May 2
FBI NYC Field Office
26 Federal Plaza
New York City
7:58 P.M. EDT / 2:58 A.M. IDT
To those who know how, there are various ways to mask the location of a telephone in use.
Some are more effective than others, but few professionals contest that the FBI is among the best in the world at untangling the circuitous linkages of phone lines and patches and electronic dead-ends behind which their targets hope to conceal themselves; conversely, the FBI has also learned the fine art of camouflaging the location of any calls its own assets place.
In the immediate event, both sides of this communications coin were in play.
“Hell of a time to expect a nine-year-old kid to make a phone call,” Jeffrey Connor murmured. “What is it, a seven-hour time difference over there? It’s the middle of the damn night.”
Tavah chuckled. “Ahmad makes a conspiracy with his son, he believes. What better hour to speak with him, when others in the house are fast asleep? In less than two minutes, Ahmad will activate his own cell phone; it is his promise to the boy, to each week make himself available at this time. After the ending of Al-Gomaaa, the Day of Gathering. After sundown, Jeffrey, on what you call ‘Friday.’ It is now early Saturday morning in my country.”
“So he visits with the kid on Saturdays, eh? Sounds like a lot of divorced dads I know,” Connor said.
“Ahmad Abu Khaled lived for many years in your country.” Tavah’s voice was openly mocking. “Perhaps he adopted the custom of your people.”
Connor grunted.
The plan felt, to him, dicey: For technical reasons, the call would be placed from here in the FBI’s New York offices. It would then be transferred by fiber-optic landline, via a secure link to the American Embassy in Tel Aviv. There, the signal would be relayed to the boy’s cell phone in a Shin Bet office; its own transmission would then be snatched from a Tel Aviv cell phone tower, seamlessly handed off to the phone of a covert Shin Bet operative posted outside Ramallah in territory controlled by the Palestinian Authority. A nearby cell phone tower would electronically stamp its own identifier on the signal as the originating locale.
Should Abu Khaled, a hunted terrorist father, have access to his own phone-tracing technology, Shin Bet had deemed—and the FBI agreed—that the intricate charade would appear less threatening than a call from inside Israel itself. The Israelis had utilized a similarly roundabout path in previous contacts between the father and the boy.
Of course, this time the FBI would listen in too.
Moreover, both its own technology and the arguably more impressive skills of multiple, global NSA stations would be employed to do what the Israelis had failed to accomplish: to paw through the electronic spectrum, sorting out the routing twists that Abu Khaled had incorporated to conceal the source of his own signal. It annoyed the FBI computer geeks; there was a longstanding, if unofficial, competition between the G-men and their admittedly more arrogant NSA counterparts.
But inter-agency rivalry be damned; this time, institutional ego would have to take a back seat.
The window was narrow, Tavah had warned: Ahmad Abu Khaled was no fool. He had imposed a strict discipline on his exposure, even to his son, and his phone would be activated only for minutes.
The best guess of the experts estimated that a global trace would need five minutes at minimum.
“We have intentionally not had the boy contact Ahmad for the past several Saturdays,” Tavah said, with an unmistakably smug tone.
“Maybe you scared him off,” Connor said.
“To the contrary,” she answered. “We have done this before. A nine-year-old child is not the most dependable correspondent. They fall asleep, despite their best efforts. Sometimes they are merely careless; they call at the wrong time or simply forget. Ahmad raised another son, you remember. For this one to be too diligent would be a red flag to him.”
“You hope,” Connor muttered.
“Hope? Not at all, Jeffrey,” Tavah said. “It is our strategy. We have psychologists in my country who have worked on such details. These small details are incorporated into this strategy. Our hope is that they will therefore have much to say to each other tonight. Such has been the case in the past, when we allowed the contacts to resume. In several of those, Ahmad has been careless enough to have significantly extended the duration of the calls.”
“Define ‘significantly.’”
“Once, by almost ninety seconds,” she said. “That call lasted slightly less than six minutes.”
She noted Connor’s expression.
“Do not fear, Jeffrey. Tonight, the boy will attempt to keep him on signal for as long as possible. The boy has been well coached in this need.”
She always calls him ‘the boy,’ Connor told himself, and realized that he had no idea of the youth’s identity.
“What is your son’s name?” he asked.
“To Ahmad, he is known as ‘Saíf.’ That is what he wished to name the boy, at least. He carefully traced it on the boy’s blanket, by hand and using indelible ink, in that lovely script Ahmad writes. Saif. In Arabic, it means ‘the Sword.’”
