by Steve Israel
Enter Professor Roger Dierker from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and his theory of “graduated threat probability patterns.” Dierker, a consultant to the NSA, programmed NICK to dig through the infinite streams of information coursing through cyberspace and then pan it, sift it, sluice it. Separating nuggets of information from worthless muck. NICK channeled information through an elaborate series of constantly updated filters. He could process billions of reports, accounts, files, and records, and recognize any one of eighteen hundred (and growing) separate “terrorist behavioral indicators.” He knew the hundreds of word patterns most likely to be used in a terrorist e-mail or phone call, as well as the hundreds of code words to mask those communications. He knew the nearly two thousand favorite terrorist training camps, neighborhoods, and vacation spots, as well as the terrorists’ “fifty preferred hedge funds.” NICK even knew the top twenty songs most likely to be downloaded to the My Favorites category of a terrorist’s iPod.
NICK was a high-tech police profiler. He didn’t pull people off the highway based on how they looked; he pulled them from the information superhighway based on what they did. It didn’t matter whether data was fed directly to him, or just happened to be passing by on its way to a Google Search. NICK saw it all. Police reports filed, arrests made, and tip lines called; passports presented, countries visited and miles traveled; Internet sites viewed and music downloaded; DVDs rented, books bought and books borrowed. Reservations for planes, trains, cars, hotels, motels; certain magazine subscriptions ordered, certain organizations joined, certain petitions signed, certain donations sent; applications for drivers’ licenses, pilots’ licenses, or licenses in any one of one hundred and sixty-five “occupations of elevated threat”; purchases of guns, uniforms, fertilizer, or any of over two thousand substances that didn’t mix well; credit reports with balances that spiked or slumped, as well as charges made, charges paid, cards applied for, and cards declined, cards reported lost, stolen, damaged; bank accounts opened, bank accounts closed, transfers in and transfers out; suspicious deposits or unusual withdrawals; birth certificates, death certificates, changes of address, visas, and passports; tax forms, immigration forms. Any form of information that could be useful to NICK.
Scanning, checking, comparing, contrasting, and cross-referencing in a ceaseless search for patterns. Reaching across innumerable bytes of information and making them all add up.
If someone blew a stop sign and received a ticket, NICK knew it. If they had a foreign birth certificate and blew a stop sign near an apartment on the federal terror watch list, NICK noted it. If they also used certain word patterns in their e-mails, NICK wouldn’t like the taste of that. He would try to wash it down with phone records, bank statements, travel information, and plenty more. He would gorge on private details. And after sucking it all in, if NICK learned of some unusual fluctuations in a savings account and some wire transfers from certain places, he would exhale a well-nourished, satisfied breath, and transmit a threat-pattern advisory. It could be a Level 5, meaning NICK wanted to keep his eternal eyes on you and your records. Or it could be a Level 1, which meant that you were about to hear a knock on your door. A few people in suits and sunglasses would ask you some questions. You’ve been nailed by NICK.
Rove blew a long whistle from his lips and asked: “What’s to stop this from spying on innocent Americans? Accidentally, I mean?”
Libby exhaled impatiently. “We take privacy rights very seriously, Karl. We have checks and balances. Safeguards. This government does not spy on the American people.”
MORNINGS WITH MORRIS
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 4, 2004
Just as on every morning for the past thirty-four years, Rona’s alarm clock that Wednesday was the sound of Morris awakening at precisely seven fifteen she heard him stirring beside her in bed. He lifted himself with a resigned sigh, and shuffled toward the bathroom. Rona knew that Morris would pee at seven eighteen, gargle his mouthwash and brush his teeth by seven twenty, and shave, shower, and dress by exactly seven forty. Then the slightest breeze of Calvin Klein aftershave would pass over Rona as he left the bedroom. By seven forty-five AM he would be sitting in the kitchen sipping his coffee, chewing on a toasted bagel with two slices of Swiss, and turning the pages of the newspaper that he retrieved from the curb. That scent of coffee and a toasted bagel was Rona’s signal. At eight fifteen she would join Morris in the kitchen for a good-bye kiss. At eight thirty he would close the door with a soft thud and go to work. That was Morris’s morning. Every morning. As precise and predictable as an atomic clock.
