Homeland: Carrie's Run: A Homeland Novel Read online

  Hell, it was possible. For part of the time she’d been in OCSA, when she wasn’t working Beirut, her official assignment was al-Qaeda. And then last year, when she’d been stationed in Baghdad, she’d spent a lot of her time studying AQI, especially the tiny bits and pieces of intel they had on Abu Nazir, the leader of AQI, and the one thing she’d come away with was that he was devious. He never did anything simple or straightforward. Ever. An attack on the Waldorf with Syrian-Iranian connections would be just the sort of thing he’d do and then leverage it in Baghdad.

  There’s something else going on, she thought. She just couldn’t put her finger on it, watching Saul packing up his laptop as they went underground into Penn Station.

  CHAPTER 13

  New York, New York

  Koslowski and one of his men were waiting for them on the platform. Koslowski was a stocky six-footer with sandy hair, wearing jeans and a leather jacket. The man with him, Gillespie, was in a windbreaker and a Yankees baseball cap. Despite the casual clothes, they both had “cop” written all over them.

  “Saul, good to see you again. You must be Mathison,” Koslowski said to Carrie, showing her his badge. “You know this woman Dima? We’re calling her by her cover name, Jihan. We’re concerned she might change her look. Put on a wig. Could you spot her in a crowd like this?” he asked, indicating the people filling the platform from the train. “All we’ve got is the DS-160 photo.”

  “I could spot her in Yankee Stadium, Captain,” Carrie said.

  “I guess we’ve got the right people then,” Koslowski said, grinning to his partner. “Glad you’re here.”

  “Where are we going?” Saul asked as they walked into the main hall in Penn Station.

  “We’ve set up on Forty-Eighth near the UN Plaza. We’ll coordinate from there. Our headquarters is out in Queens, too far from the bull’s-eye, the Waldorf.” He frowned. “We’ll have four Hercules teams, plus normal NYPD security details on the outside, with increasing security the closer we get to the bull’s-eye.”

  “Lot of firepower. You’re taking this seriously. Good,” Saul said. “What about surveillance on the Jordanians?”

  “Nothing, as we discussed. We don’t want to spook ’em. And we’re covering all four of the ones you sent us. But we have a warrant and we’ve bugged their land phones and the cell towers near their locations. We’ve got ears on every call.”

  “Arabic-speaking?” Carrie asked. Unless the monitors listening in on the calls spoke Arabic, they wouldn’t be of much use.

  “Yes,” he nodded.

  “What about Dima—sorry, Jihan? When does she get in?” Carrie asked.

  “Her plane just landed. She’s already through customs at JFK. Something interesting with her luggage,” Koslowski added.

  “Oh?” Saul said.

  “She brought in a cello. Big case,” he said.

  “She doesn’t play an instrument,” Carrie said.

  Koslowski nodded grimly. “That’s what we thought. This little lady,” he said, indicating Carrie to Saul, “definitely got our attention.”

  “What else?” Saul asked.

  “FBI’ll be coming. Special Agent Sanders. Also, we’ll have to coordinate with the Secret Service because of the Veep. We’re holding off notifying them for the moment,” Koslowski said.

  “Good. We want you guys to take the lead, not the Bureau. And we don’t want Vice-President Chasen or the governor or anyone else canceling anything till the very last second,” Saul said.

  Koslowski and Gillespie exchanged cop looks as they came out on Seventh Avenue. Traffic, people, a cool, crisp afternoon.

  “Our thinking exactly. Get them inside the killing box, then shut it down. Of course, once the Feds show up and the pissing contest over jurisdiction starts . . .” Koslowski shrugged. He led them to a police squad car parked illegally in front of Penn Station, being watched over by a uniformed policeman.

  “I’ll deal with Agent Sanders. Director Estes, Counterterrorism Center back at Langley, is on it,” Saul said as they got into the squad car.

  Gillespie got behind the wheel. They drove around the block to Eighth Avenue, then up to Forty-Second Street and across town.

