by Paul Batista
The level of fear he felt was far more intense than the fear he experienced in the several times he was under fire in Afghanistan and Iraq. At those times he knew his exposure to danger was only momentary, even if those moments lasted ten to twenty minutes. He was, after all, a doctor, not an infantryman, and he was a healer whom other soldiers were trained to protect and serve.
But now, in this long and utterly unfamiliar corridor under the Hudson River, he had no reason to believe the strange men who were pushing and pulling him had any interest in protecting him. To them he was not a healer with the special skills needed to save wounded people. He was something else, or some other type of person, to these men. They all looked like superbly trained infantry soldiers.
Gabriel knew from all of the years in which he’d lived in New York that both the Lincoln Tunnel and the Holland Tunnel were linked by underwater corridors to blocky stone structures that rose out of the Hudson River. Most people had no real idea what they were. They were anomalies. The stone structures were odd. They were ugly. As a boy, Gabriel learned they served both as air vents for the long tunnels and as escape destinations for people trapped in the tunnels. But there had never once been a disaster in either tunnel.
At the end of the corridor was an open space that resembled the innards of a towering factory floor. It was filled with dark men chained to one another, all sitting on the damp concrete floor. Some glanced at him. He was, after all, a white man, as were all the guards. But there was something different about him. He was a white man in handcuffs.
Disoriented, in pain, Gabriel Hauser heard a man with a Midwestern accent say, “Take the cuffs off him.”
A small key in the hand of a woman officer unerringly entered the lock, which clicked like the sound of two marbles gently striking each other, and the plastic cuffs fell off his wrists. Freed, his hands and arms were momentarily useless, filled with that feeling of innumerable pins and needles that he knew was the result of blood suddenly freed to flow into constrained muscles. Involuntarily, his arms rose upward because of the sudden free flow of fresh blood, as if he were a puppet.
Still in the blue blazer, blue button-down shirt, and red-and-black regimental tie he had worn for several days, Roger Davidson stepped in front of Gabriel. “Do you want to know who I am?”
Gabriel quietly said, “Not really.”
“Doesn’t matter. Because you’ll never know.”
Regaining his focus as the pain subsided, Gabriel asked, “Who are these men?”
“What men? I don’t see any men here. I see lying animals.”
Gabriel was a brave man. He stared into Davidson’s eyes. It was Davidson who finally disengaged, glancing to his left. Gabriel said, “Raj Gandhi was right, then. You stole these men.”
“Come on, Dr. Hauser, I want you to see an old friend of yours.”
Gabriel followed Davidson to a far side of the chilly concrete floor. Lying face up, utterly motionless, almost naked except for a dirty towel spread like a loincloth, was Silas Nasar. He was dead. Gabriel calculated that he had seen more than two thousand dead people, most of them men, in his life. This was the first time he shuddered.
“This,” Davidson said, “is a shame. I really wanted you to be able to talk to him, Dr. Hauser. He was a friend of yours. You cared for him. But the poor fucker had a heart attack before we could get you here. It’s a shame.”
“Bullshit. You killed him. Those are dried bullet holes on the side of his torso.”
“Make my life easier, Dr. Hauser. Who is this man?”
“He was a patient of mine. Patient X52. There’s no reason he should be dead. Certainly not from the wounds I treated.”
“Let me tell you something,” Davidson said. “I get to decide who lives and who dies. His name was Silas Nasar. You know that.”
Unblinking, Gabriel stared at him. “You’re just a simple butcher. Why are people like you even born?”
Davidson didn’t react. “Let me ask you something. The very first time you saw this man was when, as the Angel of Life, you ran to the museum steps on Sunday to begin saving lives, right?”
Gabriel said, “What planet are you from? I’m a doctor.”
“I want to show you something. Maybe it will give you your last chance to tell the truth and save your own life.” He reached into an interior pocket of his sports jacket. He held his cell phone to Gabriel’s face. “We took this information from your laptop. We found this selfie of Mr. Nasar taken three weeks ago. He sent it to you. And you sent this selfie of yourself back, with the text message, Can’t wait to meet you tomorrow. Your words, not ours.”
Gabriel said nothing.
“So,” Davidson asked, “what did you talk about? Cut the shit. What did you do? What did you plan? This man was completely preoccupied with the planning for all this . . .” Davidson paused, waving an arm broadly. “All this jihad carnage. Don’t, don’t just tell me you were interested only in his chocolate dick. Same taste as his cousin’s?”
Gabriel continued to stare at him.
“Your time is running out, Doctor. I need information. I need to save lives. In my way, not yours.”
And suddenly a recollection crystallized for Gabriel. “You were in Iraq. I saved your life.”
“What’s that they used to say in New York?” Davidson asked. “That and a subway token will get you a ride.”
“You had a gut wound from a roadside bomb. Men usually die from gut wounds. I cured you.”
“I have another friend of yours even if unfortunately you can’t talk again to Mr. Nasar,” Davidson said.
