by Dick Wolf
Bin-Hezam pointed the weapon first at the cop coming from behind the car. He squeezed the trigger, the handgun leaping in his hand.
He barely got off a second shot before a single 7.62 full-metal-jacket, boat-tail sniper bullet exploded in his brain.
Concurrently, the other tac cop had opened up on the Saudi. The twin impacts drove Bin-Hezam back and down against the sidewalk, collapsing him in a quivering heap. He resembled a pile of rags more than a human being.
What was left of Bin-Hezam’s life flowed from the gaping wound in the back of his head, his blood joining the water trickling in the gutter, turning it crimson.
The messenger bag, having jumped from his hand, lay a few feet away.
Fisk stood stunned. Only later did it occur to him that he had unwisely been standing opposite the tac teams’ lines of fire. Had they missed Bin-Hezam by just a few inches to the right—unlikely at close range, but possible—Fisk too would have gone down on the pavement in a bloody heap.
As it was, Fisk walked to Bin-Hezam, standing over the dead terrorist. They would get no further information from him. Bin-Hezam had wanted to die. The only consolation was that he never would have consented to be taken alive.
The helicopter reappeared overhead. The tac agents joined Fisk at the curb. They looked down at the Saudi, whose eyes were beyond seeing.
Part 7
Double-Speak
Chapter 47
The cab crawled uptown on Sixth Avenue in the thick of early evening traffic.
It hit every light because of the snarl of pedestrians crossing against them on this late Saturday afternoon. The driver had the radio on, 1010 WINS New York. All talk. Traffic on the ones.
The announcer cut in with breaking news. A police barricade in Chelsea had resulted in a shooting. Early reports indicated that it was an antiterrorist operation, but it was unclear at that time whether they were reacting to a confirmed threat or the actions of an unbalanced individual. The announcer issued a traffic alert for the area around Twenty-eighth Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues.
“This heat make people crazy,” mumbled the driver.
In the backseat, Aminah bint Mohammed felt herself regressing into Kathleen Burnett. As completely as she had pledged her word and life to Allah, her meager training had not prepared her for this.
The man she had met that afternoon had died. He had been martyred on the field of battle—this she knew. Baada Bin-Hezam had known he was walking into death. She realized that now. He went bravely. He went unquestioningly.
As she must now.
This was how she had come to work in the emergency room. Nursing the sick and dying. So much like what she was doing now: saving the world from godlessness and the torture of innocents.
For some time, she had passionately tended her secret life as an Islamic jihadist. That had been enough to soothe her insecurities and fears. But the bottle in which she contained herself cracked now as she understood that she had left a man to walk to his death.
She was his last human contact. She carried the things he provided in the bag he had given her. She was acting for him now.
He had accepted his death. He had passed along his strength to her with the bag and the assignment. She was, as she had never seen herself before, a sacred messenger.
Sacred, yet still scared.
The cab turned right onto one of the larger east-west thoroughfares, then left on Madison Avenue for the run up to the park. She had given the driver the Metropolitan Museum of Art as her destination. The museum was a short walk from the fenced hundred-acre pond officially known as the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir.
Aminah glanced at the red LED digits of the clock on the cab’s meter, then her eyes fell to the driver’s ID placard below. Aaqib bin Mohammed. “Follower Son of Mohammed.”
In the mirror, she saw the eyes of a fiftyish man whose face had seen sorrow and grief. His eyes flicked up into the mirror and noticed hers staring at him. She wondered what he saw in his passenger. One of those typical New York white women slipping uncomfortably into middle age. Unaware of the simple privileges of birth and geography.
“Can I help you, miss?” he asked. “You are crying?”
Aminah had not been aware of this. She swept away the tears rolling down her cheeks. “No . . . I’m fine. Really.” She played at looking out the window. So many people, so many buildings and doors. So much life. “Maybe . . . maybe you can help me. You are a Muslim?”
He glanced at her again, this time with suspicion. “I am, miss. As much as I can be, which is not much these days. It is worse now that everyone mistrusts us. But I . . . I have lost my faith in the heat of its violence.”
Aminah felt cold. “The world is violent,” Aminah said, reciting one of the most primitive truths. “Is it not?”
“It is. But I remember a time when religion brought us peace without violence. It is so much easier not to believe now. Easier and saner. So I close these windows and I drive.” He laughed, a tired smoker’s hack all too familiar to Aminah from her nursing days.
“You should have your lungs checked,” she told him.
“Yes.” He honked twice at a slow passenger vehicle in front of him. “Yes, I know.” He glanced back at her again. “You would be surprised how many people cry in taxis. Very surprised. But no one worries about my cough, until you. No one cares.”
“Then, may I ask you one more question?” She struggled to get this out. “If you have lost your faith, as you say, then have you also lost God?”
“I have not lost God, miss. What I have lost is the idea that I can ever know what God is. That is why religion has become a curse on the earth. Nobody can know. But everybody presumes. Many are willing to kill without knowing. Without even thinking.”
She felt sickened by his blasphemy, because it touched the doubts crowding her mind. She went deeper into herself for strength.
Prayer was like a fence, expanding outward. Protecting her faith.
