Collision

by William S. Cohen

  Falcone could not make up his mind about the orchids. Keep them in the apartment? Why? To what end? Sure they were beautifully exquisite and required only a spray of water once a week. But their grace ripped open old wounds. In solitary moments, which were damn near most of the time, he would look at them and feel sentimentality flow through his veins as if it were a lethal poison. Karen’s pure joy in selecting the flowers and appropriate bowls for special occasions infused the apartment with a palpable pride. She had not lived to see these rooms, but there were always orchids, and they sometimes seemed to come alive, as if they had just bathed and put on their best clothes. The walls were virtually singing their own praises, announcing to the evening’s guests that they had prettied up just for them. Now the wall offered only sadness for a remembrance of joy.

  Falcone kept one photograph. It was on a sleek mahogany table. In a moment that seemed so natural and unposed, the camera had captured the very essence of Karen, a striking blond woman in her early twenties with the high cheekbones and slim body of a Vogue model. She had her arms draped around a young, freckle-cheeked boy, who wore an embarrassed lopsided grin. That was Kyle, born while Falcone was enduring the ministrations of Hanoi’s finest torturers. He never got to meet his only son.

  Falcone couldn’t count the times he wanted to smash the glass picture frame and burn the photograph. The memory of fleeting happy moments weighed like heavy, sharp-edged stones on the margins of his mind, severing any sense of meaning to his life, undercutting the will to live out what days or years were his to complete.

  Guilt alone prevented him from carrying out an act of rage against the photograph or himself. Surely, he reasoned, he would roast in a phantasmagoric Hell—which he did not believe existed—if he were to exact vengeance against a universe he couldn’t fathom by taking his own life. His Catholic education had really fucked up his mind.

  There were only two books in the room, and Falcone kept them near his favorite chair. Both were about his war heroes, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and Joshua Chamberlain. Both had fought in the Civil War. Both had been wounded. Chamberlain had saved the Union from a disastrous defeat at Gettysburg, and Holmes had dazzled the nation with his intellect while serving as a justice on the Supreme Court.

  There was a replica of Picasso’s Guernica, which portrayed the horrors and destruction of war. Nothing else adorned the apartment walls or shelves. No mementos of Falcone’s service in the Army, his career in the Senate or as national security advisor to President Oxley.

  He felt what Churchill had called “the black dog” coming on as he went into his office, looked up a number on a slim, leather-bound address book, and called Tommy Goodman, an assistant secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs. Goodman had not yet heard about the shooting. So the conversation was short, ending with a vague promise to get together for lunch and a firm promise to get somebody to check on the vets at the homeless shelter on Mitch Snyder Place.

  Falcone went back to the living room. There was a darkness that hung in the room even though it was filled with light. Loneliness was masquerading as simplicity, as if joy could be spun like cotton candy or the past erased by refusing to see or harbor its ghosts.

  Falcone felt a wave of fatigue sweep over him. It wasn’t from the fight that he had that morning. The punishing daily workouts in the gym kept him physically strong. And the fact that he killed a man—an enemy—was not a novel experience.

  No, what weighed him down was the fact that violence seemed to be his constant companion, a dark angel that hovered somewhere above or just behind him.

  As a young boy living on the mean streets of Little Italy in North Boston, he met taunts of being a “wop” and “mick” with flying fists. On college football fields and in boxing rings, he rejoiced when he leveled an opponent with a crunching block or devastating left hook.

  After he married his sweetheart Karen, many of his friends thought that he would ease into a professional and less combative life.

  It was not to be.

  Impulsively, and without even consulting Karen, Falcone had joined the Army. Within months, he was the expectant father of a child conceived on his last leave before heading for Vietnam and war. He was leading men in battle while Karen gave birth to Kyle, alone. He had rationalized that he was simply answering the call to duty, inspired by the words of a young, charismatic president.

