“Okay, I’ll have to clear it with the supervisory special agent who has this caper, but I think we can make it work.”
****
Agents interviewed the landlord, an Italian immigrant, Angelo Severino, who owned two other buildings in the area. Predictably, he identified the picture of Aaffia as the tenant and confirmed that she had paid the rent three years in advance in cash.
Severino, a bit befuddled by the intrusive questions, told the investigating agent, “Look, she said she had an online business and needed the place for about three years. She signed a lease and paid upfront. I declared the income. What am I supposed to do, check out the name? Dahlia Aher sounded about right to me, no?”
Severino said he observed nothing suspicious in Khan’s activity and claimed she only was in the clubroom occasionally during the day. There was no pattern to her uses but he suspected she often went there late at night, a time that would have been early in the day in Europe.
Nick and Team 1 waited anxiously for the computer data from the exploitation unit. With some help from an NSA representative on the New York Joint Terrorism Task Force, the final report was filled with a lot of intelligence information. The FBI crime scene unit had found Aaffia’s fingerprints all over the clubroom, but only her latent prints were discovered.
Aaffia Khan had indeed been using the VoIP function, and she had an online account with a local ISP. She had used false registration information and paid by a money order. Her online searches were limited but seemed focused on radical websites. There was only one email message and it was apparently sent to the United Kingdom, and an overseas telephone number was stored too, both found in the FBI ACS database but without specific locations. The email message was cryptic: “54/311+3/124/34.”
Nick Brennan called John Planner right away on a secure telephone. “John, I just forwarded an email address and message with a telephone number to you guys. They both resolve to the UK. Can you help us out? It is from a hard drive Aaffia was using here in the city.”
“Standby, Nicky, we will work it up. My guys will look them over and I’ll get right back.”
Within two hours the secure phone in Nick’s office rang. Before the end of the first ring Nicky picked it up. “Johnny, what have you got?”
“Some helpful stuff, I hope. The email goes to Leeds University in the general Beeston Leeds area and was sent shortly before the phone call. The telephone is a public phone on that campus. The call was received at 03:59:10 and terminated at 4:03:04 in Leeds.” Planner continued, “Look, the university is a research center and has a whole shit load of computers. That email address goes to a computer network at the university and that public phone can be used by anyone, but at least we have narrowed it down a bit. The message itself is not an encrypted transmission and probably only has meaning to the correspondents, but since it was sent three days before the attempt the number three may be relevant.”
“What about the numbers 311 and 124, any thoughts about that?”
“Not right now, but we’ll see. The crypto guys will review it.”
“Has Leeds University come up before?”
“Yeah, a lot it is a hotbed of some radical chatter, but nothing firm. Nick, we are moving forward; stay on that azimuth.”
“No sweat, Johnny boy, as long as you don’t make me climb any trees!”
About thirty minutes later John called again. “Nicky, the best the crypto guys could figure is that 311 is a telephone symbol and call number for information, basically a nonemergency number. When it is 11:00 a.m. EDT in New York it is 4:00 p.m. in Leeds. The number three may be like we said, a reference to the bomb date being three days hence. We’ll see. 124 is similarly an open question.”
****
At the Team 1 meeting the next morning Nicky brought everyone up to date. The official information would come later from NSA to the FBI in the form of a cable, but Nick knew it was important for the team to get the information right away.
Jack Mason as usual set the agenda, “This thing is taking us back to the UK but not London. We need to track it on the front lines. Nick, I want you and Bob Phillips to go to England and hook up with our ALAT in London and have him put you together with MI-5.”
“Where do you think this takes us, Jack?”
