Direct Action (17 page)

• Tom knew that Imad Mugniyah and Tariq Ben Said had been on-site when Jim McGee was killed in Gaza. CIA, in the person of Mrs. Portia M. ST. JOHN, had rejected that possibility out of hand.
• Tom knew that Ben Said the master bombmaker was about to perfect a new, sophisticated, and undetectable remote detonator for his IEDs. CIA had no inkling Tariq Ben Said even existed.
• And finally, Tom understood that if he could OODA-loop
¹⁶
Ben Said, he could disorient the assassin, disrupt his plans, and neutralize him before he killed anyone else.

The heavy steel door in front of his nose opened outward and Tom stepped ecstatically onto the rubber pad of the corridor, where Salah was waiting for him, a reproachful look on his face. Obviously, Salah was kicking himself for not having Tom shake his handkerchief out before he’d been allowed to bring it into the interrogation room.

Tom was sweating heavily. He looked down at his hands. They were shaking. And as quickly as it had come on, his excitement was replaced by a sudden gnawing pain in the pit of his gut. That spasm reinforced Tom’s gloomy acknowledgment that even though he understood the clock was ticking, he had absolutely no idea how much time was left before the attack would occur.

Tom had always been told knowledge was power. If that was true, and given all he knew right now, why did he feel as helpless as a drowning man?

¹⁶
The OODA-loop—observe, orient, decide, and act—was a product of John Boyd, the fighter pilot–philosopher. It was Boyd who first realized that it wasn’t the pilots with the best physical dexterity who won dogfights, but the pilots who got inside their opponents’ OODA loops by thinking clearer, faster, and more decisively.

16

6:35
P
.
M
. Tom looked around Reuven’s garden, the Bouviers stretched out, snoring, at his feet, the lanterns providing soft light as dusk settled over Herzlyia. He felt a lot better and guessed that the surroundings had a lot to do with the fact that his earlier spasm of panic and helplessness had largely subsided. Reuven’s housekeeper had set out a huge earthenware bowl of fresh figs for them. Reuven had augmented the fragrant fruit with a large slab of Morbier and a chunk of saucisson de Lyon sec on a white Limoges platter.

Now the Israeli emerged from the kitchen and made his way down the marble steps carrying a 1960s-vintage Chemex and a round cork trivet. He set the trivet on the table and poured Nescafé into three mugs emblazoned with the CIA seal.

Three mugs because Tom and Reuven weren’t alone. They’d been joined by a third man. Amos Aricha was a former assistant director of Shin Bet. Aricha was a lifelong counterterrorist who had commanded the agency’s selected targeting task force. His job: arresting or eliminating the individuals who built the explosive vests and car bombs and the masterminds who dispatched homicide bombers against Israeli civilians. These days, he said, he was a partner in a private company that trained security personnel and did risk assessments. He gave Tom his business card. On it was engraved a bird of prey in flight. Below, in Hebrew, was his old task force’s motto, adapted from the old American TV show Hill Street Blues. It read, Let’s Do It to Them Before They Do It to Us.

But doing it to them was becoming more and more difficult, what with the media’s bias against Israel and the pressure to wage politically correct warfare against enemies who didn’t give a damn about humane rules of engagement. “I feel like a whatchamacallit sal-o-mon swimming upstream.” Aricha dropped heavily onto a chair. “And believe me, kiddo, I seen salo-mon. I’ve done my share of white-water rafting all around your wild, wild west.”

Amos had gone through basic training with Reuven. They’d both served in Sayeret Mat’kal, and after active duty they’d done their meluim
¹⁷
in the same unit. Which meant the two men had known each other virtually since they’d been teenagers. Tom sneaked a look at the interaction between the Israelis. Their easy relationship—the inside jokes, the back-and-forth bantering, the way they dealt with each other—made him envious. He was a Foreign Service brat. He’d grown up in seven different countries and had attended sixteen different schools before he’d settled down at Dartmouth for four straight years in the same place.

Afterward, at CIA, he’d resumed his peripatetic lifestyle with threeand four-year tours. He hadn’t ever lived in one place long enough to make the sorts of friends one keeps for a lifetime. Until he’d returned to Paris.

Aricha reached across the table for the small earthenware pitcher of milk and poured some into his coffee. He was, Tom had to admit, an unlikelylooking manhunter. A big-boned man in his late sixties with a shock of curly white hair tied back into a 1960s-style ponytail, Aricha wore faded Levi’s cinched by a tooled rodeo belt with a silver-and-turquoise buckle the size of a horseshoe, topped by a matching denim shirt whose mother-ofpearl–topped snaps were open halfway down his hairy chest. His sleeves were rolled up past the elbows to display muscular, suntanned arms and a gold Rolex on his left wrist. The ragged cuffs of his jeans fell onto scuffed brown sharkskin Tony Lama cowboy boots. All he lacked, Tom thought, was the Colt Peacemaker on his hip and the tin star on his chest.

