The Intercept (5 page)

Chapter 10

W
ithout question, what you people are about to examine here represents the greatest intelligence haul in history,” said Dennis Geeseman.

He stood at the squadron commander’s briefing podium, a thick file tucked beneath his arm, facing four men and two women sitting apart from each other on black leather recliners in the pilots’ ready room. It was just after midnight. Geeseman hadn’t slept in thirty hours, but the task invigorated him and he was cruising on adrenaline—just like the old days. He looked crisp in his blue suit, white shirt, and lavender tie. He was the ranking FBI agent on the evidence strike team of the Joint Terrorism Task Force. He was in charge.

“Okay, quick intros.” Geeseman opened his file on the podium, lifting out the top sheet, reading from it. “Ellen Bonner from Bureau forensics.”

Geeseman paused to find a hand raised, a woman in her mid-thirties wearing loose traveling clothes in the front row.

“Special Agent Bonner will handle DNA extraction and preliminary categorization of organic and nonorganic samples. Phil Elliott from the Defense Intelligence Agency?”

Elliott half stood and waved his hand. He had small, smart eyes.

“Elliott will take the hard copy from the household effects, evaluate, read, and extract whatever might connect the dots. Jeanne Cadogan from Central Intelligence Science and Technology will pick apart the household items.”

The only other woman present, Cadogan neither stood nor raised her hand.

“Clothing, cookware, and anything else that might establish ties to other locations and persons,” continued Geeseman. “Jerry Fisk from . . .”

“Jeremy,” Fisk said, interrupting him.

“Jeremy Fisk,” Geeseman corrected himself, giving his head a slight who-gives-a-shit tilt to the left. “NYPD Intel Division. He’ll be available to Phil and Jeanne for translation. He will also scan everything for names already linked to ongoing investigations in New York and London. He’s worked in both cities, the two hottest targets, as everybody here already knows. And last but not least, Barry Rosofsky and Devon Pearl.”

Geeseman gestured to two men who looked like they had been sent by a movie studio casting department to play computer hackers. Rosofsky was the plump one, Pearl the emaciated pale one, each wearing jeans, T-shirts, and shy smiles. No eye contact.

“They are here from the NSA to analyze and catalog computer drives, CDs, anything digital that had been within bin Laden’s reach.” Geeseman looked up. “As you know, I am Dennis Geeseman with the FBI. I’m going to supervise and float where you need me. I’ve got passable Arabic, Fisk, so if you get behind I can help. Here’s how this is going to work. We’ve got no clerical in the bunker, no support staff at all. You’ll each be logging your own findings on the laptops. Anderson and Storch over there”—Geeseman indicated a pair of uniformed air force enlisted men standing against the back wall—“will assist your commo and tech. We will flash to Fort Meade and Langley if we get anything urgent, through the signal intelligence station on the other side of the base. We have transportation outside for hand-carrying outgoing messages. There are no lines in or out of the bunker for this job. We’re sealed in tight, for obvious reasons.

“You’re looking for anything hot, anything unexpected, any hard intel such as names, locations, dates, or lists,” said Geeseman—repeating their dispatch briefings for effect. There was no such thing as too much communication, a fact he had learned the hard way. “Basically anything that might lead us to any outstanding, still-active plots. We don’t know what we’re getting vis-à-vis code work. We’re not expecting to find a laundry list of terrorist agents in place or senior Al-Qaeda leadership, of course . . . but then again, stranger things have happened. Lots of eyes and ears will be on this stuff for weeks and weeks, but we are the first ones to unwrap this present. This is hour one. Let’s make absolutely sure we don’t let something timely and obvious slip through our fingers. If so, we’ll all feel shitty a few weeks from now. Remember, a quick revenge strike is not out of the question. These guys are epic grudge holders, and we just pissed them off royally.

“We’re going to be here for two days minimum, maybe twice that. They have rooms for everyone over at the bachelor officers’ quarters if you want to sleep. There will be vehicles outside the bunker when you need them. We’re bringing in food, but if you want something different, it doesn’t hurt to ask. These guys love any excuse to run out to Kaiserslautern, and if it’s exotic but feasible, we will have airmen outside in the morning to fetch whatever you need. It’s only seven in the evening where we came from, so I assume everybody wants to get going right away. Questions?”

“How do we sort the stuff?” Cadogan asked, dropping the formality of a briefing into a conversational tone. “And who gets what first?”

