Authors: L.D. Beyer
As the bus passed through the toll booth, Terry Fogel couldn’t help but notice the police. In addition to the cars and trucks—even the unmarked ones were obvious—there were a dozen cops from various jurisdictions standing in the median at the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel. Besides the two or three Port Authority police officers who were normally stationed by the entrance, there were three New Jersey State Police cars and two from the New York City Police Department. He glanced up at the wall to his right and saw another half dozen cops standing on top. Then, just before they entered the tunnel, he spotted the black SUV and three men in suits. Even the Feds were here, he thought. He sat back as the bus was swallowed up by the darkness.
A few minutes later, as they pulled into the Port Authority Bus Terminal, he made another count. There were four cars and seven officers, all NYPD. And those were the ones that he could see, he mused. The terminal, as usual, was crowded, and the constant stream of buses coming and going blocked much of his view. He climbed off the bus and made his way over to the subway entrance. As he swiped his MetroCard, he saw the clusters of cops eyeing the harried commuters. The commuters didn’t seem to notice the extra police presence, but he did. He nodded to two as he jostled his way through the crowd, following the signs. He would catch the train to Penn Station. And, he thought with a grin, when he got there, and later when he visited Grand Central Terminal, he was certain that he would see the same thing.
He hid his grin. His message had been received.
The sliver of a moon hung low in the sky as Pablo Guerrero followed the path past the cantina, past the cages for the roosters, and then on to the stables. Outside, the boy had the four horses ready. Guerrero climbed onto the spotted stallion, several years past his prime, but still strong. As Alberto and two other men climbed onto their horses, he looked down at the boy.
“You know what to do?”
The boy nodded. Guerrero studied him for a second then, with a nod, turned his horse. With Alberto in the lead, the four men followed the path through the trees. They kept the horses to a walk, partly because of the uneven terrain and the darkness, but more so as to not draw attention. Four
vaqueros
—cowhands—headed out for another long day in the hills would not look unusual.
The tip had come from one of his contacts in the government. It was a difficult decision to leave Carolina behind. But he had no choice. The troops, an elite unit, were staging for the raid, and the noose around him was tightening. It was time to leave.
An hour later, as the sun was poking above the peaks in the east, they came upon the group of buildings; a handful of rustic, single-story concrete structures common to the barrios, the farms, and the ranches that dotted the landscape. For the men who worked the small ranch nestled high in the hills and for their families, this was home.
They dismounted, and while Alberto and the two men loaded the saddle bags into the back of the waiting pickup trucks, Guerrero glanced behind, down the long dusty trail they had followed. For weeks he had been preparing himself, knowing that this day might come. The safe house, another smaller but secluded ranch he owned on the coast, was ready. By the time the sun was setting, they would be there.
He glanced over the hills across the grey of the early morning and into the distance. He felt sick. In his grief, he had made a mistake. But what choice did he have at the time? He had to bury his daughter. And what choice did he have now? He had to flee.
I’ll be back, Carolina. I promise.
After a moment, he turned and climbed into the truck, knowing that until he returned, the boy would make sure Carolina’s grave was tended properly.
“We were able to locate both phones,” Monahan said, referring to the recorded conversation between the two jihadists. He went on to explain that agents had been able to triangulate the GPS chips in each phone. “We found one in Brooklyn, in the car of a Syrian immigrant named Mandhur Husam al Din. He runs a Middle Eastern food store in Bay Ridge. He belongs to the Syrian Cultural and Dawah Center, which is a Mosque headed by Sheik Ramzi Abdul-Muqtadir.”
Richter grunted. He remembered the imam from FBI briefings. A radical preacher known for his anti-American views and a suspected recruiter for the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade—a terrorist organization allegedly funded by the government of Syria—he was being closely monitored by the New York City Police Department and the JTTF.
“He insists that the phone is not his,” Monahan continued. “But we’ve taken him into custody.”
There was a pause, and Richter heard a shuffle of papers.
“The second phone was located in Chicago in the possession of Murad Al-Asadi. He’s someone we’ve been watching as well. He’s from Yemen, and we believe he’s involved in recruiting displaced Muslims for jihad training. We also have reason to believe he serves as a middleman by funneling Al Qaeda money to cells in the U.S. He too swears that the phone is not his.” There was another pause. “Both men claim to know nothing of the cesium thefts or of any plot.”
“So what’s our next step?” Richter asked after a moment.
“Their lawyers are screaming and yelling, but I’ve spoken with Ben Kiplinger,” he said, referring to the attorney general. “With the evidence we have—the phone calls, the record of suspected financial transactions in both cases—we can hold them for a while as we investigate and execute search warrants.” He paused. “Ultimately, we would need to charge them, let them go, or potentially transfer them to the military.”
