Charlson spoke carefully. “We know who the man is.”
Richie gave Jack a look, then turned back to the fed. “No offense, but you’re making it sound like he’s some kind of high-level terrorist or something. The fact is, he killed a guy right out in the open. With a can of beans. He doesn’t sound very smart or stealthy to me.”
Charlson fixed the detective with an eagle eye. “You know how we caught the first bomber in ’ninety-three? Shortly after the attack, he returned to the car rental place where he had ordered the van they filled with explosives. He asked for the deposit back! Now, that doesn’t sound very smart or stealthy either, but that man and his comrades succeeded in blowing a gigantic crater in the basement of the North Tower.”
“All right,” Richie conceded. “But you’ve got our guy’s picture on videotape. Why don’t we just put it out there? We can probably scoop him up within a few hours.”
Charlson shook his head, as if he were talking to a child. “You’re not listening. If we spread the word that we know who this man is, his compatriots will go underground. And then we may never be able to stop them.”
Richie remained unimpressed. “How do you know this guy is even involved with anything? I work in Little Pakistan. I’ve seen how these people get implicated, called terrorists, just because somebody doesn’t like ’em and calls in a bum tip.”
Charlson stared at him, incredulous. “You live in New York City and you want to argue with me about whether this sort of threat is real? Where were you on Nine-eleven? Do you know how many funerals I attended that month, detective?”
Reluctantly, Richie backed off
“There are radical Islamic fundamentalists plotting in this city right this moment,” Charlson continued. “Make no mistake: these people will do everything they can to harm us and destroy our way of life. I check my intelligence reports very carefully. And I’m not about to let good information go to waste, as it did in ’ninety-three.” He gripped the edge of his desk. “I can promise you one thing: if something terrible goes down here, it’s not going to be because I just sat back and let it happen.”
Richie leaned forward, ready to go another round, but Jack intervened; he didn’t want the fed to get defensive and shut them out. “So why did this guy kill our deli victim? What was that about?”
Charlson shrugged. “I have no idea. These people are very highly strung. They’re angry—that’s why they become terrorists. Maybe your victim just looked at him the wrong way.”
Jack scratched his cheek, disappointed. He had hoped to at least have the reason for the killing cleared up. “Listen,” he said. “I understand what you’re saying about a need for discretion here. We won’t broadcast the guy’s picture. We won’t even send his name around. But we need to get him off the street. Why don’t you help us out, and we’ll be very tight-lipped about what’s going on, and we’ll bring him in real nice and quiet?”
Charlson frowned. “I don’t think you appreciate the dangers here. Are you equipped to deal with high levels of radioactivity? Do you know what radiation sickness does to a person?”
What Jack knew was that Charlson was eager to get credit for the arrest—typical fed—and he decided to play his bluff. “No problem—we’ll just call our Emergency Services Unit and let them deal with it.”
Charlson didn’t buy it. “You don’t have the proper equipment.”
Richie frowned. “What’s all this stuff about radiation, anyhow?”
Charlson remained impassive; he wasn’t going to give an inch.
Jack was done. “You know what? I’m sick and tired of all this agency rivalry and hush-hush bullshit. We’ll just find this guy on our own. And then maybe we’ll let you know about it, a few days later.” He stood up.
Charlson sat staring at him for a good long time. Finally, he moved closer to his desk and lowered his voice. “All right. You can sit down, detective. I’m going to swear both of you to complete and utter secrecy. If you’re indiscreet and the slightest word of this investigation leaks out, anywhere, I’m going to personally make sure the NYPD takes away your badges. And your pensions. Is that understood?”
Jack and his partner nodded.
Charlson turned to Richie. “Would you please get up and lock the door?”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“I’M GOING TO LET you in on a very interesting little tale,” Brent Charlson said. He reached into his pocket, took out a key, and unlocked a drawer of his desk. He pulled out a red manila folder and laid it on the leather blotter. “This story begins in the Gulf of Aden. Do you know where that is?”
Richie shrugged. “I’m gonna guess it’s not near the Long Island Sound.”
