condition of his office. Traditionally it looked like a mildly dangerous minefield with small(ish) piles of documents placed strategically around the floor, the more pertinent ones in closer proximity to the desk. Today it looked like a medium-range guided missile had just come in.
The Ramshawe floor contained more detail on the activities of al Qaeda terrorists than you’d find in the seething cauldrons of Islamic fervor in Baghdad. That pile of data was close to the desk. Real close. The lieutenant commander had been in the building since 0500, after a heightened alert had been issued on the strength of reports from the Surveillance Office phone-monitoring section.
Ever since 9/11, the agency had insisted on strict intelligence phone observation on every single call made from any of the bin Laden family’s former residences in the city of Boston.
This stringent policy was forged in private consultations with the former NSA director, the president’s closest confidant, Admiral Arnold Morgan, who wanted it enforced—
There was one residence in particular, in the Back Bay area, that had constantly given cause for concern. The Surveillance Office had picked up so many cell phone calls that appeared to emanate from Baghdad, Tehran, or the Gaza Strip, they’d given up being startled. None of them made any sense, none of them had ever proved alarming, and none of them had ever amounted to a hill of beans.
But today’s message, received on a cell in the very small hours of the morning, seemed more specific than anything recently transmitted. The recipient was unknown to the Boston Police Department, but he was of Middle Eastern appearance, a man called Ramon Salman, who had been photographed but never interviewed. And that cell phone call had been transmitted to Syria from a block of apartments on Boston’s Commonwealth Avenue, from a suite of rooms formerly occupied by Osama bin Laden’s cousin.
This small sequence of coincidences was inflamed by the wording of the one-way transmission. Mr. Salman was the only voice. There was no acknowledgment from the other end of the line. However, that was kids’ stuff for the National Surveillance Office, which had, at the turn of the century, routinely tapped into Osama’s phone calls from his cave in the Hindu Kush, direct to his mother in Saudi Arabia.
They pinpointed this morning’s call to a position near the center of Damascus. The translation from Arabic to English read:
Lt. Commander Ramshawe had every code-breaking operator in the agency hitting the computer keys; fingers were flashing downward like shafts of light. The huge glassed bulletproof building quivered with activity. But, after eight hours, no one had cracked the clandestine communique directed, almost certainly, at one of the al Qaeda or Hamas strongholds in the Syrian capital.
Worse yet, Ramon Salman had vanished. Really vanished, that is. When Boston police had smashed their way into his apartment at 7 A.M., they had been greeted by empty cupboards, a couple of bathrooms stripped even of toothpaste, and a kitchen bereft of any form of nourishment. The phone was cut off, the television cable input was dead, and even the answering machine was disconnected.
As Lt. Commander Ramshawe put it on the phone to his boss at 7:30 A.M., “Beats the living shit out of me, Chief. But I don’t bloody like it. And who the hell’s Charlie Hall when he’s up and running?”
At approximately 0809, Jimmy had a clearer idea of the significance of the message.
That apartment on Commonwealth Avenue plainly held the key to this latest terrorist assault on an American city. At least it used to. But despite the presence of a dozen forensic guys combing through the place for clues, it was now just another dead end. Ramon Salman had vanished and taken his secrets with him. Maybe the police would pick him up somewhere. Maybe not. America’s a very big place in which to get lost, and the Arab had probably taken off around 0300, six hours before the airport closures. J. Ramshawe knew
He also knew that even the massive resources of Crypto City, the insiders’ name for the National Security Agency, would not be effective against a foe who had disappeared off the charts. So far as Jimmy could tell, the only chance was to get after the wounded Reza Aghani and persuade him to talk.
Meanwhile, so far as Jimmy was concerned, the rest of the message was nothing short of a
Meanwhile, the second part of the transmission to Syria was giving him a whole stack of worries. Reza was accounted for, and Ari was dead. But the “headquarters in Houston” was a complete blank, and that was where Reza was supposedly headed. The Texas police were concentrating a search for Ramon Salman in the Houston area, but there was no Flight 62 on any airline going anywhere near the southern Texas area.
The number 62 of course could have meant anything, and the code-breakers in Crypto City had come up with over seven thousand computerized possibilities, which included just about every takeoff in North America that week, including the Space Shuttle.
The wording did suggest that Flight 62 was the one the terrorists were supposed to be on, and that probably had meant their leaving the country ASAP. And yet, in Jimmy’s mind, he saw that last short sentence,
He had been ruminating for a half hour on this and had twice tried to speak to his mentor, the Big Man, Admiral Morgan himself. But Mrs. Morgan thought Arnold was in Norfolk with Jimmy’s boss, Admiral Morris, on board a carrier, but he would be at the White House later for lunch with the president if Jimmy’s business was vital.
“Might not be vital now at 11:30,” he said as he put down the telephone. “But it sure as hell might be at lunchtime.”
Meanwhile, back in the Oval Office, President Bedford had just been briefed that Reza Aghani was conscious, the bullet had been removed from his arm, and he was drinking tea, resolutely refusing to utter one word to any of the six police officers currently guarding his room both inside and out.
“How long before they charge him?” asked the president.
“Maybe twenty-four hours,” replied Alan Brett. “But the CIA thinks this cat is a really dangerous little character, almost certainly an Iranian Shi’ite, based in either Gaza or Syria, probably Hamas. They’re scared some civilian court will free him and he’ll hit back at us somehow.”
“Can we make a case that he’s military?”
“Well, he was carrying a bomb with him.”
“Can that make him military?”
“I’ll ask the Pentagon.”
“Okay, Alan. I’ll see you after lunch. I’m expecting Arnold Morgan in the next few minutes. He’ll probably want Aghani shot at dawn, no questions asked.”
The professor chuckled. “Not a bad plan, that,” he said archly, as he let himself out.
Two minutes later, the president’s clock ticked over to noon and the door opened. The president did not look up, because he found the scenario more amusing that way.
“Eight bells, sir,” rasped a familiar voice. “Permission to come aboard?”
President Bedford looked up, smiling, face-to-face once more with the immaculately dressed Admiral Morgan, clean-shaven, dark gray suit, white shirt, Annapolis tie, black shoes polished to a degree appropriate to a Tiffany display case.
“Goddamned towelheads hit us again,” Morgan growled. “How does it look?”
“Lousy,” replied Paul Bedford, who was long accustomed to the admiral’s propensity to dispense entirely with formalities like “Good morning,” or “Great to see you,” or “How you been?” or “How’s Maggie?”
This applied particularly when there were matters on the desk that involved even the slightest problem of a Middle Eastern nature.