  The office was on the thirty-seventh floor of a steel and glass building overlooking the UN Plaza and the East River. The building housed a number of corporations and several foreign consulates. Gillespie told them there was a direct, highly secure link to their headquarters in Queens. There were some forty people in the office, some in plainclothes, most wearing blue NYPD Counter-Terrorism Bureau T-shirts working computers and banks of flat-screen TV monitors showing street views of Manhattan, including a five-block radius in every direction around the Waldorf Astoria, plus interior security camera views inside the hotel.

  “How much street video surveillance have you got?” Saul asked after he and Carrie had set up their laptops at a big conference table.

  “A lot of people don’t realize we’ve got virtually every inch of lower Manhattan from Battery Park to midtown covered with surveillance cameras. Obviously, we’re holding off on the suspects’ locations, though at some point we’ll try to kick that in,” Koslowski said.

  “Is there anybody on Dim—Jihan?” Carrie asked him.

  “We’ve got a plainclothes team driving an unmarked car. Last I heard,” he said, looking at Gillespie, “they’re on the Van Wyck. One thing,” he added. “We’ll need you on Jihan. Make sure we’ve got her covered.”

  Carrie nodded. “But she can’t see me. Use cameras or something. The instant she sees me, she knows she’s blown. Also . . .” She looked at them and at a heavy-set older man in a suit who joined them. By his age and suit, she assumed he was a senior person in the New York Counter-Terrorism Bureau. “I need your men to understand. We don’t want her killed. I can’t get intel from a corpse.”

  The three men, Koslowski, Gillespie and the older man, frowned.

  “You understand, our primary concern is the safety of our officers and the civilians—not to mention the Vice-President and the others,” the older man said.

  “This is Deputy Commissioner Cassani. He’s our boss,” Koslowski said.

  Saul jumped in. “We understand perfectly. It’s your call. But we also understand how it is when the adrenaline is pumping in a situation with a bunch of gung-ho guys. We want to make sure that if you have to take her and the others out, the decision is made at your level and not by some wannabe Rambo trying to save the world. There’s information in that woman’s head that will make this country safer if you can keep her alive for us to interrogate.”

  “We’ll do our best,” Cassani said, nodding at the two policemen. “But safety first.”

  A black female officer came over and whispered something to Koslowski.

  “Okay,” he said. “She’s through the Midtown Tunnel. She’ll be at the Waldorf in minutes. Cello and all.” He pointed at one of the screens showing traffic emerging from the tunnel on Thirty-Seventh Street. There was a taxi with someone in it with a cello case. Carrie strained but she couldn’t see Dima. After a second, the taxi passed out of view.

  “What’s the cello for?” Cassani asked.

  “Best guess?” Saul asked, looking at Koslowski. “Keep assault rifles in the case till just before the party.”

  Koslowski nodded. “Exactly. We’ve spoken with the hotel manager. We’ve arranged a room for her on the twenty-sixth floor. Needless to say, it’s completely bugged, with full interior and corridor surveillance.”

  “No good,” Carrie said. “She’s March 14, possibly GSD. She’s not some stupid amateur. She’ll spot the cameras and phone bugs in a New York second. You have to change the room. Now! And don’t worry about bugging the land phones. She won’t use them, except for room service or something. Give her an hour or two and she’ll have a couple of prepaid cell phones. Those are the ones we want to pick up.”

  Koslowski nodded. He got up and hurried off, pulling out his cell phone. Gillespie and Cassani looked a
t her appraisingly, as if they were art dealers and she was a piece of art up for auction. Then Cassani grinned.

  “Well, Miss Mathison. Welcome to the party.”

  CHAPTER 14

  Lexington and Forty-Ninth, New York City

  The call came at 9:46 P.M. A voice message left on the answering machine at the Petra Fitness Equipment Company in Brooklyn.

  “Hada ho Jihan. Mataa takun baladiya aneyvan gahiza?” Dima’s voice saying, “This is Jihan. How long will my order take?”

  They captured the number of the calling phone from the cell tower in Brooklyn nearest the fitness company that handled the call. It took Koslowski’s team only fifteen minutes to track it to a prepaid cell phone Jihan had purchased at an AT&T store on Thirty-Seventh Street. The store was only minutes by cab from the hotel. They had two female Counter-Terrorism Bureau officers working undercover as hotel maids in the Waldorf and three male officers acting as hotel security. They confirmed with the on-site team that Jihan was not in the hotel at that time. When it was forwarded to Koslowski, Carrie translated it for him.

