by Steven James
“You could have justified taking the shot,” Ted said.
“Maybe.”
But I didn’t want to justify anything. I wanted to be right in the first place.
“That guy could fight,” I told them. “Spin kicks at my head, and each time he would land on the catwalk again. Gymnast-like balance. Someone that good has spent serious time honing his skills.”
“Martial arts or close-quarters combat?” Sharyn offered, half as a question, half as a conclusion.
“Likely. Yes.”
Ted spoke up. “With the neatly made bed beside Jamika, a military background might be a possibility.”
Officer Eddie Springman, who I found out from Sharyn was indeed Julianne’s brother, told us that he’d taken Taekwondo classes, knew some of the local dojos, and agreed to look into martial arts studios in the area. “I’ll see which instructors or students have served in the military, or know of someone named Igazi.”
Since we hadn’t mentioned the name to him, I looked at him curiously. “Why do you say that? About Igazi?”
“I spoke with Kramer on the radio while you were in the school. He told me the name of the guy you suspect.”
“He’s not a suspect yet,” I clarified.
“Sure. No, right. I get that.”
“TypeKnot,” Ted said to Springman. “That’s your generation. What can you tell us about it?”
“You can chat, share videos, post photos, whatever. Face swap.”
“Do you use it?”
“No, but, I mean, I have it installed on my phone. I just never— It’s not my thing.”
“And it’s one of those apps that deletes your posts after a few seconds?”
“Depends on the settings, but yeah. Unless you screenshot it. Nothing’s private for long online.” He laughed as if he’d just told a joke.
As Ralph had commented to me one time, “The Internet makes stupid cling to you forever.”
I tried contacting Angela Knight at the Bureau’s Cyber Division to see if she could trace the number I’d found on Jamika’s phone, but she’d left for the day and her associate wasn’t able to come up with a lead. Additionally, when he tried to analyze the audio recording I’d made of the call, the voice sample was too brief to determine anything substantive.
As it turned out, the medical examiner was indeed Canyon’s father, so he sent his assistant to transport the body while he went to be with his son at the hospital. Julianne’s CSI team finished processing the scene, and it was finally time to leave for my motel.
As Sharyn drove, she asked if I’d had a chance to get dinner on my flight.
“Not unless a packet of peanuts counts. I’m afraid I wasn’t in first class.”
“We’re both tired. Hungry. It’s been a long day. How about we grab a bite? I know a Mexican place that’s not too far. They make a mean chicken fajita. You still like chicken fajitas?”
“Well, yes.”
“Is that a yes to dinner or to liking fajitas?”
“Just the fajitas. Maybe tomorrow on dinner. I need to get settled in here.”
“Sure. Okay.”
She was quiet until we pulled into the motel’s parking lot, but then offered to wait for me if I’d like. “For supper, I mean—if you just need a few minutes? I’m just making sure.”
“Rain check. Good night, Sharyn.”
“Alright.” As I opened the car door, she added, “You’re going to need a way to get around Detroit. I arranged for a car. I’ll have a couple of officers deliver it here in the morning. Seven thirty work?”
“Perfect. Thanks. And there’s one more thing I’ll be needing.”
“That is?”
“A gun to use until I get my SIG back.”
“Got it. A car and a gun. I’m sure we’ll have a briefing tomorrow, but I don’t know the schedule. I’ll call you in the morning around eight thirty or so, give you the plan for the day. In the meantime, you have my cell number. Let me know if you need anything. Anything at all.”
18
As Ali hurriedly related his cover story again, he watched Agent Dartmoor in the adjoining room wipe down the zippers on his suitcase and begin inspecting the items inside it, one at a time.
His socks, his underwear, and then—
“That is my prayer mat,” he told Wilder.
“You’re Muslim.”
“Yes, yes, I told the other man this. What does that matter?” Sometimes he spoke in a stilted manner when he was nervous, and found himself doing that now. “This is the country of freedoms, yes? Of freedom of religion?”
“Yes. We are the country of freedoms.”
Dartmoor lifted the plastic bag containing his pill bottles and held it up to the window to show to Wilder.
“What kind of medicine is that?” he asked Ali.
“For my heart. It is for my heart. I have a weak heart.”
Then his shaving kit.
Flipping it open and dumping out the contents and evaluating them.
You must do it now. Before it is too late.
Finally, she emptied his computer bag and picked up the inhaler.
Now, Ali!
He let himself start breathing quickly, short shallow breaths. His nervousness helped, but it was more than nerves, it was—
“Relax, Mr. Saleem.”
“My inhaler. I need my inhaler.”
“We’ll get it to you in a minute. Now, I need you to tell me—”
Ali began to hyperventilate, bent forward, and leaned one hand against the table to steady himself.
Wilder hesitated for a moment, then signaled for Dartmoor to come in.
As Ali feigned gasping for air, he found himself actually struggling to breathe for real. It was no longer just an act.
