by Alan Zendell
“Situations like this,” he said, “they’re tough on everybody. A crowd this size, security has to manage their movements. They’re on alert every second without alarming anyone. See how they’re keeping people off ramps and entrance runways? See that guy? Constantly surveilling the crowd for unusual behavior. I mean anything. People standing too long in one place watching something besides the game. Loitering where they shouldn’t be. Even talking too much on their cell phones. Fans sit in their seats, walk to concessions and rest rooms, or wait in line. Anything else, one of our people wants to know why. Everyone on the network is alerted. It takes a lot out of you, hour after hour.”
Henry obviously felt connected to each of his agents. If being here with us wasn’t more important, he’d have been there with them.
“I can’t believe you live this way all the time,” Ilene said. Henry flashed her a tight smile.
8:02 p.m. The Red Sox are batting in the fourth inning. The scene on TV is routine, a baseball game being played in twilight. We can’t make out the words, but we all notice the increased activity on the remote agent’s radio.
“What’s goin’ on?” Henry demands. We hear the agent barking questions into his radio. Then his voice comes through the phone, responding to Henry.
“Security outside the stadium reports a helicopter approaching downriver.”
Yankee Stadium is located on the Bronx side of the Harlem River. Summertime in New York, tourists with money to spend often took helicopter tours of the city, and though it was frowned upon, even in normal times, pilots had been known to risk heavy fines buzzing the stadium when a game was in progress. Passengers tipped well for such extras, but this week, charter companies and tour operators had been warned to stay clear of public gatherings, and police helicopters were airborne near the stadium throughout the game.
Unlike other parts of the metropolitan area, where military aircraft patrolled 24/7, prepared to take down any aircraft that disobeyed orders from Air Traffic Control, police helicopters weren’t equipped with missiles, and it was doubtful that they’d fire them near a crowded stadium, anyway. A determined pilot flying along the river at low altitude could turn suddenly toward the stadium and be overhead before anyone could stop him. At 120 knots, he could cover the thousand feet between the river bank and the stadium in five seconds.
The agent in the stadium provides a running commentary. There’s barely a second of lag time between his account and reality. “Police aircraft is warning him off by radio. Reporting no response. Maneuvering to block his route to the stadium.
“Shit!” Henry shouts. “What’s he think he’s gonna do, ram ’em?”
“Unidentified aircraft executing sharp turn,” the agent on the phone drones, tonelessly.
“Here it comes. What the fuck, Henry?” The agent on the phone is no longer emotionless.
Police sharpshooters are on the ground. They have high-powered sniper rifles capable of disabling a helicopter in flight. Would they risk causing a crash into the crowded stands?
We hear the helicopter on the TV. It takes the director a split-second to react before it’s on the screen. It flies low over the stadium, descending in a reckless spiral. Over the stands, a hundred feet above the gaping crowd. A smoke stream like a crop duster spraying a corn field. Thick smoke angles downward in the windless air. A wide swath of stands is covered in seconds.
“Oh my God…” Ilene presses a hand to her mouth.
The helicopter is locked in a tight, fast, turn. It makes two complete sweeps of the stadium. Someone orders the police marksmen to fire. We don’t know if they hit anything. It doesn’t matter. The damage is done. Police with radiation detectors are getting high readings wherever the smoke reaches them.
The scene is panic and chaos. Yet, the crowd is unaware of the real danger. People jam the narrow exit ramps, clogging them and knocking each other down. Some jump or fall from the second deck. They drop fifty feet onto those struggling to escape below. A young man topples over the edge. My heart nearly stops when I see his face and his red t-shirt. Ilene gasps. She saw him too.
People stream onto the field. The smoke is thinner, there. Somehow, they sense the danger it presents. Ilene and I sit in horrified silence.
“Play that back, Dylan.” Henry startles me into action. “There’s no reason to panic. This is what we’d expected, not the helicopter attack, but some kind of dispersal scenario.”