“This is not a race, please keep that in mind. The containers were marked and numbered by the follow-up team after the SEALs got his body out of there. So we have rough categories with best-guess labels. You will see numbers that correspond to the lading inventory that each of you will be issued inside the bunker. The SEALs grabbed obvious discs, drives, and computers. Those are clearly identified in their containers, so Rosofsky and Pearl, you’re all set to start there. We got a lot of random debris from a trash-burning pit in the compound, so Bonner, maybe you want to grab that. We may get lucky with some genetic material. Maybe a little hard copy. For the rest, just take what looks like it might fall into your areas of examination. If, once you get it open, you change your mind, feel free to pass it on—just please make sure it goes to the right person. Don’t concern yourselves with chain of custody—that’s for those who will come after us.”

Chapter 11

T
he residual adrenaline rush of dashing for the Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt and the chopper to Ramstein, and the wild exhilaration following bin Laden’s death, kept everyone going inside the bunker. They were a dream team of detective skill and talent, the best in the country at what they did, but at first they couldn’t help sounding like a bunch of kids playing Clue. Every few minutes, another exclamation of discovery or surprise broke the steady drone of the air-conditioning fans.

“Oh, baby, will you look at this,” said Elliott, holding up a black diary bound by a simple elastic band. “He had a fucking Day-Timer. A Day-Timer. My mom had one of these.” He plucked off the band, turning the pages. “The marks in it aren’t a language, but the cryppies at Meade should have a field day with this.”

Off to the copy machine it went.

A few minutes later: “One of his wives shopped in Thailand within the past few months—or got this from somebody who did,” chirped Cadogan, holding up an ivory-colored silk undershirt. “The label is brand new, no dye stains from washing. Now how the hell did they get her there and back?”

Bonner, working silently, took smears, chips, and samples from glassware, food cans, serving utensils, hair combs, lumpy remnants of bar soap, and the contents of two small plastic bathroom garbage pails. Joining the excitement, she at one point blurted, “I’ve got blood, I’ve got semen, I’ve got hair. There is so much here that, once we sort it out and get exemplars, we’ll have positive biological IDs on everybody who ever set foot in the place.”

Rosofsky and Pearl worked at back-to-back computers. As they moused and clicked and typed, they vented the intensity of their concentration by talking mindless, dependable smack about seventh-generation video game consoles, the Nintendo Wii versus PlayStation 3. The first few flash drives they cloned gave them the general picture. Pre-takedown surveillance had found that bin Laden’s house had no electronic link to the outside world, incoming or outgoing. He depended on a courier to bring in news, field reports, and amusement.

But he had to have some way to issue his commands to Al-Qaeda cells, as well as receiving outside intelligence. After ten years of looking for bin Laden, one thing his trackers had long ago confirmed was that he paid close attention to the details of plans all over the world. This included the London subway attack, USS
Cole,
and the first World Trade Center bombing. So the team was primed to look for portable, disposable media that could port into and out of any computer or modern electronic display.

Rosofsky and Pearl scanned the CDs and flash drives for the obvious. Timetables, maps, names. Anything that could help them later when they proceeded into more complex digital terrain.

They skimmed downloaded news broadcasts, many of them featuring OBL himself delivering his pronouncements after attacks. They found a folder containing practice tirades, what was essentially a terrorist blooper reel. There were a few random documents in the mix, some of them text files, some PDF scans of handwritten pages, but nothing obviously juicy. Fisk and Geeseman were passed the Arabic documents and read what they could. They were data compilations on dozens of cities, much of it copied verbatim from sources such as the CIA
World Factbook
and Wikipedia, like terroristic book reports.

None of it alluded to a specific attack or target—nor did they expect it to. Any intel acquired so easily would be immediately suspect.

They skimmed through entire two- and three-year-old issues of
Time, The Economist,
the
New York Times,
the London
Times, The New Yorker, Wired,
and
USA Today
. They were looking specifically for any breaks in formatting, any edits within the text—any hidden transmissions.

After working for a few hours without anything to show for it, they set all that aside. Pearl opened a new folder on his screen. “It’s got to be in the pictures,” he muttered.

“Agreed,” said Rosofsky, bobbing his head across from him, as though listening required motion to penetrate his brain.

“Then you’ll also agree that Mario kicks Sonic’s ass every hour of every day from now into eternity and infinity.”

