Direct Action (16 page)

She blinked. Her eyes shifted up and to the left, a sign that she was probably going to tell the truth. “It was beautiful. I saw it in the window of the Vuitton store—the one at the corner of avenue George V and the Champs-Élysées—on our first trip. It was on display. I made some comment to Malik—you know, that it was the sort of thing I’d always wanted, but never had the nerve to buy for myself, and that was that. And then, when he arrived in August, he was carrying it with him, and he gave it to me.”

“The last night—the night of the bombing—did Malik suggest that you take the backpack?”
“No—I loved it. Loved the way people admired it. I carried it everywhere. I stored the camera in it, and my makeup, and our street maps. It was very handy.”
“When Malik brought the backpack from Paris, how was it wrapped?”
“He carried it in a big Vuitton shopping bag.”
“And inside the bag?”
“I told you last time we covered this ground.” She shrugged. “Inside the shopping bag was the backpack. Malik bought it at the duty-free.”
That was what had struck Tom as odd. First, there was no Vuitton dutyfree shop at de Gaulle. And second, Vuitton wrapped its backpacks like the treasures they were. They put them inside sturdy cardboard boxes and protected them with tissue paper.
The Israeli assumption was that Malik slipped the bomb into the backpack and set it off when Dianne went to the bathroom. The interrogation verified that he’d had the opportunity to do so before they’d left the hotel, even though her debriefings indicated that Dianne had not seen Malik slip something into her backpack, nor had he asked her to carry any of his belongings that night. Nor had the security guard at Mike’s seen anything suspicious when Dianne and Malik entered the club.
Tom had his own ideas. Shahram had emphasized that Tariq was always pushing the envelope when it came to explosives. Like Richard Reid’s sneaker bombs. What had Shahram said? Al-Qa’ida had pushed Ben Said to use a prototype fusing and detonator. If they’d waited, Reid would have brought the aircraft down.
Tom focused on Dianne. “Did he say that?”
“Yes.”
“Said he bought it at the duty-free.”
“Yes.”
Now Tom abruptly shifted gears. “Which of Malik’s friends did you see in Paris on the March trip?”
She paused. “March? None. We spent all our time alone together.”
“And in July?”
“Malik had some sort of business to do. I visited the Louvre while he met with his editor.”
“That was the only time you were apart?”
She thought about Tom’s question for about ten seconds. “No.”
“Tell me.”
“He went out one morning. To buy a newspaper, he said. Something they didn’t have at the kiosk in the hotel.”
“How long was he gone?”
She paused. “About forty-five minutes.”
“And?”
“I asked him where he’d been. He told me he’d run into an old friend and they’d stopped for a cup of coffee.”
“And the friend’s name?”
“I didn’t ask.”
Tom nodded. But his mind was racing. “Now let’s fast-forward to August.”
“We were by ourselves, except one evening we had a drink with Malik’s editor from Al Arabia.”
“What was his name?”
“Talal Massoud.”
“Describe him.”
“He’s—” She brought herself up short. “I’ve been over this material many times before, you know.”
“Not with me,” Tom said. He’d saved this part for last. “Describe him, please.”
“Average. Your height—maybe a bit taller. Overweight. Thick black hair, very curly—” She ran her hand from her brow across the top of her head. “Dark eyes.”
It wasn’t much of a description and Tom said so.
“He was pretty nondescript.”
“Dressed how?”
“Cheap white shirt open at the neck. It was so thin you could see the singlet underneath. Light-colored suit coat and trousers—tannish. And brown loafers.”
“Did he wear jewelry or a watch?”
“Not that I remember. He wore some kind of plastic disposable watch.”
“Glasses?”
“Oh, yes. Heavy black-framed glasses with tinted lenses.” She paused and looked up at the ceiling. It was a sign she was remembering a detail. “The lenses were rose-colored.”
“Did he use them to read the menu?”
“He didn’t read the menu. He ordered off the top of his head.”
“Did he carry a cell phone?”
“I think there was one clipped to his belt.”
“Did Talal take any calls?”
“Not until just before he left.”
“How was his French?”
“Good, I guess, since he lives there.”
“You guess?”
“He spoke to me in English, and to Malik in Arabic. He spoke to the waiters in Arabic, too.”
“And the phone call?”
“Arabic.”
“You met where?”
“A Lebanese restaurant in the seventeenth.”
“What was its name?”
She frowned. “I don’t recall.”
“Where is it?”
“About a block from the Villiers metro stop.”
