by John Altman
“After a long day of cooperating, two walks hardly seems too much to ask for.”
“You’re absolutely right. I’ll look into it.”
“And another set of clothes wouldn’t hurt. No need for designer labels. Anything clean.”
“Hm,” Finney said.
Zattout stroked at his beard again. “Perhaps a newspaper, once in a while. And the soap I’ve been given is hardly of the highest quality.…”
Finney came out of the cell and literally bumped into James Hawthorne.
One of Hawthorne’s eyes was glass; it gleamed disconcertingly in the shadows. For a second time, Finney felt a flash of déjà vu. He had been here before. He had seen the dusky glimmer of that glass eye. And he knew what Hawthorne would say, even before the man opened his mouth to say it. Interesting approach, Doctor. Give the prisoner every luxury he requests. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to tell exactly who is in charge of this interrogation.…
“It’s Noble,” Hawthorne said.
He put a hand on Finney’s shoulder. “There’s still time.”
The woman’s name tag identified her as Rose.
After a brief interview, Warren invited her to speak with a forensic artist he’d drafted from the NYPD. Now she sat with the man in the sun-flooded parlor. The sketch in the artist’s lap was only half finished; he had interrupted his work to deliver an impromptu lecture on the importance of his profession.
“—the most overlooked job in law enforcement,” he was telling Rose. “When most people think of a police sketch artist, they picture some cop who wanted to be a painter and failed. But that couldn’t be farther from the truth. It takes five years of experience with a law enforcement agency, two hundred hours of composite art training, a written and verbal exam, multiple letters of recommendation. It’s not a hobby. It’s a passion. Without forensic artists, they never would have caught Ted Bundy. Without forensic artists, they never would have caught Richard Allen Davis.…”
Yet another expert who felt the need to lecture, Warren thought darkly. But beggars couldn’t be choosers. He stood outside the door, smoking a Camel Light and trying to refrain from interrupting. Beside him, Ron Moore was rubbing his own shoulders with nicotine-stained fingers.
“… I’m rambling,” the artist said. “Let’s finish this up. Did you see him smile?”
Rose shook her head.
“That’s too bad. I’m also trained in odontology, you know. The study of teeth. It takes that kind of all-around education to make a really good forensic artist. It’s not just about bone structure. I’ve studied odontology, I’ve studied anatomy, I’ve studied psychology …”
Warren checked his watch. He finished the cigarette, dropped the butt in a foam cup, lit another. Beside him, Moore continued kneading his own shoulders.
Finding Rose was a start. But they needed a break—a real one. Without it, the shuddering train that was Warren’s career would derail. Even now he could sense the wheels flirting with the tracks, losing purchase. And it was all he would deserve. Some men were cut out for greatness. Others were doomed never to fulfill their potential.…
The break came two hours later.
Even before the forensic sketch had been printed up as a “Wanted” poster, a detective second-grade recognized the boy: perhaps sixteen, olive-complexioned, raven-haired, large soft eyes glistening with sensitivity even in two-dimensional black and white.
Ten minutes after the detective recognized the face, Thomas Warren II was holding a police report concerning the death of one Muhammad Nassif. The report had been written by the same man who was on the other end of the phone connection. Three mornings ago, he told Warren, Nassif had woken up dead, ha ha. The cause of death was positional asphyxia. This meant, as unlikely as it sounded, that the boy had slept wrong. He had slept so wrong that he had neglected to turn over, and had suffocated against his own pillow.
“You’re shitting me,” Warren said.
“I shit you not. The autopsy might tell a different story. But in this city it can take ten, twelve days to get the report.”
“His own pillow?”
“According to the ME—yeah. You ask me, it’s probably pills. A kid like this, some drug history, some vandalism … he gets high and takes some scripts and chokes on his own vomit during the night. Except there was no vomit in the windpipe.”
“Weird.”
“I’ll try to put a rush on the report. Big important federal case like this. In the meantime …”
In the meantime, he gave Warren an address and a name belonging to the boy’s mother.
