Aim True, My Brothers

by William F. Brown

  Al-Bari motioned toward the lettering on the van. “More Irish Humor, Mr. Murphy?”

  “Oh, no, lad. We own the business. When hard times come, a man's gotta eat; and me old Da told me a butcher shop’s as good a way as any to get rid of a body.”

  “Sage advice, I am sure,” Al-Bari said as he looked at the truck again. “But you ignored my orders. You brought two men with you.”

  “Look, Teraki, that bloody thing’s heavy! You’re gonna need some muscle to get it out of my trailer and into your truck,” Murphy said as he looked around. “You did bring a truck, didn’t you?”

  “No, I am taking yours.”

  “Oh, you can’t do that now, mate,” Murphy groaned. “The trailer’s got to go back to U-Haul and that’s me wife’s car. She’ll kill me.”

  “Better her than me, Murphy.” Al-Bari reached for his wallet and quickly counted out some large bills. “Here is an extra thousand to cover your trouble and keep your wife happy. We’ll phone you and let you know where you can pick it up in a few days,” he said as he put the wallet back in his inside jacket pocket, and his hand came back out with the silenced 9-mm SIG Sauer. With a soft Pfoot! Al-Bari shot John in the knee.

  “Ah! You Wog bastard!” the big Irishman screamed as he grabbed his leg and crumpled at Murphy's feet, rolling around on the pavement. “Ahhhh…”

  Al-Bari turned the automatic on Murphy. “I believe that is the punishment your IRA metes out for disobedience, isn’t it, Mate?”

  Before Murphy or the big bartender could do anything about it, Hafez Arazi suddenly appeared behind them and jammed the barrel of another SIG Sauer into Murphy's ear.

  “You'll die for this,” Murphy glared at Al-Bari.

  “If I thought there was even a glimmer of that possibility, I would have shot you and your other man too, not just this one. Now get in your van, and leave while you still can. And do not entertain any further thoughts about us. If you do, they shall be your last.”

  Murphy and Big Pat got John up and helped him into the Kosher meat van. The doors slammed and the van’s tires squealed as it sped out of the parking lot.

  “Let us go, Hafez,” Al-Bari said as he watched its taillights disappear down the street. “The Irishman may have more men around.”

  Inside the white delivery van, Murphy sat behind the wheel, fuming as he drove away. In the glow of the instrument panel, his face was flushed with anger. In the back, John writhed on the floor in pain.

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Murph,” Big Pat said, “John's bleedin' like a stuck pig here.”

  “Of course he's bleedin,' you ass! He just got himself shot, now didn’t he? So, shut yer yap and let me think.”

  Murphy reached over, picked up a two-way radio off the dash, and keyed the mike. “Danny! Can you tell if the bastard's left yet? That beeper better be workin’, Boyo! You got him on your screen yet?”

  “Aye, Murph. Don’t worry. I got him.”

  “Good! Don't lose him, you hear! We've got to drop John off at the hospital.”

  “Something happened to John, then?”

  “Aye! He didn't do what he was told. So, you keep followin’ that Wog. I want to know where he’s goin’ and what he’s doin’, you hear me?”

  “But Murph, what if…”

  “No ‘buts’ or ‘what ifs’, Danny. Follow him to Hell if you have to, but don’t you dare lose him. We’ll see who’s so smart now,” he snorted as he hung up.

  “How’d you figure they’d take your car and the U-Haul, Murph?” Big Pat asked. “You are one smart Mick to put a tracker on it, I gotta give you that.”

  “Something told me that’s what he’d do, that’s all. I figured he’d think that taking ours would be a whole lot easier than him rentin’ a car and trailer up here… and he wouldn’t be leavin’ no paper trail.”

  “Only a gunshot knee,” John groaned. “I’ll kill him, I swear.”

  As Al-Bari sank back in the Chevy’s front seat, he tried to relax. “You had no problem with the flights, Hafez?”

  “None. I did as you said, picked up the gun, and caught a cab.”

  “Good,” he said as his mind turned to the long drive ahead. It was six hundred miles from Boston to Yorktown. With him and Arazi both driving, they would be there by late afternoon the next day, but it would be a long night. Motive, opportunity, and now the means, he thought, just like on those insipid American police shows. He now had the means.

