The Ninth Step

by Gabriel Cohen

  The big man knelt down and stared into Nadim’s face. “We know all about you, Hajji. One of your neighbors turned you in.”

  Nadim thought of the dead dog and of its owner’s hate-filled threats of revenge, and suddenly he understood why he was here.

  Now he was truly frightened.

  THE HOURS PASSED, BUT he didn’t know how many—he hadn’t seen a clock since he emerged from the van. He desperately wanted a cigarette, but he had no way to get one. After a while he needed to evacuate his bowels, but he noticed that there was no toilet paper in his cell, and so he refrained. He turned and lay down on his little metal bed; it was a bunk, but the upper berth was empty, with the mattress folded in half.

  He expected that someone would show up at any minute and he would be able to explain about the neighbor and the dog, but no one came. Eventually, he curled up and tried to sleep, but the lights in the cell were so bright that they bored through his closed eyelids. He lay there and thought of his daughter, of her frightened face, and he prayed that his captors would let him call and tell her he was all right.

  He would demand that they let him phone a lawyer. This was America, not some foreign dictatorship. He had rights. He had seen this on TV; everyone in America had rights.

  But no one came.

  Later, as he was finally dozing off, someone rapped on the door of his cell. Nadim jolted upright, but no one entered.

  Again, he started to fall asleep; again someone banged on the door.

  Hours passed.

  Then days.

  BRIGHT LIGHT, ALWAYS, AROUND the clock, glaring in his face when he tried to sleep. Sometimes, when he was mercifully able to drift off, he would be awakened by a barrage of recorded sound, booming along the corridor, angry songs with screaming voices and thundering electric guitars. Even without the aural assault, he wouldn’t have been able to find deep sleep, racked as he was by the desire to smoke and tormented by thoughts of his worried daughter. No one would tell him what he was charged with, and he wasn’t allowed to call a lawyer.

  He was kept in his little cell twenty-three hours a day; the other hour he was escorted up to a little recreation area on the roof, where he could pace back and forth, alone. But there were other prisoners in the area they called the S.H.U.; sometimes Nadim could hear their voices. Egyptians. Turks. Yemenis. There was a fellow Pakistani from Sahiwal across the corridor; Nadim was not allowed to talk with anyone, but sometimes in the middle of the white nights they managed to exchange a few words. The other prisoner’s name was Mahmood and he ran a little magazine stand on McDonald Avenue. As far as the man could tell, he had been detained because the FBI found it suspicious that he had been sending “too much money” to his brother in Karachi.

  A sentry came by and ordered the men to be silent. The guards were angry—and confused, and scared. The sky had cracked open, that bright September morning, and their whole world had been shaken.

  The one they called Barshak, though, and some of his colleagues, seemed neither confused nor scared. They appeared, in fact, almost glad about what had happened recently: it gave them a perfect excuse to vent some deep inner rage. Nadim remembered a vicious bully in his neighborhood when he was a child, and how Nadim had become expert at finding hiding places in order to avoid this boy. But now there was nowhere to hide. He was surrounded by people, day in, day out, who wished him harm. He couldn’t flee and he couldn’t fight. (On his second day in here, he had resisted Barshak’s rough handling. The result: another guard had been called in and they had taken turns grabbing one of Nadim’s manacled arms and swinging him into a wall. This treatment achieved its purpose: he had been forced to realize the futility of fighting back.)

  And so the pressure built, with no way to release it, like a tornado trapped inside his brain.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  EVEN AFTER A LARGELY sleepless night, Jack was wired and eager for action. He would have gone to the park for a run, but he couldn’t do that now, not with his security detail. Two new guys had replaced Tommy Searle and his partner; they were supposed to keep a protective eye on him until he went on duty. What were they gonna do, jog along beside him, like Secret Service guys forced to trot after the president out on his Texas ranch?

  He was scheduled to work a four-to-midnight; he stayed home to think awhile. He was searching for the answers to several questions, but he had a feeling that he wasn’t looking in the right place. He read the paper to try to give his restless mind a break. Then he paced around some more.

