The Intercept

by Dick Wolf

  Maggie Sullivan couldn’t stop smiling, liking what they were doing to her unruly hair, asking for pro tips. Every once in a while she checked Jenssen in the mirror, probably looking to see if he was looking at her.

  When it was Nouvian’s turn in the chair, he picked up a sponge and did the area around his eyes himself. The professional stage musician was used to wearing a light coat of makeup.

  Jenssen closed his eyes serenely while two of the makeup artists silently fought over who would do his base. Sparks watched from her chair, trapped beneath a black apron, shooting daggers.

  The male stylist stepped in, separating the two women with a gentle elbow. He plucked at Jenssen’s chopped haircut. “Great TV hair,” he said.

  Jenssen, his eyes still closed, said, “Must be from watching it all these years.”

  The stylist and the makeup team laughed like it was the most hilarious thing they had ever heard anyone say in that room. Jenssen opened his eyes and looked around as though he were being put on.

  Gersten smiled to herself. For a while at least, everything The Six said and did was going to be amazing or hilarious or deeply wise.

  Once they were miked, the group was led outside into the barricaded lane of Rockefeller Center for an outdoor segment. Except for Jenssen, who had never lived in the States, everyone was familiar with the out-of-town tourists waving hello to their friends and relatives back at home. This morning, many of the onlookers had brought handmade signs honoring their arrival, in anticipation of their well-hyped appearance.

  GOD BLESS YOU! GOD BLESS AMERICA!

  NEVER FORGET!

  USA USA USA!

  UNITED WE STAND!!

  The plaza was shaded by surrounding buildings, but the heat was still an issue. In spite of it, some people had been camped out since before dawn. They went crazy when The Six emerged behind the assistant producer into the heat of the day. Flashbulbs and shouting. For a moment, Gersten expected someone to try to push through the plastic, police-style barricades.

  That moment passed, but not the applause. The crowd was still into it even after Matt Lauer emerged and the red camera light went on. Seven director’s chairs were set up, though none sat in them. The excitement of the crowd disrupted the flow of the introductions, and the interview started with everyone on their feet. Lauer took them through the aborted hijacking once again, prodding them with questions to keep the narrative flowing, before following up with a softball for each of the heroes.

  “Were you afraid?”

  “Did you think before you acted?”

  “Would you do it again?”

  Then, in a surprise reunion brilliantly staged by the show’s producers, Scandinavian Air Flight 903’s pilot, Captain Elof Granberg, and copilot, Anders Bendiksen, were brought out to Maggie’s delighted squeal. They received tearful hugs and firm handshakes from The Six, moving right down the line. The pilots’ stories were briefly recounted, augmented with the flight recording of Granberg’s distress call. Then they too were prompted to add their own words to the chorus of praise.

  The appearance fused the group yet again. Gersten detected a pattern of high and low, and briefly sympathized with the emotional roller coaster they were trapped on. The moments of genuine adulation were transfixing to watch, not only for Gersten but for the entire nation—and Gersten, close as she was to them, could only imagine what it was like to be its focus. In those few moments, the group set aside their individual characters and became the band of everyday citizen-heroes the viewing audience wanted them to be.

  The sole note of discord came when Matt Lauer pointed out the fact that a member of the Secret Service was part of their entourage. “Are you ready to announce your candidacies for the U.S. Senate?” he joked.

  Surprisingly, it was Jenssen who answered. “We are meeting President Obama later today,” said the Swede.

  Matt Lauer said, “Is that the ceremony on the USS Intrepid?”

  “Exactly.”

  Gersten saw Harrelson bristle at this public release of information.

  Matt Lauer said, “What is that like, to go from private citizens last week to meeting with the president today?”

  The others were at a loss for words. Jenssen said, “It is quite an honor, though of course, it would have been nice to have a say in the matter.”

  Matt Lauer picked up on this immediately. “Are you saying that you would prefer not to meet the president?”

  “Not at all, not at all. But some of us relish our private lives and look forward to resuming them as soon as possible. We are being kept under watch at our hotel, believe it or not, except for appearances such as these. I am not an American citizen, but most of us are, and apparently even dutiful citizens—even ‘heroes’—are subject to detention.”

  Matt Lauer crossed his arms, leaning forward for the kill. “You all are being held against your will?”

  Colin Frank jumped in as though Jenssen were on fire and Frank held the only bucket of water. “No, no. It’s a unique circumstance, Matt. I think what my friend Magnus here is saying is that there are certain compulsory aspects to our current situation, which, I want to stress, we are willing and happy to comply with.” He then pulled it back with a smile. “It’s all so new to us. It’s been a wild ride, Matt.”

  Gersten watched the mayor’s publicist look up at the sky as though praying for lightning—anything to change the topic. The woman reached for her phone before it could ring.

  Matt Lauer ended the long segment with thanks to all, linking their brave feat to the anniversary of the country’s independence. The audience’s applause turned to sustained cheering, and Gersten watched a monitor as the shot was held for a long time. The cameras took in the crowd, finding tears, then came back to the group. Maggie Sullivan spontaneously grabbed Colin Frank’s hand, then Doug Aldrich’s, raising both in acknowledgment and appreciation. They bowed like members of a Broadway cast, the moment beaming out to a grateful nation.

  The others joined the chain, even Magnus Jenssen, who moved around the group so he could lay his good hand on Alain Nouvian’s shoulder. The producers held the shot for more than a minute—in television, an eternity—before finally breaking for a commercial.

  Chapter 32

  Some street cameras look like radar guns or radiation detectors. Those stationary cameras are primarily traffic cameras, useful for capturing license plates, car makes, and drivers’ faces.