Obviously, this taxi driver was a test sent by God at her moment of truth. She rejoiced that Allah would strengthen her resolve in this way. So important was her mission.
“The museum,” said the driver, crossing both lanes of Fifth Avenue from East Eighty-sixth, pulling up at the curb in front of the massive temple to art.
Aminah reached into her skirt pocket. She carried no identification, only cash, as instructed. She handed a twenty over the seat. The fare was twelve dollars. “Six back,” she said to the infidel, a knowing lilt to her voice.
He nodded, perhaps aware of how abruptly she had ended their conversation. He made change, retaining his two-dollar tip. “Thank you, miss.”
She looked at him one more time via the rearview mirror, imagining she saw some evidence of the hidden God in his eyes. She nodded to him, charged by the exchange, feeling a surge of gratitude for God’s greatness. Aminah slid across the seat to the curb side of the car, the messenger bag still in her lap. She opened the door—but then hesitated, tapping on the Plexiglas that partially divided the front seat from the back.
In English, she said to the driver, “Peace be upon you.”
She exited and watched the yellow vehicle join the others, fading into the flow of traffic. Standing on the sidewalk in front of the museum, she felt her senses reawaken, following their momentary banishment by fear.
It was a beautiful evening, historic, holy. The sidewalk was full of people whose general good cheer was unmistakable. Conversations ricocheted off the stone bluff of the blocklong building as they passed her. The air was scented with the steamy hot dog and pretzel aromas from the vendors’ carts on the sidewalk—flavors of her youth. She saw God in the face of every person around her.
Aminah lifted the messenger bag onto her right shoulder like a handbag, turned right up Fifth Avenue, and started toward the entrance to Central Park just a few h
undred feet away.
Chapter 48
Gersten buzzed the third-floor apartment from the stoop. It was early evening in the city’s old Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Midtown West. She was just around the corner from the firehouse at Forty-eighth and Eighth, which, of all the fire stations in New York City, had lost the most personnel on 9/11.
She had two patrolmen with her. She motioned to them to stay tight against the prewar building, so as not to be viewed from above. There was no camera in the lobby.
“Yes?” came the male voice.
“Mr. Pierrepont?” said Gersten.
“Yes. Are you from Scandinavian Airlines?”
She said, “We spoke a little while ago?”
“Yes. Come on up.”
The locked door buzzed and Gersten pulled it open, the cops following her inside. She skipped the elevator—the wait in these old buildings could be an eternity—and instead used the carpeted staircase, climbing to the third floor.
The twentysomething man waiting at the door wore a cardigan sweater over a T-shirt and dress pants, and had a brown mustache. His smile faltered when he saw the uniformed police officers coming up the stairs behind her.
“Is there a problem, miss . . .?”
“Gersten,” she said, showing him her Intel shield. “Krina Gersten. Mr. Pierrepont, the truth is, I’m not with Scandinavian Air, but the New York Police Department.” The two cops caught up with her. “Mind if we step inside, out of the hallway?”
After a moment of held breath, he backed inside, allowing them to enter.
The one-bedroom apartment was a little jewel, with built-in bookcases, a rehearsal corner under a skylight with a sheet music holder set upon a small, round Oriental rug, and framed New York Philharmonic posters on the walls.
“I don’t understand what this is about,” he said, short of breath, pale.
“Are you alone, Mr. Pierrepont?”
“I am, yes.”
One of the cops poked his head in the doorway to the bedroom and around the corner into the kitchen, making sure. “You were a passenger on Flight 903, the airliner that was almost hijacked on Thursday?”
“Indeed I was,” he said. “You called and said you had a gift for me, for my inconvenience.”
“I actually have some questions for you about your seatmate on the flight.”
Pierrepont was slow to react, thinking it through. He shook his head, too casually. “I think I’ve answered every question about the flight already.”
“This is about Mr. Alain Nouvian. He was seated to your immediate left. He was one of the five passengers who intervened to stop the hijacker.”
Pierrepont swallowed. “Yes?” he said.
Gersten motioned to his rehearsal space. “I see you are a violinist yourself?”
“A violist. I play the viola. Bigger than a violin, smaller than a cello.”
“You play professionally?”
“Yes and no. I do, but not full time. I want to play full time.”
Gersten nodded. “And is Mr. Nouvian assisting you in that respect?”
Pierrepont began to answer, then stopped himself. “I’m not clear on what rights I have.”
“He tried to contact you earlier this afternoon. He left you a message, which you may even still have on your voice mail.”
She was wearing him down, but he did not yet give up on playing at incomprehension.
Gersten backed off a bit. “Would you please read Mr. Pierrepont his rights, officer?” she said.
It was painful watching the musician try to maintain his composure while the cop rattled off his Miranda rights.
“Yes,” he said, answering the question of whether he understood his rights. He said it in an exasperated why-me? tone.
Gersten said, “Mr. Pierrepont, I don’t want to arrest you.” In truth, she had nothing to arrest him for, just yet. “I don’t want to subject you to any unnecessary public scrutiny. I don’t even want to take up too much of your time. But I do want you to answer my questions.”
