Doha 12

by Lance Charnes

  “How far do I take it if they won’t come?”

  “Do what you need to.” Force? He hoped it wouldn’t come to that, but it was always an option. “Sasha, reserve suites at the Brooklyn Sheraton for them and us. Stock their bar and get room service on standby. By the time the police are done with them, they’re going to be tired and hungry. A little kindness might go a long way.”

  “As we kindly kidnap them,” Kelila mumbled.

  “Right. Finish your food, both of you. This is our only lead. Let’s not let it slip away.”

  EIGHTY-ONE: Brooklyn, 23 December

  Jake rested his head on his folded forearms but no longer tried to get any sleep. His closed eyelids glowed orange from the bright strip lights in the interview room. He was too tired to sleep, too wrung out from the past couple of days—hell, the past five weeks—and too intent on Rafiq’s last words.

  Six hours of interrogation so far with no end in sight. A revolving cast of 72nd Precinct detectives had kept at him since the moment the patrol officers brought him in, grilling him as if he was a terrorist. Just procedure, he knew. Except for one, Tatum, forties and going to seed fast, who’d come in with an attitude and kept it going strong. “Two weeks on the job and you’re bucking for Commissioner, huh?” he’d sneered. Later, it was, “Ready for your medal, Rambo?”

  The union lawyer next to Jake didn’t say anything, his default setting. Jake said, “Is there a problem?”

  “Yeah, showboat, there’s a problem.” Tatum threw down his pen. “You do your army-of-one thing and go chase bad guys and you’re a fucking analyst. This far from little people.” He held his thumb and forefinger an inch apart, right in Jake’s face. “You get in our shit and leave us to clean up. Hope you have a good time on TV.”

  Jealous? This asshole was jealous? Jake ignored the red mist in his vision and got in the detective’s face. “You want it?” Jake growled at him. “You want the ‘glory’? You want the medal? Great. Bring back my wife and fix my daughter so she won’t have nightmares for the rest of her life and you can have it. All of it. It’s yours.”

  That was an hour ago. They’d left him alone ever since.

  The door clacked open. He looked up to see a short, thick-chested man step inside and close the door behind him. Wavy black hair going grey at the temples, shoulders that come from weightlifting, rumpled blue suit shirt, loose tie.

  “Hello, sir,” Jake sighed. “Long day for you, too.”

  “Uh-huh.” Menotti spun the other padded chrome chair around, straddled it, passed his palm over his hair. “You’ve been asking for me. What don’t you want to say to the detectives, and why?”

  Jake sat up, stretched his arms behind him until his joints stopped popping. He then glanced at the camera in the far corner of the room, near the ceiling. “You saw the tapes?”

  “Uh-huh. That’s a hell of a story, even if it’s only half a story. What’s the rest? Al-Amin and one of the stiffs at Green-Wood were at Philly station, right?” Again, Jake eyed the camera. “It’s off. So’s the mike. It’s just you and me, Jake. What’s the problem?”

  “Someone blew the safe house, you know that. I don’t know who I can trust. So…”

  Menotti pulled a cell phone, thumbed in a number, listened, then said, “Put him on.” He handed the phone to Jake.

  “Hello?”

  “Hey, kid.” Gene’s voice, tired and weak, but a wonderful sound.

  “Gene! Thank God. I wanted to come by, but…”

  “I know, you’ve been busy. Sal told me. Monica said you called.” Jake winced when Gene grunted and let out a muffled “augh.” “Sorry, kid. Can’t get comfortable in this damn bed. Fucking doctors keep giving me this stuff, makes it like there’s fuzz on everything.”

  “You have no idea how good it is to hear you swear.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Look, Sal’s good people, we go way back. Trust him like you trust me. No, better than that. Listen for once. Play straight, he’ll back you up. Got it?”

  Jake couldn’t help smiling. “Okay, Gene. You get better. I’ll be by soon.”

  Menotti took back his phone, dropped it in his shirt pocket, folded his arms on the chair back. “Talk. Start at the safe house, work up to now. Go slow, I’m tired.”

  “Wait. Where’s Eve?”

