Carrie's run

CHAPTER 16

Park Avenue, New York City

There were two of them: Bassam al-Shakran, the Jordanian pharmaceutical salesman, and another man, whom they couldn’t immediately identify. They watched on the monitor showing the view from the hidden camera across the street from the hotel as two men brought what looked like a treadmill machine wrapped in plastic off their panel truck and into the service entrance of the Waldorf Astoria on a dolly.

“That’s him. That’s Bassam,” Carrie said.

“Who’s the other guy? Is it the cousin?” Gillespie asked.

“It’s the cousin. Mohammad al-Salman. Take a look,” Leonora said. They went over to her computer. On the screen was a photograph with an article from a local newspaper showing two Arab men in suits with an imam. The article was about a donation they had made to the local mosque, the Islamic Foundation Masjid. “That’s Mohammad.” She pointed.

“You were right on the money,” Koslowski said to Carrie.

They switched to a security camera video feed inside the hotel to watch the two men take the treadmill into the service elevator, but the monitor for the security camera on the nineteenth floor showed only one of the men getting out of the elevator to wheel the machine into the fitness center.

“I see Mohammad,” Koslowski said. “Where’s Bassam?”

“Look. The plastic covering on the machine’s been cut.” Carrie pointed.

They all turned to the monitor showing the hotel corridor outside Dima’s room.

“Look, Bassam,” Gillespie said, pointing. They watched al-Shakran walk down the corridor to Dima’s room and knock on the door. “What’s he carrying? A duffel bag?”

“A duffel bag,” Gillespie said grimly. “What’ll you bet is in it?”

They watched the hotel room door open and caught a brief glimpse of the woman in the blond wig letting him in. She put a “Do Not Disturb” hanger on the door and closed it. The corridor was empty.

“Now what?” Agent Sanders said, getting off the phone with the HRT team he had dispatched to Red Hook.

“We wait,” Carrie said.

“For what?”

“For Mohammad to come back,” she said.

“If he’s coming back,” Sanders said.

“He’ll be back,” she said. All along she had thought that to try to get through the Secret Service-even with the element of surprise-to the Vice-President wasn’t a one-man job. And Dima wasn’t going to be doing any of the shooting. Not Dima. So the cousin would have to come back to the hotel.

Koslowski was on his phone with Tom Raeden, the NYPD Hercules team leader. He and his men were in their Waldorf suites. One of the monitors showed them with their gear in the suite. Raeden was a six-footer with buzz-cut blond hair and the shoulders of a linebacker. Koslowski told them to get ready. With any luck, they would move in a few hours.

“What’s happening in Red Hook?” Koslowski asked Sanders.

“We contacted a Mrs. Perez, who owns the storage facility. We’ve got two men inside. There’s an auto-parts warehouse across the street. Our men went in as construction workers. They’re setting up hidden cameras now, with ex-SEAL or — Delta snipers on the roofs. They’ll be out of sight till the last second. We’ll be able to see the feed any minute,” Sanders said. “We’ve also notified the Secret Service. Part of our protocol with them,” he explained. “They’re keeping the Vice-President to his schedule until further notice.”

“What about blocking the route just in case?” Koslowski asked.

“Once they show up with the truck, they’ll never get out of that street,” Sanders responded. “We’ve got two big armored trucks that will block off either end of the street at the same time we move in.”

“Good.” Koslowski nodded. “We need to see the feeds ASAP.”

“What about when your people go into the hotel room?” Saul asked. “Will we be able to see anything?”

“Hopefully,” Koslowski said. “Two of them will be wearing helmet cameras. It’ll be jumpy, but we should see what they see.”

“There’s our surveillance,” Sanders said, pointing at two monitors. One showed the front door to the refrigerated storage facility from a camera across the street. It was in a concrete building with no windows and barbed wire on the roof.

“Like a fortress,” one of the Counter-Terrorism Bureau officers muttered.

The other monitor showed the parked panel truck with a hastily painted sign for Giovanni’s Pizza on the side, viewed from a height looking down at an angle from across the street.