“No,” Connor pressed. “What did you name him?”
Tavah looked up at him, her expression frigid.
“What I call him is of no relevance to you,” she said.
“It’s go-time.” This, from a shirt-sleeved FBI technician across the crowded room.
Tavah made no move, her eyes staring at Connor, fixed and challenging.
“Make the call, damn it,” he said.
“Such precision would not be part of a young boy’s personality,” she said, her expression unchanged, cold as dry ice. “As we wait, perhaps you have more to say to me?”
The clock in the room was digital, but Connor imagined that he could nonetheless hear each tick. He held his silence, matching hers, for what seemed an eternity.
Finally, on whatever “strategic” timetable she followed, Tavah turned to the keypad. With what to Connor felt like an infuriatingly slow precision of her own, she pressed in a series of numerals.
“Ringing now,” Connor heard the technician mutter, and both he and his Israeli counterpart slipped on headphones.
“Recording active … connection is live,” the technician’s words rasped in their ears. “All stations: initiate network trace, now…
There was a momentary hollow sound on the line; then Connor heard the voice, low and mellifluous, of the man who had planned and successfully carried out the destruction of his nation’s capital…
• • •
Both sides of the conversation were spoken in Arabic, but Tavah provided a running commentary on the content.
“Ahmad greets him, wishes him the peace of the Prophet,” she murmured. “Good—the boy responds properly, with the required formality…”
She paused, listening.
“Ahmad asks about his school lessons—” a sardonic snort here—“you would be startled indeed to know precisely what the boy is being taught, Ahmad, and by whom. The boy is chattering on, very good. Did I not know better, I myself would believe that he was today praised by the mullahs for his knowledge of the Qur’an. Ah! Excellent! The boy is now reciting a passage from memory, one of the longer ones … yes, boy: keep talking, that is very good…”
Connor glanced at the digital display: almost two minutes now.
He caught the eye of the shirt-sleeved man, whose fingers moved with urgency over the keyboard of his computer, shot a questioning, imploring eyebrow at him…
In reply, a quick head shake: not there yet…
The large plasma display was angled away from Connor’s full line of sight, but he could see moving multi-colored lines and quick-shifting numerical coordinates flashing and stuttering on the monitor’s glass.
“Ahmad interrupts … He is growing impatient, I fear. New topic, boy … yes, he now tells the father of a confrontation with an Israeli boy on the street … Good, Ahmad is relating his own schoolboy fistfights … oh? Were you indeed such a young lion, Ahmad? Truly? So very impressive you were, oh yes … no! Do not ask him where—”
Tavah looked up at Connor, and her eyes were furious.
“The boy has just asked Ahmad where he is today. A mistake; a foolish mistake. Ahmad is evading an answer, but it is clear that he remembers that he must end the conversation quickly. We have little time left, Jeffrey.”
The technician heard; his fingers flew faster, and he spoke with increased urgency into the throat-mic to his fellows laboring frantically at other stations on other continents…
We’re at three minutes-plus, Connor told himself. Not enough time…
“The boy is talking again … Good, he is asking for a paternal blessing … yes, Ahmad: please make it a very formal, a very long, blessing … speak with such passion, yes; you are such a learned man, take much time to speak the sacred words to your only living child, Ahmad … good, boy—plead with him for more … NO! A curse on you, Ahmad!”
Through his headphones, Connor heard the phone line go dead.
Not even four minutes, he realized. Nowhere near what we had to have to triangulate the fucking—
The misery of his musing was interrupted by a shout from the FBI technician.
“Score!” The tech had both arms raised high in jubilation. “Agent Connor, you gotta look at this! Fucker’s signal went through Montreal to Iceland, to the Canary Islands, to—Jeez, it was bouncing all over hell and back! Took us a shitload of work to burn through those whip-arounds, I’ll tell you. Worse, even then it was a moving target. Guy must have been in a car driving around, given the cell tower hand-offs—but before he cut the call off, we got a lock on his ass! Take that, you NSA shitheads! FBI rules!”
As one, Connor and Tavah scrambled to the console map.
A red-hued crosshair was blinking, signaling the last location of the targeted cell phone.
It was superimposed over the yellow-brown line of a secondary roadway: State Highway 10 near Milburn, New Jersey.
“He’s here,” Connor breathed. “Ahmad Abu Khaled is here. In America.”