The Bid

by Adrian Magson

  Vaslik checked out the other bed and lifted the pillow. It revealed a large hunting knife in a scabbard, the leather stained by years of sweat and dirt. Using part of the sheet to prevent his fingerprints contaminating it, he pulled the scabbard away; the knife looked old but the blade itself was clean and shiny, and razor sharp. Whoever had owned this had looked after it.

  He looked at the bed. “No cuffs on this one, and he had a weapon. So he wasn’t a prisoner.” He frowned. “Yet he got shot? That doesn’t make sense.”

  “Unless it was Chadwick,” Dave reasoned. “Although I’m betting it was a low-level member of the crew posted to look after him. If Brasher gets prints and DNA off this we’ll soon know the answer.”

  Vaslik nodded at the boxes of water bottles and canned food in the corner. “It looks like they had provisions for a while.” He stepped closer and pulled out a box containing bananas and apples, mostly blackened and rotting, the juices oozing through a hole in the cardboard. Some of the cans were bulging and looked ready to explode, and he left them alone. He turned back to the bed with the bloodstains, then inspected the lock on the door. “Why would they make somebody share this dump with a prisoner? He wasn’t going anywhere.”

  “Maybe it was someone with no choice.”

  “I guess.” Vaslik toured the walls and stopped, looking down in the corner. He stooped and came up with a DVD player. The casing showed some impact damage and was missing some bits but the screen was intact. He pushed the casing together and pressed the play button.

  Surprisingly, it worked.

  The three of them stood in absolute silence as the footage rolled by. The pictures on the screen were made all the more threatening by the complete absence of commentary.

  Within the first few seconds Ruth recognised what she was seeing. She felt the hairs stir on the back of her neck. “That’s where I met Elizabeth Chadwick. It’s in Chelsea.”

  The footage of Ben’s school spoke for itself, and nobody spoke until the DVD clicked off. The implications of the threat held over James Chadwick’s head were all-too clear: those closest to him had been under surveillance for a while, including the apartment block where Valerie DiPalma lived. It didn’t take much to imagine how vulnerable and powerless he must have felt being presented with this footage.

  “The team will bag this up,” Dave concluded. “We’d better step out and leave the rest as it is. I’ll call it in.”

  Ruth felt relieved to be back on the outside and breathing in deep gasps of fresh air. It must have been bad enough for the guard in there, but intolerable on a shocking scale for James Chadwick, knowing all the time that there were men out in the world within reach of his son, wife and Valerie DiPalma, and there wasn’t a single thing he could do about it. The sense of desperation must have been tearing at his insides.

  She shook her head. There was something bugging her and she couldn’t put her finger on it. But now she was out in the open, it was beginning to come to her. Whatever it was had been scratching away at the back of her mind ever since first stepping through the rear door of the hangar.

  Then she had it: the smell she and Vaslik had both noticed. It had been too strong to be from a small dead animal, especially in that vast space. She’d subconsciously dismissed it because the aroma was followed closely by seeing the carcass. Yet it had lingered on the air more than she would have thought normal.

  She said to Dave, “Wait. Before you do that there’s something I want to check. Give me a couple of minutes.”

  She jogged over to the hangar and walked through the main doors to the side where she had seen the boards over the inspection pit. It was probably nothing but since she was here, she might as well check—

  She ducked past the chain hanging from the overhead pulley and nudged one of the boards aside with her foot. Was that a heavy layer of soot?

  The board moved with surprising ease. As it did so, what she’d thought was soot seemed to lift off and rise into the air. Then she realised what it was as a dense cloud of flies swirled around her head like a mini-storm, buzzing furiously. Her stomach heaved with revulsion as she felt hundreds of tiny bodies bouncing against her cheeks and getting tangled in her hair in their desperation to escape. But she was too stunned to react immediately by the sheer scale of what she glimpsed lying in the hole.

  “My God. Slik! Dave!”

