Every Second

67

Springfield, Massachusetts

Through the image of his rifle scope, the sharpshooter locked on to the living room window of the one-story house on Eddywood.

The tree-lined street was deathly still, except for the chirping of birds and the quiet work of Springfield’s SWAT team. It was responding to a lead in the bank robbery abduction in Queens, New York, and Dan Fulton’s shooting in the Catskills.

New information concerning a looming attack somewhere in the United States pointed to a suspect in Springfield.

At the perimeter of the scene, FBI agent Marilyn Chase, from the Bureau’s Springfield office, was giving play-by-play updates over her phone to Nick Varner, the case agent.

At the National Counterterrorism Center in McLean, Virginia, operations officer Shane Hudson had connected more dots between the NSA intercepts from England and new incoming data from an array of top-secret networks in the US. He broke down the new analysis on the chatter by YLOI leaders in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and Kuwait and, aided by security agents, they’d tracked calls to a key US suspect: Todd Dalir Ghorbani of Springfield, Massachusetts.

Ghorbani’s name had surfaced in several highly classified databases of potential terrorist suspects. He was thirty, an American citizen who was born in Tehran, Iran. He’d been a toddler when his parents had been killed in 1988, while traveling in a commercial jetliner traveling from Tehran to Dubai. A US warship had mistaken the aircraft for an enemy fighter, shooting it down with a guided missile over the Strait of Hormuz in the Gulf.

“His relatives brought him to America to raise him after his parents were killed but they never told him the truth about the tragedy,” Chase told Varner. “Our cyber people say he found out three years ago while going through family papers after his adoptive father’s death.”

“That must’ve been a trigger for him,” Varner said.

“It was. The revelation traumatized him. He used an alias and began blogging about his story, finding sympathy with extremists, including Nazihah Samadyh. Our people say that she’d recruited him online.”

Ghorbani had a PhD in chemical engineering from MIT. He worked as a forensic scientist for a global company that specialized in investigating fire and explosion incidents around the world.

In examining the most recent chatter, the CIA and NSA tracked snatches of encrypted satellite phone transmissions between Ghorbani, Jake Spencer, Nazihah Samadyh and senior leaders of the YLOI in the Gulf and Middle East about “wedding plans” and the special gift from the “clock maker.”

The FBI’s ongoing execution of warrants tied Ghorbani and Spencer to Jerricko Blaine, Doug Gerard Kimmett and Adam Chisolm Patterson. However, no criminal history or fingerprints surfaced for either Kimmett or Patterson.

Drawing on further analysis of the chatter, US intelligence had now identified Ghorbani as the “clock maker” and that the wedding gift was a bomb that he’d constructed. More recent chatter involving Spencer’s satellite phone had been intentionally scrambled and was still indecipherable. NSA technicians would need more time to extract the content of the transmissions.

Given what local justice officials called “exigent circumstances,” law enforcement in Springfield took immediate action on Ghorbani’s home and work addresses.

An intense debate among the FBI and national security officials ensued on whether to release photos and information on all the suspects. Going public could force the suspects to halt their plans, go underground and destroy evidence, making it difficult for prosecution. Investigators pleaded for more time to capture their subjects before information was released.

Calls to numbers associated with Ghorbani went unanswered. At the plant where Ghorbani worked, his supervisor told investigators that he’d called in sick that morning. The option of using a ruse to lure Ghorbani outside his home and arrest him was considered but ruled out. The option of using a robot to breach the door, out of concern that explosives may be present, was ruled out as it removed the element of surprise.

Under the circumstances, a dynamic, deliberate entry was chosen.

“No movement,” the sharpshooter said softly over his headset to his commander.

Similar whisperings came from SWAT members in various positions around the small house. With everyone in position, the commander gave the green light.

Team members breached the front and back entrances. They entered rooms in pairs, gun muzzles raised, searching for threats in corners, within furniture and closets. They called “clear” when they’d checked each room. Within minutes, they’d reported to their commander that no one was present on the property.

With the house secured, the bomb squad began processing the house, concentrating on Ghorbani’s basement worktable. There they found traces of several components used in making explosives, including C-4, black powder and triacetone triperoxide. It was a violation of his employer’s policy to have any work-related materials leave company premises. More troubling: they found detailed street maps of Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Washington, DC, and New York City. Landmarks were flagged with Xs.

At that point, new intelligence concerning Ghorbani had been captured by FBI cyber experts from the “dark web,” which was believed to host sites unreachable by search engines and normal channels.

In a recent posting to jihadists, Ghorbani had written: “The American government murdered my father and mother. It is my destiny to do all I can to honor their memory by supporting strategic martyrdom operations.”

After Springfield detectives questioned Ghorbani’s neighbors, they’d learned that one woman had thought she’d seen him driving away from his home earlier in the day. She wasn’t certain.

“It was only a couple of hours before the police showed up,” she’d said.

Attempts to pinpoint Ghorbani’s location by tracking his cell phone or the GPS in his vehicle had failed, FBI agent Marilyn Chase reported to Varner.

“We’ve issued an alert for him and his vehicle. He’s on the move, Nick. People here are convinced he’s built a device and taken it with him, but we don’t know where he’s going.”