by Alan Zendell
“What would that accomplish that would be worth a turf battle over jurisdiction?”
“A couple of things. First, I could check the crew for traces of radioactivity.”
“Can’t the Harbor Patrol do that?”
“Probably, but if they find anything you’ll want me there. Also, it’s likely that any of the crew who knew what they were carrying understood the risks. With Sam’s help, I could test that and maybe trick them into revealing more knowledge than a journeyman seaman ought to have.”
That was complete bullshit, but William thought it over. I think what tipped the balance was that sitting and waiting for others to mess things up stuck in William’s craw as much as it did mine. His response was more than I’d hoped for.
“I like it. I like it so much, we won’t waste time going through channels. Like you said, if Homeland Security doesn’t like it, screw ’em. Can you be downtown at 12:30? I’ll round up Sam and meet you at the Federal Detention Center.” Way to go, William! Once he fixed on an objective it was best to get out of his way.
I did a quick touch-up of my face. A brief soak with a hot washcloth cleaned off the dead skin and some of the remaining scabs, and a few dabs of Ilene’s liquid makeup reduced the redness on my cheek. Reflecting sunglasses helped, too.
The 11:40 train into Manhattan got me to Christopher Street a few minutes after noon, an easy six-block walk from the Detention Center. I got there in time to see William and Samir approaching from the Houston Street subway station. William winced when he saw me. “Fall asleep in the sun?”
I laughed, and no one mentioned my face again. We entered the facility in a three-man wedge with William at the point. He flashed his ID at the federal cop monitoring the metal detectors, signed the entry log, and demanded to be escorted to the detainee holding area. When the cop hesitated, William recorded his name and badge number. “I don’t have much time, son. If you can’t handle this, I’ll deal with your supervisor. Now!” I felt sorry for the guy.
Ten minutes later we entered what looked like a high school gymnasium, with bleachers along one wall, in front of which stood eight armed guards. Twenty or so men, looking as though they hadn’t washed or shaved in days, were seated far enough apart to prevent them from communicating with each other.
I scanned the bleachers, looking for two individuals. I spotted one, immediately, still wearing the UCLA shirt I’d seen on Thursday. There was no sign of the other one.
“Is this all of them?” I asked one of the guards.
“There are three more being interviewed.” He gestured toward some screened cubicles at one end of the large enclosure. “Over there.”
I walked over to where a frustrated-looking Samir was standing. He’d intended to get close enough to the detainees to overhear snatches of conversation, but the enforced silence had left him with nothing to do while William negotiated with the Harbor Patrol Captain. A couple of minutes later, two men emerged from one of the cubicles, one in a Patrol uniform, the other in jeans, a dirty tee shirt that had once been white, and a New York Yankees cap. Bingo.
Improvising on the fly, I turned to Samir. “I need your help. Trust me?”
We approached the officer escorting Mr. Yankee Cap, and I took him aside.
“Can we isolate this guy from the group? I want to try something.” The officer handed me his clipboard and seated Mr. Yankee Cap apart from but in plain view of the other detainees with a guard posted at his side. Samir and I reviewed the officer’s interview report, which told us that Achmed Abdul Qadur spoke little or no English and knew nothing about anything.
“What’s going on, Dylan?” I understood Samir’s consternation. In the past, I’d always followed either his lead or William’s; he’d never seen me take this kind of initiative.
“I’ll explain later,” I said, hoping he’d let things be for the moment, and led him to where William was pressing a point with the Captain. A stack of six-by-nine cards containing photos, fingerprints, and personal data for each captive was on the table in front of them.
“Excuse me, sir,” I said, addressing the Captain and interrupting William. “Can I borrow these?”
The Captain looked to William, who nodded affirmatively. “Help yourself.”
Walking with Samir, I leafed through the cards until I found Achmed’s and the one with the picture of the guy in the UCLA sweat shirt. Samir looked bemused but didn’t say anything. “I need you pretend to be an interpreter, and let me ask the questions. I’ll be the belligerent asshole they expect while you act sympathetic, maybe mutter something to that effect in Arabic when it seems appropriate. Just play along and try not to act surprised by anything, okay?”