He found the buzzer he wanted—apartment 49—and leaned on it. A moment passed. The speaker crackled. Then a woman’s voice, lightly accented. “Hello?”
“Mrs. Nassif?”
“Yes?”
“It’s Tom Warren. We spoke on the phone …”
The speaker buzzed. Thomas Warren exchanged a glance with Ron Moore, then pushed forward. They ascended four flights of stairs that smelled of cooking odors and Lysol.
The boy’s mother met them at the apartment’s front door. She was pretty in a grief-stricken way: pale and drawn, lovely in her vulnerability. She led them to a threadbare couch in a dark living room, offered coffee and tea, barely seemed to hear them when they declined. Then she told her story, working her way through a box of Kleenex as she spoke.
Moore took out a pad and made notes. Warren simply listened, nodding sympathetically.
Muhammad had passed three days before, very suddenly, in his sleep. The police thought it was drugs, she said. Nobody had stated this out loud, but she had read it in their eyes. But it had not been drugs. Her boy did not do drugs. It had been something else …
… she trailed off.
“Take your time,” Warren said gently.
He had been a good boy. A few scrapes with the law, but nothing too serious. It was tough to grow up in this neighborhood and not have a few scrapes with the law. Vandalism, a pot bust. But he had been a minor; the judge had shown leniency; his record had been clean. His grades always had been good. And recently he had straightened up, she said. Over the past few months, however, he had started to get involved in something else. And this was what had killed him. She didn’t know how, and she didn’t know why. But she knew it nevertheless.
Warren tried to make his eyes glisten with some of the sensitivity he had seen in the sketch of the boy. “Go on,” he said.
She drew a hitching breath, wiped at her nose with a Kleenex, and continued.
A few months before, Muhammad had discovered a sudden interest in his Muslim heritage—thanks to his older brother, no doubt, who had gone back to Saudi Arabia in October of the previous year. Muhammad had revered his older brother. So he had taken to hanging around a mosque out in Brooklyn. He had met people there, she said. The same people his brother had met. The same people who had been responsible, in a roundabout way, for the death of her husband in Syria in 1994. Mossad had pulled the trigger, in that case. But she did not blame Mossad. She blamed whoever was at the mosque, sucking her family into this cause, this horrible, terrible, murderous cause.…
“Do you know who he met, at the mosque?”
She shook her head, dabbing at her nose.
“Do you mind if we take a look around?”
“Like the detective?” Her eyes flashed. “He spent five whole minutes looking around. He couldn’t care less about my boy. They say his pillow killed him.” She laughed hoarsely. “His pillow.”
They left the woman crying softly on her couch.
The room where the boy had died was a typical teenager’s bedroom, with a garish poster on one wall and a closet door hanging open to reveal jumbles of comic books and sporting equipment. The bed itself had been stripped down to the mattress.
Ron Moore moved to search the closet. Warren went to the dresser and opened a drawer. Below neatly folded T-shirts he found a rumpled twenty-dollar bill, a key chain in the shape of a skull, and a glossy photograp
h. The photograph pictured a slim unsmiling boy with overwrought eyes, his arm draped across the shoulders of an appealing-looking blonde.
He pocketed the photograph. The postal worker—Rose—would need to make a positive ID.
From the living room, he could hear the woman still crying.
A computer rested atop a makeshift desk. As Moore dug noisily through the closet, Warren reached out and nudged the computer’s mouse. The monitor remained dark. So the computer was not in sleep mode. Was it turned off—or had someone sabotaged it? He would bring the tower back to the brownstone, where the technicians could have a look. Even if the boy had cleaned his cache, removed his cookies, deleted his e-mail, and scrubbed his file allocation table, the techs could recover magnetic shadow images of the lost files.
He opened the desk drawer and found envelopes, floppy disks, rubber bands, stamps, Elmer’s glue, pencils, and a resin-stained roach clip.
Then, having nowhere else to turn in the little room, he found himself standing before the dresser again. He reached for another drawer and dug through rolls of FUBU socks. Then another drawer: underwear. At the bottom was a slip of paper. He raised it to the light. On the paper was an address and a single name.
