by John Altman
During these years, for the first time in his life, he had begun to understand the meaning of a certain phrase: Revenge is a dish best served cold. The meaning could not have been simpler. Revenge easily attained would be unsatisfying. It was only after the dish had been set aside, to cool down over the course of years, that it attained its full flavor.
But there was a risk, when one let revenge cool for too long. The hunger might abate, and the dish never would be consumed at all. Over the years, Ajami had felt himself many times to be in danger of losing his faith. For he had been surrounded by men who had turned out to be good men, despite their Americanism.
For too long he had been here, in the midst of the enemy camp. Their rhetoric had started to make some sense to him. From time to time, over the years, he had felt an urge to call for compromise. Compromise, peace, an end to the ancient cycle of bloodshed. Was it so impossible?
It was. The desire for peace, he knew in his deepest heart, was a betrayal of his mother’s memory.
He selected a pair of Italian loafers. He was bending to remove the shoe trees when he sensed a presence standing behind him.
He whirled around, his eyes raking the gloom.
Nobody there. Not even Pegasus.
Nerves, he thought.
But suddenly the dream was with him again: the faceless figure, with eyes deep and dark.
He shook his head. Then he leaned down again, removing the shoe trees and stepping into the loafers.
In one corner of the closet was a packed suitcase. He could take it and run, this very moment. Enough money had been shuttled into the account. But Ajami knew the assassin would find him—wherever in the world he went.
At that instant, Pegasus erupted into urgent barks.
For a moment he considered meeting the intruder with words.
He had transferred the money. He had done his part. And unlike the others in the cell, he never had seen the man’s face. There was no need for him to die.
Yet he would not have time to get the explanation out. He would be dead before he ever saw the man—just as in the dream.
He stepped to the nightstand by the bed. The dock he withdrew contained seventeen rounds of 9mm Parabellum ammunition; any one would do.
He hefted the gun, wondering if he should go to the assassin or let the assassin come to him. Let the man come to him, he decided. Place his back against a wall and he would survive this, Insha-Allah …
Pegasus continued to bark. Ajami heard the front door of the apartment buckling; a moment after that, the thunder and flash of a concussion grenade.
He trained the gun on the bedroom door. A dark form in the doorway—
He fired.
The form ducked away.
Then another blast: this one closer, inside the bedroom. A starburst filled his vision. He staggered backward, stunned. Yet when the dark figure reappeared, he managed to squeeze off another shot.
The figure returned fire.
Ajami took another step backward. He hit the wall and sagged down onto the floor, his shirt raking up his back. He had been kicked by a horse, he thought. The horse had kicked him in several places at once—in his arms, across his chest, nicking the side of his head.
He remembered the dream. The call to prayer, echoing; the sharp pain of the blade slipping between his ribs. He had never imagined it would be like this: pummeled by multiple hooves, his shirt hiked inelegantly up his back.
He could hear the call to prayer. Distantly, thinly, but there beyond any doubt.
Two men wearing body armor entered the bedroom, sweeping their firearms back and forth. Two more followed. Then Thomas Warren II, holding his own pistol at shoulder level with both hands.
By then, Ajami had followed the muezzin’s call into the light. When the men approached him his eyes were cloudy marbles, staring into eternity.
10
Noble looked like a corpse.
Finney and Hawthorne moved quietly into the sickroom. Each took a seat in a hard-backed plastic chair.
There were no condolence cards in the room; no cards, no flowers. Just a sick old man, dying alone. So Finney wasn’t the only one Noble had managed to alienate over the years. In fact, he had driven them all away—all the students and the patrons and the fawning acolytes. And now this was his reward.
Then Finney sighed, and rubbed at the bridge of his nose with thumb and forefinger. Who would be at his bedside, when the time came? Thomas Warren II? James Hawthorne? Not bloody likely. He would be as alone as Noble. More alone, he thought then. Because he himself would not be here to pay a visit.
Hawthorne remained seated for all of five seconds. Then he said, “Coffee?”
Finney shook his head. Hawthorne stood, gave an oddly ceremonial bow, and left the room.
Noble had two black eyes. The skin there was purple; dark veins stood out in a sunken road map. His breathing was papery and shallow.
An odd disassociation descended on Louis Finney. He had felt much the same sensation watching Lila die. Before the end had come many emotions—wrenching, conflicting emotions. But by the time she had drawn her last breath, the guilt and anger had given way to resignation and relief … all of it thinned by that supernatural, oddly comforting sense of disassociation.
One hand moved for the doubloon inside his pocket. “Arthur,” he murmured.
No response.
“Arthur,” he said. “It’s me.”
Noble produced a sound: a cooing burble.
His mouth opened, gaping unevenly. In the next moment, he began to shake. His knees drew up sharply, almost to his chest. Finney half stood in his chair. He looked for a call button, found one, and stabbed it.
The young nurse who breezed into the room looked at Noble, looked at Finney, and donned a well-worn expression of sympathy. “What’s happening?” Finney asked.
“Electrolyte imbalance. Just reflex. He’s not in any pain.”
Noble’s eyes fluttered open.
