A World I Never Made

by James Lepore

  “Do your people believe him?”

  “No. They think al-Siddiq got Raimondi to do his bidding. They think its possible that bin-Shalib works for the Saudis, that he was compromised somehow, possibly via Megan Nolan, that Raimondi was their ace in the hole, a mole they cultivated for years and finally put to use:”

  “I don’t believe it. Raimondi was an idiot and a coward, and he came from money.”

  “He’s the one who went to LeGrand. He knew about the faked suicide. He brought up al-Zahra, the terrorist plot:”

  “So Nolan’s on the run from the Saudis, who want to kill her because she can somehow expose their connection to bin-Shalib?”

  “That’s the theory in Washington.”

  “Who is this woman?”

  “She’s a total fucking mystery, but if she leads us to bin-Shalib ... If we find her, they want us to use her as bait:”

  “Enlist her in the war on terror:”

  “Yes.”

  “Will she have a choice?”

  “Do any of us?”

  “Not according to Sartre, who you probably despise:”

  “I do despise him, and the answer is yes, she will:”

  Ephrem stirred and then awoke as the passenger beside him got up to go to the men’s room. Stretching first, he stood also and reached for his knapsack on the rack above. As he did, he turned and scanned the car. Max and Orlofsky stared vacantly ahead, and Max was able to return for a moment to Megan Nolan and the little he knew about her. There had not been even a hint of irony in the dozen or so articles she had written for Vogue and Cosmopolitan, although Max did like the titles, especially the last one. Otherwise they were straightforward inanities. Then, after 9/11, came the pieces, obviously deeply researched, on the Trojan Horse that was Muslim immigration to Europe. Had she suddenly become patriotic and a scholar at the same time? Her past was just as puzzling. Two weeks at Bennington in 1992 followed by twelve years of capital hopping in Europe. A lifestyle supported, it seemed, by a continually replenished balance of about fifty thousand euros in a Paris bank. The bank code for the source of these deposits, all wire transfers, indicated that they came from private Swiss houses. Orlofsky’s people were working on obtaining the records of these accounts, but Max was sure they would simply show a series of cash deposits over the past ten years or so. Could this money have come from al-Qaeda-type sources? Was her whole adult life an elaborate cover as she prepared for a career in terrorism? Stranger things had happened. People went bonkers with hate and anger. He hoped Megan Nolan wasn’t one of them. He was starting to like her in the strange way that was familiar to him under a certain set of circumstances. He did not want to have to kill her.

  “Max French,” said Orlofsky, stirring Max from his thoughts, “Where did you get that name?”

  “From my parents, where else?”

  “Are you actually French?”

  “French-Canadian, German, American Indian:”

  “American Indian?”

  “My great grandfather was a miner. He married a Shoshone squaw and brought her to San Francisco.”

  “You seem distracted. Have you been thinking of our Miss Nolan? I notice you keep her picture in your jacket pocket:”

  “Where else would I keep it?”

  “And that you study it often:”

  Max smiled wryly and remained silent. Once, when he was a reporter in Paris, he had covered the story of a woman who had been suspected by the French police of murdering her husband by mixing small amounts of rat poison in his food over a period of two years. A beautiful brunette with sad, haunting eyes, he had carried her picture around as well, not disposing of it until two years later when he returned to the States to start law school.

  “Perhaps it is a good thing,” said Orlofsky.

  “What?”

  “To fall in love with your prey. It sharpens the senses:”

  Max had slept for three or four hours last night, laying across four chairs at the police station in Cheb, his buckskin shoes drying on a radiator nearby. The radiator’s intermittent muttering and the quiet hissing of his soft leather shoes had lulled him to sleep.

  “Dry shoes help, too,” Max answered.

  They changed trains in Prague and a half hour later they were disembarking in Kolin. On the platform Ephrem was met by another gypsy boy, this one perhaps two or three years older, darkly handsome, his black hair pulled into a ponytail, wearing a black motorcycle jacket à la Marlon Brando in The Wild Ones. Max and Orlofsky watched as the two boys hugged as if they had not seen each other for years, or as if the older boy had thought the younger one dead, perhaps having fallen from a boat into a swollen river. Leaning against a nearby post, pretending to read a Czech newspaper, was Marcel Dionne. Outside, the boys got into a beat-up gray Skoda. The three policemen followed as they drove out of town and picked up the main east-west highway. After only a few miles, they pulled into a truck stop complex that contained a restaurant, a truck wash, a large parking area half filled with behemoth tractor-trailers, and a drab one-story motel of about twenty rooms. The boys parked the Skoda in front of room nineteen and went in. Orlofsky was driving. He parked behind a Dumpster, but with a direct view of the boys” room, the next to the last on the right, and then sent Dionne to check out the back. The baby-faced detective returned in a few minutes to report that there was a small bathroom window at the rear of each room. No door.