  Falcone loved his country, to be sure. But it was not patriotism that was the driving force in his life. It was more than that. He was destined from the very beginning to run along the knife’s edge of existence, to see how far he could go without falling, or, falling, how far he could drop without dying. Death was the sentence we all received, so why not defy it if he could, mock it, dare it to take him? He was going to plunge full-speed right into the heart of mortality and not wait, like his father, to be chewed up by cancer and just wither away.

  He had gotten all that he had bargained for in Vietnam. And more.

  18

  Summoning darkness to a day of gunfire and death, old memories of gunfire and death flared again and again.

  During his first major engagement as an Army Ranger, he killed more than a dozen Vietcong. Afterward, when he examined each of the men he had killed, he discovered that one of the black-clad soldiers was a boy, no more than fifteen years old. And he was surprised by his reaction. There was no sorrow or guilt. No empathy. Nothing. After all, he was just a few years older at the time, and in war, the calendar doesn’t offer anyone bulletproof protection. One moonless night, while leading his unit on a patrol, he and his men were caught in a savage crossfire unleashed by the North Vietnamese. Falcone, though severely wounded, managed to survive the surprise attack. He was taken prisoner and moved to a POW site, dubbed the Hanoi Hilton. Almost everyone there was an Air Force pilot who had been shot down.

  There were many days when he wished that he could have joined his dead comrades. For four years he was confined to a twelve-by-twelve cell. Each day he would be interrogated and tortured. Sometimes the torture was psychological, the sultry voice of Hanoi Hannah coaxing him to sign a confession so he could be released to join his family and enjoy moments of pleasure once again. But mostly, the punishment came at the hands of two particularly sadistic men that Falcone and the other prisoners called Bug and Prick. Their names fit their methods.

  Without waiting for Falcone to recover from his wounds, the two men proceeded to hang Falcone by his arms from the ceiling of a torture chamber. They would hoist Falcone close to the ceiling and then let him drop several feet before stopping his fall. His shoulders were pulled from their sockets. Another favorite technique was to tie Falcone’s arms behind his back and then tie his head between his legs. He would be left in this position all day and relieved of the pressure only for a few minutes two or three times a day.

  During his third year of imprisonment, Falcone was offered an early release for “humanitarian reasons.” He was told that his wife and son had been killed in an auto accident. He simply needed to sign a confession admitting that he had committed war crimes on behalf of his imperialist country and he would be free to return to America.

  Falcone suspected it was a trick and that both Karen and Kyle were alive. If he agreed to sign the statement he would be seen as a traitor by his fellow captives and by his countrymen at home. There were other prisoners who had been in prison far longer than he had. It would be unfair to jump to the front of the line. It was a bluff. It had to be. But even if it was true, Falcone was never going to leave before the others. It was a matter of honor. Honor to his country, to his fellow prisoners. Honor even above his family.

  In fact, Karen and Kyle were dead. Killed by a drunken driver while returning home from grocery shopping.

  When the war finally ended, Falcone was heralded at home as a hero. But Falcone knew he was anything but a hero. He had broken his marriage vow to love and protect Karen. She and Kyle never would have died if he had been home. If he had not responded to the bloodlu
st in his veins, if he had not left them for the rice paddies and prisons of another land.… He would carry the guilt of his decision like a watermark on his mind: one that only he could see and only when he held it up to the light of self-reflection.

  He tried to obliterate the pain with a career in the law. He prosecuted Mafia dons and murderers. He went after corrupt public officials and corporate CEOs, sometimes wondering whether he was seeking revenge or redemption. Either way, it helped him to forget the emptiness inside, the hollowness he felt when he allowed himself a moment of reflection. He used to say that he was alone but never lonely. It was a lie that he constructed to keep others away from him, a wall that insulated him from the world of public adoration. Ironically, he was shielding himself from the very world that he was seeking to enter.

  And when he was elected to the U.S. Senate, Falcone thought that just maybe his luck would change. It didn’t. Senator Joshua Stock, his best friend, had his throat sliced by a Russian assassin.… Death just continued to stalk him. Tens of thousands died from a nuclear-bomb detonation in Savannah, Georgia. It was not his fault, but it was on his watch as President Blake Oxley’s national security advisor.