“How about a drink?” the young nurse asked politely. She found a cup and tilted it to Noble’s lips. The water dribbled immediately down Noble’s chin. She picked up a napkin, dabbing primly.
Hawthorne was stepping into the room again, holding a cup of coffee. He halted, absorbing the scene.
“Valium should relax the muscles,” the nurse said. “If you gentlemen wouldn’t mind stepping outside for a moment …”
Finney followed Hawthorne into the corridor as a second nurse stepped past them and closed the door.
Three minutes passed. The nurses came out of the room, easing the door shut. The younger turned to Finney, still wearing the worn expression of sympathy.
“It could be tonight, or tomorrow … or he could rally. It might be days yet.”
“You’ll keep us posted?” Hawthorne said.
“Of course.”
Hawthorne turned to face Finney. “Well,” he said.
Finney was watching himself from the outside: watching an actor playing a character, in a motion picture about some other hospital, in some other world.
“—come back in the morning, if we don’t get a call,” Hawthorne was saying. “In the meantime, there’s—”
“I’ll stay here,” Finney said.
The doctor showed him how to use a cotton swab to apply water to Noble’s parched lips. Then, once again, Finney and Noble were left alone.
Noble’s mouth made a shape resembling a starfish. Whenever Finney dabbed moisture onto the lips, the starfish puckered open and shut.
The day passed. Finney visited the cafeteria once, to force down sustenance. He carried a cup of coffee back to Noble’s bedside and left it untouched.
When evening arrived, Noble’s calm fractured again. His body shuddered; his knees drew up to his chest. Finney caught a glimpse of the man’s penis beneath the gown, shriveling into his body. It seemed the ultimate invasion of privacy. But Noble, he knew, was past caring.
He reached for the call button. A nurse came and gave Noble some Vali
um. Then he rested. Every few minutes Finney dabbed water onto his lips.
At eight o’clock a woman he hadn’t seen before peeked into the room. “Visiting hours are over,” she informed him.
Finney looked at her balefully. She backed off, closing the door.
Before midnight, Noble stirred only one more time. His eyes opened. Then his mouth opened. He was trying to speak. Finney leaned closer, straining to hear. But no sound came. Noble’s mouth closed; then his eyes closed.
At last, Finney moved two plastic chairs together. He sat in one and put his feet up on the other. Not much of a bed, but it would have to do.
He remained awake until the small hours of the morning, listening to the shallow breathing. Each time the breathing paused, he left his jerry-rigged bed to check on his mentor. Each time it started again, he returned to the chairs.
Sometime past one, he drifted off.
Outside the window a bird was calling: a distant, nasal pitty-pit-pit.
The call belonged to an Antillean nighthawk. Usually the nighthawk was found in climates far to the south. If one had ventured this far north, it would be one for the magazines.
He climbed stiffly out of the plastic chairs. He had been dreaming of a cemetery: Lila standing beside him, urging him to place a stone on a grave. Forgiveness isn’t a gift you give someone else, she’d said. You don’t need to carry this burden any longer. Let it go, Louis.
In the dream, a dog had been watching them—the Doberman that had frightened Zattout, fawn-colored and sleek. But now the dog, like Lila and the nighthawk, was nowhere to be seen. Beyond the window was only a parking lot, deserted in the gloomy predawn.
He turned to look at the bed, feeling mired in deep frost.
Suddenly he missed Lila so fiercely that his knees turned weak. She had been a wise woman, he thought. And beautiful—beautiful in a way that went far beyond her dazzling emerald eyes. In the mornings, he had lain beside her and counted the growing lines around those eyes. He had watched her change from a girl to a woman to a lifemate, her fate entwined with his. There had been bad times with the good; and he treasured even those. In a way he treasured those the most. Was it possible that she really was gone? Had she truly left him alone, twisting in the wind?
Behind him lay Arthur Noble. This would be Finney’s last chance to offer forgiveness.
He could do it.
He would do it.
He left the window and approached the bed. But he knew the truth before he had reached it. His throat closed to a whistling pinhole. He reached out a hand to steady himself against the bed frame.
Arthur Noble’s eyes remained closed. His mouth had opened again, crookedly. One hand was raised into a grasping claw.
Arthur Noble was dead.
Of the six names on Thomas Warren’s list—six of Iqbal Ajami’s closest acquaintances, taken from an address book beside the man’s bed—three now had lines drawn through them.
The names came from the Arab world. The men to whom the names belonged, however, had been as well integrated into American society as Ajami himself. It was a sleeper cell—a wider-ranging one than Warren had expected. These were powerful men, well entrenched. Ajami, it seemed, had been a part of something big.
But the cell no longer existed. As the names were checked, Warren discovered again and again that he was too late. Someone had been eliminating these men as methodically as a Vegas poker dealer raking in his chips.
The brownstone around him was filled with raised voices. The control post had been expanded to include another half dozen men: videographers and cryptanalysts and experts whose exact roles Warren did not even know. The director would not be thrilled, he knew, to see the operation expanding. The director was most concerned with keeping things quiet, with covering his ass. But Warren was most concerned with finding the man in black who had eluded them at the post office—and to do that, he needed more than three agents and a forensic artist borrowed from the NYPD.