  Others are rotational, operated by remote control. Usually these are placed in high pedestrian traffic areas, such as Times Square, around major landmarks, and at Ground Zero.

  The third kind of New York Police Department surveillance camera is the globe. These resemble the shoplifting deterrent bubbles descending from store ceilings. On the streets of New York, they are most often suspended from streetlamp posts like shaded eyeballs.

  Fisk stood looking at the one hanging over the intersection of Thirtieth Street and Ninth Avenue, near Penn Station. The globe hung there in plain sight. He glanced down at the color printout in his hand, with the NYPD shield in the lower left-hand corner and a time stamp along the bottom. He looked again at the street around him.

  Baada Bin-Hezam had stood in this exact spot less than three hours ago.

  No question. Fisk had a zoom-in of his face as well. No disguise. Fisk could just barely make out the dark spot that was the mole on the left edge of his jaw. Bin-Hezam wore a dark blue or black Windbreaker, blue jeans, and black Adidas sneakers. He carried a large plastic generic store bag in his hand, the printed words THANK YOU plainly visible.

  Fisk distributed a packet of images, including one of just the bag, and dispatched twelve Intel officers to canvas the immediate neighborhood in an ever-expanding grid. They were to show store workers the image of the bag, and if they got a positive match, then and only then Bin-Hezam’s face. He expected to get a lot of bag matches. He hoped to get
at least one face match.

  But he never expected to be the one to score the positive identification. It did not come from the shop that was the source of the bag, but rather from a store owner who remembered a man matching Bin-Hezam’s description carrying such a bag.

  It happened at a small hobby shop called To the Moon, sandwiched between an Irish pub and a Thai food takeout restaurant, mere steps from the surveillance camera. The proprietor, a burly man wearing a black-and-white-striped railroad engineer’s cap over a bush of white hair, looked up from his steaming bowl of noodles and his open copy of Model Railroad News and nearly stabbed at the enlarged image of the THANK YOU bag with his chopsticks.

  “The Saudi,” he said.

  Fisk’s eyes widened in surprise. “Come again?”

  The man looked at Fisk’s shield. “Aw, shit. Tell me he’s not a bad guy.”

  The hobbyist confirmed the full photo of Bin-Hezam. He even claimed to know what was in the plastic bag: “A satchel or shoulder bag of some sort. I think it was imitation leather, though. I could see right down into it. Please tell me this guy’s not a mad bomber or something.”

  “I don’t know what he is, sir,” said Fisk, “I’m just trying to identify him.” Fisk excused himself for a moment, calling in support, then returned to the man. “When would you say he was in here?”

  “Oh, I’d say, about three hours ago? Soon after I opened. That’s usually at nine but I got in a little late today—I was up late watching junk.”

  This guy wasn’t a kook. Fisk now had a positive ID on Bin-Hezam.

  “Sir, I need to know, to the best of your recollection, everything he said, touched, and bought.”

  The hobbyist took another mouthful of noodles. “Bought is easy.” He came down from behind the high glass counter and walked Fisk to the back wall rack of rocket kits. “He picked up one of these big boys. The full kit. Said it was for his son.”

  The kit the hobbyist was referring to was to construct a rocket approximately three feet long by three inches in diameter.

  “I went over the safety key for him, on account of his kid. He didn’t seem to want to talk much otherwise. Well spoken. Paid cash. Hundreds.”

  Fisk stood before the display of rockets, running various scenarios through his head. One word kept recurring to him: “fireworks.”

  The hobbyist said, “This guy didn’t have a kid, did he.”

  Chapter 33

  In her Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, apartment, Aminah bint Mohammed sat watching her cellular phone vibrate on the kitchen table. She stared at it as though it were a giant mechanized roach, summoned to life.

  At first she was paralyzed by a mixture of fear and surprise. Twice before she had been instructed to clear her weekend for an opportunity to be of service. Twice before she had done so, remaining indoors and alone with the phone they had given her, waiting for it to ring.

  Twice before, the weekend had passed with no contact whatsoever.

  But, far from becoming complacent, in fact she was confident that this third weekend alert would be fulfilled. She had been given explicit instructions earlier in the week. Still, with the phone now lighting up and moving, she fought back panic.

  She only hoped she was worthy of the trust they had placed in her.

  She was under strict orders not to answer the phone. She was to wait for a voice mail to be recorded, and access that.

  The phone stopped moving, but Aminah’s hands remained gripping the edge of the table. She watched the device.

  A minute or so later a blue light began pulsing, indicating a voice mail.

  She stood and wrung her hands, pacing out of the kitchen and then back in. The windows were open, and her fans moved hot air through the apartment. City sounds floated in over the whirring. She had been uncomfortably hot all weekend; now she felt only chills.

  She rummaged in a drawer for a pen and paper so as not to make any mistakes, then thought better of it. She closed the drawer, wiping her clammy hands on her long robe.

  She went to the telephone, picked it up. She unlocked the screen and dialed voice mail, her fingertip leaving a wet smudge on the touch screen.

  It rang, asking for her pass code. She entered the six digits that corresponded to her first name.

  It was a male voice. He spoke in English, no words, only a return number. She listened to the message twice, but did not bother to memorize it. The device did that for her.

  She redialed the number from her call register. It was the only call she had ever received on this phone.

  The call rang once.

  The same male voice answered. “You are prepared?” he said. He spoke with a directness of purpose, and the reverence of a prayer.

  “I am prepared,” she answered. American English was her native tongue.

  “The Hotel Indigo, West Twenty-eighth Street. Between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, Manhattan. Top floor, penthouse suite A. Do not come veiled. Not even a hijab. Speak only English. And bring what you have.”

  She was searching for an appropriate response when he hung up. The line was dead, the call ended.

  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.r />
  “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.