The coffeemaker in the field office break room was not of this millennium. Nor was it for the faint of heart. Nicknamed La Brea, its spewings resembled tar from the famous Pleistocene pits of California. Which was why, when Special Agent Burke arrived for his first meeting of the day, he had a Starbucks Venti in hand.
It was not yet seven in the morning, but Alves had called an hour ago, causing him to wonder if she ever slept. They converged in the third-floor lobby.
“Forensics has something they want to show us in The Lab,” Alves said. They began walking in that direction. “We got an ID on our bomber,” she added, waving a printout at him.
Burke was mildly surprised. “That was quick. What’s the degree of confidence?”
“As close to a hundred percent it as gets in our business.” She read from the paper. “Mohammed al-Qusami, Saudi national, twenty-one years old. Former ISIS fighter, captured in northern Syria four years ago. The Kurds had him in lockup for over a year, then he escaped when Turkish forces came across the border and everything went to hell. Fortunately, during his captivity the Brits paid a visit and took pictures of all the detainees for their rogues’ gallery. While they were at it, they took DNA samples. Al-Qusami’s is a perfect match to the bits and pieces we’re collecting outside the Watergate.”
“Good on the Brits for taking the initiative. Any idea where al-Qusami went after his jailbreak?”
“Once we nailed down the name, we found a file in our own archives. Unfortunately, combined with what the Brits had…” She held up a single page. “There was a report that some of the group he escaped with went south. The question of who they eventually fell in with is anybody’s guess. That was Assad’s territory then, and mostly still is. Syria, of course, is swarming with Russians and Iranians, and then you’ve got about twenty or so different militias. Odds are, al-Qusami and his buddies either joined one of the militias, or went to ground waiting for ISIS to make its comeback.”
“Lovely. If we had some credible claim of responsibility for this attack we might know where to start.”
“We’re still watching, but nothing passes the sniff test yet. On a more positive note, the night shift began comparing the picture the Brits provided to recent arrivals at our big east coast airports—Dulles, Atlanta, JFK. Our software is getting really good at matching surveillance footage with known faces, and it didn’t take long. Al-Qusami flew into Dulles five days ago, a nonstop from Cairo. After clearing immigration, he took a taxi to a very unclean hotel twenty minutes from the Watergate—the place has all the ambiance of a Turkish prison. We’ve had a team going over the room for a couple of hours, but so far it’s a dry hole.”
“Was this guy on the terrorist watch list?”
“Mohammed al-Qusami was, but all we had was the name when he arrived—we hadn’t tied in the photo yet.”
“Meaning he entered under a false ID,” Burke surmised.
“Yep, and a pretty good one. We haven’t found any trace of the passport, so he must have ditched it at some point. But between immigration and the airline, we were able to find the name he was traveling under. That’s what led us to the hotel room. It’s a Saudi identity. Not legitimate, but backstopped pretty professionally—a real passport was issued six months ago. Valid address, employment records, travel history, the works. Somebody went to a lot of trouble to make Mo’s entry seamless.”
Reaching the door of the forensics room—fondly referred to as The Lab—Burke drew to a stop. “So we’ve got a twenty-one-year-old kid who probably started fighting for ISIS when he was, what … seventeen?”
“Probably less.”
“Which means the chances are good he’s not highly educated. Probably never had any training beyond which end of a Kalashnikov to point downrange.”
“That’d be my take. He was a low-level recruit—the usual jihadi cannon fodder.”
Burke stood pondering. “That all fits the profile of a suicide bomber, I guess. Young radicalized male, early exit to Paradise. Still … something about it feels wrong.”
“In what way?”
Burke pondered, then shook his head. “I dunno.”
“Oh, we also had a couple of dogs work the hotel. They hit on an equipment room near the service elevator, some kind of control closet for the fire sprinkler system. Traces tested out positive for Semtex.”
Burke eyed his partner. “What do you think? Any chance he’s a lone wolf?”
