by John Weisman
Tuesday afternoon, Reuven had used his connections to put MJ on the overbooked Air France flight to Paris—bumped to first class. She’d spend the night at rue Raynouard, get the rest of her stuff, then continue on to Washington Thursday. The radiant look on her face as she went through the departure gate was ample evidence that Tom had indeed provided her with perfect cover for status.
While he was at Ben Gurion with MJ, Reuven had obtained copies of the pertinent debriefs. They were in Hebrew, of course, and so he’d had to translate while Tom made his own notes. It had taken the better part of two days to go through the hundreds of pages of transcripts. Then he and Reuven worked on interrogation scenarios. They’d gone for almost twenty hours straight. Reuven had finally insisted that Tom get enough rest so he’d be sharp the next day.
The next day—today. Today was what Sam Waterman used to call “showtime.”
10:31 A.M. Salah stopped in front of a gray steel door with a full length sealed pin hinge. He opened the file and displayed the cover page for Tom to see. Attached to the Hebrew typing was a full-face–slash-profile mug shot of a dark-haired woman. She was plain as a sparrow. Not physically unattractive, but exceedingly ordinary. Not like Malik. Tom had seen pictures of Malik. He was an Islamic Tom Cruise.
“She’s waiting for you in there.” Salah flipped the file closed, turned to Tom, and nodded for him to enter. “Rap twice on the door,” he said in French. “I will come for you.”
“Agreed.”
Tom sneaked a quick look at the inside of his left wrist. His pulse was racing. He paused and stared at the gray door, taking a couple of seconds to clear his mind of all extraneous information, focus his concentration on the interrogation, and slow his respiration. Show nothing. Give away nothing. Display nothing.
And yet…there was so damn much to remember—so many details, factoids, info-bits. Pieces of a puzzle in a pile on a table. And you had to assemble them blindfolded. With the clock running. And lives at stake. The task was staggering. Daunting. Overwhelming.
And all in a day’s work. He put his hand on the heavy steel handle, pushed it downward, and pulled the thick door toward him.
Her name was Dianne Lamb. She was twenty-seven years old. She had been extremely easy to crack. At least that’s what the transcripts indicated. It had bothered him at first that she was a woman, because that fact indicated that the bad guys were taking things to a whole new level. In fact, not only was she a woman, but she was an educated woman—a modern, educated Western woman. This was not somebody who acted in order to secure the twenty-five-thousand-dollar onetime payment for homicide bombers from the Saudi royals (money washed through Wahabist charities), the twenty-five-thousand-dollar homicide-bomber payments Saddam Hussein skimmed off the UN’s Oil for Food Program or the blood money Arafat paid through a series of middlemen.
Dianne Lamb was a graduate of Cambridge, with a respectable second in French literature. She worked as a copy editor for the BBC’s book-publishing division, where she specialized at nitpicking typos and misprints in BBC’s profitable cook-book series. Twenty-seven years old, she lived a spinster’s life in the chic northern London neighborhood of Islington, where she shared a tiny two-bedroom flat with a forty-five-year-old bookkeeper who worked three floors below her at the Beeb. She hadn’t dated much. There’d been one serious and devastating relationship at Cambridge, and nothing since. Her family was upper middle class and professional. They lived in Surrey. Her father, Nigel, was a vice president at an international banking house who commuted to an office in the City every day. Her mother, Stephanie, who’d been born in France but brought to the UK as a three-year-old, did volunteer work at the local hospital. Neither, according to the intelligence reporting, was connected either financially or ideologically with any Islamist terrorist movement or anything that might even come close.
Nine months ago, in January, Dianne met Malik Suleiman. He was the Sorbonne-educated London-based correspondent for Al Arabia, which he’d described to her as a small Paris-based Arab-language weekly. He was tall, good-looking, and secular.
