The Watchmen

by John Altman

  On the street, the paranoia remained. He threw a quick glance over his shoulder. Had Rose followed? No. But a man was there, short, wearing black. The man wasn’t looking at him. He was looking through the window of the coffee shop, seemingly intrigued by the menu taped to the glass.

  Nassif faced front again. He put on his headphones and switched on the Discman at his waist. Five minutes later he was descending into a subway station. Two minutes after that he was stepping onto a train, lost in the pulse of music, oblivious to the fact that the small man in black was stepping into the next car, a mere dozen feet away.

  The paranoia left him alone until the moment he was fitting his key into the lock of his front door. Then it returned with a vengeance.

  Something was wrong.

  He switched off the Discman and lowered the headphones around his neck. He listened: to the sound of a radiator clacking, to a mid-afternoon cartoon playing in a nearby apartment, to the slow distant thud of helicopter blades outside.

  The dope, he thought. Why had he smoked it? Now, of all times, when he needed to be ready for anything.…

  He raised the key again and twisted it.

  The apartment was empty, and overly warm. He set down his backpack inside the front door. Sometimes, when he stepped through that door, he felt a sensation of coming home. But not this time. This time the apartment felt as it did when he was at his unhappiest—like a temporary way station, a place he and his mother had ended up entirely by accident. This place was not home. It never could be home. Home would be Mecca, the place that harbored their roots.

  Yet even this thought, at the moment, did not ring true. At the moment the truth seemed to be that he was caught between two worlds, living in neither.

  He missed Lisa.

  It would have been nice to be with her, this afternoon. To go into his bedroom and lock the door, the way they had so many times over the fall and winter. To lie on his bed, listening to music, cuddling and touching as she pushed his hand away. Each time she’d pushed, she had done so with less force. Eventually her giggles had thickened, as her breathing had slowed. If they hadn’t broken up, by now he would have gotten to third base at least.

  But he had made his choices. He was a part of something bigger now. And soldiers like himself had to do without the comforts of women.

  The paranoia was shading to depression. He gave his head a small shake, and moved deeper into the apartment.

  In the kitchen he poured himself a glass of orange juice. He drank it leaning against the counter, feeling the liquid slosh uncomfortably in his stomach. Then he rinsed the glass and went to his room. He returned the P.O. box key to its drawer and sat down on his bed.

  The feeling occurred again: Someone was watching him.

  He looked at the cracked-open door of his closet. Was that where the eyes were? Or were they under the bed? Or hovering outside his window, belonging to a ghoul unhindered by the laws of gravity?

  It was only the weed.

  But his eyes stayed locked on the closet door. Suddenly he felt he could sense a monster there, more clearly than he had since the days of his early childhood. It was a man, and yet not a man. It was low to the ground and its eyes rolled as they followed him—even as he stood, taking a step toward the closet door, moving in slow motion, back in the swimming pool now, a swimming pool filled with black water. The eyes rolled and the fetid breath hissed over sharp curved teeth.…

  He pulled the door open.

  A football. A skateboard. A winter coat. A jumble of old comic books, tapes, and baseball caps.

  No monster.

  His mouth twisted.

  This was the last time he would let himself be pressed into smoking anything. Let his friends notice that he had changed; let them think what they liked. He would not open himself to a repeat of this experience. Already his fear was turning to embarrassment.

  He shut the closet door.

  For six hours the assassin sat motionless.

  The boy was puttering around his room—doing homework, talking briefly on the telephone, executing a series of lazy push-ups. As afternoon turned to evening, a woman entered the apartment. His mother, from the look of it. They dined together at a small table in the kitchen. Then she watched television in the living room; the boy returned to his bedroom. He did more homework, then sat before his computer. Yet he did not return to the dresser drawer, the one into which he had placed the key.

  Who was he?

  The assassin sat cross-legged on the roof across the way, and wondered.

