John Weisman - Direct Action

Reuven looked at the detonator components. “Time frame?”

“To explosion from the time the sequence is initiated? Maybe five seconds.”

The Israeli frowned. “Range?”

“Worldwide. You could place the call from anywhere-even do it online.”

“Jeezus H.” Tom shook his head. “Can you tell us what telephone number has been assigned to this particular SIM card?”

“Sure-if I had the right equipment.”

“Which is where?”

“Well, they’d have it at Verizon, or Sprint.”

Tom’s eyes widened. “The U.S. cellular companies?”

“Yup. This isn’t a European SIM. All the local SIM cards are GSMs. This one is CDMA. Which means it’s Verizon or Sprint.” Semerad backed his scooter up. “You guys got broadband?”

Tom nodded. “Sure.”

“You let me plug my laptop into your connection and I’ll pull down what you need in a matter of minutes.”

1:21P.M. Roger Semerad squinted at the computer’s screen. “The detonator SIMs are all for Los Angeles-area numbers.”

Tony Wyman looked at Tom. “What were the dates of those flights?”

Tom checked his notes. “Outbound Wednesday, November twenty-sixth; returning Friday, November twenty-eighth. Outbound Wednesday, December tenth; returning Friday the twelfth.”

“I think,” Wyman said, “we can rule out an attack over Thanksgiving.”

“Why?” Tom asked. “He’s scheduled himself to be in Los Angeles over Thanksgiving. What better time for an attack than during the peak holiday travel time.”

“No,” Reuven said. “The al-Qa’ida model is to stage simultaneous attacks, not a series. They carried out the operations against your embassies in Kenya and Tanzania within minutes of each other. On 9/11, they hijacked four aircraft almost simultaneously. It’s the AQN pattern.”

Wyman played with his monocle. “You read it as attacks on Flights 068 and 070, and attacks on Flights 069 and 071 all on one day.”

“Two days,” Tom said. “All of Ben Said’s tickets were for a Wednesday and a Friday,” Tom said. And then he clapped his hand over his mouth. “Oh, my God-it’s Christmas. It has to be Christmas.”

Wyman pulled a pocket secretary out of his jacket pocket and flipped through it. “Tom’s right. This year, Thanksgiving and Christmas both fall on Thursdays.”

He paused. “Fits the al-Qa’ida pattern of scoping out the flights first-hand. Satisfies the simultaneous-attack criterion, too.”

“But that’s not enough.”

Wyman turned toward Tom. “Why not?”

Tom looked at his boss. “Wheelbarrows, Tony.”

“What?”

“Roger said the SIMs all came from phones registered in the Los Angeles area. Now, you can make a call from anywhere to anywhere on a cell phone. What this tells me is that Ben Said bought his cell phones in Los Angeles because that’s where he’s going to use them.”

Wyman frowned. “That’s awfully thin, Tom.”

“Maybe. But it’s what I think.”

Roger Semerad wheeled his scooter next to Tom and said, “Wasn’t al-Qa’ida going to strike at LAX during the Y2K New Year celebration?”

Wyman nodded. “The guy coming from Canada with the explosives in his car, right?”

“That’s the one.” Semerad played with the handlebar of his scooter. “Isn’t one of AQN’s benchmarks that they like to hit targets more than once?”

Wyman spent half a minute in silence. “If we go ahead, we’re doing so on very circumstantial evidence.”

Tom said, “That doesn’t make it any less valid.”

Finally, Wyman turned to Reuven. “You head back to Tel Aviv and get the DNA work done.”

The Israeli saluted.

“And make sure your man Salah gets us copies of everything he pulls out of Hamzi.”

The Israeli nodded in agreement. “Will do.”

Wyman cocked his head in Reuven’s direction. “By the way, what do you guys call your company?”

Reuven didn’t hesitate. “Hawkeye.”

“Well, next time-if there is one-we operate jointly, Hawkeye’s going to split the expenses. I can’t afford to float you people.”

“What about seventy-thirty,” Reuven said. “You’re established. We’re just starting out.”

“Half and half, Reuven, it’s the American way.” He paused. “But you get to use our facilities here and in Washington-not that you haven’t been doing that already.” Wyman turned to Tom. “Write this up. You know what to leave out and what to include. I’ll check it over. Then we’ll head for Washington. I want you and MJ with me when I present this package to CTC.” He caught Tom’s look of amazement. “Your fiancée had a lot to do with this,” he said. “If she hadn’t had the grit to bring the Gaza material to Paris in the first place, we probably wouldn’t be standing here.”

Tom beamed.

“You work with her.”

“I’m on it.”

“Good. We’re handing them twenty-four-karat material, Tom. And I can assure you they don’t get twenty-four-karat very often these days.”

18 NOVEMBER 2003

3:04 P . M .

14528-C FLINT LEE ROAD, BUILDING 42, CHANTILLY, VIRGINIA

THEY WERE EARLYfor the 4P.M. appointment with representatives from CTC because Tony Wyman always liked to be early, and besides, like all good case officers, he preferred never to go anywhere he hadn’t scoped out in advance.

They’d driven out from the 4627 corporate offices in Rosslyn in Wyman’s big, gray Suburban. Tom found the venue bothersome. A proposed meeting at CIA headquarters had been summarily rejected by the CTC chief, who hinted that Wyman and Tom were unwelcome presences at Langley. Wyman had suggested as an alternative one of CIA’s Rosslyn satellite offices because of their proximity to 4627. That, too, had been rejected. Instead, CTC had dictated the Chantilly site, just short of an hour’s commute west of Rosslyn through the crowded Dulles corridor and along the perpetually gridlocked Route 28.

14528-C Flint Lee Road turned out to be an anonymous shoe box of a one-story building set among scores of identical one-story shoe-box buildings that lined both sides of a potholed, four-lane road that ran on an east-west axis half a mile south of Route 50 and six-tenths of a mile due south of Dulles Airport’s barbed-wire-topped outer perimeter fence.

As they turned onto Flint Lee Road, Tom, who was riding shotgun, said, “I don’t like it, Tony.”

“Why?” Wyman flicked a glance in the rearview mirror then turned toward Tom.

“Just gives me bad vibes. And why the hell did they make us drive an hour? You know as well as I do they have plenty of suitable sites in McLean or Vienna.” He stared through the windshield. “Plus, there’s only one way in and out.”

“Amen.” Wyman drove past the turnoff to 14528, turned left into a cul-de-sac warren of warehouses, and pulled over. He turned to MJ, who was riding behind him. “What about you?”

She shrugged. “You guys are the operators. You tell me.”

Tom said, “I think we position ourselves in a standoff position and see who arrives.”

Wyman nodded. “I agree.”

“What are you concerned about, an ambush of some sort?”

Tom thought about Jim McGee riding in the front seat of the armored State Department FAV and said, “Nothing’s out of the question these days.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” MJ said. “Aren’t you two being just a little bit too much cloak-and-dagger?”

Tom turned to face her. “Didn’t you see the T-shirt I put on this morning?”

“T-shirt?”

“It’s the one that reads PARANOIA: IT’S MORE THAN A FEELING, IT’SA WAY OF LIFE.” “Very funny.”