  “I found a self-storage place in Virginia that is not far from Yorktown. We will store the weapon there until we get the truck back tomorrow.”

  “What will we do with Murphy’s car and trailer?”

  “We shall leave them at Dante’s.”

  “He won’t mind?” Arazi asked.

  “No, he won’t mind,” Al-Bari smiled.

  There was no turning back now. He suspected the Egyptians were already on his trail after he killed Trench Coat, and probably the Americans, too; but they were too slow and too incompetent to hope to catch up. By now, Sayef’s people in Beirut would want him very badly, too. They all hated him now, even Sayef, but there was nothing any of them could do to stop him. His plan was like a random motion machine. Slowly, the time, the location, and the seemingly innocent activity would all come together at the precise time and place where he would strike, but not until then.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Washington, DC, Wednesday, October 17, 5:50 a.m.

  Senior Secret Service Agent Frank Daniels had a bad day and a long night before he was finally able to crawl into bed around 1:00 a.m. “Nothing but jerks and morons anymore. That’s all I deal with, jerks and morons,” he muttered to his wife.

  “Then retire. You don’t need it, and I sure don’t either,” his wife answered.

  They were both sound asleep when the bedside phone began to ring, and ring, and ring. Finally, his wife, Janice, rolled over and jabbed him in the ribs with a sharp elbow. “Frank… Frank! Will you please answer that goddamn thing?” Finally, she growled in disgust, rolled over, and pulled the pillow over her head. “Bastards!” she muttered.

  Daniels groped for the phone and knocked it off the table onto the floor. Leaning over, he grabbed for it as it bounced and skittered noisily across the hardwood. It was out of reach, but his fingers found the cord. He reeled it in and raised the phone to his ear.

  “Yeah. Whozit?” he rasped.

  “Wake up, Frank. This is Ed Barnett.”

  Daniels reached over and brought the alarm clock close enough to his face to see the time. When he did, his eyes shot open. “You got any idea what time it is?”

  “You told me to never call you at work, remember?”

  “I meant to take your stuff through channels!”

  “Channels don’t like me, Frank, and this time I can’t wait.”

  “You can’t wait? All right, all right, whadaya want, Eddie?” Daniels groaned.

  “Eddie? Is that Eddie Barnett?” his wife mumbled into her pillow. “Shoot him.”

  “I can’t over the phone,” Daniels answered, “but if I ever get a clear shot…”

  “Oh, come on, Frank, Janice loves me.”

  “No, she loves Louise. You, she wants me to shoot.”

  “Look, that thing we discussed two days ago has heated up. We’re pretty sure the guy’s here; and he’s planning something, right now. Have you guys heard anything? Any little piece might fit something we have. Can we meet later this morning?”

  “If I knew anything, I’d have called you. I told you that before.”

  “What about the groups we talked about. Anything?”

  Daniels slowly got his brain going into second gear. “I can’t get away until late morning. I’ve got a meeting. I can meet you at eleven o’clock, but not in town. Out at Tyson’s Corner inside the big mall, in front of Barnes and Noble. Meanwhile, I’ll dig through the files and see if we have anything new, but I’m not too optimistic.”

  “I’ll see you then, Frank. You’re a peach. And now
that you’re wide awake, why don’t you roll over and nibble on her ear?”

  “She’d hit me with a table lamp.”

  It was not until noon that Barnett was back at the Israeli Embassy and walked into the basement conference room. Mouse and Rachel Ullman were already there, and it was painfully obvious that he had walked in on a long, strained silence.

  “Where the hell have you been?” Ullman asked irritably.

  “I was meeting with a friend from the Secret Service. Sorry, couldn’t be helped. He doesn’t like to talk on the phone, so I had to meet him out of town.”

  “Well? Did he come up with anything?” Mouse asked.

  “There are four groups they feel might have some usefulness for a guy like Al-Bari. They are all active, all somewhat dangerous. All have their own rabid cause, and all have some tie to foreign sources of money and arms. The first is a radical Black Muslim splinter group in New Jersey that is now lining up with the Shiites.”

  “The Shiites?” Mouse questioned. “Elijah Muhammad isn’t good enough anymore?”

  “Iran has a lot more money to offer,” Ullman added.

