Carrie's run

CHAPTER 15

Red Hook, Brooklyn, New York

“Back so soon?” Saul said over his shoulder. He and Koslowski and a handful of others were looking at security camera videos from sites around Brooklyn.

“I think I know how to find the truck,” Carrie said, taking off her jacket and sitting at the table. Leonora sat next to her. Saul, Koslowski, Gillespie and a couple of other officers joined them.

“Well, Mathison, you certainly know how to get our attention,” Koslowski said. “What’ve you got?”

“I’m an idiot,” she said. “It was right in front of us. We knew Bassam al-Shakran, the Jordanian pharmaceutical salesman, had been in Iraq, and his brother was killed there. All along, because of Dima, and Nightingale in Beirut, we assumed the attack was coming from Hezbollah or the Iranians. But the Jordanians are Sunnis, not Shiites. Like al-Qaeda. What if the attack is coming from Abu Nazir in Iraq?”

“Suppose it is. So what?” Gillespie said.

“He never does just one attack.”

“Never?” Gillespie asked.

“Listen, I was in Iraq. I studied this guy there and I’ve looked at everything we have on him in Langley. He’s never done anything like a single attack. Not ever,” she said.

“Are you suggesting the Waldorf’s a diversion?” Koslowski said, lasering in on her.

She nodded. “For something bigger.”

“Like what?” Gillespie said.

“You tell me. I’m sure NYPD counterintelligence has a list of potential targets and probabilities.”

“Sure. The Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, the B of A Tower, the Statue of Liberty, Times Square, Grand Central Station, the UN, the Stock Exchange, the Federal Reserve, Lincoln Center, Yankee Stadium-although it’s out of season-Madison Square Garden, bridges, tunnels. Take your pick. This is New York; the list is endless,” Gillespie said.

“These guys are in Brooklyn. Anything there?” Saul asked.

“The Brooklyn Bridge,” Leonora suggested.

“Interesting,” Carrie said.

“Why interesting?” Koslowski said.

“On 9/11, there was a photograph of people fleeing from Manhattan on foot across the Brooklyn Bridge.”

“Yeah, it was a famous picture. Among others. What about it?”

“It became iconic in the Middle East,” she said. “At the time, Ayman al-Zawahiri was reported to have said, ‘Next time we’ll eliminate their means of escape too.’ ”

For a moment, no one spoke. They were New Yorkers, she realized. She had brought memories of the day back to them.

“What about the truck?” Saul said. “You said you thought of something.”

“Yes,” she said. “Suppose it is the Empire State Building or the Brooklyn Bridge or whatever. They’re not flying planes, so it means a truck filled with explosives. Think. What explosive would they use?”

“Of course,” Saul said, slapping the table. “HMTD. They flew in. Had to go through security. They didn’t bring anything in with them.”

“HMTD,” Koslowski said. “Hexamethylene triperoxide diamine. We’ve always figured that would be what they would use. It’s cheap. Powerful. You can make it from three ordinary household products that are all perfectly legal and that you can purchase anywhere without ever attracting the slightest attention. HMTD and, of course, fertilizer have always been our assumptions.” He looked around the table, where the others of his team were nodding.

“Except it has a drawback,” Carrie put in.

“We know. It’s super unstable. Very volatile. The slightest jar, or if the temperature gets a little too warm, and-pow!” Gillespie said, snapping his fingers. “Dealing with it at room temperature is extremely dangerous.”

“I see what she’s getting at,” Koslowski said. “The only way to be sure it won’t go off until you need it is to refrigerate it.”

“Exactly. We check every refrigerated storage facility in New York City, starting with Brooklyn,” Saul said. “We’ll find the truck nearby.”

“There’s another possibility,” Koslowski added. “The explosive could be in one of their apartments or inside the fitness company building.”

“I thought of that,” Carrie said. “If they’re using a number of refrigerators-and they’ll need a lot because it’ll take a ton of explosives to take something like the Brooklyn Bridge down-they’ll have to be burning electricity like crazy. Check with the power company on the usage at the fitness company and their apartments. If it’s gone up a whole lot recently at one of them, that’s where it is.”

