by Steven James
Immediately, he was on me, going for the gun.
I had no leverage, and if he got the SIG, I would have no chance of stopping him. So, rather than risk letting him get it, I flicked it aside. It dropped onto the fragile paneling, smashed through, and plummeted to the gym floor.
He stood, poised and ready to attack me again.
Both hands free now, I grabbed a cable, and swung up to my feet.
I didn’t like this at all.
Fighting this guy on his terms was not going to work. His balance was far better than mine and if I wasn’t careful, I was going to end up next to my SIG on the floor of the gym.
The rafter above me was out of reach, but I could snag it with a high enough jump.
Okay, so that was a possibility.
“Hands up where I can see them,” I ordered him, though I had no weapon to back me up.
He didn’t reply and he didn’t move, but rather just stood there, backlit by the Maglite’s beam jutting up from where it now lay, out of reach. Then all at once, he swept in at me, closing the space between us in one fluid motion, sending another kick flying at me, this time toward my face.
I ducked, but his heel grazed the top of my head on its way past.
The catwalk pendulumed to the side as he landed, but again the movement didn’t seem to bother him.
Maybe that’s why he came up here. His balance. Because he knew he’d have the advantage.
“I’m a federal agent,” I said. “Stand down!”
No response.
This man wasn’t going to fall on his own.
Alright then, I would help him.
I crouched, then leapt, going for the beam above me, but with the tweaked ankle I didn’t get the height I was hoping for. Although I stuck it with my right hand, my left hand slipped off. But my right hand’s grip was firm enough for me to do a pull-up and plant my left as well. I swung my legs up and kicked him hard in the chest with one foot and directly in the face with the other, knocking him backward.
He teetered on the edge of the boards, waving his arms urgently to regain his balance, but then tipped back into the darkness and crashed through the ceiling tiles, dropping to the gym floor without uttering a sound.
From this angle I couldn’t see him land, but only heard the groan of the floorboards as they flexed under the impact.
I let go of the beam, dropped back onto the catwalk, and peered into the gym, trying to make out his face, but only saw his motionless form shrouded in the day’s long shadows.
Catching my breath, I hurried back through the attic’s entrance to the ladder that led to the gym.
On the way down, I kept wondering why he hadn’t fled when I was in the library, why he’d gone to the attic in the first place.
With the flex in the floor, I doubted that he had been killed, and I figured that after I cuffed him I could ask him why he ran.
Or there might’ve been another person here in the building the whole time. Maybe you were fighting the wrong guy.
But he was dressed the same as the man outside the house.
That means nothing. There could’ve easily been two people wearing the same outfit.
When I emerged in the gym, he was gone.
I rushed to the hall.
No one.
Nothing.
Ted flew out of the library, where he must have decided to check after finishing up in the locker room. “I heard something,” he called to me. “You alright?”
“Yeah. Check out front—the door he came in. I’ll head around back.”
I passed through the gym, tossed the exit door open, and scanned the area outside the school.
No one fleeing on foot.
Blue and red lights pulsed through the neighborhood from the DPD cars that’d arrived, but I didn’t see any people. Using my phone for a light, I scoured the nearby underbrush, but, apart from a rabbit that I startled and sent scampering into the night, there was no movement.
When I returned to the gym, I heard the shouts of officers in other parts of the building, and as I was reaching for my identification, Springman, the young officer who’d been guarding the crime scene appeared, gun drawn, shouting for me to put my hands up! But a second later when he recognized who I was he lowered his weapon.
“Our guy is close,” I told them. “Likely injured. Find him. Go.”
He took off.
No one else in the gymnasium.
No body on the floor.
No flashlight.
And no gun.
Wherever the suspect was, he now had my SIG.
15
Atlanta, Georgia
The border agent was finishing up with a short, stout, Eastern European woman who’d been on Ali’s flight. Just one more person—a businessman in a finely tailored suit—stood between Ali and the agent.
Be obedient.
Do nothing to raise suspicion.
He drew his computer bag closer to his side.
“They can refuse you entry for ‘undeclared reasons,’” Fayed had told him. “Which means they can do so for veritably any reason they choose. And according to the laws of the infidels, they have no legal responsibility to tell you what that reason is.”
The agent handed the passport back to the woman, who nodded graciously and ambled forward as the man in the designer suit approached the agent’s booth.
You’re next. Just get through.
Ali moved forward and waited dutifully behind the strict yellow line painted on the tiling.
To make it easier for the agent, he tucked his boarding pass and declaration form into the pages of the passport, using them to bookmark where his photo was.
Less than a minute later, the agent finished with the business executive. No hassles, no problem.
He waved him on.
Be at ease, Ali.
Breathe.