I backed up to the start of the attack, wondering how we’d failed to anticipate such an obvious ploy, but that was the way things often worked out. You could plan till the cows came home, but situations like this often turned on things no one foresaw.
Almost immediately, my cell phone rang, and a few seconds later, Ilene’s. It was Marc and Gregg calling from a sports bar, but I let her deal with them. I heard her crying. That hadn’t been Gregg we’d seen. They’d decided not to go to the stadium after all.
Henry and I replayed the attack again and again. We’d imagined using the DVR to focus on things happening in the stands, but it served an entirely different purpose.
“Let me,” Henry said. I watched him re-run the attack one frame at a time, starting just before the smoke obscured the view. He zoomed in until the FAA identification number was clearly visible on the side of the helicopter. If we’d known it a week ago…counting from Wednesday, we still had two days to track them down. Maybe it would be enough, but even if we didn’t, now that we knew exactly what to expect, there was no way that helicopter was going to get anywhere near the stadium during the Thursday re-run.
Henry believed that, too. He also knew what his investigative resources were capable of, and he seemed confident.
“You know what really pisses me off?” he said. “It’s the other me who’s going to nail these bastards, and I’ll only have a fleeting glimpse of his memories.”
This version of Henry would continue to do his job on this version of Thursday. He thanked us both. “I have to proceed as if following up on what we just witnessed were my only option,” he said. “I’m heading back to the office.”
Ilene was still trying to talk on both cell phones. She handed me one after Henry left and we tried to talk our kids down from their shock. I was sure everything would be different when they woke up on Friday, but I couldn’t ignore their need for consolation.
Gregg was on my phone. “You knew, didn’t you, Dad? You saved our lives.”
“I guess I did.”
“How? Why do I have the feeling I’ve never really known who my father was?”
“Please, Gregg, I’ll explain tomorrow. I have too much to do right now. Trust me, this will look a lot better in the morning.”
I ejected the DVD from the recorder and retrieved the 10:00 briefing email from Henry’s agent. Then Ilene and I helped each other stop shaking.
The final thing I had to do was take another pill. I wouldn’t chance screwing things up on Wednesday by not sleeping.
46.
Wednesday morning, I couldn’t think of a reason to alter my encounter with Ilene. Why make her deal with even a second hand account of Thursday night’s horror?
Henry and I had been through this once before. He’d already told me he’d been expecting me to show up Wednesday morning. This time, I didn’t disappoint him, and thus, another bifurcated Henry came into being. I played the attack DVD for the current Henry, then showed him Mary’s Thursday findings and his agents’ late evening email update, giving him a thirty-six hour edge over his other self.
We assumed that the pilot who flew Husam al Din from JFK was the same one who attacked Yankee Stadium. Henry assigned someone to track him down. Maybe he’d lead us to one or more of the suspects Mary identified.
If it looked like we weren’t going to locate the terrorists before Thursday, we’d make our case to William for a perimeter of helicopter gunships protecting the stadium, even if it meant telling him the whole truth. He’d have no trouble arranging for the attack craft. Either they’d force
it to land where personnel trained for the task could recover the radioactive cargo, or they’d blow it up over the mile-wide Hudson River.
We were confident about the plan for Thursday; it was today, Wednesday, that we needed to work on.
“Let’s evaluate what we have,” Henry said, looking at the short dossiers we’d collected on the five people Mary selected on Thursday.
“Why don’t we call Sam and Mary in and talk it over?” I said.
“Won’t they wonder?”
“Mary’s already leaning toward these five; the data that came in today and tomorrow probably just firmed up her conviction. She told me what made her settle on them. We’ll use her own reasoning. If she agrees, Sam will too.”
With all four of us at the table, Henry said, “I’ve been looking at Mary’s findings. Five of them caught my interest, four with Middle East connections and one who’s a suspected drug smuggler with a possible connection to Afghanistan, and all five are affluent. It takes money to finance terror.” Mary had been nodding as Henry spoke.