The name was Iqbal Ajami.
When Iqbal Ajami stepped off the elevator, Pegasus was waiting, meeting him with a series of high terrier yips.
Ajami bent, scratched behind the dog’s ears, then set down his briefcase and moved into the kitchen to find a rawhide bone. He watched as Pegasus carried it protectively to a bowl by the refrigerator, feeling an almost painful stab of affection. This little dog, he realized suddenly, was the closest thing in the world he had to a friend. If he did decide to run, Pegasus might be what he missed most.
He showered, fixed a drink, and settled down before the evening news. A terror suspect in New Jersey had been arrested by the FBI. For a moment, as Ajami sipped at his drink, his spirits sank. He rubbed at the dark semicircles beneath his eyes. Fatigue and depression competed inside him. But he would not give in to either. The thing to remember was that more shuhada were waiting to take the place of this captured man. Just as others would replace Ajami, if he were to fall.
The movement had many members, wearing many faces. There were the infantry, the rank-and-file foot soldiers. There were the sleepers like Ajami himself, who had mingled so long among the enemy that they had, on the surface, become indistinguishable from them. There were the American Arabs who went overseas to train in Afghani camps, and the Arab mothers who came to America specifically to have their babies, so that the children would be U.S. citizens and in twenty years could cross the border with impunity. There were zealots and cynics, puppets and puppeteers, members of other organizations that had been absorbed into the Base. They were thousands strong, with millions more waiting in the wings. Their strength only would continue to grow.
And despite the assassin’s turning to bite the hand that had fed him—despite the man covering his tracks, and disturbing Ajami’s sleep—there was no cause for concern. Quinlan’s letters had informed him that Zattout had given up only a single cell in Rawalpindi. He had thrown his captors a bone: a few men, a few chemistry textbooks and bombs using Casio watches as timers. He had not revealed the cell to which Ajami belonged. Nor had he exposed the other sleepers of which he knew. Zattout would hold out … long enough for the assassin to reach him and end this, before genuine damage could be done.
His attention was drifting. He found himself looking not at the news but at the room around him, furnished with walnut antiques and a towering grandfather clock, decorated with George Stubbs hunt scenes and phalenopsis orchids. From the kitchen came the sound of Pegasus gnawing on his bone, audible even over the television.
He drank more vodka, replaying the events of the day in his mind, wondering if he had made any fatal mistakes.
The FBI already was overwhelmed with lawsuits from non-profit religious charities. The 501(c)(3) organizations he had accessed during the day therefore enjoyed some measure of relief from federal supervision. Yet somewhere inside himself, Ajami knew they were watching. And moving such large amounts of funds in so short a time only increased the chances of raising eyebrows.
Despite the risks, he had no other choice. He needed to set up his offshore account—all of his instincts clamored for this safety measure. He also needed to finish preparing the second half of the payment, so that the assassin would not have reason to come after him. And he needed to do it all without letting his performance at the law firm suffer, or otherwise drawing attention to himself.
He heaved a sigh. That afternoon he had lifted seventy-five thousand dollars from a charity called Kindness Without Borders, to put toward the assassin’s numbered Swiss account. From a business called Digital Imperatives he had borrowed fifty thousand, freshly laundered, for transference to his own nest egg. Was it too much, too fast?
His dream of the night before occurred to him—the same dream he had been having ever since the assassin had started murdering the members of the cell. In the dream, Ajami was mounting the steps of a stage. He was a young man, in his twenties. His mustache was black as pitch. He had forgotten why he was mounting the stage. He had nothing to perform. The auditorium before him was filled with white light and suffocating stillness.
He tapped the microphone, coaxing a whine of feedback, and drew a breath. For one more moment there was only silence: silence, and the overpowering glare of the hot white lights.
Then he began to recite. Later, after he’d awoken, Ajami couldn’t remember a single word of the poem. He didn’t know if the poem had used any words at all. But it had been elegant, and it had been passionate; he remembered that much.