  The two men came running and stopped dead when they saw what she was looking at.

  “Now we definitely call it in,” Dave Proust said abruptly, and clamped a handkerchief over his face. “This place is a major crime scene. We’ll need to advise Homeland Security, too. No way is some pencil-head going to ignore this.”

  “I’ll do it.” Vaslik paused to flick some of the flies out of Ruth’s hair, then took out his phone and called Brasher’s number. He was patched through immediately to Brasher’s cell phone, as he was on his way to Alva to interview Donny.

  He took a couple of minutes to describe what they had found at the airfield, then came to what lay in the inspection pit. “At least four males, possibly five, it will be hard to tell until they’re pulled out of there. They look to me like Latinos, and some are wearing working clothes as far as we can see, including boots and gloves. Like construction workers.”

  “Out there? Constructing what?”

  “I’m coming to that.”

  “Can you tell how they died?”

  “They were shot at close range with an automatic weapon. There are dozens of shell casings in the pit around them, as if the men were ordered down there, then hosed down.”

  “How long ago do you estimate?”

  “Could be a couple of days to a week or more. With the temperature down there and the fire and flies … I’m only guessing. The bodies are a mess.”

  “Christ, this is all we need,” Brasher breathed heavily down the phone. “I’ll arrange for the Oklahoma State Police and a forensics team, and some of our own people from the local bureau to get on the way immediately and lock the place down. What the hell were they doing out there?”

  “It looks like they were a construction crew shipped in to build the inside of the workshop where Chadwick and one other, like a guard, were held. There was food and water and one of the beds had been fitted with handcuffs. Once the crew was done, it looks as if they’d served their purpose.” He looked across at Ruth, who waved her cell phone. “Ruth’s sending you photos of the scene and shipping labels on some cardboard boxes we think must have been used to bring the drones over. It should be easy to verify with Memphis FedEx by the codes on the boxes, but we’ve seen pieces of one of the missing EuroVol drones, anyway, so that’s pretty much a formality.”

  “Got that. Good work. Before I go, I have some intel about the guy who attacked Ruth.”

  “That’s good to hear. Let me put you on loudspeaker.” He pressed the button and Brasher’s voice echoed around the hangar.

  “Ruth, we’ve come up with a name to match the prints found on the knife and hard hat from that guy who attacked you in Newark. His name is Yusuf Kalil, of no fixed address but appears to be known in Newark and New Jersey as a local hoodlum. He has no known extremist links, but he’s done time for robbery, aggravated assault, and a sexual assault on a female minor.”

  “Sweet guy,” Ruth muttered. “Have you got him yet?”

  “Not yet but we will soon. He arrived here on a student visa from Syria twelve years ago. Our guess is he might be a jihadi sympathiser but more likely he’s a cheap muscle for hire.”

  “Did you come up with anything on the man named Paul?”

  “Funny you should ask.” Brasher’s voice sounded upbeat. “I issued the photos to all agencies, some with ID- and data-matching resources they don’t like sharing on a general basis. You can guess who I mean.”

  “Like Langley?” said Vaslik.

  “In that general area, yes. Anyway, one of
them came back with a positive ID. His name is listed as Paul Malick, aka Asim Malak, precise origins unknown.”

  “So he’s an illegal.”

  “That’s correct. We have nothing on him in the US so far, but from what little we do have he must have been living here under false papers for at least seven years, possibly longer. Our guess is he came in via Mexico or farther south and acquired papers that allowed him to travel in and out of the country on several occasions, mostly to Germany or Turkey, both gateways to the Middle East. The latest intel is that he’s currently wanted in Egypt and Jordan for murder, bombing, and organising crimes against the state, and is suspected of membership of organisations like al-Qaeda and specifically being allied to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. If that’s true the guy has some serious history. Either way they say he’s considered highly dangerous and he’s definitely linked to Bilal Ammar and others with known extremist and jihadist agendas.”

