John Weisman - Direct Action

Ben Said and a second man lay atop the plastic sheeting, arms and legs splayed out. Reuven had head-shot them-a neat triangle of bullet holes between the bridge of their noses and their upper lips. The realization that the Israeli had sucker-punched them caused another emotional tsunami to wash over Tom. They’d actually murdered these men. Killed them in cold blood.

Reuven must have read his thoughts. “What? You thought I’d tell them, ‘Go for your guns,’ like this was some old Western movie?” He bent down and started to rifle through Ben Said’s pockets. “This isn’t the Marquis of Queensbury, Tom. This is real life.”

The Israeli pulled a German passport from Ben Said’s jacket. “Let’s see who he is this week.” Reuven opened the document and squinted. “Lothar Abdat, born twenty-seven March 1956 in Hamburg.”

He flipped through the pages. There was a credit-card receipt and Reuven peered at it. “Air France-the main office on Champs-Élysées.” He patted Ben Said down. “But no ticket.” He reached into the bomb maker’s trouser pockets and turned them inside out, spilling coins and keys onto the plastic, and pawed through them. Reuven gave Tom an encouraging look. “Take the other one. See what he’s carrying.”

1:14A.M. They’d stowed almost everything they could in the wheeled duffel bag. They’d pulled the clothes off the three bodies. As Tom packed Ben Said’s explosives and the detonators, Reuven used a kit in his satchel to take the corpses’ fingerprints, as well as saliva and hair samples for DNA testing. Now he picked up the Vuitton knapsacks one by one, counting the various components on the folding table as he lifted them up and dropped them into the duffel.

Tom had regained his composure. It actually hadn’t taken him long, something that surprised him because he, like most Americans, was both unaccustomed and unprepared to deal with the sorts of lethal encounters that typified this brutal new form of warfare.

Reuven looked over at him. “Double-check for shell casings, okay? We’re still missing one nine-millimeter and one twenty-two-caliber.”

“Okay.” Tom went to the foyer and dropped to his knees, his fingers searching along the floor molding of the short corridor. Reuven had fired six times. He’d fired ten shots. The man he’d killed had shot three times. So far they’d recovered only seventeen casings.

He found the missing 9mm shell just behind the bedroom door frame. He still disagreed with Reuven’s “kill them all and let Allah sort it out” approach to terrorism. But in one respect, the Israeli was absolutely on the mark: America’s unpreparedness and its inability to deal on a societal level with this new kind of war were indeed things that had to change.

The Marquis of Queensbury and his book were out the window. Bin Laden and al-Qa’ida certainly didn’t play by any rules. And it was a rough game that was getting rougher by the day. The bad guys had beheaded Danny Pearl in Pakistan. Now insurgents were taking hostages in Iraq and beheading them, too. It wouldn’t be too long before it happened closer to home.

The world was turning upside down. Was? Tom snorted loud enough to make Reuven look up. Hell-the world had already turned upside down. It used to be so damn uncomplicated. Terrorist groups were hierarchical. Cut off the head and the rest of the organization died. That was true of all the old-line groups: the Red Army Faction; Brigate Rosse, Baader Meinhoff; PLO, PFLP, Japanese Red Army, Sendero Luminoso. All of them were hierarchical.

He finally came up with the missing.22-caliber casing, which had wedged behind a loose piece of floor molding. Those neat and tidy days were gone forever. If Task Force 121 got lucky in Afghanistan or Pakistan and grabbed Usama today, al-Qa’ida would still continue to wage war on the West. Because it wasn’t a terrorist organization in the conventional sense. It was a cell-based politico-military organization with stand-alone guerrilla and terror operations like Ben Said’s running concurrently in a score of countries. The same thing was true of Islamist terror groups in Indonesia, the Philippines, Egypt, Algeria, and Morocco.

The old terrorists tended to be Marxist or Communist inspired and supported-so-called people’s liberation movements. Al-Qa’ida and other Islamist movements were more insidious. They exploited local nationalism and Islamic fervor, transmogrifying terror into a particularly effective-and deadly-fusion of politics, ideology, and religion. And it was going to be a protracted series of battles. If the current situation were overlaid on a World War II time line, the U.S. was still in the first months after Pearl Harbor. Moreover, CIA was almost entirely ill-equipped to deal with Islamists.

But then, so was 4627. Tom broke his thought train and looked over at Reuven. “What about the bodies?”

“Milo will handle them in the morning. This place will be totally sanitaire by tomorrow night. The cars we give to him, too-Ben Said had car keys in his jacket. We’ll find it and drive to the warehouse. They’ll go to the grinder-with these three.”

Reuven caught the horrified expression on Tom’s face and ignored it. “My guess? Your fiancée was right and I was wrong. Ben Said was about to tie up loose ends. Get rid of Hamzi. Shift the operation. Cover his tracks.” The Israeli paused. “But that’s not the problem.”

“What is?”

Reuven jerked a thumb toward the knapsack parts. “There were four detonators and six whole knapsacks, right?”

“Yup.” Tom nodded.

“Well, there were enough parts to make three more knapsacks on the table.”

“So?”

“How many Montsouris packs did Hamzi order?”

Tom thought about it for a few seconds “Twelve.”

“One for Dianne Lamb,” Reuven said, “six on the table, and three in parts. That leaves two unaccounted for.” The Israeli paused. “And then there’s the Air France receipt.” He looked at Tom, his expression grave. “We’re behind the curve. Ben Said’s operation is already in play.”

11 NOVEMBER 2003

9:12 A . M .

223 RUE DU FAUBOURG ST. HONORÉ

THEY’D LAID EVERYTHINGfrom the safe house out on the long library table. Tony Wyman picked up one of the wads of explosive and sniffed. “No odor at all.” He shook his head. “How in God’s name did he do it?”

“We’ll know in a couple of days.” Reuven rubbed his shaved head. He looked exhausted-emotionally wrung dry. The Israeli looked at his watch. “When’s your IED guy getting here?”

Reflexively, Wyman checked his own wrist. “Any minute now.”

Tom slapped the telephone receiver down. “Got it. Thanks.”

Reuven cocked his head in Tom’s direction. “So?”

“He had tickets on the Air France Flight 068 to Los Angeles. Business class, departing Wednesday November twenty-sixth, returning Friday the twenty-eighth on Air France Flight 069. Second trip: Air France 070, departing Wednesday the tenth December, returning the twelfth on Air France Flight 071.” He checked his notes. “That’s a lot of flying in a short time.”

“Scouting trip,” Tony Wyman said. “Has to be. It’s a common AQN tactic. They’re known to do thorough target assessments.” Tom knew Wyman was correct. He had friends in the Federal Air Marshals Service who, for a period of months, had noted an increase in provocative behavior on domestic flights all over the United States. Subsequent investigations had determined that al-Qa’ida was probing for weaknesses in the system.

Still, Tom was dubious. “Ben Said wouldn’t travel just to scope out the plane-check for marshals on the flight or evaluate the security. It wasn’t his style.” Indeed, the bomber had put himself at considerable risk by taking an Air France flight in the past. But there’d been a deeper purpose when he’d flown to Israel: to test the detonators.