  At half past ten, lights began to wink off throughout the building. The mother stayed awake for another hour, watching the monologue of a late-night talk show. The boy stayed awake for another hour after that, still at his computer. Sometime past twelve-thirty, he stripped to boxer shorts. He vanished into a bathroom, then reappeared with his hair standing on end. He spent ten minutes reading a comic book in bed, and switched off the light.

  Still the assassin waited.

  At last he left his position. His six-hour surveillance had been prefaced by a two-hour reconnaissance of the post office; he felt tired, hungry, and out of sorts. But he rolled his head on his neck, rotating his wrists until they cracked, and then pressed himself into action.

  He descended the fire escape and crossed around to the front of the tenement. He reached into the right sleeve of his tunic, withdrawing the slim lock pick. Then entered a foyer papered with take-out menus and smelling of Chinese food.

  Four flights brought him to the door that should have corresponded to the apartment. He paused, listening. The apartment was quiet. The door had three locks. He raised the pick.

  Before entering, he returned the tool to his sleeve and slipped out a blade to replace it.

  Silently he opened the door. Then dissolved forward, into the darkness. Before him was a kitchen rustling with mice. On his right, the boy’s bedroom. He stepped into it, then paused again to listen. The boy was sleeping, his breathing even and regular. The curtains on the window were open, letting in the unnatural light of the city sky at night.

  He crossed the room lightly, on the balls of his feet, and opened the drawer where he had seen the boy put the key. After a moment he found it.

  So Ajami had tapped this youth to check the box, instead of doing it himself. Why the added layer of caution now? Had something gone wrong? Had they made a connection with the dead girl?

  And more to the immediate point: What was to be done about it?

  The boy complicated things. Leaving him alive would take control away from the assassin. Was he to spend every moment at the post office, making certain that he gained access to the box before the boy came to check it? He would be noticed. Was he to come to this room every night and conduct a search, to see if the boy had retrieved a message? An unnecessary risk. Besides, a message might be picked up and sent along to Ajami on the same day.

  But taking the boy’s life might cause problems of its own. The assassin did not know the child’s relationship to Ajami, nor the role he was playing. The boy was an unknown quantity.

  He disliked unknown quantities.

  He made a decision. He would take the key for himself and remove the unknown quantity from the equation. Problems might result, but he would remain in control. He would have the key.

  Once the decision had been made, he pocketed the key and closed the drawer. He turned and approached the bed.

  As he reached forward, the boy’s eyes opened.

  The expression on his face was peculiar. He did not look surprised.

  For several seconds, their eyes locked.

  Then the assassin reached forward, gently covering the nose and mouth with one gloved hand.

  Ali Zattout moved the glass beneath his nose, inhaling the bouquet. He sipped, rolled the wine around in his mouth, and swallowed. “Taste that?” he asked.

  Quinlan arched an eyebrow.

  “The hint of brett,” Zattout elaborated. “A wild yeast, often found in Burgundies.
Some sommeliers won’t put up with it. But just a touch of it … as we have here … adds complexity.”

  For a few moments, they tasted their wine in silence. Zattout’s demeanor was more relaxed than at any time Finney had seen him previously. Because they were not interrogating him, for a change. They were simply rewarding him—sharing this excellent bottle of wine, with no questions being put forth.

  When the wine had been offered, Zattout had not reacted with enthusiasm. His brow had beetled, beneath the unforgiving light in the cell; a thin sweat had appeared in the hollow of his collarbone. He’d thought it was a trick. But he couldn’t figure out just what the trick was. Until Quinlan had consumed the wine himself, Zattout had refused to sample it. Then he’d raised his own glass, suspiciously.

  Now, only a few sips later, the alcohol was taking visible effect. The primarily monosyllabic prisoner Finney had observed until now was gone. This was a man who knew wine, and who enjoyed it.

