She pulled the phone away from her ear, amazed. It had started.
Chapter 34
Fisk spoke with Intel Division chief Barry Dubin via a secure link from the Midtown South Precinct on West Thirty-fifth Street. He swallowed his food quickly, tucking the rest of his turkey club sandwich out of view of the camera.
His monitor showed a view of the Intel briefing room from one corner of a table. There were others in the room with Dubin, who sat comfortably in his high-backed seat as though conserving energy for the rest of the weekend.
“So what do we know?” asked Dubin, the former spook. “It’s real-world now. We’ve got a hot situation.”
Fisk said, “Bin-Hezam is in Manhattan and on the move. Likely staying here somewhere, since we’ve turned up nothing off the island. Either a cash customer at a hotel, or else he’s being put up by associates.”
“I would think he’s got to have associates. But so far nothing on that front?”
“Nothing,” said Fisk.
They had scrutinized snoop cameras in a three-block radius, searching for more images of Bin-Hezam. They had picked him up on two cameras, but in terms of information, learned nothing more. He was the same Saudi Arabian carrying a plastic bag.
What it did show was that the technology was not infallible: face recognition programs had failed to filter the images and push them to Intel. Nobody wanted to talk about that, though. Sometimes the sentinels wanted to believe in the magic of ultimate security as much as the people they sought to protect.
The other issue was that, despite rumors to the contrary, many of the thousands of Manhattan’s city blocks were not yet wired with surveillance cameras. Camera location maps, drawn and maintained either by hobbyists or First Amendment activists, were available to anyone with an Internet connection—making it easy enough for an undesirable to select a hotel or host apartment on a residential street without electronic eyes.
Dubin said, “We swept up all our questionables in the past week, in advance of the Fourth and the One World Trade Center ceremony. I wonder if maybe we cleared out some of his help? Sure hope so. Maybe this is why he’s moving around doing errands on his own? Because otherwise why risk that when he should be laying low? All the effort that went into inserting him here . . . I don’t see how he can be a lone wolf.”
“Agree in principle,” said Fisk.
“So.” And here Dubin looked at the others in the room, people Fisk could not see. Fisk assumed there were federal agents among them and was glad he was participating in this meeting via remote. “The big question is, do we take the hunt for Bin-Hezam public? Do we saturate the airwaves this afternoon and evening and put the city to work for us?”
“Or does that start a panic and work against us,” said Fisk.
“This is the swaying tightrope we’re on now,” said Dubin. “Do enough, but don’t do too much.”
“Not my call,” said Fisk, “but I think going to TV does not materially improve our chances.”
“What does materially improve our chances, Fisk?”
Fisk shrugged, conceding the point. “Indeed.”
“That said,” continued Dubin, “I lean your way as well. There’s a line of thought that says that if we even introduce this idea into the ether, that compromises the entire fireworks show tonight and becomes the focus. If we scare people away and there’s no actual threat or arrest at the end of it, that becomes the story. The fireworks display is a big fucking deal, symbolically.”
Fisk nodded. Reading between the lines, he was now certain there was someone from the mayor’s office there, perhaps even the governor’s. Fisk had spent enough time around Dubin to know that he would pay lip service to his political overseers if need be—but then turn right around and do whatever he needed to do to get the job done right.
“Bottom line,” said Dubin, “we put this guy’s face on TV, we give him oxygen, we wind up creating a supervillain. We give terror a platform and a voice in tonight’s show. We mint an archenemy—and I just don’t think we’ve crossed the fact threshold on that just yet.”
Fisk agreed. “We’ve got nothing from cell phone surveillance?”
As with the camera screening, the NSA cell phone monitoring was being performed by computer. The court order granting permission to digitally monitor cellular towers came with specific conditions, some of which were even honored. But the sheer quantity of Arabs speaking via cell phone at any given minute in the five boroughs was staggering. Each of the five major providers serving those areas had received the judge’s surveillance order electronically through a crisis link established after the communications chaos during the World Trade Center attacks.
Dubin told Fisk what he already knew. “No leads. Lots of garbage. I’ve asked them to slow it down, go back through records from the morning hours before and after we have him on camera. In case we missed something. Which is entirely possible, even for the best computer systems in the world. I wish we’d gotten a picture of him talking on a phone, so we could zero in on a time. I should tell you, Fisk, there’s been some talk about imposing federal priority, but I think you agree, we are best equipped to handle this.”
Again, playing to the room. Fisk’s role was to be the straight man. And so he nodded yet again.
Dubin was a master at this. When it came to deflecting pressure or criticism, even in the hottest of circumstances, the man was 100 percent Teflon.
Fisk said, “In many ways, this is a statistical exercise. If we keep at it long enough, chances are good we’ll get a hit.”
“But long enough doesn’t get us through tonight, Fisk. Nor through tomorrow morning. Now, what’s with this rocket talk?”
“He dropped three hundred fifty cash on a kit. And he was carrying an imitation leather bag or satchel.”
“Is this a kid’s toy or are we talking air attack?”
Fisk answered, “Yes and I don’t know. It can get height. Launch it from the top of a building, you’ve got true elevation, though not enough power for aim.”
Dubin winced. “Air delivery says biowarfare agent to me.”
Fisk said, “A small bomb is going to go bang, and that’s it. So I agree.”
“We’re going to have millions of people lined up along a two-mile stretch of the West Side tonight, from nine o’clock until about nine twenty-five. Sitting ducks. It’s a massive task just securing the ground on a normal July Fourth, now we have to think air? He launches it from a window or a roof, one of those parachute floaters riding the breeze off the Hudson?”
“It’s tough to defend.”
“Or is he looking at Sunday morning down at Battery Park? Ground Zero? Dropping a toy rocket full of who-knows-what over the ceremony?” Dubin was getting angry now.
Fisk said, “As an attack tool, it is not precise. It can’t travel far, though it doesn’t have to. It does seem to indicate some high-altitude interest. If it indicates anything.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means what we know is that we still don’t know much. We don’t have any bioagent yet.”
“Here’s what we do know,” said Dubin, sitting forward. “We’ve got a ceremony this afternoon on the USS Intrepid with the president. We’ve got the fireworks tonight, setting potential victims out along Eleventh Avenue like a human buffet. Then tomorrow morning, the dedication of One World Trade Center, with not one but two U.S. presidents in attendance, the sitting president and his predecessor, also the vice president, the governor of New York and his predecessor, the mayor and his predecessor, foreign dignitaries, nine-eleven families, an audience of millions. At oh-eight-hundred hours tomorrow. That’s about twenty hours from now.
“We’ve spent the last ninety minutes debating how to call these things off gracefully if we don’t get this Saudi before then. That is—how to call it off without appearing to call it off, because as you know, neither the president of the United States nor his staff would ever go for it. It’s not his job to make our job easier, it’s the other way around. So we’re trying to come up with ways to tighten up security today, tonight, and tomorrow, whether we get this guy or not. But guess what? Security is already as tight as can be going in. So we need ideas.”