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  He understood the pure futility of walking into either of them and asking what this Faisal al-Assad was up to, moving his own money around like that.

  Strauss had grilled Goldman and had established there had been some urgency in the transaction, and had a distinct feeling that his client was already in Torrington when he made the call. He had not, however, checked.

  So far as Mack could tell, Faisal had already spent, or was quickly preparing to spend, a large hunk of this cash in Connecticut, suspecting perhaps setting up a base from which to conduct an attack. The New York Sayanim boss had pointed out that al-Qaeda always set up bases, not necessarily close to their target. The 9/11 attack was masterminded and carried out from Boston, from a network of city-center apartments owned by bin Laden’s relatives. The very name al-Qaeda meant The Base in Arabic.

  Mack strolled down the sidewalk taking in the storefronts he passed. He was struck by the volume of real estate brokerages, almost all exclusively involved in the development of commercial property. If Faisal al-Assad was making a big investment, or even buying into an office block or some kind of industrial real estate, well, Mack surmised there would be nothing suspicious about that. After all, Faisal al-Assad was an executive director of a Saudi oil construction outfit in Riyadh and New York. An investment interest in an up-and-coming area like Torrington, where they were hoping to reconstruct even the railroad down to New York, surely made good business sense.

  But Mack had a hunch there was more to it. He needed to find out whether the Saudi had started writing checks of an unusual nature, whether he was trying to finance a new base. Looking into the window of an old established local real estate office, Cutlers and Sons, he decided this was the place anyone might go to look for a remote country retreat, which would make for a great base.

  And he was already wondering if there was a sizeable Jewish College situated anywhere in this picturesque corner of Connecticut.

  He pushed open the front door, closed it carefully behind him, and was greeted by Miss Aimee Cutler.

  9

  AT HIS BUDS CLASS eleven years ago in Coronado, young Mackenzie Bedford had three times been announced Honor Man, the Navy SEALs’ most coveted accolade for the outstanding member of a training course.

  Mack had been Honor Man at Sniper School. He’d been Honor Man in the murderous section for Unarmed Combat. And Honor Man, Class of 234, the overall outstanding student among that group of eleven young iron men, the only ones left standing out of 163 starters.

  Right now Honor Man was standing before a twenty-three-year-old real estate broker named Aimee, giving serious thought as to whether to tell the biggest lie of his entire life, or the second.

  He could tell her he was a close, personal friend of Faisal al-Assad, and wanted to know if Faisal ended up finding a place to buy in this area, but that could leave a trail. Better would be for him to pretend he was also looking to buy, and could she show him some properties that recently sold so he could get a better sense of what his money could buy.

  Aimee Cutler was looking at him kind of quizzically, as if he might be a bit slow-witted. Mack grinned and went with lie number two.

  “I’d be glad to,” she said with a smile and rummaged in a file cabinet for her sales brochures. She then punched a set of numbers on her keyboard, which swiftly lit up a large computer screen on the wall. She beckoned for Mack to sit down on the opposite side of her desk and asked him what price-range he was considering.

  “Well, I’m looking for some land, something to give me a little seclusion, and protection from development on adjoining lots,” he replied. “So I guess I’m looking at around one to one-and-a-half million dollars.”

  “Oh yessir,” said Aimee with more enthusiasm than she intended. “I’m sure we can find something very nice for that. Right now it’s a buyers’ market and property is a lot cheaper than it was a couple of years ago.”

  She came up with around six small farms and country houses that had been sold in the previous three months. The fifth one she showed him was Mountainside Farm. And the words of the intercepted phone message stood before him—“Be sure they can see the mountain.”

  None of the other names were as obvious as this, although Mack realized he had no clues whether the other five houses could see the darned mountain or not. But since none of them was any longer for sale, he could not really ask for the brochures. And if he did, he was certain he would not be given them. He just needed to remember them.