  He was drawing Quinlan’s attention to the full-bodied robustness. Interesting, Finney thought, that Zattout was so knowledgeable on the subject. Had he been the devout Muslim he often had claimed to be, in his previous life, he would have abstained from alcohol altogether. Clearly, the opposite was true. Since his capture he had not requested a prayer mat or even a copy of the Koran; but he discussed the subtleties of Burgundies with a brio that could come only from experience.

  There was a story—probably apocryphal—that enjoyed unfailing popularity among terrorist hunters within the U.S. intelligence community. In the months leading up to the First World War, U.S. forces in the Philippines had been the target of several attacks by extremist Muslim factions. General Black Jack Pershing’s response had been to round up fifty suspected terrorists and tie them to posts. Two pigs had been butchered in front of the helpless prisoners. To devout Muslims, pigs are filthy creatures; being exposed to their blood is to be denied entrance to paradise. As the prisoners watched, forty-nine bullets were soaked in the blood of the swine. These bullets were used to execute forty-nine of the men. Pershing’s soldiers dug a hole, and upon the bodies of the prisoners dumped pig flesh, offal, and entrails. The fiftieth man then was released. And for forty-two years, the tellers of the tale concluded, there had not been a single attack anywhere in the world made by a Muslim extremist.

  Even if the line of thought was worth pursuing—and Finney had his doubts that it was—Zattout obviously would not be susceptible to such tactics. He continued to declaim about the wine, even as Quinlan struggled to change the topic.

  What Quinlan wanted to discuss was al Masada, the Lion’s Den. Zattout looked dismayed at the potential detour. Nothing would come for free, he was realizing. But dutifully he answered: describing how the small group of men who had come together there had gone on to form the pillars of an international terrorist organization. These bin Laden loyalists had scattered to Spain, Germany, Bosnia, Saudi Arabia, and the United States. They had planted the seeds of al Qaeda sleeper cells even as bin Laden had devoted himself—and his family construction business—to the creation of a system of underground tunnels beneath the mountains of Jaji.

  In any event, Zattout said, hadn’t they spent enough time on the subject for one day? To return to the wine …

  Quinlan acquiesced. For several minutes, Zattout held forth on the topic. Quinlan listened graciously—then, when Zattout paused to breathe, quickly returned to the subject of the loyalists who had scattered to the corners of the earth, to establish sleeper cells. He wondered aloud if there were any specific cells that Zattout, for whatever reason, had neglected to mention.

  Zattout looked to his right, toward his strong hand. No, he said after a moment. Upon the subject of sleeper cells, he had told them everything he knew.

  But he couldn’t speak of it anymore—not without a break. Wine such as this, Zattout explained, was not to be quaffed but savored.…

  In one corner of the living room, Finney had found a shabby recliner. He’d made a habit of coming to it after the interrogation sessions, to pore over his notes in private.

  As expected, the wine had loosened Zattout’s tongue. Yet Quinlan had failed to skew the conversation in a direction that would benefit them. In the future, a more concrete set of questions should be planned in advance—

  When Thomas Warren II stepped into the doorway, something in his body language set Finney immediately on guard.

  Noble had taken a turn for the worse, he thought. Perhaps he already was dead. And so Finney had let his last chance to offer forgiveness slip away. No doubt a bigger man would have found the grace within himself to put aside old grievances, at the end, and visit the man’s deathbed. But evidently he was not a bigger man.

  Warren pressed his lips together. Finney had known he would press his lips together, just that way. He had been here before, perhaps in a dream. He could anticipate the words that were about to be spoken. I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news, Warren would start.

  “I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news,” Warren said.

  I’ve just gotten off the phone with the hospital …

  But what he said was: “An emergency’s come up. Quinlan and I are going to need to go down to Langley. Immediately.” A measured pause. “I’d like you to fill in with Zattout in our absence.”

  Finney said nothing.