  “Go and get us some food,” Orlofsky said to Dionne, nodding toward the busy restaurant. “And coffee:”

  “And blankets;” said Max, looking at his watch and then the cold gray day outside. ”We could be here a while:”

  It was one PM. Max and Orlofsky watched Dionne as he walked around the motel to the left and through the maze of parked trucks, taking a circuitous route to the restaurant so as not to be seen by the occupants of room nineteen. While Dionne was gone, a car pulled up—another Skoda, this one a grimy white—and parked next to the gray one. A third gypsy boy, with dark curly hair, perhaps eighteen, got out and entered room nineteen using his own key.

  “Two cars,” said Max.

  “Yes;” Orlofsky replied. “I’ll call for help. We should be watching the back window, anyway.” They had already checked in with the Kolin police, and now the French agent called his contact there, a Sergeant Ruzika, and asked him to send out an unmarked car, with food and blankets for a possible all-night stakeout. Ruzika himself arrived twenty minutes later in a Ford pickup and parked alongside one of the tractor-trailers, at an angle that gave him a good view of the rear of the motel. Once he settled in, he buzzed Orlofsky on the radio.

  “There are two Skodas,” Orlofsky said, “one gray, one white, parked on our side of the motel. You take the white one when it leaves. I’ll buzz you. Plate number: CF553. Do you have backup?”

  “Yes. A car near the entrance:”

  “Have you heard from Prague?”

  “Yes. Your boy called a party here in Kolin. Arturo Toscanini, a Paris address. Phony.”

  “Our gypsies are great kidders. Any other calls?”

  “No.”

  “What about your gypsies?”

  “There is a family of ten or twelve in an apartment near the square. They’ve been there for about six months. There is also another group of about twenty in an abandoned Soviet mining camp a few miles from here. Shall I send someone?”

  “No. They warn their friends:”

  “I agree.”

  “Did you bring supplies?”

  “Yes.”

  “Keep an eye on that back window.”

  Marcel had been unable to get blankets in the restaurant and they spent a cold night. But it was worth it. At around two AM, the door to room twenty swung open and Catherine Laurence stepped outside to smoke a cigarette. Max had also studied her photograph, taken on the day five years earlier when she was promoted to detective sergeant, though not as much and not with the same interest as Megan Nolan’s. When she emerged, Orlofsky and Dionne were dozing. Max di
d not wake them immediately. He watched Laurence, her face lit by the dim glow from a yellow lamp above the door, struck by her beauty. You’re not obsessed with her, Max, he said to himself, you’re very cool with respect to Catherine Laurence. You could kill her and not skip a beat.

  There was a low railing, made of plastic or cheap, painted wood that separated the parking lot from the cement apron that ran along the front of the motel. Max watched as Laurence stepped closer to it to flick her half finished cigarette away. When the door behind her opened, she did not turn. A large man, perhaps six-four, with a strong face and deep-set eyes came out of room twenty and, stepping behind Laurence, rested his hands on her shoulders. Even in the dim yellow light, Max could see that these were large hands, the hands of a working man or of a great lover. Laurence, her arms folded across her chest, raised her hands to take hold of Patrick Nolan’s. Max’s father, one of the first casualties of the Vietnam War, had had large hands. So Max had been told. Hands that caressed a weapon, and his nineteen-year-old wife, before leaving Fort Lewis for Nam. Would that man have traveled halfway around the world to track down a runaway son who was suspected of high crimes?

  Max shook this thought from his head. When you were an orphan, you had many many more questions than you had answers. Then he nudged Orlofsky, and when the Frenchman raised his head, he pointed to the couple under the yellow light, and whispered, “Voilà.”

  ~34~

  CZECH REPUBLIC, JANUARY 8-9, 2004

  Mohammed, Abdel al-Lahani, and their army of two were staying in a motel on the outskirts of Kolin. Most of the fifteen or so rooms were empty. There were a few backpacking, marijuana-smoking young people. A middle-aged couple checked in and out within two hours. Tedious examples of the corruption of the West. But the old crone that owned the place did not ask for passports or car registration information. Illicit love, drugs, foreign nationals that fit the typical terrorist profile, these did not bother her as long as cash was paid in advance. Lahani paid for a week, though they did not plan on staying that long. They needed only a day or two more of isolation and anonymity.

  On his way back from the gypsy camp yesterday, Mohammed had stopped in Kolin to purchase a second car for their mujahideen to use. They were now sitting in it, perched above the old mining camp, their orders to phone Lahani immediately if they saw someone who could be Megan or if the gypsies appeared to be breaking camp. Mohammed was sure that the leader, Corozzo, a wild-looking man with a gold tooth and an eye patch, had lied. Either Megan was in the camp or the chief knew where she was. Mohammed had mentioned a large sum of money to Corozzo as a reward to anyone helping them locate Megan. If nothing developed soon, Lahani’s plan was to raid the camp and extract Megan if she was there, or information as to her whereabouts if she was not. By any means necessary.

  At two in the morning, Lahani and Mohammed were awakened by a rapping on their door. They had been sleeping lightly, fully dressed, expecting gypsy greed to bring them either a traitor or an attempted robbery. Through the door, their visitor identified himself as Sebastian, Corozzo’s son, having come with information about Megan Nolan. Nine-millimeter pistols in hand, they let the man in and invited him to sit in the room’s one rickety chair. He was wearing a heavy overcoat with a woolen scarf wrapped around his neck and a hunter’s cap on his head. When he took these latter two off, his blackened and swollen right eye and the ugly welt along his right jawline were revealed.

