The Intercept (11 page)

Chapter 21

B
aada Bin-Hezam had been to New York often enough to know that the quickest way into the city from Newark Airport was the New Jersey Transit train into Penn Station.

He had threaded his way through hundreds of people waiting outside customs for the passengers of SAS Flight 903. Some of them had carried cameras and microphones, which they had thrust at any of the exhausted people who gave the slightest indication that they would tolerate the intrusion. Bin-Hezam had not ducked their glare, but instead had strode through it like a busy professional whose plane had landed long overdue. No one was interested in a man of Arab descent.

One of the greeters had had a clutch of red Mylar balloons, each in the shape of a heart. He had been a conservatively dressed man, trying to hand them to the rescued passengers. Other celebrants had held signs, many under the mistaken belief that the flight attendant and five passengers who had overpowered the hijacker were still on Flight 903. They were there to give them a hero’s welcome.

NEVER FORGET!! 9/11/01

WE LOVE YOU!!!

THANK YOU, HEROES

USA USA USA

Bin-Hezam had avoided direct eye contact, making his way to the end of the crowd, while his peripheral vision had been carefully tuned to the telltale signals of police surveillance. A glance lingering too long . . . an ear bud . . . a sudden move as he had made his way to the escalator . . .

He had ridden the steep flight of mechanical stairs, up out of the melee to the arrivals hall. He had stepped off and proceeded to the tram that would shuttle him to the train station.

No one had been with him.

There had been a twenty-minute wait until the next scheduled train. He had found the lodging kiosk, a tilted bank of lighted square advertisements listing dozens of hotel selections. He had determined it best not to make lodging arrangements in advance. He wanted to shrink his electronic footprint down as small as possible. His only requirement had been that he sleep that night far from any established Muslim neighborhood.

He had selected the Hotel Indigo on West Twenty-eighth Street in Manhattan, a small boutique hotel tucked away in the middle of a block known as the center of the flower district.

Again, he had been unobtrusively vigilant during the train ride. He had disembarked at Penn Station, pausing for some minutes in a bookstore in order to allow his fellow passengers to filter through, then had headed for the street.

The summer heat had been instantly discomforting. He was unused to the humidity. To him, water and moisture symbolized relief, but on the island of Manhattan it was oppressive and a bit disorienting.

The hotel was just a three-block walk from Penn Station, but Bin-Hezam had traveled a roundabout way just in case. His luggage was not heavy, but anything that restricted mobility in the heat was a burden. When he was confident he had not been shadowed, he had headed for the hotel.

On Twenty-eighth Street, he had passed many open shop gates and idling flower trucks, the sweaty vendors working busily on the last day of the work week.

As well they should, Bin-Hezam had thought. Many memorial flowers would be needed before the end of this weekend.

Past a young Hispanic bellman inside the hotel’s chrome-and-glass doors, the clerk at the reception desk had been a young woman with dark ringlets and a false brightness that Bin-Hezam had found grating. A Jewess, of course. The neighborhood abutted the garment district, an old Zionist stronghold now flowing into Asian.

Bin-Hezam had masked his distaste, wiping his brow with a handkerchief and presenting himself for check-in. “I would like a suite for two nights, please,” he had said, in his refined British art dealer voice.

“Do you have a reservation?”

“I do not.”

“Because we are nearly full this weekend for the Fourth of July festivities.” She had smiled with nonsensical enthusiasm and clicked her computer keyboard in search of accommodations. “We have a junior penthouse suite available on the top floor,” she had said.

“That will be fine.”

“Wonderful,” she had enthused, as though by accepting her recommendation he had accomplished some great feat. “May I have a credit card and a driver’s license or other form of picture identification?”

“I will pay cash,” Bin-Hezam had said.

The girl had hesitated, having been thrown off her routine.

“Unless that is a problem?” Bin-Hezam had asked.

“No, of course not.” She had recaptured her smile, resuming her singsong voice. “The rate for the junior penthouse suite is eight hundred dollars. If you do not wish to leave a credit card, we do require a two-hundred-dollar cash deposit, which will be refunded—minus incidentals—to you upon your departure.”