Charlson smiled benignly. “That’s right, detective. In fact, it’s about eight thousand miles away. The gulf connects the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea, and it’s a crucial shipping lane for that part of the world. It runs past Somalia, unfortunately, which is a notoriously unstable country, overrun with radical Islamist rebels. The coast is very popular with pirates, who like to dash out into the gulf in speedboats and hijack commercial ships. Then they sit tight and demand large cash ransoms.”
He adjusted his eyeglasses, opened the folder, and stared down. “On December eighteenth of last year, one of these pirate crews took control of an Iranian merchant ship in the gulf. Supposedly, the vessel was laden with iron ore and ‘industrial products.’ Our investigation shows that the ship was owned and operated by the IRITC. That stands for Islamic Republic of Iran Transport Corporation, a state-owned company run by the Iranian military. After the pirates seized control of the ship, they sat back and demanded a ransom of two and a half million dollars.”
Richie interrupted. “Why wouldn’t the ship’s owners just go in and take it back by force? You said they were connected to the military, right?”
“Very simple: if the pirates were attacked, they could sink the ship. The potential loss might be much greater than the ransom demand. It’s a difficult problem.” Charlson sat back and steepled his hands together again. “Now, incidents like this are practically routine in the gulf—they get hundreds of pirate attacks every year. But what happened next was not routine. Not at all. While the Iranians were trying to decide what to do, the Somalis went poking around the cargo containers, just out of curiosity. After several days, some of them started to get very ill. They lost their hair and got mysterious skin burns. And then they began to die off, one by one.”
Jack whistled. “That wouldn’t be radiation sickness, by any chance?”
Charlson nodded. “That’s exactly what it was.”
Richie squinted. “The Iranians were transporting stuff for a nuclear power reactor? They’re hoping to build a bomb, right?”
“Good guess, but no.” Charlson stuck the folder back in the drawer and locked it away. “Now we’re getting into some very sensitive intelligence matters, so I’m afraid I’m going to have to skip over how we found out about all this. But the gist is that the ship was actually hired by a company in Pakistan. A front for a group of Islamic fundamentalists. And it wasn’t bound for Iran at all.” He paused for dramatic effect. “Guess where it was headed.”
Jack grimaced. “The port of New York?”
Charlson nodded. “Unfortunately, that’s correct.”
Richie frowned. “They already have a nuclear weapon? And they were trying to transport it over here?”
Charlson shook his head. “A standard nuclear weapon or its components wouldn’t give off that level of radiation. That’s the good news.”
Jack winced. “And the bad?”
Charlson leaned closer. “Are you gentlemen familiar with the term ‘dirty bomb’?”
“I CAN’T BELIEVE THIS!” said Richie as he and Jack descended in the elevator. “Here I was thinking we had caught the most ordinary case in the world, some stupid neighborhood beef, and now it turns out that—”
“Later,” Jack said, gesturing with his eyes at the other occupants. “Let’s discuss it on the w
ay home.”
They rode the rest of the way down in silence, mulling over what they had just heard.
Outside, Jack glanced back up at Brent Charlson’s office tower. Even under normal circumstances, he was not big on spending time in Manhattan. As a kid, he had grown up with a view of this borough right across the East River, but like many Brooklynites, he didn’t feel much need to visit. The center of New York City was just too much: too crowded, too tall, too loud, too fast-paced. Brooklyn felt more comfortable, a low flat plain of family homes, of neighborhoods where people knew and looked out for each other.
Today he was especially glad to be leaving. He wanted to get back on familiar turf, where he knew how to do his job and didn’t have to worry about world politics or any of this spy business. He couldn’t avoid it now, though—he had insisted on becoming more involved, and now he was, and it was a damned heavy weight. He looked up; the midtown skyscrapers felt as if they were pressing down on him, as if—at any second—bombs might go off and the buildings would come thundering down.
“Christ,” Richie said as he settled into the passenger seat. “What I wouldn’t give for a nice simple domestic violence case! Or somebody popped by a drug dealer.”