“This is exactly what he said he didn’t want,” said Pierrepont suddenly. “Exactly what he was afraid of.”
“Okay,” said Gersten. “Maybe you have heard about what happened to another of your fellow passengers? Less than an hour ago, down in the flower district?”
Pierrepont’s shocked expression told her that he had. “You mean, that man . . . he was on our flight too?”
“A second terrorist. I need answers, Mr. Pierrepont. I need to know what you two and Mr. Nouvian were talking about.”
Chapter 49
Dubin had his feet up on his desk, tilted back in his big leather judge’s chair. He was the picture of relief. Stopping the Saudi took heat off him from about eight different directions.
“So what do you want, Fisk? A bigger office?”
Fisk smiled, playing along. “This one is nice.”
Dubin shook his finger no-no-no. “Maybe if you had caught the bastard alive.”
“I know it,” Fisk said.
“He fired on officers. This kamikaze shit is the toughest nut of all. Now I’ve got to put a tac team cop on leave, pending the shooting inquest. No way to keep this quiet, Fisk. This is going out over the news as a big win.”
Fisk nodded, though it didn’t feel that way to him.
Dubin continued. “Won’t know for sure until they test it, but looks like a half pound of TATP in the shoulder bag. The stuff they call ‘Mother of Satan.’ Remember that Shah attempt in Times Square? Same thing. They love that shit. Mixing it makes them feel like fucking mad scientists.”
“But where’d he get it? Traces in his hotel room, but he didn’t make it there. Hasn’t been in town long enough to mix and cool it.”
“The penthouse suite, hmm? Not very Muslim of him.” Dubin pulled his feet off his desk, sitting forward. “It was given to him, I’d say.”
Fisk said, “A half pound of homemade boom is not much either. Where was he headed with it? And a loaded weapon?”
“All compelling questions.”
“And with no detonator.”
“Yeah. I don’t like that part either. Maybe that was his next stop, where he was headed. Or—you can detonate with a gun, can’t you? Even impact. Looked at that way, he did have a detonator tucked inside his shoulder holster. We got the rocket body from beneath his bed. I think he was zeroed in on the fireworks. Forty thousand fireworks for America, one exploding rocket from Al-Qaeda.”
“All they need for impact.”
“It only takes one. Presumably he was going to do some damage—we don’t yet know where—then try to make a late flight back to Saudi Arabia.”
“We didn’t find the igniter,” Fisk reminded him. “For forty-eight hours now we’ve been straight out, trying to find this guy without any hard evidence he was up to no good. Now we have that evidence—and we still don’t really know what’s going on.”
“The picture will become clearer over the next twenty-four hours, once we unravel this thing. Point is, we got him. We did our job. This is a huge boost to Intel, and ought to silence the naysayers—at least for a couple of news cycles.”
Fisk left Dubin with his victory. He flopped into his office chair and awakened his laptop, closing his eyes for a few moments to ruminate on what had happened.
A Yemeni had tried to take over an airliner bound for New York. A flight attendant and some passengers stopped him. Under interrogation, the Yemeni confessed that he intended to crash the plane into midtown Manhattan at rush hour ahead of the July Fourth holiday weekend. Then he clammed up.
Before departure from Stockholm, at least one passenger witnessed the Yemeni talking to a well-dressed Saudi Arabian businessman booked into the business-class cabin. When the Saudi arrived in New York, he avoided the city’s Muslim neighborhoods, hiding out instead in Chelsea. H
e murdered a contact in Harlem on Friday night, shopped for a rocket and a messenger bag on Saturday morning. The rocket body was discovered beneath the hotel bed. The Saudi had explosives on him when he was killed, though not enough for a major attack.
But they still had no idea how or where he procured them. Or where the rocket igniter was.
Fisk opened his eyes and reached for his phone. He needed to update Gersten, but more than that, he needed someone to help him untangle this mess.
Chapter 50
Gersten ignored her buzzing phone, standing with The Six watching the news update on the hospitality suite television.
The anchorwoman spoke over footage shot from the corner of Twenty-eighth Street and Seventh Avenue, showing investigators and members of the coroner’s office—all in white Tyvek suits—going over the sidewalk in front of the Hotel Indigo. Gersten thought she recognized Fisk to the left, talking with someone from the hotel.
“New York City police commissioner Raymond W. Kelly’s office has confirmed that a terrorist plot has been thwarted. A Saudi Arabian male carrying a loaded handgun and a bag of explosives was shot and killed by police snipers outside a Chelsea hotel a short while ago. Police say the shooting came after an intensive search for the man by New York police. One unconfirmed report states that the dead man was a passenger on Scandinavian Airlines Flight 903, the plane aboard which on Thursday an attempted hijacking was thwarted by hero passengers. We will continue to bring you breaking developments as they come in.”
DeRosier muted the television with the remote control.
The group was shocked.
Flight attendant Maggie said, “What the hell does that mean?”
Colin Frank’s eyes sparked with excitement. “Means there was an even bigger plot at play here.”
Gersten held up a hand to settle them down. “We still don’t know for sure, but one theory is that this man was a backup plan in case the hijacking was foiled. I will say that, for a while today, there was some concern that this man’s target might be you six.”