  He asked Aimee if this was the specialist broker for his kind of search, and she assured him that Cutlers had been for a century the pre-eminent real estate brokerage in the area for all farms and upmarket homes. “We have a tie up with Sothebys,” she added. “Although my grandfather thought they might be a little . . . well . . . razzle-dazzle for us.”

  “Yes, I can see that,” said Mack, thoughtfully. “This office itself feels like a room in a stately country house.” Aimee smiled, and he asked her if she had any local maps printed off for clients. She walked across the office to a small chest of drawers and produced two. One zoomed tightly in on Torrington only, the other was a much bigger scale and took in the entire area, north to the Massachusetts border, and west to New York State.

  Mack asked if it would be okay to scribble in the amounts of money paid where the houses sold. “That way I can show my wife, and then we can take a drive around and get a feel for the area and its costs,” he said.

  “Good idea,” Aimee, writing in $875,000 over the place on the map where Mountainside Farm stood. She filled in the others, and as she did so Mack logged in his notebook the other five names.

  Ultimately, though he saw the error of his ways. He had the names. He had the prices. And he had the locations. But they were jumbled up both on the map and in his mind. He couldn’t really tell whether Mountainside Farm was way over there next to Haystack Mountain, or at the end of Main Street, Torrington.

  One thing he had not screwed up, however. He had left no trace of his interest in Mr. Faisal al-Assad. And he folded his maps, promised Aimee he and his wife would be back in the next couple of days. He left the name Charles O’Brien, and set off on his search for the country property that Faisal al-Assad may have already purchased.

  The main trouble with the entire area, he decided, was it was full of goddamned mountains. Every house inside a forty-eight-million-mile radius could see the mountain. “Fuck it,” said Mack, wryly.

  BACK AT THE FARM, the newly bearded Ibrahim and his team were gathered around the big table studying a detailed map of the interiors of the main buildings at Canaan Academy. These plans are readily available at any town planning office, and even on the Internet. Indeed the school prospectus for parents contained a double-page spread detailing classrooms, the gymnasium, dormitories, and the Great Hall. A member of one of the Sleeper Cells, this one located in Hartford, had accessed this one.

  But the principal problem being discussed was not the general layout of the location, but that they had no one on the inside, which was rare for an al-Qaeda operation in any country in the world. Indeed the Beslan program had been built around the insertion of “advance men,” posing as workmen and taking jobs inside School Number One during the vacation, hiding explosives and mapping out the vulnerable points in the school.

  The Canaan hit would have none of these luxuries because there had been so little time to organize it. Ibrahim, Yousal, Ben, and Abu had been released rather suddenly, and in the opinion of the al-Qaeda executives, they had no other field operatives capable of such a high-level assault on the Great Satan.

  That was why the United States had been free of attack for so long. Al-Qaeda’s top commanders had died in Tora Bora, and they had never been replaced. But happily, they now had a new recruiting operation, located in the judicial rooms of the U.S. Court system, carried out by American judges anxious to act in absolute fairness and return these illegal combatants to the battlefield.

  That was why Ibrahim Sharif was presiding ove
r this remote group of terrorists, who were planning the most vicious and utterly outlandish assault on American school children in all of history. And their reasons were simple: It worked in Russia. It’ll work here. With the guidance of Allah, we may now make the strike that will drive the Infidel out of the Middle East for ever.

  It was, of course, a mindless and lunatic plan. Such an assault would do no such thing. It would merely infuriate the Americans, whose president would be compelled to hit back, hard. Ibrahim and every single one of his cohorts was a fanatic, both extreme and irrational.

  But Ibrahim was not a fool “We do not have any worthwhile recce in place,” he said, “and that is a major disadvantage to us, because it means we have to make a frontal attack. But we cannot just charge in and somehow blow the place apart, because that would probably mean blowing ourselves up at the same time.

  “And while Allah approves that sacrifice, and awaits us all on the other side of the bridge, it would not be in His interest for that to happen. Because He would prefer we live to fight another day, and once again strike down the Infidel.”

  “Then how will we launch our attack?” asked Ben al-Taburi.