  “I’m aware that it’s not what you signed on for.” Warren’s voice was reasonable, pitched low. “I’m also aware that we run the risk of setting ourselves back, by changing interrogators. Yet it can’t be helped. If we’re forced to start with someone new, we’ll be set back even further. But you, Doctor, are familiar with the case. And it’s only until we return …”

  He looked at Finney. A bright challenge in his eyes belied the studied evenness of his voice.

  “Take a few minutes to think about it,” he said, generously.

  7

  Twelve hours after securing Finney’s commitment, Thomas Warren II was stepping into the main lobby of CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

  As his identification was checked, he found himself looking at the statue of Wild Bill Donovan standing against the lobby’s left wall. Donovan had been the director of the CIA’s forerunner, the OSS. The statue portrayed him with one thumb hooked jauntily through a loop of his belt, every inch the cowboy. The biblical inscription beside the statue read: And you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.

  He rode the elevator to the seventh floor, then stepped through a door labeled 7d70—director of central intelligence. He passed through another security detail and entered the wood-paneled office of the DCI. The director was standing by an immense polished conference table. Through a window over his shoulder, sunlight danced brightly across the Potomac.

  At Warren’s entrance, he turned. His only greeting was a curt wave at a chair.

  Warren sat, took a deep breath, and then delivered his report as he had rehearsed in the Town Car. The words tumbled from his lips as he tried to get it all out before the DCI could interrupt. Conversations with the director, Warren had discovered, tended to go best when one secured an early lead. If the man saw a chance to assume control, he wouldn’t hesitate. Then, operating from a position of power, he would press his advantage until his opponent gave up hope of anything except full surrender.

  As Warren spoke, a furrow appeared on the DCI’s brow. He pressed on, striving to find optimistic phrasing. The mole within their ranks had been identified. At this very moment Quinlan was undergoing interrogation in a Maryland safe house. This seeming setback might in fact be a golden opportunity. The thing to focus on was not the past but the—

  “You’re using the specialist?” the DCI interrupted.

  Warren nodded. Did the director seem displeased at that decision? Did he consider the use of the specialist overly harsh? He explained—although the DCI knew it full well—that they had no other choice. Polygraphs, instead of detecting lies, detected only changes in heart rate, breathing, and voice steadiness. A k
nowledgeable man who took the time to train himself could control his physiological responses and deceive the apparatus. Joseph Quinlan, who had received polygraph training from the agency itself, certainly qualified as a knowledgeable man. The usual manipulations that formed the bedrock of agency interrogation strategies would be worthless against a subject who had spent decades mastering them from the other side. So a more aggressive approach was required.

  When the tumble of words had finished, the sudden silence felt daunting. The furrow remained on the DCI’s brow. “How the hell did this happen?” he asked at last. He seemed to be speaking mostly to himself; his eyes, behind thick lenses, were turned inward. “How the hell did we let this happen?”

  He meant the question rhetorically. Warren said nothing.

  Then it was the DCI’s turn. A lot of people had shown a lot of good faith, he said, in keeping their relative distance from the Zattout interrogation. The FBI, Defense, INS, Customs—all would have liked to have had a hand in the operation code-named KINGFISHER. But too many chefs spoiled the broth, so they had agreed to keep away. Now, however, when it came out that Warren had fouled up—that he’d allowed a mole in his midst to compromise the operation, right under his nose—these people would not be pleased.

  At the phrase “fouled up,” Warren bristled. “We’ve been making progress with Zattout,” he said defensively. “And the leak hasn’t been too severe. Two letters over two weeks. It’s not the end of the world.”

  Furthermore, any information that Quinlan had leaked before he was under Warren’s authority was certainly no fault of Warren’s. For a moment, he let the implication hang in the air. Two could play at the DCI’s game; fingers could point both ways. He would not take the entire blame for Quinlan’s treachery. And if it wasn’t all his fault, then whose fault was it? The director of counterintelligence’s, whose job was to ferret out moles? Or might it go higher—all the way to the DCI himself?