¹⁷
Annual reserve duty.

“My boy,” Aricha said to Tom in thickly accented English, “you have what we call balagan gadol—a big problem—and so do we.”
It all made such perfect sense in hindsight. On the way back from the prison, Tom had called his office and had one of his people check on whether there had been multiple sales of Vuitton Montsouris backpacks in August 2003. It took less than two hours for the results to come in from Paris. Malik and Dianne had met with his “editor” on Saturday, August 15. On Monday the eighteenth, twelve Vuitton backpacks—the entire stock in Vuitton’s Champs-Élysées store—had been ordered by telephone. A commercial messenger had picked them up, paying in cash. There was no record of where they’d been delivered.
But there was a signature from the messenger on the receipt. Using the secure phone at Reuven’s office, Tom had called one of 4627’s Parisian gumshoes and had him wash the name through the police computer. By four o’clock Tel Aviv time, the private investigator had the name of the messenger service and verified the delivery address: Boissons Maghreb. By 4:30, 4627’s Paris office had used one of its technical employees to set up a phone tap and begun the slightly more intricate arrangements to intercept Yahia Hamzi’s cell-phone transmissions. There was no jumping through hoops to satisfy a station chief, no waiting for ambassadorial approval, no back-and-forth with Langley.
More to the point, Tom understood there’d been no explosives in the radio Dianne Lamb had brought from London at Malik’s request. Malik had carried the bomb. Tariq Ben Said had somehow incorporated the plastique into the lining of the Vuitton backpack and done it in a way that still allowed the explosive to have the same lethal effect as a shaped charge.
God, how sophisticated things had become. When Tom had gone through case officer training in the 1980s, IEDs were relatively simple. You had your pipe bombs. You had your car bombs. You had your Molotov cocktails. You had your basic explosives: PETN, RDX, dynamite, or plastique—C3, C4, or Semtex. There were homemade mortars (the IRA favored those) and there were the occasional remotely detonated devices used by the ETA Basque separatists against the Spanish. But they were the exceptions to the rule.
Nope. In the 1980s, IEDs were all pretty basic, keep-it-simple-stupid bombs. Tom, for example, had been taught to make a cone charge powerful enough to blast through three inches of armor plate using a wine bottle and a one-pound block of C4. Today, he’d need less than a quarter of that amount. Today, it was all miniature devices and remote control. Explosives were now so concentrated that you could build a bomb powerful enough to bring down a 747 and conceal it in a tennis shoe. You could set off an IED planted in a car on a street in Haifa by making a cell-phone call from a café on the rue du Midi in Brussels. And you could—if you were Tariq Ben Said—create a totally unidentifiable bomb capable of killing sixteen and wounding scores more by transmogrifying the lining of a Louis Vuitton backpack into a weapon of mass destruction. The stuff was frigging invisible. Malik Suleiman had carried the goddamn backpack right past the baggage inspectors at de Gaulle and subsequently slipped it through Israel’s vaunted security systems. What would happen when he brought it through U.S. airports, whose ineffective TSA (Transportation Security Administration) personnel were known derogatorily as “thousands standing around”?
Tom popped a chunk of sausage into his mouth. “Which brings me to point number two. Why did Malik ask Dianne Lamb to bring his radio in her suitcase? After all, the explosives were in the backpack.”
“There was a radio involved in the Jerusalem explosion.” Aricha sipped his coffee. “So there’s got to be a reason.” He set the mug on the table. “But let me tell you, I still talk to Shin Bet. And their forensics people have been over the goddamn thing top to whatchamacallit bottom. They haven’t found anything. There were never any explosives concealed in either one of the radios.”
“These people never do anything without a reason.” Reuven picked up his mug and sipped. “There had to be explosives somewhere.”
“No there didn’t, goddamnit—” Tom almost choked on his sausage. “Don’t you see, Reuven?”
“See what?”
“It’s always been the assumption that Dianne unwittingly carried the explosives.”
Amos nodded. “That’s the pattern. The Irish woman flying from Heathrow, the—”
“I know about all those cases. But there was no trace of explosives in anything Dianne brought from London.”
“So far. We also know the man you call Ben Said and we call Bomber-X—he had to make small whatchamacallit batches of a new formula.”
That Aricha knew Ben Said’s formula was made in small quantities was surprising because Tom hadn’t mentioned that fact to Reuven, or anyone else. He decided to elicit. “Are you sure, Amos?”