  “With ACS in the break room. Half the precinct’s in love with her by now, so if you end up on Rikers, there’s plenty of fosters for her.”

  Fosters? Like hell he’d let that happen. “How’s Miriam?”

  “Fine. She’s next door. She’s holding out, too.” He glared at Jake. “Talk.”

  Jake talked for nearly ninety minutes, detailing everything he and Miriam had done from the moment they fled the Crown Heights safe house to the instant the police snapped handcuffs on them at the chapel. Menotti asked a few questions but otherwise just listened, letting his eyebrows and hand gestures make his comments for him. At the end, Jake slumped in his chair, drained, and focused on the now-empty liter bottle of water on the table before him.

  Menotti sighed, shook his head with a worrying amount of solemnity. Finally he said, “Do you know how many felonies you just confessed to?”

  Oh, shit. “A few?”

  “More than that. The really impressive part is, you did it in less than two days. On the other hand, you took down five terrorists.”

  “I got one, sir.”

  Menotti fired a flamethrower look at Jake. “You took down five terrorists. Maybe—just maybe—we can get a Jack Bauer exemption for you.” He pushed out of the chair and headed for the door. “I have to talk to the Commissioner and the Feds. Stay here and don’t say anything to anyone, understand?”

  Jake couldn’t believe they weren’t going to hang him out to dry. Or maybe they were.

  If he didn’t end up in prison, what then? At the safe house, Google had given him over a million hits on “coping with grief.” Several had talked about finding a “new normal,” but he still couldn’t imagine a normal featuring that huge hole where Rinnah should be.

  Once he was out of here, he needed to hold onto Eve and not let go, let her know he had enough love to make up for Rinnah’s missing share, show her he wouldn’t leave her again, that she was safe. To hell with this special-ops bullshit; from here out he needed to be the best dad ever. He had no idea how he’d pull that off, but knowing he had to was scarier than being shot at.

  What about Miriam? a little voice in his head asked. Where does she fit in?

  Good question. Eve liked her. Jake had come to like her, too, although it still felt like cheating on Rinnah. But she had her life in Philadelphia—work, home, friends, probably a boyfriend—and she’d want to go back to it, forget all this insanity…and him, and Eve.

  That thought hurt far more than he’d expected.

  Menotti returned two hours later, his shirt more rumpled, his tie completely gone. He thunked a new liter bottle of water in front of Jake and straddled his chair again. “All right, here’s the play. We’re going to turn on the camera and you’re going to tell your story again, from the top. Only, it was all you. You used ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ on al-Amin, ones you learned in the Israeli Army. When you called me yesterday, I authorized you to continue the investigation. You shot the three at the chapel in self-defense. You tracked the gal on the hill and killed—”

  Jake perked up. “Gal?”

  “Uh-huh. The one on the hill, with the sniper rifle. Busted arms, busted neck, crushed windpipe.”

  “She’s not Hezbollah. They wouldn’t use a woman.” Jake had a vision of the Mossad woman at the chapel. “What color was her hair?”

  “Blond. Long, down past her shoulders.”

  The female agent who chased Alayan’s van had short, pitch-black hair. “She’s Kaminsky’s. Which means Hezbollah’s sniper killed her and got away.” One’s still out there, he realized. This part wasn’t over after all. He ran the Hezbollah team’s lineup through his increasingly foggy brain. “It’s the Pe
rsian kid. You already have a sketch of him. Miriam and I both saw him at 30th Street Station.”

  “Aw, hell.” Menotti ran his hand over his hair, left it wrapped around the back of his head for a moment. “Whatever. Mention him. We’ll pin Alayan on him, which is probably the way it was anyway. But the woman’s Hezbollah and you did her hand-to-hand before all the rest went down. Otherwise we have to explain who she really was.”

  Are you insane? “But—”

  Menotti shot his palm straight out at Jake. “Listen, don’t talk. The Bureau’s taken charge of the bodies. They’ll do the post at Quantico, they’ll make sure they come up with the right answers. That’s how this plays. No Kaminsky, no Mossad. Your girlfriend was just—”

  “She’s not my girlfriend.”

