Witness to Death

by Dave White

  “What happened?”

  Shrugging, the cop said, “I don’t know. Probably shouldn’t talk about it.”

  “My friend. I came down to bail him out. He was under arrest.”

  The cop laughed. “How are you planning on doing that? There isn’t a judge here.”

  She hadn’t planned at all. In fact, if bail hadn’t been posted yet, she wasn’t sure what she’d be able to do. When she drove down here, she just wanted to see John. Make sure he was okay. But life had taught her when all else failed, lie.

  “His lawyer’s right behind me,” Michelle said. “He’s coming from Toms River.”

  Behind them, the firefighters turned off the water. The smoke leaving the building was gray steam, not the black Michelle remembered from when the house on the corner of her street burned down a few years ago.

  “You realize the building’s on fire?” He smiled as he said it, but it didn’t come out funny.

  “Please, is there someone I can talk to?”

  The cop sighed and looked at the water bottle. “I can ask my commanding officer. What’s your friend’s name?”

  Michelle hesitated a moment. John’s face had been all over the news. Saying his name wouldn’t be like saying any old name. Maybe this guy would be shell shocked enough not to notice.

  The cop widened his eyes, waiting.

  “John Brighton,” she said, the name falling from her lips.

  “Really?” The cop shook his head. “The guy who’s wanted for murder? You paid his bail? I brought him in myself. He hasn’t even been arraigned.”

  Michelle flushed. “Can I at least talk to him?”

  “Stay on that side of the barrier. I’m going to get the commander.”

  He stalked off. Michelle watched him go, walking with a cop attitude, like he owned the world. She wondered if they taught that in the academy, “How to Hold Yourself Like an Asshole 101.”

  Maybe it was the uniform, she thought. Frank walked like that and he wasn’t an asshole.

  She watched her cop talk to another cop, one with more decorations on his uniform. Her cop pointed her way. His boss pointed toward the far end of the parking lot where they stood. Her cop walked over toward the lot and looked around. He wiped his brow once more and shrugged. Then he came back, talking to the other cop before he even stopped walking. The decorated cop looked toward the lot pointing again. Then he slowly dropped his hand. Both looked back at Michelle and started walking her way.

  That wasn’t good.

  They reached her in three seconds. She counted. The decorated cop’s hands were balled in fists. The crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes were tightened by his squint. He had a chin that looked like a turkey gobbler.

  The other cop finished the water.

  “You wanted to see John Brighton?” Decorated didn’t speak, he shouted.

  She nodded, the steel wool in her throat keeping her from speaking.

  “Where is he?”

  She still didn’t speak, but the steel ball moved from her throat to her stomach. Where is he? As in, he’s gone?

  “I asked you a question ma’am.”

  “I don’t know where he is. He should be here. I just wanted to talk to him.”

  “You said you paid his bail,” the first officer said.

  “Well, I—” She hated being called on a lie.

  “He’s not here. If you had something to do with it, you better tell us.”

  “I have no idea where he is. If I did, I wouldn’t be here talking to you. I can try calling him.” She dug her cell phone out of her purse.

  “Do that.”

  She dialed and waited. It went right to voice mail. She told that to the commander.

  “Jesus Christ.” The commander turned to the other cop. “Samuelson, go ask around. See if anyone’s seen him. I need a damn walkie. Samuelson, wait, gimme your radio.” He pointed at Michelle. “Stay here.”

  He hailed a fire fighter, and then walked up to him. The commander put a hand on the fighter’s shoulder and started to talk, waving his free hand. Then the commander said something into his walkie. He listened for a moment, then returned to Michelle.

  “His lawyer set the damn fire. Who are you?”

  “Um,” Michelle said. His lawyer?

  The commander shook his head. Another explosion—soft, sounding like a firecracker—came from the building. The commander looked back at the building, then again at Michelle.

  “Wait here. We’re going to want to talk to you. I have to check on some other things. Obviously. Jesus Christ.”

  Michelle didn’t wait. As soon as the commander was ten feet away, she slowly, so as not to draw attention, turned and walked behind the barrier. Once the officers were out of sight, Michelle dashed toward her car. With luck, she’d be back on the Turnpike before they even noticed she was gone.

  An hour and a half after taking the train in, Callahan took a cab out of New York.

  No one was looking for him according to Weller, and as far as he could tell, the cops were watching the trains, not automobile traffic. Port Authority had never been any good at watching the tunnels anyway. They put one cop on the Jersey side and he was supposed to catch the one suspicious truck out of the ten thousand that went through the tunnels each day.

  On the car ride, his cabbie Ranjit tried to convince him that the Lincoln Tunnel was the best way to Jersey City. It wasn’t, but Callahan didn’t argue. The longer routes were the safest. He checked his voice mail.

  No messages. There were several missed calls from Michelle, however. He guessed that if John had gone to the police, he’d been arrested. By now, Michelle must have heard.

