by Mike Lawson
After that day, she told him if he ever needed a favor to just ask, and he occasionally did, particularly when things got complicated or he needed access to the resources at her disposal. She treated him most times like an aggravated big sister, and why she helped him was not always clear. Sometimes she helped him because she decided that whatever he was doing was sufficiently important to warrant it. At other times, however, he suspected she helped simply because she was bored with retirement – or semiretirement, whichever the case might be.
‘It’s been my experience,’ Emma said, ‘that whether or not something’s a conspiracy is a matter of perspective. If a bunch of guys are doing something we like, we call it a good organized effort. It’s only a conspiracy when we don’t like it.’
‘Huh?’
‘Say the city council of Dirt Water USA wants to tear down kindly Grandma Jones’s house to make a convenient highway exit to the local mall. Now that’s a conspiracy to all those who side with Grandma, but for all those citizens who want easy access to the mall – which by the way will improve sales and thereby increase tax revenues for the good city of Dirt Water – it’s just a city council doing its job by exercising its right of eminent domain.’
‘Fine, Emma. Conspiracies are in the eye of the beholder. But I’m not talking about grandma and a freeway exit.’
‘So what are you talking about?’
‘I think,’ DeMarco said, ‘there’s a chance that Reza Zarif tried to crash a plane into the White House because somebody told him that they were going to kill his wife and kids if he didn’t. But then the … the bad guys, they killed his family anyway.’
Emma could do two things that DeMarco had always wanted to be able to do. She could arch a single eyebrow and she could whistle through her teeth to call a cab. She now arched an eyebrow, the left one.
‘And what makes you think that Mr Zarif didn’t do exactly what the papers – and the Federal Bureau of Investigation – said?’
DeMarco explained. He said the FBI’s theory was that Reza had just snapped because of all the pressure he’d been under lately and then decided to commit an irrational act of terrorism that would bring attention to the plight of Muslims worldwide. The problem with that theory was neither Mahoney nor anyone else who knew Reza well could accept that he would do something like that. But what they really couldn’t accept was that he would kill his wife and two young children.
‘So I asked myself,’ DeMarco said, ‘what if someone held a gun to the heads of Reza’s kids and told him to fly the plane? I think if Reza thought that might save his children, he’d do it. He was an experienced pilot and he knew he was going to get blown out of the sky, just like he was. What I’m saying is, I think the man would have been willing to commit suicide if he thought it might keep his family alive, especially if he knew he wasn’t going to kill anybody else, much less the president.’
‘But what makes you think anybody held a gun to his kids’ heads?’ Emma said.
‘Two things, and I’ve already told you the first: my gut feeling that he wouldn’t have done what he did if he wasn’t forced.’
‘Well, that’s weak,’ Emma said.
‘The second thing is the fingerprint on the bullet box.’
DeMarco explained how Donny Cray’s fingerprint had been discovered on the box of bullets used to kill Reza Zarif’s family and the FBI’s conclusion as to why the single fingerprint was there.
‘So,’ DeMarco said, ‘one explanation for that fingerprint is that this yokel Cray sold Reza a gun just like the FBI thinks. But another explanation is maybe Cray was in Reza’s house.’
‘But what motive would Cray have?’ Emma said.
‘I don’t know,’ DeMarco said.
‘And this other guy, the one who hijacked the shuttle. Did someone force him too?’
‘I don’t know,’ DeMarco said again. He was getting tired of saying that.
He told her how questioning Youseff Khalid’s wife had been a little tough since she didn’t speak English, but he said he didn’t see any evidence that the woman had been abused in any way and she denied – he thought – that she’d been used to coerce her husband to hijack the shuttle.
‘Well, shit, Joe,’ Emma said, clearly unimpressed with DeMarco’s logic.
‘Yeah, I know,’ he admitted. ‘But what really makes me think there might be an honest-to-God conspiracy going on is not Reza Zarif or Youseff Khalid but the cabdriver who tried to walk into the Capitol with blocks of C-Four strapped to his chest.’