“Where’d you put the camera for that one?” Koslowski asked.

“On a telephone pole,” one of Sanders’s FBI men said.

“What time is it?” someone asked.

“A little after noon,” Gillespie said, looking at his watch.

“Going to be a long day,” Sanders said.

Two officers, a man and a woman, from the counterterrorism team brought in boxes of deli sandwiches and soft drinks. Everyone grabbed something and started to eat. There was a murmur of conversation.

“There he is,” Carrie said, her mouth full, pointing at the monitor showing the view from the FedEx office on Park Avenue.

“Who?”

“Mohammad. The cousin.”

They watched a man in a brown suit walk toward the entrance to the Waldorf.

“Good eyes. He changed clothes,” Koslowski said.

They watched Mohammad go into the hotel. On another monitor from normal hotel security surveillance they watched him walk across the ornate lobby into the elevator. A minute later, the corridor monitor showed him exit from the elevator, walk past a hotel maid-she was actually one of Koslowski’s female officers-knock and enter the hotel room.

“Now all they have to do is wait,” Koslowski said.

“Like us,” Saul said.

“Where’d he leave the truck?” Sanders asked.

“Probably in a parking structure, then took the subway back,” Koslowski said. “I’ve got plainclothes checking all the midtown parking structures for the truck.”

“Tell them to be careful approaching. It’s likely to be booby-trapped,” Saul said.

“We assumed as much,” Koslowski said. “We’ll have to evacuate and get the bomb squad.”

A half hour later he fielded a call from one of the plainclothes officers.

“We found the truck. It’s in a Quik Park on West Fifty-Sixth near Ninth,” he announced, and said something on the phone.

“Tell them not to go near it. To wait to evacuate the entire structure and approach only after we take down the Waldorf and Red Hook,” Saul said.

“I just did,” Koslowski said.

“Son of a bitch, there it is,” one of the FBI men said, pointing at one of the monitors.

“Is that him?” Gillespie asked.

“That’s him,” Koslowski said, glancing at the photograph on the table. “Abdel Yassin. Welcome back to the party. Who’s that with him?”

“I don’t know,” Carrie said, “but tell your people to try not to kill him. If he’s from a local cell, once this is over you’re going to want to take them all down.”

“There they go,” Gillespie said as the truck drove away and out of the frame of the hidden camera, coming east, out of the sun, low on the horizon, hovering just above the building line. In a little while, it would be dark.

“Time?” Koslowski called out.

“Seventeen eleven hours,” Leonora said, checking her watch.

“Tell your people to get ready,” Koslowski said to Sanders.

“Yours too,” Sanders said, talking on the phone.

Koslowski alerted Raeden and his team and the undercover operatives inside the Waldorf. He told Gillespie to get the outside perimeters ready to completely close off several city blocks around the hotel but not to move until the Hercules teams did.

“Once we say ‘go,’ no one, I mean no one, gets into or out of the Waldorf Astoria,” he said.

All eyes were on two monitors: one showing the view from across the street from the refrigerated storage facility in Red Hook, the other showing the corridor security camera view where Dima and the two Jordanians were still in the room. They hadn’t stirred all day. They had attached sound sensors on the floor of the room above Dima’s, but there had been surprisingly little conversation or movement, although the technician did report a number of clicklike sounds that suggested they were loading and checking their weapons.

They watched on the monitor as the truck with the pizza restaurant name on its side drove up to the refrigeration facility and parked in the curbside loading space. The two men, Yassin and the unknown man who looked Middle Eastern, both dressed in white coveralls, got out of the truck. They took a steel flatbed handcart out of the truck into the storage building.

“Move into position,” Sanders said into his phone. “Take ’em down.”

They saw a squad of ten men, now dressed in full SWAT gear with HK33 assault rifles, the backs of their jackets marked “FBI HRT” in yellow Day-Glo letters, come out of the building across the way and split into two teams, deployed against the refrigeration building on either side of the door.

