Pruitt acknowledged the team leader's order by immediately briefing his team. The three agents from the end of the line along the building jogged to meet Katsoulis, who was already around the corner.
Jafal el-Sharif had finally fallen asleep in the extremely uncomfortable wooden chair that he had dragged from the kitchen table to his bedroom. His head leaned precariously against the paint-chipped window framing, half shaded by the orange light that invaded his family's apartment. His head twitched within moments of his eyes closing, slamming his head against the sharp edge of the wood frame and causing him to briefly cry out in pain. Fortunately, his wife and children were not in the apartment to hear him. He had sent them to stay with her sister after receiving a strange request from a member of his mosque.
He had been asked to watch the street around his apartment for any suspicious law enforcement activity. With the recent discovery that the New York City Police department had been profiling local Muslim communities, activists within the Bayonne Muslim society had started to vocalize their opposition to further cooperation with local police. The man had told Jafal that his assistance was critical to proving that the federal and local law enforcement agencies were illegally targeting Muslims for discrimination.
"They" suspected that a major operation was underway in Bayonne, possibly in his own neighborhood, and they wanted to send the media down to intercept the police at the scene. He had been warned to be especially vigilant at night, when the police liked to terrorize members of the community, before disappearing back into the night. Some members of the community had supposedly vanished in these raids, only to reappear behind bars in Guantanamo Bay. Something had to be done to stop this harassment, and Jafal would be their first line of defense. He had a cell phone number to call if the police showed up on his street.
He shook his head from the impact and cursed himself for falling asleep. He figured he had only been out for a few seconds. He took a deep breath and leaned forward to take in more of the street. His eyes caught movement to the far right, and he immediately inched forward in the chair. What he saw nearly caused him to fall onto the floor in front of the window. Two heavily armed police officers disappeared into the side door of the apartment building on the opposite side of George Street. They were right! They moved so quickly and quietly that he had almost missed them. Allah had woken him at just the right moment! He grabbed the cell phone resting on the windowsill and dialed the number he had programmed into his phone.
"Allahu Akbar," he whispered gleefully, hoping to strike a small blow against the oppressive American regime.
"We have a possible problem," Anish Gupta said.
He leaned forward, staring at a lone laptop screen set on a folding table at the safe house in New Brunswick. They had moved all of the computer equipment from the van into the house, where it would remain until they acquired a new van with the required internal configuration to continue mobile field operations. Anish had been confident that they could carry out the necessary surveillance from the small house. Once Graves and Tariq had positioned themselves on the roof of a nearby Hamm Brands warehouse, all he claimed to need was uninterrupted high-speed internet access and his decked-out laptop.
The surveillance post was close enough for their wireless signal mapper to detect and pinpoint passive cell phone transmissions within the vicinity of the target building. It could also transmit enough power to perform a few highly classified snooping tricks. Thanks to Hamid Muhammad's confession, they had been able to turn one of the terrorist's cell phones into a bug. Hamid didn't think any of the previously known numbers would be active, but one of the men had apparently violated strict security procedures and kept his old phone. This had been one of the ways they had corroborated Hamid's information. One of the cell phone numbers matched an active phone located at 98 Hobart Avenue, which was where Hamid swore they would find the missing terrorist cell.
"What's up?" Aleem muttered, physically exhausted from the evening's activities.
"I have two cell phones operational within fifty feet of each other. I can hear one of them ringing from our co-opted phone in the target apartment. The other is located across the street. I think it's a lookout. We're live with Tariq and Graves," he said, pointing to a microphone mounted on the table.
Aleem sat up at the dining room table, his mind scrambling to figure out what they could do to covertly assist the FBI SWAT team. Hamid didn't think they would be armed with much more than knives and pistols, but he also wasn't sure to what extent the cell would be supported by his loyal followers within the Bayonne Muslim community. The apartment had been secretly rented by Hamid a year earlier and kept vacant for the purpose of temporarily hiding a cell in plain sight. He had given the apartment key to one of his followers to deliver to the cell's leader, with sealed instructions. This had been followed by another sealed message to be carried to his contact in Bayonne. He had been forthcoming with this information, clearly wanting to avoid a sudden inferno engulfing his head again. Aleem had no reason to believe that Hamid knew about the lookout in the adjacent apartment. In any event, he would use this information to further terrorize the Imam.
"Tariq. Can you see any movement on infrared? You should have a clear line of sight to the apartment's front door," Aleem said.
Aleem had wanted the surveillance team to transmit the feed to their safe house, but Graves didn't want to overcomplicate the communications rig they needed to erect on the warehouse roof in order to support mission essentials. The anonymous tip to the FBI had been placed before the surveillance team had figured out how they would get into Hamm Brand's sprawling complex and onto the roof of the massive building. The trip back to Bayonne from the safe house in New Brunswick had put them on a tight schedule.
"Nothing yet. SWAT teams are in the front and side doors. Hold on. Shit, I have multiple heat signatures in the common area. They're up. I have no way to engage," he heard on the speaker.
"There's nothing you can do. Anish, can you provide a distraction? Ring their phones?"
"I can ring the number we have…or I can activate the camera's flash."
"Do both. Coordinate the flash with SWAT's countdown," Aleem said.
Gupta had scanned all active VHF frequencies before and after the FBI SWAT team's arrival, quickly determining which frequencies were used for the tactical team's P25 Digital Encrypted radios. He had access to an extremely proprietary brute-force key-recovery program that could provide him with the encryption key, and in an act of sheer desperation, he could try to "rekey" all of the radios using a program that Graves had acquired from sources that Gupta had worried about more than Sanderson. Neither of these methods had been necessary, since their illicit access to the multiple FBI networks provided them with the "key" used by Task Force Scorpion's tactical units. He had enjoyed using the same technology to co-opt the Newark field office's radios during their escape with the Imam for Masjid Muhammad.
Gupta typed furiously at the keyboard, while monitoring the SWAT team.
"Three second countdown. Damn they moved fast. Two, one…"
"I just saw a flash," Tariq said.
"The phone should be ringing too. Wow! I just lost my hearing," he said, snatching the headphones from his head.
"Three flashbangs. Windows shattered. No gunshots. Lots of yelling," Tariq reported.
"You just heard the bang part of the flashbang," Aleem said.