“I will concede that the Wii is indeed a fantastic console. For six-year-olds who scare easily.”

“I’m starting with the porn,” said Pearl, so completely immersed that he was unaware of the non sequitur. The first images opened on his screen.

F
isk bailed out for a break once words started swimming before his eyes. He went to the base, grabbed a Twix bar from a vending machine, and sat down at the phones, staring off into space, munching chocolate and caramel and cookie. Once his focus returned, he allowed himself one call. He checked the time difference in New York, then pulled on a headset and dialed anyway.

The phone was answered on the second ring. “Ze condor flies at midnight,” said Fisk in a hammy German accent.

“Caller ID comes up as ‘Germany,’ ” said Krina Gersten. “I half expected to hear the chancellor’s voice.”

“Everything sounds a little dirtier when spoken with a German accent, don’t you think?”

“You’ve been working hard, I can tell.”

One Friday evening more than six months earlier, after a long noncourtship of flirtation and denial, the inevitable had happened. They returned late from a day of interviewing baggage handlers at JFK about a missing shipment of magnetic relays, the type that were ideally suited for delayed bomb fuses. They came back together on the Long Island Rail Road from Jamaica in order to avoid the rush hour traffic in a cab. Not much happened on the commute back: each was tired, recharging on the long ride when they switched to a crowded subway car. They got out at Grand Central, since each of them lived on the East Side of Manhattan. It was only as they clicked along the black-and-white tiles on their way through the vast train station that Fisk slowed and raised his eyebrows to her, suggesting a detour with just a look.

They closed the Oyster Bar after two bottles of Australian Riesling, dozens of oysters, a pair of thick crab cakes, and previously untold life stories. Then they found a waiting taxi outside as though it had been part of the plan all along. They held hands in the back of the cab, Gersten resting her head against Fisk’s shoulder, riding in buzzed silence to Fisk’s two-bedroom co-op in Sutton Place.

Inside the apartment door, once it finally closed and it seemed that conversation was again permitted, Gersten said, looking around, “Family money?”

“Yes,” Fisk said. “And the money I make from being an international gigolo.”

She nodded, smiling. “Who’s making the bigger mistake here?” she asked, kicking her shoes to the side and leaning against the wall. “It’s me, right? Always the woman.”

“Don’t say that. I don’t want you to do anything you’re going to regret.”

She looked at him with one eye almost closed, as though viewing him through a surveyor’s instrument. “Exactly what you should say at this moment.”

“Don’t profile a profiler,” said Fisk, shedding his jacket and spilling change on the kitchen counter. “I do have ulterior motives, however.”

“When did you know?” she asked.

“Know what?”

She pointed her finger back and forth between them. “This.”

“When?” He opened his refrigerator, bending down to look. He pulled out two bottles of Amstel Light and went to the cupboard for crackers, something solid, anything. “Hard to say. But I know this. I lock into that first moment we met like it was yesterday. Your hair was still choppy.”

“You liked that.”

She was right behind him now. He straightened and turned. The co-op apartment kitchen was typically cramped. Gersten seemed shorter than he was used to, and then he remembered that she had kicked off her shoes. That started to get him hard. “I think there was something in that moment. But then we both knew it was a bad idea, and so went about wasting months and months pretending to be professionals.”

“Pretending,” she said, licking a bit of lingering oyster sand off her lip.

Fisk showed her the Amstels but she shook her head.

“Bathroom,” she said.

He pointed.

She went.

He put down the bottles and waited.

She returned. He feared that the spell was broken, that she was going to beg off now, having had that conversation in the mirror. She would make plans for tomorrow, then back out via text, avoid him at work Monday morning, always avert her gaze whenever she saw him, and pretend that this night had never happened.

She stood at the kitchen entrance, unfazed by the fact that he hadn’t moved an inch while she was gone.

“Mouthwash,” she said.

He thought about that one. “I’m probably out,” said Fisk.

“Oh, well,” she said.

She didn’t move. Neither did he. Good sign.

“You know, I’m pretty good at keeping secrets,” Fisk told her. “Kind of what I do for a living.”

“Really?” she said, with an exaggerated searching glance at his ceiling. She was terribly attractive when she was unsteady. Probably because so much of their job demanded absolute steadiness. It was nice and dangerous and sexy to see her off-kilter. “That’s funny.” She pushed a hair away from her eye. “Me too.”

“Covert operations,” he said.

