Inauguration Day

by Claude Salhani

  “Not really,” replied the Secret Service agent. “Let’s not jump to conclusions too fast. This is by far not entirely in the terrorist’s advantage. The podium where the president will be sworn in is guarded from the time it is built. It is checked by dogs and bomb-sniffing machines before the president arrives. We will now add chemical and biological sniffers too. The entire perimeter is secured and sterilized. So are all other locations POTUS will attend. What always worries us after the inauguration is when the president heads back towards 1600 and decides to walk, shake hands, and mingle with the crowds. That is the most dangerous time for us.”

  “Yes, I understand,” said Laura, “But you must understand the way Omar thinks. In his mind, he’s already sure his plan will work. There are no ifs. He’s not counting on the off-chance the president will or will not get out of his presidential bulletproof, bomb-proof limousine to shake a few hands. No one, including you gentlemen, know where or when the president will decide to walk or meet the crowds, right? That’s not good enough for Omar. He’s already chosen his location. He already knows where and when he will strike. In his mind, he will not fail, and will not leave such a major detail to chance. He has gone over his plan again and again. He is now convinced that he cannot fail and is waiting to strike.”

  “Well, that really kind of narrows it down a bit for us. It really eliminates a number of options. All we need to do is find out where and when that is,” said one of the Secret Service agents.

  “What about the rest of the day?” asked Potter.

  “There are the usual galas in the evening. Again, no fixed agenda announced, and we don’t know until the last minute which inauguration balls POTUS and FLOTUS will attend. What is known is that the First Couple will attend several functions, but with no fixed time. These are issues they decide at the last moment,” said the Secret Service agent. “The order in which the First Couple decide which ball they will attend has much to do with how much the Republican Party in that particular state was able to raise and how vital their contribution to the election has been.”

  “It seems clear to me that he’ll need to have visible contact with the president before he can detonate his device, or attack,” said the FBI agent.

  “It certainly looks that way,” agreed Royce.

  “All right, that sure makes our job somewhat easier,” said Potter, the FBI man. “Let’s back up a bit here. I think we hit on something. You say this man already picked out his hit and knows where and how he will strike?”

  “Yes, that’s right,” replied Laura. “I am sure of it. He would not be wasting his time waiting somewhere on the off-chance that the president might or might not pass by.”

  “Great. In that case, that information is public knowledge, something he picked up from the media. Let’s look at the options, see what’s been published and go over it. If he has that information, then we can access it too. The agenda is simple. We know there is the church service in the morning. We know there is the inauguration ceremony at noon and we know there is the walk down Pennsylvania Avenue before he reaches 1600. The rest is up for grabs. No other fixed settings or times,” said the senior Secret Service agent.

  “Cancel the walk,” said Royce. “We don’t know exactly where it will take place.”

  “Even better,” agreed the Secret Service agent. “That narrows it down to two possibilities: the church and the Hill.”

  “The Hill. That’s where I would strike,” said Potter. “That’s where the president will be the most vulnerable and that’s where we must concentrate all our efforts.

  “In the meantime, gentlemen, we have less than four days to track this bastard down. We need to find out when, where, and how he entered the country, where he is staying, and what he has been doing all this time. We must check all Washington hotels for Arab nationals, all car rental agencies and airlines. Mr. Potter will be your point man on this case. Between now and the inauguration, I would like us to meet twice a day, at seven every evening and six in the morning for situation updates. Gentlemen, you have your work cut out for you. Good luck, and may God help us.”

  “Just one more thing, Mr. Royce,” said Laura.

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  “I’d like to bring in Clayborne to help out. He has also seen Omar. He can help.”

  “Clayborne? Now who might he be?”

  “He’s the journalist, sir,” interjected Potter. “The one who gave us the pictures.”

  “No ma’am, I don’t want no goddamned newspaper man in on this operation.”

  “Sir, I think Miss Atwood might have something here,” said Potter. “He’ll cooperate with us. He’s not a threat. I’ve already spoken to him. He’s the one who came to us with the pictures.”