With a disinterested glance above his glasses, the border agent signaled with two fingers for Ali to come forward.
Good eye contact. Let him trust you. This is just a slight inconvenience that you must go through, that all visitors must go through, before entering the United States of America. You haven’t done anything wrong. You’re simply here to visit relatives in Michigan.
The agent was staring absently at his computer screen as he held out his hand to receive Ali’s passport.
When he handed it over, the agent, whose nameplate read T. Snelling, studied the photo, then thumbed through the pages that’d been stamped from Ali’s slew of trips from Kazakhstan to Germany and England over the past two years. Work as a translator often required travel, which was another reason he’d been chosen for this mission.
However, his trip to Yemen for his training had no stamp. That one had been privately arranged by people who knew exactly who to bribe.
“This your first visit to the United States?” Agent Snelling asked.
“Yes.”
“Purpose of your trip?”
“I’m visiting relatives in Dearborn, Michigan.”
Immediately he berated himself: No, no, no, Ali. You didn’t need to tell him all that. It sounds too prepared. Just the state, you just needed to mention the state.
Snelling was studying Ali’s face now, carefully comparing it to the passport photo. “How long will you be staying?”
“A week. Well, just over a week. Eight days.”
The agent set the passport facedown on the glass face of a scanner. “Names?”
“Names?”
“Your relatives in Michigan. In Dearborn. What are their names?”
“Gregor and Tatiana.”
“And you’re named Ali Mahmoud Saleem.”
“Yes.” Ali couldn’t tell if it was a typical line of questioning or if he’d already raised some sort of suspicion. “I’m a Musl
im,” he explained, before being asked. “I took a new name. It is all on my passport. My name is.”
“I see that. But the names of your—how are you related to Gregor and Tatiana?”
Ali felt a slight tremor in his throat.
“They are my cousins.”
“When was the last time you saw them?”
“Two years ago in Germany when my uncle got remarried.”
“Is there another one now?”
“Another—?”
“Wedding. Here. In the States.” The agent’s voice had taken on a sharper edge. “Is that why you came?”
You’re provoking him.
“No.” Ali stumbled for the right words. “No wedding.”
“Then why now? Why fly all the way over here for eight days to see them?”
Ali had been eyeing the scanner and suddenly realized that Agent Snelling was looking directly at him.
“Tatiana is starting a new business.”
“What kind of business?”
“A restaurant,” he said too quickly. “She is starting a bakery.”
“Which?”
“Which?”
“A restaurant or a bakery?”
“They bake bread as well as pizza, serve it.”
“Uh-huh. And you flew all the way over for that? For a pizza?”
“I came to see them.”
Agent Snelling lifted the passport but didn’t return it to him. He was scrutinizing the screen of his computer instead. From the way the monitor was positioned, Ali couldn’t see what was on it.
“We have a few additional questions for you,” Snelling said at last. “I’ll need you to go with Agents Wilder and Dartmoor for a secondary screening.”
He motioned for two of his associates who were standing nearby to come over. He gave them Ali’s passport and they led him to an interrogation room after taking his bags from him, even though he told them he was fine carrying them himself.
++++
No luck.
We searched throughout the school, down the street, and in the abandoned buildings nearby, but found no sign of the man I’d chased from the crime scene.
With the gymnasium’s bowed floorboards, I could certainly understand how he’d survived the fall, but afterward he’d just disappeared—and with the number of officers we had sweeping the area, that was no easy task.
One team interviewed the bystanders who’d gathered near the house, but no one could—or would—give us a description of the man who’d been standing there beside them filming.
There’s a stigma in many urban areas about “snitching,” and that dynamic might’ve been at work here. Often, people fear retribution when the police leave—which is understandable but doesn’t help our job any.
In addition, sometimes friends and relatives of the victim want to take justice into their own hands.
And justice on the streets rarely looks like it does in the courts.
While the DPD expanded the perimeter, shut down the surrounding streets, and went door to door, I returned to the house to finish assessing the scene so the medical examiner could have the body transported to the morgue for an autopsy tomorrow.
16
Ali found himself in a small room, not much larger than the one-bedroom apartment in Ust-Kamenogorsk that he shared with his fourteen-year-old sister, Azaliya.
For the last two years he’d done his best to raise her now that their parents were gone, leaving to start a new life and find work somewhere else in the country. And never even sending word about where they were or what they were doing.
Gone.
It had been hard on Azaliya.
With the recent worldwide downturn in oil prices, uncertainty of the global financial markets, and the divestment of two of the Russian billionaires who owned much of the land in the area, the economy of Ali’s city—which depended almost solely on income from the nearby oil fields—had been decimated.
Many families had lost everything.
