He walked back to the real estate office and waited for Aimee Cutler, who drove her car around to the front and picked him up. Aimee headed for the Norfolk area by a direct but narrow network of passes and country lanes, never even seeing a main road. She covered the distance pretty quickly, too, before stopping at a large farm on the south side of the village.
“This is the one you liked in the brochure,” she said. “It’s a very nice house, and sits in eighty acres of farmland. They’re asking $2 million plus, but they probably won’t get it,” she said.
Al-Assad feigned interest, but this house was to close to a group of houses on the edge of Norfolk. He wanted seclusion, a place where comings and goings would not be noticed. He did not care particularly about the price, but it ought not to be ostentatious.
The next property they saw was ideal except for the entrance. The house itself was situated at the end of a long driveway, and more or less surrounded by mature trees. Its outbuildings were perfect, and it had four bedrooms. But that driveway emerged onto the principal road in and out of Norfolk, less than four hundred yards from the start of the built-up area. And it had enormous black wrought-iron gates with gold-painted tips on the upright struts.
The price was $1.4 million, and if it had had a rough old post-and-rail farm gate Assad would probably have bought it. But these gates were only a couple of ticks short of neon-lit, and they were electrically operated. Traffic in and out of that house would be too public, and there would be a lot of waiting around for the electric mechanism to kick in. Aimee and Faisal waited for almost a minute to drive in.
The sale died in that minute, and they moved on to the next house, which Aimee had warned was a little run down—real estate code for “absolute wreck.” Mountainside Farm stood in the foothills of Haystack Mountain, which rose to its north.
The house was within thirty acres of the south bank of the Blackberry River, which could be crossed by road from West Norfolk, and it was less than two miles from Canaan Academy.
The property met all of Faisal’s requirements. For a start it did not even have gates. Its entrance was on a lonely road, through a gap in the woods onto a cart-track. The woods were probably fifty yards deep when you drove in, and from there the drive was blacktopped and ran another three hundred yards to the house, which was, as suspected, a wreck.
Aimee explained it had been used for years by a New York scientific writer who specialized in botany, and only came on weekends in the summer. He plainly had never painted the place, and he had put it on the market to include its entire contents, furniture, and pictures, carpets and curtains, which Faisal assessed must have been worth all of twelve dollars and forty cents.
But it had a couple of sofas, a three hundred-year-old television, a dining room table, and eight chairs that had seen better days. The kitchen was the best room in the house, with a fairly modern stove and fridge and a tiled floor. Aimee said the hot water system had been renewed recently, “definitely since the Vietnam War.”
Outside, the outbuildings were spacious if run down. There was a big, high barn in which there was still a line of cattle-feeders, suggesting someone had once run a herd up here. But that must have been long ago, because there was an outside machine room, which contained a tractor that dated back to the 1930s. The asking price was $900,000, plus $25,000 for fixtures and fittings.
“I’d need to spend a lot of money to fix it up,” mused Faisal. “When can I have it?”
“This afternoon if you like, for a cash sale. My brother is the local lawyer representing the client. And I have him on stand-by.”
“I’ll offer $875,000 cash, payable immediately with a local banker’s draft, Connecticut State. No further questions or checks.”
“Let me call Danny,” said Aimee. “He’s been a friend of Roger’s for years. He has power of attorney and can do the deal right away. The place has on the market for almost a year.”
She walked outside the barn and dialed her brother’s number. Faisal could see her speaking into her cell phone, smiling. He caught the sound of the word “cash,” and then, “I’ll do that,” and then, “See you in an hour.”
Aimee returned to her client and told him the deal was done, and that they should return to Torrington immediately. On the way, he should call the bank, and she would call her office to have the final documents prepared.
The bank manager was a little surprised to have received $1.5 million that morning and then have $875,000 of it spent three hours later. But he moved quickly. The draft was prepared, and by 4:45 p.m. that afternoon, Faisal al-Assad was the owner of Mountainside Farm, with annual property taxes of $2,400, payable in advance.
