Banquo's Ghosts

by Richard Lowry

  “Whatever we want,” Wallets said, flat and matter-of-fact. His bruised chest didn’t seem to bother him so much now. He looked down at her without pity. He wanted to try to spook her before doing anything, but he also was speaking the simple truth and wasn’t going to wait long for her to crumble. She kept trying to fight, but could only ineffectually flex her muscles, pinned down like that. When the mouth clamp pried her chops open, she started to mew, a pathetic sound.

  Banquo’s voice: “Get on with it.”

  “Do you want to talk?” Wallets asked, looming over her, all cold gray eyes.

  Yossi flipped a latch on the mouth clamp, allowing her to move her lips. The words came out in a spitting slew: “Djjal! Djjal! ”

  “All right.” Wallets signaled to Yossi, and the latch opened again, forcing her mouth open. The mewing came back. Her eyes jerked in their sockets, straining to look from side to side. Yossi had gone behind one of the mausoleums and come back with a wet washcloth and a silver ice bucket, empty of ice but filled with water. Yasmine’s eyes darted as far as they could to the side to try to watch him, then closed. More of that terrible whispery high-pitched sound. Wallets assumed it was a prayer.

  The sound seemed now like it was mingling with tears, a low barely audible mumble from the depths of her soul up to her Lord. Yossi with the ice bucket looked to Wallets.

  Wallets gestured, but he didn’t move. “Go on,” he said, pointing toward Yossi like he was going to take the ice bucket himself if he didn’t begin. Carefully the Turk placed the towel over Yasmine’s open mouth and methodically tipped the ice bucket, pouring a stream of water over the towel. It quickly dampened, and began to choke her. Soon she began to drown. The sound went from cat-screeching-in-the-middle-of-the-night to a soft gurgle. A sound that rattled your insides. Her body straightened in a convulsion and then thrashed as much as it could under the constraints. Yossi hesitated and Wallets waited, looking at the second hand of his watch. Ten seconds, fifteen, then twenty.

  “Take the towel off,” Wallets said. With practiced movements, Yossi took off the towel, flipped the latch loose on the mouth clamp and both men tipped the spine board on its side, letting the water run out of her. The sound of retching, coughing, spit-up filled the room. Then deep gasps. When the spine board came face-up once more, Yasmine was still gasping for breath, her eyes streaked with red and bulging toward the ceiling. She kept breathing hard and seemed to get herself under control, starting to mutter her prayer again.

  Wallets nodded to the Turk. The mouth clamp froze open, and the process was methodically repeated. From behind the room divider, O’Hanlon, Smith, Wesson, and Bryce watched, transfixed. They held their breath almost as one as the stream of water poured onto the towel, as Wallets counted off the seconds on his wristwatch. Twenty seconds, twenty-five, thirty . . .

  The towel came off, the spine board flipped, and the sound of retching filled the ballroom, a thread of puke stretching to the floor.

  “I can’t take this,” Smith said. Wesson stared back with haunted eyes. Bryce’s face was very, very pale, and he looked as if he just wanted someone to relieve him of duty. The body on the spine board still convulsed, even right side up, the sound out of Yasmine’s throat a death rattle. The death of her resistance. They only needed to do it once more. One more time. The third time paid for all. No more prayers. But it seemed an age.

  Wallets wrung the drenched towel back into the ice bucket. Then looked at Yasmine’s face, bleached nearly white. “Talk to us,” he said.

  She kept her eyes closed tight, as if she hated herself for doing it, but she began to speak, through her wheezy gasps. The loose mouth clamp rattled a little. And these are the nuggets they got from her, not much considering, but helpful, especially the last:

  “That’s all the teams . . . unfortunately.”

  “Yahdzi put the titanium canisters together long before Johnson’s Iran tour. That project long in the pipeline.”

  “The other material. Diplomatic Pouch over twenty trips, JFK and Mexico City. Trucked north to Nogales, and some direct to delivery bay, King Prussia Mall.”

  “In Brooklyn, DeGraw and Bond.”

  Wallets nodded and walked behind the room divider. Banquo pensively stroked his face. Satisfied for the present. Johnson’s face had a very dark cast to it, something between resignation and reckoning. O’Hanlon was there in body, not in spirit. He’d pushed his chair back and was staring at the floor, smoking a cigarette. He didn’t look up. The terrible question—was this the payoff or just more dead ends? They’d find out soon enough.

  “Are we done?” he asked no one in particular, a tone of disgust in his voice.

  Not by a long shot—they still had to track the bastards down.

  Outside in the real world, the great chase opened up to full throttle.