Bin-Hezam had reached into the breast pocket of his rumpled but expensive brown suit jacket, retrieving a slim black leather billfold. He had selected sixteen crisp one-hundred-dollar bills and slid them inside his pale green Saudi Arabian passport, handing both to her.

She had smiled and counted the bills in front of him. In Manhattan, a foreign traveler bearing high denominations of U.S. currency was not at all unusual. “And the deposit?” she had asked, her voice inflecting the question mark.

“There will be no incidentals,” Bin-Hezam had said, offering her a tight smile that communicated his insistence.

She had hesitated again, looking into his tea-colored eyes—a greedy Jew, of course—then had set aside the alleged hotel policy without further complaint. “All right, Mr. Bin-Hezam. That will be fine.” She had counted out the sixteen hundred dollars again before depositing them into her under-counter tray. “Would you like to join our rewards program?”

“I decline.”

She had smiled and nodded. “No problem.” Another flourish of keystrokes and she had printed a receipt, returning Bin-Hezam’s passport to him. “Would you like one room key or two?” she asked.

“Just one.”

She had made the key and had slid it into a small folder, writing the room number on the outside. “Please enjoy your stay.”

B
in-Hezam had slept, something he had not counted on doing. He had budgeted his time for a lengthier detention in Bangor or at Newark. More questions. More computer checks. He was immune to any form of scrutiny.

He had been hours ahead of schedule. The sleep would sharpen him for the next day’s work.
Insha’Allah
it would all go this smoothly.

His room was so garish as to be painful to his soul, haute decor of a sort that reeked of competition among designers to prove who could combine the most outrageous colors in the most off-putting patterns. In this case, shades of purple with red counterpoints and aqua-blue details. He had looked out his window before drawing the shade, the lights of the city peaceful, unsuspecting.

Bin-Hezam had set his wheeled carry-on upon the luggage stand. He had drawn back the zipper but had not unpacked. He had gone into the bathroom, another assault of form versus function, and quickly had shed his clothes. He had hung the suit on a towel rod while he had showered, hoping to steam out the wrinkles and some of the perspiration.

Afterward, he had put on a light cotton dishdasha from his luggage and knelt to pray, seeking God’s blessing that he remain calm within this den of chaos. That he perform his duty with grace and cunning. And that he be brave at the end.

He had climbed into the bed. There, beneath the covers, Bin-Hezam had given himself over to a remembrance of the night he had been called to be. This had been his nightly routine while waiting for sleep to take him.

Like many before him, Bin-Hezam had once been visited by Mohammed in a dream. The prophet had shown him that hell was as real as Earth, and that the boy would be sent there when he died if he ever dared disobey his father.

He had shown Bin-Hezam fire that was a hundred times hotter than the noontime sun. It had burned off his skin, which grew back darkened only to be roasted off again and again. The burning had been agony. He had held his own innards in his hands while slung from a ceiling by chains of razor, the calluses of his feet just barely off the surface of the floor, near enough to it to be bitten by laughing scorpions.

His dry mouth had begged for sweet water, but the only drink he had been given was his own blood that never stopped flowing.

The following morning, young Bin-Hezam had reasoned that, because hell was real, not only must he believe that there is no god but one god and Mohammed is his prophet . . . but he could not tolerate anyone else who believed otherwise. To do so would be a sin. He had determined that he must do everything within his power to banish nonbelievers from the world, for the good of all mankind and the love of Mohammed.

Some years later, he had had the dream again, prompted, he had been convinced, by the hideous photographic evidence of the abuses at Abu Ghraib. Young men like himself in that terrible prison, raped and defiled, tortured by the American Crusaders, including American women.

It had been a sign. Their pain became his pain, their chains his chains.

The Americans had tried to bring hell into this Earth. The jihadists at his mosque in Harad had taught him that the Crusaders and their Jewish masters would not rest until they had killed every last Muslim and unleashed the fire of hell.

Finally, his thoughts had turned to his dear parents, recalling his mother’s delight every time she found perfect dates in the market, his father’s firm instruction of Baada and his five siblings. His mother a goddess of kindness, baker of the best
fatir
he had ever eaten—and his father, a cobbler, a devout man but one never called to be a soldier of jihad.

Bin-Hezam had prayed for them. Secure in his purpose, saved from hell, he had drifted into a dreamless sleep mumbling his parents’ names.