Faisal knew the recce of the area around the academy had been made by members of the Sleeper Cell in Boston, a group that had been very nearly moribund with fear and trepidation since American Airlines Flight 11 had smashed into the World Trade Center’s North Tower on that September morning in 2001. His memorandum from Boston had stated clearly the new property must have clear views of the Haystack Mountain, otherwise it would be too far away from the target.
Well, he had located and purchased the precise, correct farmhouse, with privacy, seclusion from the road and the village, and plenty of barn space. Aimee handed him the keys and told him to visit her office the following morning to pick up another set of keys, plus instructions and warranties for kitchen equipment. Meanwhile she would leave him to run out and inspect his new house in peace. Faisal al-Assad thanked her and stepped outside, walking down the street to the Royal Inn to pay the bill and collect his team.
Before stopping at the house, they drove to an agricultural dealer, where Faisal ordered five hundred bales of hay to be delivered next day.
“You got a decent-sized barn?” asked the salesman.
“No problem,” said Faisal. “Mountainside Farm on the East Norfolk Road.” He paid with his American Express card and drove to a supermarket, where he told Ibrahim and the team to get out and get whatever they wanted, and that he’d meet them at the check-out to settle the tab.
Next, they set off for East Norfolk using main highways, rather than Aimee’s labyrinth of country lanes. It was growing dark when they arrived at Mountainside. But they unpacked swiftly, checked out the upstairs rooms, checked the hot water, found some dry logs in the wide brick fireplace, and settled in.
Faisal told them they would be receiving an old farm truck in the morning, and that he would return in two days. He said his good-byes and left.
Faisal headed south toward New York City. He would, he knew, not pass this way again. His work was done.
JOHN STRAUSS spent only three minutes on the phone to his fellow Sayanim, Jarvis Goldman. He respected the Park Avenue banker and had received useful information from him before. And if Jarvis was exercised about this Arab’s $2 million that was suddenly headed out of Manhattan into the wilds of the Connecticut mountains, then he would continue the investigation.
He called Mack Bedford at the Waldorf and summoned him to the world headquarters of Banda Fine Arts. There he informed him about Goldman’s suspicions, suggesting that Mack head up there and check it out.
Mack’s own brand new black Pro4X Nissan Titan truck was a vehicle gazed upon with awe in rural Maine, but was regarded as the transport choice of a plumber in Park Avenue, New York. And Mack had never forgotten a SEAL instructor stopping him in Anne’s Pontiac out in the SPECWARCOM base in Coronado.
“What the hell are you doing in that red faggot car?” he’d demanded. “Men drive trucks, boy. SEALs don’t drive anything else.”
Mack grinned at the memory, and then he told Johnny Strauss he had a vehicle parked in the Waldorf garage. Right now he needed to take down whatever details there were about the money transfer. And he’d be in Torrington tomorrow morning, hard on the track of the Arab, Faisal al-Assad. He wasn’t sure what there was to find, but if it was there, he’d find it.
THE AL-QAEDA attack on Canaan Academy had been masterminded in Peshawar b
y Shakir Khan and three senior bin Laden commanders, one of them Captain Musa Amin. As ever, their problem was drafting personnel into the United States. This was the main obstacle to every terror attack attempted during the years of President George W. Bush, when every last one of them was thwarted by security forces. And the ports of entry were still slammed shut. Al-Qaeda’s planners either had to sneak their killers over the border from Mexico, or use personnel already in residence in the States. A border crossing from Canada was more certain to end in failure and capture, than taking Osama for a walk along Fifty-First Street at Lexington, past the Seventeenth Police Precinct.
More Sleeper Cells were active now than at any time since 9/11. Calls were being made in and out of the States to the Afghan mountains, to Tehran, and Peshawar, because jihadist personnel in the United States needed to be supplied, paid, and armed.
Two trucks carrying five of these cutthroats were headed down from Boston to Connecticut, expressly to assist Ibrahim and his men. They would act as bodyguards, servants, drivers, and, in the final stages, armed terrorist combat soldiers, forging what they considered to be a brave and gallant attack on the unguarded, predominantly Jewish American students at Canaan Academy.