“How did you get there?”
“From George V, by metro. We changed at Étoile.”
“Describe the restaurant.”
“It’s nothing special to look at.”
“Don’t be nonspecific, Dianne. You edit cookbooks. You deal with this sort of material every day.”
She shot Tom a sharp look. “There were Formica tables and white tablecloths—the inexpensive kind. They used paper napkins. It was nothing special. There were posters—Lebanese tourist posters—on the walls. No unique decor; no style. It was just another neighborhood place. We went there because Malik said Al Arabia’s offices were nearby. The restaurant sits at the intersection of boulevard Courcelles and boulevard Malesherbes. There were tables on an enclosed veranda adjacent to the sidewalk—the kind of thing you can enclose during the winter. The main dining room was raised off street level by two or three steps. I can’t really recall.”
“And the editor? What direction did he come from?”
“He was waiting for us.”
Tom nodded. “Where did he sit? Where did you sit?”
“He and Malik sat next to one another. They sat with their backs to the sidewalk. I sat facing the intersection.”
“And behind you?”
“There was a wall—a divider, really, about four feet high. Malik said he wanted me to have the view.”
Tom was familiar with the intersection and there wasn’t much of a view. Not that it wasn’t good tradecraft. With their backs to the sidewalk, a lip-reader in a surveillance vehicle wouldn’t be able to follow Malik’s conversation with Talal. And with the wall behind Dianne, eavesdropping would be nigh on impossible from over her shoulder without being very obvious about it. “What did you talk about?”
“It was small talk mostly. Talal asked a lot of questions about me. About my family, and my job, where I’d gone to college, where I lived in London—that sort of stuff.”
“Did he know London?”
“I’m not sure. He said he came to London occasionally.”
“Did he say why?”
“He mentioned he had a friend in Finsbury.”
Tom blinked. Mentioning Finsbury had been a tactical error on Talal’s part. Finsbury was a trigger word. The Finsbury Park mosque in a northern London neighborhood was riddled with al-Qa’ida sympathizers.
Dianne seemed to be unaware of its significance. “Did that mean anything to you?”
Hands clasped, she said, “No.”
Her tone told him the Israelis had probed the area and come up empty. He decided to leave the subject. “How long did you spend with him?”
“Talal? About an hour. We had some mezze—it was quite spectacular, actually—and a half bottle of Moroccan wine. Talal and Malik talked business for about a quarter hour. Then he got a call on his cell phone. He paid the bill, excused himself, and left us to ourselves.”
There were no inconsistencies or contradictions from the interrogation transcripts. She had seen nothing passed between Malik and Talal. Tom was convinced she was telling him the truth as best she could remember it.
It was time to wind things up. Time to play out the hunch that had smacked him upside the head when he’d read about the Vuitton backpack. Tom slid his hand into the pocket of the coveralls and felt for the first of the three photographs he’d concealed in the handkerchief. The one he’d decided to show her first had one of its corners folded back so he could identify it by feel.
He slid the small black-and-white rectangle with Imad Mugniyah’s likeness across the table. “Do you recognize this man?”
Dianne squinted down at the small picture. “No.”
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely. I’ve never seen him in my life.”
Tom picked up the photo of Imad Mugniyah, stuck it back in his pocket, and replaced it with the second picture, which he’d cropped from Shahram Shahristani’s surveillance photo of Tariq Ben Said. “What about him?”
She pulled the image across the table. “No.”
He retrieved Ben Said and pulled a third photo from his pocket—it was a crop of Yahia Hamzi’s passport picture. Reuven had made sure to remove the stamp in the bottom corner so its origin would be obscured.
She glanced at the photo then looked over at Tom. “That’s Talal Massoud—Malik’s editor at Al Arabia. His hair is longer, his face is a little bit rounder, and he’s wearing different glasses. But it’s Talal.”
Tom reclaimed the picture and returned it to his coveralls, fighting to keep his composure so that he’d give off no hint of the excitement he felt. The pulse racing in his temples, he stared at her coolly and spoke in laconic Marseillaise. “Thank you, Dianne. We’re done.”
He rose, walked to the door, and rapped twice sharply on the cold metal. The pieces of the puzzle were coming together and it was time that he and Reuven called Tony Wyman on the secure phone and laid things out.
They—whoever they were—had been worried enough about Jim McGee to murder him. Blew up the Suburban and killed Jim and two others because they believed McGee knew something he shouldn’t have known: that Imad Mugniyah was in Gaza.