  The first Workbench Boy caught napping in Queens had coughed up the location of his buddies. Two of them in a car headed to the Bronx—in a twenty-year-old Toyota Corolla with New Jersey plates, FD1357—and one of them on the subway on his way to Grand Central Station. There was some confusion as to yet another Jihadi riding the rails, but no one seemed certain as to his route or identity. Smith and Wesson got the call to go to Grand Central, while the city’s powers-that-be bickered in the Waldorf over whether or not to shut down the subway.

  When they descended two levels to the 7 Train platform coming in from Queens, there were so many cops on the platform, it felt like rush hour, but only for New York City’s Finest. Passengers arriving on the 7 Train—despite their reading materials, their iPods, and their distracted rush—noticed all the cops, and it dawned on every passenger in a flash that something was wrong. Many passengers hesitated and began to step back into the subway car. The cops had to hustle them out, “It’s all right. It’s all right; keep moving.”

  Smith and Wesson prowled the platform like the caged cheetahs of the Bronx Zoo who run round and round the perimeter of their enclosure all day. They started at the front of the platform, near the exit, and walked down the platform as each train from Queens arrived, looking for the mark they knew so well from their surveillance of the safe house. When they moved through the crowd from each train, they scanned every face, then back to the front of the platform, following the departing passengers rushing toward the escalators. Next train ready to do it again. And quickly got tired of looking at the number 7 in a purple oval—denoting the train line—on every car. After the fifth train, they wondered if they were wasting their time hunting one lone Jihadi when there were cops here on lookout. Their new buds, Officers Carmine and Doleful Duane, had requested and been granted assignment with the Roll-Up Task Force.

  On the arrival of the sixth train, they hadn’t bothered to walk all the way to the front, but stood in the middle, when the train’s door shuddered opened, and there he was one door away, closer to the exit. They recognized the close-cropped back of his head as instantly as if it’d been a Michael Jordan advertisement in the 1980s. The tallest and strongest of the Queens Boys. Some animal instinct made him look behind him and realize he’d been made. He started sprinting, and Smith and Wesson ran after him, dodging through the passengers who stopped to see what was going on.

  He veered toward the other track, as a new Queens-bound 7 Train swooshed into the station. Wesson caught him by his right shoulder, closest to the tracks. He had one foot now on the bright yellow rubber edge of the platform. He swung his body violently around, back toward the middle of the station, and the motion—combined with her own momentum—sent Wesson flying out over the track.

  The conductor had been laying on the horn, a sustained, blaring, high-pitched wail. But it did no good now. The conductor pulled the emergency brake, the wheels screamed against the rails, but the dumb flat head of the train, like a metallic worm, barreled ahead. Wesson was thrown nearly perpendicular against the front of the steel nose, and for a moment it seemed she’d be able to grasp the metal chains across the front of the car to hang on in some miraculou
s fashion. But she lost her grip. Then vanished under the wheels.

  Smith wanted to lunge after her partner, but not against a moving train. The moving cars brought her up short. There was only the awful cacophony of the horn and the wheels—and suddenly two shots.

  The backpacker was down, felled by two risky, precision shots by Doleful Duane, down in a crouch on one knee. The train had nearly stopped now, the doors still closed. Smith could tell some passengers were screaming, others had their hands over their mouths. The cops were motioning the conductors to keep their doors closed. In the third car, one face didn’t look horrified, only very interested. He ducked out of sight, and Smith noticed strange movements in the car. She looked harder, and people were pressed against the doors and windows—and she saw the telltale wisps of the metallic floury powder. The other backpacker was in there.

  “Open the doors,” she shouted, but the cops were still signaling the conductors to keep them closed. The backpacker’s head could be seen on and off moving through the car, and then he went down, three good Samaritans on top of him. Smith ran to the front of the train and pounded on the windows for the conductor to open the doors of the third car.

  When he finally did, people hustled out, or just stepped out dazed, their hands up in pleading gestures, covered with the floury powder, or trying desperately to pat it off. The cops rushed in and had to pull off the good Samaritans—a burly redhead on his way to Citi Field, a skinny Latino guy with his iPod buds still in his ears, an older, balding guy in a cheap suit—all covered in the powder and punching and kicking the backpacker, down in the fetal position.

  Smith barked orders to the cops: “Quarantine this platform and corridor above. No one leaves the station.” Officers Carmine and Doleful Duane jumped on it, passing their orders to the other policemen on the platform, and within fifteen seconds they established a rough cordon in the pedestrian corridor above, and began to process straphangers, scanning their clothes with Geiger counters. Getting names and addresses. Most were cooperative, but there’s always one or two knuckleheads, and these mooks soon found themselves nose to dirty subway stanchions in plastic cuffs.

