Intercept (48 page)

It was soon clear to Hannon and Marinello that there was little to be gained from continued questioning of people who were not even witnesses. And the only person who had seen anything, Ms. Calvert, had had an emotional breakdown over the events and tendered her resignation.

Mark Jenson called a staff meeting in the Common Room for 6 p.m. to discuss the future of the academy. He was keenly aware that if they decided to go ahead, as normal, and another bomb was to hit the school and kill several hundred students, he would be held accountable.

Tony Marinello did his level best to convince the headmaster that the chances of the killers returning were extremely remote, simply because people here would be ever on their guard. “Sir,” said Tony, “you probably have the safest school in the country. They never come back.”

“You may very nearly be right,” Jenson replied. “But they hit the World Trade Center back in the mid-nineties. And, as we all know, came back for a more successful second try in 2001.”

“Different, sir. Very different. The Twin Towers were a world symbol of U.S. power, unmatched anywhere. There was nothing comparable. This is just a school. There are hundreds like it. And any one of them will do just fine for a terrorist group trying to frighten the populace.”

“Well, we do like to think we have unique qualities here at Canaan . . . ”

But Officer Marinello was already out of the door, with his case, in his own opinion, proven beyond reasonable doubt.

 

THERE WAS A GENERAL ALERT
out for the scruffy Dodge Ram throughout New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Vermont, and New Hampshire. But this general alert did not instantly develop into a manhunt, because the evidence that there had been a suicide bomb was too strong. Thus state troopers in the half-dozen states that surround Connecticut were not fired up and lasering their way down the highway, searching for the old Dodge banger to the exclusion of all else.

Ibrahim was on the Turnpike heading for Boston within forty minutes of the explosion. He felt more relaxed in Massachusetts, but the truth was, he had no idea where he was going. But by a process of elimination he’d arrived at one single word. North.

South led back to the Mexican border, which gave him the shudders, even though it had been Hassan who had shot dead the two border guards. New York also gave him goose bumps, both because of the bomb in the men’s room and his sneaking suspicion that Faisal al-Assad had flown the coop.

Ibrahim had no idea how intense the police dragnet was right now. Indeed, he had no idea whether they even had a description of the truck he was driving. Nor if they even knew he existed. But his suspicions were those of an international terrorist, of a professional killer who was being groomed to become one of bin Laden’s right-hand men.

He needed to get centered. To develop a plan. To him, there was nowhere south where he could reasonably seek refuge. Or escape. Airports were out of the question. So were major seaports. Which ruled out almost everywhere. The only border he’d ever heard was possible to cross illegally was Canada, mostly because it was nearly four thousand miles long. No one could patrol all of it.

Ibrahim needed to make contact with someone from the organization. He got off the highway at the next exit, and headed to a rest stop near the town of Blandford, a ski-resort located in the Berkshire Hills. It was high, spectacular country, and he considered it likely that reception would be excellent on his cell.

Ibrahim dialed the number of Faisal al-Assad on Sixty-Ninth Street, the apartment that had been his home for several days. The phone had
plainly been disconnected, but Ibrahim’s call was a big mistake. The New York police were wire-tapping that apartment, given Assad’s connection to the farm. Ibrahim’s call went straight through to the police, who could actually answer. When one of them asked who was speaking, Ibrahim did not respond, just stated that he wished to speak to Mr. Assad. Again they asked for identity, trying to keep him on the line, but Ibrahim sensed an intervention, and clicked off his phone.

The NYPD raced through the procedures to trace a call, but it took too long, and they came up only with a wide stretch of country in the Berkshire Hills, probably off Interstate 90. They logged the beacon but nothing else.

But they did not need anything else, because that beacon was precisely twenty-three miles from Canaan Academy, where there had been a bombing less than a hour ago. The coincidence was undeniable. Ten minutes later, in the collective minds of the both the Connecticut and Massachusetts state police, there was no doubt that the two known terrorists, photographed getting out of Mountainside Farm, were heading for Boston.