  “Well, fine, do it, if you must, but by God, keep it quiet. I don’t want to read about this in tomorrow’s Post. Do it, but grab that S.O.B. fast.”

  It was a gargantuan task to find a man in a city the size of Washington, and in that short a time. Every available FBI and Secret Service agent was put on the case. Additional agents were called in from cities as far away as San Diego and Seattle. Several agents were positioned around the Capitol building just in case Omar returned. They knew it was a long shot, but they had little else to go on. Hundreds of agents visited hotels and car rental agencies. They intended to start with those closest to the Capitol and gradually work their way to the Virginia and Maryland suburbs.

  By the afternoon of the first day, they found a bellboy at the J. W. Marriott on Fourteenth Street who seemed to recognize the photograph, but wasn’t certain. The face looked familiar, yes, the man had stayed on the ninth, no, the tenth floor. Oh, that must have been about two months ago. He remembered because of the large tip. None of the receptionists could remember, there were so many people checking in and out every day. It was a busy hotel, after all. Names of all Arabs who had stayed in the hotel over the last three months were run through the FBI’s and ICE’s computers. There were twenty-four names: four Egyptians, seven Saudi Arabians, three from the United Arab Emirates, five Kuwaitis, one Lebanese, and four Moroccans. All were checked and turned out to be legitimate businessmen or diplomats. Next, all the guests’ names from the past three months were entered into the FBI database.

  The first real break came at Washington’s Ronald Reagan National Airport, where the young woman at the car rental agency thought she recognized the photograph. “Yeah, yeah, I remember him. I rented him a car. I remember him because he looked kinda cute, you know, exotic-like. He was, um, tanned and had an accent. A foreign accent. Kinda like Eye-talian, not the Brooklyn Eye-talian, no, not that, kinda like real exotic like, you know what I mean?”

  “You keep records, don’t you?” asked the agent.

  “Yeah, sure we do, hon. We keep meticulous records,” said the young woman. “Let me see, now,” she busied herself punching keys into her computer. To the FBI agent every second felt like hours. “Here ya go, hon,” she announced finally. “Oh, man, I can’t pronounce this name. Stav-ros Papa-do-pou-los, ah guess that sounds kinda like Greek, uh, not Eye-talian after all? Rented a Ford Escort, a white one with Virginia plates. Here, y’all wait a minute. I’ll print it out for you, hon. It’s got the tag number and all.”

  “What address did he give?”

  “Gee, he put down some address in Athens . . . Athens, Greece. Guess he’s not from Georgia now, is he?”

  “Let me have the printout on that, will you, please?” said the agent grabbing the sheet.

  GOLAN HEIGHTS, SYRIA

  The snow on the Golan Heights covered the ground in a thick white carpet, giving the usually rocky terrain a clean and serene appearance. Brigadier General Kamal Kader stood behind a wooden barrier, the cold morning wind slapping his face.

  He looked proudly at the fluttering Syrian flag flying on a pole above him. A dozen yards away, behind the barrier, were Finnish troops serving with the United Nations Truce Observer Force, UNTSO. Their job was to keep tabs on both sides and rep
ort unusual movement to the Security Council in New York. The UN troops had arrived here after the October 1973 Arab–Israeli War and remained ever since.

  Less than a hundred yards away from the UN banner, the General could clearly see the Star of David adorning the blue and white Israeli flag. Using a pair of powerful field glasses, the General scanned the horizon, looking at Israeli troops on the other side of their barrier. General Kader spat on the ground.

  He conferred briefly with the Finnish UN commander, a young major from Helsinki, returned the commander’s salute, and jumped back into his Russian-made jeep.

