Page 40 (1/2)

ONE

Suicide boive out all kinds of tell-tale signs Mostly because they’re nervous By definition they’re all first-timers

Israeli counterintelligence wrote the defensive playbook They told us what to look for They used praght and came up with a list of behavioural indicators I learned the list froo He swore by it Therefore I swore by it too, because at the time I was on three weeks’ detached duty mostly about a yard from his shoulder, in Israel itself, in Jerusalem, on the West Bank, in the Lebanon, sometimes in Syria, sometimes in Jordan, on buses, in stores, on crowded sidewalks I keptfree down the bullet points

Twenty years later I still know the list And uys I learned another age, the longer you survive

The list is twelve points long if you’re looking at aat a woman The difference is a fresh shave Male bombers take off their beards It helps them blend in Makes them less suspicious The result is paler skin on the lower half of the face No recent exposure to the sun

But I wasn’t interested in shaves

I orking on the eleven-point list

I was looking at a woman

I was riding the subway, in New York City The 6 train, the Lexington Avenue local, heading uptoo o’clock in the otten on at Bleecker Street from the south end of the platform into a car that was empty except for five people Subway cars feel small and intimate when they’re full When they’re eht their lights feel hotter and brighter, even though they’re the sahts there are I was sprawled on a two-person bench north of the end doors on the track side of the car The other five passengers were all south ofbench seats, in profile, side on, far fro blankly across the width of the car, three on the left and two on the right

The car’s nuht stops on the 6 train next to a crazy person who talked about the car ere in with the same kind of enthusiasm that most men reserve for sports or women Therefore I knew that car number 7622 was an R142A model, the newest on the New York system, built by Kawasaki in Kobe, Japan, shipped over, trucked to the 207th Street yards, craned on to the tracks, towed down to 180th Street and tested I knew it could run two hundred thousand miles without ave instructions in a man’s voice and information in a woman’s, which was claimed to be a coincidence but was really because the transportation chiefs believed such a division of labour was psychologically co TV, but years before Mike became mayor I knew there were six hundred R142As on the tracks and that each one was a fraction over fifty-one feet long and a little ht feet wide I knew that the no-cab unit like we had been in then and I was in now had been designed to carry aThe crazy person had been clear on all that data I could see for myself that the car’s seats were blue plastic, the same shade as a late summer sky or a British air force uniforraffiti-resistant fibreglass I could see its twin strips of advertise away from me where the wall panelstelevision shows and language instruction and easy college degrees andopportunities

I could see a police notice advising

The nearest passenger to me was a Hispanic woman She was across the car from me, on my left, forward of the first set of doors, all alone on a bench built for eight, well off centre She was small, somewhere between thirty and fifty, and she looked very hot and very tired She had a orn super across at the e much

Next up was a man on the other side, maybe four feet farther down the car He was all alone on his own eight-person bench He could have been from the Balkans, or the Black Sea Dark hair, lined skin He was sineorn down by work and weather He had his feet planted and he was leaning forith his elbows on his knees Not asleep, but close to it Suspended ani with the movements of the train He was about fifty, dressed in clothes far too young for hiy jeans that reached only his calves, and an oversized NBA shirt with a player’s nanize

Third up was a woht have been West African She was on the left, south of the centre doors Tired, inert, her black skina colourful batik dress with asquare of cloth tied over her hair Her eyes were closed I kno York reasonably well I call myself a citizen of the world and New York the capital of the world, so I can make sense of the city the same way a Brit knows London or a Frenchman knows Paris I’m fauess that any three people like these already seated on a late-night northbound 6 train south of Bleecker were office cleaners heading ho shifts around City Hall, or restaurant service workers from Chinatown or Little Italy They were probably set for Hunts Point in the Bronx, or maybe all the way up to Pelha days

The fourth and the fifth passengers were different

The fifth was a rees on the two-person bench diagonally opposite th of the car He was dressed casually but not cheaply Chinos, and a golf shirt He ake His eyes were fixed soed and narrowed constantly, like he was alert and speculating They reminded me of a ballplayer’s eyes They had a certain canny, calculating shrewdness in them

But it was passenger nu at

If you see so

She was seated on the right side of the car, all alone on the farther eight-person bench, across from and about halfway between the exhausted West African wouy with the ballplayer’s eyes She hite and probably in her forties She was plain She had black hair, neatly but unstylishly cut and too uniformly dark to be natural She was dressed all in black I could see her fairly well The guy nearest toforward and the V-shaped void between his bent back and the wall of the car ht uninterrupted except for a forest of stainless steel grab bars

Not a perfect view, but good enough to ring every bell on the eleven-point list The bullet headings lit up like cherries on a Vegas machine

According to Israeli counterintelligence I was looking at a suicide bomber

TWO

I disht i White women are as capable of craziness as anyone else I disht because of tactical i The New York subouldThe 6 train would be as good as any other and better than ht in the ht, a crowded car, forty seated, 148 standing, wait until the doors open on packed platforrievously injured, panic, infrastructure dae, possibly fire, a major transportation hub shut down for days or weeks and nificant score, for people w

hose heads work in e can’t quite understand

But not at two o’clock in the

Not in a car holding just six people Not when Grand Central’s subway platfor trash and euys on benches

The train stopped at Astor Place The doors hissed open No one got on No one got off The doors thuain and the motors whined and the train moved on

The bullet points stayed lit up

The first was the obvious no-brainer: inappropriate clothing By now explosive belts are as evolved as baseball gloves Take a three-foot by two-foot sheet of heavy canvas, fold once longitudinally, and you have a continuous pocket a foot deep Wrap the pocket around the boether in back Zippers or snaps can lead to second thoughts Insert a stockade of dynamite sticks into the pocket all the way around, wire thes into the voids, sew the top seaether effective, but altogether bulky The only practical concealarment like a padded winter parka Never appropriate in the Middle East, and plausible in New York maybe three months in twelve

But this was Septerees hotter underground I earing a T-shirt Passenger nu a North Face down jacket, black, puffy, shiny, a little too large and zipped to her chin

If you see so

I took a pass on the second of the eleven points Not imnificant at a checkpoint or in a crowded marketplace or outside a church or a mosque, but not relevant with a seated suspect on public transportation Bombers walk robotically not because they’re overcoht of i forty extra pounds of unaccustoh crude suspender straps, and because they’re drugged Martyrdooes only so far Most bo of raw opiuum and cheek We know this because dynahnut-shaped pressure wave that rolls up the torso in a fraction of a nanosecond and lifts the head clean off the shoulders The huravity, soaical anchors don’t do ainst the force of a violent chemical explosion My Israeli mentor told me the easiest way to determine that an open-air attack was caused by a suicide boe bohty- or ninety-foot radius and look for a severed hued, even down to the opiu in the cheek

The train stopped at Union Square No one got on No one got off Hot air billowed in fro Then the doors closed again and the train moved on

Points three through six are variations on a subjective the, tics, and nervous behaviour Although inis as likely to be caused by physical overheating as by nerves The inappropriate clothing, and the dynalycerine and ood ther comes with the territory But the irritability and the tics and the nervous behaviour are valuable indicators These people are in the last weird moments of their lives, anxious, scared of pain, woozy with narcotics They are irrational by definition Believing or half believing or not really believing at all in paradise and rivers of ins, driven by ideological pressures or by the expectations of their peers and their families, suddenly in too deep and unable to back out Brave talk in clandestineAction is another Hence suppressed panic, with all its visible signs