Direct Action (37 page)

1:14
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. 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
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223 RUE DU FAUBOURG ST. HONORÉ

THEY’D LAID EVERYTHING from 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.

“There’s more,” Tom insisted. “There has to be.” He frowned at Reuven. “It might have been helpful for us to be able to ask the man himself.”
Reuven’s expression grew cold. “Don’t go there.”
“Why not? It’s a valid question. Why kill him in cold blood? Why did we have to kill them all before we’d had a chance to learn anything?”
“It was necessary.” Reuven turned away.
“C’mon, Reuven—why?”
The Israeli answered him with silence.
“You can’t squeeze water from a stone, Reuven. You can’t get answers from a corpse.”
“Maybe”—the Israeli whirled around—“you’d have preferred to spend two or three months double-checking everything he told us so we can separate the fabrications from the truth. If, that is, he’d even given us a grain of truth in the first place?”
“You don’t know unless you try.”
“I know he won’t make any more bombs,” Reuven growled. “I know he won’t blow up any more women and children. I know he won’t kill any more 4627 people. Maybe for you that’s not good enough, boychik. For me, it is.” Fists clenched, he advanced on Tom.
Who wasn’t about to give an inch. “He doesn’t have to make more bombs, Reuven. By your own count, there are two of them still out there— and no way to find them now that he’s dead.”
“Enough.” Wyman stepped between the two. “This bickering is getting us nowhere.” He looked at Tom. “What’s done is done. I’ll—”
He was interrupted by urgent knocking on the library door. One of the 4627 security people opened it. “Mr. Wyman? There’s a Roger Semerad downstairs asking to see you.”
Wyman’s face lit up. “Please—escort him up here right away.” He turned toward the others. “Roger’s retired FBI. He was their top explosive forensics guy until he contracted multiple sclerosis just over six years ago. He’d always been something of a maverick—and his wisecracking got on Director Freeh’s nerves. So Freeh eased him out—right into the arms of Deutsche Telecom. Now he’s based in Bonn as DT’s head of technical security. I called him last night—asked him to make the drive over, just in case.”
“Isn’t it a long way to come on spec?”
“Not for Roger. He drives a Bentley turbo. Believe me—he looks for just about any excuse to make a road trip.”

9:28
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. Roger Semerad was a big guy with a voice to match, a face full of salt-and-pepper beard, and a bone-crushing handshake. He got around in a small black electric cart equipped with a clip-on headlight, an oldfashioned bulb-powered bicycle horn clamped to the handlebars, and a

He high-fived Tony Wyman then gave Tom and Reuven, whom he’d caught staring at him out of his peripheral vision, a penetrating second glance. “Here’s the story in a nutshell, fellas,” he said. “I’m Roger. I got MS. Can’t hardly feel my legs anymore, so I need the scooter, and which is also why I’m driving an automatic Bentley instead of a Ferrari. And just in case you wanted to know, frigging MS screws with you worse than a cheap gin hangover.”

There was a moment of self-conscious silence as Tom and Reuven suddenly found the pattern on the rug hugely fascinating.
Semerad cocked his head at Tony Wyman. “Think they got it, Tonio?”
“Hope so.”
“Me, too,” Semerad growled. “That said, let’s get to the problem solving.”
He scootered across the room to eyeball the display on the library table. “You guys gonna compete with the Cameroonians at the marché puces?”
“Something like that.”
“Well, you ain’t gonna go very far on that slim inventory, Tonio. Kinda meager.”
“All depends how it’s used,” Tom said. “We think it’s enough to bring down a couple of planes, maybe more.”
“Tell you what.” Semerad took a quick turn around the library then parked himself in front of Wyman. “I’m gonna set up in that there corner.” He pointed toward the map table and its magnifying light. “Alls I need is for someone to unstrap the case off the back of this contraption and I’m happy to go to work.”
Tom gave him a skeptical glance. “Don’t you want to know what we’re looking for?”
“Nope. I kinda like to find out for myself.” He steered the cart over to the table and plucked a detonator off the green felt, hefted it, then looked it up and down. “Nice,” he said. “Whose work?”
Tom stood with his arms crossed. “We’ll let you tell us, since you like to find things out on your own.”
Semerad laughed. “Touché, kiddo.” He tooted his horn twice and wriggled his eyebrows in a passable Harpo Marx. “Gangway, gents. The cavalry has arrive-ed.”

11:55
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. “Frigging incredible.” Roger Semerad raised the jeweler’s loupe on its headband and wiped perspiration out of the corners of his eyes with a huge blue-and-white handkerchief. “This guy’s a genius—if he weren’t a frigging criminal, I’d hire him.” When his remark was greeted by silence he waited until the others had gathered around him. “He’s managed to miniaturize a SIM card and a PDA processor and use ’em to create his detonator package.”

Wyman said, “SIM card like in a cell phone?”
“You got it, Tony. A Subscriber Identity Module. In technical language it’s the thingy that stores all your subscriber info like your account number and your phonebook. Can’t use a phone without a SIM card these days.” “So basically what we’ve got here is a cell phone without the phone.” Semerad nodded. “In a way.”
“So how does it become a detonator? Don’t you need a ringer to trigger the explosion?”
“That’s how it’s commonly done. Like the car bombs and IEDs we’re seeing in Iraq now. ETA—the Basque separatists—and the IRA have been using cell phones for years. They wire cell-phone ringers to detonating caps. Place a call or send an instant message to the doctored phone and kablooey. Believe me, it’s not rocket science. But there’s no ringer here. That’s the creative part. He’s replaced the ringer with a computer chip.”
Tom shook his head. “I don’t get it.”
“This guy, he pulled the processor out of a PDA—like my Palm Tungsten over there, but a much older model. You know that all computer chips create heat, right?”
Tom nodded.
“Most of the newer chips have what you might call a throttle control on them. They’re programmed to shut down if they get too hot.”
“Understood.”
Semerad held up the detonator. “Well, there’s no governor on the chip in this doohickey.”
Wyman popped the monocle out of his eye. “Which means...”
“Which means when the cell-phone component responds to a call and a specific code is keyed in, it sets the chip running. And the chip keeps getting hotter and hotter. And I mean hot. Red-hot. Fire-in-the-hole hot.”
Wyman shook his head. “But heat alone doesn’t set plastic explosive off, does it, Roger?”
“You need something that produces energy to set off your explosive— like a percussion cap or even the cell-phone ringer. In this case, your bombmaker has been real inventive. First he slipped some explosive into the body of the detonator—that way, when the bomb goes off the detonator itself is destroyed, leaving very little in the way of forensic evidence. And then he’s managed to create a brief but powerful electrical charge by combining the technologies in the SIM card and the PDA chip.” He shook his head in amazement. “This guy is incredible. He’s transferred all the elements—even the carbon fiber antenna—onto some sort of flexible membrane to cut down on weight and signature. He’s miniaturized the equivalent of an electric blasting cap, a remotely operated blasting machine, and a self-destruction device and fit everything into a package that weighs, what? I’d venture less than fifty grams.” He gestured toward the Vuitton knapsacks, then looked over at Wyman. “Tonio, I’d wager a big pile of dinero that this damned thing is completely undetectable passing through airport security.”
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.”