  Koslowski nodded.

  “We have lift-off,” he said.

  When one of the undercover maids inspected Jihan’s room, she reported that the cello was standing against the wall and its case was empty. She said she saw no weapons or explosives or anything suspicious.

  “When do you start surveillance on the suspects?” Saul asked Koslowski.

  “A little after midnight,” he said, checking his watch. “We’re totally passive. Two hidden cameras. One on the roof of the building across the street from the fitness company, the other across from the Jordanian salesman’s cousin’s apartment in Gravesend. Two of the Hercules teams go into the hotel at oh three hundred hours. They’ll stay in suites until we decide to move.”

  “You’ll take them in Jihan’s room just before they go operational?” Saul asked.

  “That’s the plan,” Koslowski said, pouring himself a cup of coffee.

  Less than an hour later, the whole thing began to unravel. It started with a call from NYPD Counter-Terrorism’s Queens headquarters. Koslowski came over to Carrie and Saul, looking grim.

  “We had a helicopter do a fly-by to do an infrared scan on the Jordanians. Just to cover our asses before we put in the surveillance cameras. The college kid, Abdel Yassin, isn’t in his apartment. We don’t know where he is.”

  “College kid my ass. He’s thirty years old,” Gillespie growled.

  “That’s not all,” Koslowski said, putting two satellite photographs on the table. They were of the same location: the Petra Fitness Equipment Company building and parking lot. “Do you see it?”

  Saul and Carrie studied the photos. Then she saw it.

  “Shit,” she said.

  “What’s shit?” Saul said.

  “One of the trucks is missing.”

  “All right, but what does it mean?” Gillespie asked. “We always assumed the guns would be fitted inside some fitness machine and delivered to the hotel. So they use another truck. What’s the problem?”

  “The problem is that we don’t know what’s going on or why they would do that. The problem is that there’s an unknown operating here. It obviously has something to do with Yassin and the truck,” Carrie said.

  “What are you doing about it?” Saul asked.

  “We wanted to run it by you two. See if you had any ideas,” Koslowski said. “We’re thinking of doing an APB on Yassin and the truck with a ‘Do Not Approach or Attempt to Apprehend.’ ”

  “Don’t,” Carrie said sharply. “You have ordinary cops who don’t know what this is about and if they get too close, even inadvertently, they’ll spook Yassin. The situation goes from unknown to uncontrollable in a nanosecond. I repeat, we don’t know what this is about yet.”

  “She’s right,” Saul said.

  “It’s my fault,” she said.

  “How’s it your fault?” Koslowski asked, looking at her.

  “There’s something else going on here. I’ve sensed it all along because the pieces don’t fit. If Dima—sorry, Jihan is GSD or Hezbollah, I can see Syria involved, I can see Hezbollah, I can see Iran, but for the life of me, I can’t see the Sunnis in this. And it has nothing to do with Abbasiyah. I should have figured it out,” she said, shoving the laptop away from her. She looked out the window at the lights of the buildings on First Avenue. This is where September 11 happened, she thought, not far from here.

  “Don’t beat yourself up. None of the rest of us figured it out either,” Koslowski said.

  “What are you going to do?” Saul said to Koslowski.

  “Start the surveillance on the three sites: the cousin’s apartment in Gravesend, the factory and the college guy’s apartment. We know where they’re going. The Waldorf. We’ll be waiting,” he said grimly.

  Carrie got up. “I need to change, shower. I can’t stay here. I need to think,” she said.

  Saul looked at her, concerned. “You’ve been going nonstop for days,” he said. “Take a breather.”

  “We booked rooms for you guys at the Marriott,” Koslowski said. “On Lexington and Forty-Ninth. You can walk from here. Clean up. Grab a bite.”

  “Saul, I’ll see you later,” she said, grabbing her jacket.

  “Wait,” Koslowski said. “I’m sending Sergeant Watson with you. Leonora,” he called over to the young black woman officer who had spoken to him earlier.