Chapter 22

O
kay, Fisk,” said Dubin, coming to the door, motioning him into the office. “I think you know the commissioner?”

Fisk shook the hand of the compact, buzz-cut ex-marine who ran the entire New York City Police Department. Commissioner Kelly made a point of meeting every one of his thirty-six thousand sworn officers, and Fisk had shaken his hand three or four times previously. But this was the first time he had ever seen the commissioner at the Brooklyn headquarters of the Intelligence Division.

The commissioner said, “Good to see you again, Fisk,” and abruptly sat back down in his chair, legs crossed, ready for business.

Fisk took a seat. Dubin remained on the edge of his desk.

“I wanted you to brief the commissioner personally as to this Flight 903 thing,” said Dubin. “With everything going on this weekend, we can’t take any chances.”

Fisk nodded, unable to determine whether Dubin was kicking this upstairs or simply passing the buck. Was he covering his own ass, or did he truly believe there was enough evidence to warrant getting behind Fisk?

“Tell him what you told me,” said Dubin. “Your theory. The long form.”

Fisk turned to the commissioner. “It’s not reached the level of theory yet. But I’ll lay out the dots for you and I think you’ll agree that they might connect.”

The commissioner said, “Be precise. Tell me why you think what happened on that airplane might be the beginning of something instead of the end of it.”

Fisk collected his thoughts before speaking. He knew he had but one chance to sell the commissioner on his fears.

“One,” Fisk began, with a measured pace to be sure everything he said was fully digested. “Wide view first. If he was acting alone, then the hijacker Awaan Abdulraheem was on a mission that, at the very least, put him at a disadvantage to succeed. There is no way in this day and age that one man, acting alone, could take control of an American-bound aircraft with a phony bomb and a small knife. I’ll leave out the chance that this guy might not be playing with a full deck, and could be more ‘gee-whiz’ than ‘jihad.’ ”

He paused. The commissioner gave him nothing, no indication.

“Two. He is, by every indication, a jihadist, trained in Pakistan, versed in terror-speak—and yet with no financial resources of his own. If someone trained and sponsored him, then why wasn’t he better prepared?

“Three. He has confessed. He broke down in ten minutes. I’m not saying he’s a plant, but they screen these guys, they train them to stand up to us. They give them a script. It’s our job to shake it. Normal and natural that they isolate these guys, so they can’t give up the entire network. But they prep their holy warriors, and this Abdulraheem was a songbird. A scared songbird. I’d love to test this guy’s IQ. I think he’s a puppet, a dupe. That he absolutely believed that he was going to get away with heroic martyrdom—but he was the only one.”

Still no word or nod from the commissioner. Fisk looked to Dubin, who was no help.

“Four. He shares tribal kinship with bin Laden. Enough said.

“Five. He shares tribal kinship with another passenger on the same plane, a man named Baada Bin-Hezam. Bin-Hezam is a Saudi who is, or claims to be, an art dealer.”

The commissioner’s eyebrows went up on that one. “Where did you get the tribal connection?” he asked.

“Our own Analytical Unit. Earlier today.”

“Go on, Fisk,” said the commissioner.

“Six. I worked on the Ramstein inventory from bin Laden’s house. I had product clearance for all the intelligence work that’s been ongoing at NSA, CIA, and the rest of the task force. I was one of the ones shaking the pocket litter out of his pockets. Before we shipped it out of Germany, we found some misencoded plain text in images of sunflowers. NSA got a lot more. Indications that point away from operations such as a lone airplane hijacker. Bin Laden was seriously lathered about the Bassam Shah attempt and isolated bombings in general. A lack of discipline, that’s the take. OBL wanted a target worthy of high symbolic value. He openly questioned why they hadn’t learned from past mistakes and anticipated our methods. Am I reading too much into that? I don’t know. But a lightweight Yemeni with a fake bomb on an airplane cannot possibly be all there is to this thing. Goes against everything bin Laden was talking about. I think it’s more than fifty-fifty we’re being played.”