Richter made a note. He knew that under the provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act, the men could be detained indefinitely. They would have to be transferred to military custody where they would be treated as enemy combatants, prisoners of war. But would that accomplish anything? The cesium was still missing, and finding that was the priority.
“What about accomplices?” he asked.
“We’re interviewing known contacts, influential people in their communities,” Monahan replied. “But that’s a long shot.”
Richter frowned as he made another note. He knew this was likely to be met with open hostility, that many in the community—the business leaders, the sheiks, and the faithful—would refuse to answer any questions until the men were set free.
They spoke for another few minutes. When he hung up, he considered the news. Locating the cell phones had been the easy part, he knew, a simple matter of triangulating the embedded GPS chips. Now they faced the challenge of learning what the potential suspects knew and the legal hurdles of detaining them. Meanwhile, the FBI and Homeland Security were moving as fast as they could.
He hoped it was fast enough.
As Jerry Watkins climbed down the steps, she smelled the familiar sour smell, an unpleasant odor from years of grime, grease, urine, decaying garbage, and dampness that seemed to be forever trapped in the stairways, platforms and tunnels of the subway. She swiped her MetroCard and pushed through the gate. She normally wouldn’t have noticed the smell, having grown immune to it over the years. But, ever since the treatments began, many things seemed to make her nauseous now. Odors she previously found pleasant, especially certain foods, now left her gagging. She stepped away from an old man who reeked of cigarettes and garlic.
Seconds later, she heard the rumble of the train. It was her first day back at work after two weeks off. It had been a whirlwind that had begun with a routine medical test and an apologetic look in her doctor’s eye. This was followed by CT Scans to confirm the doctor’s suspicions. She had spent several days learning as much as she could about breast cancer and treatment options, speaking to her doctor, to other women, to support groups, and then spending hours online. Thankfully, according to her doctor anyway, the cancer had been caught early enough and she had more options. The surgery, a lumpectomy in her left breast, had been followed by chemotherapy—which she knew was the cause of her nausea—and the implantation of radioactive seeds where the tumor once was. The seeds would remain for another week.
After three days spent on the couch, she was anxious to go back to work. A computer programmer, she worked for an investment bank in lower Manhattan. Not exactly on Wall Street, she thought, but it didn’t matter. With the amount of transactions her firm handled daily, they had the ability to move the markets, if not rattle them occasionally.
What was the term now? Too big to fail?
She had joked with a friend that at least it provided job security.
The train pulled into the Wall Street station and her anxiety grew while she waited with other passengers for the doors to open. She needed to get out; out of the subway, away from these people, away from their odors, away from the stink of the station, into fresh air. She climbed the stairs and felt a sense of relief when she made it to the top. There, she spotted the two police officers, not an unusual sight in Manhattan.
As she passed, one of the cops frowned and stepped toward her.
“Ma’am. May we have a word with you?” The female cop asked.
“I think I got something. Let’s go back.”
The pilot nodded and began to bank. As he came out of the turn, he spotted the barn directly ahead. The weathered siding and missing roof shingles indicated that it probably hadn’t been used in some time. He glanced at the nearby house. The front porch was missing a step, the screen door was bent at an odd angle, and most of the windows were boarded over. The farm looked abandoned. Yet the fresh, dark soil, neatly sculpted as if a giant comb had been dragged through it, indicated that the fields had been recently tilled. Someone was farming the land. And in the driveway sat a rusty and dented late-model Ford pickup truck.
“Go right over the barn this time,” the young patrolman said. Then he turned and glanced at the pilot. “Can you get any lower?”
The pilot, a twenty-eight year veteran of the Ohio State Police nodded as he turned slightly and began to descend. He leveled off at two hundred feet. The young cop sitting next to him hadn’t even been born yet when he’d joined the force, he thought once more. That made him feel old, and he tried once again to chase the thought from his mind. A mission was a mission he thought, and he would rather be flying than on the ground. Usually called out for search and rescue, sometimes a missing person, other times a wanted fugitive, this was just another form of reconnaissance, he told himself. The difference was, his eyes wouldn’t help him much today, except for keeping the plane in the sky.
As they passed over the barn, the kid watched the meter then smiled.
“Bingo!” he called out.