She appeared in the doorway.
“Let him have the inhaler,” Wilder told her.
At first she hesitated, but when she saw how distressed Ali was, she handed it to him.
Hastily, he held the mouthpiece to his lips, pushed down the release mechanism, and took a long, deep puff. Then another. He coughed slightly, then began to breathe easier.
He took one final puff, just to make sure.
And so.
It was done.
“Are you alright?” Wilder asked him.
“Yes.”
There was no turning back.
The virus was not designed to be contagious yet, wouldn’t be until after interacting with his specific DNA, and then only after forty-plus hours. It was amazing what synthetic biology could do. But afterward, oh yes, it would spread.
The two agents finished testing and analyzing all of the items Ali had with him. He answered the rest of their questions calmly and carefully, knowing all too well that if he was denied entry, if he was sent back to Kazakhstan, he would never see Azaliya again, and the subsequent suffering she would go through and the abuse she would be forced to endure would all be his fault.
More will die.
Like the man in Yemen.
That Rafidah, one who rejects, kneeling in the sand.
By the time the agents finally released him, his flight to Detroit had already departed. They told him he could speak with “a representative” to request a voucher to stay at a hotel that night and receive assistance in rebooking his flight, but he declined.
Though to some extent he was relieved that he had carried out this aspect of his mission, he’d been instructed not to use the inhaler until he was in Michigan.
He didn’t know the full extent of the plan, but from what he did know, the timing was vital in order to see things through to the end.
Now, all of that had been put at risk.
From piecing together the little he’d been told and what he’d inferred from the conversations he’d overheard, the genetic
modifications altered the properties of the virus, increasing its virulence, but only after the contagious stage of the disease had ensued.
In other words, the victim would remain out of bed and asymptomatic while the virus was contagious so that it would be “more widely disseminated.”
Contagious at forty-two to forty-four hours.
But not symptomatic until sixty-eight to seventy-two.
And by the end of the week he would be dead—unless he was one of the extremely rare exceptions. But with a mortality rate of nearly ninety-seven percent, that was not very likely.
With the help of a Russian scientist, Fayed’s group had confirmed the virulence of the disease using some of the schoolgirls that Boko Haram had most recently abducted in Nigeria and converted to Islam, turning them into martyrs.
Eighty-eight of the ninety-one girls that had been tested died within six days. All now in the arms of Allah.
Or so Fayed had assured him.
Of the three that survived, two had committed suicide when they saw how disfigured they’d become. The final girl was stoned to death after she admitted that she’d secretly remained a Christian all along and had never truly converted to Islam.
You need to get to Dearborn. You need to meet with Fayed.
After the border agents returned his luggage to him, Ali walked as casually as he could to a bathroom, where the airport wouldn’t have any video or audio surveillance.
Only when he was alone and locked in an empty stall did he check his mobile phone.
A text from Fayed’s number was waiting for him: All set, brother?
Ali replied: Call me.
Less than ten seconds later his phone rang.
In a hurried and hushed voice, Ali summarized what had happened at the border checkpoint.
The whole time Fayed Raabi’ah Bashir listened silently. No questions, no response, until at last Ali finished by saying, “What should I do? I have missed my flight. The next one doesn’t leave until morning.”
After only a slight pause, Fayed told him to use the credit card and documentation he’d been given to rent a car and stay at a hotel for the night. “I will text you which rental car company to use and which hotel to stay at. Once you are there, I want you to wait until you receive further instructions. Do you understand?”
“Yes. I’m sorry, I had no choice, I—”
“How are you feeling?”
“I’m fine. There won’t be any symptoms for another couple days.”
Fayed didn’t respond to that, but instead said, “I will get you the information regarding the car and hotel. Be brave, my brother.”
“Yes.”
“Allahu Akbar.”
“Allahu Akbar.”
After the call, Ali deposited the inhaler in the bathroom’s locked sharps container for needles and bio waste, where it would soon be expeditiously destroyed without any scrutiny or inspection.
As he rode the underground train to the main terminal, he noted that there were nine other people with him in the car. All breathing in the same air.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Tick.
And tock.
Life was separated from death by only the thinnest of membranes. That diaphanous film of a passing moment. The cessation of a single heartbeat.
Tick.
There.
Tock.
That was it.
Nothing more to come.
Just like with that man with that hood over his head.
But his death was not so clean and sterile.
With all that spurting blood.
There, in the dark and dampened sand.
There, with the high desert sun, the unblinking eye that watched over all, just as it had been doing since 570 BCE when the birds flew to Mecca to destroy those who had laid siege to the Holy City.
During the ride toward baggage claim and ground transportation, Ali turned toward the corner of the train car so that no one would see, raised his hands upward toward his chest, cupping them slightly, and surreptitiously prayed to Allah, the God he wasn’t even sure existed, that none of this would put his sister in any more danger, and that somehow, if at all possible, no more innocent people would die.