“I’ll get right on it. Wake the bastards up. Everyone hates Con Ed anyway,” Gillespie said, getting up and going over to a phone. Carrie checked her watch. It was after three in the morning. When she looked up, Koslowski was watching her.

“Not bad, Carrie,” he said, grinning widely. “If you ever decide to leave the CIA, you’ve got a job in New York if you want it.”

“I’ll keep it in mind, Captain,” she said, glancing sideways at Saul, who was focused on his laptop screen.

Forty minutes later, one of the male officers jumped up.

“Got it,” he called out, coming over. “The truck’s parked in a lot one block from a refrigerated storage warehouse in Red Hook. We told our guys to look for it but leave it alone. Just drive on by and don’t go back. Rookie patrol officer spotted it. Said they painted over the Petra Fitness company logo on the side of the truck and replaced it with a pizza restaurant, but he said the paint job was easy to spot.”

“Where’s Red Hook?” Saul asked.

“From where that location is you can go up the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and be on the Brooklyn Bridge in less than five minutes. Manhattan in ten minutes,” the officer said.

Saul looked at Koslowski. “Now what?”

“We’re gonna need more resources,” Koslowski said, getting up and taking out his cell phone. “I need to call the commissioner.”

“Did somebody say ‘resources’?” said a man in a gray business suit who was just coming in, followed by a half dozen men in suits and about twenty men in military-style SWAT gear with the acronym “HRT” in Day-Glo paint on their jackets. “I’m Supervisory Special Agent Sanders,” he said to Carrie and Saul.

“Great,” Gillespie muttered under his breath. “The Feds are here.”

Sanders came over to Carrie.

“You must be Mathison. I guess you’re the little lady who got us all down here. I hope to hell you know what you’re doing,” he said.

“I could say the same about you,” she said.

“They’re on the move,” Leonora said, indicating one of the TV monitors. The screen showed the Petra Fitness Equipment Company building and parking lot as viewed from the hidden video camera they’d installed on the roof of the building across the street. On the screen, two men-one of whom they’d identified as Bassam al-Shakran, the Jordanian salesman, from a frozen image that, though blurry and enlarged, appeared to be of him, and the other, the driver, an Arab-looking man they didn’t know-had gotten into one of the Petra company’s panel trucks.

It was 9:46 A.M. Carrie rubbed her eyes. They’d been up all night and they had a long day ahead of them. She’d just come back from the restroom, where she’d stepped inside a stall to take her meds before going to the sink and splashing her face with water.

“Assuming they’re going to the Waldorf, how will they go?” Saul asked.

Gillespie shrugged. “Fastest would be Shore Parkway to the Gowanus Expressway to the Brooklyn Bridge,” he said.

“So we don’t know if they’re going to hit the bridge or the hotel,” one of the FBI men with Sanders said.

“Yes, we do,” Carrie said as the truck passed out of the camera’s view. “It’s the wrong truck to hit the bridge. They’re headed for the Waldorf.”

“Do we have air surveillance?” Sanders asked.

“Over here,” Koslowski said, pointing to one of the monitors that showed traffic on a Brooklyn street as seen from above. “We’ve got one of our AW119 helicopters flying high enough so they won’t hear it. See the truck?” He pointed out the white panel truck in the traffic flow.

“They can’t follow continuously,” Saul said. “We don’t want it spotted.”

They watched the truck make a right turn onto a highway.

“They know. There it is. They’re on the Belt Parkway. Looks like they’re headed for Manhattan all right.”

“We could take them out now,” Sanders said. “Set up a roadblock. My sharpshooters. Never let them get near the Waldorf.”

Koslowski made a face. “I don’t think-”

“The minute you do you alert the other team. You think there are no media in New York City?” Carrie said, jumping in. “Once that happens you don’t know what they’ll do. And if they spot your roadblock and start improvising, what then? How many dead civilians do you want? Not to mention we don’t know what’s in that truck. A couple of pounds of C-4 would make one hell of a hole in Park Avenue. We want them contained.”

Sanders stared at her. “You understand, Miss Mathison, you’re here to observe,” he said.

