“My boy,” Aricha said to Tom in thickly accented English, “you have what we callbalagan gadol -a big problem-and so do we.”
It all made such perfect sense in hindsight. On the way back from the prison, Tom had called his office and had one of his people check on whether there had been multiple sales of Vuitton Montsouris backpacks in August 2003. It took less than two hours for the results to come in from Paris. Malik and Dianne had met with his “editor” on Saturday, August 15. On Monday the eighteenth, twelve Vuitton backpacks-the entire stock in Vuitton’s Champs-Élysées store-had been ordered by telephone. A commercial messenger had picked them up, paying in cash. There was no record of where they’d been delivered.
But there was a signature from the messenger on the receipt. Using the secure phone at Reuven’s office, Tom had called one of 4627’s Parisian gumshoes and had him wash the name through the police computer. By four o’clock Tel Aviv time, the private investigator had the name of the messenger service and verified the delivery address: Boissons Maghreb. By 4:30, 4627’s Paris office had used one of its technical employees to set up a phone tap and begun the slightly more intricate arrangements to intercept Yahia Hamzi’s cell-phone transmissions. There was no jumping through hoops to satisfy a station chief, no waiting for ambassadorial approval, no back-and-forth with Langley.
More to the point, Tom understood there’d been no explosives in the radio Dianne Lamb had brought from London at Malik’s request. Malik had carried the bomb. Tariq Ben Said had somehow incorporated the plastique into the lining of the Vuitton backpack and done it in a way that still allowed the explosive to have the same lethal effect as a shaped charge.
God, how sophisticated things had become. When Tom had gone through case officer training in the 1980s, IEDs were relatively simple. You had your pipe bombs. You had your car bombs. You had your Molotov cocktails. You had your basic explosives: PETN, RDX, dynamite, or plastique-C3, C4, or Semtex. There were homemade mortars (the IRA favored those) and there were the occasional remotely detonated devices used by the ETA Basque separatists against the Spanish. But they were the exceptions to the rule.
Nope. In the 1980s, IEDs were all pretty basic, keep-it-simple-stupid bombs. Tom, for example, had been taught to make a cone charge powerful enough to blast through three inches of armor plate using a wine bottle and a one-pound block of C4. Today, he’d need less than a quarter of that amount. Today, it was all miniature devices and remote control. Explosives were now so concentrated that you could build a bomb powerful enough to bring down a 747 and conceal it in a tennis shoe. You could set off an IED planted in a car on a street in Haifa by making a cell-phone call from a café on the rue du Midi in Brussels. And you could-if you were Tariq Ben Said-create a totally unidentifiable bomb capable of killing sixteen and wounding scores more by transmogrifying the lining of a Louis Vuitton backpack into a weapon of mass destruction. The stuff was frigging invisible. Malik Suleiman had carried the goddamn backpack right past the baggage inspectors at de Gaulle and subsequently slipped it through Israel’s vaunted security systems. What would happen when he brought it throughU.S. airports, whose ineffective TSA (Transportation Security Administration) personnel were known derogatorily as “thousands standing around”?
Tom popped a chunk of sausage into his mouth. “Which brings me to point number two. Why did Malik ask Dianne Lamb to bring his radio in her suitcase? After all, the explosives were in the backpack.”
“There was a radio involved in the Jerusalem explosion.” Aricha sipped his coffee. “So there’s got to be a reason.” He set the mug on the table. “But let me tell you, I still talk to Shin Bet. And their forensics people have been over the goddamn thing top to whatchamacallit bottom. They haven’t found anything. There were never any explosives concealed in either one of the radios.”
“These people never do anything without a reason.” Reuven picked up his mug and sipped. “There had to be explosives somewhere.”
“No there didn’t, goddamnit-” Tom almost choked on his sausage. “Don’t you see, Reuven?”
“See what?”
“It’s always been the assumption that Dianne unwittingly carried the explosives.”
Amos nodded. “That’s the pattern. The Irish woman flying from Heathrow, the-”
“I know about all those cases. But there was no trace of explosives in anything Dianne brought from London.”
“So far. We also know the man you call Ben Said and we call Bomber-X-he had to make small whatchamacallit batches of a new formula.”
That Aricha knew Ben Said’s formula was made in small quantities was surprising because Tom hadn’t mentioned that fact to Reuven, or anyone else. He decided to elicit. “Are you sure, Amos?”
Tom caught a flicker of motion in the Shin Bet man’s eyes. And then Amos deflected the question. “It’s not impossible there were explosives in the radio as well as the backpack.”
Tom decided not to follow up the elicitation. It would be too obvious. So he deflected back. “What’s the point?”
Aricha looked at Tom. “The point is, one plus one equals two. Two radios. Two bombs. The point is that this Ben Said has come up with a new way of targeting Israel.”
“Hold it.” Tom scampered from the patio up to the living room, where he’d left his interrogation notes. He flipped through the sheets until he found what he wanted and charged back downstairs. “The batteries were dead, Amos. The radio batteries were dead.”
The Israeli shrugged. “So,nu?”
“Don’t you see? They weren’t dead-they were something else. Dummies. Containers for some critical element of his bomb. Malik sent Dianne to buy new batteries. He got her out of the room while he did whatever he had to do. Removed whatever was concealed in the batteries. There had to be something in the batteries.”
Amos frowned. “When you go through security at Heathrow,” he said, “especially when it’s a Tel Aviv flight, they make you turn on all your electronic devices. No exceptions. They would have done the same at de Gaulle, or Dulles, or wherever. That’s the standard practice these days.”
“But Malik’s radio was in Dianne’s suitcase, not her hand luggage,” Tom said. “It would never have been inspected. Not in Europe. In Europe, you can lock your luggage. Only in the U.S. is luggage for the hold hand-inspected.”
“This has nothing to do with the U.S. He was trying to launch attacks here in Israel.”
Tom ignored the Shin Bet man. “There had to be something concealed in the batteries. I think Dianne carried detonators. They spent all their time together on the August trip. But in July, Malik was by himself twice in three days. Once for a meeting with his editor-who we know works with Ben Said. And once for a meeting with ‘an old friend’ whom he met while buying a newspaper. My guess is that Malik picked the detonators up in Paris on the previous trip.”
Reuven shrugged. “What’s your point?”
“My point is that maybe they were Ben Said’s prototype detonators. We can’t discount that, can we?”
Amos gave Tom a dismissive stare. “Prototype-schmototype. I don’t think it makes much difference at this point.”
“I do. I think we’ve been focusing on the wrong target. We’re thinking inside the box. We’re no better than Langley.”
He got blank stares from the two Israelis. “Look,” he said, gulping some coffee to wash the sausage down. “There’s this old shaggy-dog story about a guy who goes through a diamond-mine gate every night for a week with a wheelbarrow full of dirt. The security guard sifts the dirt. He searches the guy-even puts on rubber gloves and does a body-cavity search. Nothing. Bubkes. The guard never finds a thing. After two weeks of this, he pulls the fellow aside. ‘Look,’ he says, ‘I know you’re stealing diamonds. I just can’t figure out how you’re doing it.’ And the fellow looks at the guard and says, ‘Since this is my last day on this job, I’ll tell you what I’ve been doing. I’ve been stealing wheelbarrows.’”