“He didn’t read the menu. He ordered off the top of his head.”
“Did he carry a cell phone?”
“I think there was one clipped to his belt.”
“Did Talal take any calls?”
“Not until just before he left.”
“How was his French?”
“Good, I guess, since he lives there.”
“You guess?”
“He spoke to me in English, and to Malik in Arabic. He spoke to the waiters in Arabic, too.”
“And the phone call?”
“Arabic.”
“You met where?”
“A Lebanese restaurant in the seventeenth.”
“What was its name?”
She frowned. “I don’t recall.”
“Where is it?”
“About a block from the Villiers metro stop.”
“How did you get there?”
“From George V, by metro. We changed at Étoile.”
“Describe the restaurant.”
“It’s nothing special to look at.”
“Don’t be nonspecific, Dianne. You edit cookbooks. You deal with this sort of material every day.”
She shot Tom a sharp look. “There were Formica tables and white tablecloths-the inexpensive kind. They used paper napkins. It was nothing special. There were posters-Lebanese tourist posters-on the walls. No unique decor; no style. It was just another neighborhood place. We went there because Malik saidAl Arabia ’s offices were nearby. The restaurant sits at the intersection of boulevard Courcelles and boulevard Malesherbes. There were tables on an enclosed veranda adjacent to the sidewalk-the kind of thing you can enclose during the winter. The main dining room was raised off street level by two or three steps. I can’t really recall.”
“And the editor? What direction did he come from?”
“He was waiting for us.”
Tom nodded. “Where did he sit? Where did you sit?”
“He and Malik sat next to one another. They sat with their backs to the sidewalk. I sat facing the intersection.”
“And behind you?”
“There was a wall-a divider, really, about four feet high. Malik said he wanted me to have the view.”
Tom was familiar with the intersection and there wasn’t much of a view. Not that it wasn’t good tradecraft. With their backs to the sidewalk, a lip-reader in a surveillance vehicle wouldn’t be able to follow Malik’s conversation with Talal. And with the wall behind Dianne, eavesdropping would be nigh on impossible from over her shoulder without being very obvious about it. “What did you talk about?”
“It was small talk mostly. Talal asked a lot of questions about me. About my family, and my job, where I’d gone to college, where I lived in London-that sort of stuff.”
“Did he know London?”
“I’m not sure. He said he came to London occasionally.”
“Did he say why?”
“He mentioned he had a friend in Finsbury.”
Tom blinked. Mentioning Finsbury had been a tactical error on Talal’s part.Finsbury was a trigger word. The Finsbury Park mosque in a northern London neighborhood was riddled with al-Qa’ida sympathizers.
Dianne seemed to be unaware of its significance. “Did that mean anything to you?”
Hands clasped, she said, “No.”
Her tone told him the Israelis had probed the area and come up empty. He decided to leave the subject. “How long did you spend with him?”
“Talal? About an hour. We had somemezze -it was quite spectacular, actually-and a half bottle of Moroccan wine. Talal and Malik talked business for about a quarter hour. Then he got a call on his cell phone. He paid the bill, excused himself, and left us to ourselves.”
There were no inconsistencies or contradictions from the interrogation transcripts. She had seen nothing passed between Malik and Talal. Tom was convinced she was telling him the truth as best she could remember it.
It was time to wind things up. Time to play out the hunch that had smacked him upside the head when he’d read about the Vuitton backpack. Tom slid his hand into the pocket of the coveralls and felt for the first of the three photographs he’d concealed in the handkerchief. The one he’d decided to show her first had one of its corners folded back so he could identify it by feel.
He slid the small black-and-white rectangle with Imad Mugniyah’s likeness across the table. “Do you recognize this man?”
Dianne squinted down at the small picture. “No.”
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely. I’ve never seen him in my life.”
Tom picked up the photo of Imad Mugniyah, stuck it back in his pocket, and replaced it with the second picture, which he’d cropped from Shahram Shahristani’s surveillance photo of Tariq Ben Said. “What about him?”
She pulled the image across the table. “No.”
He retrieved Ben Said and pulled a third photo from his pocket-it was a crop of Yahia Hamzi’s passport picture. Reuven had made sure to remove the stamp in the bottom corner so its origin would be obscured.
She glanced at the photo then looked over at Tom. “That’s Talal Massoud-Malik’s editor atAl Arabia. His hair is longer, his face is a little bit rounder, and he’s wearing different glasses. But it’s Talal.”
Tom reclaimed the picture and returned it to his coveralls, fighting to keep his composure so that he’d give off no hint of the excitement he felt. The pulse racing in his temples, he stared at her coolly and spoke in laconic Marseillaise. “Thank you, Dianne. We’re done.”
He rose, walked to the door, and rapped twice sharply on the cold metal. The pieces of the puzzle were coming together and it was time that he and Reuven called Tony Wyman on the secure phone and laid things out.
They-whoever they were-had been worried enough about Jim McGee to murder him. Blew up the Suburban and killed Jim and two others because they believed McGee knew something he shouldn’t have known: that Imad Mugniyah was in Gaza.
Except McGeehadn’t known it was Mugniyah. All he knew was that there was a mysterious individual who moved frequently and who was protected by an imported crew of bodyguards, some of whom were Hezbollah, others possibly Iranians-the Seppah.
Those revelations hadn’t killed McGee. What had set the ambush in motion was Shafiq Tubaisi’s offhand comment that Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the godfather of Hamas, had kissed the man’s hands.Yassin kissed both his hands and asked for his blessing.
That was what Shafiq told McGee. Tom had read it in McGee’s penultimate message. He’d understood the significance of the act, even if McGee hadn’t. Which was why he’d tasked McGee to order Shafiq to get a picture.
Because of that tasking, McGee was dead-and so was Shafiq. They were dead because somewhere, in somebody’s head, an operational clock was ticking. And the bad guys out there, the ones President Bush had so accurately termed the evildoers-accurate because Tom knew that was precisely how the Koran referred to criminals, murderers, and assassins-were about to stage a major hit.
The evildoers were gearing up for something big. Something spectacular. The evildoers’ version of shock and awe.
There was, Tom understood all too well, a particular rhythm-a cadence if you will-to megaterror. Megaterror is not impetuous, seat-of-the-pants stuff. It is well planned, highly organized, and above all disciplined. The bad guys plot, probe, and test. They take months performing target assessments in order to weed out the harder-to-strike targets in favor of the softer ones. This very week in New York, Boston, Washington, D.C.; Orlando, and Miami, there are al-Qa’ida sleepers posing as tourists. They visit Universal Studios, Capitol Hill, Faneuil Hall, or South Beach and take thousands of digital photographs, which are passed on to al-Qa’ida analysts who pore over them in order to identify security flaws.
Other sleepers-just like Ramzi Yousef in 1992-find jobs as taxi drivers or commercial messengers. What better way to learn the ebbs and flows of a city and uncover its vulnerabilities? Still others find work on the hundreds of minimum-wage crews who spend their nights scrubbing office-building bathrooms and waxing corporate headquarters’ lobbies and corridors. When’s the last time anyone paid much attention to the anonymous peons who clean Citigroup’s offices at night? Or Merrill Lynch’s? Or GM’s? Yet what better way to discover the best places to preposition blocks of C4 or Semtex; to disable the elevators; to cause the largest number of casualties.