“Well, you just heard my damn observation, Special Agent,” she said, and heard Gillespie snort, stifling a laugh.

“Easy, boys and girls,” Koslowski said. “We’ve got two full Hercules teams, all of them ex-Navy SEALs, Delta, CIA, who spent the night in suites inside the Waldorf, just two floors above Jihan’s room. We’ve got another Hercules team set up in the UBS office on Forty-Ninth across the street and another team inside the FedEx on Park Avenue. Plus, we’ll have plenty of regular NYPD to lock down the block completely before the main event. Once we close it, we won’t let a mosquito in or out.”

“What about this woman, this Jihan? Are we sure she’s in the hotel?” Sanders asked.

“We’re monitoring the hotel corridor security camera. Here’s the feed,” Gillespie said, pointing out another of the monitors, showing the hotel corridor. “She went into the room at 12:17 P.M. and hasn’t come out.”

“Let’s look at her going in,” Koslowski said.

“Go to double oh sixteen hours,” Gillespie said to one of his officers, who typed on his computer. They watched the corridor flash back in time to sixteen minutes after midnight. They waited, then saw a slim, stylish woman with long blond hair get out of the elevator and walk to one of the rooms. “Freeze it.”

“You know this woman?” Sanders asked Carrie.

“As a double agent in Beirut. Yes,” she said.

“Triple,” Saul muttered.

“And that’s her? No question?” Sanders said persistently.

“She’s wearing a blond wig, but yes, that’s Dima, a.k.a. Jihan.”

“And nothing since?” Koslowski asked the officer.

“Nothing. Yesterday she requested room service for breakfast for after eleven A.M. We suspect she gets up late,” the officer said.

“Okay. You keep your eyes peeled on her corridor. Nothing else. And let’s keep monitoring her phones and the room phone, everyone,” Koslowski called out. “Anything she does, let me know ASAP. Don’t be afraid to interrupt me.”

“What about the other two possibles we came up with? The Egyptian doctor and Ghaddar, the Lebanese businessman. Anything?” Saul asked, looking up from his laptop.

“We put front and back surveillance on them. Apart from the fact that our Egyptian doctor seems to have a fascination with the hookers on Tenth Avenue, they seem to be who they say they are,” Gillespie said.

“And the truck? Where is it now?” Carrie asked.

Gillespie looked at the monitor showing the view from the helicopter camera.

“Looks like Fort Hamilton. See the water?” he said, referring to the bay. “They’ll be coming up on the Verrazano Bridge shortly.”

“What about the other truck? This refrigerated storage facility? The HMTD?” Sanders asked.

“That’s where we’d like your Hostage Rescue Team,” Koslowski said. “The problem is, we don’t know who’s watching. If we did, we could set up and the minute this Abdel Yassin shows up, take the son of a bitch down.”

“We have no idea where he is right now?” Saul asked.

Koslowski shook his head. “We’re checking to see if he bought a cell phone and we’ve been monitoring all the calls in the Midwood-Flatbush section of Brooklyn for the past two days. So far nothing.”

“When do you think he’ll move?” Sanders asked Carrie.

“Late afternoon. Early evening. They don’t want to do something that will alert the authorities before their Waldorf operation is in motion. The Veep is scheduled to arrive at the Waldorf at eight thirty-five P.M. Figure Yassin and whoever else is with him will be at the storage place probably after six P.M.,” she said.

“Where is this place?” Sanders asked.

“Red Hook in Brooklyn. Mostly an industrial area right near the waterfront,” Koslowski said.

“We’ll move our people in undercover this morning,” Sanders said. “Set up so we can close it down.”

“No uniforms, no badges, nothing that attracts attention of any kind, especially from locals. If they send an alert, we could blow the whole thing,” Carrie said.

“Why are you so worried about locals? Won’t they cooperate?” Sanders said.

Koslowski half-smiled. “Listen, you remember the movie Casablanca? You know the part where Humphrey Bogart tells the Nazi that there are certain sections in New York he advised even the German army not to try to enter?”

“What about it?”

“He was talking about Red Hook,” Koslowski said.