The pilot began to fly an oval pattern over the barn while the kid confirmed his readings. It was amazing technology, he thought. From two hundred feet in the air, the meter was able to pick up radiation. That both amazed and frightened him. The kid had assured him that they were safe, although he still wondered. What the heck did the kid know anyway? If that meter was able to pick up the radiation from this far away, were the levels high enough to affect him? He glanced over at the kid again. He was excited and didn’t seem the least bit troubled by being so close to something so dangerous. The pilot sighed. The kid was too young to remember the emergency drills, the fallout shelters and bomb cellars of the Cold War. Just a young kid himself in the 1970s, the pilot remembered the teacher telling students to put their heads below their desks, as if the eighteen-inch by two-foot piece of wood over their heads would protect them from an atomic blast.
He glanced over at the kid. “Do we have enough to confirm?”
The kid smiled and nodded.
“Call it in,” the pilot instructed as he began to climb. He wanted to put as much distance between whatever was in the barn and his plane as he could. He leveled off at one thousand feet. From here, he was still in position to support the response team on the ground. That is, if they arrived within the next hour, he thought as he checked his fuel gauge. After that, they would have to bug out.
He glanced over at the meter in the kid’s hands and noticed that, although the radiation levels had dropped, they were still registering something. He glanced at the fuel gauge again and then at his watch, anxious as the seconds passed by at a snail’s pace.
When Jerry Watkins reached her building, her face was still red. She hesitated outside the door for a second, then turned and walked to the bench by the small fountain. She was embarrassed and she was angry. She had felt guilty when the two cops had questioned her, like she had done something wrong. The female cop had finally asked her if she had recently undergone any medical treatments.
How could they know?
She had wondered at the time. She felt as if her privacy had been violated. She stared back at the cop, unsure what to say as both cops glanced down at their gun belts. It took her a moment to realize what they were doing—she had read something about this in the
New York Times
, hadn’t she? It was then that she remembered the card.
“I’m sorry,” she stammered and fumbled in her purse. The nurse had told her that she should carry the card with her; that certain detectors could be sensitive, especially in airports. She had absentmindedly stuck the card in her purse, less concerned about it and her future travel plans at the time than the cancer inside her.
The cops had been polite, professional and had even apologized for the inconvenience. That didn’t make it any better, she thought.
God damn it!
There was something wrong with the world when she was forced to explain her medical condition to two cops, to two strangers carrying meters that could sense what was going on inside her own body.
Rusty Morgan saw the plume of dust in the distance, rising above the Nevada desert. He grabbed his radio and alerted his crew to the inbound load. After thirty-six years in the business, he had begun thinking that it might be time to sell out and retire; especially now, with scrap metal prices as high as they were. The last two years had been great for his business. Everybody attributed it to the demand from China, but, he thought as he squinted into the sun—trying to make out the truck—whatever it was, he had a decision to make. Sell now, while his business was profitable or ride out the next few years of high prices and pocket as much cash as he could. The trouble was, he thought as he stared at the truck rumbling across the desert, what would he do instead?
He grabbed the meter and walked down to the scales. By the time he got there, two of his men were waiting. The truck pulled through the open gate and drove up to the scale.
“What you got today, Pete?” Rusty called up to the driver.
“Copper pipes, various lengths, some coils of tubing, and some wiring. Also got some iron pipe and some metal workbenches.”
Rusty shook his head. “Where did you get this stuff, Pete?”
“Aw, come on, Rusty. You going to grill me every time?”
Rusty shook his head. Maybe it was better if he didn’t know. He wiggled the meter at Pete.
“Jeez, Rusty. The meter too?”
Pete hopped out of the cab. Rusty ignored him and climbed up into the truck bed. He turned the meter on and, after a moment, it began to chirp. Rusty’s head spun. He shot Pete a dirty look as he quickly climbed out.
“What the fuck’s wrong with you, Pete?” he screamed in the driver’s face. “You trying to kill me? You trying to kill my boys? You trying to destroy my business?”
Pete backed up, his hands held, palms out, in front of him. “I swear, Rusty,” he pleaded. “I didn’t know. I got it from some guy in Reno.”
“Get this shit out of here!” Rusty snarled.
“Aw jeez, Rusty! What am I supposed to do with it?”
Rusty took a step toward him; Pete flinched then scrambled back into the truck.
Seconds later, the truck drove out through the gates. Rusty, still angry, watched as it headed back across the desert. That was the last time he would do business with that guy, he told himself. He still remembered, all too vividly, the dirty load he had received several years back; the one that had almost shut down his business.
He shook his head and hurried back to his desk, searching for the card. It took him a moment to find it. The visit last week from the stern-faced woman and the two doom-and-gloom men from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission had frustrated him. With her hair pulled back into a bun so tight she couldn’t even smile, she had come into his yard unannounced with the men in tow waving their meters. She had demanded to see his records, treating him like an uneducated redneck.
He dialed the number. It was Pete’s turn for a taste of bun lady.