  Ruth and Vaslik looked at each other. If they needed proof of something serious being planned, then the links were now coming together, pointing towards a disparate group of extremists who had gotten together in the name of jihad.

  But that didn’t tell them where this Paul, aka Asim Malak, had now gone, or where he had taken James Chadwick.

  “So now will you call off this visit by the president?” said Vaslik. “This is looking more and more like a serious, planned assassination attempt.”

  “I already suggested that as soon as we got word on Malak, but it got voted down. The president won’t bow to terrorist threats on home soil because of the message that would send to Americans: that the person in the White House can no longer go wherever he likes—even a US military base—because of a threat? No chance.”

  thirty-seven

  Woods County Jail was a low-slung building set in a quiet, spacious section of Alva, surrounded by stores, dealerships, and government buildings. Ruth and Vaslik walked in through the front entrance and found Tom Brasher and a woman waiting for them.

  “Glad you could make it,” Brasher said, shaking hands. He introduced his companion. “This is Special Agent Karina Wright. She’s been assigned to work with me on this case.”

  “Hi.” Wright nodded briskly. “Good to meet you both.” She was small and slim, with neat, dark auburn hair and the clear skin tone of a woman with a serious health regime. Ruth was surprised; anything less like Brasher was hard to imagine, but she figured Wright had to be more than just a pretty face to have been assigned to this job.

  “I can’t let you folks into the interview suite with us,” Brasher continued, “but you can observe from the room next door. We don’t have much time before due process begins. At the moment he’s being held on charges relating primarily to public intoxication and threatening behaviour, but we hope to upgrade those in a few minutes. Let’s get to it.” He nodded to a uniformed guard standing nearby, who checked in their weapons and cell phones then led them through security to an interview suite down the corridor. Ruth and Vaslik were shown into a room with a video monitor on one wall, showing another anonymous room with a table and two chairs. Seconds later, Brasher and Agent Wright appeared on the screen and sat at the table.

  Donny Bashir appeared, accompanied by two large guards. He looked shrivelled and terrified. With a mop of unruly black hair and a thin growth of beard around his chin descending to a prominent Adam’s apple, he looked every inch the campus geek rather than a man engaged in acts of terrorism.

  The guards made him sit then left the room, and Donny looked around, shifting nervously in his seat and blinking, but avoided looking directly at the two agents.

  Tom Brasher ran through the preliminaries, introducing himself and Special Agent Wright and confirming why Donny was being held. Donny said nothing, merely waiting, eyes fixed on the table.

  Then Brasher changed tack and nodded at Karina Wright, who said, “Mr. Bashir, would you tell us how you met Bilal Ammar?”

  Donny blinked hard several times, his head jerking up, but he said nothing. In fact, he seemed more stunned by Wright’s soft voice than by the question she had put to him. He looked away in confusion.

  Wright repeated the question. “We know you are friends with Bilal; what we’d like you to tell us is how and where you met him.”

  Donny shook his head.

  “You don’t know him—is that what you’re telling us?”

  “No.” He said the word too loud, then hesitated and repeated it softly. “I mean, no. He’s not my friend.” He had a slight accent and his words were precise, as if carefully thought out.

  “A colleague, then? You attended the same mosque in Queens, New York, isn’t that correct?”

  Donny nodded. “Yes. Correct.”

  “So now you remember him.”

  He nodded.

  “You’re a long way from there now, aren’t you? Are you down here on vacation?”

  He looked troubled by the question and stared around like he suspected a trick. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Very well, I’ll be more direct. What were you doing in the bar—Jokers, I believe it’s called—when you were arrested?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  “Can’t remember what you were doing here or can’t remember the bar?” Wright’s voice, although soft, was relentless and probing, and Ruth and Vaslik could see why Brasher had allowed her to take the lead. Another reason was evident in Donny’s reaction to her—nervous and almost embarrassed, as if he had little understanding or experience of attractive women. “I hear you really tied one on down there, is that correct?” Her voice had taken on a light tone, and he responded with the faintest of smiles in acknowledgement.