19
After dropping off my bags in my room, I decided I needed to at least eat something, so I found a nearby gas station, where I picked up a can of V8, a Snickers bar, and the sole remaining leathery-skinned apple that was left in the wooden basket near the checkout counter.
I also snabbed a new Mini Maglite.
Christie had made up that word “snabbed” one morning when I was leaving for work: “Can you snab some yogurt on your way home?”
“‘Snab’? I’ve heard of ‘grab,’ ‘snatch,’ ‘snag,’ ‘nab.’ But ‘snab’?”
“It’s nouveau.”
“You made it up.”
“Maybe.” A tiny smile. “But it’s a good word, right? As soon as you hear it you immediately know what it means. No dictionary needed, and it’s fun to say.”
“So, I can snab an object. Can a person be snabbed?”
“Oh, yes. But you wouldn’t want that.”
“Doesn’t it matter who’s doing the snabbing?”
“Well.” She straightened my collar for me. “I suppose if you were snabbing me, that I could deal with.”
________
On the way back to the motel, I noticed that all of the storefronts on this street except for a seedy-looking marijuana shop called Puff and Blow were shuttered, dead, and dilapidated.
Someone had written JUST MARRIED on the back window of the car parked in front of the cannabis store, but the i had worn off.
Okay, that’s awkward.
A late-model Lincoln sedan with darkened windows prowled the street, slowing as it approached me, the driver perhaps on the hunt for a drug deal or a mark for a robbery, but I waited it out, watching it stoically as I slowly finished the V8 and began working my way into the Snickers. Eventually it moved on.
From my limited familiarity with Detroit, I knew that the city administrators were promoting urban gardens, and even farms, within the city limits with the goal of creating a smaller, greener city.
But the renaissance that the city had been shooting for over the last three decades had been slow in coming.
How do you retool a city of this size? How do you alter an infrastructure that was built to support a metropolis of three million people and downsize it to be appropriate for a fifth of that? How do you find the time and money to demolish a hundred thousand homes, businesses, churches, schools, or warehouses when your city is already bankrupt? Who pays for it? Doing one a day, every day, would take nearly two hundred and seventy-five years. And what do you do with the patchwork tracts of vacant land?
No easy answers.
That’s where my mentor came in.
The mayor had called on my old professor and advisor for my doctoral studies at Simon Fraser University, Calvin Werjonic, PhD, JD, to consult with the city council. Since he was the world’s foremost expert in environmental criminology, there was no one better qualified than he was to help.
From keeping up with him online, I knew that during his consultancy he had exhaustively studied and analyzed the demographics and layout of the city.
It might be a good idea to pick his brain at some point as we moved forward with this case.
++++
Using the password he’d gotten from his contact in the New York City FBI Field Office, Blake logged into the Federal Digital Database and reviewed the information regarding the woman who’d been killed in northern Minnesota at Aspen Cove Lake.
Simone Tee.
Thirty-three years old.
According to the case files, a patron at a nearby bar remembered her leaving with a man who fit the descr
iption of the person Blake suspected was responsible for her murder. And, taking into account the connection with the modeling agency, Blake also believed he knew who the killer’s ultimate target was. However, he wasn’t sure where she would be these days or even where to begin looking for her.
That man had been obsessed with her ever since first seeing the movie, ever since taking her home from that nightclub more than fifteen years ago.
Blake had always found obsessions to be, somehow, at the same time both difficult to understand and also quite easy.
We all want a “why.”
But often there is no “why.”
What leads to an obsession?
Who knows?
Obsessions aren’t something to make sense of, but instead they grow from any desire that remains unchecked by logic or unbridled by conscience.
No, there’s never a satisfactory explanation that justifies an obsession. If a reasonable person could find justification for that action, it wouldn’t be an obsession. Just like phobias. If you’re afraid of a cobra, that’s justified. If you’re afraid of a garter snake, that’s not. And fear of buttons? The number thirteen? Or perhaps linonophobia, the fear of string? Or one of the strangest of all phobias, one that oddly enough even has a name: anatidaephobia, the fear that wherever you go, somehow a duck is watching you? Irrational. Unjustifiable. But real.
And so, with the man who went by so many names, the obsession was what it was: present, impossible to understand, yet all-consuming in its power over him.
Find her and you’ll find him. Then you can stop him. You have an obligation. The day he went to prison you promised yourself you’d do it if the day ever arrived. You know what he’ll do if he’s free. He’ll kill until he’s killed. You can’t let that happen.
Blake spent thirty minutes scouring the Federal Digital Database for the name “Scarlett Farrow” and any iterations of it but came up empty.
Trying a different approach, he examined Mannie’s research, looking at other crimes in which a grenade had been used. Mannie had found nineteen instances worldwide since April, but some were suicide attacks. Blake decided that the crime in Detroit merited the most attention. Someone had thrown a grenade through the front door of one of the precinct’s stations, but it had failed to go off.