Samir agreed, struggling to suppress a smirk. We approached Achmed and dismissed his guard. He looked at us warily and I made sure he saw whose picture I held next to his.
“Achmed Abdul Qadur?” I mangled the pronunciation of his name deliberately and Samir did an admirable job of maintaining a straight face.
Achmed glared at me, his face a mask of superior insolence. I had no illusions about understanding the psyche of an Arab ship hand. But if Achmed was an average seaman about to be exposed for some petty crime, who’d been yanked off a ship after it was rammed by an exploding tugboat and thrown into detention in the land of the Devil, I guessed he’d try not to piss off his inquisitors. I took off my sunglasses and glared back, trying to convey revulsion and disgust as I studied him, from his greasy hair to the grimy toes protruding from his open sandals.
“Tell him that most of his friends will be released, as soon as we locate a ship willing to take them,” I instructed Samir. Achmed might or might not understand more English than he claimed, but he couldn’t mistake my sneering tone. “Make sure he knows that doesn’t include him. Tell him he we know what he was sent here to do, and he won’t survive a week in one of our prisons once the other inmates find out.”
As Samir translated, I did my best to look intimidating. Maybe I don’t look mean enough; the son of a bitch never even flinched. He glared hatred at me until it was I who looked away. I’d never been face-to-face with anyone like Achmed before. For that matter, I’d never conducted a hostile interrogation. The malevolence of Achmed’s stare cut right through me. But after the way he’d tried to escape on Thursday, I felt sure he held the key to what we were looking for. I couldn’t let anything stop me from finding it.
I didn’t mind letting him think he’d won that round. This little drama was for the benefit of Assem Hamid Jabir, who watched intently from inside the hood of his UCLA sweatshirt. Either he was trying to hide or they didn’t have air conditioning where he came from.
I spent several minutes stoking Achmed’s loathing, noting that some of Samir’s translations seemed overlong, and wondering if Assem could see Achmed’s eyes bug out with rage from eighty feet away.
I turned to Samir and spoke so Achmed could hear me. “Does he understand me?”
“I’m sure of it. I can tell from his eyes that he doesn’t need my translation.” No more good cop/bad cop.
I thought I played the final act to perfection, reaching down and grabbing the neck of Achmed’s shirt, jerking him off his seat in plain view of everyone in the gym. In his face, I said, “You’re going to tell me who sent you, you bastard!” He just glared silently at me.
I released him and backhanded his face hard enough for him to see stars as he dropped back to his seat. I was as shocked by what I’d done as Achmed. I’d always been horrified by stories of prisoner abuse, yet I’d hit him without a thought. The resulting hush told me I had everyone’s attention.
Resisting the temptation to turn to see how William was reacting, I held up the picture of Assem and pointed to him, towering over the now-cringing Achmed and stage-whispering, “We know what you and Assem were up to, Achmed. What will your friends think when they see you giving him up to gain your release? Tell me who sent you here or you’re a dead man.”
He tried to stare me down again, t
his time from six inches away. His malevolence got to me again, heightened by the stench of his filth and sweat. His glare told me he would gladly kill me if he could; a part of me I hadn’t known was there whispered, unless I kill you first. His rage filled me and I made it my own, submerging my moral center so deep I was deaf to it. No way was I going to let Achmed and his friends hurt my family, my city, or my country. I brought my left shoe down on his foot, grinding the heel onto his exposed big toe. Everyone saw his back stiffen from the unexpected pain, but not what caused it. His gaze locked on Assem.
I pressed harder on his toe, feeling something give. He gritted his teeth, and I said, “Louder, Achmed I can’t hear you,” making sure Assem heard me. I leaned down to put my ear to his mouth, effectively blocking everyone’s view of his lips. Then I rose, and looked directly at Assem, releasing Achmed’s crushed toe.