“The Metropolitan Police tend to focus on the capital. We need a broader perspective. MI-5 does the whole country the world even. Meet up with the Assistant Legal Attaché, Corey Rooker, and go to Leeds University and start something. Kristin, I want you to connect up with RCMP and Immigration and figure out how the hell Aaffia got here. Al, you and Kevin have to scour the city and try to figure out where Khan got her money—a hawala, maybe a foreign bank or some local cash provider. I don’t know, but she was living on something. Larry, go down to Fort Meade and meet with our NSA partners and our DIA comrades, especially Planner and Carrillo, and see what resources we can use. Bhiren is planning something, and we have to get him before he gets us.”
The meeting ended on an up note with a renewed sense of high morale; everyone felt the team had made some progress. But everyone also knew that Bhiren al Mohammed was still out there somewhere.
****
After Nick and Bob Phillips landed in London they were met at British Immigration in Gatwick by MI-5 agent Michael Bradford. He introduced himself, welcomed his intelligence community colleagues and stepped them through the formalities.
“Call me Mickey. I hate it, but that is what everyone calls me, even my wife and mother!”
“Nice to meet you, Mickey. I’m Nick Brennan, this is Bob Phillips,” Brennan said with a smile and his hand extended.
With a firm handshake and a crisp English accent, Mickey directed their next move, “Tomorrow we meet with Rooker. Tonight we go to a pub to bond.”
****
Corey Rooker had been the Assistant Legal Attaché, called the Alat, for almost five years. As an FBI special agent he was assigned a concentration in counterterrorism after a brief stint in cyber crime. He loved London and planned to stay as the Alat as long as he could. Working in the embassy, Corey was in constant contact with the CIA station chief and the NSA representatives stationed there. Among his other duties, he coordinated with the Metropolitan Police of London, widely known as the Met. The police service was also called New Scotland Yard, which was actually the main police building which derived its name from 4 Whitehall Place, the original headquarters of the Met. MI-5 was well known throughout the kingdom as the domestic intelligence service.
MI-5 is sometimes also known in the civil service community as Box 500, a reference to its original address.
Corey Rooker, a fifteen-year veteran of the FBI, enjoyed working with the British government and found their modern intelligence officers to be completely competent, if sometimes a bit overzealous.
History wasn’t so kind to Box 500; it had suffered enormous failures in World War II and in its early dealings with the IRA in the Irish War of Independence but made great strides in the war on terror.
Since the UK had no formal or single constitutional document its agents found interesting and creative ways to meet its daily security mission. Culturally, the Brits tended to rely heavily on electronic and human surveillance and like the FBI even paid citizens in a variety of fields to keep their ears to the ground.
That morning in Rooker’s office everyone sat around a conference table which was attached to and oddly running directly out from the front of Corey’s desk. Corey liked to sit in his preferred position “at the helm” while his guests were seated at the long, thin, dark tabletop.
After the introductions around the room Nick, started the dialogue, “Corey, as you know, we have the date and time of a telephone call placed by Aaffia Khan to a public booth on the campus of Leeds University three days before the attempted bombing in New York. The call was placed at about eleven a.m. New York time and around four p.m. in Leeds. We also have an email address that resolves to the university. The college has over thirty-thre
e thousand students and faculty and is the center of some radical chatter and recognized research; together, that is scary!”
Mickey joined in, “Even though the campus is urbanized or ‘red brick’ as they say, there are no security cameras right around the phone box. One CCTV camera is several hundred feet away on the steps leading down from a nearby building. There is another about a hundred feet away at another exit and entrance to the main building. The other two approaches to the telephone box on the sidewalk have pole cameras at varying distances. There are thousands of computers on the campus in virtually every department with no realistic way for MI-5 to check each. As best we can figure, there is no VoIP capability on any of the institution’s machines.”
Bob Phillips was thinking in terms of a plan to get started. “Let’s go from the specific to the general. Can we get copies of the images we do have around that public telephone near the time of the call from New York?”
Rooker answered, “Yes, we have them all being reviewed right now. At the precise time of the call many students and others traveled through that area. Many of the images are fleeting and some only show people from the back. When you guys are ready to look them over, let me know.”