“Do you have enough on any of them for a warrant?” Samir asked.
“Not yet. Without more information, we might as well select suspects with a dart board. Any ideas?”
“I requested property searches from six counties for everyone on the list we got from the State Police.” Samir said. “They said it would take a few days, but if I call back and ask them to focus on these five, we might get something today.”
“Have William call the three counties closest to the landing site,” Henry suggested. “He’ll have no trouble motivating them.”
William agreed to make the calls, and a few minutes later, the agent assigned to locating the pilot reported in.
“The FAA database lists a leasing company in Weehawken as the owner of the helicopter. The manager said it’s out on a one-month charter. He agreed to copy his entire file on the lease for us when I told him the pilot had helped a suspected terrorist avoid capture and turned off the helicopter’s transponder in controlled airspace.”
I had the file in my hands by 9:30.
“Now that we’ve identified the pilot,” Henry said, “all we have to do is find him.”
“Find her, you mean,” I said, handing him the file. Since Farah Pauline Johnston was a licensed pilot, we were confident that she hadn’t used a false name or address. The New Jersey State Police issued an alert for her, and Mary dove into the law enforcement databases looking for links connecting Johnston to anyone on her list.
The FBI had a file on Johnston from when she was a campus activist at Rutgers. She’d never been indicted, but she was arrested twice, once for creating a disturbance outside the Israeli Consulate in New York. A news video in the file showed Johnston inciting Palestinian supporters in UN Plaza before leading a two-block march to the Consulate, where she baited the NYPD into arresting her. It sounded like a job for Rod.
I called him while Henry contacted the detective who’d helped us with the phone records and told him about Johnston. He offered to pick her up for us. A half hour later, he called to report that she wasn’t at her apartment and her truck hadn’t been there in over a week.
“Every police Agency in the state is on the lookout for her and the truck,” he said. “My partner’s checking whether she has a cell phone. I’ll call you when I get back.”
“What now?” I said.
Henry closed his door, loaded the attack DVD, and searched for clear views of the helicopter’s windshield from different angles. He zoomed in trying to make out the pilot’s face. The leasing company had sent us a copy of Johnston’s driver’s license photo. Henry held it up to the screen. Even with the pilot’s headgear obscuring part of her face and the glare from the stadium lights, it was clearly Johnston at the controls.
Henry told William we were getting close and we might need him to react quickly to approve an action. We all knew Henry had the authority to act on his own. William said he appreciated the attention to protocol, but not to wait on his availability if something came up.
Mary expanded her database to include close associates and family members of the five suspects drawn from watch list files, and Samir reviewed vehicle registrations and responses from tire dealers while he waited for real estate data.
“Look at this,” Samir said. “Two of our prime suspects own vehicles that could have made those tread marks.”
Things were moving, but so was the clock. The tension in my gut was becoming painful, but before I could complain, Henry’s phone rang again. It was the State Police detective calling to tell him that Johnston had a GPS cell phone and an EZ-Pass, the electronic scanning device used for paying highway tolls in the northeast.
“As long as her phone’s turned on we can track her,” Henry said, as he dialed the wireless carrier’s number. A subscriber normally had to give permission to be tracked, but carriers were required to assist law enforcement in criminal investigations. Henry faxed over a formal request and received authorization to access Johnston’s GPS data and phone records.
The pace picked up after 1:00. Samir received one of the county real estate match lists. A wall map of northern New Jersey was soon dotted with color-coded pins marking last week’s helicopter landing site and properties owned by our five prime suspects or their family members. Rod arrived and was quickly closeted with Henry, who briefed him about the attack.
At 1:30, the New Jersey Turnpike Authority reported an EZ-Pass hit on Johnston’s truck going north on the Garden State Parkway. An hour later she exited onto I-287. She must have turned her phone on when she exited, because we started getting GPS readings that indicated she was heading northwest toward the area of the landing.