  The maneuvers had been announced nearly two months earlier and his presence on the Heights was not unusual. The General drove to Kuneitra, once the capital of the Syrian Golan Heights. Now it was a deserted, devastated town; a ghost town. The town had been occupied by Israel in 1973 and before their retreat had been completely demolished by Israeli soldiers using bulldozers and explosives. Hardly a single house remained intact. Instead of rebuilding, the Syrians decided to leave the town as it was, a relic and a reminder of the mutual hatred that existed between the two neighbors. Syrian officials made a point of taking every official visitor to view the devastated town.

  The jeep stopped outside the building that once housed Kuneitra’s public school. Like other buildings in the town, most of it stood in ruins. A Syrian flag hung above the front steps. There were several other vehicles already parked in the courtyard when the General drove in. When General Kader walked into what was once a classroom, six Syrian officers who were chatting among themselves jumped to attention.

  “At ease, at ease,” said the Syrian general, motioning them to remain seated. “Sit down, sit.” To keep warm, the officers had started a fire. They burned scraps of wood in a large tin receptacle that had once contained cooking oil. The General rubbed his hands near the fire. He didn’t like the cold, and the snow only made it worse.

  “Brothers,” said the General, “in three days we will be in a position to savor our revenge against the Zionists, to erase past defeats with the sweet smell of Arab victory. We must stand ready to lay our lives on the path of glory for the good of our motherland and for the benefit of the entire Arab nation.” The General looked around the room at the six officers that he had personally hand-picked. He trusted every one of them implicitly. They were all fellow Alawites and came from the port city of Latakia, like himself and like his beloved president. He knew each and every one of these men and their families personally.

  “Brothers, for the moment, we must continue to play the game. We are on maneuvers, but I want your soldiers to be ready, for the final hour is now near. In three days, in the afternoon, we will get the green light to tear down these dreaded barriers and retake what is ours. What has been unjustly stolen from us. Brothers, you all know what is expected of you, and I know you will not disappoint your motherland, or your president. May Allah be with you.”

  “Allah be with us,” replied the six in unison, standing and saluting their general.

  WASHINGTON, DC

  The second break came from the Immigration Service computer, when it matched the photograph taken on Capitol Hill with the one of a passenger who had entered the country through New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport more than two months ago. But after that, the leads simply dried up. When the FBI SWAT team descended on the Brooklyn address the passenger had declared, to no great surprise, they realized the Brooklyn address did not exist. Well, it did exist, but it was a parking lot. It would have been too good to be true if the terrorist had turned up. Too easy. It looked as though the man had simply evaporated into thin air after leaving Kennedy Airport. There was no trace of him. They questioned every taxi driver, every porter, and every airline employee. No one remembered another face in the crowd in an airport the size of Kennedy.

  After their initial successes, the special task force set up to track down Omar seemed to have hit a dead end. Their leads from the car rental company, the hotel where Omar had stayed, and the INS photograph led some of the team members to believe these leads would soon materialize into something more concrete, allowing them to close in on their target. But it was not so. Every new lead dried up. One or two restaurants seemed to recognize the photograph, but had no credit card stubs. The man always paid in cash and never returned to the same place twice. Omar had covered his tracks well. The agents combed through every hotel from the center of the District of Columbia to Baltimore and Annapolis on the Maryland side and as far south as Richmond, Virginia. Nothing, nil, zilch. They checked and rechecked every airline computer and still came up blank. There were so many ways for the terrorist to travel. He could have taken the train or simply used a new identity to purchase an airline ticket to any number of destinations. The credit card he used to rent the car turned out to be fake and the agents knew the Palestinian was far too smart to use it a second time. Still, the credit card company was informed to immediately alert the FBI should the card ever be used again.

  An all-points bulletin had been put out with the car’s tag number and description, not that the agents had much hope the terrorist would use the car again. He probably needed it for a single trip and had discarded it. Most likely the car had been stripped down and sold in the not-so-nice parts of the nation’s capital.

  “A man cannot simply disappear into the thin air, damn it. He’s gotta be hiding out somewhere.” The words had come from Chester Higgins. FBI Director Royce had agreed to let him team up with Laura and had assigned one of Potter’s men, Special Agent in Charge Tony Billings, to liaise with them. The three had exhausted every possible and logical explanation. Just where could this terrorist be hiding?

