Cracking The Terror Code

On the night before they went out on a suicide mission to kill someone, the Assassins, the 12th-century cult of holy-warrior hit men, were given a taste of the Paradise that awaited. They smoked hashish (the word assassin derives from hashashin, users of hashish) and read in the Quran about the sensual rewards of martyrdom:

Spend eternity in gardens of tranquillity.
Youths of never-ending bloom will pass around to them decanters, beakers full of sparkling wine...
And suck fruits as they fancy.
Bird meats as they relish.
And companions with big beautiful eyes
Like pearls within their shells...

Maybe that's what Majed Moqed was dreaming about late last summer when he wandered into the Adult Lingerie Center, a grim cinder-block building next to an auto-parts store in Beltsville, Md., sometime around midnight. In addition to red thongs and crotchless panties, the Adult Lingerie Center offers pornographic videos and books. But Moqed didn't seem to be having much fun. He flipped through some magazines, looked at the titles of some videos. Then, after about 10 minutes, he left. The night manager figured him for a cop.

It's hard to imagine that the dirty movie Moqed paid $3 to watch on another night inspired him to give his life for Allah. But investigators are having a hard time figuring out exactly what did. In a large room at FBI headquarters in Washington, about a hundred analysts known as the Links Unit are feeding raw data--phone bills, ATM receipts, fake IDs, odd bits of Islamic verse, the testimony of Vegas strippers, the investigative tidbits from a global manhunt--into banks of computers. They are looking for patterns, examining the ties that bound Moqed and the 18 other suicide hijackers to one another and to their shadowy masters. The G-men are not just trying to solve a crime but hoping to avert another, bigger catastrophe. Yet despite an impressive sense of urgency and an unusual degree of cooperation between the historically wary CIA and FBI, the investigators are making slow progress. In part they are hav-ing difficulty following a well-concealed trail that weaves all over the world and far back in time. And they are just plain stumped by the hellish nature of their adversary.

Consider the puzzle nagging at Charles Prouty, the chief of the FBI's Boston office. Why, he wonders, did Mohamed Atta, the suspected ringleader of the attack, and Abdulaziz Alomari make a quick side trip to Portland, Maine, on the eve of the attack? Were they meeting with someone? Were they trying to duck security at Logan airport? The two hijackers nearly missed the connecting flight from Portland to Boston on the morning of Sept. 11. (Their bags did miss the plane, giving investigators some early clues.) They could have thrown off a plan that had been so carefully plotted. An ex-Navy SEAL, Prouty told colleagues that it didn't make sense for the hijackers to violate the standard rules of "op sec," military lingo for "operational security."

But then again, Al Qaeda isn't the Navy SEALs. Americans were chilled last week by the publication of a set of instructions, written by hand in Arabic, found in Atta's luggage: "The Last Night," the document reads. "1) Make an oath to die and renew your intentions. Shave excess hair from the body and wear cologne. Shower..." On goes the assassins' manual, a weird mix of hygiene for homicide and exhortation to stay prayerful and focused, because the coming day will be "the day, God willing, you spend with the women of Paradise."