There was a single bathroom in the underwater fortress. It had an iron door on iron hinges. Both the door and its hinges were more rusted than the rest of the spare, austere place. Like a kid in a school yard, Davidson pushed Gabriel in the direction of the bathroom. Gabriel resisted the impulse to push back. He had met men like Davidson before, one of them, in fact, was Roger Davidson himself. Gabriel knew Davidson was not a Marine, Navy SEAL, or a regular Army soldier, but a killer attached to some federal agency like the CIA, NSA, FBI, or an utterly anonymous group. Gabriel was strong, but not trained in the ways to kill. Davidson was.
When Davidson pulled open the iron door to the bathroom, Gabriel saw Mohammad Hussein. He was sitting on a chair next to an open latrine. Mohammad stood immediately, and just as immediately, Gabriel rushed forward to embrace him. Mohammad was even more slender than he had been in Afghanistan when they had hugged for the last time, in those last hours before Gabriel was taken out of the country. “It’s been so long, Gabriel,” Mohammad said in that slightly accented, almost perfect English that had made him such a valuable translator.
As Davidson was filming them with his cell phone, Gabriel said, “Where did you go? Where have you been?”
“I’m sorry I’ve caused you such heartache. All I can say is that I’ve been here, in this bathroom, for three hours.”
“How are your children?”
“Well, thank Allah.”
With his cell phone camera still running, Davidson said, “Don’t be shy, Mr. Hussein. Tell the doctor why you’re really here.”
“Gabriel, I was devoted to the Taliban. And now to ISIS. I am who I am, so I became an interpreter. I was trusted. I knew you were a special doctor, that you had permission to treat generals, colonels, CIA people even if all they got was paper cuts. My job was to get information. I had contact with you, with generals, State Department people, CIA, everyone, through you. Americans have an aversion to learning our language. I love English.”
Gabriel said, “I don’t believe you.”
“Even before you left, I found out that people like Mr. Davidson here were—how do you put it—alert to me. So after you left Kabul I was arrested by Mr. Davidson and his friends. I didn’t like it. They let me continue to e-mail you for a while as if nothing had happened. Then Mr. Davidson and his friends got the idea that if I escaped from the Americans I would find my way to ISIS. Mr. Davidson liked to beat me
in the prison camp, his people raped my wife, they terrified my children. But all of them were still alive. I learned to listen to Mr. Davidson.”
“This person I hear you describing, the person I know as Mohammad Hussein,” Gabriel said, “isn’t you.”
“I was promised that if I was allowed to escape the detention center and went to Syria to join one of the rebel groups my wife and children would be safe. Mr. Davidson said I had a lot of value. I knew the languages, and I hated Americans. It would take time, he said, to establish my credibility. I might not succeed, but if I tried, he said, my wife and children wouldn’t be harmed again. He had his ways, he said, of tracking me and my sincerity. I was even given courses on tactics and ways of acting with groups like ISIS. I’m a good actor.”
“You’re lying to me now.”
“No, Gabriel, not now. In the past, yes, I did.”
“Did you love me?”
“I’m not sure what that means when that word comes from you.” “Why did you just hug me?”
“Why not?” Mohammad shrugged, the inelegant movement of a man Gabriel had always seen as innately, naturally elegant. “I found my way to ISIS. I found love there, mission, revenge. I was the only one there who knew English.”
“Why are you here?”
“I was sent back by ISIS to Kabul. Mr. Davidson was gone. I never found my wife and children. I still had my American credentials as a loyal translator. I still had your e-mails urging Americans to let me come to the U.S. because of all the service I had done for you as a nurse. And so I came to America.” He gestured casually at the dead man. “Silas Nasar was my first contact here.”
“Was he your cousin?”
“Of course not. But I knew you would love him. And I knew, Gabriel, how much you hated what America had done to you. A match made in heaven, you and Silas.”
“This man you are pretending to be now,” Gabriel repeated, “is not the person you are, Mohammad. I know you. You’re not a hater, you’re not a killer, you’re not a liar, not a pretender.”
“I never made you any promises. You never made any to me.”
“That’s enough,” Davidson suddenly interrupted. “Enough of this girlie talk. Let’s just get this done.”
Davidson then climbed a small circular iron stairwell. As though responding to a prearranged signal, Mohammad Hussein followed him. The woman who had unlocked Gabriel’s handcuffs reattached them and in an almost gentle tone said, “Follow them.” With no physical prodding, Gabriel too ascended the iron stairs.
A small door opened. Suddenly he was in the open air on the top of the strange building just above the flow of the vast river’s waters. Three men were already there, each with professional cameras and audio equipment. They wore ski masks revealing only their eyes. They wore black gloves. The cameras and audio equipment were off. Davidson led Gabriel into a makeshift, chain-link cage, large enough so that Gabriel could only stand and not bend over or turn. And then Davidson, too, put on a full-size ski mask and black gloves. He took off his blue blazer and white shirt and tossed them down the door into the stairwell. He dressed in the kind of white robe with a loose belt Gabriel had seen on thousands of normal civilian men in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Slender Mohammad Hussein, also wearing a ski mask he had pulled over his head and face before emerging into the open air, squeezed into the cage with Gabriel. He draped a heavy, professionally printed sign over Gabriel’s neck and chest. In Arabic, a language Gabriel could fluently read but barely speak, the sign read The Angel of Life and Death Defiles Islam. It read the same in English as well. Mohammad, without speaking to Gabriel, slipped out of the cage with a cat’s agility.
