by Mike Lawson
He read the three articles on the hijacking attempt, skipped the editorials on Broderick’s bill, and then, because he hadn’t been keeping his ear to the ground as directed, he called Jerry Hansen at Homeland Security to see if there was anything new going on with Reza Zarif. Jerry wasn’t in. Too bad. He’d tried – and he wasn’t going to try anymore. Hassan Zarif was just going to have to accept that his brother had done what he did for the reasons given by the boys in the Bureau.
So, beach umbrella shading his form, a drink in his hand, he picked up the novel he’d been trying to finish ever since coming to Florida. So far the novel had taken a backseat to sex, but maybe today he’d get past the sixth chapter. He’d just opened the book and started to flip through it to find the last page he’d read when his cell phone rang. He figured it was Ellie. She had said she would call him after she’d jump-started the island’s economy and tell him where to meet her for lunch.
‘Hel-lo,’ he said cheerfully into the phone.
‘Where the hell are you?’ Mahoney said.
Aw, shit!
‘I’m in Florida. Don’t you remember?’ DeMarco said. He could hear the whiny desperation in his voice. ‘I told you I had this week off.’
‘I don’t remember that,’ Mahoney said, ‘but you need to get your ass back here. I want you to check out this guy that tried to hijack the shuttle. Broderick’s goddamn bill reported out of committee yesterday, and the Senate’s gonna vote on it in two friggin’ weeks.’
‘I don’t understand,’ DeMarco said. ‘Is there some connection between the hijacking and Reza Zarif?’
‘Goddammit!’ Mahoney screamed. ‘How the hell would I know? That’s what I want you to find out.’
Rather than argue with Mahoney, DeMarco said, ‘I understand.’ I understand is a really good noncommittal reply.
DeMarco had asked himself more than once why he still worked for Mahoney. He had graduated from law school the same year his mafia father had been killed, which made employment in any decent law firm on the eastern seaboard problematic. But then his godmother, his dear Aunt Connie, came to his rescue. She and Mahoney had had an affair when they were both fifty pounds lighter, and she pressed the speaker to give DeMarco a job, which he did, and which DeMarco gratefully accepted at the time. But why was he still with the bastard all these years later? The answer to that question, unfortunately, was because he had no marketable skills. When you’re a lawyer who’s never practiced law, a man who acts part time as a bagman for a politician, and when you can’t even put the politician’s name down on a résumé as your former boss, your career options become somewhat limited. And at this point, he was heavily invested in a federal pension, possibly the only good thing about working for Mahoney.
But, pension and future career prospects aside, there was no way DeMarco was leaving Florida that day. He’d leave tomorrow, meaning he’d cut his vacation one day short, and the only reason he was doing that was because Ellie was returning to Iowa tomorrow. As far as he was concerned, there was no urgent need to look into this hijacking no matter what Mahoney said. There’d been nothing to indicate that the Bureau was wrong about Reza Zarif, and therefore no rational reason to think that there was any connection between Zarif and this nut who’d tried to hijack the shuttle. Or maybe a better reason for not rushing back to Washington was this: What in hell did Mahoney think DeMarco could do that ten thousand FBI agents weren’t already doing?
If Mahoney called later in the day to see if he was back in D.C., DeMarco planned to lie to the inconsiderate shit. He’d tell him he’d been on his way but a massive accident on the bridge from Key West to the mainland had caused him to miss his plane, or that all the flights out of Miami had been delayed because security was so tight, or that …
Aw, screw it. He’d make up something when the time came.
15
He watched the boy for three days before he approached him.
The first day that he followed him, he saw the boy enter the public school he attended, but three hours later he left it. He was holding books in his hand when he left the school, just as he had been when he’d left his home that morning. He wondered why the boy was leaving school so early in the day.
The boy walked a block from the school – but not in the direction of his home – put his books down in an alley behind a Dumpster, and covered them with old newspapers. Then he began to walk.