Mustafa Ahmed came from Pakistan thirty years ago, and twenty years ago he became an American citizen. According to newspaper reports, he wasn’t known to have been involved in any political organizations, and he rarely attended his mosque. His only outside interest appeared to be soccer. He had bought an expensive cable package primarily so he could watch international games, and three times in his life he had taken vacations to attend World Cup matches. He had never married but he did have a large extended family, three siblings and a passel of nieces and nephews whom he reportedly spoiled rotten.
Following his attempt to detonate a bomb inside the Capitol, the FBI searched Mustafa’s house and found a folder filled with literature – pamphlets and books and articles taken off the Internet – that were sympathetic to radical Muslim causes. All Mustafa’s friends and family, people who had been in his house, said they had never seen such reading material in the place before and they had never heard Mustafa side with al-Qaeda politics. They all said the same thing. The only thing the man cared about was soccer, and he didn’t have a political bone in his scrawny body.
Folks did admit that Mustafa was a very emotional man, one of those little mouse-that-roared guys who took offense easily and was always ranting and raving about something. And a month before he attempted to blow up the Capitol he lost a case in traffic court that he was felt was due to religious bias. His car had been broadsided by a white man, and the white man claimed Mustafa had run a red light. Mustafa swore the light was green, but the white judge sided with the other man, and a bailiff had to drag Mustafa out of the courtroom as he screamed curses at the judge, calling him a fool and a bigot.
Mustafa’s friends admitted that he’d been outraged by what had happened but refused to agree that losing a case in court would have provoked him into doing what he did. The FBI discovered, however, that the court’s decision had a profound impact on Mustafa’s life. Mustafa’s cab company was a loosely affiliated group of gypsy drivers, men who owned their own cabs, and the cabs were insured by the drivers, not the company. For whatever reason, Mustafa had missed a payment on his auto insurance and he didn’t have the money to pay for the damage to his cab or the white man’s car. So Mustafa hadn’t just lost a case in court. He hadn’t worked in a month, he had lost his means of earning a living, and he was being hammered on by collection agencies to pay his bills.
As with Youseff Khalid, the man who hijacked the New York–D.C. shuttle, the FBI suspected that Mustafa had been helped by somebody. Somebody had given Youseff the plastic gun he had snuck onboard the plane, and somebody had provided the C-4 and constructed the bomb that Mustafa had strapped to his chest. The only reason the bomb didn’t explode, the FBI explained, was that one of the wires connecting the dead man’s switch to the detonator had somehow torn loose, maybe when Mustafa put on the raincoat he had worn over the bricks of C-4. But somebody had made the bomb, and it probably wasn’t Mustafa.
With the two kids who had tried to blow up the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel, the Bureau knew for a fact that an al-Qaeda operative was involved. In the case of Mustafa Ahmed and Youseff Khalid they were convinced of similar organized terrorist involvement but as yet had no concrete evidence to support their theory. But when one took into account all the factors involved – the literature in Mustafa’s house, his bitterness toward the judicial system, the sophisticated bomb vest, the depression caused by his financial problems – the FBI believed it had a pretty good case that Mustafa, with the h
elp of some radical group, had the motive and means to blow up the Capitol.
But the real problem with all of this, DeMarco told Emma, was not Mustafa but the guy who had killed Mustafa.
His name was Rollie.
* * *
‘Rollie?’ Emma said.
‘Right,’ DeMarco said. ‘His full name is Roland, but he looks like a Rollie and everybody calls him Rollie.’
Roland Patterson was a short overweight guy with bad feet who always looked puzzled. He was a security guard who screened people entering the Capitol and made sure they walked through the metal detector. And if the detector alarmed, Rollie would tell them to take the change out of their pockets. That was Rollie’s job.
‘I’ve never talked to the guy,’ DeMarco told Emma, ‘but I see him in the morning, about half the time when I go to my office. And right away you get a sense of him. The other guards will be sitting there bullshitting, and they’ll be giving Rollie a hard time. He’s just that kind of guy, the kind other guys are always teasing about something. And he always has this confused look on his face.’