When the recitation was finished, the final echo of his voice dribbled away. There was more quiet, heavy and thick—
—and then a mordant patter of applause from a single pair of hands.
He left the stage, descending the steps carefully, and made for the auditorium’s exit. He could sense a man coming to his feet, but continued moving at an even clip. To hurry would betray fear. And that, he understood suddenly, would be the end of him.
He reached the door. At the same instant he heard the thin, sibilant whicker of a blade leaving a sheath. But he would not turn. To turn would be to seal his fate.
He felt the sharp, swift pain in his rib cage. Then the slipping forward, his body folding onto the ground with his heart catching in his chest. In the distance, the eerie sound of the muezzin’s call to prayer, reverberating through the old city.…
Just a dream.
He tried to focus on the news again, to distract himself. But even here, forty stories up, he did not feel safe. The assassin was a stealer-in. He was a ghost wind, an eye of God. If he was to come for Ajami, nothing in the world would stop him.
At quarter past six he stood, clicked off the news, and trudged wearily into the bedroom. He would have liked to stay home tonight, to catch up on some of the sleep he had lost over the last few weeks. But his dinner plans could not be canceled. Tonight he would be asking David Goldstein for the kind of favor that could be requested only in person.
As he buttoned his cuff links, he ran through the words he would use. He planned to ask Goldstein to hold a bit of money for a few days and then funnel it back. The man owed him a favor, thanks to Ajami’s wise (and complimentary) counsel during his divorce; he would not refuse. So a Jew would help to further the cause. A Jew would help, albeit unknowingly, to sate Ajami’s hunger for justice.
He had trouble with the cuff links. He was exhausted. And the terror of the dream would not leave him.
Was he weakening, after his two-decade journey toward justice? Had he lived with the seductive comforts of the West for too long?
Ajami’s hunger for justice had begun when he was a child, surrounded by the squalor of the Sabra refugee camp. But it had crystallized when he was twenty-seven years old: holding his mother’s head in his lap, both of them soaked through with her bloo
d.
It had been September of 1982. The Israelis had invaded West Beirut, targeting the PLO Research Center and the Palestinian camps at Sabra and Shatila. But the Zionists would not dirty their own hands in the camps—not when they had others willing to do their bidding. Phalangist militiamen were eager to avenge the 1976 Palestinian massacre of Christians at Damour, and so Phalangists were charged by the Israeli general staff to enter the camps and weed out PLO supporters. In this world, there was always a past massacre to be avenged. And this day in 1982 would see yet another—the massacre for which Ajami, more than twenty years later, now was seeking justice.
For seventy-two hours the Israeli army had turned darkness to daylight with their flares, illuminating the camps for their willing executioners. The militiamen had worked their way through the settlements, slaughtering every human they came across. Had Ajami’s mother been a terrorist? No. She had been a widow and a mother. Yet she had been gunned down in cold blood.
Ajami had not been there to protect her. He had been out looking to see if the rumors were true—if death was sweeping through their camp, indiscriminately. The calamity had been real, indeed. And his mother, an innocent, had become part of it.
At twenty-seven, Ajami already had been too old to become a foot soldier in the great holy war. That was for the fortunate young, the mujahedeen, who could extinguish themselves and their enemies in a blaze of glory. Instead, Ajami had needed to assume a more administrative role in the organization—a less satisfying position but a necessary one. As the Zionists had perfected the art of staying behind the scenes, dangling their marionettes on jerking strings, so too did the cause need to master such skills.
He had worked hard to make opportunities for himself, pulling himself from a life in the camp to a life in the city, moving west, from one relative to another. He had reinvented himself as a student, and in time had been awarded a law degree in London. There he had begun to attend services at a local mosque, where he had met recruiters for al Qaeda. Then he had gone to al-Masada, the Lion’s Den, the first training camp of its type in Afghanistan. He had been introduced to the American woman who would marry him, thereby securing U.S. citizenship. Once the marriage was dissolved, he’d moved to Manhattan and started the long slow rise to his current position.