Tom caught a flicker of motion in the Shin Bet man’s eyes. And then Amos deflected the question. “It’s not impossible there were explosives in the radio as well as the backpack.”
Tom decided not to follow up the elicitation. It would be too obvious. So he deflected back. “What’s the point?”
Aricha looked at Tom. “The point is, one plus one equals two. Two radios. Two bombs. The point is that this Ben Said has come up with a new way of targeting Israel.”
“Hold it.” Tom scampered from the patio up to the living room, where he’d left his interrogation notes. He flipped through the sheets until he found what he wanted and charged back downstairs. “The batteries were dead, Amos. The radio batteries were dead.”
The Israeli shrugged. “So, nu?”
“Don’t you see? They weren’t dead—they were something else. Dummies. Containers for some critical element of his bomb. Malik sent Dianne to buy new batteries. He got her out of the room while he did whatever he had to do. Removed whatever was concealed in the batteries. There had to be something in the batteries.”
Amos frowned. “When you go through security at Heathrow,” he said, “especially when it’s a Tel Aviv flight, they make you turn on all your electronic devices. No exceptions. They would have done the same at de Gaulle, or Dulles, or wherever. That’s the standard practice these days.”
“But Malik’s radio was in Dianne’s suitcase, not her hand luggage,” Tom said. “It would never have been inspected. Not in Europe. In Europe, you can lock your luggage. Only in the U.S. is luggage for the hold hand-inspected.”
“This has nothing to do with the U.S. He was trying to launch attacks here in Israel.”
Tom ignored the Shin Bet man. “There had to be something concealed in the batteries. I think Dianne carried detonators. They spent all their time together on the August trip. But in July, Malik was by himself twice in three days. Once for a meeting with his editor—who we know works with Ben Said. And once for a meeting with ‘an old friend’ whom he met while buying a newspaper. My guess is that Malik picked the detonators up in Paris on the previous trip.”
Reuven shrugged. “What’s your point?”
“My point is that maybe they were Ben Said’s prototype detonators. We can’t discount that, can we?”
Amos gave Tom a dismissive stare. “Prototype-schmototype. I don’t think it makes much difference at this point.”
“I do. I think we’ve been focusing on the wrong target. We’re thinking inside the box. We’re no better than Langley.”
He got blank stares from the two Israelis. “Look,” he said, gulping some coffee to wash the sausage down. “There’s this old shaggy-dog story about a guy who goes through a diamond-mine gate every night for a week with a wheelbarrow full of dirt. The security guard sifts the dirt. He searches the guy—even puts on rubber gloves and does a body-cavity search. Nothing. Bubkes. The guard never finds a thing. After two weeks of this, he pulls the fellow aside. ‘Look,’ he says, ‘I know you’re stealing diamonds. I just can’t figure out how you’re doing it.’ And the fellow looks at the guard and says, ‘Since this is my last day on this job, I’ll tell you what I’ve been doing. I’ve been stealing wheelbarrows.’ ”
“That’s supposed to be funny?” Amos shrugged. “What’s the point?”
“Let me put it another way.”
“Maybe you’d better, because you’re confusing me good.”
“We’ve all been trying to analyze the situation so we can solve the Ben Said problem, right?”
“Of course.” Aricha set his coffee down. “The goal must be to stop or prevent the megaterror he is planning to commit on Israeli soil.”
“That’s always been the assumption.”
“But you also contend, Tom, that the ambush ten days ago in Gaza in which three American embassy employees were killed, and the two bombings—Heinrich Azouz, the German national in the Nablus Road Hotel, and Malik Suleiman at Mike’s Bar in Tel Aviv—are all related equally to the planning for this megaterror.”
“I do.”
Aricha cracked his knuckles. “I can tell you for sure Shin Bet doesn’t see it.”
“See what?”
“The relationship. In the first incident, the bomb went off prematurely while Azouz was affixing the detonator. That’s what you call operator error. We were able to prove conclusively that the explosion was caused by static electricity. End of story. In the second, a survivor swears he heard Malik, the perpetrator, exclaim, ‘Allah akbar!’ just before the explosion went off. We are convinced he detonated the bomb after having second thoughts about killing his girlfriend. No operator error, no static. Full stop. And the Gaza incident was Arafat’s way of sending a signal to the Bush administration to back off its support of Sharon.”
Aricha rapped scarred knuckles on the tabletop. “I accept that incidents one and two are related. I accept your theory that the man you call Ben Said and we refer to as Bomber-X is working on a new form of undetectable explosive. I accept that he was a participant in the Gaza incident, by which I mean he supplied the plastique and was on-site for its detonation so he could watch firsthand its effects. But that’s the extent of it, Tom. Gaza is a whole other whatchamacallit—kettle from fish. Full stop again. End of story, kiddo.”