Jack pulled out into the busy stream of traffic moving up Third Avenue. “This is gonna be tricky,” he acknowledged. “We’re supposed to find the guy, but without making any damn noise.” He pondered what Charlson had told them. The fed had never really gotten around to explaining how their suspect—named Nadim Hasni—was tied in with the terrorist plot. The detectives had been about to press him on it, but the man had left for a briefing.
Jack had been stunned by 9/11 of course, but he had never really believed that Islamist terrorists might explode a nuclear weapon in New York. There were simply too many innocent Muslims living here who would be killed too. But a dirty bomb—a bomb made with conventional explosives, with radioactive isotopes added so they would be dispersed in the blast—was another thing. It would have a limited explosive impact, so it could be targeted much more specifically, and the initial release of radiation might only kill a few hundred or thousand people. Still, the psychological impact on the entire country would be hard to even imagine.
“So why do you think this Hasni guy killed Brasciak?” Richie said.
Jack sighed. “I don’t know. It doesn’t exactly sound like a smart thing for a terrorist to do, killing one person out in broad daylight. With such a stupid weapon, no less.”
“This is really eating me up,” Richie said. “Charlson says our guy’s a car-service driver, so he would be in that database I was looking at. I don’t know what happened. I guess I just missed him.”
“Don’t worry about it. There must have been, what, forty or fifty thousand licenses in there? Anybody could’ve missed one face. Think about when we show people mug shots: their eyes glaze over after the tenth one.”
Soon they were zooming down Broadway toward Chambers Street. As they came up the ramp onto the Brooklyn Bridge, both men fell silent. An NYPD squad car with flashing lights was permanently parked at the base of the bridge, a rather weak effort to discourage terrorist activity there. Maybe it made the general public feel better. As Jack drove across the span, the water of New York Harbor sparkled in the sun. He kept his eyes fixed straight ahead. He knew that if he glanced right, he would see the skyline of lower Manhattan also shining in the sun—with a big gaping hole where the towers had once stood.
“Hey,” Richie piped up. “I know what we should do. Let’s just send this Hasni guy a letter.” He told a story about an NYPD sting operation in which they’d scooped up a number of mooks with outstanding warrants by sending them notices to come in and pick up unclaimed tax refunds. Ah, the criminal mind … Under other circumstances, Jack might have gotten more enjoyment out of the tale.
“Where ya goin?” Richie asked a while later, in Brooklyn. “The car service is on Coney Island Ave.”
Jack turned off Church Avenue onto a small side street. “I know. I just wanna see where our guy lives.”
Richie frowned. “Charlson said we should stay away. They’ve got the place covered.”
“Don’t worry—I’m just gonna breeze right past.”
And so he did. Nadim Hasni’s block was nothing special: just a line of modest little aluminum-sided row houses. Jack spotted some neighbors as he drove along: a trio of tiny Mexican kids vying to heave a basketball toward a homemade hoop, a couple of women in Arab headdresses. There was a big plate-glass window in the middle of the block—a Laundromat, Jack saw as he cruised by. He peered for house numbers above the concrete stoops. There. The one with the sign for the doctor’s office on the lawn. He grimaced. Adolescent Gynecology? What the hell was that?
“That must be the surveillance vehicle,” Richie said, nodding at a shiny black van with tinted windows parked a few yards down.
Jack kept on driving and turned left at the next corner. With satisfaction, he noted a traffic light two blocks away: Coney Island Avenue. His theory about their suspect living close to the deli had been right on the money.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
AT THAT MOMENT, THOUGH, Nadim Hasni was nine miles away, in Jackson Heights, Queens, walking out of a subway station into a burst of sound.
Overhead, above the rusty green metal trestles of the elevated 7 line, a train made a rackety thunder as it left the station. On Roosevelt Avenue, in front of Nadim, cars honked as they navigated a complicated and very busy intersection. The sidewalks were packed, the passersby speaking an amazing babble of different languages. He heard Urdu, Hindi, Pashto, Punjabi, and several unfamiliar tongues. The faces were mostly brown: Indians and Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, but also Mexicans and Tibetans and Ecuadorans, with an occasional pale Russian mixed in.
