“What kind of a room?”
“A square room with junk in it, some shelves with junk on them. Old paint cans, shit like that.”
“How big?”
“Not big, like the size of your bedroom. The ceiling’s low, so you’ll have to duck some more.”
“Let’s go,” he said.
Chapter 46
Manhattan,
Friday, March 6, 2009,
9:45PM
Matteo, Sr. had taken Matt to the East Coast War Memorial on the day it was dedicated by President Kennedy in 1963. His father’s brother Sabato, a merchant marine man lost in the North Atlantic in 1942, was one of the names inscribed on the eight stone slabs that flanked a bronze eagle on a raised semi-circular concrete platform at the north end of the park. Matt, one at the time, remembered nothing of the day. He liked to go to the dedications, Matteo, if he could. He went by himself to the dedication in 1951, by President Eisenhower, of the Marine Corps National Memorial in Washington. When Matt was ten, in 1972, his dad took him to see the Corp’s Sunset Parade at the Memorial, featuring the Drum and Bugle Corps and the Silent Drill Platoon. The flag flies every day here, Matteo had said. It’s the only one. In 1986 they went to the dedication of the Beirut Memorial at Camp Lejuene, where the tears fell like rain, including Matteo’s. They were planning to go to the opening ceremony for the Korean War Memorial scheduled for July, 1993, when Matteo died. Matt went without him, but that was his last, until tonight. Are you here, Pop? he said to himself. I hope so.
“He’s late,” Matt thought. They had arrived early, he and Jack and Clarke and Stryker, in time to give the lawyer his simple instructions: Stand there and wait, we’ll do the rest, and to post themselves as invisibly as they could. His watch now read 10:05. He was sitting on a bench under a copse of trees about fifty yards away, watching Stryker, who was standing next to the eagle, his hands in his pockets, the collar of his camel hair coat up. The eagle was lit by recessed ground lights, which formed a spotlight of sorts on Stryker. The wind off of New York Bay was up and whipping the lawyer’s white hair into a froth. A character out of Shakespeare, Matt thought, or a Greek tragedy, the king about to take a big fall.
His gloved hand gripped the Ingram 19 in his coat pocket, produced nonchalantly by Jack McCann from the glove compartment of his unmarked car on the short ride down to the tip of Manhattan. CB’s got plenty of these, Jack had said, smiling, holding his own Ingram to Stryker’s ribs in the back seat. Jack and Clarke were in the trees behind the platform, also some fifty yards away. The starkly bare trees afforded little cover, but the night sky was filled with thick clouds, making the park beyond the cone of light around the eagle a dense, near-impenetrable black.
A bearded figure appeared, bulky in a short thick coat and a woolen cap, climbing the six or seven steps that swept visitors up to the memorial’s promenade. He had appeared from Matt’s right, seemingly out of nowhere, but then Matt realized he had been standing among the trees nearby all along, waiting in the same black cover as he and Jack and Clarke were, doing his own reconnaissance. Matt got to his feet and began walking toward the memorial. Jack and Clarke, he knew, were doing the same. He had taken only a few steps, still hidden by the night, when two other men appeared, from behind the stone slabs, and took up positions on either side of Mustafa and Stryker. Both were wearing dark leather overcoats. One was tall and thin, with a perfect V-shaped beard on his face, the other squat and full-bearded. Both had their hands in the pockets of their overcoats.
When Matt reached the steps he pulled his Ingram out and stepped quickly onto the platform. “Hold it,” he said, pointing the pistol at Mustafa and his two young soldiers. “Don’t move.” At almost the same moment, Jack and Clarke appeared, Jack from the right, Clarke from the left, their pistols in their hands, their arms extended. “Get down,” Clarke shouted. “Down on the ground.” He was about twenty steps away from the four men clustered under the bronze eagle, the ground lights on them as if they were players on a stage, frozen for a second, but waiting for a cue to perform. V-beard and his partner each drew pistols from their coat pockets, but before they could take aim, Matt began firing, as did Jack and Clarke. Mustafa pushed Stryker in front of him as this hell broke loose. In a matter of seconds, Mustafa, Stryker, V-beard and his partner were down, all shot in the chest, all dead.