Rona pulled the blankets to her cheeks, blinked at Morris as he dragged his feet to the bathroom, and thought, God forbid the man should sleep late one day. Or go really crazy and have his bagel before getting dressed. God forbid he changes his routine.
There was a time when Rona tried to change Morris’s routine. To coax him from his seat in front of Turner Classic Movies by changing the scenery of their marriage. Once, she enrolled them in the adult lecture series at Long Island University. The course was American History. Morris never made it any further than the Pilgrims. She tried to accommodate his love of old movies by joining the Cinema Arts Centre in Huntington. But Morris said he didn’t like movies with subtitles or post-film discussion groups.
So she gave up on trying to change Morris and kept trying to change the world. Which seemed easier. She joined the Great Neck Democratic Committee and the Hadassah Social Action Committee and the North Shore Breast Cancer Action League. She volunteered for local political campaigns. She conducted on-line debates. Not on computers, but on lines at supermarkets and bakeries and the women’s apparel department at Bloomingdale’s. She reconciled to her and Morris’s uneasy truce. Morris survived by not making waves. Rona survived by acting like one of those wave machines at the science fair.
Which is how their marriage survived.
Plus, she thought, With all the mishagas in the world—this one divorcing that one, almost half of Great Neck having affairs with the other half—I should count my blessings.
She knew one thing about Morris: A man who won’t take chances by attending adult education wasn’t a high risk for adultery.
Of that much she was certain.
THE TYPE-A G-MAN
THURSDAY, AUGUST 5, 2004
It was in parking lot section L-5 that Agent Fairbanks’s infamous temper erupted for the first time that morning.
He stomped on the brake pedal. His car screeched to a stop. He grabbed the steering wheel as if he were strangling it, and emitted a “Jeeeeeeeezuuuz H” so long and loud that it rattled his car windows, carried clear across the parking lot.
In the Department of Homeland Security Employee Assistance Program, Fairbanks would angrily insist that all mistakes didn’t make him angry—only mistakes caused by laziness made him angry. And right there, sitting for the entire world to see in Section L, Row 5, Space 8 of 285 Melville Corporate Center, Quadrangle 1, was a lazy mistake. A lazy mistake that could result in an elevated threat to the United States of America.
Fairbanks poked hard at his cell phone.
“May I help you,” Marie’s voice answered, in a bureaucratic tone that sounded as if she meant to say, “Only a few months to my retirement, must I help you?”
“It’s me. Get me Agent Russell.”
A few seconds passed, and Russell’s voice trembled into the phone.
“Agent Russell. I’m curious. Do you by any chance recall where you parked your vehicle today?” Fairbanks felt his throat constrict around his words, chafing his voice.
“Uuuuhhhh—”
“Because I do. I know where you parked today. And yesterday. In space L-five-eight.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Now, Agent Russell. Tell me. Why does parking your vehicle in this particular location violate my DHS Subagency Parking Directive NYM-PD-three?”
“Sir,” Russe
ll quivered. “NYM-PD-three states that employees using the parking lot should avoid parking in the same parking space every day. Sir, I was going—”
“And why should we avoid parking in the same location, Agent Russell?”
“Sir, because if a terrorist cell is conducting surveillance, we self-identify our vehicles to them.”
“And why don’t we want to self-identify our vehicles to them?”
“Sir, to avoid anything that may compromise homeland security or cause potentially life-threatening actions against our persons or property.”
“Which is why our vehicles are what, Agent Russell?”
“Unmarked vehicles, sir.”
“And when you park in the same location, on two consecutive mornings, in a building publicly known as the site of a DHS office, what have you done?”
“Sir, I have marked the unmarked vehicle.”
“Yes, you have. Now, get your ass down here and move this vehicle, or I will have it and you both transferred to North Korea!”
“Yes, sir. On my way, sir.”
To say that Agent Tom Fairbanks’s temper got the best of him was to describe his entire career in federal law enforcement. Thirty years of personnel files were splattered with similar evaluations: “A ticking time bomb”; “A grenade with the pin pulled halfway out”; “We gave him a gun?,” and “STRONGLY recommend anger management therapy” (with three red lines scrawled angrily under the word “STRONGLY”).