“Assem Hamid Jabir,” I shouted. “Achmed says you have something to tell us.”
William watched attentively, and the Harbor Patrol Captain signaled for one of the guards to escort Assem down to Samir.
Remembering how he and Achmed had run on Thursday, I wasn’t surprised when Assem broke away from the guard. He got three steps before Samir tripped him and pounced on him, levering his arm backward until he screamed. Assem rose, glaring at Achmed, who said, in perfect English, “They lie, my brother, you know I would not.”
Samir dragged Assem to his feet and led him to where Achmed was trying to stand on his damaged toe. As he passed me he turned and spat, his sputum landing squarely on my face. “You think you have won,” he sneered, “but you are too late.” He barely got the last word out when William, who had been striding rapidly toward us, slammed a ham-sized fist into his face. It’d be a while before Assem spoke clearly.
Samir and I watched as the two prisoners were cuffed and led away. “What do you suppose he meant by that?” Samir asked William.
“He meant Dylan was right. We can search that ship until doomsday but we won’t find a thing. I need to go sit in on their interrogation. We may still salvage something from all this.”
“How’s your hand, William?” I asked, still wiping my face.
Samir looked at me as though he wasn’t sure who I was. “What the hell was that, Dylan?” He clearly expected an answer.
In Samir’s world what I did to Achmed was mild. He didn’t sound like he was scolding me for abusing a prisoner, though with my adrenaline level returning to normal, I knew I had some explaining to do – to myself.
“Your insight was inspirational,” Samir said, “How did you know?”
I should have realized this moment would come. “The UCLA shirt made me suspicious,” I lied. “It seemed over the top. The others were sullen and morose, but the more I watched Assem, the more nervous he seemed. Then I saw Achmed’s Yankee cap and the way Assem’s eyes followed him when he came out of the interview room. After that I just went with my gut.”
Samir was much too smart to buy that crap, but to my surprise, he just shook his head in amazement. Weak as my explanation was, he obviously couldn’t imagine a better one.
“By the way,” I said, “what did you say to Achmed that made him so rabid?”
“I told him your mother was a Zionist whore and you wiped your ass with pages torn from the Quran.” I suppressed an impulse to hug him and tell him how glad I was that he was alive.
WEEK 3
19.
Samir’s acceptance of my flimsy explanation, followed later by William’s, taught me a valuable lesson. People are drawn to success. They want to believe in winning streaks. Caught up in the excitement of watching someone roll a string of sevens, no one thinks about how improbable it is. All that matters is winning, and the greater the stakes, the more likely people are to accept it without question, so I decided to stop worrying about protecting my secret. If I told the truth no one would believe me, anyway. And if they began suspecting that I had my own confidential sources, I could live with that.
I left the Detention Center high on the knowledge that I’d been able to use the strange turn my life had taken to save Samir and the two gorillas, but the terrorists were still winning. My high wouldn’t survive long against the reality that they’d successfully smuggled dangerous isotopes into the area.
With eighty minutes until my train left, I walked, soaking up the vibrancy of the city. I went north on Hudson Street, not far from where the NRC radiation lab that was the site of my first job had been, remembering the queasy feeling I had when I discovered that such a place existed in the heart of lower Manhattan. I’d worried, back then, what would happen if the isotopes we worked with got loose. All these years later, I’d come full circle.
I’d been involved with William for more than half that time, but I’d always been the science geek, letting others do the dirty work. That had changed, today. My rush long since spent, I thought about what I’d done to Achmed and recoiled inside. Had I witnessed someone else doing what I did, I’d have felt…what? With each step I took I relived the feeling of his bones crunching under my heel. I stopped and leaned against a lamppost trying to silence an inner voice that accused me of violating something basic I’d thought I believed.
I started walking again. At Clarkson Street, I came to a New York anomaly, a monument to a Depression-era mayor, neither statue nor building, but a postage stamp-sized park. Where but New York City could you cram a baseball field, a municipal swimming pool, and five recreation buildings into an acre and a half?