Watching, Carrie knew there were also at least two snipers who would now position themselves for firing on the roof of the building from which the team had emerged. She couldn’t see the armored trucks and the rest of the team deploying to block off both sides of the street, but from Sanders’s conversation on his cell phone, she assumed they were moving into position.

Koslowski and Gillespie looked at each other and nodded.

Koslowski called Raeden.

“Go,” he said. “It’s all yours, Tom.”

“We’re on,” Gillespie said into his cell phone to the NYPD commander outside the Waldorf.

The two Hercules teams inside the Waldorf were now in motion, Carrie knew. They would be making their way down the stairs to the floor where Dima and the Jordanians were. Anyone they encountered on the stairs or in the hallway from this point on would be taken into custody. Then, on the monitor, she saw first one, then a number of the Hercules team members emerge into the corridor and move toward the room. One of the undercover maids was with them. In her hand was a Beretta nine-millimeter pistol.

The team positioned themselves on both sides of the room door. They wore Kevlar vests and were armed with M4A1 assault rifles and snub-nosed shotguns.

“Captain, tell them not to kill her,” Carrie said to Koslowski. He didn’t answer, his eyes riveted on the screen. They watched the maid knock on the door.

At that moment on the other TV, the two Arab men emerged from the refrigeration facility pushing the handcart stacked six rows high with large cartons.

It was the largest amount of HMTD Carrie had ever seen. There had to be a good thousand pounds there. The largest amount of it she’d ever even heard of. They really were going to take something serious down.

The HRT teams swarmed toward them, rifles aimed, shouting for them to put the boxes down and raise their hands in the air. For an instant, the two men hesitated.

The Jordanian, Yassin, started to reach into his pocket. Cell phone! He’s going to detonate, Carrie thought. Shoot! Now!

Instantly a bullet ripped into his head from across the street. The cart started to roll. It’s going to tip over! she thought, instinctively tensing for the explosion. They’re all going to die! As Yassin’s body hit the pavement, the cart started to tip. It was like watching a disaster in slow motion. Her mind screamed, It’s going to blow! At the same time, two HRT men opened fire on the second man, who crumpled to the pavement.

Don’t hit the cartons! she thought, cringing in anticipation of the explosion. If just one of those bullets hit. . They watched in horror as the handcart tipped over, the cartons spilling into the street, one of them bursting open to show something white inside. The HMTD.

Nothing happened.

They lucked out, Carrie thought, breathing again. The HMTD was still cold enough to keep it stable, otherwise they would have all been killed. The HRT team swarmed around the cartons and the two downed men.

“Both dead,” Sanders announced to the room.

They’d been incredibly lucky. They’d have to get the HMTD back into refrigeration right away. It was just lying out there in the street. She barely had time to complete the thought.

“Housecleaning service,” the undercover maid in the hotel corridor on the other monitor said, and then stepped away and out of range of the door.

“Come back later,” said Dima’s voice from behind the door.

Raeden, the Hercules team leader, nodded. A second man put a card key-Carrie assumed it was a master key-into the door slot, grabbed the handle when it turned green and pushed the door open.

“I said come back later,” a woman said. It was Dima. Carrie could see her coming toward the door. Only one of the men, Bassam al-Shakran, was visible as the team barged into the room. He was holding what looked like an AR-15. Dima screamed as the Hercules team charged into the room.

The helmet camera of the lead Hercules team member showed a jumpy image as Bassam dived to the side and fired his rifle. The cousin fired a second AR-15 at Raeden as a storm of shooting erupted inside the room, loud popping shots sounding dense as hail. The helmet camera dropped to floor level, showing the room sideways. Raeden. Is he dead? she wondered. Are they all down? What’s going on? All she could see from the helmet camera were legs moving; hard to tell whose.

It was over in seconds.

“I can’t see. What about Dima? Is she alive?” Carrie cried out.

Gillespie was shouting into his phone to secure the site. Sanders was barking into the phone, calling the Secret Service. Koslowski was looking at the monitor and listening to someone on his cell phone. Probably one of his team inside the room.

“Is she alive, dammit?” Carrie shouted.

Koslowski turned to her, his face a mask.