  And now, one of his law partners had been killed, nearly cut in two by the bullets of an assault weapon.

  Was he so hated by the gods? For what? Was it because he abandoned his faith in that North Vietnam chamber of horrors or because God had abandoned him? Was it the melancholy of the Irish? Or the fatalism of the Italians?

  He was never sure. But in the darkness of his soul he sometimes saw his fate: He was destined to lose those whom he loved or knew.

  In the drawer of the end table next to his bed was a printout of an anonymous document he had come across one night when he was searching on Google for a poem that had dimly appeared in his mind and then disappeared. He did not find the poem. But he did find that anonymous document and had read it again and again. He had not quite committed it to memory. He did not want it in his mind, but it was there, confronting him.

  How deep is the color black? Deep as a starless sky? Dark as Death’s dank breath? How silent is silence before it becomes a sound? In here, where time does not exist, I spin through the night, screaming in a pain that no one hears. I cut through tissue that bleeds invisibly. I am neither myth nor the imaginary. I am the truth told too late.

  *

  He had read a recent study that said scientists were able to plant false memories in the minds of mice. Some predicted they would soon be able to apply this medical technique to people and block or erase bad memories by substituting false ones.

  Falcone silently vowed that he would be the first in line to volunteer. Anything to forget.…

  He returned to the bar, poured another slug of vodka into his empty glass, and knocked it down in one long gulp. Setting the glass down, he picked up the remote control to his Sonos Sound System and tapped the button that keyed into his favorite radio stations, a source of memories from earlier, better days.

  He pulled off his slip-on shoes and stretched out on the living room sofa. The alcohol had started to ease the stress that he felt in his neck and soften the sounds of the traffic in the streets below.

  Closing his eyes, Falcone listened to the lyrics and melody of an old song, the strings of the artist’s guitar and timbre of his voice floating in the darkness in primary colors, like burnished leaves on a stream that wends its way to a cold and familiar destination.

  19

  Sergeant Clarence Reed watched the monitor as the image of the town car’s muddied license plate enlarged until it was a mass of colors that looked like an amateur’s attempt at an impressionist painting. Reed slowly brought the upper right-hand corner of the plate into focus. The orange color, topped by a blue band established that it was an Empire Gold plate, of the kind issued by New York State to replace blue-and-white plates.

  The fake mud—a combination of water-based brown paint and silicone polymers—covered all but the tops of the plate’s last two numbers. Reed split the monitor, leaving the plate on one side and pulling up a series of images of New York plates. Comparing the tops of the numbers, Reed came up with 4 and 8.

  Assuming that the town car was registered in New York City and would be of interest to the NYPD Intelligence Division, he sent an urgent e-mail request for a search for the registered owner of a black Mercedes with plates ending in 4 and 8. Because any information about the Sullivan & Ford shootings was to be copied to Assistant Chief Louise Mosley, she saw the request e-mail within minutes. She immediately called Mike Simon, a former CIA officer who was deputy director of the New York Joint Terrorism Task Force, with whom she had worked closely on several clandestine intelligence cases.

  The task force, a domestic intelligence organization formed by the New York Police Department in 1980, ran a network of undercover officers and informants to track suspected terrorists. It was frequently criticized for its profiling of Muslims and for its often unfriendly relationship with the FBI. But its relationship with the Washington police was quiet and friendly.

  “Your guys just got an urgent request from us,” she told Simon. “I’m calling you to tell you what’s behind it. We believe the car contains one of the shooters who killed four people here. They may be heading to New York.”

  “I’m on it personally, Lou,” Simon assured her.

  Half an hour later he called her back to say, “This is a great lead, Lou. Thanks much.”

  “What have you got?”

  “I can’t tell you everything on the phone. But we traced the Mercedes with those last numbers. It’s registered to a town-car company with Russian mob connections and maybe some deals that we’re looking at. The task force has been keeping an eye on those guys. The guy who runs this is into some bad stuff. We’ve got an all-points out on the car, emphasis on East Coast, big emphasis on Washington–New York corridor. And, lest I forget, the FBI.”