  In the early afternoon, he called the lieutenant from the bomb squad. And then—though he hated to do it—he phoned Brent Charlson.

  “Listen,” he said, “I don’t know if you heard about this, but somebody planted a bomb under my car the other night.”

  “My God!” the fed replied. “Do you know who did it?”

  “I don’t. I thought it was probably due to a Mafia thing I’ve been investigating, but I just talked to someone at the bomb squad and he said that the explosive they used was Semtech. I remembered that you said that you had intercepted chatter involving that word. And here I’ve been poking around, looking for this Hasni guy. So I’m wondering: Do you think maybe word could have gone out to his terrorist cell? That they might have targeted me?”

  He was fully prepared for more scorn or at least impatience from the fed, but Charlson’s reasonable, grandfatherly tone was back.

  “I wouldn’t be at all surprised, detective. We have reason to believe that the cell is directly connected to Al Qaeda. At the very least, they’re part of a splinter group. Now, these people are highly motivated, highly organized, and they’ve already proven that they’re willing to kill innocent bystanders. I don’t see why murdering an NYPD detective would trouble them one bit. I’ll be glad to look into this, to see if we’ve picked up any more chatter. I trust you’re taking security measures?”

  “Yeah. I’ve got a couple of uniforms watching my house.”

  “Good, good. Listen, I promise we’re gonna roll up the whole gang very soon. In the meantime, I’d suggest you just go about your normal routine and stay away from these guys. Okay?”

  “Thanks,” Jack said. For once, he thought he might have even detected real comradeship in the fed’s voice. If there was one bond that could unite all law enforcement officers, it was the risk of getting killed on the job. From all Jack’s years as a cop, he knew that nothing could make you put aside petty differences faster than hearing a 10-13, a radio call about an officer in trouble.

  On the other hand, someone had tried to kill him. And he had absolutely no intention of resting until he tracked that person down.

  JACK’S SECURITY TEAM TRAILED him until he was safely inside the Seven-oh precinct house. The uniforms stopped in to the detectives’ lounge for sodas, then bid him farewell until later that night.

  He told his partner about the car bomb and about his suspicions.

  “Christ!” Richie said. “Do you think I oughtta see about getting some security too?”

  It sounded like a rather self-centered reaction, but Jack didn’t hold it against his partner—the man had a wife and two kids to worry about. “I don’t know,” he replied. “But we should definitely watch each other’s backs.” He glanced around the Seven-oh squad room. A busy day, evidently: most of the other detectives were out. He noticed a bumper sticker on the side of the next desk: it read DON’T MAKE ME RELEASE THE FLYING MONKEYS!

  He dug a pinkie in his ear. “I’m thinking about who we’ve interviewed: someone who might have sent a warning to Hasni or his buddies. The ex-wife? Not a likely prospect, I gotta admit—there was no love lost there. But if she heard from Hasni, she might have mentioned our visit.”

  Richie frowned. “And there was the car-service boss and the other drivers. And the shopkeepers along Coney Island Ave. I know your business card doesn’t give your home address, but it would hardly take a genius to track you down.”

  Jack nodded. There was no shortage of candidates. He glanc
ed at his partner’s worried face and decided that it wasn’t going to help anything if they were both freaked out. “Look at the bright side. It was probably just some Mob guy who thought I was getting too close. If that’s the deal, you’ve got nothing to worry about.”

  Richie looked pained. “Hey, I’m not just thinking about me here!”

  Jack nodded. “I know you’re not. And I appreciate it.” He sat up straight. “Let’s focus on finding Hasni. I’ve been thinking about why he and Brasciak both disappeared from the tax rolls back in Two thousand one. Now why does someone go off the radar like that?” He ticked off possibilities on his fingers. “They’ve just gone out of town for a while. They got fired or laid off. They’re out sick. Or they’re in jail or upstate.”

  “I already checked with the Bureau of Prisons. They don’t have a record of either guy being inside at that time.”

  Jack nodded. “I know. But it seems unlikely that two strangers left town at the same times, or got sick simultaneously, or something. And it seems like a very big coincidence that this happened right after Nine-eleven. So what else could have happened?”

