I buttoned my peacoat when I got out of the taxi and watched as the Delta Hotel bellhop loaded my bags onto the cart.
It was late September 2012—ten days after my car trip with Chiheb—and I was back in Toronto to find a safe house and meet with Jaser.
Everything changed when we learned of the American sleeper. Chiheb was planning attacks across the border, but the RCMP was aware. We had our own Chiheb and had to find him.
This had become my only case. The FBI had other undercover agents take over my caseload. Progress on the case was briefed daily to the White House. My four-day babysitting mission had stretched into three months with no end in sight.
While we focused on the American sleeper, Canada wanted an airtight case and pushed me to get the plot’s final details.
I called Jaser from my two-room suite. No answer. The RCMP wanted me to spend some alone time with him. Take his temperature without Chiheb. They were concerned he was just following along.
Jaser had moved to Canada in 1993. His family was forced to leave the United Arab Emirates after his father refused to spy on the Palestinian refugees living there. Jaser, fifteen, arrived with his parents and two brothers—eleven-year-old Nabil and ten-year-old Shadi. His mother was pregnant with another boy. The Immigration and Refugee Board accepted Jaser’s family into Canada under an old program that accepted stateless refugees.
While the family fought to stay in Canada, Jaser was convicted of fraud in 1997 and for threatening a pub manager in 1999. Ordered out of Canada, he was finally picked up in 2004 after Canadian immigration issued a warrant for his arrest. He was released from the Toronto West Detention Centre when officials couldn’t find a country to deport him to. Being Palestinian, Jaser had no country.
He stayed out of trouble after that. Jaser married and started a limo company. He was pardoned in 2009 and received permanent resident status in 2012. When his limo company failed in 2011, he took a job driving special-education students and working customer service for a moving company. By the time I met him he’d gotten his job as a taxi dispatcher.
Jaser fit the profile of a petty criminal who was now sprinkling a little jihad on his activities. Disenfranchised, he wanted to lash out against the Jews and the government for stealing his country. Jaser was a cliché.
I unfolded two maps of the Toronto area and spread them out on the living room table. We still didn’t know the target for sure. Was it the bridge they scouted over Labor Day or another one? Doug came up with the idea for the maps.
“If he sees them, maybe he can walk you through where they are potentially going to do this,” Doug said in the briefing before I went to the hotel.
Worth a shot.
My cell phone rang about an hour later. It was Jaser. I told him I was in town and wanted to meet up. I could hear radio traffic in the background as he talked. He suggested we meet at the taxi dispatch office but reminded me that there was audio and video there so we couldn’t discuss the plan.
“Why don’t you come by the hotel?” I said.
We could have a late dinner and talk in private, I told him. Jaser agreed. I hung up and called Chiheb. He knew I was in Canada and I had promised to check in. When he found out Jaser was coming over, he got upset.
“Any discussion about the projects should be with all three of us,” he said.
He was acting like a jealous girlfriend. He didn’t want to be left out, but he was busy with his dissertation and couldn’t leave.
I sensed some tension after the first trip, but it was clear Chiheb and Jaser were in a power struggle over who was the leader. There was no way Chiheb was going to let Jaser sap my resources with his plans. For now, the tension worked in my favor.
“I could get to Toronto Sunday,” he said.
“Perfect, brother,” I said. “We will pick you up then.”
That gave me two days with Jaser. He arrived around nine o’clock. We prayed and then ordered room service. While we waited for our food, Jaser noticed the maps on the table and started to show me where he and Chiheb were thinking of derailing the train. It was a bridge south of Toronto near Lake Ontario. But he didn’t think the plan was doable. There was no way to cut the rail in two hours, the time between trains. He wanted to do it his way. Jaser made a gesture with his hands, like a bomb.
“Boom,” he said, hinting that the best way to derail the train was with explosives.
Dinner arrived—fish and risotto—and we talked about renting a safe house as we ate. I told him I had talked to a real estate agent and my company was ready to sign a lease for a condo north of Toronto. Jaser liked the area, but he was concerned my name would be on the lease. I assured him my name wouldn’t appear on anything regarding the safe house.
The food was delicious. I picked up the plate of fish and offered him more before taking another sliver. He waved it off but kept eating the risotto.
“This rice is good,” I said. “The rice is nice, right?”
“It’s good, yeah,” Jaser said. “It has a nice flavor to it.”
“It’s called risotto,” I said. “Vegetable risotto.”
“Yeah, it’s pretty good,” he said between spoonfuls. “Mind you, though, if I would make this risotto it would be creamier. And the rice would be cooked more.”
I chuckled. That was such a Jaser comment. He was that kind of guy. Everything he did was better. This was his first taste of risotto, but he could make it better.