He looked back at the notebook, trying to block out the noise. Past the room’s window was a cedar terrace overlooking a garden. It would have been nice to take a few minutes off, he thought, to go out on that balcony and soak up a little sun. Or—even better—to crawl into one of the brownstone’s bedrooms and curl up to steal a few moments’ sleep. But he could not afford that, not now.
Nathan Hoyle was standing in the doorway. He came forward and flashed a gregarious smile.
“Go ahead.”
“The woman at the post office ID’d the photo. Muhammad Nassif was the one checking the P.O. box.”
Warren nodded.
“Still no autopsy report. But we’re working on it.”
When Hoyle had gone, Warren looked back at his notebook. Three of Ajami’s closest acquaintances, dead. The boy, dead. No doubt news of more would come in as the investigation progressed.
Perhaps they were suicides, he thought.
Perhaps he had stumbled onto some new breed of mujahedeen, and these men had taken their own lives to cover their tracks. But if they were suicides, they had been of the assisted variety. One man had died during an attempted mugging, another during an interrupted burglary. The third apparently had been taken by a heart attack. The fourth, whose name he just had received over the phone, had suffered an especially bizarre accident: losing his footing as he rode in his own elevator, and falling in a particularly awkward way that had broken his neck. And then there was the boy. Killed by his own pillow.
He thought of the small man at the post office. The man who had managed to elude a trap that should have been inescapable. This man had not suffered the fate of the others. Because …
… because he had been the one to kill the others.
Had something gone wrong inside the cell? Had someone hired this man to dispatch the sleepers, and make it look like a series of accidents? Or was the man on his own, serving a personal agenda?
Perhaps word of Quinlan’s capture had leaked. That was why somebody was cleaning up the sleeper cell—so that Quinlan’s insight would lead the agency nowhere. There was another mole somewhere, still reporting …
… no. Most of the deaths had occurred before Quinlan had become known to them. And who was to say anybody was cleaning up anything, after all? The series of deaths might have been just what it seemed—an extremely unlikely coincidence.
He got the specialist on the phone. The man’s voice was thin but calm as he reported that Quinlan had revealed nothing. It would take time, he explained. Quinlan had spent decades mastering this game.…
Warren hung up, then looked at the notepad again. One of the remaining names on the list might provide a clue. If any of the men still lived. Which he doubted.
The dead men. Ajami, with a packed suitcase in his closet and an offshore account ready and waiting. Why?
Because he’d been scared.
Because he’d feared a visit, Warren presumed. A visit from their man in black.
He leaned back in his seat, looking out at the cedar terrace.
The phone rang. He answered, listened, then reached for the pen and crossed out the next name on his list.
Not suicides. These men had been eliminated—methodically, pitilessly.
By the man in black. He knew it now.
The man had visited each of them, in turn.
He must have left some evidence of his visits. He was not invisible, after all.
Warren reached for the phone again.
“Stop,” he said.
The analyst froze the image. The digits in the lower right-hand corner of the monitor ran backward, to 07:31:26-4-12.
He ran the sequence again. The video had been captured by a security camera in the lobby of Al Guhrair’s apartment building. Onscreen, a man moved past the front desk with his face turned down. He had come from the stairwell, and within three seconds had vanished through the door leading to the street.
“Let me clean that up,” the analyst said.
As he worked, he explained what he wa
s doing in more detail than Warren needed to hear. He tweaked the luminance signal, increasing the overall brightness of the image, and then adjusted the chrominance signal, sharpening the contrast of the relative color values. The video imaging analyst was a pudgy man, redheaded, with green Irish eyes. He studied the grainy image onscreen for a few seconds; the mouse in his hand clicked metronomically.
“We’ve got a signal-to-noise ratio of thirty db, which makes this a good candidate for enhancement. Let’s apply a filter to emphasize the motion. A mathematical routine estimates the velocity and acceleration of the subject, and the computer compensates at the level of individual pixels.…”
The clip replayed. The figure with the downturned face became the most noticeable object on the screen: a wiry man, dressed all in black.
The analyst zoomed closer. Now the face onscreen looked like an abstract portrait of a face, blocks of gray and white, the kind of optical illusion that might assemble itself meaningfully if the viewer backed away and relaxed his eyes. The analyst tapped a fingernail against his two front teeth. “And for my next trick …”
The image sharpened. Warren found himself looking at a photograph of a man that might have been taken with any disposable drugstore camera. The dark eyes faced down, pointedly avoiding the camera.
Warren waved Anthony Cass forward. Cass approached, holding his baseball cap in both hands.
He studied the screen.
He nodded.
11
Finney’s nose was running.
He raised the handkerchief to blow it. His hands were trembling slightly, making the task more difficult than it should have been.
They reached the town. They climbed the hill. They passed through the log gate, then through the checkpoint at the stone wall. When the Town Car disgorged them before the farmhouse, Finney headed immediately for the front door. He took the staircase to his room.
His hands wouldn’t stop shaking. He pressed them together, twisted them into a knot. At last, the trembling subsided. He kept his hands tightly entwined, to forestall a recurrence.