“Leave your guns,” said Jack. “Take theirs.”
“Leave our guns?” Matt said.
“They’re CB guns, Matt,” said Clarke. “Untraceable.”
“These two guys killed Mustafa and Stryker,” Jack said, picking up a Glock 17 and placing his Ingram next to V-beard’s gloved hand. “God knows why. That is Mustafa, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Matt answered.
“Good, drop your gun next to him,” said Clarke. Matt did as he was told, while Goode picked up full-beard’s gun and replaced it with his own.
“Must have been a hell of a shoot out,” said Jack, smiling his wicked smile.
Chapter 47
Whitestone, Queens,
Friday, March 6, 2009,
10:15PM
Michael and Antonio stopped at the door to Lucky’s basement. They had groped the secret passage’s rough stone wall in the pitch black, keeping their eyes on the rectangular line of light around the door at its far end. Standing still, trying not to breathe, they listened to the faint but unmistakable sound of rock music on the other side of the door. Turning the knob as silently as he could, Michael pushed the door open and they stepped quietly into the basement, finding themselves, as Michael had said, behind the seven-foot high wooden frame of a long abandoned coal stall. The music was louder now, coming from the opposite side of the room, which they could see was lit by an electric bulb in a wire cage hung between dirt-encrusted steel beams in the exposed ceiling. They crouched and waited for some other sound, but heard nothing.
Gesturing to Antonio to stay low, Michael stepped on the concrete foundation that held the stall and peered over the top plank. A man, about twenty, his eyes closed, his head against the wall to his right, an automatic rifle resting on his lap, was sitting on the bottom step of the open wooden staircase that led up to Lucky’s back hallway. Next to him on an overturned plastic bucket was a transistor radio on which the Doors’ Light My Fire was playing at low volume through the hiss of interspersed static. Michael scanned the room quickly, then crouched back behind the wooden wall. He mouthed I don’t see her to Antonio, and was about to indicate that there was a man with a gun, when the teenager gripped the top of the stall and began to rise to look for himself. As he did, the top plank tore off with a loud crack. Plank in hand, Antonio ducked and froze, as did Michael. At first they heard only the music, but within a second or two came the unmistakable sound of footsteps approaching the coal bin. When they got close, Antonio sprung out and swung the plank full force, striking the guard, if that’s what he was, in the side of the head, knocking him to the concrete floor and sending his rifle clattering across the room. Before the man could move, Antonio swung the plank again, this time hitting him square on the top of his head and knocking him out cold.
“He’s out,” Michael said. “Listen. Do you hear anything?”
They stood still for a second or two, looking down at the felled rifleman.
“No,” Antonio said, finally. “Just the music.”
“Is she here?” said Michael. They both looked around the room, which was filled with more junk than Michael had remembered. Dusty cases of old soda bottles were piled on the floor. Gallon paint cans, bags of grout and stacks of cracked ceramic tiles lined the shelves, a chipped sink covered with cobwebs sat in a corner. The smell of mold and must filled the air.
“What was he guarding if it wasn’t her?” Antonio said.
“She has to be… There.” Michael pointed to a tattered blanket, army green, hanging over the space under the stairs. Antonio
reached the spot in one long step, sweeping the blanket away to reveal Jade kneeling on a dirty mattress, her hands trussed behind her back to her feet, a bruise covering the whole of one side of her face, gagged, a towel tied around her eyes.
“Mom,” Antonio said, kneeling and taking her face in his hands. “Mom.”
Chapter 48
Stone Ridge,
Saturday, March 7, 2009,
1PM
The Catamount Motel, with its apple orchard and pretty, oval pond, was set in a small hollow, surrounded by rocky, tree-covered outcroppings on all sides. On one of these outcroppings, behind a row of stunted mountain laurel, crouched Matt DeMarco and Basil al-Hassan. Both had field glasses to their eyes, which they had trained at the moment on the entrance of the motel’s driveway on Route 12. Occasionally one or the other would swing his binoculars over to look at the door to Room 6, and then back again. The same strong wind that had riled Everett Stryker’s thick white hair last night had swept away the clouds over the Hudson Valley, leaving a clear, pale blue sky through which the sun was shining brightly. The surrounding snow-clad fields and woods, the frozen pond, and the motel’s low-pitched snow-covered roof were glistening with a liquid whiteness as the first warm sunlight in a month reached them.
