The Intercept by Dick Wolf Page A

Cop work was still largely a boys’ club, and as she told him, she had been dealing with this sort of thing her entire career.
    They touched down smoothly, taxiing right up to the main terminal. An airport representative escorted them to a common room outside the detention center, where the terrorist reaction team had nearly finished their postmortem. The fellow FBI agents acknowledged one another, then everyone took a seat around a conference table while the lead agent spoke from his notes.
    “Looks like this guy Abdulraheem was the whole thing,” said the agent. “We’ve got everything he had. His story is so common among these young wannabe terrorists that it can’t be a legend. He loved the attention he got in Sanaa, Yemen, when he was recruited into one of those puppy cells at his mosque. They sent him to Peshawar for indoc, gave him a cutout contact, and told him to wait until he received orders. For a year he waited. And waited. And maybe went a little crazy. That’s how they do it, they test your fidelity, your patience. Abdulraheem failed the test. The wait was too much. He took a page from the nine-eleven playbook, bought an undetectable obsidian knife, jumped on the friendly old Internet, and watched some British flight school’s taped lectures on controlling an airliner’s course and altitude with the autopilot. That was it. He made his move alone on SAS 903, that is confirmed. His target was undefined in midtown Manhattan. He was planning on figuring that part out once he got inside the flight deck. This actor’s gonna be with us for a long, long time at Club Gitmo. Very small potatoes, seems to me, but who knows? He might know a few more names. He’s proven he doesn’t have the stuffing to wait the long wait. If he’s got anything else, it will come out, sooner rather than later. But the critical threat here is over.”
    Gersten and Fisk sat through the rest, Fisk noting his thoughts on paper. The briefing broke up, and he and Gersten went into the interrogation room alone, spending a half hour’s face time with Awaan Abdulraheem.
    With his language skills, Fisk took the lead, speaking to the subject in Arabic while Gersten played the intractable female presence. Fisk laid down a few baseline questions, in order to establish a rudimentary rapport, but the narcosynthesis of the mild hallucinogen the subject had been administered had not fully worn off yet. For Fisk, it was like interviewing a sleepy drunk.
    Abdulraheem was loquacious, neither fierce nor defiant, and often pathetic, like a neglected child who had been bad and looked forward to the attention punishment would afford him. The drug contributed to Abdulraheem’s mood, clouding his true character, but to Fisk it was evident that the would-be hijacker was not very bright. He was hardly the embodiment of the fear, suspicion, and anxiety one might expect, as he would no doubt be portrayed by the media.
    As they huddled outside afterward, Fisk translated a few of his answers for her. He could not mask his annoyance. He understood the need for immediate intervention, but mood-altering drugs should be a method of last resort. Especially when the administrator was unsure of the proper dose, as had been the case here.
    “Bottom line?” said Fisk. “Not a major player.”
    “A lone wolf?” said Gersten. “The odds are against it.”
    “I’m not making any final pronouncements,” said Fisk. “Maybe he’s dogging me—maybe he’s Keyser Söze. But I don’t think so. More likely he’s double-digit IQ, led more by religion than reason.”
    “He got himself on the plane,” said Gersten. “He got a knife on there.”
    Fisk nodded, rechecking his briefing notes, finding the passenger list. “And he—or someone else—paid for a business-class seat.”
    B efore Fisk and Gersten finished, the task force released the other passengers and crew, and SAS Flight 903 departed for Newark, its original destination. Each passenger answered direct