  “If she did all the things you said, and she’s covering for you, she damn well ought to be. Like I said, she was along for the ride. If it’s you, we can work out an LOD determination for this mess. If it’s her, she’ll be looking at a few years upstate.”

  “But this is so far outside my line of duty—”

  “Your job is to catch terrorists. You caught terrorists. We’ll work it. Right now, we have to explain a live scumbag in custody, one on the loose, four dead bodies and a lot of shooting at Green-Wood. We’ll make the story simple. Besides, it’s already going out to the Times.”

  “Miriam gets away clean?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What about the bomber? There’s less than a day left.”

  “Already working it. FBI’s getting warrants now.”

  Jake propped his elbows on the table and rested his eye sockets on his upturned palms. The “simple story” meant everything got pinned on him. They probably were going to try to make him some kind of hero, for God’s sake. If it fell apart, he’d be burnt toast. But Miriam would go free and he might survive to watch Eve grow up. A good enough trade? It was the only one he’d get, so it had to be.

  He ignored the sour taste of doom in the back of his mouth and looked up at Menotti. “Okay, sir, I’ll make the statement. Let’s do this.”

  EIGHTY-TWO: North Bergen, New Jersey, 23 December, 6:45 AM

  Al-Shami leaned a shoulder against the warehouse’s brown concrete wall, lit a cigarette, drew deep, blew the smoke over his right shoulder. In his flannel and watch cap, he was just another worker waiting for the doors to open. He’d left the binoculars in his car. A man smoking isn’t suspicious; a man with binoculars is.

  The Super 8 motel hunched on the other side of traffic-choked Highway 495. Squat, white, two floors stretching back from the highway, each side lined with half-full parking. The early-morning gloom sucked the color out of everything, making this desolate commercial area even more barren and depressing.

  The first police cars had arrived thirty minutes earlier, just as he’d expected. Now the driveways into the motel were blocked by a collection of marked and unmarked cars—North Bergen, Hudson County, New Jersey State Police, a lone NYPD car, black four-wheel-drive vehicles, an ambulance—stretched along the access road west of the motel. SWAT had just scrambled along the edge of the car park on the low bluff overlooking the building’s east side.

  The police formed up into their groups on either end of the motel. Al-Shami pinched out his cigarette, stuck the butt in his pocket, and waited for the show.

  At precisely seven, the police charged up the outside stairwells and poured down the walkway toward four rooms in the middle of the motel’s east-facing side. Men in tactical gear, helmets and assault rifles led the uniformed and plainclothes police with their shotguns and pistols. They ducked beneath the four rooms’ windows, took up position outside each room. Yes, there were the two men flanking each door. Yes, now the pipe-like door rams. Police around the world must follow the same manual.

  Doors smashed in, men raced inside. Al-Shami smiled as he pictured the shouting and waving of guns. And just about now…

  Black smoke poured out each doorway. After a few moments, the smoke turned gray as the motor oil he’d pooled on the sheets gave way to the burning bedding. One by one, police tumbled from the rooms, coughing and waving their arms.

  “That’ll keep them busy,” al-Shami said to himself. He turned and walked toward his rental car a block away.

  Today’s headlines on the New York Times front page had made him glad he and his team hadn’t stayed in these rooms Jabbar had rented. They’d checked in, of course, and he and Fayiz had come back to leave their little gift for the police. But he’d never actually use travel arrangements anyone else had made, not if he wanted to stay alive.

  On his way through the morning damp to the car, he considered the new problem from his handler Altair. The last surviving member of Jabbar’s team had asked Beirut for instructions. Could al-Shami use him, then extract him?

  Normally, al-Shami hated working with people he didn’t know. Altair had hinted at the “political considerations” around this one, which usually meant the damned Iranians were involved. Not that al-Shami cared, but Hezbollah would soil themselves trying to keep their sponsors happy. And they were the clients, after all.

  He reached his dark green Chevrolet sedan, checked the underside and wheel wells for unwanted presents, then backed off and unlocked it with the remote. No explosion; good. He looked back toward the motel, chuckled at the plume of smoke.