He appeared to walk aimlessly, no destination in mind. He would stop occasionally and sit at a bus stop or on a park bench or on a stoop. But he would just sit, looking down at his feet, not even paying attention to the people around him. The boy was unhappy and something was weighing heavily on his spirit. This was good.
The next day when the boy left his apartment building, he put his schoolbooks down behind another Dumpster, this one right near his apartment, and began walking again. For five hours he either walked or sat. He did nothing, participated in no activity, spoke to no one, ate nothing, then returned to his apartment, picked up the schoolbooks he’d hidden, and went into the building where he and his mother lived. He had obviously decided to stop going to school but didn’t want his mother to know.
On his fourth day in Cleveland, two things happened: a man, a Muslim, tried to hijack a plane in New York and that was the day he approached the boy.
He needed to find out more about the hijacking, but from what he’d heard it appeared that his brethren had helped the hijacker. Unfortunately, just as he had failed in Baltimore, whoever had assisted the man in New York had also failed. But not completely.
What Sheikh Osama wanted was for the faithful who lived in Western countries to rise up against the infidels. If outsiders attacked, as they had on 9/11, people would die, and the cause would be advanced, but what was happening now was far better. In London, in Madrid, in Paris, all the recent attacks had involved Muslims who lived in those countries – and that was important. First, the security forces of those countries, which were already stretched thin, were now forced to spend more time looking inward, at their own citizens. And this provided the second advantage. By investigating their own citizens, they alienated them. People already scorned because of their skin color and their religion were now harassed by the police, detained, their houses searched – and sometimes, as had been the case with the boy’s father, their lives were destroyed. The fact that there had been two back-to-back attacks on Washington committed by Americans … Well, even though the attacks had failed, they clearly demonstrated that God listened to Sheikh Osama.
When he approached, the boy was sitting on the ground, on a small grassy bluff overlooking the Cuyahoga River. He had come to this place twice before; he seemed to like watching the river as it flowed away from this ugly town. He sat down next to the boy. The boy glanced over at him but didn’t say anything, and looked back down at the river. He greeted the boy in the language of the boy’s father and wished God’s blessings on him. He could tell the boy was surprised to be addressed this way, but still he didn’t respond.
He had been thinking for four days about what he would say to the boy during their first meeting. He had been thinking that he would begin by saying how sorry he was for what had happened to the boy’s father and then lie to him and tell him how something similar had happened to someone he had loved. But he didn’t want to begin with a lie, and he still had not come to a decision when he sat down next to the boy. And then God told him how to begin.
He said, ‘What do you think about this man who tried to hijack that airplane this morning?’ And the boy, though he was still looking at the river and not at him, said, ‘I think it’s too bad he was killed before he could do what he planned.’
There are times when you meet someone and you have an instant connection. It was that way between him and the boy. The boy, of course, needed a father – so he would become his father. Also his teacher, his brother, and his friend. He would become whatever he needed to become to make the boy his own.
He had found the boy o
n the Internet while hiding in Philadelphia. He had searched for tragedy, and there he was. The boy’s father had made the mistake of going home to see his dying mother in Pakistan and, through sheer coincidence, through sheer bad luck, he happened to be in his mother’s village at the same time that one of Osama’s warriors was passing through. The Pakistani spies who worked for the Americans relayed this information to the CIA, and when the man returned home he was detained and questioned. He was detained for three months before the FBI was finally satisfied that he had no connection with al-Qaeda – other than being a Muslim.
The boy’s father had had a weak heart to begin with, and the stress caused by his imprisonment worsened his condition. He had also owned a shoe repair business, and in the time he was in jail his business died like a plant that has not been watered. His wife, a simple woman who had never become acclimated to American life, was brought to the brink of a nervous breakdown from being questioned by the police and because of what was happening to her husband. And the boy, of course, was harassed by his schoolmates, all those Christians who had pretended to be his friends. Two months after being released from jail, the boy’s father had a heart attack and died. The boy’s mother, who now survived on a small Social Security check, had to sell her home and move into a small apartment in a dirty part of a dirty city. The boy told him later that his mother was still so stunned by what had happened that she barely spoke.