Ibrahim, too, experienced a sudden heightening of the senses. That phone call, he guessed, had betrayed him, to an extent. He had no idea how the U.S. police could possibly know his identity, or his role in the blast that blew the bus. But these were Americans, and they were not like other people. They knew everything.

Ibrahim was growing more scared by the minute. Yousaf had gone into a total decline, and he sat staring at the Berkshire Hills as they rushed past the old Dodge truck. But Yousaf did not see the golden autumn slopes before the snows. All he could he see was the hot, dry wasteland of eastern Cuba, and the brown, neglected grassland and vegetation around the Guantanamo Bay prison.

He wasn’t saying anything, but he was trying to think of ways to help Ibrahim. However, the sudden appearance of two state police cruisers coming the other way at high speed, blue lights flashing, sirens blaring, jolted them both into the reality of their situation.

Yousaf sat upright, and muttered, “They’re not looking for us, are they?”

Ibrahim replied, “I don’t think so. Not yet. But I’m getting off this highway right now.”

He swung off the turnpike at Exit 3, before Springfield, and headed north, driving through the Berkshires on minor roads where his truck looked more at home than on a major highway. He kept heading north and east, aiming for the coast, way above Boston.

He was uncertain about this particular compulsion, but during his two semesters at Harvard he’d often traveled with other students up to coastal Maine for long weekends, sometimes fishing, sometimes hiking.

And like so many generations of Boston students, he’d loved that wild country, its loneliness and its permanent atmosphere of a lost time, of living in a bygone age. Maine was a throwback of a state, and in the opinion of many, it was a throwback to better and more kindly times. So Ibrahim was headed for Maine, where he could not only think, but there was also that 490-mile border that Maine shares with Canada, where only a couple of roads actually cross from one side to the other.

Ibrahim was clueless about the loneliness of that horseshoe-shaped frontier line, the paucity of highways or even roads, the hostile weather, and the impossibility of traveling across those mountains and into Canada. Also he was not sure why he thought Canada would be a much easier proposition for a wanted man than the United States. For the moment, he was concentrating on finding the correct roads to take him north of Boston, and he continually left the principal north- and east-running throughways, ducking and diving onto country lanes, adding many hours to his journey.

As darkness began to settle over New England, he pulled up at a rest stop and told Yousaf to fill up the truck with gas, paying for it with cash. He then walked over to a quiet area outside the restaurant and made a phone call to his old master, Sheikh Abdullah Bazir, in Muslim Bradford.

It was 11 p.m. in England. The Sheikh had left the mosque and was back in his basement office. Ibrahim quickly explained that his U.S. mission had failed, and that almost everyone involved had been killed in the blast.

Sheikh Abdullah himself was a highly skilled bombmaker, and he actually winced when he was told the size of the device, and the volume of enhanced ammonium nitrate Ibrahim had used. “They must never have had a chance,” he said of the men on the bus. He expressed deep regret about the deaths of Ben al-Turabi and Abu Hassan, and assured Ibrahim that tonight he would pray for them. To beg Allah to accept them as Martyrs to his cause, and to welcome them now into Paradise.

And then he told Ibrahim what he needed to hear most: That he would get both Ibrahim and Yousaf out of the United States. He would immediately alert Shakir Khan in Islamabad, who would contact the Sleeper Cells in the American Northeast. If more funds were necessary, they would be arranged through the holy men in Riyadh and through a labyrinth of law firms in London and the United States.

Now Sheikh Abdullah ordered Ibrahim to drive on into lonely country, to stay out of cities and off highways. He advised him it was safer to travel in the dark, but to stay well clear of the U.S. police. He was to call in whenever possible on this land line at this time, 11 p.m. Bradford. Then he asked for Ibrahim’s cell phone number, which would only be used in an emergency. Meanwhile he would endeavor to plan a route for them, out of the United States.

Ibrahim felt better now. He went inside the restaurant and purchased a box of cheeseburgers and fries, which he and Yousaf consumed in the parking lot. Once again they headed north, crossing the New Hampshire border south of Nashua, and heading up to the White Mountains.