  “Well,” replied Ibrahim, “We need to get those boxes into the school. I think they should be marked in big letters with something innocuous, and then wheeled in through this door right here on the side. Not the main entrance.”

  Everyone peered over to see the plan. “Guess we’ll have to take a couple of hand-carts since three of them will weigh close to six hundred pounds,” said Yousaf. “And what do we do when we get ’em in there. Light a fuse?”

  “I’m coming to that,” said Ibrahim. “But first we need to mark the boxes. So we need a can of paint, probably green—not red or black, because those colors can mean danger. And we need those stencils where you paint in the gaps to form the letters. That way they’ll look official.”

  “And what goes on the boxes?” asked Ben.

  “How about a couple with the words Athletic Equipment, for the gym. Maybe Weights or Barbells.”

  “What about the other ten?”

  “We could have six going to the kitchen labeled Flour or Corn Oil. How about Sugar or Coffee? There’s almost a thousand kids in this school. They must have big boxes coming in all the time.”

  “And the other four?” persisted Ben.

  “Oh, Disinfectant, Soap, Detergent—perhaps one just marked Wholesale. It’s not a problem. Boxes marked like that being brought in through a side door by a uniformed man, marked so anyone can see what they contain—not even suspicious.”

  “But who will bring them in?” asked Ben. “We can’t go in there wearing hoods and masks?”

  “Of course not. We’ll have one of Mike’s boys go shopping in Torrington. Buy us some smart workmen’s overalls, paint, brushes, stencils, and the rest. We also need a large book of invoices, white, yellow, and blue. A man with invoices is official.”

  “Invoices,” said Mike. “That’s a nice touch.”

  But who’s going to detonate it all?” asked Abu Hassan. “We cannot do it, unless we want to die. Who do you have in mind? A couple of short-order kebab cooks in the kitchen?”

  “Jewish guys don’t eat kebabs,” volunteered Ben.

  “Well, not pork kebabs,” said Abu Hassan.

  “Shut up,” snapped Ibrahim. “I am setting the explosive to detonate on an electronic time-fuse inside each box. We drive to the side door and deliver the boxes to various pre-planned locations. We slide them off the hand carts and place them strategically around the ground floor of the school.

  “They will all be electronically linked to a master switch, which works by radio link. I had considered a satellite but I don’t think that’s necessary. A simple, powerful impulse will make the connection. Each box will have an electronic sensor fitted into wood. It’s important that the boxes face out—not facing the wall that is.

  “The detonator can be activated from the bus as it leaves the school grounds, and all twelve bombs will explode simultaneously two minutes later. That’s the timeline. In that time, the bus will be at least a mile away. We’ll abandon it somewhere remote and switch to the regular vehicles, heading straight for Boston.

  “I’m aiming for the Mass Turnpike within twenty-five minutes of the explosion because the Connecticut State Police will be in charge, and we want to be over the border in a different state as quickly as possible.”

  “Yousaf, Ben, Abu Hassan, and I will fly out of Logan that night, direct to Madrid. The rest of you will just go home and keep your heads down until further notice.”

  “That’s a good plan,” said Abu Hassan.

  “Not mine, I’m afraid. I have just been chosen to carry it out. The entire strategy was mastered by Shakir Khan and his Saudi advisers. Faisal al-Assad was very important. And there will be great rejoicing at home when we carry it out. We will be heroes of the al-Qaeda movement.”

  “When do we carry it out?” asked Yousaf.

  “The date is next Friday. So we need to be efficient. But not in a tearing rush. We move carefully, and we prepare thoroughly. That way we will make no mistakes. I have the greatest confidence in every one of you.”

  “Is the date firm?”

  “Very firm. It’s a special day at the school, with many, many more people than usual. According to my orders from Faisal, it’s called Abraham’s Day, and all the parents will be there from around 10 a.m. Shakir Khan is looking for a hit before noon. That gets us all out in time for the evening flight to Madrid, where our passports are in good order.”