He put a hand on the boy’s thin shoulder and said, ‘You haven’t eaten all day. Let’s go somewhere and get some tea and some food. Let’s go talk about your father. Let’s talk about who you are.’
16
‘You look like you’ve been someplace where the sun actually shines,’ Hansen said.
‘Yeah, Key West,’ DeMarco said.
He’d gotten off the plane an hour ago and managed to make it to Jerry Hansen’s office at Homeland Security just as Hansen was shutting off his computer and locking up his safe. DeMarco’s plane had in fact been delayed leaving Miami because of security. They were searching every carry-on bag going onto every plane because of the attempted hijacking of the New York–D.C. shuttle.
‘Key West,’ Hansen echoed. ‘Man, that sounds good. It must have been ten degrees when I left for work this morning.’
‘Is that right?’ DeMarco said. He didn’t want to talk with Hansen about the weather or his aborted vacation. ‘I was just wondering if you could fill me in on that hijacker, like you did before with Reza Zarif.’
‘I dunno,’ Hansen said. ‘The general said I could talk to you about Zarif; he didn’t say anything about this other guy. Plus it’s kinda late.’
‘I cleared it with the general,’ DeMarco lied. ‘Call him up. He’ll tell you.’
DeMarco was betting that Andy Banks’s staff hated talking to him, Banks being the unpleasant, unreasonable, demanding bastard that he was.
Hansen studied DeMarco’s face, looking for signs that DeMarco was lying.
‘Nah, that’s okay,’ Hansen said, after a moment. ‘I’ll take your word for it. Anyway, it’s just like it was with Zarif. If you read the paper this morning, you got almost everything.’
Hansen then told DeMarco just what he’d already read in the newspaper. Twenty-five years ago Youseff Khalid had left Somalia with his parents, became an American citizen, and eventually earned a degree in computer sciences from Colorado State University. He had worked for IBM in New York City for nine years but was laid off three months ago. According to IBM, Youseff had just been a random casualty of corporate downsizing, meaning there was probably some guy in India who was now doing his job. Youseff, however, didn’t accept this explanation. He was convinced that he’d been fired because he was both black and Muslim, and he had filed a discrimination suit. He’d been informed a week ago that it would probably take two or three years before anyone would make a decision on his lawsuit, and in the three months since he’d lost his job the only work he had been able to find involved making coffee drinks for people who didn’t need caffeine. Youseff’s friends told the FBI that Youseff had been depressed, angry, and absolutely convinced that he was a victim of racial and religious bigotry.
Youseff’s congressman, Representative Charles Cantrell from the fourteenth district of New York, came forward about this time and showed the FBI two letters that he’d received from Youseff. The first letter politely asked Cantrell for help. The second letter, written a month later, cursed Cantrell to the heavens for caring more about IBM than he did about a poor constituent – which, of course, Cantrell did: IBM was a major contributor; Youseff was not. Youseff’s second letter concluded with the statement that Shakespeare got it only half right: We shouldn’t just kill all the lawyers, we should kill all the lawmakers too. Then the FBI discovered that Youseff had taken six flying lessons four years earlier but had never obtained a pilot’s license.
The FBI added up the facts: a Muslim with a grievance plus flying lessons plus a letter to his congressman saying all lawmakers should be killed, and the Bureau concluded it was very likely that Youseff had planned to crash the shuttle into the Capitol after he had hijacked it. And because the shuttle was cleared to land at Reagan National, it was possible that Youseff could have entered the no-fly zone and crashed the plane before the Capitol’s defenders had time to react and shoot it down.
To DeMarco there was one major difference between Reza Zarif and Youseff Khalid, which was that Khalid’s motive seemed more substantial. It appeared that Zarif had just wigged out and turned kamikaze. Khalid, on the other hand, had, at least from his perspective, a more legitimate complaint. He’d lost his job because of what he thought was prejudice and then was ignored after trying to rectify the situation by filing a lawsuit and writing his congressman. It may have been irrational to try to hijack a plane and crash it into the Capitol, but at least DeMarco could somewhat understand his reasoning.