Except McGee hadn’t known it was Mugniyah. All he knew was that there was a mysterious individual who moved frequently and who was protected by an imported crew of bodyguards, some of whom were Hezbollah, others possibly Iranians—the Seppah.
Those revelations hadn’t killed McGee. What had set the ambush in motion was Shafiq Tubaisi’s offhand comment that Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the godfather of Hamas, had kissed the man’s hands. Yassin kissed both his hands and asked for his blessing.
That was what Shafiq told McGee. Tom had read it in McGee’s penultimate message. He’d understood the significance of the act, even if McGee hadn’t. Which was why he’d tasked McGee to order Shafiq to get a picture.
Because of that tasking, McGee was dead—and so was Shafiq. They were dead because somewhere, in somebody’s head, an operational clock was ticking. And the bad guys out there, the ones President Bush had so accurately termed the evildoers—accurate because Tom knew that was precisely how the Koran referred to criminals, murderers, and assassins— were about to stage a major hit.
The evildoers were gearing up for something big. Something spectacular. The evildoers’ version of shock and awe.
There was, Tom understood all too well, a particular rhythm—a cadence if you will—to megaterror. Megaterror is not impetuous, seat-ofthe-pants stuff. It is well planned, highly organized, and above all disciplined. The bad guys plot, probe, and test. They take months performing target assessments in order to weed out the harder-to-strike targets in favor of the softer ones. This very week in New York, Boston, Washington, D.C.; Orlando, and Miami, there are al-Qa’ida sleepers posing as tourists. They visit Universal Studios, Capitol Hill, Faneuil Hall, or South Beach and take thousands of digital photographs, which are passed on to al-Qa’ida analysts who pore over them in order to identify security flaws.
Other sleepers—just like Ramzi Yousef in 1992—find jobs as taxi drivers or commercial messengers. What better way to learn the ebbs and flows of a city and uncover its vulnerabilities? Still others find work on the hundreds of minimum-wage crews who spend their nights scrubbing office-building bathrooms and waxing corporate headquarters’ lobbies and corridors. When’s the last time anyone paid much attention to the anonymous peons who clean Citigroup’s offices at night? Or Merrill Lynch’s? Or GM’s? Yet what better way to discover the best places to preposition blocks of C4 or Semtex; to disable the elevators; to cause the largest number of casualties.
Still other sleepers gauge first-responder reaction time by phoning in bogus threats and videoing the results. Tom knew that for the past ninety days, there had been a precipitous rise in the number of false alarms in New York, Paris, London, and Madrid. That told him that at least one of those cities had been targeted.
They were probing the airports, too. A three-week-old memo from 4627’s Washington office reported that al-Qa’ida was currently identifying chinks and weak spots in domestic U.S. airline security by sending easily identifiable Muslims on cross-country flights with orders to act suspiciously and thus identify the federal air marshals on the flight. Other, less noticeable sleepers were photographing the incidents with cell-phone cams. The air marshals’ faces went into an al-Qa’ida database. Interpol reports from Brussels indicated similar occurrences on domestic flights all over Europe. But no one had any inkling what al-Qa’ida was planning— with or without Tehran’s help, with or without Fatah’s diplomatic pouches.
That was why the megaterror process often took years to identify and target, why it was so hard to go proactive. The first al-Qa’ida reconnaissance of U.S. embassies in Africa that resulted in the 1998 attacks in Kenya and Tanzania took place in 1993. The planning for the October 2000 suicide bombing of the USS Cole began four years earlier. Plotting for 9/11 also began in 1996, more than half a decade before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, when Khalid Sheikh Mohammad first suggested training terrorists to fly hijacked aircraft into buildings in the U.S.
But in each case, the pace accelerated inexorably in the period running up to the attack itself. There was always a palpable quickening of tempo. Intensified message traffic, multiple probes and/or dry runs, and increased target assessments always—always—indicated that al-Qa’ida had started its countdown.
The Big Question, as the pundits always said on those long-winded Washington talk shows, was: Countdown to what? To that, Tom hadn’t an answer.
But then, neither did CIA. CIA was dysfunctional these days. That’s why the Company, as it was sometimes called, was currently reduced to hiring private firms like 4627 to gather human-source intelligence on its behalf. And 4627 was hiring people like Jim McGee because CIA was incapable of completing the mission it had been created to do. CIA was in a shambles. The Agency was clueless.
Of course Tom hadn’t a clue either. But he knew a lot more than CIA did.