  “Would you like a drink?” Sebastian asked, reaching inside his coat and pulling out a half-full pint bottle of whiskey. The two Saudis shook their heads, but the gypsy did not seem to notice, taking a long swig and returning the bottle to the folds of his voluminous winter coat.

  “Where is the Nolan woman?” Lahani asked. He was sitting on the edge of one of the room’s two beds, across from Sebastian, leaning forward, his hands clasped in front of him. Mohammed was standing to the right of Sebastian, his pistol held at his side.

  “Who is she?” Sebastian asked. He had to cock his head to one side to look at Lahani through his good eye.

  “She is a dangerous criminal;” Lahani answered.

  “A criminal? Yes, I believe it. And a bitch:”

  Mohammed looked closely at the young gypsy’s face, handsome beneath its bruises and its growth of beard. There was fear in the depths of his watery drunken eyes, which was to be expected. And something else. A bitch, he had called Megan.

  “Where is she?” Lahani asked.

  “I heard you mention twenty-five thousand euros;” the gypsy said to Mohammed, turning his head in exaggerated slowness, as if in full control, the way a drunk will.

  “Where is Miss Nolan?” Lahani asked, an edge now in his voice.“Is she at the camp?”

  “No, she has left:”

  “Where is she?”

  “I don’t know, but tomorrow she is to meet her father. I will find out where and call you:”

  “How will you find out?”

  “There are people in the camp who hate the woman. It won’t be hard:”

  “How was the meeting with her father arranged?”

  “A gypsy from our tribe arrived this morning. He made the arrangements with Corozzo.”

  “Just the father? Anyone else? Are the police involved?”

  “No, my father would not deal with the police:”

  “What happened to your face?”

  “A quarrel with Corozzo. With the money I will be free:”

  “Yes, you will get your money when you have delivered Megan Nolan to me:”

  “I would like some now. Half.”

  With a nod from Lahani to Mohammed, this Sebastian would be dead. Corozzo would probably thank him. But Lahani believed his story. There was the truth of hatred in his eyes. He could kill him later, once he was sure he had Megan in his sights.

  Lahani reached for his jacket, hanging on the back of a chair, and took his billfold from it, extracting a roll of hundred euro notes, counting off ten, and handing them to Sebastian. He then wrote his cell phone number on a slip of notepaper and handed it to the gypsy.

  “You will call me, I know,” Lahani said. “You would not risk your life and your entire family’s for a thousand euros:”

  “One more thing,” Sebastian said.

  “Yes.”

  “Corozzo has someone watching you, to warn him if you head for the camp. He is a boy of fifteen, driving a red Volkswagon Beetle:”

  “Thank you. We will take care of him.”

  “Yes, I’m sure you will:”

  Sebastian did call late the next morning. Afterward, Lahani had Mohammed call their two men in from their stakeout. While waiting for them, the Saudi prince savored his situation. A week ago, a French policewoman had made a routine call to the Foreign Office in Rabat regarding a female suicide possessing a Moroccan diplomatic visa. The inquiry had reached the person who had issued the visa, who indeed issued all such visas in Morocco, a jihadist in league with the Falcon of Andalus. Now, after seven months of circling in frustration and muted anger, the Falcon was about to land. Where Uncle al-Siddiq, through his idiotic dupe, Charles Raimondi, had failed, he would succeed. He would kill Megan Nolan with his own hand, first looking her in the eye, and thus expiate the humiliation that had weighed so heavily upon him these past months. Afterward, he would resume his work of killing infidels, of reinstituting the caliphate in Europe, starting in Spain, the most cowardly among a continent of cowards. March 11 was only two months away.

  ~35~

  CZECH REPUBLIC, JANUARY 9, 2004

  Pat had turned off the cheap electric heater when they went to bed because it made so much noise he knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep. When he woke at two AM the room was very cold and Catherine wasn’t there. He turned the heater on and, as he was dressing, he saw the glow of a cigarette outside through an opening in the synthetic drapes that covered the front window. Relieved, he stood for a moment and watched Catherine smoke. She was wearing Uncle Daniel’s blue wool sweater and her stylish Fre
nch jeans. Her hair hung down to her shoulders. Her arms were folded on her chest and her head was slightly bent. She looked younger from behind, more like a girl of twenty than a woman of thirty-five. Younger and more vulnerable. She had been subdued during their long day of waiting, and so had he. They had bought provisions, checked into the room, showered, eaten, made love on the edge of exhaustion, fallen asleep for six or seven hours, eaten again, watched CNN—understanding little—and then tried to sleep again.

  As the day wore on, Pat realized that they had become disconnected somehow, a phenomenon that he gave himself credit for grasping, but the cause of which eluded him. It had been a long time since he cared whether or not he was disconnected from a woman, much less tried to figure out why. Now he cared, but was confused as to the cause.