“Corey, I’d like to see them before we go up to Leeds, okay?” Brennan asked.
“Sure, no sweat.”
About an hour later Mickey, Nick and Bob went into the SCIF in the embassy and began looking at the tapes on their secure computer. Mickey was among a few foreigners who were cleared for SCIF entry; based on the need-to-know prohibitions, all classified information unrelated to the present case was secured before he entered.
Looking at the images, all agreed Corey Rooker was right: there were many people passing in and out of the camera’s lens. They decided to look at the tapes beginning fifteen minutes before the call and compare that with people perhaps reentering the building or leaving sometime shortly after the call was terminated.
“What time is it in New York right now?” Nick asked Bob.
“It is ten o’clock here, so it five a.m. in New York. There is a five-hour difference and in case you are wondering, it is November seventh, 11/7.”
“There is another example of you Yanks getting it wrong. November seventh is seven November, properly expressed as 7/11,” Bradford opined with a smile, “and it is a telephone box, not booth.”
“No matter, I just want to send these tapes to Andy Fischer’s crew. Maybe Banke can give us some tips.”
“They get to work at about seven, so in a couple of hours we can talk to them, but let’s go ahead and just email them now,” Bob suggested.
“Mickey what is the layout? You know, where is the telephone booth in relation to other buildings and approaches, and is it obvious that one can’t be observed while on the phone?”
“Here, let me show you the satellite image of that part of the campus.” Opening up a folder, Mickey said, “Here is the booth as you call it. Here is the main building and here is the attached building. Over here one could approach the telephone box on the sidewalk away from those buildings but probably would be captured on video from the security cameras set up high on these poles right here. My best estimate is that the person who took that call is in the tapes somewhere, but there is no image of him or her actually on the line, and a cautious and prudent person would know that.”
The three continued to study the tapes and view them against the satellite blowup. It just seemed like entirely too many people, Brennan thought.
The secure line rang and Bob Phillips picked it up, “OS Phillips.”
“Phillips, this is Banke in Brooklyn. I just read your email. Let me look over the pictures and see if I see anything. I’ll call again in a little bit.”
****
Banke began the task by slowly going through the file to get an idea of its length and complexity. Then he watched the films at real speed and then slowed them down to observe them in slow motion. There were apparently four different cameras dated and time stamped. He decided he could coordinate them and make time-sensitive comparisons. At first blush Arthur thought that no one person was seen on any two or more separate videos. But as he studied the images more closely, there were indeed three people captured on two different cameras.
Arthur called Nick at the embassy about three hours later. Nick put the call on speakerphone. “Brennan, I did a quick pass over the reels. I didn’t see the same person in any two frames from different camera angles, but I did see a general pattern of behavior. When I looked more closely, I realized I was wrong, I think.”
“What do you mean, Arthur?”
“Look, the way I do this is based on the techniques a BDO develops. A behavior detection officer approach; a bomber leaving a device as it explodes never looks back. Everyone is shocked and looking at the carnage as he continues to walk—you know immediately he is your bomber. When we are impatient or running late at a traffic light we stare at it thinking it will change more quickly. We often exhibit certain behavior as we engage in certain activities.”
“What did you pick up?”
“Well, when someone has an appointment he walks with purpose and often looks at a watch, clock or the cell phone for the time. This is especially true as he approaches the place he has to be at a certain time; the more important the meeting the more frequent the behavior, and the person is usually a little early. It’s like TEDD with the surveillance specialist—certain things fit.”
“Okay, so what have you got?”
“Out of all those many people captured by those cameras, with the proviso that the pole cameras without enhancement don’t give us a clear facial, there are only about ten people, all males, at and around the time of the call who fit that profile, and five of them I think return to or enter the main building after the call was connected and completed. Three of the five approached a little earlier from the sidewalk and their faces are shot from a sort of oblique angle from above. The other one comes out of the main building and appears to return to it. The others either just walk by or maybe walk away unseen.”
