Twenty

by James Grippando

  “No!” said Carter.

  “Yes. I will.”

  There was silence in the room.

  “Would you excuse us for a minute, Jack?” asked Gonzalez.

  “A minute,” said Jack. He stepped into the hallway and waited outside the closed office door. A minute later, perhaps a little more, Gonzalez invited him back inside. He returned to the chair, facing them.

  “I’m authorized to tell you that Rusul is a trained intelligence gatherer,” said Gonzalez.

  “Come again?” asked Jack.

  “I met her when I was legal attaché at the US embassy in Baghdad,” said Carter. “We used every asset at our disposal to fight terrorism in Iraq. Even teenage girls.”

  Jack wondered if that was “Carter’s law” or US policy. “She worked for the American forces?” he asked. “Or for Iraq?”

  “She was trained by us. But she worked for the Iraqi Counter Terrorism Service.”

  “What is she doing in Miami?”

  “She’s been here quite a while,” said Carter.

  “Why?”

  “That’s none of your business, Mr. Swyteck.”

  “She’s working for the FBI?” asked Jack.

  Carter was silent. Gonzalez answered: “Technically, yes.”

  “Technicalities worry me,” said Jack.

  “That makes two of us,” said Gonzalez. “Honestly, we don’t know which side she’s on anymore. So the sooner your client coughs up the name . . . the sooner we can all feel safe.”

  Chapter 47

  Jack went straight from the epicenter of federal prosecutorial power in South Florida to the Miami-Dade Pretrial Detention Center.

  Xavier’s communication skills had shown no improvement. Every attorney-client communication since Monday’s polygraph examination had been a rerun of the Jack Swyteck monologues. Wednesday would be different, Jack resolved. He had leverage.

  “Tell me about Rusul. Your Iraqi girlfriend.”

  Xavier’s jaw nearly dropped. Jack had him. Maritza—Rusul—was the one topic his client could not keep quiet about.

  “How’d you know where she’s from?”

  “It was certainly no thanks to you,” said Jack. “But I’m not as dumb as I look.”

  The young man seemed concerned, or at least skeptical. “Did she tell you?”

  “No. I heard it from the FBI.”

  Xavier was now fully engaged, no longer slouched in his chair. He leaned forward, his chest bumping right up against the table between him and Jack.

  “Are they watching her because of me?”

  “You might say that. She works for them. Or at least she used to.”

  “That’s a lie.”

  “Did she never tell you she worked for the government?”

  “She worked for the coffee shop. San Lazaro’s.”

  Jack flashed the smile of the older and wiser. “Let me tell you something, Xavier. I’m married to a woman who has actually done undercover work for the FBI. She’s had a lot of jobs. She may have even been a barista somewhere along the line.”

  “Undercover? What are you talking about? Rusul loved me. I loved her. I know why she called herself Maritza and pretended to be from someplace she wasn’t. She was forced to marry the same man over and over again, every time he wanted pleasure.”

  Jack assumed the word marry was a euphemism. “So, when the imam told me she was a—”

  “No! She was not a prostitute!”

  “I understand. She was a victim of sex trafficking.”

  Xavier rose, his wrist shackles rattling as he pushed away angrily from the table. It wasn’t news to him, but hearing Jack say it was clearly upsetting. He went to the other side of the room and leaned against the wall. Jack gave him a moment, then continued.

  “What was the name of the man she was forced to marry?”

  His client didn’t answer.

  “Xavier? Do you know the man’s name?”

  “Abdul,” he said, muttering.

  A man named Abdul from Iraq wasn’t much to go on. “What more can you tell me about him?”

  “I think he’s here.”

  “Here in Miami?”

  Xavier nodded.

  Jack couldn’t hide his frustration. “Xavier, why has it taken you this long to tell me this?”

  No answer.

  Jack tried a more understanding tone. “Xavier, I understand you love this girl. But you’re looking at the death penalty. If you’re trying to protect—”

  “I need to talk to her,” Xavier said, cutting him off.