They stopped at a small motel and checked in for the night, again paying in cash. They rose early and made their way back toward the Atlantic coast, crossing mountainous country as they drove along Route 2, up toward the city of Bangor.

They reached the downtown area without incident, and headed for a parking lot. They took their bags, left the Kalashnikovs clipped under the fuselage, and headed into a big supermarket, with an attached restaurant. Yousaf walked to the counter and purchased coffee and sweet pastries; Ibrahim went to the magazine area and bought a road atlas, which provided a complete state-by-state tourist guide to the United States, Canada, and Mexico.

Ibrahim almost choked on his coffee when he saw how impossible it looked to cross into Canada via Maine. He already knew that one of the roads in was I-95, which had customs officials, Canadian immigration, and major police security at the border. Too many terrorists had tried. Too many had been caught.

Ibrahim poured over the map. There was a ferry to Nova Scotia from Portland, Maine, but they were already a hundred miles north of Maine’s largest city, and neither of them wanted to head back south. Ibrahim finally deduced that their only chance was the fast ferry to Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, which left from Bar Harbor every morning.

Ibrahim was relieved. He helped himself to a second pastry and asked Yousaf to fetch another two cups of coffee. Half an hour later they decided to make the final leg of their long journey to the coast of Maine. They picked up their bags and were about to leave the supermarket when Ibrahim froze. Out in the parking lot, precisely where the Dodge was stationed, were two state police cruisers, blue lights flashing. Standing
at the rear of their parked truck were two troopers, both with notebooks, both writing.

Ibrahim dragged Yousaf back inside, grabbed a cart, and placed both leather traveling bags at the bottom. He then began filling the cart with cabbage, lettuce, bags of potatoes, and mixed salad, piling it all on top of the bags.

He then headed to one of the check-out lanes and began bagging up the vegetables. It took ten minutes before they were ready to push the loaded cart outside; when they reached the door, the two troopers were still there, the only difference being that one of them was speaking on his cell phone. Now one thing was very clear to Ibrahim: he and Yousaf were the very definite targets of a police manhunt.

There were probably two or three hundred other vehicles in this supermarket parking lot and the troopers were interested in only one, the one driven by two known terrorists, ex-Guantanamo, and plainly now wanted by Connecticut state police in connection with a bomb and the attempted murder of fifteen hundred U.S. citizens.

The vehicle’s registration number had obviously been circulated and any minute the police were going to find two AK-47s clipped under the fuselage.

“Walk,” said Ibrahim. “Walk slowly with the cart, like everyone else. Head in the opposite direction of the truck and those two cops. Act like you’re going directly to your own car.”

Yousaf looked doubtful, but he did as he was told. They reached the far end of the lot, and were now as geographically far away from the cruisers as they could be without leaving the parking lot.

At this point there were a lot of options, all of them flawed. Grab the bags and get a taxi. Hopeless. Grab the bags and find a bus station. Worse. Find the road to the coast and try to hitch-hike. Ridiculous. Grab the bags and find a car-hire. Lunacy. Steal a car. Better. But only with the driver. The difference might be hours of safe driving before he was missed; the other method, just to take a car and vanish, might have the police on their tail within ten minutes.

“Keep pushing,” said Ibrahim. He now walked beside the cart, which allowed him to plunge into his own leather bag to search for the pistol he’d been given by Mike and the Sleeper Cell guys when they arrived with the fertilizer. Because it was farthest away from the main doors, this area of the parking lot was the least busy. There was a line of eight parking
spaces and only two of them were occupied. A four-foot high concrete wall separated the lot from the busy downtown street running past.

Ibrahim slipped the pistol into his jacket and helped push the cart toward one of the parked vehicles. And there they waited, never even glancing way across the lines of cars to the spot where the cops were still standing by the old Dodge.

After five minutes a new cruiser pulled in and joined the other two. The troopers had decided to seal off the supermarket and question everyone still shopping.
No need to bother with people out in the lot. If this Ibrahim and his buddy Yousaf had come out already, they’d have headed for their truck. And if they’d tried to make a break, we’d have seen them.