Chapter 28

By midmorning on Saturday, July 3, Fisk was no closer to finding the Saudi from Flight 903 than he had been the day before. Baada Bin-Hezam had vanished into—or from—New York.

At seven o’clock that morning, Fisk scrambled an interdiction team to Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn. An Arab man matching Bin-Hezam’s physical description had been spotted parked in a loading zone and entering a building carrying a satchel. Fisk captained the sweep from Intel headquarters, listening as crash units sealed off the block. The man was taken down without incident upon exiting the building. He claimed to be a jeweler checking on his aging mother before catching an early bus to Atlantic City to play in a five-thousand-dollar minimum buy-in poker tournament.

Verifying his story took nearly two hours. During that time, the man’s distraught mother phoned a family friend whose daughter was a lawyer with the Brooklyn office of the ACLU. So piled on top of Fisk’s disappointment in the case of mistaken identity, he then had to spend precious minutes on the phone with the ACLU lawyer. He tried sweet talk first, then a straight-up apology, but she would have none of it. An admittedly clumsy appeal to her patriotism was similarly rebuffed. Only dropping the name of her boss, with whom Fisk had dealt some months before in an ongoing surveillance case, prevented her from taking her client’s case straight to the media.

At least—he hoped it had. Fisk’s only real success so far, in the midst of one of the largest manhunts in the history of the city, was that it was still operating under the media’s, and therefore the public’s, radar.

He was getting nothing from his people on the street. Ten o’clock came and went, and the swarm of hourly contact reports from his rakers in the Muslim neighborhoods all turned up negative. Nothing. Not for the first time did Fisk wonder if he had launched a career-killing goose chase.

Maybe the hijacker Abdulraheem really had been just another jihadist looking for a moment of glory in a world that memorialized evil more often than good. Maybe this Saudi Bin-Hezam really was an art dealer.

Of course they had looked into his past. Early hours still, but they found deals he had brokered. Bin-Hezam’s name was on a number of transactions, none of them major, none in six or even high five figures. His past travel synced up with the sales and festivals. The few clients he maintained checked out as legitimate sculptors and painters, along with a handful of galleries.

So on paper, he was legit. The question was, was this just a shadow career, meant to pacify exactly such scrutiny into his background? Or was Bin-Hezam simply another of life’s minor players, like the vast majority of us, with his own shortcomings, hang-ups, and foibles?

This was a big part of Fisk’s job. Being a viewfinder, locating an individual within the vast sea of humanity and bringing him into focus as quickly as possible in an attempt to determine whether he truly was one of the peaceable ones.

On the plus side, he did not believe that, in the real world, the shared kinship between Abdulraheem, Bin-Hezam, and bin Laden could be sheer coincidence. Such a random occurrence was possible but—and here Fisk snapped the ring of circular logic that was squeezing his mind like a tourniquet—realistically improbable.

If thirteen years as a criminal investigator had taught him anything, it was that coincidence was the stuff of Russian novels and television sitcoms. When people converged without any apparent reason, it was only because the objective viewer—Fisk—could not yet determine the reason.

Fisk returned to mouse-clicking the stream of images dispatched to him from the city police cameras. All night, and now into the day, he had been looking at computer-screen pictures of men who looked vaguely like Bin-Hezam. Hell, he’s probably in disguise, thought Fisk. That’s what I would do.

The cameras could compensate for certain obvious disguises: wigs, mustaches, sunglasses. But he knew that finding the Saudi solely via camera technology was the longest of his long shots.

A few minutes later, Fisk’s phone finally rang. One of Fisk’s best rakers had information on a taxi driver who claimed to have picked up a man meeting Bin-Hezam’s description, but wearing a trim mustache and eyeglasses. It wasn’t much, but at this point a tip was a tip.

The raker, a dispatcher for a Brooklyn cab company, said that his driver was a Kuwaiti Sikh. “He picked up a fare uptown. I can get you the name of the hotel. The fare was not a guest, he walked up off the street. How the driver remembers him. He had a mustache and glasses, but he also wore a suit jacket. Something’s not right.”

“Go ahead,” said Fisk.

“Usually he would have refused the man, because you know you want the hotel fares, not the ten-block errand trips. But this was a fellow Arab. He says that he remembers the man seeming visibly relieved once he closed the door, though he wasn’t out of breath or anything like that. He gave him an address. The driver doesn’t remember where. They never got there anyway. Somewhere in the East Sixties at a red light the fare pushed cash through the window and got out. Driver doesn’t remember the intersection because another fare got right in.”

Most likely the Saudi walked another block or two and hailed another cab. “I’m sending over somebody with pictures for your driver to look at. Meanwhile, get me the name of that hotel.”

Fisk’s adrenaline was flowing. This felt like something. The intercept.

The Capricorn Hotel lobby had Oriental rugs hanging on the walls. There was no restaurant adjacent, only a small sports bar that was, at that hour, still serving a limited breakfast.

Fisk showed his shield and explained why they were there. His explanation approached the truth. His people printed out the register and quickly entered all the names into the Intel database. Fisk posted two men in the lobby, just to be careful. None of the registered guests matched Bin-Hezam’s description, and none of the staff reacted strongly positively either to Bin-Hezam’s passport photograph scan or to another image augmented with a digitally added mustache and eyeglasses.

The cabdriver, on the other hand, made a positive identification. Fisk liked cabbies as witnesses; all cops did. Juries too.

Fisk walked outside to the cabstand, empty at that time of the morning. He watched the cars and people going past, squinting into the rising sun, feeling its heat.

Baada Bin-Hezam had stood there some twelve to fifteen hours before.

The question now was: where had he been coming from?

Chapter 29

Gersten was up early Saturday morning, her trusted phone alarm summoning her from sleep. She checked for overnight messages from Fisk but there were none.

He was plenty busy, she told herself. He had real work to do.

Gersten was looking forward to another day as a camp counselor.

She pulled on running pants, New Balance sneakers, and a nylon Windbreaker, and dug her ear buds out of her travel bag. She stowed her sidearm in the hotel room safe, then rode the elevator down to the street. Even that early in the morning, the sticky July heat was oppressive. Any other day she might have reconsidered, or else hopped in a cab to her gym. But she needed the streets, the distance, the workout.

NPR’s Weekend Edition carried her to Park Avenue and straight up to Sixty-first, where she turned left and then north again on Fifth Avenue, running uptown along the wide sidewalk outside some of the city’s best residences, opposite Central Park.

At Seventy-ninth, she turned left into the park itself, cutting back south along East Drive. She ran in the shade when she could. She changed radio stations, riding her presets until she hit disco music. One of her presets was having a Summer of ’76 flashback weekend, and it was perfect, just what she needed. The groove carried her south through the park.