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  “With respect, my friend,” said one of the others, “the enemy has learned well.”

  “That, I reject. It is not they who have learned well, it is we who have learned poorly. I have been praying on this recently. We have given up our greatest advantage, and that is the element of surprise. Always in battle, the moment arrives when courage and a calculated risk turn the tide. Years ago in Afghanistan, we learned when we chose to sacrifice thousands in order to close Khyber Pass to the Russian supply convoys. It worked. By the light of Allah, we wore them down. We bled them slowly, the work of a thousand leeches, until they retreated. We have now drawn the Americans into the same trap. They are stuck, bleeding like a pig, and yet still refuse to change their way of life that so offends God.” Bin Laden removed an empty hand from the folds of his robe, pointing at each man in turn. “We are at the moment of Khyber Pass now. We will part today with a vision of beautiful success, and a divine plan to achieve it.”

  The room was silent for a long minute. The man who spoke halting Arabic lifted his hand, asking permission to speak. Bin Laden nodded.

  “We must direct our energy toward a target of such powerful symbolic importance to the Americans that its destruction will resonate for generations.”

  Bin Laden nodded. At the very least, he was confident that his words had gotten through to them.

  Another said, “They are waiting for a direct attack from us.”

  “Precisely. And we should never give them what they anticipate.”

  “But our resources have dwindled.”

  “All the more reason to act smarter, to move more swiftly. With an economy of effort. We must think in a new way. What is our goal? Anwar.”

  Anwar, the younger man directly to bin Laden’s right, said, “Not the destruction of lives, but the destruction of a way of life.”

  “A people.” Bin Laden returned his hands to the folds of his robe. “We must lead them like the dogs they are, manipulate them through their weakness. Their existence is an affront to all that is good in the universe. We need a single target of supreme consequence. A strike that will break the soul of the Western demon. Our enemy has raised its heavy shield in anticipation, inviting us to strike it directly, like fools.” Bin Laden sat up, seeing clearly as though visited by a bolt of divine inspiration. “Instead, we will feint to expose their vulnerability—and then strike deeply and cleanly. Remember, a strike to the ankle is just as fatal as one to the throat. For the giant still falls.”

  Part 3

  May 2011

  Ramstein Air Base, Germany

  Chapter 9

  Airman third class Donnie Boyle had been in Mortuary Affairs ever since he finished basic training the year before. He had bargained with the recruiter in Boston and gotten an assignment to Germany, but at the time he had no idea this kind of job even existed.

  At first, handling the dead gave him the same evil dream night after night. In it, the mangled parts he unloaded off aircraft from Iraq and Afghanistan reassembled themselves into men and women, sat up, and asked him if they could bum a cigarette. He always told them he didn’t smoke, which he didn’t, whereupon the bodies came apart again and sank down into a pool of greenish liquid.

  Boyle got over the dreams in about a month, but he still hated the job. It ate away at him like an ulcer. Two or three times a week, a giant C-17 Globemaster touched down bearing a load of brushed aluminum coffins. Each was draped with an American or English or Australian flag. Long before Boyle got to Ramstein, they had discontinued the arrival ceremonies with Class A uniforms, bands, and salutes. It had gotten to be too much to bear for everyone involved. Now they unloaded the planes with a forklift. A forklift. But respectfully.

  From the runway apron, the dead were transported by flatbed truck into a refrigerated hangar. That was where the forensic specialists took over. After the deliveries, Boyle and the other guys who worked on the ramp helped open the coffins. You never knew what you were going to get. Inside could be anything from what looked like a man or woman taking a nap, to something resembling a large, burned pot roast, to anything in between. Sometimes, there was so little left—no dog tags or labeled uniform—they could not positively identify the dead soldier in Kabul or Baghdad.

  The main task in Ramstein was figuring out who had died for his or her country. Because everybody assigned to Mortuary Affairs already had top secret security clearance, it was easy to pull out Boyle with two other guys when the contents from bin Laden’s house arrived. The assignment orders were UFN—Until Further Notice. Word was it would be three days, tops.

  Three days away from the coffins. It was a stone gift.

  The first load from Pakistan came in on a white Gulfstream jet with no markings at all, not even a tail number. The crew did not disembark. The jet sat dark on the airfield, way across at one of the grass-covered humps where they used to store nukes.

  Within the hour, a camo Marine Corps C-130 touched down and taxied over to the Gulfstream. Boyle and the others rode a cart out to facilitate the offload into the bunker.

  From the outside, the bunker looked like a World War II ruin. They entered through a fifteen-by-fifteen-foot storage locker with piles of broken machinery and aluminum sheeting all over the floor. At the far end of the clutter, a steel door opened into a ten-by-ten-foot air lock. On the side walls of the chamber, white Gen-Nex painters’ coveralls, tie-on face masks, and booties hung on hooks. Boyle suited up, pulling blue latex gloves from a box on the door rack. Tedious work, but so was popping open coffins.

  No forklifts here. Boyle and the other two men worked like movers, slogging through a long day toting sealed crates, taped cardboard boxes, steel picnic coolers, and an endless number of bags of rocks and dirt. Every time they went inside, they had to suit up; every time they went out, they had to shed the coveralls, masks, gloves, and booties.

  The room beyond the air lock was not what he had expected from looking at the grass bunker outside. It was a clean, brightly lit compartment, about fifty feet by fifty feet, with computer stations in the center and deep wall racks set against white-enameled tin walls. To Boyle’s mind it resembled a morgue for possessions.

  Perpendicular to the storage racks were metal tables, each with its own laptop computer and tray of instruments. Scalpels, scissors, tongs, piles of plastic bags, magnifying glasses, tins and vials of liquid, a dissection microscope. The interior was air-conditioned to sixty-four degrees Fahrenheit. The artificially cold air scratched his throat, and the steady hum of the blowers gave him the sensation of being airborne or underwater.

  Two guards in field armor and battle hats stood watch, each wielding an M16, making radio checks into their boom mics once every fifteen minutes. The offload took eight hours. Afterward, the airplanes refueled and taxied away, made a running turn into their takeoffs, and disappeared into the rainy night over Germany.

  An officer showed up while Boyle and the others were finishing the last of the Gatorade. His orders to them were to forget what they had just done. In the morning, they would be needed to run errands to and from the bunker. The officer didn’t say for whom.

  Chapter 10

  Without 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

  The 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 do
cuments 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.

  Fisk 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.