A game was in progress. I slipped inside the fence to find a set of bleachers much like the ones in the Detention Center, except that these were populated by kids and parents, old, lonely-looking men, and a few, like me, who just looked like they needed to escape for a while.
I watched the kids play, feeling, at once, the idyllic nature of the scene and the horror of what it could become if terrorists were allowed to turn it into a radioactive wasteland. Suddenly, what I’d done to Achmed didn’t seem so bad. I wondered what my father would have said.
He’d been awarded a Purple Heart in Korea. I’d always been naively proud of his injury, without giving any thought to what he must have experienced in combat, until the day he heard me telling Gregg he was a war hero. Looking stricken, he walked to the corner of the room and sat in a chair, staring out the window. Hours later, he approached me with tears in his eyes, the only time I’ve ever seen him cry.
Speaking softly, as if he had barely enough energy to get the words out, he said, “I’m no hero, Dylan. There’s nothing positive about being in combat, not ever. You do things you thought you never would because you have no choice. I didn’t know if I was capable of firing my gun at another human being until the day my platoon was ambushed and I saw my friends being shot down. I was no hero, I was crazy with rage and fear. I killed four enemy soldiers and got shot in the leg. They gave me a medal, but it was the most terrible day of my life.”
I told him he was wrong, he’d just done what he had to but he shook his head.
“You just don’t get it, Dylan. That doesn’t matter.”
Doesn’t it? I’d never understood it before, but I knew, at that moment, that my father was wrong. He’d fought his war on a battlefield. Mine was here, in the streets, on the pier, in that gym – wherever people like Achmed threatened the things I cared about. I took no joy in what I did to him, but I’d do it again if I had to. Damn right I would.
***
I called Gayle’s house from behind third base. She’d been fitted with a walking cast, and she’d be back in the office next week.
“Wilson told me you stopped by yesterday.” She sounded awful.
“I was checking on how things were going. He said everything was on track, and you were managing things from home.”
“They’re doing great without me, thanks to you.”
“It’s not because of me. Except for a two-minute conversation with Wilson, I’ve barely had time to look at your project all week.”
“I gu
ess you were too busy to return my calls, too.”
Oops.
“I only heard your message a little while ago.”
“I left a couple on your cell phone on Wednesday, too.”
I still wasn’t sure how people reacted to my not being there when I skipped a day, but this week, even on my Wednesday, I was completely out of touch.
“I’m sorry. It’s been a hellish week. I haven’t looked at my cell phone since Tuesday.” I’d swapped it for my secure Agency phone before leaving to meet William, Thursday morning. It had been locked in my briefcase, and I hadn’t turned it back on until a few minutes ago.
“Damn, I did it again. I shouldn’t lay my problems on you. It’s just that…”
“What? Tell me.”
“You’ll think I’m nuts,” she sighed. “I really needed to talk to you Tuesday evening, but I didn’t want to bother you at home, so I put a reminder in my phone to call the next morning. The last thing I did Tuesday night was think about what I wanted to say to you. Then, Wednesday morning, I had a nagging feeling there was something I was supposed to do, but I couldn’t remember what. It was only when my phone chimed that I remembered how badly I wanted to talk to you. It was weird.”
“Not really. You’re under stress.”
“That was what I wanted to talk to you about. But there’s more. Something distracted me, and I forgot again. When my phone reminded me an hour later, I had the oddest sensation, like it wasn’t just slipping my mind, something was making me forget.”
Something like a giant rubber band imbued with enormous potential energy?
“Let’s not worry about that now. What do you need?”
“What do I need? Maybe a new husband.”
Oh.
“Are you sure I’m the one you should be talking to?”
“Who else? I don’t usually discuss these things with women friends. I could talk to Ilene, but you’re the one I trust with this. I know you’ll keep me honest. Unless you’d rather not?”
I assured her that I was okay with it, and she said being home all week had been the breaking point for tensions that had been growing over many months when Rod either wasn’t there, or took no responsibility for the house or family when he was.