They’d met at a bar in Knightsbridge and quickly become involved. In March, he took her to Paris for a long weekend. They’d traveled on the Chunnel train, stayed at the George V, and spent their time in two-star restaurants and exclusive clubs. Malik obviously came from a wealthy family. In July and August, they returned to Paris for two more long weekends. Again, they stayed at the George V. And then, in September, Malik invited Dianne to visit the Holy Land with him. He said the magazine wanted a piece from him on how ordinary Israelis were coping with the Intifada. Once again, he would pay all the expenses. Think of it, he’d said, as an engagement trip. Once they’d returned, they’d visit his parents in Morocco and break the good news.
It was an offer she couldn’t refuse. But two days after he’d booked their flights, Malik’s publisher demanded he fly to Paris and undertake a special interview. It took some jiggling, but Malik was able to fix things. Dianne would fly directly from London. He’d take the train to Paris, do the interview, drop the tape off at the magazine, then catch the first available flight and meet her at the Tel Aviv Hilton.
But there was a problem. Because Malik was jumping from point to point, he wanted to take only carry-on luggage. Dianne had a big suitcase. Could she take a few things for him—so he’d have enough clothes for their week in Israel and the West Bank? And also his portable radio and some other personal effects?
Of course she could. And so, she flew to Israel on a Monday—the British Air flight. She took a cab from Ben Gurion and checked into the Hilton.
The room was perfect: on the eighth floor, with a broad ocean view. Malik arrived Wednesday evening from Paris, with his rolling leather carry-on and a present for her: a fabulous Louis Vuitton backpack. It was his apology for being tardy.
They made love twice. Afterward, Malik took the radio from her bag and turned it on so he could listen to BBC World News. He was, she’d told the interrogators, a real news freak—had been for as long as she’d known him.
When the radio didn’t work, he’d checked the batteries and discovered they were dead. So he’d sent her out to buy fresh ones at the newsstand in the lobby while he unpacked.
They’d traveled all over, Malik making lots of notes and taking lots of digital photographs for his article. They visited Jaffa and walked all around Tel Aviv. They took a bus all the way to Haifa and Acre. They visited Tiberias and swam in the Sea of Galilee. They stayed in a beachfront hotel in Netanya and wandered past the tourist restaurants. They spent two days in Jerusalem, staying at the American Colony Hotel, an old Arab palace on the Nablus Road. On the second day, the hotel concierge hired an Arab taxi for them and they drove through the occupied territories to visit Jericho, and then Ramallah.
In Ramallah, in a restaurant, they’d met by chance a PLO security officer who’d invited them to see evidence of how badly the Palestinians were being treated by the Israelis. He’d taken them to the Fatah offices and played a video: a long montage of photographs showing dead Palestinian children, all murdered, he said, by criminal Israeli settlers. Dianne admitted Malik had spent some time alone with the Palestinian while she looked at the video.
After one more night in Jerusalem, they took a cab to Tel Aviv and reregistered at the Hilton. They ate dinner in the room, then made love. Afterward, Malik suggested they go nightclubbing. They started at Montana, a crowded beer bar on the northern edge of Old Tel Aviv. From there, they went on to a number of clubs, working their way south, toward the Hilton. Then Malik suggested they try to get into what he called the hottest club in Tel Aviv: Michael’s Pub. It was on the waterfront, a block and a half from the American embassy.
They’d taken a cab. They were sufficiently fashionable to be allowed through the rope line after Dianne’s backpack was checked by the security guard. They’d found a table near the dance floor, ordered a couple of whiskey sours and a plate of mezze, and gotten up to dance. They’d danced two dances,
and Dianne excused herself to go to the loo. That’s where she was when Malik blew himself up.
10:31 A.M. Showtime. Tom stepped through the doorway. His face a neutral mask, he reached behind himself and pulled on the handle until he heard the heavy bolt snap shut.
14
10:31 A.M. The interrogation room was bare and palpably cool—at least fifteen degrees cooler than the corridor. There was something else in evidence, too: the faint but unmistakable scent of Salah’s parfum pénitentiaire.