  “You’re free to call anyone you want. But as your lawyer I need to remind you that every call from here is monitored. The police will hear everything.”

  “Then you need to talk to her for me.”

  “You want me to call her?”

  “No. You can’t trust phones. We never trusted phones. No texts, no emails, nothing like that.”

  No electronic trail was consistent with the evidence in the case so far. “How did you communicate?”

  “In person. We had meeting places.”

  “So you had standing meetings, like every Tuesday at six o’clock in the park?”

  “No. In my house it was impossible for the kids to have standing meetings. My mom micromanages everyone’s schedule. I had to meet Rusul when an opening popped up.”

  “How did you arrange meetings if you didn’t text or email?”

  Jack detected the hint of a smile, the first he’d seen from his client. Xavier seemed proud of his own cleverness.

  “Do you know Lincoln Road Mall?”

  Interesting, thought Jack, the way teenagers assumed that anyone over the age of forty had never heard of the places young people liked to go on Miami Beach, even though young people had been going to those same places since the 1930s. It was more promenade than mall, a ten-block, pedestrian-only stretch of Lincoln Road running east-west in the heart of Miami Beach. Thousands came every day for the cafés, bars, shops, and galleries in a treasure trove of art deco–style buildings that never seemed dated. The only vehicles were at the cross streets.

  “Yes, I know Lincoln Road Mall.”

  “Something you probably don’t know is that at the Pennsylvania Avenue intersection there’s a live webcam twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. It never moves. It’s the same camera angle, forever. If you download the EarthCam app, you can see everything as it happens in real time.”

  “You’re right,” said Jack. “I had no idea.”

  “It’s cool, right? I never got the app, cuz my parents were always checking my phone. But Maritza opened it every day at four p.m. If I wanted to get together, I would go to the intersection right before four o’clock, and that’s how we knew where to meet.”

  “You met at the intersection where you were on camera?”

  “No. In the middle of the intersection there’s an oval-shaped island of grass. The island has two palm trees and two lampposts. I would bring a yellow ribbon with me. If I tied it around the nearest tree, we met at the coffee shop across from the candy store on Lincoln Road. The far tree meant our spot on Ocean Drive—the bench by the showers for the beaches. The near lamppost meant the mall at Brickell City Center. The far lamppost, midtown.”

  On the cuteness scale it was somewhere between teenage crush and puppy love, but Jack couldn’t deny its effectiveness.

  “What makes you think she still checks the webcam?”

  “She’s smart. She knows that’s the only way I can get a message to her.”

  Jack was starting to feel a bit like Cyrano de Bergerac. Or Tony Orlando and his hit song about the old oak tree. “So you want me to go to the intersection and tie a yellow ribbon around a palm tree?”

  “Yes. Choose the palm tree closest to the camera. In thirty minutes she’ll meet you at the coffee shop a block away.”

  “I know what I want to ask her,” said Jack. “What do you want me to ask her?”

  Xavier shrugged, and his answer told Jack pret
ty much all he needed to know about the two of them. “Ask her to stay safe.”

  Chapter 48

  At four p.m. Maritza opened the webcam app on her cell phone.

  For the first week after Xavier’s arrest, she’d checked the Lincoln Road webcam every day at four o’clock without fail. She knew he couldn’t call her from police-monitored pay phones in the detention center, and she obviously couldn’t visit him. Her only hope of any word from him—even something as simple as “I’m okay”—would have to come through his lawyer at one of their old meeting spots. By the second week, she was checking maybe every other day. That Wednesday, however, she was sure to check. Something told her that if Xavier was going to reach out to her, it would be on the four-week anniversary of the shooting.

  “Oh, my God,” she said aloud, staring at her phone. The yellow ribbon was on the nearest palm tree.

  She gave a minute of thought as to whether it was a trick or trap of some sort. She’d been waiting too long for this signal, and she couldn’t ignore it. But she couldn’t ignore the risk, either. She packed her gym bag accordingly. The traditional black chador wouldn’t conceal her identity, but it would certainly conceal the 9 mm Glock she would carry beneath it. She grabbed her keys, got in her car, and drove to South Beach, speeding down the expressway like Danica Patrick.