  Callahan should call her back. But there was no time. He couldn’t get in an argument now.

  Instead, he dialed the DHS. After going through the code phrases again, he was put in touch with Candy Balascio. Candy was the one who put him in touch with Omar when Callahan had first come over from the CIA, two years after he’d started working for the government.

  He needed to find Omar Thabata, and Candy was the first place to go.

  That was how the night had started, but with the explosions and violence, he’d lost sight of that. If Thabata was smart, he’d be packing his shit, aborting his plan—whatever it was—and booking a flight back to Pakistan.

  ****

  The first time Callahan had heard of Thabata, though, he was sitting in long term parking outside Newark Liberty Airport. It was the summer of 2003, and Callahan had just been hired by the DHS. They sent him to New York to learn the ropes with some of the members of the FBI Terrorist taskforce. Callahan looked through the windshield of his car staring at the New York skyline and imagining mound of rubble and cracked buildings where the Twin Towers used to be.

  They’d just dodged another bullet.

  One of the FBI agents working the case, Hank Manfra, opened the passenger door and sat down next to him.

  “Did you shower?” Callahan asked.

  It wasn’t a code. The guy smelled like rotten Parmesan cheese. Leave it to Callahan to get assigned his first case, and have to meet up with someone with B.O. Candy Balascio had called Callahan before the sun came up and told him and Manfra to get down to the airport.

  Manfra laughed. “Arresting bad guys makes me work up a sweat.”

  “Me too.” But I shower.

  “The bomb would have taken out front of the terminal. All those people waiting to be picked up.”

  “C4?” Callahan wished he’d gotten out of the car before Manfra got in. He’d need at least three air fresheners to salvage the interior.

  Manfra shrugged. “Haven’t gotten a look at the device yet. There are things going on in Jersey City. Even better, one of the guys in cuffs is willing to tell our bosses about them.”

  That seemed too easy to Callahan. In the past it’d taken an electric drill aimed toward the ear, a scream and a gunshot leaving these assholes to infer that the friends who kept quiet were dead. His personal favorite was w
aterboarding. Watching a guy try to talk while spitting water, knowing you had him in the palm of your hand. The CIA’d been doing anything to get these guys to talk. And here, this guy wanted to just hand him the information.

  DHS was proving to be an easy job.

  “What kinds of things?”

  Callahan tried to picture the guys they’d arrested talking to each other in the back of the van they were currently handcuffed in. Panicking.

  Two young Muslims, Mohammad Al-Fariq and Jawad Ibrahim had taken a cab to the airport. When they got out, they each carried a large gym bag. Just as they were about to place them on the ground, Manfra and Callahan approached with a warrant. The men were arrested and the bags were searched. Once Manfra saw the explosives inside, he ordered the terminal evacuated.

  Now one of them wanted to talk.

  Callahan shifted in his seat and took a deep breath through his mouth.

  “The email we intercepted from Al-Fariq, it was going to someone important wasn’t it?”

  Manfra sat straight and turned slowly toward Callahan.

  “You ever hear of Omar Thabata?” he asked. “I haven’t. We’re lucky we caught the email. Al-Fariq was so confident, damn thing wasn’t even written in code. Check the files.”

  Callahan sent a text to Candy asking her to look him up.

  “I’ve never heard of him. Who is he?”

  “According to Ibrahim, he’s the guy who planned this whole thing. Lives in J. C.”

  “Let’s talk to him.”

  Callahan radioed over to the van and told them not to leave yet. He drove over to it and stood outside the double doors. He could hear muffled voices through them, and it sounded like arguing. The conversation stopped when Callahan opened the doors. Al-Fariq turned his head toward Callahan, while Ibrahim stared at the floor.

  “I want to talk to your superiors,” Ibrahim said.

  “Shut up,” Al-Fariq hissed.

  “Doesn’t matter what you want. We’re gonna put you away for a long time. Guantanamo, you hear of it? It’s not nice there. I’ve been there.”

  Sweat dripped off Ibrahim’s nose. Al-Fariq swore.

  “I will tell you something. I will give you a piece of free information. And when you find I’m right, you’ll come back to me,” Ibrahim said.

  Callahan waited, widening his eyes so they knew he was intrigued. Manfra leaned against the van, sniffed, and wiped at his nose.

  “The man who planned this. He is an angry man,” Ibrahim said. “Omar Thabata. He contacted us through our Mosque in Irivington. We’ve not been in touch since.”

  “I’ve never heard of him,” Callahan said. “If he’s as dangerous as you make him sound, he’d be in our database. Like you two idiots.”

  Manfra shook his head, then wiped his nose again.

  “We were told we could contact him in Jersey City. Where he lives.” Ibrahim rattled off the an address in Jersey City. Turned out to be another Mosque. “I’ve only met him once. When I picked up—“

  “Shut up!” Al-Fariq screamed. Ibrahim listened this time.