  Richie’s face scrunched in thought.

  “I was looking at the paper this morning,” Jack continued. “I was reading about these ‘black sites’ where guys who got suspected of terrorism were flown to other countries. Or were held in secret detention.”

  Richie frowned. “I could see that with Hasni. But what about Brasciak?”

  “I don’t know.” Jack frowned. “I think maybe I should give a call to a friend of mine in the FBI.”

  Richie’s bushy eyebrows went up. “You’ve got a friend who’s a Feeb?”

  “Yeah, we worked together on a case out at Governors Island a while back.” Agent Ray Hillhouse was a big African-American man. Like Jack—a Jew in the NYPD—he was a minority in his outfit; with that in common, maybe that’s why they’d been able to skip the usual chest thumping and noncooperation.

  Richie frowned. “What about what Charlson said, how we aren’t supposed to discuss this with anyone?”

  If his landlord had not uttered a lucky warning, Jack knew that he would be in a thousand bloody pieces right now. “To hell with Charlson.” He glanced around: there were a couple of other detectives in the room. “I’m gonna go outside and call my guy. I’ll be right back.”

  The day was unsettled, warm and humid, a harbinger of the coming miserable New York summer. Jack watched a gaggle of young uniforms walk down the street—they all looked like they were about sixteen.

  “How the hell have you been?” It was good to hear Ray Hillhouse’s booming voice through the little phone. Jack pictured the man: heavyset, bespectacled, sporting an FBI wind-breaker.

  “Aside from the fact that I almost just got blown to bits, not too bad.” He explained about the recent incident, then said, “Listen, have you got a couple of minutes? I need to talk to you about something, in complete and total confidence.” Keeping his voice low and an eye on his surroundings, Jack laid out the whole saga of Nadim Hasni and Robert Brasciak. “So can you poke around?” he concluded. “But keep it really quiet?”

  “No problem,” his friend replied. “You know I don’t specialize in counterterrorism, but I’ll be glad to ask around. And lucky for you, I’m having a slow day around here—you’re saving me from some really boring background checks. Why didn’t you call before?”

  Jack frowned. “Charlson made a huge deal about how I wasn’t supposed to discuss this with anyone, so as not to compromise his investigation. But if my life is at stake …”

  “Say no more—I’m on it. I’ll call you back as soon as I find anything.”

  When Jack returned to the squad room, Richie was eager to move. “So where do you wanna go with this today?”

  Jack scratched his cheek. “I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about Hasni’s apartment. I’d love to get a look inside, but the feds are probably keeping an eye on it.” He mused for a moment, then grinned. “But maybe we can take care of that.”

  “I ALMOST FEEL GUILTY about this,” he said, half an hour later.

  “You feel bad?” Richie said. “After the way that fed has treated us?”

  “I said almost.”

  Jack had called Charlson and told him that they had spotted Nadim Hasni again—back on Seventy-fourth Street in Jackson Heights. Then the two NYPD detectives sat in their car at the end of Hasni’s block. A few seconds later a couple of crew-cut bozos hustled out of a house just down the way from the Pakistani’s apartment, jumped into a car, and went racing off.

  Three minutes later Jack and Richie were standing outside their suspect’s front door. Luckily for the detectives, the landlord upstairs—the gynecologist—had handed over the keys without demanding to see a warrant. He had been more concerned about how he was going to collect the next month’s rent.

  Richie got his first look at the bullet traces. He scratched the back of his neck. “This doesn’t play right to me. If Hasni was out here and he saw one of Charlson’s guys breaking in, why would he shoot? You’d think he’d just hightail it the hell out of here.”

  Jack nodded. “I wondered the same thing. Maybe it was the feds who did the shooting. Maybe they like playing vigilante.” He turned the key and gave his partner a wry look. “I’m glad we didn’t have to break in. My lock-picking skills are rusty.”

  In they went.