“It’s conceivable he could have put it there himself the day before, but given the timeline of his arrival—it seems really tight. To begin, he would have had to acquire the explosives. I can’t imagine him driving out to West Virginia and busting into the explosives shed of some mining operation.”
“Agreed,” Burke said. “One way or another, the kid had help. Was he traveling alone?”
“As far as we know, yes. No apparent associations on the flight in, and the desk clerk at the hotel where he stayed remembered him checking in alone and never saw any visitors.”
“Let’s track back on that camera footage from the hotel service entrance, at least a week. I’m thinking somebody probably delivered a package before our bomber was even in the country.”
“I’ll work on it.”
Burke eyed the door to The Lab. He didn’t fantasize that every answer was inside. But one or two would be nice. “All right, let’s see what the OTD guys have.”
OTD was the agency’s Operational Technology Division. Burke and Alves walked into an expansive room bristling with equipment. Hardware and monitors topped every table, and cables ran across the floor like the root system of some vast computational forest. The trash can overflowed with takeout food containers, and a whiteboard on the far wall displayed lines of code that looked like dry-erase hieroglyphics.
Burke immediately recognized Tom Waters, the local office’s leading expert on bombs and explosives. He’d worked with Waters before, and in every case had been impressed by his depth of knowledge. Seated next to him was a younger man—wrestler’s build, mil-spec haircut, two-day growth of beard.
Waters rose and shook hands with Burke and Alves, then introduced the younger man. “This is Cody Aarons. I called him in special for this one.” More handshakes as Waters continued, “I know my stuff domestically, but Cody here is fresh from downrange. He was Army EOD, spent most of the last six years in the Middle East. The bombmakers there, the ones who build the vests and IEDs that kill so many of our guys, improvise constantly. Since we don’t know the provenance of this device, I wanted every opinion I could get, and Cody knows the latest trends overseas.”
“Sounds like a good idea,” said Burke. “What’s the consensus?”
Waters deferred to Aarons, who picked up, “We’ve narrowed things down, but we don’t have the whole picture yet. The guys on scene are still finding bits and pieces of the device, and we haven’t identified every fragment of what’s in the evidence room. It’s going to take some time to put together. I can tell you the explosive material was definitely Semtex.”
“Can it be sourced?”
Waters said, “The factory adds chemical taggants to identify batches, but postexplosion—it gets more complicated. There are tons of Semtex floating around the world, getting sold and resold, smuggled across borders. It’s notoriously difficult to track. This vest was rigged from two nylon backpacks, the kind you can buy at any big box store in the world. They packed it with commercial grade hardware, which is equally useless for determining origin. The nuts, bolts, and nails you see in the Middle East are the same ones you buy at Home Depot in Alexandria. All of it comes from factories in China, just takes a different boat.”
“So far it sounds pretty generic,” Alves said.
“Mostly,” Aarons agreed. “But there is one element we’re looking at more closely. As I’m sure you know, all explosive devices have four main components.”
“Power source, explosives, initiator, and switch,” Burke replied.
“Exactly. We found what was left of the battery—that kind of dense, soft metal gets banged up but generally stays intact. We actually found two, a primary and a backup, both common six-volt DC battery packs. We also recovered bits of wiring we’ve tied to the initiator. It was an electric detonator, Russian manufacture. Again, pretty common for military use and mining across the world.”
“And you already covered the explosives,” said Burke. “Which leaves the switch.”
“That’s what we’re focusing on,” Aarons said. “There are a lot of creative ways to do it, so the design can be a telltale.”
“It was a handheld, right?” said Alves. “The congressman said he saw something in the guy’s hand.”
“Yeah, we’re certain about that. We identified parts scattered in the street below. In my experience, the standard configuration is a dead man’s switch. You press the button to arm the device, then releasing it sends the triggering impulse. That way if the bomber is incapacitated, success is guaranteed.”
“Incapacitated, or say … tackled,” Burke ventured.
“Exactly. From an attacker’s point of view, it’s a bit of insurance. But there’s something unusual about this one—I first noticed it looking at the videos. Put in simple terms, I think the switch might have had a built-in delay.”
Burke straightened. “A time delay? Of how long?”
