, in case of dogs. He then laid his cotton-clad arm on the table, palm down, and with his good hand slowly peeled the sheet of explosive dough from the tabletop. It did not come off as smoothly as expected. He molded the TATP onto his left forearm, feeling it compress the cotton. Then he patched and repaired with bits left on the table.

  He was sweating but had nothing handy to wipe his brow. At one point he shook his head violently, spraying sweat around him. Jenssen took the two igniter pellets from the messenger bag. He made sure that their antenna wires were laid cleanly on the edge of the explosive, then embedded one near the heel of his hand, the other at the opposite edge. He pressed them gently but firmly, ensuring they wouldn’t chafe, but also flattening them against his arm as much as possible.

  It looked good. Now the plastic. The sheet of thin acetate fit his forearm well. It had to, in order to insulate the explosive from the wet gauze impregnated with plaster of paris. He pulled it from the ice bucket, shaking off excess water.

  This part was most essential if his work was to stand up to scrutiny. He began at his hand, following the same pattern of winding as he had with the cotton batting. He formed a grip across his palm like the old cast, and as he wound, he transferred the layers of remaining gauze from one side of his arm to the other, passing it underneath and above.

  He was most careful not to be too fastidious, and in doing so wind the gauze too tightly. The process took him a half hour. His initial disappointment—the white cast appeared bumpy—gave way to encouragement once he regarded his work in the mirror. The makeshift cast was evenly layered around his arm. It would further set over the next few hours. Right now, it felt neither too tight nor too loose.

  Then he heard a knock at his door. He swallowed to make certain his voice was clear of any audible distress. “Yes?”

  “We’re heading down to the lounge.” It was the journalist’s voice, already wobbly with drink. “Party time! Let’s go, Magnus!”

  The usual overfamiliarity of the liquor-addled personality. “Getting dressed. I will be along in a bit.”

  “If you don’t, we’re gonna have to bring the party to you!”

  Exactly what Jenssen did not want. He listened to Frank thumping away down the hall. The original plan had anticipated and accounted for one or two fellow heroes to join him, most likely after the fact. No one expected that four other passengers would leap into the fight. Jenssen had told himself that there was increased safety in numbers, and he had faded into the group well enough, but the price paid was having to put up with their self-inflated egos.

  The truth was, it was difficult to converse with pawns and treat them as equals.

  In the silence that ensued, Jenssen heard the street noise rising to his window. Car horns and bus hydraulics and a faraway siren. The hotel ventilation system clicked on automatically, sending a rush of cool air at him from a vent over the door. The sounds of life.

  He fingered the wireless trigger. The bomb he had just built into his cast would explode a microsecond after ignition, vaporizing every shred of his body and destroying every living thing within fifty yards of detonation. He would feel and hear nothing other than God’s grace. There were many worse deaths than that.

  Chapter 59

  At 11:00 P.M., the Lounge at New York Central—the Hyatt’s second-floor bar, extending from the hotel façade over Forty-second Street, adjacent to the entrance to Grand Central Terminal—was full of post-theater nightcappers.

  The hotel had cleared the far right corner for the heroes, and the mayor’s office was picking up the tab. Antipasti, shrimp, and plates of french fries sat on the corner table. The mayor’s PR person lingered just long enough for one glass of Chablis. She and Maggie and Aldrich crowed about the fireworks, then she received a text and abruptly said her good-byes.

  Gersten arrived, feeling fried from a few hours of recapping the past forty-eight in cop language. DeRosier was drinking Diet Coke, still sore from his run. Patton chose to live dangerously with an on-duty O’Doul’s.

  Gersten’s attention first went to Colin Frank, the journalist sipping a vodka-and-something while
engrossed in knee-to-knee discussion with a very attentive—and aggressively attired—Joanne Sparks. Gersten wondered how that had happened, then decided it was probably Sparks’s way of showing up Jenssen.

  If so, the effect was not as intended. Jenssen sat at the far corner of the bar, nursing a club soda and lime. Maggie Sullivan, his other entanglement, was laughing with a male stranger while alternately watching the Yankees game on the overhead televisions.

  Aldrich sipped bourbon on the rocks, chatting with Gersten and Patton. He was an amiable enough guy, more so after two drinks, and he loved to talk about auto parts. Nouvian sat next to Jenssen, drinking one of the lounge’s cocktail creations, though it seemed like neither had much to say to the other.

  Maggie politely excused herself from the stranger and came over to Gersten. “I’m finally one of the popular girls at the school dance!” she whispered, laughing.

  “Slow down, girl!” said Gersten.

  Maggie fanned herself with her hand. “It’s a roller coaster, I’ll tell you. I don’t know what to make of myself.” She sipped her Seven and Seven. “I met the president today!” she exulted. “This hand.” She looked at her hand. “Who am I again?”

  She was the one Gersten would miss most of all. Maybe the only one. She was the most real, somehow, and the most joyful. Gersten thought to tell her that, but now wasn’t the time, and here wasn’t the place.

  Maggie picked up on Gersten’s appreciation somehow, throwing her arm around her. “Nice to see you detectives as people, for a change.”

  Patton killed his nonalcoholic beer. “We got peace in the valley tonight.”

  Gersten smiled and nodded, because it was expected of her. But Fisk’s suspicions weighed on her mind. She sipped her water, desperate for a real drink, hoping Fisk would arrive soon.