What DeMarco meant was that if one of the other guards said, ‘Hey, Rollie, go get us some coffee,’ Rollie’s brow would furl and he’d get an expression on his face as if he were being asked to make a number of extremely complex decisions. Where should he go for the coffee? What size cups should he get? Should he pay for the coffee or ask the other guys to pay? DeMarco had no evidence that Rollie was in any way stupid. He was just a guy who mulled things over slowly and took his time answering.
The other thing about Rollie was that he almost always worked near one of the Capitol’s entrances, at a job where he could sit for long periods. Supposedly, Rollie had a partial disability, some problem with his feet that prevented him from walking the perimeter.
‘The day Rollie killed Mustafa Ahmed, he did two things completely out of character,’ DeMarco told Emma. ‘First, he decided to take a walk when he went on his break. Normally, when it was time for Rollie’s break, he’d go into this little room the guards used and have a snack and read the paper. But that day – and it was colder than hell outside – he decided to stretch his legs and walk around the building, and he just happened to stop and bullshit with the two guys guarding the West Terrace barrier. The second thing he did that was unusual was that he made a decision and he made it quickly.’
This was what really bothered DeMarco: Rollie, a guy who couldn’t seem to decide what kind of doughnut to buy, assessed the situation with Mustafa in about five seconds and then pulled out his gun and killed him.
‘I mean, that’s what I don’t get,’ DeMarco said. ‘The other two guards, they’re scared shitless trying to figure out what to do. Here’s this crazy guy walking toward them with enough explosives on him to blow the dome off the building, they’ve never been in a situation like this before in their lives, and they’re probably thinking that if they shoot Mustafa they’ll hit the C-Four and blow themselves to kingdom come. But not Rollie. Friggin’ Rollie takes out his gun and blows the guy away.’
There was one other thing about Rollie, DeMarco explained to Emma. While everybody agreed that Rollie was a malingering slug, they also agreed he could shoot a pistol. When the guards had to pass their shooting quals, Rollie had no trouble at all. He was overweight, flatfooted, and not the least bit athletic, but he was a natural when it came to using a pistol.
‘Hmm,’ Emma said. ‘Anything else?’
‘Well, no, but when you look at the whole package, you’ve got a lot of stuff that doesn’t make sense: an apparently apolitical cabdriver who suddenly decides to become a suicide bomber, and the guy who takes him out is the last person you’d expect to do it. It’s just a puzzle.’
‘And maybe a conspiracy,’ Emma said, smiling slightly.
22
He sat watching the television set, amazed at what had almost happened.
A man had just tried to walk into the U.S. Capitol with an explosive device strapped to his body. They had pictures of the man – somehow, some way, in this country there was always someone with a camera or a cell phone nearby – and the pictures showed the man standing, his arms outstretched, and then the bullets striking his chest. Why didn’t the bomb explode? he wondered.
But it was still amazing. Counting the man who had tried to crash his plane into the White House, there had been three attacks by Muslim Americans in a period of less than a month, and the last two had been only a week apart. The country was in an absolute frenzy. This man Broderick and his bill, his law – whatever they called it – it appeared he was going to succeed.
And if he did, the hatred would grow.
Maybe that was why the attacks had happened so close together: because Sheikh Osama wanted this law passed. But that could also explain the failures. Whoever was helping the American martyrs had rushed their planning or had not trained their recruits well or had not checked their equipment as thoroughly as they should have. But still, two attacks in seven days? That was phenomenal. They had never acted this quickly in the past.
He was embarrassed. He knew he had to move slowly and cautiously; unlike his brethren here in America, his identity was definitely known to the authorities. Still, it had been over three months since Baltimore. He needed to move more rapidly, particularly if his success could influence this law they kept talking about.