Come to think of it, there was another major difference between Khalid and Zarif: Khalid, thank God, hadn’t killed his wife and his three kids.
‘Did the FBI uncover any sort of connection between Reza Zarif and this hijacker?’ DeMarco asked. ‘You know, phone calls to each other, letters from the same mosque, e-mails, common friends, anything like that?’
‘No, and they looked hard,’ Hansen said.
‘Where’d he get the gun he snuck on the plane?’ DeMarco asked.
‘Now that’s the sixty-four thousand-dollar question,’ Hansen said. ‘It’s the gun that makes the Bureau think some bad guys – you know, al-Qaeda – may have gone to Youseff and convinced him to do what he did. This weapon was special. The Bureau’s lab thinks at least one part came from India, and it took pretty high-tech equipment to make the plastic parts. This weapon definitely wasn’t somethin’ you could pick up in your average gun shop.’
‘How ’bout from someone like Donny Cray?’ DeMarco said.
‘No way. Cray didn’t have the equipment or the know-how to make something like this,’ Hansen said, as he put on his coat. ‘And in case you’re wondering, the Bureau didn’t find Cray’s fingerprints in Khalid’s house or in his car or on the gun.’
‘But there’s no trail to any specific terrorist group,’ DeMarco said.
‘Not yet, but Jesus, DeMarco, this thing just happened two days ago. Look, I gotta get—’
‘Did the Bureau ever find Donny Cray?’ DeMarco said.
‘Yeah they found him. His body, anyway.’
Hansen wrapped a bright orange scarf around his neck and started toward the door, but DeMarco remained seated.
‘His body?’ DeMarco said.
‘Yeah. It was just like I told you. The guy hitched his trailer to his pickup, headed south, and drove off the road. And he left the same day the roads were icier than shit. Anyway, some hunter found the pickup and the trailer in a gulch. Cray’s neck had snapped and his girlfriend – her head went through the windshield. Neither of them was wearing seat belts, and his truck was so damn old it didn’t have air bags. Look, I gotta catch
—’
‘So the FBI wasn’t able to confirm that Cray really sold Reza a gun.’
‘No, it’s hard to talk to a dead guy, but Cray selling him a gun still makes a hell of a lot more sense than Cray having been to Zarif’s house or him being some kind of Muslim convert al-Qaeda operative. Look, I’m outta here.’
DeMarco thanked Hansen and trailed behind him as he left the Homeland Security building. He didn’t even try to keep up; he bet that the fastest the guy moved all day was when he was leaving work.
As DeMarco watched Hansen fleeing, he was thinking that maybe now he could report back to Mahoney and tell him that he was through investigating Reza Zarif. He hadn’t uncovered any flaws in the FBI’s explanation for either event, and there didn’t appear to be any connection between Reza and Youseff Khalid.
But one thing did bother him, and the thing just wouldn’t go away. It was like a woodpecker rapping on the back of his head.
It bothered him that Donny Cray had died before the FBI could talk to him.
17
The bar was called Mr Days. Flat-screen television sets marched across the walls of the place, one hanging every five feet, and showing on all those screens was nothing but sporting events. The sound on the sets had been muted, and captions ran across the bottom of the pictures so one could read the all-too-familiar clichés of the broadcasters. Everything that could be said about sports had already been said a thousand times over, but apparently something had to be said about these events.
DeMarco was waiting for a man named Barry King who worked for the DEA. He wanted to talk to King about Donny Cray. DeMarco felt somewhat guilty about not having followed up on Cray earlier; he probably would have had he not been so anxious to escape D.C. and bask in the sun. But, he rationalized, he really didn’t have any reason to investigate Cray more thoroughly until Cray died. Until then, the FBI’s explanation that Cray had most likely sold Reza the gun had sounded plausible; now, the coincidence of his dying before the Bureau could confirm the sale was disturbing.
