“Correct me if I’m wrong,” Lieutenant Roth said mordantly, “but would it be accurate to say that we don’t have jack shit on this guy? I mean, we don’t even have this guy’s name.”
“Not quite,” Sarah said. The others turned around to face her. She explained what they’d just received from Johannesburg.
Instead of the outburst of excitement or appreciation that she expected, there was a beat of silence, and then Agent Vigiani spoke.
“This guy escaped from prison in South Africa more than two weeks ago and we never heard about it?” she asked bitterly. “They didn’t send out a heads-up, didn’t alert Interpol, nothing? I don’t get it.”
“I doubt it was deliberate,” Sarah said. “South Africa’s been an outcast for so long that they’re not used to sharing their internal problems with the international authorities. They haven’t exactly gotten their act together.”
“Oh, well, this is quite a relief,” said Lieutenant George Roth. “Now we have a name. All we have to do is ask around-if we’re permitted to do that-to see if anyone happens to know a terrorist named Henrik Baumann. Makes our job so much easier.”
“A lead’s a lead,” Sarah said irritably.
“Your job is just about impossible,” Whitman agreed. “Yes, we have a name, and we’ll soon have prints, maybe even a photo. But we’re still searching for a needle in a haystack.”
“A needle in a haystack?” Lieutenant Roth replied. “More like trying to find a short shaft of wheat in a field that might be anywhere in Nebraska.”
“We’ll never find the guy with that attitude,” Harry Whitman said. “You’ve got to believe the guy’s out there. Each of you has to think of yourself as the fugitive. What he’s doing, what he’s planning, what he might have to buy, where he might be living. And everyone makes mistakes.”
“From what you’re telling me,” Lieutenant Roth said, “this guy doesn’t.”
Sarah spoke without looking up. “No. He’ll make a mistake. We just have to catch him at it.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
During the lunch hour on February 26, 1993, at 12:18 p.m., a bomb concealed in a rented yellow Ryder truck exploded in level B-2 of the parking garage of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan. An estimated fifty thousand people were inside the 110-story skyscraper, one of the World Trade Center’s seven buildings, at the time. Tens of thousands were stranded in offices, stairwells, and elevators as a result of the explosion, including seventeen kindergartners from P.S. 95 in Brooklyn, who were trapped in an elevator. A thousand people were injured, mostly from smoke inhalation, and six were killed. One of the great symbols of New York City sustained almost a billion dollars’ worth of damage.
After a painstaking investigation, eight men were subsequently arrested, of whom four were convicted of the bombing after an extraordinary five-month trial during which 207 witnesses were called, ten thousand pages of evidence amassed. The four men, all Arab immigrants, were followers of a blind Muslim cleric in a New Jersey mosque.
This was the worst act of terrorism ever to hit the United States up till that point. The bomb, which was built by amateurs, consisted of twelve hundred pounds of explosive material and three cylinders of hydrogen gas. It cost less than four hundred dollars to make.
Terrorism experts (an enormous number of them seemed to spring up all at once) all announced that America had lost its innocence, that America’s cities had become fortresses. The security in major buildings, particularly landmarks, was enhanced. Parking garages were no longer quite so easy for just anyone to enter. Concrete stanchions were placed around public spaces so cars could not drive into them. Incoming packages were X-rayed. Visitor passes and employee identification cards were checked more rigorously.
Unfortunately, that heightened vigilance lasted for only a few months. Although the new security cameras and the concrete stanchions remained in place, the shock of the World Trade Center bombing gradually faded, and people returned to life as usual.
The terrorism experts declared that America had finally joined the ranks of Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East, where terrorism is a regular occurrence. Actually, the United States had seen terrorism before.
There had been a few isolated incidents: in Chicago in 1886, a bomb exploded in a crowd of policemen; in 1920, a bomb went off on Wall Street. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, there was a wave of leftist-radical bombings, but they were sparse, mostly done by the Weather Underground faction of the Students for a Democratic Society and other members of the “white left,” who’d launched a campaign of urban terrorism hoping to spark a revolution. In a famous 1970 incident, leftist radicals had blown up the University of Wisconsin Army Research Center with a crude bomb made of diesel fuel and fertilizer. But the Weathermen dissolved in 1976 as a result of internal squabbling and by 1980 had more or less ceased to exist.
During the 1970s, the world was swept by terrorism, but the continental United States was mostly left alone, with the exception of a series of attacks, from the mid-seventies to the early eighties, by the Puerto Rican independence group FALN. Most of the Puerto Rican attacks, however, were limited to Puerto Rico. In 1980, in fact, more Americans were killed by lightning than by terrorism-and that was, worldwide, a big year for terrorism.
From time to time in recent years, America has gone through terrorism scares-in 1983, when a U.S. warship accidentally shot down an Iranian passenger plane, and in 1991 during the Persian Gulf War. But very little ever materialized. Of the five terrorist incidents on U.S. soil in 1991, none was associated with the Middle East. Four took place in Puerto Rico; the only one that happened in the continental United States was an attack on the Internal Revenue Service Center in Fresno, California, on April Fools’ Day by a group calling itself Up the IRS, Inc.
In fact, in the thirty-four terrorist incidents recorded in the United States and Puerto Rico between 1987 and 1991, not a single person was killed or even injured.
So while the bombing of the World Trade Center certainly jarred America into the realization that terrorism could actually happen here, that realization faded all too quickly. By the end of 1994, America returned to its normal state of blissful unconcern.
And then, on April 19, 1995, came the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, the worst domestic terrorist incident in U.S. history. Like TRADEBOM, the bomb was loaded onto a yellow Ryder rental truck. This one consisted of a ton of ammonium-nitrate fertilizer. It killed 167 people.
Fortunately, by the early 1980s the Federal Bureau of Investigation had begun to take terrorism seriously and had set up six Joint Terrorist Task Forces around the country. The largest was in New York City. It operated out of 26 Federal Plaza and was commanded jointly by the FBI and the New York City Police Department. And for more than a decade-until the Trade Center bomb-it went without an international incident, a “major special,” as such significant attacks are called.
The composition of the Joint Terrorist Task Force is always precisely 50 percent FBI agents and 50 percent New York City police detectives. Under the Memorandum of Understanding that established the task force, the FBI is the lead agency. The police members are sworn in as federal marshals to enable them to handle federal violations. A lieutenant oversees the policemen; an FBI supervisor oversees the agents.
It is a choice assignment for cops, and the task force members selected are always the cream of the detective corps. They tend to be senior detectives; the FBI members tend to be younger. They always work in teams of two and are further divided into squads-one that deals with Muslim fundamentalists, for instance, one for domestic terrorism, one for other international groups like the Sikhs or the Provisional Irish Republican Army.