He and the boy had been to the refinery five times now, three times during the day, twice at night, and they still had one or more trips to make before they would be ready. The first visit had been the most dangerous. He had stopped the El Camino on a road that was not heavily traveled, and from which he could see the refinery, and then he had jacked up the vehicle to make it appear that he was changing a flat tire. But if a policeman had driven by, and if he had seen two Arabs, and if he’d realized the significance of the refinery, they could have been arrested on the spot. That did not happen, though; God protected them.
During the first visit, he and the boy studied the refinery for three hours. He took photographs with a digital camera with a long-range lens and used binoculars to study the markings on the various tanks and pipes. The refinery was filled with tanks and pipes; it was a forest of tanks and pipes. But the boy was very bright and he had no trouble at all memo rizing the markings that were significant and tracing the routing of the pipes that were important.
The next two daylight visits, he’d dropped the boy off and told him to find the best spots to place the explosives, places not too close together, places where the charges would not be visible to someone passing by, places where he could hide when he attached the bombs. He told the boy it was particularly important that certain valves be destroyed so the valves couldn’t be shut to stop the chemical from escaping.
He purchased bright-colored clothes for the boy, the type of clothes that teenagers his age wore: a sweatshirt that had the logo of a local sports team, baggy jeans, silly-looking tennis shoes. He made the boy turn the bill of the baseball cap around so it was pointed backwards, and when the boy did he couldn’t help but laugh. Even the boy laughed, something that rarely happened.
And he told the boy, ‘Don’t sneak. Don’t act like you’re skulking about. Act like a boy. Throw rocks, kick cans, run a stick along the fence. You’re just a boy walking about, going wherever boys go.’ On the last visit they’d been lucky enough to find a dog wandering near the refinery, and he tied his belt around the dog’s neck to serve as a leash, and the boy had pretended to walk the dog as he looked for places to hide the bombs.
23
‘So you wanna know about Jubal Pugh,’ Patsy Hall said.
Hall was a mid-level supervisor at the DEA, and according to Barry King she was the DEA’s expert on Pugh. She was in her early forties and had smile lines bracketing intelligent brown eyes, a trim build, and short-cut, no-fuss dark hair. She was wearing a charcoal-gray pantsuit, a white blouse, and a big gun in a holster on her hip. She was short enough – and the gun was big enough – that the handgrip o
n the gun was halfway up her rib cage.
Two minutes with Hall, and you knew you were dealing with someone who was bright, tough, stubborn, and confident. DeMarco bet that none of the men who worked for her had any doubt that she was the boss, and most of them, the ones with any brains, knew she deserved to be the boss.
‘Jubal Pugh,’ Patsy said, ‘likes to—’
‘Jubal,’ DeMarco said. ‘That name just cracks me up.’
‘His full name in Jubal Early Pugh, Jubal Early having been a Confederate Army general who – Aw, never mind. At any rate, Jubal likes to wear an old slouch hat and he shaves about once a week. In the summer, he wears bib overalls, no shirt, no shoes, and he talks so slow you wonder if he’s ever gonna finish a sentence. Your first impression would be that he’s the brother of the guy who played the banjo in Deliverance. And you’d be totally wrong.
‘Pugh sells meth; he’s one of the top five dealers in Virginia. His territory also includes parts of West Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. I know he’s killed people and burned their houses and intimidated witnesses to stay king of his little hill. I know all this, and I haven’t even been able to arrest the bastard, much less convict him. And I’ve been after him for more than five years.’
Hall gave a little tug on her holster to readjust the pistol grip digging into her ribs.
‘Jubal didn’t go to school beyond the tenth grade, and he started out with a 1956 Airstream trailer and ten acres he inherited from his daddy. Today he owns four hundred acres. He’s got apple orchards and gas stations and a muffler shop, and he makes cider for sale. He uses these businesses to launder his drug money. He’s not that smart, but he’s smart enough to know what he doesn’t know. He’s got a good accountant, who makes sure he stays out of trouble with the IRS, and another guy who manages his legitimate businesses. And even though he’s no Rhodes scholar, he hires people that are competent and then he micromanages the shit out of them so they don’t screw up.’