After dinner, he laid out his ideas. He wanted to train a sniper—likely from the household mosque where I met him on my first trip—and target Jewish businessmen, gays, and local leaders. He told me how we could inflict more damage than anyone in al Qaeda because he knew Canada and Toronto better.
“There is so much we can do,” he said. “So much pain we can inflict. Look at the Prophet, peace be upon him, all the wonderful things he did. He did all of that, but he didn’t have a day job. I do, unfortunately, and if I didn’t and I could focus on this, I think I can do . . .”
I stopped listening and looked at him. Did he just say if he didn’t have a job he could be like the Prophet? A Muslim never compares anyone or anything to the Prophet, or any prophet for that matter. It was haram. But Jaser was as good as the Prophet, except he had to dispatch taxis.
It was getting late and Jaser wanted to go home to his wife. We planned to meet the following day. I told him about my plan to meet with a real estate agent to finalize the lease on a condo on Harrison Garden Boulevard in North York.
After Jaser left, I met the team at a nearby hotel suite. Frank answered the door. Nelly, Joey, and Doug were waiting in the living room.
“Good call with the maps,” I told Doug as we talked about the meeting with Jaser.
“I know,” Doug said, shrugging his shoulders and sniffing.
It stopped me in my tracks.
“Did you just sniff?”
Doug did it every time he was right or told a joke that made someone laugh. From that moment on, we called it the “Dougy Sniff.”
As we talked through the next Jaser meeting, Frank filled us in on the layout of the condo. The living room had a couch and an easy chair with a table in the middle. The whole place was wired with microphones and cameras.
“Hey, Frank, tell me where the best cameras are,” I said. “Where do you want them? I can throw my bag on the chair to make them sit on the couch, or if you’d rather have one of them in the chair?”
I was trying to figure out where I could sit to avoid the camera. It made life for their tech guys a little easier because they didn’t have to pixilate my face. But Frank looked at me like I’d just asked him for a naked picture of his wife.
“You don’t need to worry about any of that,” he said.
“Excuse me?” I said.
“Don’t worry about where they are. Just get them in there and we’ll figure it out.”
I looked at Joey and Nelly. Nelly shook his head. Joey cringed. He knew this was something he’d have to fix.
“Is this fucking guy for real?” I said. “Is he really not telling me where the cameras are? Frank, you know I’m a cop, right? I’m not a confidential informant or a source. I’m police just like you.”
That was the big difference between how the Canadians and Americans ran their undercover programs. The Canadians kept their undercovers in the dark. American undercovers were in on everything behind the scenes. I wasn’t used to working in the dark.
“No, I just meant don’t worry about it. You have enough to think about,” Frank said, realizing he’d hit a nerve.
“Fuck you,” I said. “I don’t want to know where your cameras are. It’s your prosecution.”
I left to put my bag back in my hotel room. I could hear Nelly behind me.
“You fucked up,” he said to Frank.
Joey found me a few minutes later in my room. I was unpacking.
“Come on,” he said. “I’ll tell you where the cameras are.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said.
I wasn’t interested.
“I was making an effort,” I said. “I was trying to make their lives easier so they didn’t have to redact me for hours and hours. If I sat in a chair and my face was obscured they could use the whole tape.”
Their case. Their country. Their rules. But Joey told me where the cameras were anyway.
That night I picked up Jaser and took him to the condo. It had two bedrooms, a small kitchen, and a sitting room. In the foyer, Jaser noticed a fruit basket with a thank-you note from the real estate company. Next to the basket was the lease.
“Please enjoy this place on us,” the thank-you note read. “We’d love to do business with you.”
Jaser was intrigued with the lease and that my name was nowhere on it. I told him my company got the condo for two months. I gave Jaser a quick tour. He approved of the place and looked forward to showing it to Chiheb.
Chiheb called Jaser from downtown the next day. He needed a ride to the condo after catching a carpool from Montreal to Toronto.
“I know where he is,” Jaser said. “I’ll go grab him.”
I gave him the extra set of keys to the condo.
“I’ll get dinner,” I said.
There was a Pizza Pizza restaurant around the corner. I got two large pizzas with green peppers and onions and met them back at the condo.
Chiheb seemed happy to be in Toronto. I sensed he didn’t like being out of the mix. We gathered around the table and started to eat. When the train plot came up, Chiheb mentioned their first recon trip. This was the Labor Day fishing trip. The bridge sat near Lake Ontario. Both Jaser and Chiheb started to giggle. They were like two old college buddies telling stories from their glory days.
“We wanted, from the beginning, to get closer to the bridge,” Chiheb said. “I mean, there was many trees, many trees. And it was some type of a mountain, very strong to walk . . .”