“Doesn’t this seem strange to you?” I asked Henry. “She’s a pilot. She knows we can track her this way. Wouldn’t you expect her to be more circumspect?”
Henry laughed. “It’s like Rod said. If criminals and terrorists were as smart as people think, we’d never catch most of them. She probably thinks she’s in the clear since nobody’s come after her. She’s undoubtedly pleased with herself and feeling like she can get away with anything.”
We marked Johnston’s path with yellow map pins. When she stopped moving, around 3:00, our mapping software identified her location as a local roadhouse. Ms. Johnston seemed intent on spending the rest of the afternoon steeped in watered-down booze. Rod and I suggested rounding her up and grilling her while her senses were dulled by alcohol, but Henry demurred.
“If we grab her now and upset tomorrow’s operation they’ll go underground again,” he said, speaking so only Rod and I could hear him. “They’ll still have the cesium and we’ll lose any chance to bag them before tomorrow.”
Meanwhile, Mary had been going thru Johnston’s phone records, and one of Henry’s agents obtained access to her bank statements. My adrenaline level rose a notch when Mary reported that in the past month, there had been twenty-one calls exchanged between Johnston and two of the five men on her preferred suspect list, a Bulgarian importer named Stefan Stoychko and the alleged mobster, Peter Bushati.
“They’re the same two whose vehicles came up matches for the tire treads,” Samir added. We were finally getting somewhere. My pulse quickened; I could almost hear the blood singing through my veins.
More animated than I’d ever seen him, Samir appended the two names to the request for phone and bank records and dove into the remaining real estate matches. Both Stoychko and Bushati had amassed considerable fortunes and invested heavily in real estate. They and their immediate families owned nineteen properties in northern New Jersey, from riverfront condos, to sprawling estates, and a couple of farms. Samir used blue and green pins to mark their locations on the map.
We’d made two critical connections. It was almost anticlimactic when we found two $50,000 deposits in Johnston’s checking account – the first, a week before Husam al Din’s arrival at JFK, and the other just five days ago – and corresponding debits in one of Stoychko’s business a
ccounts.
The others felt justifiably pleased with their day’s work, but we still didn’t know where either Husam al Din or the cesium were. Rod, Henry, and I were on a shorter fuse. At 4:15, we huddled around the pin-speckled map.
“I still think you should arrest all three of them and sweat them till they break,” Rod said. “This is one of those times when the ends justify the means.”
“Even if I agreed with you,” Henry said, “we don’t know what end we’d achieve. Besides, we don’t have to decide right now. We still have a few hours.”
I studied the pins in the map, feeling like I was living in a movie cliffhanger. The heroine is tied to the railroad tracks while a speeding train approaches. The hero desperately beats back every obstacle the director can think of to get there before the train decapitates her. Tension grows as the scenes flash from train, to heroine, to struggling hero. Will he make it in time?
Of course he will. He always does. But this was real life.
I forced myself to relax and let my pattern recognition reflexes take over. Study the pins. One of them holds the key. I didn’t question it, I just knew, the way I’d known a lot of things lately.
Eliminate the urban and riverfront properties. They’ll want privacy, isolation if possible. I mentally removed five green and three blue pins from the map.
Scratch the three multiple-residence buildings, obvious rental properties. It was possible that they had Husam al Din stashed in an apartment in one of them, but they wouldn’t launch the operation from there.
That leaves eight properties: the two farms, four luxurious houses, and two estates on considerable acreage. I logged onto Earthview, a military-grade version of Google Earth. I could virtually fly over any terrain I wished, viewing the land below from any desired height. The view wasn’t live, but I’d get a good sense of what was there a few days or weeks ago.
I spread my wings and soared over northern New Jersey, locating each property by GPS coordinates. The high-resolution view showed me neighborhoods, roads, traffic, parkland, commercial development, open space. The detail was amazing – individual houses, cars, trees, even people sunbathing in their yards.
