Fisk took a seat. Dubin remained on the edge of his desk.
“I wanted you to brief the commissioner personally as to this Flight 903 thing,” said Dubin. “With everything going on this weekend, we can’t take any chances.”
Fisk nodded, unable to determine whether Dubin was kicking this upstairs or simply passing the buck. Was he covering his own ass, or did he truly believe there was enough evidence to warrant getting behind Fisk?
“Tell him what you told me,” said Dubin. “Your theory. The long form.”
Fisk turned to the commissioner. “It’s not reached the level of theory yet. But I’ll lay out the dots for you and I think you’ll agree that they might connect.”
The commissioner said, “Be precise. Tell me why you think what happened on that airplane might be the beginning of something instead of the end of it.”
Fisk collected his thoughts before speaking. He knew he had but one chance to sell the commissioner on his fears.
“One,” Fisk began, with a measured pace to be sure everything he said was fully digested. “Wide view first. If he was acting alone, then the hijacker Awaan Abdulraheem was on a mission that, at the very least, put him at a disadvantage to succeed. There is no way in this day and age that one man, acting alone, could take control of an American-bound aircraft with a phony bomb and a small knife. I’ll leave out the chance that this guy might not be playing with a full deck, and could be more ‘gee-whiz’ than ‘jihad.’ ”
He paused. The commissioner gave him nothing, no indication.
“Two. He is, by every indication, a jihadist, trained in Pakistan, versed in terror-speak—and yet with no financial resources of his own. If someone trained and sponsored him, then why wasn’t he better prepared?
“Three. He has confessed. He broke down in ten minutes. I’m not saying he’s a plant, but they screen these guys, they train them to stand up to us. They give them a script. It’s our job to shake it. Normal and natural that they isolate these guys, so they can’t give up the entire network. But they prep their holy warriors, and this Abdulraheem was a songbird. A scared songbird. I’d love to test this guy’s IQ. I think he’s a puppet, a dupe. That he absolutely believed that he was going to get away with heroic martyrdom—but he was the only one.”
Still no word or nod from the commissioner. Fisk looked to Dubin, who was no help.
“Four. He shares tribal kinship with bin Laden. Enough said.
“Five. He shares tribal kinship with another passenger on the same plane, a man named Baada Bin-Hezam. Bin-Hezam is a Saudi who is, or claims to be, an art dealer.”
The commissioner’s eyebrows went up on that one. “Where did you get the tribal connection?” he asked.
“Our own Analytical Unit. Earlier today.”
“Go on, Fisk,” said the commissioner.
“Six. I worked on the Ramstein inventory from bin Laden’s house. I had product clearance for all the intelligence work that’s been ongoing at NSA, CIA, and the rest of the task force. I was one of the ones shaking the pocket litter out of his pockets. Before we shipped it out of Germany, we found some misencoded plain text in images of sunflowers. NSA got a lot more. Indications that point away from operations such as a lone airplane hijacker. Bin Laden was seriously lathered about the Bassam Shah attempt and isolated bombings in general. A lack of discipline, that’s the take. OBL wanted a target worthy of high symbolic value. He openly questioned why they hadn’t learned from past mistakes and anticipated our methods. Am I reading too much into that? I don’t know. But a lightweight Yemeni with a fake bomb on an airplane cannot possibly be all there is to this thing. Goes against everything bin Laden was talking about. I think it’s more than fifty-fifty we’re being played.”
“That’s a serious contention, Fisk,” said the commissioner. “Do we have a clear link to Al-Qaeda? And before you answer, let me tell you this.” Kelly sat forward. “If you don’t have a hard and direct link, and we act on this, we will be conducting one of the most difficult manhunts in this city’s history—and in total secrecy. Because we will not use the media, because we cannot ever afford to be wrong. We cannot use non-Intel law enforcement because it will leak immediately. We cannot panic ten million people. And—this is just a fact—we cannot and will not squander all the optimism and confidence the foiled hijacking has brought to this city and this nation. No way I’m going to pop that balloon unless I’m damn well sure it’s going to pop on its own. People are happier and healthier and more confident when they think they can’t be beat. Just so you know where you stand, Fisk.”
“Understood, Commissioner.”
“Now. Do you have a link?”
“What you’re really asking for is proof, and I don’t have that. You know how we do things here. Al-Qaeda is not an organization with what we think of as military units. It’s more like a method shared by many, rather than an orderly group of soldiers working together. There’s top-down, but no schematic. Awfully hard to put two bad actors together at any time. So how do we track them? By figuring out who’s related to who and which training camps they’ve attended—if they’ve attended any at all. Now, Abdulraheem could not have known the things he told us about training in Pakistan, unless he had been there. The site itself was one of Al-Qaeda’s most closely guarded secrets. Unless I’m misinformed, we didn’t even know about it until we took down bin Laden.”
The commissioner nodded. “If we had knowledge that this other passenger, this Saudi, had gone to the same camp—then it would be boom time.”
“No way to know that,” said Fisk. “Or highly unlikely, I should say. But here’s the thing. The Saudi—Baada Bin-Hezam—has vanished. He stepped off the plane in Newark and disappeared into the wind.”
The commissioner made a face, looking more sour than usual. “What do we have on this Saudi, besides the passport dope?”
“In terms of imaging, we have jetway camera captures from the boarding gate in Stockholm. I should have Newark Airport customs hall crowd pictures and passport control security video by tonight.”
Dubin uncrossed his arms. “Can we get anything sent over here right away?” Then he answered his own question by picking up his phone and calling the photo tech section. He ordered the Stockholm images e-mailed to his computer immediately.
The commissioner stood, his hands on his hips. “Okay, I don’t think we have any choice but to go after him. If we do pull back the curtain on this guy and find there’s nothing, I’ll still feel it was a job worth doing. These are the kinds of inferences we should be making.”
The commissioner looked at Dubin, who took a deep breath and nodded. Fisk could almost feel the machine roaring to life.
“I don’t like how cold we’re going into this,” said Dubin.
“But that is why we’re going,” said the commissioner. “Because it’s so cold. Because this guy is invisible to us now.” He turned back to Fisk. “This is your call, Fisk, so you’re going to run it. But—quietly. He’s an invisible man, so you run an invisible op. Figure out a way to make it look like a routine seek-and-find with your informants and other assets and resources. For the time being, only the three of us know how deep the water is here. Let’s keep it that way. Assign analysts to different pieces of the puzzle. Only Intel cops get photographs of the Saudi for their own information. No mug-flashing in the neighborhoods—or limited. Definitely no spraying his name around. I’d like to think we’ve learned something from the Shah episode. Clear?”
“One other person knows,” said Fisk, looking to Dubin. “Gersten.”
The commissioner said, “Krina Gersten?” Fisk looked to him, hiding his surprise. “Her father was a good friend of mine, and a great cop. And her mother is a hell of a woman. Where is she on this?”