“Hard,” Jaser said.
“Hard, is very hard. There is a lot of trees, a lot of insects, a lot of—” Chiheb said.
“I saw a frog this big,” Jaser said, holding his hands about six inches apart.
“Oh my God, you’re kidding me,” I said, egging them on.
“That was a crazy place,” Jaser said.
Jaser said they got lost in some thick grass that was ten feet high. Both made it sound like an expedition to the Amazon. The insects. The frogs. The brush. Finally, they stumbled onto the banks of the lake. Out in the distance was a boat. A young couple with big cameras was paddling nearby.
“We waved at them like this,” Chiheb said, waving his hand over his head like he was trying to flag me down. “We would like to see the sea.”
I started to laugh. He had tried to flag down the CSIS surveillance team. The same guys who had insisted Chiheb and Jaser were going fishing. I was having trouble keeping a straight face.
“He’s calling them over to take us to the other side,” Jaser said.
“No way,” I said.
One of the agents put down his camera and waved back.
“They didn’t understand,” Jaser said. “They were just waving back, but they wouldn’t move. So I was telling him maybe they’re not in a good mood. That’s why they wouldn’t come.”
Jaser and Chiheb fought their way back through the grass but got lost again.
“We ended up in somebody’s backyard and they were out having a barbecue,” Jaser said.
“Halal?” I said, laughing.
“You ask if it is halal, ask him what they said to us,” Chiheb said. “Ask him what they said to us.”
I looked at Jaser and then Chiheb.
“What?”
“‘Why are those terrorists there?’” Jaser said.
“No they didn’t,” I said.
Chiheb couldn’t keep a straight face as he tried to avoid my gaze. He started to laugh.
“I am testing you if you will get scared,” he said.
“No, they were nice people,” Jaser said.
“Ah, okay,” I said. “What’d they say?”
“We talked to them for a while,” Jaser said. “I gave them a copy of the Quran.”
“They were thinking that we are camping, because many people come to this place, I mean for adventures,” Chiheb said.
Despite getting lost twice, they saw enough of the bridge to look for another target. There were too many houses nearby. The terrain made it impossible to bring the equipment needed to cut the rail on the bridge.
Instead, they set their sights on a new, more isolated location near the U.S. border. The location fit the criteria set out by Chiheb from the start, but they only visited it at night. They needed pictures and video of the rails during the day.
“What do you think, we go visit soon?” Chiheb said to both of us.
This is what I was hoping, that they would ask me to scout the location with them. The final piece of evidence for the Canadian case. One more overt act for the conspiracy.
“What do you think, do you have work tomorrow?” Chiheb asked me.
“No,” I said.
They wanted me to come because of my expertise in construction. We agreed to scout the new location the following morning.
Chiheb stayed at the condo for the night, since I already had a hotel room. I left with Jaser. The cold hit us as soon as we left the condo. Jaser zipped up his leather jacket. I left my peacoat open.
“You don’t get cold?” he said, shivering. “I’m freezing.”
“If you feel my skin, I’m hot,” I said. “I’m always hot. When I’m at home, my wife goes to bed with two sweatshirts, sweatpants, socks, and sometimes even gloves.”
Jaser laughed.
In legend, I am always married. It would be odd if I wasn’t.
“I’m wearing no shirt and I’m on top of the covers. I have a tremendous amount of heat, I’m always very hot. Maybe because I’m Egyptian.”
We got in the car. Jaser’s smile was gone. He stared out the window. There was no energy to his movements. I noticed his mood changed when Chiheb started talking about the train plot.
“Something’s on your mind. I want to know what you’re thinking,” I said. “Spell it out for me. You’re the brains here, habibi. You can’t hold back now.”
Jaser just shook his head.
“Not brains, brother. You know, like I said to you, it seems to be too much work for a very small job.”
“You think we should go bigger,” I said.
“It’s too small,” he said, turning to look at me. “It’s a big operation, we’re setting up for a big operation and we end up doing something very tiny. The setup is nice, but the operation doesn’t make sense.”
I couldn’t tell if Jaser didn’t like the plan or didn’t like that it wasn’t his idea. He hated being one of the workers. My job was easy. Pay for equipment and supplies and upload the video. Jaser and Chiheb had to go out in December and cut the track. If he was going to get his hands dirty, it had to be for his plan. He wanted to do his sniper plot instead, but there was no way Chiheb would go for it.
Unless Jaser convinced me.
“Who are they?” he said about the people on the train. “Slaves. Really, just like you and me, workers. You know? Sheep. We don’t want sheep. We want the wolf. We can get the wolf. Brother, we can get the wolf.”