May 1
Federal Bureau Of Investigation
New York Field Office
26 Federal Plaza, 23rd Floor
New York City
3:35 P.M. EDT
The Federal Bureau of Investigation was once mythologized as a collection of single-minded crimefighters: as loyal as they were incorruptible, as incorruptible as they were relentless—and as relentless as they were conservative-minded, at least as evidenced in the dark suits, plain ties, and pristine white shirts they uniformly wore.
The FBI’s legendary director, J. Edgar Hoover, managed the myth and enforced the dress code.
Robert Hanssen—the Soviet’s FBI mole who first betrayed his country’s deepest secrets four years before Edward Snowden was even born—somewhat tarnished the Bureau’s image of loyalty and incorruptibility. The same scandal likewise dulled the sheen from the term “relentless.” It took the FBI more than two decades to discover Hanssen’s extracurricular activities.
As for the white shirts, the death in 1972 of Hoover—who today might be described as something of a micro-manager—put an end both to that rule as well as to the equally archaic mandate that agents wear hats while in the field.
A revolutionary concept: Today’s FBI agent has the fashion freedom to wear shirts of oxford blue if so wished—though, perhaps revealingly, many still do not.
One of the latter was the current FBI director who, at the moment the President of the United States was lifting off in MARINE ONE, was presiding over a meeting of the FBI’s surviving assistant directors, of hastily gathered SACs from field offices in the Northeastern U.S., and of carefully selected FBI special agents whose area of expertise focused on counterterrorism.
“Can we put up the photo of this Huntsman woman, please,” the director was saying, in a vexed tone that was anything but a question.
The image on the oversized plasma screen—a map of Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia, on which a scarlet-hued cone spread eastward from Dulles well into the blue of the Atlantic—remained unchanged.
“Pull up the damn passport photo,” hissed the head of the New York facility, who was also an assistant director, to a harried agent seated to the side at a laptop computer.
Jeffrey Connor hid his grin behind a hand; as one of the underlings at this confab of the Bureau Exalted, his sympathies lay with a fellow drone.
Poor guy’s probably hoping his next assignment isn’t to Missoula, Montana, Connor thought. Or more likely, hoping that it is…
Before Washington D.C. died, the session would have been held in the FBI’s Strategic Information and Operations Center, an expansive area inside the J. Edgar Hoover Building where dozens of support staff would have been manning banks of video and computer screens, coordinating by secure telephone and online communications with field offices and local law enforcement, data-mining broadcast and Internet content—all part of an efficient beehive where sophisticated systems provided near-instantaneous information on all known facts and any new developments associated with such a terrorist attack.
The SIOC was, like its host city, gone; while the New York City field office was now the largest FBI facility still standing, both the amenities and the efficiencies here paled in comparison to the accommodations that had been previously available, literally hours ago.
A color head-and-shoulders photo of a young woman finally materialized on the plasma screen. She was attractive, perhaps in her early 20s, fair-haired and blue-eyed and as markedly Western as the typical girl next door, if one were particularly fortunate in one’s neighbor.
“Okay,” the FBI director said. “Fatíma Huntsman. Now deceased. What do we know that will help us track down the person or persons who sent this bitch here to trigger a nuclear bomb?”
The assistant director shifted his eyes to Connor and nodded almost imperceptibly.
“Sir,” Connor said, “we’ve locked down where she came from: Her route took her from Afghanistan, near the Paki border, through India to Yemen and then to Mexico. She killed three Mexican coyotés after she crossed into Arizona. From there, she—”
“I saw the NBC broadcast too, Special Agent. What I’m asking is who the hell sent her?”
“Ms. Huntsman is—was—the daughter of a known Palestinian terrorist, Mr. Director,” Connor said, and nodded to the man at the laptop.
“This is Ahmad Abu Khaled … a moment, sir—okay, that’s him, seated in the chair on the left. This photo was taken by Shin Bet four years ago, in the Baqa'a refugee camp north of Amman. In Jordan, sir.”
“Right out in the open like that? What—he’s at a café, drinking a damn coffee?”
“Yes, sir. At Souq Al-Hal’lal. That’s the sook—the marketplace—in the camp.”
“Four years ago. Where is he now?”
“Shin Bet says it doesn’t—we don’t know, sir. He may have gone dark, underground. He may be underground, literally.”
Brows furrowed around the table.
“Dead, I mean,” Connor added hastily, reminded again of a propensity toward unwelcome levity in the presence of the professionally humorless.
“So you think it was a Palestinian group behind this?”
Connor shook his head with conviction. “Palestinians are bit players in the terrorism show these days, sir. Cannon fodder, typically. Our operating theory is that, given the sophistication of the crime—the attack, I mean—we’re looking at a far more viable entity as the prime suspect. Most likely, a state player that can utilize the various terror networks as foot soldiers. Somebody with the connections, the resources, the … the overall expertise, sir, to mobilize assets and to provide a nuke for the operation.”
Connor hesitated.
“Go on and say it, Special Agent,” the director growled. “We’re all thinking it anyway. You mean Iran, don’t you.”
Again, it was not phrased as a question.
“I’d be speculating,” Connor replied. “But the Iranians are clearly pretty close to the top of our suspect list, Mr. Director.”
The director grunted. “Like Pakistan was yesterday. Any evidence—okay, any indications, for God’s sake—that this Abu Khaled person, or his daughter, can be connected to the ayatollahs?”
“Iranians are shi’a, sir. Palestinians are almost exclusively sunni.”
“Both Muslim.”
“Yes sir. But usually, they mix like oil and water.”
“So, no? In your opinion, Special Agent?”
“So we don’t know. That’s not my opinion; that’s the fact. VEVAK—that’s the Iranian spy agency, sir—VEVAK is all over Syria and Lebanon. They’ve recruited heavily in the Palestinian refugee camps, to boot. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard has, too. Either could have approached the Palestinian groups, directly or through a sunni cutout maybe using their assets in the Hamas organization as a front—possibly, a double cutout, going through their shi’a allies in Hezbollah first—and enlisted their aid. The Iranians are pretty good chess players; it’s hard to read them, sir. Harder to know what they’re doing underneath the table.”
“What do the Israelis say?”
The New York assistant director in charge spoke up.
“They say they want to help, Jim. You heard the President: ‘all possible cooperation and coordination.’ Special Agent Connor is meeting with the chief Shin Bet representative as soon as we conclude here.”
“Yeah. That should be a helluva lot of—”
There was a knock on the conference room door, which opened without other preliminaries to admit a man Connor did not recognize.
He took the moment to glance at the clock.
It’s 3:37 already, Connor told himself. Next I have to sit down with some Israeli semi-spook and try to find out what the hell they have in their damn files. That’ll take hours, one way or another. I better call Katie and tell her I won’t get back until—
Connor saw the new arrival whisper with urgency to the FBI director, and watched as the director’s face turned ashen.