  Another lonely, low-ceilinged basement pad. This one was quite different from Brasciak’s: it was dedicated, not to a bachelor’s crude pleasures, but to the memory of one rather homely but sweet-looking little girl. Jack examined the snapshots on the fridge: the dead daughter blowing out birthday candles, standing in front of a seal pool at an aquarium, riding a bicycle, eating an ice cream cone on the Coney Island boardwalk. There were other photos of her scattered throughout the apartment, and drawings and paintings by her—she seemed to have a special fondness for fish and other aquatic creatures.

  As Jack rummaged around, he couldn’t help feeling a bit of sympathy for Nadim Hasni. Yeah, the guy had committed murder, but he also seemed to be a pretty loving dad. There were different ways of dealing with the death of a child: some people went through a period of mourning, then put the snapshots and photo albums away. Hasni, though, clearly wanted to keep his daughter’s memory alive. The apartment was practically a shrine. And it had a strange frozen-in-time feel. Judging by the deli’s surveillance video, Nadim Hasni had not set out to commit a homicide the other morning. He had gone out to work or to shop, leaving things in his place in a typical bachelor’s jumble: dishes in the sink, open newspapers on the kitchen table, clothes scattered by the foot of the bed …

  Jack’s cell phone vibrated and he almost jumped. He looked down at the little blue screen: Brent Charlson.

  The fed sounded breathless. “Where did you say you saw him?”

  “I told you,” Jack replied. “The corner of Seventy-fourth Street and Thirty-seventh Ave.”

  “Where are you guys now?”

  “Driving around, looking for him.”

  The fed didn’t say anything; he just growled and hung up.

  Moving quickly, the detectives tromped from room to room, scanning opened mail, looking for a calendar or address book, checking for any possible indication of where their suspect might have gone to ground. It was highly doubtful that he would come back here, or return to Jackson Heights, or go back to his place of employment. And where was he sleeping?

  No calendar or address book—maybe Charlson had taken them. The detectives kept on pawing through Hasni’s belongings; they wouldn’t have much time until the feds came back. It was not what they might have expected from the home of a fanatical terrorist. There wasn’t a single picture of Osama bin Laden or anyone else who looked like a radical leader. There wasn’t any religious imagery at all. Jack tried to remember: Was that a Muslim thing, that you weren’t supposed to have pictures of God or his prophet? Either way, he realized that he hadn’t even seen a copy of the Kor
an.

  He sorted through a heap of stuff on a dresser in the bedroom: some coins (all U.S.), an electric bill, a couple of movie stubs (for Pakistani or Indian-sounding flicks), a receipt for a visit to the New York Aquarium. He held the latter up and gave it a good look. He had noticed several snapshots of the girl at an aquarium, and now he recognized it as the city’s own. He went back into the kitchen. On the little dining table, buried under some bills and junk mail, he dug down for something he had glanced at ten minutes before. There: another aquarium receipt. Both were date stamped.

  Jack called to his partner. Richie came in and he showed him what he’d found. “That’s weird,” Richie said. “Check this out.” Jack followed his partner into the living room, where the detective rustled through a pile of papers on a side table and came up with another receipt.

  Jack scanned it, then looked at his partner. “All these dates are fairly recent. You can tell from the snapshots that he liked going there with his daughter. But why would he still be going there now that she’s gone? I mean, I could see him visiting once, maybe with a friend’s family or something. But three recent trips?”

  Richie squinted. “Maybe it’s where he meets the other terrorists. Maybe they’re planning something out there.”

  Jack considered that possibility. Coney Island was already open for the season. Each weekend, thousands of New Yorkers thronged the boardwalk and the beach. The place was known as America’s Playground.

  If the terrorists wanted to slaughter a lot of people and make a big political statement, it was hard to imagine a more effective setting.

  He glanced at his watch: the aquarium was probably closed for the day. But tomorrow he and his partner would definitely pay it a visit.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  NADIM SAT IN HIS hiding place under the boardwalk, finishing some french fries he had snuck out to purchase at Nathan’s Famous hot dog stand. The hot greasy starch filled his stomach, which was good, because he was rapidly running out of cash.