He felt a devil inside of him, a chatty demon, delighted to talk.

“I am from beautiful Yemen,” he said, his voice like a song. “Arabia Felix, as the Roman conquerors called our fertile home on the Red Sea. My people have grown mangoes on the outskirts of Sanaa for five generations. I am twenty years old. I am mujahideen. I serve one true God.”

Awaan began to weep, crippled by his failure. What had they done to him—turning him into someone else? Demons. Their questions elicited responses as though through dark magic.

“I am not a pilot. I learned how to turn the dial on an autopilot to get the plane to New York. My strike into the heart of that city of devils would have been my gift unto God!”

They want to know about the others. Hold on to yourself, he thought. He focused on his mother back home. How proud she would be. He was not the misfit they all thought he was, after all. He was capable of great things.

“I am an obedient soldier,” he said, his tears hot and stinging. He bore down, remembering his pain, nattering on through a forced smile. Hold fast, he told himself. Answer literally.

Who else planned attack?

“The plan grew from only my heart. No others.”

They pressed, wanting more from him. Wanting everything. He choked back his own words, convulsing, struggling for air. He gagged, finally, and a bilious stream of vomit splashed warm into his lap.

Chapter 16

Once SAS 903 had declared the attempted hijacking and was diverted for landing at Bangor, the FAA shut down the airport to all traffic with the exception of law enforcement aircraft. Inside the main terminal, no more than one hundred passengers due to meet or depart on midday flights were inconvenienced.

Airline workers joined with the small food service shops to make the 230 unexpected visitors as comfortable as possible. By the time the Airbus taxied to the jetway, they had coffee, sandwiches, and soft drinks set up on a buffet in the main arrivals hall inside the security screening gates.

The mood was distinctly cheerful, even exuberant, as the passengers deplaned: all of them grateful that the worst had not happened, that they were on the ground, that they were alive. Airport representatives were coordinating with the airline and Homeland Security to reroute passengers and their luggage. The airport lockdown kept media at bay, and the passengers were encouraged to call their loved ones but not to contact any media outlets for the time being.

Maggie and the five heroic passengers who had come to her aid were escorted to a lounge converted into a mini-emergency room, in accordance with airport disaster planning. With the FBI agents and police standing guard, each person was greeted by a physician and a nurse. Maggie’s bleeding had stopped, but she was dizzy from both blood loss and stress, and experiencing shocklike symptoms.

Trude, the other flight attendant, had become hysterical once the passengers and crew had exited the airplane. She was dosed with antianxiety medication, but when that did not settle her down, she was taken to a local hospital for evaluation. The pilots were both questioned, but because neither was in fact an eyewitness to the attack, their value to the investigation was limited.

The blond man who had snatched the bomb trigger from the hijacker’s hand was thought to have broken his wrist and received immediate medical attention.

A female FBI agent took the floor, speaking loudly. “Could I have everyone’s attention, please? Very quickly, we want to get the injured treated right away, and everyone else looked over. I need to ask that your cell phones be turned over to us at this time, so that we may contact your families and associates for you. You of course will be able to contact them yourselves at a later time.

“I need to insist that no one talk to anyone else until we have had a chance to debrief you. This is very important. You have all been instrumental in disrupting a terror attack, saving the lives of your fellow passengers. It is imperative that we begin our investigation into this incident with uncorrupted witness accounts, so we’ll ask you to bear with us for the next few hours.

“Other than that, once you have been evaluated and medically cleared, feel free to help yourselves to sandwiches, coffee, tea, and sodas. Restrooms are through those doors, and you do not need an escort but we do ask that you go one at a time. Any other questions or issues, please seek out one of the officers. Thank you.”

Jeremy Fisk and Krina Gersten rushed over to Teterboro Airport just in time to hitch a ride on a Treasury Department jet carrying three quick-reaction investigators from the Joint Terrorism Task Force from New Jersey to Bangor, Maine.

Intel Division was being included because the flight had been bound for Newark Airport, and the plot apparently involved a target within the New York metropolitan area. The mood on the jet was cordial, but mistrust continued between the JTTF and Intel. In the wake of the averted Times Square subway bombing, the heads of both departments had publicly pledged their support for each other, but the reality hadn’t trickled down to the street agents.

Fisk had been on his way to lunch when he got the alert. He was told to take one other Intel cop with him, and the decision was an easy one. Krina had been relegated to various shit assignments recently. As a female cop investigating a largely Muslim population, there were some obvious limitations on her assignments, but over time Fisk had come to defend her allegation that there was more to it than that. She never complained, except privately to him. Cop work was still largely a boys’ club, and as she told him, she had been dealing with this sort of thing her entire career.

They touched down smoothly, taxiing right up to the main terminal. An airport representative escorted them to a common room outside the detention center, where the terrorist reaction team had nearly finished their postmortem. The fellow FBI agents acknowledged one another, then everyone took a seat around a conference table while the lead agent spoke from his notes.

“Looks like this guy Abdulraheem was the whole thing,” said the agent. “We’ve got everything he had. His story is so common among these young wannabe terrorists that it can’t be a legend. He loved the attention he got in Sanaa, Yemen, when he was recruited into one of those puppy cells at his mosque. They sent him to Peshawar for indoc, gave him a cutout contact, and told him to wait until he received orders. For a year he waited. And waited. And maybe went a little crazy. That’s how they do it, they test your fidelity, your patience. Abdulraheem failed the test. The wait was too much. He took a page from the nine-eleven playbook, bought an undetectable obsidian knife, jumped on the friendly old Internet, and watched some British flight school’s taped lectures on controlling an airliner’s course and altitude with the autopilot. That was it. He made his move alone on SAS 903, that is confirmed. His target was undefined in midtown Manhattan. He was planning on figuring that part out once he got inside the flight deck. This actor’s gonna be with us for a long, long time at Club Gitmo. Very small potatoes, seems to me, but who knows? He might know a few more names. He’s proven he doesn’t have the stuffing to wait the long wait. If he’s got anything else, it will come out, sooner rather than later. But the critical threat here is over.”

Gersten and Fisk sat through the rest, Fisk noting his thoughts on paper. The briefing broke up, and he and Gersten went into the interrogation room alone, spending a half hour’s face time with Awaan Abdulraheem.

With his language skills, Fisk took the lead, speaking to the subject in Arabic while Gersten played the intractable female presence. Fisk laid down a few baseline questions, in order to establish a rudimentary rapport, but the narcosynthesis of the mild hallucinogen the subject had been administered had not fully worn off yet. For Fisk, it was like interviewing a sleepy drunk.