As he hurried across the busy avenue and reached the far side, a happy memory came to Nadim. He and his wife had come here on weekend expeditions from Brooklyn, bringing their excited young daughter, and they had walked on both sides of her, holding Enny’s hands and swinging her up and over the sidewalk, on their way onto Seventy-fourth Street, into the heart of what tourists called Little India, though it was actually a shopping destination for people from all over the subcontinent.
While his neighborhood back in Brooklyn had been decimated after 9/11, here things still bustled with the energy of a bazaar in Karachi or New Delhi. Nadim remembered his shock when he had first seen this place: Pakistanis shopping next to Indians, Muslims eating in restaurants right next to Hindus. Back home, they fought bitterly, clashing over religion and borders, but when they came to New York, they discovered that what they had in common was more important than how they differed: here they were all minorities, brown people in a white country, all Desis, children of the South Asian diaspora.
Every weekend they thronged these few blocks, which were like a carnival bursting with tastes and smells and sounds from home. Nadim remembered how Enny used to practically shake with the excitement of it all. They would take in a Bollywood movie at the Eagle theater, then gorge themselves on the grand Indian buffet at the Jackson Diner, then stroll along the strip to window-shop. The drabness of the low brick buildings was concealed under an intense mosaic of bright signs and colors: the brilliant magenta, purple, and yellow fabrics of the sari shops; the gleaming gold necklaces in the jewelry stores; the rows of fruit and vegetables outside the Patel Brothers supermarket, where you could buy a twenty-pound bag of basmati rice or chapati flour. The street was also a riot of sounds: a boisterous Bollywood soundtrack blaring from the front of a DVD shop; some Indian hip hop thumping from the window of a passing car; the fantastic, lopsided rhythms of Bhangra romping out of the doorway of a CD store. Nadim’s little family would inhale the street as well: the warm sugary smell of roasting nuts, the aroma of frying samosas, the familiar blends of masala spices. At the end of the day, they would cap off their adventure with one last stop: a visit to Kabir’s Bakery, where Enny would get to pick a sample from the prodigious array of de
nse, milky sweets, and Nadim would always get a helping of rasmalai, the dessert that always transported him back to his childhood, to the safety of his grandmother’s kitchen.
Enny had loved this place, loved it all. Nadim had too, and today he had hoped for a brief distraction from all his troubles here, but he could not find it. His nerves were stretched too tight. To make matters worse, he had to keep a constant eye out so he wouldn’t run into his ex-wife, who lived just a few blocks away. He lit a cigarette and took several deep drags, but today the smoke just seemed to make him more jittery.
He saw loving couples and happy families, with their hopes of bright futures. Once he had been part of this world, an adventurer in this rich fresh land, a member of this great shared family. Now the passersby seemed alien to him, misguided, lured by golden baubles and sugary sweets. By a false, cruel dream. What future could he make for himself here?
The street had turned into a tense gauntlet, and he needed to escape. He was almost at the end of the block when two big speakers outside a CD shop blared on: pounding drums, shouted chants, skirling pipes. Nadim froze in the middle of the busy sidewalk, caught in an internal whirlwind, his mind torn open by jarring white light, by screaming, by jagged blasts of sound.
He stood there, unaware of his surroundings, until he felt cool drops on his face. He looked up: an April shower.
The passing streams of shoppers ran under awnings for shelter.
Nadim, unstuck, moved on.
AARIF’S APARTMENT WAS SO sparse that it was a wonder he even owned four chairs for the gang to sit on.
Nadim was grateful for the quiet and the calm, up here near the top of this ugly brick building, two blocks from Seventy-fourth Street. While his host made tea in his kitchen nook and they waited for the others to arrive, Nadim had a smoke while he padded about the little studio checking out photographs of Aarif’s extended family, in Rawalpindi. This was one reason for his comrade’s spartan life here in New York: he sent a lot of his earnings back home. Most of the rest went toward the realization of their plan.
The Ninth Step Page 9