  Turned out Ibrahim wanted to cut a deal to stay out of Guantanamo. He’d heard the stories of military prisons and wanted nothing to do with them. He was supposed to die at the airport that day. For his cause. Not be tortured by Americans. He wanted to cut a deal to go to Newark State Penitentary.

  Not that the inmates would treat him any better. But Ibrahim didn’t need to know that at the moment.

  The following Thursday, Callahan and two feds raided a Mosque in Jersey City. Omar wasn’t there. But his name started to pop up in emails and phone taps. There were whispers of him. Informants said he was planning something big, but it had to be foolproof, something that wouldn’t fail. He would wait until the right moment.

  But Callahan didn’t remain on the case. Weller reassigned him, put him undercover, doctored the files to make it look like he went back to the CIA and Afghanistan. His file said he was killed in the line of duty three weeks later. His superiors didn’t even know he existed.

  The DHS was a nebulous part of the government. It controlled many different agencies such as the Secret Service, the Coast Guard and Customs and Border Protection. Weller sold Callahan on the job, saying how easy it’d be to hide one person in a beauracracy and have him get the dirty work done. Callahan assumed there were others like him throughout the country, but never asked about it.

  ****

  And Omar Thabata remained just a name, until tonight.

  “What the hell have you gotten yourself into?” Candy said, when she got him on the line.

  “That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”

  “What do you need?”

  “Omar Thabata. Weller gave me an address of a Mosque where he’d been seen last. Maybe two weeks ago. I wanted to see if you had anything more recent.”

  Candy took a deep breath. He’d heard that sound too many times over the years. Every time he was in a tough spot and called her for help, she’d take a deep breath and get him the answer he needed.

  “We haven’t heard a peep from him. No emails. No phone calls. He went off the grid,” she said.

  Callahan took a deep breath himself.

  “I saw him tonight.”

  He told her about the meeting he was supposed to witness and then what happened on the docks.

  “So, I guess he’d be an important guy to catch up with.” He could hear Candy’s smug smile in her voice.

  “Good guess.”

  “Well, how’d you find out where he’d be tonight?”

  “A friend.”

  “You try asking that friend again?”

  “Probably not in my best interest at the moment.”

  “I’ll talk to Duffy. See what we can find out.”

  “I said the same thing to Weller,” Callahan said. “I want to talk to her.”

  “What’d he say?”

  “Not to. Plausible deniability.”

  Candy said, “I thought I heard Duffy mention you by name once.”

  Callahan felt cold. “Probably not. You want, ask Weller if you can talk to her about me. I’m going to try the Mosque after I run another errand. I want to catch them off guard in the middle of the night. If you find anything out before then let me know.”

  Sixty-three dollars later, Ranjit dropped him off a block away from where he’d left his car earlier in the evening. He could see the yellow tape and flood lights the cops had set up around the waterfront. Uniforms and guys in long jackets milled around near an ambulance, where two paramedics lifted three body bags into the back. Callahan walked in their direction.

  Enough civilians mingled around the tape that he could blend in. Edging his way toward the ambulance, he shut out the waves, the sirens, the traffic, and the background noise from onlookers and focused on the words the detectives were saying. He watched the hulking detective’s lips move, trying to match it with one of the sounds he heard. Just like the CIA taught him at the Farm.

  “—ation on fire. Take them to Greenville. There’s room there.”

  Greenville was a hospital on JFK Boulevard. He wanted to see the bodies up close. He didn’t think he’d recognized any of them, but he had to be sure. Of course, he also wanted to take a look at their belongings, see if there were any clues to who they were, who they worked for. But—-what did the cop just say?—the police station was on fire? That meant the evidence would be locked up in a police car’s trunk for a while. It would be less difficult to follow and examine the bodies.

  The ambulance sped off, sirens blaring. Callahan listened to the detectives talk some more, and heard these guys had no IDs on them. In fact, there was no evidence other than the bodies. What? All these guys were armed. Where’d the guns go?

  Callahan went back to his car. He took his time, walking a few blocks out of the way. He doubted they’d been able to connect his car to the situation, but he didn’t want to be surprised. When he rounded the corner from the west, his car was alone, untouched and u
nobserved.

  Getting in the car, he hoped the hospitals were busy with injuries and not deaths tonight. He didn’t need to walk in on an autopsy.

  ****

  Twenty minutes later, wearing thick glasses and a baseball cap he kept in the car, Callahan stepped past a nurse who smiled at him. She asked if she could help him and he shook his head. When she asked what he needed he said the bathroom and nodded to the restroom behind her. She smiled again and moved along. Callahan kept going, rounded a corner, and ducked into a stairwell. The smell as he descended the stairs changed from lemon air freshener to stale cigarette smoke. He wondered how long it’d been since they ventilated the stairwell. Smoking hadn’t been allowed in public buildings for a few years. And who knew how long in a hospital.