Adnan Farah was not in Room 6. He had been there for the past three days, but was now on his way to Beirut at the request of the Dutch government. From conversations he had had with McCann and Goode, who had been summoned to the commissioner’s office for a six AM meeting, Matt had learned that The Hague had not taken well the loss of the Fuchs brothers, who had dedicated most of their lives to keeping The Netherlands safe. Apparently Josef and Wilem had been on the phone while they were holed up with Farah in Room 6 of the Catamount. The Dutch prime minister had called the Secretary-General of the UN, and persuaded him to demand that Farah, a suspect in the UN’s investigation into the assassination of Rafik Hariri, be handed over to Monteverde, and that Erhard Fuchs’ surveillance log be made available, as was Ehrhard’s wish, to the Manhattan District Attorney. The US, officially in full support of the UN investigation, had agreed. Bill Crow? Jack had said, He doesn’t exist. Alec Mason? A suicide. That’s a different league they play in, Matt.
Someone high up in the US Justice Department had called Jon Healy, who had then moved, with undignified alacrity, to dismiss the charges against Michael.
Jade, who had been mistreated but not raped, was at Matt’s house in Pound Ridge, resting. Michael and Antonio were there as well. Jack and Clarke had rounded up some off-duty NYPD officers to do protection duty. Many more than were needed had offered. Matt had called Crow several times, to try to lure him out, but his calls had gone to a dead phone. Back into the woodwork, Matt had said to himself, with the other cockroaches.
Which left Haq, the mastermind, the start of all the killing, the dead bodies all pointing back at him. Basil wanted him dead, and Matt, leaving Jack and Clarke out of it, had agreed to help the man who had posted Michael’s bail and buried his mother, who had tried to help him rescue Jade, and who was a Muslim on the side of the angels in an Islamic world gone mad.
Early this morning a young Syrian associate of Hassan’s had materialized in a beat-up van, wired the door to Room 6 with a quiet professionalism, and vanished in the space of thirty minutes. Then, Basil, through a maze of official and unofficial channels, had reached Haq, his countryman, his compatriot, and told him that he knew where Adnan Farah was and that he felt it his patriotic duty to inform him of the young technician’s whereabouts. He cannot move, Basil had told Haq. He is sick. He wants to talk to you, Colonel, only you. The people that were holding him have vanished. He says they told him many interesting things about the Hariri investigation, things he would like to pass along to you personally. He called me, but he won’t speak to me, only to you or Mustafa, who has returned to Syria to be with his sick brother.
Why would he believe you? Matt, who had heard Basil’s end of the conversation, asked.
He thinks I am desperate, trying to curry favor, Basil had answered. He cannot reach Mustafa. He may think his faithful servant has turned on him, that he has his own agenda.
Freeing his son?
Yes. Adnan can expose him. I think he will come.
What if he doesn’t show?
One way or another, I will need asylum.
They had taken up their position after the call to Haq. Three hours had passed. A few minutes ago, a pickup went by on Route 12, the only car they had seen all morning.
“We could just leave,” said Matt. “The bomb will go off whether we’re here or not.”
“He may send someone else,” said Basil. “I want…”
Before Basil could finish his sentence, the gleam of a car turning off Route 12 onto the Catamount’s snow-covered driveway caught both of their eyes at the same time. They raised their binoculars to see a black Mercedes sedan with diplomatic plates churning slowly through the snow toward the motel, then stopping in front of Room 6. Three men got out, one from the front passenger side and the others from the back, all dressed like bankers in overcoats and wool scarves, and headed across the small concrete apron that ran along the front of the rooms. The driver stayed behind, pulling the large sedan forward into the motel’s parking lot, where he began to make a sweeping U-turn in the snow. Matt followed the sedan with his binoculars for a second, then returned them to Room 6.