“We’re trying to nail that down. If you watch the video, Ridgeway grabs the bomber’s right hand. It was the right move, pretty much his only option. He had to keep al-Qusami from releasing the trigger.”
“He told me as much during his interview,” Burke agreed. “He said he knew a little about vests, so he tried to clamp down on the guy’s hand.”
“Which probably kept him from releasing the trigger while they wrestled,” Aarons said. “That lasted about ten seconds. But right before he lifted the bomber toward the rail, their hands came apart. From that moment to the initiation of the explosion was another 8.1 seconds.”
“Isn’t it possible the bomber was holding the switch down all that time?” Burke ventured. “I mean, he was fighting for his life—in the heat of the moment he might have subconsciously kept his hand clenched.”
“Possible,” said Waters. “None of the videos are of high enough quality to tell. Either way, Cody’s observations got us thinking. Our electrical guys are piecing together what we think is debris from the switch—so far, thirty-five bits of circuit board and plastic. They don’t have enough yet to prove or disprove what we’re suggesting, but there is some evidence to support the idea.”
“Such as?” Burke prodded.
“The switch itself is unusual, not something you’d buy at a hardware store or online. It looks like a custom job—some real engineering, precision circuitry.”
“Who could make something like that?”
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Cody admitted. “But then, jihadi bombmakers are good at adapting—they try to stay one step ahead.”
“We’ve still got a lot to figure out,” Waters cautioned. “If there was a delay, it could have been anywhere from the 8.1 seconds—the moment the congressman lost his grip on the bomber’s hand—to as much as thirty-four seconds. That’s the interval from when al-Qusami’s hand came out of his pocket.”
“Will your guys be able to figure that out?” Alves asked.
“Probably. But again, it’ll take some time. Most of the pieces we’re putting together are smaller than a grain of rice.”
Burke considered it. “Tactically, it might make sense. If a bomber is rushing a target and security intervenes, maybe wounds him in the final moments, there’s a good chance he’ll let go of the switch. But if he has an extra few seconds, he might get a little closer.”
“True,” said Aarons. “Like I said, the guys who design these things are ingenious, albeit in a sick way.”
Burke stared at Alves, who shrugged.
Minutes later the two were walking away down the hall.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“What makes you think something’s wrong?”
She stared at him like a longtime partner would, even if they’d only been teamed together for a year.
“I don’t know. I keep thinking about that video, the one from ground level.”
“What about it?”
“To begin, we still don’t know where it came from. And the person who took it—what were they doing? You couldn’t see the ceremony from ground level. Who films the side of a building? It’s like…” His voice trailed off.
“Like they knew what was about to happen?”
Burke shrugged.
“Maybe it’s a deep fake.”
“A what?”
“You know, a deep fake. One of those clips that are doctored professionally—they show people doing and saying things that are pure fiction.”
“Oh, right,” he said. “Well, that’s not an issue here. We’ve got footage from five different angles, five different sources, not to mention about a hundred eyewitnesses.”
“True. Crazy as it seems, this all really happened.”
After a long pause, he said, “That footage taken from the rooftop—the view that showed al-Qusami closing in.”
“What about it?”
“Tell me what struck you about him.”
Alves considered it. “I guess the fact that he was moving. Everyone else was static—standing and listening to the senator.”
“No, I mean al-Qusami himself—what was unique about him?”
“Well … I guess he was pretty small.”
Burke nodded. “That’s what I thought too.”
Alves pulled the printout she’d referenced earlier from her pocket. She searched out the vitals, and said, “When he was a guest of the state in northern Iraq, he clocked in at five-foot-four, ninety-nine pounds.”
“Huh.”
“That was probably after a few months of Kurdish prison food. He might have gained a few since then.”
“True,” Burke allowed. “But either way, he was not a big individual.”
“Is that relevant?”
“I don’t know. At the very least it’s … notable.”
“What now?” Alves asked.
“It’ll be a few days before OTD gives us any answers. In the meantime … I think I’d like to have another word with Congressman Ridgeway.”