She was tiny—fragile as a soft-boned baby chick and obviously as vulnerable. Not more than five two or five three. She stood, fists clenched, behind a metal table. She had the sort of delicately featured yet hugely plain face that made her look ten years older than her actual age. Her appearance certainly wasn’t helped by the shapeless gray prison shift and dirty tennis shoes with no laces.
She looked at Tom with wide-eyed apprehension. Under his relentless gaze, her right hand jerked upward in order to smooth down her uncombed, short, mouse-brown hair. She was largely unsuccessful. An absurd, recalcitrant cowlick completed her hapless and wretched appearance.
Her body language read exhausted written in capital letters, but her brown eyes were clear, even—Tom found this surprising—piercing. Equally promising, she displayed neither the zombie look, the loony’s smile, or the thousand-yard stare. Salah had done well. He’d wrung her dry, yet been careful not to break her into unusable emotional shards.
Tom slipped into character and kept his voice neutral but commanding. “Assieds-toi.” It was the way you told a dog or a naughty child to sit.
She slipped demurely onto a straight-backed chair that was bolted to the concrete. She looked like a schoolgirl: knees pressed together under her shift, ankles locked. She raised her hands from her lap and clasped them together, interlocking her fingers as if she were about to play the old nursery game. “This is the church, this is the steeple, open the doors and see all the people.”
Tom allowed himself a quick scan of the room. The cameras had to be behind him. And the microphones? There were probably three or four of them, spread out so nothing would be missed.
He looked down at her. “Parle-moi de Mal-ik,” he said, speaking in a slow, almost pedantic Marseillaise accent. “Tell me everything the two of you did on that first”—he punched the word—“wonderful trip to Paris last March.”
She cocked her head as a child would do and looked up at him for fifteen, perhaps twenty seconds. He could see the gears engaging. She was trying to figure out what he wanted, where he was going.
He gave her nothing. “Paris. Last March.”
Finally, a single tear formed in the corner of her right eye. When it had built up enough mass, it rolled down her cheek and plopped from her chin onto the front of her shift. “Oh, Malik,” she said. “Poor, silly, romantic Malik. I loved him so.”
She started to blubber and tugged at the sleeve of her shift so she could wipe her nose. Then she caught herself and stopped, muffling a huge sob.
“Here. Use this.” Reaching into the pocket of his coveralls, Tom played with the fresh, starched handkerchief he’d brought until it released what he’d hidden inside its opaque folds. He extracted the hankie, shook it out, advanced, reached over the chair that had been placed for him, and dropped it onto the surface of the table.
She picked it up. It was an oversize gentleman’s handkerchief made of French linen. It had hand-rolled edges and it smelled ever so faintly of Givenchy Gentleman. Tom knew Malik had used the same cologne. And just like Salah, he understood sensory triggers can often help interrogators prime the pump, so to speak, when they’re dealing with emotionally frail personalities.
He watched her body language. He silently counted the seconds—one thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three—until the emotional tidal wave washed over her.
Fire in the hole! She held the handkerchief to her face and silent-screamed, caught her breath, silent-screamed again, and collapsed on the tabletop, her arms splayed out around her head.
He waited until the dry-heaving finally abated. “Dianne,” he said. “Dianne, we have to talk.”
Her shoulders pumped up and down. She pressed the handkerchief to her face like a talisman. “Have to talk.”
“Paris. The George V. Malik.”
She swallowed hard. “We took the Friday train from Waterloo. We…we’d…” She bit her lips, then wiped at her nose, which was wet.
Tom said nothing. There were perhaps eight, nine, ten seconds of silence. And then she inhaled deeply to get herself under control, wiped her nose with her sleeve, and began again. “We’d decided to take the day off. We met on the platform. I’d come from my flat by subway.” Her French was perfectly enunciated and unmistakably upper-crust British in its inflection. She sounded somewhat like the late and unlamented Princess Di—the same nasal, stiff-upper-lip Sloane Ranger tone.
“Where is your flat?”
She held the handkerchief to her face and inhaled deeply. “I live in Islington. On Gerrard Road—just above the canal.” She looked at him strangely. “I’ve been over this material before.”
