“You need to sit down, sir.”
“I need to use the restroom,” Fahd said.
“Get back in your seat!” Two more attendants moved in to block his path.
“Please — I need the toilet,” Fahd said.
“If you don’t sit down by the count of three, you’ll be arrested. There’s a marshal on this plane. One — two —”
In the midst of the fracas, no one noticed that Mohammed al-Nerzi, the quiet man with close-cropped hair in 47A, had turned on his cellphone, a prepaid model that had been bought in New York a month before. The phone found a working cell and blinked its eagerness to serve. Al-Nerzi held down the 4 key, automatically dialing a number that he had programmed into the phone the night before.
The number belonged to another cellphone, a phone that not coincidentally was also on board UA 919. No one could answer the second phone, but no one needed to. It was hidden in a red canvas bag in the baggage hold below. The bag had been slipped on board by Uday Yassir, a Syrian who had been hired three months before to join United’s ground crew at Heathrow after a routine background check found nothing untoward.
Unlike the passengers’ luggage, the canvas bag hadn’t gone through a security screen. It wouldn’t have passed. The phone inside it was hooked to a detonator wired to a pound of C-4, the plastic explosive preferred by armies and terrorists. The squat grayish brick had the power to tear a ten-foot hole in the plane’s aluminum skin, destroying the Boeing’s structural integrity and breaking the 747 apart in midair.
Across the cabin, the flight attendant said, “Three.”
Zakaria Fahd sat down.
And Mohammed al-Nerzi looked at his phone. The call hadn’t gone through. He couldn’t understand what had happened. He should be dead. The plane should be in a thousand pieces. Something was wrong. He silently cursed his misfortune, then tried to dial the number twice more before turning his phone off and slipping it into his pocket. The man in 47B never noticed.
What al-Nerzi didn’t know, what investigators discovered only after the 747 landed and they found the bomb in the plane’s hold, was that the turbulence over New Jersey had smashed the second phone, preventing it from receiving the call to detonate the C-4. Only the sudden violence of a late-March squall had saved UA 919 from destruction.
“WE’RE ON OUR final descent into Washington Dulles International Airport. Flight attendants please be seated for landing,” Captain Hamilton said. In 35A, Angela Smart craned her neck as the jet passed through three thousand feet, two thousand. They broke through a heavy layer of clouds, and she could see thick woods, roads heavy with traffic, the brown waters of the Potomac. The ride was mostly smooth now. One thousand feet. Five hundred.
Touchdown. The jet bounced once on the runway, then landed for real. A giant cheer erupted across the cabin, whoops and applause. The captain threw on the brakes, and the big Boeing came smoothly to a stop. The cheering continued for a full minute before finally slowing down.
“We’re glad to have you home,” the captain said, and the applause exploded again.
SHAFER’S PHONE RANG. He listened for a moment, then hung up.
“They’re down,” he said to Exley. “But something happened on the approach. They want to scrub the hold, talk to some people.”
An hour later, with the 747 still on the tarmac at Dulles, an FBI agent found the red canvas bag, and the truth of what had almost happened to UA 919 finally became clear.
Finding the would-be bombers wasn’t hard. Inexplicably, al-Nerzi didn’t even try to get rid of his phone. And the timing of Fahd’s stunt appeared strangely coincidental, as did the fact that both men had bought their tickets the same day, through the same travel agent. Exley had little doubt that both men would end up in federal prison, or Guantanamo. But somehow she didn’t feel any better. Only an incredible stroke of luck had saved the lives of 307 people today.
IT WAS NEARLY midnight when Exley and Shafer shuffled through the agency’s deserted underground parking garage, their heads low. Five cups of coffee had not hidden her exhaustion, just covered it with a layer of jitters.
“It was too close this afternoon,” she said.
“We need better intel,” Shafer said. “Turbulence isn’t a reliable fail-safe.” He laughed mirthlessly. “Where’s John Wells when you need him? The great Jalal.”
After his cryptic note in 2001, Wells had gone silent. The agency had all but forgotten that he existed, but at particularly stressful moments Shafer liked to invoke Wells’s name. He joked of Wells as a magic bullet, a talisman who would reappear when needed to rescue the agency single-handedly. The joke had a bitter edge. Shafer and Exley both knew that the agency desperately needed someone like Wells, someone who could provide reliable information from inside al Qaeda.
“I still think he’s alive,” Exley said as they approached her Caravan.
“Prove it.”
“Prove he isn’t.”
“I’ll bet you a hundred bucks we never hear from him again.”
“I’ll take it,” she said. She squeezed her alarm key and the Dodge gave her a friendly blink.
“See you tomorrow,” he said.
Tomorrow. Sunday. Another chance to disappoint her kids. “Tomorrow,” she said. “Great.”
He touched her arm as she slid into the van. “Think more’s coming, Jen?”
“This was a one-off. Otherwise at least one more plane would have gotten hit today. But—”
“But?”
“I think they’re trying to distract us,” she said. “Something is coming. Big. They’re waking up.”
“Strange, isn’t it?” Shafer said. “Nerzi didn’t even have to be on the plane. He could have made that call from anywhere. He wanted to be there. He wanted to die.”
“I wish we understood them better.”
“I don’t know how anyone can understand that.” He started to close her door, then stopped. “You know what, Jennifer? Take tomorrow off. Hang out with your kids. We’re going to have plenty to do.”
She didn’t argue, just slipped her key into the ignition as he shut the door.
JANET AND LORI were out tonight, Exley saw as she nosed the Caravan down Thirteenth Street to her apartment building. When she and Randy separated, she’d moved into D.C. proper, doubling the length of her commute and subjecting herself to Washington’s insanely high taxes. But she’d wanted to put some distance between them, and she didn’t regret the choice. She had bought an apartment just off Logan Circle, a once-iffy neighborhood that had gentrified, thanks to Washington’s hot housing market. Still, on Saturday nights a couple of prostitutes sometimes cruised Thirteenth, looking for behind-the-times johns who had missed the news about the area’s renaissance. She’d gotten to know them — or at least their names — while buying gas at the BP Amoco down the block from her building. She gave them a wave and got a halfhearted nod from Janet in return.
She parked the Caravan in the building’s underground garage and trudged to the elevator. Her legs ached from the hours she’d sat at her desk. She wanted nothing more than a glass of red wine, maybe two, before bed. In fact, that wasn’t entirely true. She wanted lots of things more than a glass of wine. A backrub, maybe. A boyfriend. A job that didn’t leave her constantly exhausted and on edge. But the first two weren’t immediately available, and she knew that she would have an awful time leaving the agency no matter how miserable she got. She was fighting for the United States. She couldn’t picture herself working for some private risk-management company, even for double the pay and half the hours. Maybe a couple more years of this would burn her out so badly she’d have to leave, but not yet.
No backrub, no boyfriend, no new job. A glass of Shiraz would be it instead.
Inside her apartment, a tidy one-bedroom in the corner of the building’s third floor, Exley flicked on the Ella Fitzgerald in her CD player, opened a bottle of wine, and stretched out on her couch. She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror across the room. God, she looked tired. She could remember being beautiful. She had the