“That’s a serious contention, Fisk,” said the commissioner. “Do we have a clear link to Al-Qaeda? And before you answer, let me tell you this.” Kelly sat forward. “If you don’t have a hard and direct link, and we act on this, we will be conducting one of the most difficult manhunts in this city’s history—and in total secrecy. Because we will not use the media, because we cannot ever afford to be wrong. We cannot use non-Intel law enforcement because it will leak immediately. We cannot panic ten million people. And—this is just a fact—we cannot and will not squander all the optimism and confidence the foiled hijacking has brought to this city and this nation. No way I’m going to pop that balloon unless I’m damn well sure it’s going to pop on its own. People are happier and healthier and more confident when they think they can’t be beat. Just so you know where you stand, Fisk.”

“Understood, Commissioner.”

“Now. Do you have a link?”

“What you’re really asking for is proof, and I don’t have that. You know how we do things here. Al-Qaeda is not an organization with what we think of as military units. It’s more like a method shared by many, rather than an orderly group of soldiers working together. There’s top-down, but no schematic. Awfully hard to put two bad actors together at any time. So how do we track them? By figuring out who’s related to who and which training camps they’ve attended—if they’ve attended any at all. Now, Abdulraheem could not have known the things he told us about training in Pakistan, unless he had been there. The site itself was one of Al-Qaeda’s most closely guarded secrets. Unless I’m misinformed, we didn’t even know about it until we took down bin Laden.”

The commissioner nodded. “If we had knowledge that this other passenger, this Saudi, had gone to the same camp—then it would be boom time.”

“No way to know that,” said Fisk. “Or highly unlikely, I should say. But here’s the thing. The Saudi—Baada Bin-Hezam—has vanished. He stepped off the plane in Newark and disappeared into the wind.”

The commissioner made a face, looking more sour than usual. “What do we have on this Saudi, besides the passport dope?”

“In terms of imaging, we have jetway camera captures from the boarding gate in Stockholm. I should have Newark Airport customs hall crowd pictures and passport control security video by tonight.”

Dubin uncrossed his arms. “Can we get anything sent over here right away?” Then he answered his own question by picking up his phone and calling the photo tech section. He ordered the Stockholm images e-mailed to his computer immediately.

The commissioner stood, his hands on his hips. “Okay, I don’t think we have any choice but to go after him. If we do pull back the curtain on this guy and find there’s nothing, I’ll still feel it was a job worth doing. These are the kinds of inferences we should be making.”

The commissioner looked at Dubin, who took a deep breath and nodded. Fisk could almost feel the machine roaring to life.

“I don’t like how cold we’re going into this,” said Dubin.

“But that is why we’re going,” said the commissioner. “Because it’s so cold. Because this guy is invisible to us now.” He turned back to Fisk. “This is your call, Fisk, so you’re going to run it. But—quietly. He’s an invisible man, so you run an invisible op. Figure out a way to make it look like a routine seek-and-find with your informants and other assets and resources. For the time being, only the three of us know how deep the water is here. Let’s keep it that way. Assign analysts to different pieces of the puzzle. Only Intel cops get photographs of the Saudi for their own information. No mug-flashing in the neighborhoods—or limited. Definitely no spraying his name around. I’d like to think we’ve learned something from the Shah episode. Clear?”

“One other person knows,” said Fisk, looking to Dubin. “Gersten.”

The commissioner said, “Krina Gersten?” Fisk looked to him, hiding his surprise. “Her father was a good friend of mine, and a great cop. And her mother is a hell of a woman. Where is she on this?”

Fisk said, “She was with me in Bangor. She’s leading the Intel detail covering the flight attendant and five passengers. We’re protecting them, and we’re also watching what they say to the media or anybody else.”

“Good, leave her there,” said the commissioner. “We need someone sharp inside the tent. Let her know what to look out for, and tell her to keep it under her hat. She has to know enough of what we know in case one of the so-called Six—and God, how I hate that name already—figures out what we’re doing and starts blabbing.”

N
ot since Chesley Sullenberger’s “Miracle on the Hudson” had America anointed heroes so quickly. The Six, as they were becoming known, were for the most part in the throes of newfound celebrity. The twenty-four-hour news channels starved for breaking news had taken to the Internet, searching for any minutiae about the lives of the six formerly private citizens they could use to fill their airtime, biographical or otherwise.