Tom ignored her. “Of which canal do you speak?”
Her eyes were eloquent. They said, You absolute shit. You are doing this for no reason at all other than you can. But still, she responded to his question. “The Grand Union.”
“How long is the walk from your flat to the Metro stop?” He purposely misspoke.
She gave him a reproving glance. “We call it the Underground in Britain.”
Tom rephrased the question.
“About four blocks.”
“And you carried your baggage the whole distance?”
“I had a carry-on. I could wheel it.”
“And the train took you directly to Waterloo Station?”
“I had to change once—at Euston.”
“What underground did you travel?”
“The Northern Line.”
“The whole time?”
“The whole time.”
Tom adjusted the straight-backed chair on his side of the table, then dropped onto it. “And you met Malik at Waterloo.”
She put the handkerchief to her face and inhaled again. “Yes.”
“Who arrived first?”
“I did.”
“Where did you meet?”
“There is a board, showing all the departing trains.”
“Yes?”
“We met in front of it.”
“When did you buy your tickets?”
“Malik had bought them.”
“When?”
“I don’t know. He had them when he arrived.”
“So you went directly to the train?”
“Yes.”
“Where did you sit?”
“In first class.”
Tom nodded. What he’d just done was to pose a series of neutral “control questions,” in order to gauge her physical reactions under nonthreatening conditions. She’d responded as he’d hoped she would: breathing even, eye contact steady and nonevasive, and hand-and-foot movement minimal.
He was taking her back to the Paris trips for another reason. The Israelis had been interested in her relationship with Malik because they were deconstructing the bombing. Reverse-engineering everything leading up to the event so they could see where the chinks were, and how they could be closed.
Tom had his own ideas about Malik. The obvious thing was that he’d recruited her as a mule, to carry the explosives. Virtually all agent recruitments are based on four behavioral elements: ego, money, sex, or ideology. EMSI, pronounced “emcee,” was the abbreviation they taught at the Farm. Dianne’s was a classic sex recruitment. The scenario with plain-Jane targets usually followed similar patterns: a taste of the good life—a few bottles of the bubbly, followed shortly by a romantic French dinner, followed thereafter by a healthy bout of the old in-and-out at a stylish bachelor flat. Tom’s eyes scanned the prisoner, read her body language, demeanor, an
d aura. She was an open book. One great, sweaty orgasm and she’d be wrapped around Malik’s little finger forever.
“How did you meet Malik?”
“It was an accident.”
“An accident.”
“I was having a drink with a friend. We’d been to Beauchamp Street. The sales, you know—the January sales? And we’d stopped at this pub for a glass of wine.”
“Which pub?”
“The Bunch of Grapes. It’s on Brompton Road.”
“Who were you with?”
“Deirdre. Deirdre Ludlow. We’d gone to school together. Known one another since we were eight.” Dianne gave Tom a wistful look. “She was always the pretty one. I was always the bright one.”
“You say you’d been shopping?”
“We’d been in and out of stores for at least two hours.”
“And?”
“Malik spilled a glass of champagne all over my arm.”
Tom thought, I wonder where he spotted her. It was obvious to him that Malik had been trolling. Knightsbridge during the January sales was the perfect place to target young women. It was all becoming clear now: the plain wren with her beautiful friend. But what was it Malik had seen? What scent had Dianne thrown off that the predator knew she was the weak one?
Tom already knew the answer. All Malik had had to do was look at the two of them. That was hint enough if he was the pro Tom believed he’d been. He’d probably spotted Dianne by appearance alone. Her clothes were expensive but frumpy. Salah had displayed them to Tom. The labels came from the best shops in Knightsbridge. So having spotted her, Malik had watched from afar and assessed. She wore no engagement or wedding ring. Her beverage of choice? Safe white wine. He’d confirm his first impressions by reading her body language. She was no type A personality. No alpha bitch. She obviously did as she was told, something he was able to confirm by the manner in which she constantly deferred to her better-looking companion. There was more: her eyes always downcast. That meant she was probably submissive.