Still other sleepers gauge first-responder reaction time by phoning in bogus threats and videoing the results. Tom knew that for the past ninety days, there had been a precipitous rise in the number of false alarms in New York, Paris, London, and Madrid. That told him that at least one of those cities had been targeted.
They were probing the airports, too. A three-week-old memo from 4627’s Washington office reported that al-Qa’ida was currently identifying chinks and weak spots in domestic U.S. airline security by sending easily identifiable Muslims on cross-country flights with orders to act suspiciously and thus identify the federal air marshals on the flight. Other, less noticeable sleepers were photographing the incidents with cell-phone cams. The air marshals’ faces went into an al-Qa’ida database. Interpol reports from Brussels indicated similar occurrences on domestic flights all over Europe. But no one had any inkling what al-Qa’ida was planning-with or without Tehran’s help, with or without Fatah’s diplomatic pouches.
That was why the megaterror process often took years to identify and target, why it was so hard to go proactive. The first al-Qa’ida reconnaissance of U.S. embassies in Africa that resulted in the 1998 attacks in Kenya and Tanzania took place in 1993. The planning for the October 2000 suicide bombing of the USSCole began four years earlier. Plotting for 9/11 also began in 1996, more than half a decade before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, when Khalid Sheikh Mohammad first suggested training terrorists to fly hijacked aircraft into buildings in the U.S.
But in each case, the pace accelerated inexorably in the period running up to the attack itself. There was always a palpable quickening of tempo. Intensified message traffic, multiple probes and/or dry runs, and increased target assessments always-always-indicated that al-Qa’ida had started its countdown.
The Big Question, as the pundits always said on those long-winded Washington talk shows, was: Countdown to what? To that, Tom hadn’t an answer.
But then, neither did CIA. CIA was dysfunctional these days. That’s why the Company, as it was sometimes called, was currently reduced to hiring private firms like 4627 to gather human-source intelligence on its behalf. And 4627 was hiring people like Jim McGee because CIA was incapable of completing the mission it had been created to do. CIA was in a shambles. The Agency was clueless.
Of course Tom hadn’t a clue either. But he knew a lot more than CIA did.
• Tom knew that Imad Mugniyah and Tariq Ben Said had been on-site when Jim McGee was killed in Gaza. CIA, in the person of Mrs. Portia M. ST. JOHN, had rejected that possibility out of hand.
• Tom knew that Ben Said the master bombmaker was about to perfect a new, sophisticated, and undetectable remote detonator for his IEDs. CIA had no inkling Tariq Ben Said even existed.
• And finally, Tom understood that if he could OODA-loop16Ben Said, he could disorient the assassin, disrupt his plans, and neutralize him before he killed anyone else.
The heavy steel door in front of his nose opened outward and Tom stepped ecstatically onto the rubber pad of the corridor, where Salah was waiting for him, a reproachful look on his face. Obviously, Salah was kicking himself for not having Tom shake his handkerchief out before he’d been allowed to bring it into the interrogation room.
Tom was sweating heavily. He looked down at his hands. They were shaking. And as quickly as it had come on, his excitement was replaced by a sudden gnawing pain in the pit of his gut. That spasm reinforced Tom’s gloomy acknowledgment that even though he understood the clock was ticking, he had absolutely no idea how much time was left before the attack would occur.
Tom had always been told knowledge was power. If that was true, and given all he knew right now, why did he feel as helpless as a drowning man?
16
6:35P.M. Tom looked around Reuven’s garden, the Bouviers stretched out, snoring, at his feet, the lanterns providing soft light as dusk settled over Herzlyia. He felt a lot better and guessed that the surroundings had a lot to do with the fact that his earlier spasm of panic and helplessness had largely subsided. Reuven’s housekeeper had set out a huge earthenware bowl of fresh figs for them. Reuven had augmented the fragrant fruit with a large slab of Morbier and a chunk ofsaucisson de Lyon sec on a white Limoges platter.
Now the Israeli emerged from the kitchen and made his way down the marble steps carrying a 1960s-vintage Chemex and a round cork trivet. He set the trivet on the table and poured Nescafé into three mugs emblazoned with the CIA seal.
Three mugs because Tom and Reuven weren’t alone. They’d been joined by a third man. Amos Aricha was a former assistant director of Shin Bet. Aricha was a lifelong counterterrorist who had commanded the agency’s selected targeting task force. His job: arresting or eliminating the individuals who built the explosive vests and car bombs and the masterminds who dispatched homicide bombers against Israeli civilians. These days, he said, he was a partner in a private company that trained security personnel and did risk assessments. He gave Tom his business card. On it was engraved a bird of prey in flight. Below, in Hebrew, was his old task force’s motto, adapted from the old American TV showHill Street Blues. It read,Let’s Do It to Them Before They Do It to Us.
But doing it to them was becoming more and more difficult, what with the media’s bias against Israel and the pressure to wage politically correct warfare against enemies who didn’t give a damn about humane rules of engagement. “I feel like a whatchamacallit sal-o-mon swimming upstream.” Aricha dropped heavily onto a chair. “And believe me, kiddo, I seen sal-o-mon. I’ve done my share of white-water rafting all around your wild, wild west.”
Amos had gone through basic training with Reuven. They’d both served in Sayeret Mat’kal, and after active duty they’d done theirmeluim17 in the same unit. Which meant the two men had known each other virtually since they’d been teenagers. Tom sneaked a look at the interaction between the Israelis. Their easy relationship-the inside jokes, the back-and-forth bantering, the way they dealt with each other-made him envious. He was a Foreign Service brat. He’d grown up in seven different countries and had attended sixteen different schools before he’d settled down at Dartmouth for four straight years in the same place.
Afterward, at CIA, he’d resumed his peripatetic lifestyle with three- and four-year tours. He hadn’t ever lived in one place long enough to make the sorts of friends one keeps for a lifetime. Until he’d returned to Paris.
Aricha reached across the table for the small earthenware pitcher of milk and poured some into his coffee. He was, Tom had to admit, an unlikely-looking manhunter. A big-boned man in his late sixties with a shock of curly white hair tied back into a 1960s-style ponytail, Aricha wore faded Levi’s cinched by a tooled rodeo belt with a silver-and-turquoise buckle the size of a horseshoe, topped by a matching denim shirt whose mother-of-pearl-topped snaps were open halfway down his hairy chest. His sleeves were rolled up past the elbows to display muscular, suntanned arms and a gold Rolex on his left wrist. The ragged cuffs of his jeans fell onto scuffed brown sharkskin Tony Lama cowboy boots. All he lacked, Tom thought, was the Colt Peacemaker on his hip and the tin star on his chest.