  Take this new man or not? This Sohrab had survived that battle in the graveyard, so he was either capable or a coward, and it was unlikely he was a coward. Fayiz was increasingly miserable with a stomach bug he’d picked up on the road. The heightened security around the target made an extra man desirable.

  Very well, then. He’d call Altair and make the contact. They didn’t have much time. In twelve hours, they’d either be victorious or dead. Or, perhaps, both.

  EIGHTY-THREE: 23 December, 3:00 PM CET

  Over seventy tourists waited in a line that stretched from the museum entrance across the Westermarkt’s brick pavers, then east along the neat brick wall of the café Werck. The saw-toothed wind off Amsterdam’s Prinsengracht canal tore at their winter coats and pinked their faces.

  The Westerkirk’s hour bell bonged three times.

  A sudden rush of visitors spewed out the museum’s exits. Two women and a man wearing museum ID tags shouted, “Please move back! Please!” repeating the same words in Dutch and English as they shooed the evacuees and the queue away from the museum’s glass walls. A fire-alarm klaxon ratcheted through the open doors.

  Two police cars followed the blare of their sirens into the opposite end of Westermarkt. They swerved into a vee formation across the street, blocking it. Around the corner from the museum, a white police VW Golf slid to a halt just shy of the Werck, closing the road along the canal. More sirens wailed in the distance, grew louder.

  In the confusion, almost no one noticed a white Mercedes van slip behind two police vans as they charged onto the short stub of Westermarkt from the Keizersgracht. No one except the driver of the second police van, Anje Rogier, a short, blond female cop four days on the job.

  Rogier checked the mirror again. The vehicle behind her didn’t have a light bar or the familiar red-and-blue stripes on the side and nose, and its driver was a dark-skinned civilian. It showed no sign of stopping. She took in the swirling crowd rapidly filling her windscreen.

  How could someone attack the Anne Frank House?

  She acted before she could think. Rogier stomped her brakes and slewed across the intruder’s path.

  The intruder plowed into her van’s left side, blasting glass and air-bag powder through its cabin. Tires shrieked across the brick pavement.

  The last thing Anje Rogier saw was the bloody-faced driver of the third van slamming his palm against his dashboard as he broke into a triumphant grin.

  The grinding racket of the fire alarm drowned out the well-lubricated buzz of five hundred Crédit Industriel de l’Orient managers and executives mingling, gossiping and flirting in the two-story nave of Paris’ Pa
lais Brongniart. Until this moment, the Champagne flowed as relentlessly as the Seine and the hors d’oeuvres piled up like the bank’s gaudy profits. The only nod toward politically prudent modesty was the unfashionably early hour, meant to limit the extravagance (no orchestra, no pop-star entertainment, and no “+1” guests) and the drinking.

  The event manager tapped the microphone on the dais. “Mesdames! Messieurs! Our apologies. Please leave the building through the main entrance. There is no danger.” The ushers and serving help echoed their boss’ instructions as they herded the still-festive group through the main doors into the grand colonnaded portico and the plaza beyond.

  Guillaume Berton hung back, matching his companion’s progress step-for-step. Celeste was a sleek blond new to the bank’s compliance department, and from the moment they’d both grabbed for the same flute of Champagne forty minutes before, they’d wrapped their conversation around themselves like insulation against their colleagues. She had quick eyes, lips that bore much watching and an ivory knit dress that was both demure and ravishingly provocative. A ring, but no mention of a husband to go with it. Two years after Thérèse had disappeared into a Parisian autumn, Berton allowed himself to hope he’d not spend another Christmas alone.

  Sirens greeted them when they stepped outside: the familiar two-tone shrill of police cars, the lower-pitched blare of fire engines. Berton and Celeste paused next to one of the portico’s giant granite columns to watch the show.

  Car horns, squealing tires. A white van slalomed through traffic on Rue Vivienne, cutting off oncoming cars on Rue du 4 Septembre. A police Renault, blue light strobing and siren wailing, followed just seconds behind.

  The van swerved past the green news kiosk on the corner, jounced over the curb, and plunged into the midst of nearly five hundred people milling in the forecourt between the Palais and Rue Vivienne.