  Carrie made a face. “I’m a big girl, Captain. I won’t get lost in the big bad city.”

  “It’s not that,” he said as the woman, Leonora, came over. “You’re critical to us. Out there”—he gestured at the window—“anything can happen. You could accidently run into Jihan on the street. I can’t let you go without one of ours. Besides,” he said, smiling, “she can keep you company. You can both grab a bite on the department. When you’re ready, come back.”

  She and the policewoman, Leonora, walked to the hotel. The night was cool, crisp, people on the streets hurrying along, traffic normal for a weekday evening in Manhattan. Carrie checked in to the Marriott. They went up and after Leonora checked out the room, Carrie undressed. Leonora turned on the TV.

  “He seems like a good guy, Koslowski,” Carrie said, heading for the shower.

  “He’s one of the good ones.” Leonora nodded. “Don’t be fooled. He never does things simply.”

  It was while she was taking her shower, letting the warm water run over her, eyes closed, feeling everything that had happened over the past few weeks since Beirut start to drain away, that she found herself thinking about what Leonora had said about Koslowski. Not simple.

  Simple.

  And then she had it. Son of a bitch! The thing that had been bothering her all along. The thought jolted her so much she nearly ran out of the shower naked. She stood under the water, forcing herself to breathe.

  Take it easy, she told herself. Think it through. She was good. Her mind was clear, meds okay. She was onto something.

  He never does things simply. Abu Nazir. Damn him! What if the thought she’d had on the train was right? All along they’d assumed because of Dima and what had happened to her with Nightingale in Beirut that it was a Hezbollah or an Iranian operation. But what if it wasn’t? What if it was AQI?

  If it was Abu Nazir, he wouldn’t do it simple. Never. That wasn’t his style. There would be more than one attack. It wasn’t just the Waldorf, which could be just a diversion! What was it Julia had said about her husband Abbas’s reaction: “It was the way he said it . . . It scared me.” There was going to be a second, separate attack. Something big. Even bigger than taking out the Vice-President. Something Abu Nazir could say to the Sunnis was retaliation for Abbasiyah. If he pulled it off, the Sunnis would flock to him. He could take all of Anbar Province. And it involved Abdel Yassin and the missing truck!

  They had to find that missing truck—and fast. And do the same thing they were doing with Dima and the Waldorf: wait till the last second, trap it, and k
ill it.

  She got out of the shower, put on a fresh pair of jeans, a top and jacket. Her hair was still wet and she looked like a drowned rat, but that didn’t matter.

  “Come on,” she told Leonora. “We have to go back to the office.”

  “What about dinner?” the policewoman said, getting up. “Believe me, it isn’t often the department pays.”

  “I don’t care,” Carrie said, heading for the door. “We can order Chinese.”

  “Why? What’s up?”

  “I think I know how to find that truck,” she said.

  CHAPTER 15

  Red Hook, Brooklyn, New York

  “Back so soon?” Saul said over his shoulder. He and Koslowski and a handful of others were looking at security camera videos from sites around Brooklyn.

  “I think I know how to find the truck,” Carrie said, taking off her jacket and sitting at the table. Leonora sat next to her. Saul, Koslowski, Gillespie and a couple of other officers joined them.

  “Well, Mathison, you certainly know how to get our attention,” Koslowski said. “What’ve you got?”

  “I’m an idiot,” she said. “It was right in front of us. We knew Bassam al-Shakran, the Jordanian pharmaceutical salesman, had been in Iraq, and his brother was killed there. All along, because of Dima, and Nightingale in Beirut, we assumed the attack was coming from Hezbollah or the Iranians. But the Jordanians are Sunnis, not Shiites. Like al-Qaeda. What if the attack is coming from Abu Nazir in Iraq?”

  “Suppose it is. So what?” Gillespie said.

  “He never does just one attack.”

  “Never?” Gillespie asked.

  “Listen, I was in Iraq. I studied this guy there and I’ve looked at everything we have on him in Langley. He’s never done anything like a single attack. Not ever,” she said.

  “Are you suggesting the Waldorf’s a diversion?” Koslowski said, lasering in on her.

  She nodded. “For something bigger.”

  “Like what?” Gillespie said.