The trucks were deliberately old, each with assorted bumps, dents, and scratches. At first sight they looked like a couple of props from Creatures of the Black Lagoon, so caked was the mud on the wheels and bodywork. This had the effect of deflecting the fact that each one was equipped with a brand new Dodge-Chrysler engine, and a new set of heavy-duty Goodyear tires. Beneath the flatbed rear section of each truck, fastened with industrial clips, were four AK-47 Kalashnikov rifles, and the tool-boxes were packed with ten fully loaded SIG-Sauer 9mm pistols.
Stacked in the rear of the lead vehicle were forty white plastic 25kg bags of the industrial fertilizer, ammonium nitrate, which, when mixed with either No. 2 fuel-oil, diesel, kerosene, or even coal-dust, develops into high-explosive of majestic proportions. The complete mixture is usually referred to as ANFO, at least it is when being used for peaceful purposes like blowing apart hillsides and quarries for mining purposes. In the modern world, it’s normally known as an IED (Improvised Explosive Device), and universally prized by the very worst kind of terrorists, the guys drawing a sneaky bead on serving U.S. or British military or diplomatic personnel.
Of course these villains have found various ways of increasing its explosive power, like using a “booster” in the form of a couple of sticks of dynamite, or, even better, mixing in powdered aluminum, which increases the blast to the extent of knocking down an entire office building rather than merely blowing out the front wall.
Powdered aluminum was once used widely in mining, where experts are still employed to make their ANFO on site. But recently this became too expensive and has been largely discontinued except in the case of well-funded, state-sponsored terrorists. So of course there were two large bags of it behind the seats of the second truck.
This vehicle contained all the paraphernalia required for a large scale IED. In fact it contained all the paraphernalia for several large IEDs— bundles of dynamite, electronic detonators, det-chord, and, in the rear, twelve empty wooden reinforced packing cases, three feet long by two feet wide and a foot high, roped together in the back.
Later, six of these would be packed with ammonium nitrate, mixed generously, 50 pounds to three quarts of fuel oil, and reinforced with the powdered aluminum, plus a couple of sticks of TNT to hasten the deadly explosion. This would give the Chosen Ones six very special high-velocity devices, sufficient to flatten a Manhattan skyscraper.
But the second six would be even more special, because these were being packed with the most powerful weapons-grade ammonium nitrate available. Nitromethane was the substance packed into the fertilizer truck-bomb that Timothy McVeigh, with one principal assistant, used to completely destroy the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in April 1995. That blast killed 168 people, and injured 680 others. It damaged or destroyed 324 other buildings and burned out 86 cars.
It was a fertilizer bomb, in a Ryder truck, which detonated under the World Trade Center in 1993—as was the IRA car blast in the City of London, a concrete-shattering one-ton bomb, that same year. The Bali nightclub blast in Indonesia in 2003 was a fertilizer bomb, and that same month, another knocked down two synagogues and the British consulate in Istanbul. One of the biggest raids on Islamic radicals was carried out by the British Police in London and Bradford, and among other things, and people, they rounded up a half-ton of ammonium nitrate.
The biggest blast of all, however, was an accident, when the French merchant ship, SS Grandcamp, packed to the gunwales with 2,500-tons of heavy ammonium nitrate fertilizer, suddenly ran too warm and blew up on the wharf in Texas City 1947. The explosion of this massive industrial time-bomb was heard 150 miles away and sent a black mushroom cloud more than two thousand feet into the air.
Great white-hot hunks of the ship crash-landed into the gigantic petroleum and petro-chemical holding tanks hundreds of yards away. These secondary blasts leveled buildings. The ship’s anchor, which weighed one-and-a-half tons, was blown off its shackles and flung two miles away into the Pan-American refinery, where it buried itself ten feet into the ground, like an asteroid from outer space. The Texas City blast remains the most catastrophic industrial disaster in United States history.