“Is one of them Haq?” he asked.
“Yes,” Hassan replied. “The one on the right.”
Matt could see that Haq was older, perhaps sixty, the other two younger, in their twenties. One of the young ones approached the door first, reached for the doorknob and began to turn it. Then all three disappeared in a ball of fire as Room 6 exploded, spewing smoke and burning debris out to a fifty-foot perimeter, some of it, still burning, landing on the hood of the sedan, which had come to a sudden stop in the middle of its U-turn. Matt and Basil watched as the Mercedes, snow spraying from the treads of its German-made tires, circled the ashen debris field, sped along the driveway and turned onto Route 12, disappearing quickly from view behind the tall pine trees that lined it.
“Let’s go,” Basil said, smiling, getting to his feet.
Then a shot rang out and the handsome Syrian was on the ground, a bullet hole, perfectly round, ringed with blood, in the middle of his forehead.
“Fuck,” Matt said, throwing himself flat and bellying toward Hassan. “Basil?” he said, when he reached him, taking him by the arm and shaking him. Dead. “Fuck.” Then another shot hit a tree behind him and another hit the small boulder he had been crouching behind. Staying on his stomach, Matt reached for his binoculars, crawled to a small opening between the boulder and the mountain laurel and took a look across the hollow, a distance of about a hundred yards. The sun was behind him, shining on the opposite rocky ledge. His eyes were drawn to a quick bright flash. Swinging the glasses toward it, he saw Bill Crow, on one knee, aiming a scoped rifle in his direction.
Looking around, Matt saw a laurel branch, narrow at the bottom but still leafed at the top, in the snow some ten feet away. He belly-crawled to it, and, reaching it, turned onto his back and pulled off his black Gore-Tex jacket. Still on his back, looking up through the trees to that pretty blue sky, he placed the leafy end of the branch inside his jacket, up near the collar. Taking hold of the other end, he raised the jacket and almost immediately a shot ripped through it above the breast pocket, where a person’s heart would be. He pulled the jacket down, turned onto his belly again and elbowed his way back to the opening next to the boulder. He saw nothing, no flashes from a scope, no Crow. No more moving, he said to himself. The sun’s behind you, there won’t be a reflection from your lens. He reached into the back pocket of his jeans and pulled out the SIG P226 Jack had given him last night to replace the Ingram he had left at the War Memorial. It’s a present, Jack had said, pulling the pi
stol from a case of un-numbered automatic and semi-automatic handguns that his friends in the Counterterrorism Bureau had given him. You may still need it.
Wait, he said to himself. Wait until dark.
But he didn’t have to wait. There was Crow stepping down from his rock perch, his rifle slung over his shoulder. When he reached the pond, Matt, still fully prone, extended his arms, cradled the SIG and aimed it at Crow’s feet. It’ll kick like a motherfucker, McCann had said. Aim low, keep it on automatic. The rounds will spray upward. When Crow was almost to his side of the pond, Matt pulled firmly on the trigger, then watched as the Native American with the large chip on his shoulder, the chip that had killed him, pitched forward onto the ice, slid a few feet and came to a stop, his arms and legs splayed out like he was skydiving. Skydiving and bleeding at the same time, the ice around him turning a deep shimmering crimson.
Epilogue
Pound Ridge,
Saturday, March 14, 2009,
2PM
The thumping sound from the driveway re-announced itself when Matt turned off the water after rinsing the last of the lunch dishes. Except for that, the house and the whole neighborhood was quiet, as it always was in Pound Ridge. Peaceful. The boys had devoured the potatoes and eggs and hot peppers he had made and served with thick slices of Italian bread, and then gone out and shoveled the last of the snow off the half-court he had laid out eight years ago. The court had never been used, and neither had the Wilson ball that Michael retrieved from a utility closet in the garage. The day was clear and sunny and warm, the first touch of spring in the air. Jade was out buying food for dinner.
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