  “There is just one thing,” said Mike. “I’m concerned about the entrance to this property. I don’t know if anyone will suspect something is going on, but I do think we should post a guard down there. Not some armed killer parading around with a Kalashnikov. Just someone out of sight in the woods.”

  “One of your guys?”

  “Yes. I’ll brief Ali. He’ll do it. He’s big and agile, spent a few months in the Pakistani Army.”

  “Speaking of Kalashnikovs,” said Abu, “will we take weapons in with us, I mean when we enter the school building?”

  “Oh, I think that would be essential,” said Ibrahim, “because we might be apprehended by someone, or stopped, or questioned. And then someone would have to die. Our rifles should be in soft holders and placed on top of the boxes. If we have to fight our way out of the building, we’ll be ready. But I don’t think that will happen. We’ll be too well organized.”

  “Wouldn’t matter much if someone did have to die,” said Abu Hassan. “If they’re in that building, they’re going to die anyway.”

  “Everyone’s going to die, except us,” said Ibrahim.

  THREE HOURS LATER Mack Bedford was on his way down the main road to East and West Norfolk. He had checked out two of Aimee’s sales, and now he was on his way to Mountainside Farm, which he believed represented his best chance. He did not of course have a name or an address, just the sum of $875,000 scribbled on a map. He would probably have to ask where the house was once he reached the approximate area.

  By now Mack guessed he may be around Torrington for a couple of days, and, driving along, he suddenly spotted the Blackberry River Hotel, a red-brick building in its own grounds, set back from the road. He decided to check in for a couple of nights, just to give himself a reasonable base. He was like al-Qaeda in that way; he needed a solid platform from which to launch an attack.

  He talked to the receptionist, reserved a second floor double room, and dumped his bag on a big comfortable chair. It was growing colder outside and he pulled on his soft, waterproof, combat boots, the ones he’d worn at the bridge on the Euphrates. He wore a black turtle neck, his Navy sweater, and a heavy-duty, dark-blue and red parka.

  Back downstairs, he asked the receptionist if she’d heard of Mountainside Farm and she told him precisely where it was.

  “Cross the river, and turn left down the road. The farm’s about a mile down on the right, entrance through a copse
of trees.

  “Who lives there?” he asked.

  “Don’t know,” said the girl. “It’s been on the market for months. But I did hear it had been sold this week.”

  Mack thanked her and took a quick peak around the hotel. There was a nice downstairs lounge, and the restaurant looked charming. He said he’d be there for 8 p.m.

  It was three o’clock when he finally set out and he found the house easily, then driving past and coming to a halt about a half-mile down the road. He pulled off onto the grass and stepped out of his vehicle, taking with him the binoculars he always kept in the Nissan. He slung them around his neck, zipped up his parka, and stepped back into the trees, moving slowly toward the blacktop drive he could see up ahead.

  He left the track and walked through the undergrowth to the end of the treeline, standing some forty yards from the gatepost that marked the end of the wood and the beginning of the private drive. There was no sign for a private road, or a warning to trespassers. Nothing to betray this was Mountainside Farm.

  From this vantage point, Mack still could not see the house or any of the farm buildings. The black-top drive swung right, and there were more trees on its left side two hundred yards further on.

  Mack moved further left, along the old broken post-and-rail fence, which had once been constructed to delineate the entrance wood from the pasture. Before the Manhattan botanist got a hold of the place, that is, and let it slide rapidly downhill.

  He was now standing fifty yards to the left of the gate post on the left side of the track. There was a clump of bushes here, which had not only devoured the fence, but had wound themselves around the trunk of a scrub oak forming a prickly barricade. In Mack’s judgment it would have made a perfect “hide” for a duck-shoot, if there’d been any ducks. Which there weren’t.

  “Friggin’ suburbs,” muttered Mack, who was, when it came right down to it, a raw-boned hunting/fishing Down Easter from the most rugged coastline in the United States. He smiled at his own sarcastic assessment of this mountainous wilderness, set two hundred fifty miles southwest and several light years away from the land he really loved.