She winked, then pressed her forefinger to the side of her nose. “Exactly.”

He gave the enterprise some thought.

“Operation Friday Night Friction,” he said.

She shook her head. “Too crass. Who do you think I am?”

He thought some more. “Operation Class Not Crass.”

“Better. Getting warmer.” She shifted her weight from one stocking foot to the other. “This is such a sweet mix of wrong-right.”

He nodded. “Sour and sweet.”

“It’s good right here. The threshold. I want to hold on to this moment.”

“Not me,” he said.

“I want to know things about you,” she said. “This is just part of it for me.”

“Absolutely,” he said. “Me too.” And then, because he didn’t feel like he had convinced her, he added, “The fact is that I would say just about anything right now to keep this night going—full confession. But just reminding you, underlining it, so you know—this didn’t start tonight, for me. And because of that, it won’t end tonight. No matter what happens.”

She nodded, taking his words to heart. “We intersect, but don’t disappear—deal?”

He puzzled over her words as she leaned her shoulder against the doorway. “Fucking profound,” he said. “Where’d you get that from? That’s good.”

She said, “Are we going to stay here, or do you maybe have a bedroom?”

“I have a bedroom,” he said.

In they went. Everything else disappeared. It was quiet and they were serious. They were locked in on each other.

No artificial light in the room, just the city night through the open window blinds. Whispers and slow, careful movements, each one watching the other.

Intensity built. Caresses became squeezing, rhythm became thrust.

“Goddamn, Gersten,” said Fisk—as at once she went from supine to straddling him.

The fucking became frantic, even rough. Her gym-hard body on him, her hair brushing against his face. His hands gripping her hips. Almost like a fight, except that there had to be two winners.

He watched Gersten’s face in the shadow of the city night. He felt her fingertips chewing into the tops of his shoulders. He watched her lose herself, lose all inhibition, moaning. It ended with the headboard banging into the wall . . . and then silence.

A siren four floors down on East Fifty-fifth woke him, not the sunlight. He squinted and found her sitting on the floor against the wall near the door, wearing a pair of his gym shorts and a V-neck undershirt, checking her phone. Her hair hung over her eyes and her legs were crossed. A glass of water stood on the floor next to her.

They were both hungover and elated simultaneously: the sour and the sweet.

Junk TV became their focus that day, as neither one wanted to be the first to delve into a critical conversation.

“You have anything today?” Fisk asked her.

She studied the television, curled up sitting on his sofa now, a throw pillow beneath her bent left leg, chin on her bare knee. “Yeah,” she said, though her eyes didn’t sell it. “Actually there are some things I could do . . .”

“I wasn’t asking so you’d go,” he told her. “In fact, I was hoping maybe you could stay.”

She took her chin off her knee and looked at him. Profiling him for sincerity.

“Know this,” she said to him, “I swore to myself I’d never get involved with another cop. And I never have. Never.”

Fisk shrugged. “What makes you think we’re involved?”

Her eyes narrowed, taking the joke as intended. Fisk noticed the small gold detective’s shield replica, about the size of a nickel, dangling from a plain dog-tag chain around Gersten’s neck.

“Your father’s?” he asked.

She nodded, touching it with her forefinger. “His badge number. Four six three two. My mother gave it to me when I graduated from the academy. I take off everything else but this.”

Fisk tugged the pillow slowly out from beneath her bent leg. “Prove it,” he said.

“M
iss me?” he asked now, many months later, speaking on the secure line from Ramstein Air Base.

“Intolerably,” she sang, a mix of exaggeration and honesty. “Everything good?”

“You know the drill. FBI is running it. They still hate me but they need me. And Geeseman’s still two parts asshole, one part haircut.”

“He’s probably monitoring all comm, FYI,” she told him. Gersten still lived with her mother, but stayed most nights at Sutton Place, even when Fisk was gone. “Wish I was in on it. That is some hot shit, you lucky dog. OBL. I’m walking around picking up trash dropped by snotty NYU Muslim kids again tomorrow.”

Fisk smiled. “Muslim beards are the new hipster goatee. You fix the faucet?”

“Nope. Couldn’t get it. Dropped a note to the super.”

“Lazy,” he said, stifling a yawn.

“It’s not my sink,” she said, and he could tell she was smiling. “All right, I can hear the exhaustion in your voice, and that you want to get back to it. Find something big, will you, hero?”