  “I guess.”

  “And where was Mr. Ammar when you were in the bar? He wasn’t there with you, was he?”

  “No. He was asleep. He sleeps heavily.”

  “At the motel down the road.”

  “Yes.”

  “So, not the best of company?”

  “I guess.”

  “So you decided you needed some fun and went to Jokers, is that right? I mean, that’s what vacations are for, right—having fun?”

  “It wasn’t.”

  “Wasn’t what—fun? Hey, I’m not surprised; you did get yourself arrested. Although I’m pretty sure your friends in NYU might call it fun, wouldn’t they? Sort of a rite of passage, that kind of stuff.”

  “I guess.” He frowned, clearly thrown by the sudden shift in the tone of questions. “Why are you holding me here? I want a l—”

  “Actually, Donny,” Wright interrupted him and raised her hand, which made him flinch and stop speaking instantly, “we’re just trying to figure out why an intelligent NYU graduate like you is hanging around with a thug like Bilal Ammar. He is a thug, isn’t he?”

  He nodded. “I guess.”

  “Of course he is. I bet you have more brains in your little finger than he does in his whole body. And what about Paul Malak? Is he a thug, too?”

  Donny looked up, his face going pale. “What? I don’t understand … Why are you asking about him? I never mentioned anyone called Malick, I—” He stopped speaking abruptly, as if a switch had been thrown.

  “Malick. I’m sorry, I should have said Malick, which is what he likes to be called. Although his real name is Asim Malak, isn’t it?” She bent to catch his eye and said gently, “You can tell me, Donny. Nobody else will hear you. It’s just a name.”

  Donny nodded and said softly, “Yes. Asim Malak.”

  “Good. That’s great, Donny. And where is Asim Malak now, do you think? And Bilal Ammar, of course. Incidentally, we know they’ve left the airfield. And they’ve taken the drones and James Chadwick with them. So, where are they going?”

  Donny stared at her, eyes wide, and swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing furiously. “I don’t know.”

  “But that was
nothing to do with you, was it, what they did inside the hangar? Was it Malak or Ammar, Donny? Somehow I can’t see Ammar being bright enough to be the boss, or Malak wanting to get his hands dirty with the other stuff.”

  “Stuff ?” Donny’s voice was almost a whisper, as if the question had slipped out unawares.

  “You know what I mean.” Her voice was silky smooth now, almost gentle in its probing. “The conversion of the workshop to a prison cell; the kidnapping of James Chadwick; the theft of the drones. And the killing of the construction workers. All that.” She sat back. “Frankly, I can’t see a man like you being part of that. Not really. You seem like a nice guy to me. You must have got taken along for your technical skills, isn’t that correct?”

  Donny said nothing, simply staring at her like a mouse confronted by a predator. And blinked once.

  Then a tear rolled down his face.

  “Interesting technique,” Vaslik murmured. He was frowning.

  Ruth wasn’t impressed, but she said nothing. She hoped Wright wasn’t finished yet and that there was more to come. It had been a masterclass in interrogation up to a point, without a voice raised in anger, real or simulated. But the technique was oddly neutralised by Wright’s underlying expression, which came across as slightly cruel, even casual. The smiles were there, along with the soft voice, but so was more than a hint of contempt and condescension.

  They listened as Donny described the process of his introduction to Malak and his subsequent recruitment—a process that had led from a good job at Apple to the cell here in the Woods County Jail. It poured out like a flood, with no pauses for deliberate thought or fabrication. And at the end they had everything they needed to connect Malak and Ammar to multiple murders and a plan to bring terrorism to the United States.

  What they didn’t have was so much as a hint at the current whereabouts of the two men, James Chadwick, or the drones. In that, it seemed Asim Malak had been ultra-cautious, keeping his plans very close to his chest and trusting nobody with the essential details—not even the location of the target itself.