Tom said, “Wheelbarrows, Amos. Think wheelbarrows.”
The Israeli scratched his head. “Reuven, what’s with these wheelbarrows?”
Reuven toyed with the heavy gold chain around his neck. “Pay attention, Grandfather,” he said in Hebrew. “Maybe even you will learn something from the youngster.”
Tom caught the look that passed between the old soldiers. He swiveled toward Aricha. “You’re basing your conclusions on two common threads: the explosives, and the fact that there’s a plan to wage megaterror against Israel sometime in the near term.”
“Because those are the logical conclusions to draw from what we know about the events. We look at what happened, and we draw conclusions from our experience. We rely on”—he fought for the word in English— “empirical logic.”
“Precisely.” Tom noted the look of confusion on Aricha’s face. “But, Amos, too often, when we analyze a problem, we begin the process by formulating our conclusions. I think that’s what happened in Shin Bet.”
“You say we start with conclusions? I think not.” Aricha folded his arms on his chest. “Shabak started with explosions.”
It was a defensive position. Tom extended his legs, shifting his own body into a nonthreatening attitude. He softened his tone. “I’m not talking about you personally. It’s a problem that’s endemic to the whole intelligence community—you, us, everybody.” He paused as he caught the confused look on the Israeli’s face. “A natural mistake, if you will. In this case, Amos, the conclusion Shin Bet drew—and it’s a perfectly logical one to reach—is that two of the three incidents are directly related to explosives and evidence of a mega-attack on Israel in the near future.” He looked at Aricha. “Am I correct in the way I characterized the situation?”
The Shin Bet man’s head bobbed up and down. “On the money.”
“What I’m saying is that if that’s how you see things, then all of your analysis—all the evidence—tends to support that predetermined conclusion—this is all about megaterror directed at Israel.”
Aricha frowned at Reuven. “Again he thinks our evidence is wrong.”
“No.” Tom began again. “Your evidence is accurate. But I think by focusing on the literal substance of the problem—the evidence, the arguments pro and con, the conclusions—we’re missing the point. We all missed the point. That’s what I mean by wheelbarrows, Amos. The security guard reached a logical conclusion: since it was a diamond mine, the guy had to be stealing diamonds. That was a logical assumption, right?”
“From a diamond mine you don’t steal rubies. Yes—logical.”
“But incorrect. Bad analysis. If the guard had approached the problem with an open mind—if he hadn’t boxed himself in by not considering any other conclusion than ‘diamonds are being stolen,’ he might have included the possibility that something else was being taken. Like wheelbarrows.”
Tom watched as Aricha stroked his chin. Warily, the Israeli said, “Go on.”
“We’ve been focusing on explosives for use in attacks against Israel. I think these people solved the explosives problem a long time ago. I think Ben Said has a formula that worked—until now. Why now? Because now we can all start devising countermeasures.” He paused, gratified to see Amos nodding in agreement. “I think what Ben Said’s been working on since August...is detonators.” Tom took another swallow of coffee. “Jerusalem—the German Arab. He blew himself up arming the detonator, right?”
“Yes.”
“And Malik. What was he doing? He was attaching the detonator to the bomb, or arming it, or something. Because the idea was for him to go to the restroom and detonate the device remotely. He was going to be a lucky survivor. Dianne was going to take the fall.”
Aricha cut one of the figs in half, speared a piece, and put it in his mouth. “So how did the device go off prematurely, kiddo?”
“It could have been a faulty detonator,” Tom said. “It also could have been the embassy—set off by one of the variable-frequency oscillators mounted on the embassy building.”
“Mike’s is two hundred and five meters from the northwest corner of the embassy,” Reuven said. “I paced it off yesterday.”
Aricha frowned. “Wouldn’t they know that? These people do target assessments, Reuven.”
“It’s common knowledge the ambassador has forbidden VFOs on embassy vehicles, Amos,” Tom continued. “The embassy’s devices have been camouflaged to look like TV satellite dishes. No different than hundreds of others.”
“Go on.”
“But I decided the explosion wasn’t set off by the embassy devices. It was Malik’s carelessness. Or, the detonator was faulty. Possibly the remote—maybe there’s something awry in the circuitry. I don’t know— I’m not an explosives expert. Which brought me to the third incident: Gaza. It was an anomaly.”