  “Keep me posted, Mike. These are bad guys.”

  “Don’t worry, Lou. We’ll find that car and the bastards in it.”

  20

  When Yazov turned the town car onto Pennsylvania Avenue, a red, two-tier Washington tour bus was in front of him. Ordinarily he would have swung around the bus. But the hulking concrete J. Edgar Hoover Building, headquarters of the FBI at 935 Pennsylvania Avenue, was coming into view on his left, and he decided to remain as inconspicuous as possible. On the GPS, the blinking red light showed the laptop was two blocks farther up, at 701 Pennsylvania Avenue.

  Yazov was still behind the red bus when he pulled up to the curb opposite the Navy Memorial’s granite sea.

  “Any ideas what we do?” Yazov asked.

  “Too much traffic,” Kurpanov said. “We gotta get movin’. There’s a cop car in the next block.”

  “Where’s laptop?” Yazov said, pointing to the GPS. Kurpanov leaned forward and squinted at the image.

  “Looks like seven hundred one,” Kurpanov said. He opened the window, stuck his head out, and craned for a look at the tall semicircular buildings encircling the Navy Memorial. “It could be anywhere in these goddamned buildings.”

  “You are right. And now?”

  “Somebody must’ve found it.”

  “Yes, Ahmed,” Yazov said, laughing. “That is a true idea.”

  Yazov pulled away from the curb. His eyes shifting back and forth from the windshield to the moving arrow on the GPS, he turned left at the signal light onto Seventh Street. He made his way through knots of traffic to New York Avenue and turned in to the entrance of the Horizon Motel, which had an underground garage.

  They did not speak to each other as they climbed the stairway to their second-story room. Yazov did not like talking on a job. And he did not like elevators, where you might meet a potential witness.

  He was not used to taking charge. All he usually did was drive and wait, then drive again after the job. Now, Viktor Yazov decided, he had to take charge.

  He slid the keycard into the lock and entered. He threw
the keycard and car keys on the top of the cabinet containing the minibar. He opened the door and took out a miniature bottle of vodka and a Diet Coke. Sitting on the edge of one of the twin beds, he handed the Coke to Kurpanov, opened and drained the vodka, then motioned for Kurpanov to sit opposite him on the other bed.

  Speaking in Russian, he said, “When we were at the parking lot at the airport, that guy—”

  “Cole Perenchio,” Kurpanov interrupted.

  “Yes. That guy. When we were at the parking lot, the tracker was on, the tracker on the laptop.”

  “Correct,” Kurpanov said, also speaking in Russian, which made talking to Viktor much easier than when he spoke in halting, “fucking”-laden English.

  “We followed his taxi to the hotel, correct?”

  “Correct.”

  “So we know where he is. Tonight we go there and we kill him.”

  “Viktor, we have no instructions to kill him.”

  “Correct. But we cannot go back to Basayev saying we lost Dukka. Lost the laptop! Kill Perenchio and we can tell Basayev we have done something.”

  “My gun—”

  “Your gun,” Yazov said, frowning. “Your fuckin’ gun. Yes. And you also lost that. So we use my gun. We find him and maybe we find the laptop. Maybe he has it now.”

  “It is worth trying, Viktor. I agree.”

  “All right. Here is my plan. We lay low today, tonight. We eat in that Chinese place down the street. Hang out, watch TV. Tomorrow we wait for darkness. We drive to Perenchio’s hotel, check in. You do your hit, like that one Dukka and you did in that hotel in Newark. We will do it like that. You call Perenchio’s room, tell him he’s got a pizza delivery. He knows he did not order it and gets frightened. He leaves the hotel to go to some safe place—maybe to that friend he met at the airport place—and you follow him and you kill him. Then I pick you up and we come back to this place and next day we pay our bill and—”

  “And Dukka’s room. He’s…” Kurpanov said, his voice trailing off.