  “Let’s mark them down anyway,” Mouse said. “Next?”

  “There’s a Puerto Rican nationalist group, the FALN in Harlem,” Barnett went on. “Mostly bombers. So far, all they have hit are Manhattan office buildings or subway stations in the middle of the night, when they are usually empty.”

  Ullman shook her head. “Al-Bari would find them a bad joke.”

  “They always got their money and weapons from Cuba and Venezuela, but with Chavez dead and Castro nearly so, they might do some ‘contract’ work if the price is right.”

  Ullman shrugged. “Perhaps. What else do you have?”

  “The IRA. They have well-established ties to Libya, Syria, Iran, Hamas, and all the other Middle East terrorist groups for the past forty years. I doubt they’d do anything overt, but they can get things. The cell in Boston has been the most active lately. The FBI says several armories were hit there in the last few years. One only a few days ago.”

  “You said there were four groups?” Ullman asked, looking to Barnett again.

  “They’re out in California, and a bit loony.”

  Mouse broke in, “It would not be America without one.”

  “Defenders of the Earth — an eco-terror splinter group. They’ve pulled some bank jobs and have arms. Their idols are the European radical groups from the 1960s and 1970s, like the Red Brigade and the Bader-Meinhof Gang, but these people are pure crazy and high most of the time. They tried to blow up a nuclear power plant last year, and I can’t believe a guy like Al-Bari would be stupid enough to rely on people like that.”

  “Unless he had a totally crazy mission in mind,” Ullman pointed out.

  They sat quietly for a few moments rethinking the information. “That is a splendid set of choices you set before us, is it not?” Mouse asked, shaking his head in disgust.

  “Time’s short. What do you want to do?” Barnett asked.

  “I like the Black Muslims and the IRA,” Ullman answered. “Barnett, why don’t you and your FBI partner go to New Jersey and make a house call on the Black Muslims. The Egyptian and I will see what we can learn from the IRA in Boston. Do we all agree?” she asked. “Or, would you prefer to switch places or partners. Your choice.”

  “No, that’s fine,” Barnett said.

  “It is fine with me, as well,” Mouse agreed, with a thin, plastic smile.

  Jersey City, New Jersey, is sandwiched between Bayonne, Hoboken, and Newark, directly across the Hudson River from the southern tip of Manhattan. For over a century, its watchword has been “Thank God for Newark and Hoboken,” because when you are ugly, it helps to have some even uglier girls living next door. Once a port, rail, and manufacturing center filled to the brim with German, Irish, and Italian immigrants, in recent years its downtown and waterfront had been rebuilt and gentrified with trendy high-rise buildings that looked out on the New York City skyline. The political bosses, machine politics, and corruption of earlier decades had also become more subtle, but Jersey City continued to have a majority African-American population. Obama carried the city with 81% and a gypsy cab driver is as likely to run over a unicorn or a Zombie on Montague Street as a white Republican. The thin veneer of its glitzy new waterfront ended at the Jersey Turnpike just to the west. The elevated expressway stood like a modern Hadrian’s Wall, protecting the city’s new downtown businesses and residential towers from the rundown neighborhood of West Arborville.

  That morning, it was a particularly dilapidated section of Van Dyke Drive that drew Eddie Barnett and Charlie Wisniewski’s attention. It showed all of the familiar urban pathogens, with strolling hookers in short, plastic mini-skirts, the homeless pushing shopping carts, ‘taggers’ enhancing the architecture with their own unique forms of building art, and blowing trash. Most of the storefronts were boarded up and the only ones still open were neighborhood bars, a Salvation Army soup kitchen, several welfare hotels, a thrift shop, a Pentecostal church, and a large mosque that took up half the block. A former residential hotel, it was built of conservative brown and cream-colored brick. At four stories tall, it dominated the street. While Jersey City and its neighbors had no shortage of mosques or Muslims either, this one was affiliated with the Black Muslims and had recently been drifting toward the Shiites.

  Two blocks away, around the corner and up a side street sat a dozen police cars, a tactical police communications van, and a SWAT bus. Across the street from the mosque stood an old, derelict office building. The lower floors were boarded up and abandoned, but in the third floor front office, two local cops dressed in full body armor, tactical helmets, and riot gear peeked out through a narrow gap in the boards. Behind them stood a knot of local, State, and Federal cops and politicians, gesturing, pointing, and arguing about what to do next.