Agent Fairbanks could not contain his temper, and so his temper contained him—in the Melville, Long Island, regional field office of the Department of Homeland Security’s Subagency of Intelligence and Analysis. The field office was Washington’s latest strategic doctrine in the global War on Terror: the best offense is a good flowchart. No looming attack, no catastrophic hurricane, no national emergency, was so grave that it couldn’t be handled with a good reshuffling of the bureaucracy.
Agent Fairbanks had been shuffled and reshuffled. He was frayed and brittle and now discarded to the bottom of the deck: in Melville, Long Island. Of course, were it not for his reputation for uncontrolled rage, he might be starting his day in more challenging locales: FBI offices in Manhattan or perhaps even in Delhi or Mumbai. But his FBI days were behind him. The FBI had been a stop in his federal law enforcement career. A brief stop.
Fairbanks entered his corner office. A small window, shielded by dented and stained aluminum blinds, offered surveillance of the immense parking lot four floors below. He separated two slats and saw Agent Russell racing back to the office, darting through the endless lanes of cars, like a rat navigating a maze.
The office was spartan. A lonely leather chair sat caddy corner to his desk, and dark gray file cabinets were pushed up against a far wall. The walls were decorated as an afterthought. A Census Bureau map of Long Island dominated the wall opposite the window, resembling a trophy fish. Above his desk were two framed citations in cheap black frames: the Huntington Township Rotary Club “Law Enforcement Man of the Year Award” from 2003, and a Proclamation from the Town of Oyster Bay (“Whereas Agent Thomas Fairbanks has made a vital contribution to the safety of the residents of Oyster Bay . . . Whereas Agent Thomas Fairbanks represents the qualities of leadership, dedication, and sacrifice that emblify”—was that a word, Fairbanks wondered when he received it—“public service; Now, therefore, be it resolved that the citizens of Oyster Bay do hereby thank Thomas Fairbanks for his service to our Town and to the United States . . .”).
The only evidence that Fairbanks had a life outside the department was the gold, tri-fold picture frame on his desk, displaying his three children. There was TJ (now president of his junior high school class); Trisha (who had just organized the Sweethollow Middle School Christian Conservative Kids’ Club); and Timothy (who, last summer, led his T-ball league in stolen bases, despite a league rule against stealing bases). “They are their father’s children,” people remarked when they gazed at the photographs, in the same tone they used after clucking their tongues and nodding their heads when they passed a traffic accident on the highway. The boys’ shining blond crew cuts gave them a halo effect; and their bright blue eyes sparkled with a pride and confidence that some mistook for a disturbing, possibly psychotic, arrogance. Trisha’s long blond hair fell to her shoulders. She parted it just like her favorite television star, Ann Coulter. And each child boasted what the family called “the Fairbanks smile”: thin lips pressed together, angular jaws clamped forward, cheeks clenched. As if their faces had to be bolted on tight to contain the volcanic anger within. The Fairbanks children looked angry just like Daddy.
He removed the only item from his in-box. It was a copy of the DHS NEW YORK REPORT, the department’s monthly newsletter. Fairbanks despised it. Every glossy issue taunted him with graphic reminders of his current predicament. There was a photo of McCarthy, the female director of the Buffalo office, announcing the break-up of an attempted border infiltration from Canada. There was Schiff, at a press conference with the Governor, announcing a bust in Binghamton. Binghamton, for Christ’s sake! Serrano in the Bronx, and Bishop in Syracuse. But no room for Fairbanks. As if his office wasn’t even a part of the department. As if they weren’t on the map. As if nothing ever happened on Long Island.
Marie’s lethargic knocking rescued him from his anger. “You told me to remind you. So I am,” she whined.
Fairbanks stared at her. “Remind me about what?”
Annoyance spread across her face. “Your conference call. It starts in fifteen minutes.”
As if the employee newsletter isn’t bad enough.