TMZ went with a revealing bikini photograph from Maggie’s Facebook page, taken about ten years before. Upon seeing it, she turned red and covered her face when the others reacted—Frank, Nouvian, and two of the cops hooted good-naturedly—but she couldn’t stop laughing.

“Aruba,” she said. “I was teaching aerobics back then.” She discreetly set aside the cream cheese–smeared bagel she had been nibbling on.

Mayor Bloomberg had hired four temps from his own public relations firm, setting them up in one of the rooms on the floor to field media requests. The lead publicist, a tall, cheery woman with a practiced manner, took the floor.

“First of all, let me say what an honor it is just to be here with you. What you did was absolutely amazing, and the whole country is fascinated and basically in love with all of you.”

She brimmed with genuine excitement, reflected back to her by most of them. Jenssen and Nouvian stood out as being not entirely enamored of the situation.

“We have been inundated with interview and appearance requests—just swamped. Exciting and appropriate. But so much so that we couldn’t honor them all in a month if we wanted to. The mayor has asked me to coordinate things for you this weekend, to guide you through these extraordinary circumstances you find yourselves in.”

“Oprah,” whispered Maggie to the others, followed by an amazed giggle.

“Haven’t heard from Oprah yet”—the publicist smiled—“though I’ll be shocked if we don’t. Now as I said, there are a lot of opportunities and things are starting to come together, but I wanted to meet with you first and talk about your desires and expectations.”

“Such as?” asked Frank, the journalist.

“Well, often in a group situation such as this, people will nominate one to do the bulk of the speaking for them. It just makes it easier to have one voice, rather than six. So let me start like this. Does anyone want to volunteer?”

They looked at one another for a moment. Then Jenssen’s good hand went up.

The publicist looked surprised. “You’d like to be the spokesman?”

“No,” he said. “I’d prefer not to participate at all.”

“Not at all?” she said.

“That’s correct,” he answered.

Nouvian’s hand went halfway up. “I . . . I don’t mind doing my part. But I’ve got a concert coming up in six days at Lincoln Center. That means a minimum of six hours of practice per day. Minimum.”

“Okay.” The publicist was confused now. She looked to Gersten for guidance.

Gersten stepped forward. “I’m sure it’s hard for all of you to comprehend, cooped up here in hotel rooms in midtown Manhattan. But you are famous and probably on your way to becoming household names. Whether you believe it or not, you have become symbols of the best that Americans can be, of courage, of resilience. To put it another way, you are no longer private citizens, not anymore.”

She saw them trying to comprehend this, each in his or her own way.

“Now, you can turn your back on that, you can close your shades when you get home, you can unplug the phone and close your Facebook pages. Or you can, I don’t know, go around to the openings of restaurants and nightclubs for the next twenty years. The world is your oyster right now. The public wants to see you and hear from you and be inspired by you. So why not give them that? At least for this weekend.”

“Look,” said Colin Frank, not to Gersten but turning toward his fellow heroes. “I haven’t said much about this yet, except for a conversation I had with Joanne.” He nodded to the IKEA store manager. “But not only are we famous, we are going to be rich. Very, very rich, each of us, if we play our cards right. Now—I’m not saying we have to play anything up. On the contrary, the truth will out. But people will want to hear our stories. They’ll want to read our books. They may want to . . .” He pointed at Maggie. “Wear the bikinis we wear.” They laughed. “Eat the cereal we eat. Shop at the stores we shop at. Sounds crazy, but . . . do you see what I’m saying?”

“How much money?” asked Aldrich, the retiree.

“I don’t know. Nobody knows. We should talk further about how we want to go about this, both together and separately. I’m not saying we’re going to become Kardashians. Though I’m not saying we’re not. Maybe you have a charity you want to get behind and support, driving its fund-raising. I don’t know. Am I going to write a book about this? You bet your ass I am. We are going to have people coming at us, vultures and opportunists, and we need counsel, we need advice. We need lawyers and managers—and I know this sounds crazy. But I’ve been thinking about this, now that things have settled down. We have something so few others have. We are not only witnesses to but participants in history.”

The publicist interrupted him. “And that is a conversation I certainly encourage you all to have. And if I can be of any service to you going ahead, we can talk about that too, at the appropriate time. But Mr. . . .”