Chapter 16

I was not worried about Amalie's safety because she was encased in TK armor just as I was. I landed us on the roof of the building and found the trapdoor leading into the building. This was a two-storey building, so I did not expect any problems in finding our way around. I instructed Amalie to stay close to me as we entered the building.

This floor was used as a storeroom and there were a lot of things here, including stored arms and ammunition, but I did not spot any explosives. My first thought was "I wonder why?" but I did not worry about that. I figured that we would find that out when we questioned the man downstairs.

The door to his office was closed, but not locked. His office was easy to find because it was the only one with light showing under the door. Motioning Amalie to stand back, I tried to open the door quietly, but it squeaked, and the man looked up at me when I stepped into the room.

He pulled a gun from a shoulder holster and pointed it at me. He said in Arabic, "Who are you? How dare you disturb me in my private office?" Amalie understood him, of course, and she mentally translated what he said into English.

I didn't hesitate to take him over. I probably should have done so before we even entered the building, but that had not occurred to me. I am now your Master. You will do everything I tell you to do. Do you speak English?

The man stared at me quite blankly, so I assumed that he did not speak English well enough to understand my mental commands. I asked Amalie, "Please repeat my words in Arabic so that I can say them phonetically. I have to be the one who gives him his first orders. Please tell me how to say, "I am your Master. You will do everything my associate tells you to do." Let's try that and see what happens.

Amalie translated for me, and I was able to transfer the commands to the man at the desk. I knew immediately that it worked because he looked expectantly at Amalie as if he were waiting for orders.

OK, Amalie, you know what to do. Be sure your recorder is working and get all of the information you can from him. Meanwhile, I will look around the building to see what I can find.

Very well, Billy, but this may take some time. How long should I spend on the questioning?

Keep it up until you are sure that you have everything useful that you can get from him. You can have all night, if it takes that long. I am especially interested in what he might know about other cells and their future plans.

I left Amalie to run the interview while I looked through the filing cabinets, hoping to find something useful in English. In the bottom drawer, I found some invoices for kerosine and ammonium nitrate—a highly explosive combination. I pulled the papers out and put them in front of Amalie. When you get a chance, find out what you can about these materials and what he planned to do with them. Amalie nodded, and I went back to rummaging around in the files.

Then it dawned on me. I was doing this search the hard way. I TPed the whole filing cabinet and one other in the room to the basement of our home. We could look through the files at home at our leisure.

I said to Amalie, I'm going to wander around and see what else I might find that would be useful or interesting. I'll be back in a few minutes. If you need me, just give me a mental call and I will TP right back here.

I spent about an hour wandering through the building, occasionally popping back in to reassure Amalie that she had not been abandoned and I had not forgotten her. I didn't find anything of obvious interest, so I went back to the office to wait for Amalie to finish her questioning. She spent nearly four hours extracting information from this guy, and I'll admit that she seemed to be very thorough. Toward the end of the interview, Amalie finally got around to asking about the kerosine and ammonium nitrate.

Suddenly, her eyes lit up and she got very attentive to what the man was saying. When he finally ran down, Amalie said, Those explosives were a part of the Holland Tunnel bomb. They had the explosives delivered to several places so that nobody would be likely to get suspicious. How can anybody not be suspicious when kerosine and ammonium nitrate in the volume of hundreds of pounds are delivered to one place? This was 5,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate and 6,000 gallons of kerosine! Somebody was being deliberately stupid!

I was feeling particularly mean that night when I thought of all of those terrorists who were going to get off from the bomb plan, so I took my frustrations out on this guy. I TKed us all to the second floor and used TK to pile all of the refuse in one spot. I laid the man on top of this paper and wood scraps and froze him in place. I then started a fire in the trash heap and left the man to cook there. Even if he was not burned to death directly, he would surely die from the burns he received, so I figured that he was getting his just desserts no matter which happened.

Once the fire was going well and he was beginning to roast, I TPed Amalie and me back to the suite. It was only after we returned to the suite that I realized that I had made a tactical blunder. I had allowed the rest of the members of this cell to escape in my moment of rage at the leader of the group. Definitely, I needed to keep my temper under better control.

Amalie gave me a synopsis of what she had learned during her interview. This guy had been rather small potatoes in the terrorist racket, but he did know a lot of the other cell leaders. She thought that she could give me a list of names and home addresses of most of the leaders of cells and the Imams that encouraged them.

She was computer literate enough to be able to make me a list of these names and addresses if she had access to a computer and printer. I asked her to take Mary to a computer store tomorrow where they could buy what she needed—a laptop and the minimum in an ink-jet printer. Amalie said that she would do that if I really wanted her to, but the hotel had computers and printers available for rent, and they could be delivered within an hour.

After sleeping a few hours, Amalie had the computer and printer delivered to our suite while we were eating a late brunch, mostly of fruit and toast. She spent about two hours working on the list from the data on one of the tapes she had made the night before. When the list was ready, I mentally contacted Overdorf and told him that the list would appear on his desk within a few seconds. I TPed the list to him and ordered that he deliver it to John Meyer as soon as possible. I let Meyer think that the list had originated with Overdorf, and left him to wonder at that near miracle.

Overdorf was left with instructions to go after the other terrorists cells as quickly as he could. He should let me know if he received any political flack so that I could take care of it. Overdorf was to be in nominal command of the antiterrorist operation, but John Meyer was to do the actual planning.

I figured that would be sufficient to stifle terrorist activity within the city from the Muslims, but I was still worried about that Black group and the skinhead gang. I talked it over with my wives, and we decided to take direct action against those two groups. We figured that Overdorf had enough to do right now.