  The chador was something she hadn’t worn since her first and last visit to Xavier’s mosque. Agent Carter had given it to her and told her to wear it. Carter had choreographed her every meeting with Xavier, except the ones they’d arranged on their own through the webcam. It had taken him months to get clearance for her to work the assignment, and if her father hadn’t been a CIA agent killed in Iraq in service to his country, she never would have been approved. But Carter had pull, not only with the bureau, but with her. She owed him. Carter had reminded her of that when he’d called in the favor from Rusul.

  “I need you,” said Carter.

  They were at San Lazaro’s Café. Rusul had been working there almost a year as Maritza Cruz. Staying in Iraq as Rusul had not been an option. Not after word got out that it had been Rusul who had helped the American not only put that fraud who called himself a cleric out of business, but put him away for the next fifteen years in an Iraqi prison.

  “Just ask,” said Maritza.

  “There’s a family in Coral Gables. Well-to-do. Khoury is the name. They have a seventeen-year-old son named Xavier. We got our eye on him. I’d like you to get to know him.”

  He showed her a photograph.

  “Handsome boy,” she said. “But seventeen is a little young for me.”

  “Not for the role you’re going to play it isn’t.”

  “What role is that?”

  He hesitated, clearly reluctant. Finally, he said it. “I need you to play a prostitute.”

  “Damn it,” said Maritza, still in her car. It was 4:35 p.m. She’d made it to South Beach in record time, but she was wasting precious minutes hunting for a parking space, which was a form of extreme sport on Miami Beach, something that could quickly turn as violent as your average African safari. The trick was to target an unsuspecting gazelle walking along the sidewalk with her car keys in hand, stalk her at a steady and patient 3 mph all the way to her parked car, and then pounce on the opening as she pulled away.

  Maritza found her mark and zipped into the opening. Getting dressed in her car was something she’d done on a regular basis when parking overnight behind the church, so slipping on the chador while still in the front seat was a piece of cake. She grabbed her Glock, concealing it beneath the chador, and then jumped out the car, walking as fast as possible to the coffee shop on Lincoln Road Mall.

  Chapter 49

  Jack and Theo waited at a café table beneath the palm trees outside the coffee shop. They were at the geographic heart of Lincoln Road Mall, across the street from Dylan’s Candy Bar. The promenade was loaded with places like Dylan’s, celebrity-owned shops with lines of tourists out the door, most of whom would buy nothing unless in need of a prop to hold in their storefront selfie.

  “You and Andie doin’ okay?” asked Theo.

  Jack had brought Theo along because the last meeting with Maritza had ended with a gun. Jack didn’t think of himself as a risk taker, but this one was worth taking if it meant stopping another school shooting.

  “It’s getting better,” said Jack. “Things were pretty tense for a while.”

  “What’d you expect, defending a school shooter? You’re lucky she didn’t up and kick your ass.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Because she could, you know. Kick your ass.”

  “Yes, I’m aware.”

  “I mean literally. If Jack Swyteck versus Andie Henning was on pay-per-view, Andie would absolutely kick—”

  “Theo, I get it.”

  Jack drank from his tall paper cup. It was decaf at this hour, but the Sumatra bean flavor was still there.

  “That has to be her,” said Theo, pointing across the street with a nod of his head.

  Jack instantly knew whom he meant. He hadn’t expected her to show up dressed as if she were still in Baghdad. Nothing was covering her face, however, so if the idea was to conceal her identity, it was beyond ineffective; it seemed counterproductive, more likely to draw attention than deflect it amid a crowd of tourists dressed in shorts.

  Then Theo said what Jack was thinking. “I bet money there’s a gun under that getup.”

  “I’m betting you’re right,” said Jack.

  “You scared?”

  “No. You?”

  “Nope. If she’s gonna shoot someone, it’ll be you.”

