Free THE WAVE: A John Decker Thriller by J.G. Sandom

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    Decker shook his head and returned to his surveillance. He had set up a Nikon D70 digital camera on a tripod with a telephoto lens. The suspects’ apartment was on the seventh floor of a nondescript pre-war, nine-story building just across the street. It was part of a whole row of rather run-down brick apartment buildings that stretched for almost eleven blocks. Decker took photographs of Mohammed bin Basra while the suspect used his PC in the living room. He couldn’t see the screen, not clearly anyway, despite the powerful lens; it was raining again. But he had seen and photographed the PC wallpaper before. It featured some kind of arabesque design and Arabic calligraphy that fascinated Decker. Indeed, curious for another perspective, a few days earlier he had even emailed copies of the images to some Islamic expert over at the CIA, who had promised to pass them on to NSA, who had . . . It was always the same, Decker thought. He likened it to skipping stones over black holes. He had yet to get a response to his email, and he doubted he ever would.
    With a deep sigh, Decker zoomed in a little closer. It was difficult to read but he took some pictures anyway. As Decker photographed the PC screen, he managed to make out a few brief words in Arabic that he’d already documented in his notebook: Pregnant she-camels. And then, more chilling still: When hell is stoked up . He sketched a corner of the arabesque design. The notebook was already full of images, stray pieces of the PC wallpaper rendered over time. He flipped the pages and the images fluttered into place, coalescing like a film strip. He hesitated at the final page. In the lower right hand corner of the wallpaper was a number, clearly visible: 540,000 .
    Decker considered how they had first discovered the three suspects. The man on the PC, Mohammed bin Basra, had been linked to a scheme to sell stolen cigarettes tax free. Some of the profits had been funneled through bank accounts in Indonesia suspected of being connected to the Brotherhood of the Crimson Scimitar and other Islamic terrorist networks.
    Originally from Saudi, bin Basra first came to the United States in 1997, when he took undergraduate courses at Hunter College in New York. His father was relatively wealthy, involved in some kind of construction business back in Saudi. A few years earlier, bin Basra senior had been suspected of being associated with Al Qa’ida; the family had given money to a charity that turned out to be a front for the terrorist network. In 1999, Mohammed was arrested with Ali Singh and a youngster named Mohammed Qashir for disorderly conduct during a disturbance at a mosque in Queens, but the charges were dropped after his family made a sizeable contribution to the mosque. In 2000, he traveled to Afghanistan where – according to suspects imprisoned at Guantanimo Bay – he turned up at an Al Qa’ida training camp. Then, in the summer of 2002, although he was now wanted for questioning by the Bureau, bin Basra somehow managed to slip across the border into Canada. From there he traveled via Russia to Kazakhstan, where he underwent further training in explosives with a man named Gulzhan Baqrah, known associate of El Aqrab, the spiritual leader of the Brotherhood of the Crimson Scimitar. This was after the U.S.-led invasion had shut down all the Afghan training camps. Henceforth his whereabouts remained a mystery, at least until the cigarette heist.
    Suspect number two, Ali Singh, was born to a middle class family in Islamabad, Pakistan. Following graduation from a technical college, where he’d excelled, he worked as an electrical engineer in Islamabad from 1992 through 1995. He was discharged, but the reasons were somewhat vague. He emigrated to the U.S. in 1996. When he couldn’t find work in his chosen profession, Singh got a job at the Imperial Taxi Company in Long Island City, Queens, and at a storage company in Flatbush. Not much was known about his past; his file