It was the weekly ITACCC—Interagency Threat Assessment and Coordination Conference Call. It would be like all the others. He would sit at his desk, holding the phone with one hand as if to choke it, while beating a pen against his desk with the other hand. Each of his colleagues would report on the latest threats in Buffalo and Brooklyn and Onondaga and Oneonta and Saugerties and Syracuse. Threats here, threats there, threats everywhere. There would be all the hoopla about what happened in Albany. Two leaders of a mosque had been arrested for participating in a terrorist conspiracy. In Albany! Sting operations and investigations and threats everywhere except Long Island. Cut off from the United States by some damned glacier eons ago, cut off now from the color-coded warnings, advisories, and alerts that rolled in from Washington every morning. And at the end of the conference call, the senior agent would ask, almost like a set-up joke in a nightclub comedy act, “How ’bout you, Long Island? You got anything out on Long Island? A break-in at the mall? Not enough low-fat skim milk at the Starbucks? Bada-bing!”
Still, there was some hope. Maybe something came up over the weekend.
Fairbanks had two ways of finding out.
“Send in Agent Russell. When’s he’s back from his little stroll through the parking lot,” he ordered Marie.
Russell appeared minutes later, panting and disheveled, his blond hair blown in all directions across his head, his tie flipped over his shoulder. He hugged a thicket of unruly files against his chest.
“You’re late,” Fairbanks snapped. “I have my conference call in ten minutes. And you’re late.”
“I was moving my—I’m sorry sir.”
“What do you have for me? Anything?”
Russell repositioned the files against his chest and struggled to pull one out. “Actually, sir, I think this time we do have something.”
Fairbanks’s eyes widened. “Really?”
Russell rarely saw his boss pleased. And right now, he seemed on the brink of pleasure. “Yes, sir. We received a call from the county police. One of their undercover guys picked up some intel at a mosque in Bay Shore Friday night. Next week, the Long Island Council of Islamic Clerics will be hosting a meeting with a special visitor. So special, that he is on the watch list’s offfff . . .” his voice trailed as he pulled another paper from the stack against his
chest “. . . the NSC, the DIA, the JSC, the BFIA, Interpol, Mossad, the Saudis, the Paks, . . . and us.”
Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! “Who is it?”
“We have some surveillance photos,” continued Russell. “Taken in Karachi, Amman, Kuwait City, Madrid, and Detroit. And now he’s on his way here. To our neck of the woods, sir.” He tried to balance himself as he hugged the files with one arm and pulled out a dozen black-and-white photographs with the other. He spread the images across Fairbanks’s desk, like a card dealer in Vegas. Fairbanks leaned forward, his eyes squinting.
“What’s his name? Give me his name!”
“Sir, he goes by the alias of Akrim al-Dulaimi.”
“What else do you have, Russell? Anything? Jesus H!” He gathered the photographs on his desk and was going to fling them at Russell. But Russell’s arms were holding the other files against his body, and all that would do is create a mess. So he tossed them in the garbage behind him.
“But, sir. Our sources believe that Dulaimi is a credible threat. And he’s having a meeting right here—”
“I know what our sources think!” Fairbanks barked. He rubbed his throbbing temples. An anger-management coach taught him this technique. Visualize the pressure dropping, lower and lower. Down, down, down. Visualize it subsiding. But he couldn’t. He’s one of ours, he wanted to shout. The county’s undercover unit is hot on the trail of an FBI undercover asset. Let the meeting happen. There’ll be twenty cops and ten real people and not a terrorist among them!
But Fairbanks couldn’t say these things to Agent Russell. Or anyone else. He couldn’t even tell the county police that they were wasting resources trying to bring an undercover operative to justice. At some point, they would either drop him or arrest him. As with so many others. Fairbanks knew that everyone jumped on judges for appearing so lenient with certain suspected terrorists. Half the time they get a friendly phone call from Washington at the last minute. “Hey, Your Honor . . . errr, you know that the defendant you’re about to put away for plotting the destruction of the United States of America? Errr, he’s actually in the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program . . . that’s right . . . yes, he’s very convincing . . . no, we couldn’t say anything earlier because it would compromise national security assets . . . thanks for understanding . . . just a heads-up . . . keep it quiet . . . bye now.”