  “Get away from that damned window!” Jersey City Police Chief Fuad Wilson shouted when he saw the two cops peeking between the boards. As they scurried away, he turned to his SWAT Team Head, Jackson Pomeroy. “Where do you get these dumb asses, Jackson? Don’t they understand English?”

  “We’re just tryin’ to get ready, Chief.”

  “Ready?” Eddie Barnett countered, even more angry and frustrated. Charlie stood next to him, arms folded across his chest, nodding in agreement. “This was going to be a quiet, slow and easy look-see,” Barnett added. “Remember?”

  “Look, Agent Rankin, our boys don’t do this every day. They need a little practice, that’s all,” Mayor Roscoe Hamilton answered. “What’s the harm?”

  “The harm? By now, half the State of New Jersey knows you’re here.”

  “And you still don’t have a clue who’s inside, do you?” Charlie asked.

  Chief Wilson took a manila folder from the hand of one of his aides and opened it to a grainy, faxed photo of Ibrahim Al-Bari. “Barnett, I can get a half dozen of Jersey City’s finest to swear they saw your guy in there — big, dark, and carryin’ an AK-47.”

  “Ah, fer Chris' sake,” Charlie cut the man off. “Like that’s gonna stick.”

  Unfazed, Mayor Hamilton countered, “You goddamned Feds really frost me! Look, this is my city, and that damned mosque's been a pain in everybody’s ass ever since it opened. We’ve wanted to shut it down for three years and this is the best shot we’ve had to do just that. So stay the hell out of it.”

  “They don’t vote, huh?” Barnett quipped.

  “No, in point of fact they don’t… or leastwise they don’t vote for me.”

  Barnett looked back and forth at the two locals and could only shake his head, exasperated. “If you send that SWAT Team in, guns blazing, you're gonna end up with a bunch of bodies on your hands. Our guy will be long gone out a back door and the New York press will have all your heads on a platter.”

  “Be reasonable, Agent Barnett,” Wilson countered, trying to sound conciliatory. “We aren’t going in guns blazing, but we are going in.�
�

  “Reasonable?”

  “Yeah, that place is like a big zit on the City’s butt. Pop it good and a dozen perps'll spill out that we can nail on open warrants. Then we can shut it down as a public nuisance. What's so wrong about that?”

  “Wrong? What's wrong is that we want Ibrahim Al-Bari, and the charges will never stick if that's all the ID and probable cause you've got.”

  “Who you tryin’ to kid, Barnett,” Pomeroy argued. “Once you Feds get your hands on him, you’ll chuck him on one of those CIA ‘black’ planes and have his ass in Gitmo before the sun goes down. But this here’s the firing line, and we don’t have that luxury.”

  “Luxury?” Wisniewski snorted. “What you’ll end up with are so damned many lawsuits that the Jersey Bar will vote you Man of the Year. Just think of it — all those shysters sportin' new sharkskin suits, BMWs, and Rolexes on your city’s dime, while you and Wilson here get old and gray giving depositions.”

  Wilson and Pomeroy looked at each other, suddenly concerned that their once-brilliant plan to use the Feds to get rid of a city nuisance was coming apart at the seams.

  Eddie Barnett stepped to the window and stared across at the mosque, thinking.

  Charlie looked at him, recognized the expression on the young Agent’s face, and frowned. “Eddie, you ain't gettin' another one of them pizza ideas, are you? 'Cause if you are, I'll smack you silly.”

  Barnett wasn’t listening. A faint smile crossed his lips as he turned back toward Wilson and Hamilton. “Can you get us up on that roof?” he asked, pointing across the street toward the mosque.

  Thirty minutes later, Eddie Barnett and Charlie Wisniewski dropped out the side door of a Jersey City Police traffic-copter and crept across the roof of the Mosque, dressed in JCFD firemen's coats, boots, and hats. Barnett carried a fireman’s red-handled ax and a cardboard box. Wisniewski kicked a coiled fire hose out the door, screwed it onto a water standpipe, and opened the valve. When Barnett reached the building’s main air handler, he ripped off the air filter, pulled three smoke grenades out of the box, and dropped them down the open intake.