“Okay, but on the return to the main building, can you see any faces?”
“Going out, yes, but no, not on the return. But we have their clothing, although the styles—jeans and jackets—are very common, I think I can make a tentative match with any facial we have coming out of the building before the call and probably anyone who appeared on the sidewalk, but I’m not sure. I’m going to have the photo unit try to enhance the sidewalk pole camera pictures and closely coordinate the timing frame by frame, but I think we’ve got something.”
Mickey spoke up, “Mister Banke, this is Mickey Bradford with MI-5. That is amazing; we had our analysts work up the pictures and so far they weren’t able to get as far as you seem to have. Can MI-5 help in any way?”
“Yes, Mister Bradford. Please have them discreetly measure in feet and inches the distances from each of the cameras to the phone booth.” Pausing, he went on, “And if possible have someone walk at a moderate pace from the front of the booth to the base of the steps of the main building.” Getting a bit more specific, he added, “Now please also measure the time walking from the last sidewalk camera if one were sitting looking left out from the phone booth to exactly the front door of the telephone box, as you call it.”
“Yes, of course we can do that. I think some of our analysts have already done some of those measurements.”
“Thank you, that will be very helpful. One other thing, since we know when the call was—10:59 New York—it would be useful to know when our guy actually went into the telephone. It may be earlier than we think. Any thoughts on that would be greatly appreciated. Brennan and Phillips, I will talk to you later.”
Later that day, Agent Bradford got a report back from his office. The nearest pole with a camera was 200 feet from the booth, and a medium-sized male with an average stride covered the distance in just about thirty-eight seconds—precisely 37.9 seconds. The camera nearest the main entrance steps was 101 feet a
way from the booth, and the male walker at a moderate pace covered that distance in nineteen seconds. While the other distances from other security cameras were also recorded and tested, Mickey knew that Arthur Banke was most interested in those two particular CCTV units.
“Here are all those measurements Banke requested, Nick,” Bradford said as he handed Brennan a set of papers.
“Thanks. I am going to email these to Brooklyn and Manhattan right away.”
It was getting close to seven in the evening in London, and it had been a long day, so Nick and Bob decided to go back to their small hotel rooms in the London borough of Kensington and Chelsea, just west of central London. Nick thought he would take a jog through the dark city streets before he and Bob had a late meal at the pub across from their accommodations.
****
Around seven the next morning Mickey rang the telephones in both hotel rooms Nick and Bob occupied and advised them he was downstairs with a car ready to take them up to the City of Leeds. With the morning sun just rising, the pair was already showered and dressed, and each grabbed a cup of coffee in the hotel lobby on their way to meet Bradford at the curb.
The trip to Leeds would take about three hours and twenty minutes and shuttle the three men pass the wooded countryside with the beautiful dark colors of the late autumn and the many small homes that dotted the landscape. Before entering Leeds they pulled into a local tavern for a meal and to clean up. Back on the road as the early afternoon approached, the bare trees were set against the orange and red southern horizon as the sun began to prepare to set in a few hours. While the sun would go down near five, the sky began its preparation with a bright light show this far north much earlier.
****
Nick and Bob were deeply impressed with the size and the layout of the institution formally known as the University of Leeds. The main building was a broad five-story light gray stone structure with a tall spire at its center and a large clock facing outward. The recessed front entranceway had four columns in the gothic style surrounding and in front of the large doorway with fifteen deeply set steps leading up to it. The building had ceiling-to-floor windows and took up the whole landscape. Similar-type buildings surrounded the main structure moving both left and right, out and back in a staggered pattern. The enormous campus included many other buildings in a variety of colors and styles, with some sporting a dull red brick look. The foot traffic provided the constant movement of people in every direction, and as Brennan and Phillips looked about they once again began to wonder how they would find just one character in this enormous sea of characters.
Once a Noble Endeavor Page 19