Beneath Gabriel’s feet was a slippery, viscous substance. But his keen mind and sensitive body focused on other things as the men with cameras, speaking in English, gave theatrical directions to Mohammad at the side of the cage and another man, unrecognizable to Gabriel, standing on the other side of the cage, also in a full mask.
Once the camera’s eye began to shine, Mohammad spoke: “What you are about to witness is the consequence of disloyalty to Islam. This man, called by infidels the Angel of Life, who in Allah’s eyes is the Angel of Death, joined the slaughter of the faithful in Iraq and Afghanistan. He kept alive those who killed us.”
This is when and how I die. Gabriel suddenly sensed a profound spirit of ease, as he listened to Mohammad’s familiar voice. It was a glorious summer day. A light breeze tinged with the scent of ocean water swept over the Hudson River. During his childhood and teenage years this powerful river had been part of his life, like the Mississippi in Mark Twain’s life. Gabriel had seen it every day from the slender and grimy window in the kitchen of his parents’ apartment. And during those wonderful years when he had loved Jerome Fletcher every room of that large apartment on Riverside Drive had views of this ancient, all-powerful river. Gabriel had learned the exuberance of running on the miles of the esplanade that bordered the Hudson. He knew its scents, its moods, the qualities of light on its surface. Now he was about to join its eternal flow and become a part of it.
“Now the Islamic State is here,” Gabriel vaguely, almost serenely, heard Mohammad say. “Allah is a God of love and a God of vengeance. We have just taken the life of the president of this evil nation. And we now take the life of this betrayer. Allah will do with him as Allah sees fit.”
All of this, Gabriel knew in the last seconds of his life, was being broadcast on YouTube, Twitter, Snapchat, television, every device able to deliver sights and sounds as they happened around the globe. But they could not deliver his ecstatic inner sense that he was now part of the river, the flow of air, the scent of fish and the plants that had always thrived on the river’s life-giving waters.
As the fire engulfed him, he made no sound. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
THEY STOOD IN the middle of the pastel-painted hallway. Each of the four Secret Service agents was in a corner, one as close to the oak door as possible to make sure it was secure and stayed that way.
Andrew Carter spoke first. “She’s a remarkable woman.”
“She has balls.”
“Apparently more than that, Roland. How else can you explain this Garafalo guy? He couldn’t have been interested in her balls.”
“It’s her personal life, Mr. President. I knew about her and him.”
“Did you tell her it didn’t show good judgment for the commissioner of the biggest police department in the world to be the playmate of a Gambino family member who’d served several years in a federal prison?”
“No, I didn’t. And she didn’t give me advice about my personal life.”
“Well,” Carter said, “the personal is now political. Lazarus has a great deal of power.”
“Is that so? He hasn’t done much to impress that on me in the last four days.”
“He has many friends in the courts and the justice department. There is already a grand jury investigating her, and Garafalo, and the tape that crazy doctor made, and the murder of a New York Times reporter. Who knows? I’m not a lawyer. She could be indicted and arrested in an hour. All Garafalo has to do is talk.”
“Mr. President, he went to jail for years because he wouldn’t talk.” Roland was so close to the president that he smelled the man’s rancid, fear-tinged breath. “Let me make it clear,” Roland continued, “I’m not firing her. And we have more important things to talk about. There are millions, probably billions, of people in the world who think you are dead. It was the explosion heard around the world. Whoever those people are—Boko Haram, ISIS, the evil spawn of Timothy McVeigh—billions of people saw on Twitter what was happening half an hour ago on First Avenue.”
“My people,” Carter answered, “are setting up a press conference right now, in the dining room. There will be a curtain hanging behind me, with American flags all over it. Roland, you should be flattered. I’m taking a cue from your stage acting when people thought you were dead at the Met.
The only difference is that no one will know where my broadcast is coming from.” He stopped, as if deciding whether to say what was on his mind. Then he said, “I admired you, by the way, when you went to the Museum the day of the first explosions. It took courage. I admired that.”
“Or,” Roland answered, “it was just stupid. I didn’t imagine at the time that these attacks would continue.”
Carter’s expression changed, from near admiration to something more somber. “You had no authority to order the lifting of the lock-down. That’s my authority.”
“It is? Really, the silence from D.C. was stunning. You and Lazarus and that bizarre general talked a great deal. But nothing happened. You don’t know this city. Garbage piles up quickly here. Millions of people move around all the time. They’re not really obedient. There’s more and more chaos. I knew that. You didn’t. And you still don’t. A ride in a motorcade from the UN building along scenic First Avenue is not going to reveal much to you.”
“Roland, you knew about the plan for a lockdown almost from the day you became mayor. My sources told me you never once voiced an objection.”
“The people, including Lazarus, who briefed me about this always seemed to be living in a fantasy land. He was always with these anonymous, white, obsessed men and women from Tulsa, Oklahoma, or outlandish places like that. I listened and said nothing. They knew less about Manhattan than they know about Neptune.”