And yet, ammonium nitrate is not taken very seriously by U.S. authorities, not even considered a high-risk item in terms of road transportation. You need a license to buy it, but it’s not even classified as dangerous, and it’s labeled just an “oxidizer” when traveling from place to place.
The lead truck driver, who traveled by the name of Mike, even though he had been named Mustapha long ago in a village in the Punjab, made his southern turn about twenty miles before the state line. From Springfield, he had only thirty miles to go along Route 57, and then down a narrow mountain road, straight across the border to Norfolk, Connecticut.
He found the house with ease, leading the way through the woodland at the entrance, and up the long blacktop drive to the barns. Ibrahim and Yousaf were waiting outside, and they greeted their colleagues warmly, offering coffee, and questioning them about their cargo.
Making bombs is a highly skilled business, with little room for error, and obviously dire consequences for those who fumble in making them. Yousaf knew a lot, and Ben and Abu were competent. But Ibrahim was a master. He opened the wide doors of the barn and signaled for the trucks to drive inside.
“How’s the security?” Mike asked immediately.
“I think very good,” said Ibrahim. “The house cannot be seen from the road. And cannot be spied on except from its own private woodland.”
He turned and pointed to a long line of trees on the north side of a former cattle pasture. “Even then it’s not possible to see into the barns because they both have a solid wall at the back facing those trees.
Mike nodded. But he was frowning. “What can you see from the woodland by the gate?” he asked.
“Too much,” replied Ibrahim. “I walked the property this morning early. We could not do much about anyone standing in there with a pair of binoculars.”
“But we’re not expecting anyone even to know we’re here,” said Mike. “That is correct, right?”
“Certainly. So far as I know we have not been observed.”
“I would suggest an armed guard with a cell phone at the gate. Not to stop everyone with deliveries—just to watch from a hidden position if anyone shows up unexpectedly.”
“I haven’t had the manpower for those kind of luxuries,” said Ibrahim. “We’ve all been killing ourselves this morning building straw castles.”
“Building what?” said Mike, laughing.
“Come and see,” chuckled Ibrahim. And he led the way to the next bigger barn and slipped in through the narrow gap between the almost-closed doors. Inside was a construction made of four-foot long bales of straw. Two twelve-foot high
walls, around fifteen feet apart, came out twenty feet from the back wall and formed a kind of three-sided box.
At the end nearest the barn entrance was a third wall, fifteen feet long standing crossways and twelve feet high. But this wall was not joined in any way to the other two. It was freestanding, blocking the way into the box, shielding what might be scheduled to go inside.
Mike was amazed. “Wow!” he said. “What’s going in there?”
“One large yellow American school bus,” replied Ibrahim, tapping the right-hand side of his nose with a forefinger. “Very nice fit in the straw garage,” he added. “That way we can work in peace.”
“Where’s the bus coming from?” asked Mike.
And again Ibrahim went into his forefinger tapping routine. “Not far away,” he said. “New York State, near here. Car, truck, and bus auction held every Saturday. There’s two coming up. Excellent make, Blue Bird, out of Georgia, around ninety thousand miles on the clock.”
“Once we get it here, how far does it go?”
“A couple of miles.”
“And that’s it?”
“Probably,” said Ibrahim.
MACK BEDFORD’S Nissan Titan rolled along the Naugatuck River Valley into Torrington about two hours before Mike and his Islamic dynamite squad turned south for Norfolk. It was around 10:30 in the morning when he pulled into the same parking lot where the jihadists had parked the previous day.
Mack was not precisely laden with overwhelming evidence. He knew only that a wealthy forty-two-year-old Saudi oil executive, Faisal al-Assad, of East Sixty-Ninth Street, New York, had transferred $2 million out of his Gotham National account on Park Avenue, and moved it to a couple of small banks in the old mill town of Torrington in northwestern Connecticut—$1.5 million into the Connecticut State and $500,000 into the Bank of New England. Standing on the sidewalk in front of the parking lot he could see both banks on the far side of Main Street.
Intercept Page 26
