The Intercept

“That depends.”

“On what?”

“On Bassam Shah.”

Chapter 4

Bassam Shah left his Ford Taurus in a mall parking garage, taking only his laptop bag from the backseat. Before leaving the car, he fished the detonators out of the air-conditioning vents, leaving them on the floor in front of the passenger seat. He left the car keys in the cupholder and the driver’s door unlocked before walking away.

The detonators were removed almost immediately, just minutes before an FBI surveillance car secured a spot within eyesight of the Taurus. The ru

Shah hurried through the shopping center, hopping a taxi that took him to a prearranged address. He entered the front door of the high-rise apartment building and immediately went to the basement below, utilizing an old tu

Gone were his laptop and one of his phones.

Shah entered the subway, riding for an hour. He sat in a corner seat, placidly but carefully watching riders get on and off.

He switched trains twice, watching for familiar faces, seeing none. Still, he could not relax. He tried to tell himself that this was normal. He boarded a 7 train, wearing ear buds whose plug end was tucked into his empty pocket. His jaw was trembling and there seemed to be nothing he could do to stop it. Anticipation and adrenaline had set his muscles to shaking. He wished he had a player into which he could plug the ear buds, only to counter the alarms going off inside his head.

He was finally able to soothe himself by focusing his thoughts on the task at hand. He imagined the subway car filling suddenly with a blast of orange flame. The shock wave tore the steel hull apart as it blasted through the underground tube, obliterating every human in its wake. His mind went further, well beyond the blast radius, into the fear that would ripple throughout the city and the country at large.

Paralysis would ensue. Then necrosis. Then death.

No one and no place is safe. Not in New York City, not anywhere.

That was the message.

Physical exhaustion caught up with him, coupled with the rocking of the subway car, lulling him to sleep. He awoke fighting, wild-eyed, when a Transit Authority driver shook him from his slumber. As the uniformed woman bustled off to call the authorities, Shah rushed out of the car and up an out-of-service escalator and quickly onto the street, chastened by his own inattention. Too much was at stake.

He walked the rest of the way to Times Square. The sunshine warmed him and he met no one’s eyes. The city pla

Until the 1970s, Greeks owned and operated most food cart franchises in New York City. The business had fractured throughout the 1980s into the 1990s. Most vendors still rented their carts from descendants of the old Greek owners, but now different nationalities specialized in certain products.

Fruit stands and downtown hot dog carts were ma

Shah’s father, a cabdriver, had purchased his cart in 1997, just before it became prohibitively expensive to do so. In May 2001, he left the family to attend a funeral in the Andarab district of Baghlan Province and never returned. The family’s search for him was initially confounded by the travel and information restrictions imposed after the 9/11 attacks, but he was never heard from again. His disappearance remained unsolved and festered like a wound in Bassam Shah’s mind.

Shah had, over the course of that decade, come to associate his father’s vanishing with the terror attacks. All this ruminating had led him to the certainty that his father had been somehow involved in the Holy War. He believed that his father was still alive and had been pulled into the resistance movements in the mountains, most likely crossing over into Pakistan.

At the training camp Shah had attended in Waziristan, his instructors hinted as much. Their discouragement of his desire to continue the search for his father served to confirm his thoughts. Cells must be kept separate for security reasons, and Shah pledged himself to the larger cause.

The coffee cart cleared thirty thousand dollars a year. Shah himself had operated the cart alone for much of the middle of the decade, his dependably friendly morning face for the arriving armies of financial district bankers and clerks masking the tumult inside. In those days, which seemed so long ago now, he had kept a stack of Korans in a box beneath the cart, and handed a copy to anybody who would take it. But when questions about his father’s fate took over his thinking, consuming his daily life, he realized he needed to leave the cart and seek his own path.

He moved to Denver for a year for religious observance in a mosque outside the city. Shah subleased the cart to a fellow Afghan, a cousin who was eager to work and who appeared content with his subsistence living, even happy—and essentially blind to the plight of his countrymen.

Shah returned to New York every few months to check on his cousin. His visits were always the same. Sell a few cups of coffee, greet the occasional old customer, and help his cousin tow the cart back to Greenpoint in Brooklyn for storage at the end of the day. But recently he had treated these visits as less than a courtesy call and more of a reco

He found Ahmed working beneath the cart’s faded umbrella just off Seventh Avenue, a strategic position equidistant from the many Starbucks around Times Square. Midafternoon was a slow period, when customers tended to be caffeine-craving tourists off their usual time clock or nearby office workers in need of a stimulant between meals. Shah plucked out his ear buds and greeted his cousin, who was excited to see him. He inquired about the business and made small talk, but not much more. He treated Ahmed coldly, which was not his intent, but Shah knew he was not himself. He saw that Ahmed noticed his lack of spirit, but Ahmed said nothing.

Under the pretense of examining the cart for possible repairs, Shah examined the area beneath the cart where he used to store his Korans. Ahmed’s Puma backpack was the only item there.

Ahmed brought up a problem he was having with the coffee distributor, and Shah nodded as though any of this mattered. An approaching man called his name—“Bassam!”—nearly sending Shah into a panic. But Shah saw that the old man was a former customer, recognizing his nicotine-gray face and the sneakers he wore with his suit like the female commuters.

The customer was effusive, wanting to know how he was, and Shah responded as though from the bottom of a murky pond. He was so many leagues away from any sort of common social interaction. And this man was a Jew, and Shah felt a sting of foolishness for allowing himself to befriend him so many years ago.

“Is anything wrong, are you all right?” asked the man. “You seem different.”

Shah shook his head or nodded, he did not even know which. No matter how he responded to the man, his mind was saying Go away.

And finally the man did, and Shah could tell Ahmed was looking at him warily. Shah told him they were packing up a little early that day. Together they pushed the cart two blocks through the square, then three blocks west to the parking lot on Forty-third Street. There they loaded the cart onto a rusty trailer hooked to a 1999 Toyota Camry and towed it back to the storage building in Greenpoint and locked up. Shah handed Ahmed his backpack and a wad of bills.