At least he and his sister had a place to stay.
A number of geopolitical forces came into play to make things in the region even more unstable, all stemming from unrest in the Middle East: the civil war in Syria, the tightening of coalition forces against insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the military offenses of countries such as Turkey against Muslims considered to be “extremists.”
Those factors meant that it had become more difficult for the leaders of the groups Westerners called Islamists, or jihadists, to recruit new members from the Middle East.
Even though oil money gave the groups significant revenue, their casualties were drastically cutting into their numbers.
Consequently, they’d ventured farther east, into Kazakhstan, to recruit fighters and to enlist those willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for their cause. They made the appeal to other Muslims, primarily ethnic Kazakhs: jobs, money to send back to family members, a vital role in fighting the infidels. Their duty as Muslims.
“What is there for you here? Come and fight with your Muslim brothers,” they would say. “You’ll make more money than you could ever imagine that you can send back to support your family, and then you’ll receive immeasurable riches in paradise.”
After, of course, a martyr’s death.
Fayed had waited until the end of Ali’s training to tell him what his mission would be.
His men had taught him how to wear a suicide vest so that it wouldn’t be noticeable, where to position himself in the crowd, and when to detonate it to produce the most efficacious results.
He’d been expecting additional instructions on how to pack it with nails, or how to wire it himself, but instead they just gave him the inhaler and told him how long it would be, after he used it, before he became symptomatic and contagious.
“But what is it?”
“It is retribution for the Crusades. It is the will of Allah. It is the birds flying in over the desert clutching the sacred stones in their beaks and in their claws.”
“The birds?”
“Surah Al-Fil.”
“Of the Elephant?”
“Yes. All that you need to know will be explained in due time.”
Then they explained the virus’s progression.
“After the symptoms start,” Ali had asked, “what happens then?”
“Then your sister will be safe and cared for. And you will receive your reward.”
But in truth, the bestowal of pleasures in the afterlife held less appeal to Ali than the knowledge that Azaliya would be safe in this one.
Now, here in this cramped room at the airport, one of the agents stayed with him while the other took his bags to an adjoining room, visible through a metal mesh-reinforced window spanning the length of one wall.
“I’m going to pat you down,” Agent Wilder told him. “Is there anything in your pockets that could harm me? Any needles or sharp objects?”
“I have done nothing wrong.”
“Is there anything in your pockets, Mr. Saleem?”
“No. I don’t understand why you are doing this.”
“Hold your arms out to the sides, please.”
No, no, no. It can’t happen like this. What if they find it? What if—
Suddenly, he felt totally unprepared for any of this. He was just a translator. He wasn’t a terrorist. He was—
Think of your sister.
Do as he says.
After the pat-down, the agent said, “Have a seat, sir.”
As Ali did, all of his senses seemed to sharpen simultaneously.
It’d happened to him once before, two years earlier when he was having chest pains and went to see a physician.
After the examination, the doctor told him to wait in the room, then went to consult with another physician.
While he
awaited his doctor’s return, he heard a nearby faucet dripping distinctly and clearly, above the faint blip and hum of a machine somewhere down the hall. He noticed the acrid, bleachy smell of the cleaning agent they’d used in the room. He realized how skin-colored the walls were and he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was inside a diseased body with a heart pulsing, that he himself was a dying man surrounded by the drip and hum of blood.
And now it was happening again.
The drip and the hum.
His senses sharpened. All attuned.
The pulsing of blood.
He sensed the damp rub of his shirt’s fabric under his left arm, the sweaty pressure on his legs as he shifted in his seat. On the wall, the hands of a circular clock ticked their way around the face, each second clacking louder than it should have.
Tick.
And tock.
And tick again.
The agent had used cologne, a fresh and wind-brushed scent that seemed out of place in this stifling, cramped room.
Tock.
“Sir,” Ali said, “I don’t understand what—”
Tick.
On the other side of the glass, Agent Dartmoor wiped down his bag, doing an explosive trace detection. Ali knew about ETDs. Part of his training. Back in Yemen. Back when—
Agent Wilder interrupted his thoughts, “Please explain to me your reason for coming to the United States.”
“I told the other man, out there in the booth.”
“Yes. Now tell me.”
17
While examining the rest of the house, I paid particular attention to the blood spatter in the kitchen and the cellar where Canyon Robbins had been stabbed, but found nothing else of note.
Sharyn tried to find out who’d uploaded the video to the news app site, but the links and postings were all anonymous.
I searched online for the name “Igazi” but couldn’t identify anyone living nearby with that name, leaving the likelihood that it was a street name or nickname.
I relayed to the team how the fight in the attic had gone down and how the assailant had used his light to blind me as he came toward me.