  “He could be anywhere,” said Laura. “It’s a big city. He might have rented a room from an individual, to avoid having his name appear on a register. Maybe a boarding house.”

  “Too many people come and go in a boarding house. He needs somewhere more discreet, quieter.”

  “So, you just disappear, then,” said the man from the FBI.

  “Not when you have more than a thousand agents out looking for you. The best agents in the country.” Higgins puffed on his cigar and blew a cloud of smoke out of the car’s window. “Where would you hide?” he asked Laura. “Put yourself in his place, where would you hole up?”

  “I’ve been doing just that, Mr. Higgins,” said Laura. “I’ve been desperately trying to crawl into that monster’s mind for the last week—hell, for years. He is being very, very cautious and is taking absolutely no chances. That’s the way he normally operates. He trusts no one and even his people in Beirut don’t know where he is. We have been listening to their phones in Lebanon on a continuous basis for the last two months but without much luck. We believe he is passing his messages through a contact in Athens. The calls are always very short, never more than a minute. The only information exchanged were two numbers given to Omar by the Athens contact. At first we thought they might be telephone numbers, but they were not. We cross-checked them for any addresses on our files, or dates, but came out blank. We couldn’t make sense of them. He never stays on line more than a few seconds. Not long enough to trace.”

  Billings swerved to avoid hitting a jogger as they came over Memorial Bridge. “So where would you hide?”

  “I’d get out of public places. I’d avoid hotels and rent something and remain low. I’d use a different name from the one I used previously and this is precisely what the bastard is doing,” said Laura, slamming her fist into the dashboard in frustration.

  “We’ve checked with real estate offices in the District, Virginia, and Maryland. They have no record of Stavros whatever the fuck his name is, or seen his face. If he’s rented directly from a landlord, it’d take months to track him down. And we only have two days left to find him.”

  “We know the date of his arrival and car rental,” said Laura. “One thing we haven’t done is go through the classifieds. We need to get the newspapers starting with his date of arrival and
go two, three, four weeks from there and track down every possible lead through the classifieds. Contact every number, check every name.”

  “Marvelous,” said Higgins. “Potter will love you for it. You will probably blow his overtime budget for the rest of the year.”

  “Who ever said spy work was all glory?”

  ***

  Several days had passed since Omar had last been outside his apartment on E Street. He opened the two trunks brought from New York and carefully inspected its contents. Satisfied that everything was in good working order, he replaced the items in the cases and locked them in a closet. He kept the key on a string around his neck at all times. He spent time watching television and cooking simple meals for himself. He played out his plan in his mind over and over. He worked out in the spacious living room to pass the time and keep in shape. He spent hours watching television, switching from one channel to the next; from the home selling networks to MTV, from Court TV to the nostalgic shows of the sixties and seventies. He remembered seeing some of the older shows on a black and white set at a neighbor’s in the refugee camp. They were strange people, these Americans. Strange.

  The night before Inauguration Day, Omar left the apartment for the first time in nearly a week. He took his rented Ford from the underground garage on Third Street to the commuter’s parking lot in New Carrollton, Maryland, locked the car, and rode the Metro back to E Street. No one noticed him or the plates he had stolen off another car a few minutes earlier. His escape was now in place. In fact, he had two different escape routes planned out: the Metro to New Carrollton and car to BWI, or the train that connected the Metro stop to the same airport. Or, if need be, he could always ride the Metro to National Airport. Omar lingered for a while on his balcony, looking over the city whose destiny he was about to change the next day. Nothing would be the same by this time tomorrow. The world would wake up and take notice of the Palestinians and their plight. Yes, they would.

  Before going to sleep, Omar turned his television set to CNN and watched a report on the final preparations for the morning’s inauguration. He was about to turn off the set when a photograph of the Syrian capital appeared on the screen behind the newsman. Omar turned up the sound.