  Maritza crossed the street and came straight to their small café table. Jack and Theo rose, and then they all took their seats.

  “Brought your bodyguard, I see,” said Maritza.

  “Brought your gun, I’m sure,” said Jack.

  “Good to know we understand each other,” she said.

  Jack asked if she wanted coffee. Theo went inside to order it for her, leaving them alone to talk. Jack had not told Theo about his meeting with Agent Carter and Gonzalez in the US Attorney’s Office. He told Maritza, right down to the final point.

  “Sylvia Gonzalez says she doesn’t know which side you’re on anymore.”

  “Makes sense that she would say that. She wants to keep you afraid of meeting with me.”

  “Should I be afraid?”

  “Only if you’re afraid of the truth.”

  “What is the truth?”

  She thought for a second. “The truth is I love Xavier.”

  “I’m guessing that falling in love was not part of your original assignment.”

  She laughed a little. “No. Not at all.”

  “What was the original assignment?”

  The smile drained away. “Have you heard the myth of the seventy-two virgins?”

  Jack had. It was the promise of dark-eyed virgins in paradise that recruiters distorted to induce young men into suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism. Jack first read of it after the attacks of 9/11.

  “Yes. I’ve heard of it.”

  “Agent Carter didn’t think an American boy raised in the Western world of immediate gratification would be quick to act on the promise of what might come in the afterlife. I was to play his real-life virgin. Xavier’s reward.”

  “Reward for what?”

  “Martyrdom.”

  “You mean the shooting,” said Jack.

  “I didn’t know it was a shooting. All I knew from Agent Carter was that Xavier was being groomed for a suicide mission.”

  “Groomed by whom?”

  “Someone with connections with al-Qaeda. The whole point of the assignment was to figure out exactly who that person was.”

  “Could that be Abdul?”

  The very mention of his name seemed to make her cringe. “Did Xavier tell you about Abdul?”

  “I’m sorry,” said Jack. “I shouldn’t have just dropped his name on you like tha
t.”

  “It’s okay. There’s a side of Abdul that Xavier doesn’t know. Abdul has worked with Carter going back years in Iraq. Way back. They first met when Carter was a Green Beret and an adviser with US Special Forces. Later on, when Carter was the FBI’s legal attaché in the embassy, he brought Abdul into the Iraqi Counter Terrorism Service.”

  “Was it Carter who brought him to Miami?”

  “Yes. It’s temporary. It was Abdul’s job to find the connection between Xavier and al-Qaeda. Offering me up to al-Qaeda as the virgin for Xavier’s sacrifice was part of his cover.”

  “So in this instance, Abdul is actually one of the good guys.”

  “He’s not a good guy,” she said firmly. “He’s incapable of being good. I told Carter that.”

  “Told Carter what, exactly?”

  “Abdul has gone rogue. He’s training me for the next shooting.”

  “Why would he think you are trainable for such a heinous act?”

  “He doesn’t actually believe I’ll go through with it, if you ask me. He’s training me because he needs someone to pin it on after it happens.”

  “He’s setting you up?”

  “I believe he is,” she said.

  “The same way he set up Xavier?”

  “You said it. Not me.”

  Jack was skeptical. “It’s one thing to think a seventeen-year-old boy can be manipulated. You’re savvier than that.”

  “Not in Abdul’s eyes. He thinks I’m still the fourteen-year-old girl under his control—the pleasure bride who will do anything he says, even if she’s crying in pain or gagging in disgust.”

  Jack had researched pleasure marriages and sex trafficking after his talk with Xavier. “You mean the Mut’ah?”

  “I don’t want to talk about that.”

  It was clearly a painful subject. “I understand. But help me understand. Why are you going along with this, letting Abdul train you for a shooting?”

  “I allow him to think he can train me, because I want Carter to see him for who he really is.”

  “Why doesn’t Carter see it?”

  “Abdul is a very clever man. Devious with his explanations.”

  “What’s his explanation for training you to be a shooter?”