  Smith was still barking orders: “No one leaves the station. Get a hazmat team here ASAP, and get under that train!” She crouched down and looked under the cars. No sign of her partner.

  “Wesson!”

  She died on the tracks from loss of blood before they could get her out. The backpacker on the platform, dead too. The other one, badly beaten but alive. The worst-contaminated—along with Wesson’s body—were taken to NYU Medical Center and given total decontamination and iodine shots.

  There was another guest of the hospital. Walid from Union Square. Someone had called an ambulance for him when he had been weaving and having trouble standing near the New Utrecht Avenue-62nd Street subway stop back in Brooklyn. He arrived at the Kings County Medical Center wearing tights under jeans that had been coated with lead-based paint on the inside, tennis shoes that were painted outside with the same paint, and a pair of grey Ultex rubber radiation-reducing gloves. The clothes dissolving.

  Kings County Emergency in Brooklyn took one look at him and transferred the kid and all his disintegrating clothes locked in a hazmat container immediately to NYU Med Center—sending him right back to the Manhattan he had been so desperate to escape. Radiation cases were all to be handled at a central location as long as possible. Decontaminating the facilities in one hospital seemed better than decontaminating dozens across the city. Now the ambulance personnel who had picked him up in the first place were getting treated for radiation poisoning, right at NYU, while the Kings County ambulance was parked under the East Side Drive behind some chain-link fencing.

  Walid wore a green hospital gown, propped up on a bed, with black hairs sprinkled over his shoulders. He had been losing his hair for an hour. He grimaced in pain in between muttering incoherently in response to questioning from Smith. She wore a hazmat suit now. His arms were cuffed to either side of his bed. A cop at the door and a doctor at the back of the room also wore hazmat suits. The kid had tested for radiation off the charts, “a walking Nagasaki,” as the doctor had put it to the agents when they arrived.

  “Why did you do this?” Smith asked. “Who helped you do this? Tell us—it’s not too late. You can help.”

  His eyes were pleading, asking for forgiveness or understanding. And he mumbled something that sounded like, “Onion Square. I’m sorry.”

  News filtered back in from the street—and Johnson marveled at the change in the Waldorf since Banquo’s arrival, from the Mad Hatter’s tea party to an oiled machine. The phones rang, people answered them, properly dispatched, issues resolved. Ready for the next.

  A backpacker stopped outside the Metropolitan Opera.

  An entire cell cornered in their row house in Jersey City, a standoff, and then a shoot out—four Jihadis dead.

  A car with two backpackers—the one that had been coming from Queens—tailed by a police helicopter over the Bronx-Queens Expressway, then forced to stop at the ramp to the George Washington Bridge by two squad cars. Traffic backed up to Greenwich, Connecticut, as a tow truck was called in and the Jihadis brought into custody in the Fort Apache Precinct in the Bronx.

  Matters obviously had gotten beyond the point where they could be kept under wraps. Or where doing so served the people of the city. The Mayor, the Deputy Mayor, and the Police Commissioner’s faces had taken on a grayish tinge as the hours progressed. Phone calls coming into City Hall from newspapers and the rest of the media. Drudge had posted a headline, linking to stories of a few of the discrete incidents:

  WORMS IN THE BIG APPLE?

  With a siren flashing. Immediately, his site bent and nearly crashed under the weight of the traffic.

  At last, after an eon of press-gagging, and hiding under a very large desk, those at the Waldorf conference table resolved that the Mayor must go downstairs to deliver a statement and take some limited questions from reporters—although his avail would surely occasion a melee from journalists frenzied by the cocktail drug of a world-changing story about which they as yet knew next to nothing. They’d talked to the White House, which wanted the Mayor out first—as the highest political authority on the ground—before the Feds took over. They had word the president would be making his own preliminary statement within the hour.

  The Mayor would enlist the help of the general public, urging them not to flee the city, which would potentially expand exposure, but please stay inside, and make their way home on foot while authorities handled “a manageable security situation with potential public health consequences.” Then, the most ticklish bit: “Young men with backpacks have been implicated in this situation. If you see someone acting suspiciously, do not engage that person, but call authorities immediately.” How much more could he say? Should he mention they were of Middle Eastern or South Asian origin, or would that risk opening to retaliation every young Middle Eastern man in the city? They decided to keep it vague.

  As he and the Deputy Mayor pored over the brief text one more time, word came in about what had happened at Grand Central and the loss of Wesson. O’Hanlon got up to leave for NYU Medical, but Banquo grabbed him from his chair, placed a hand up around his neck, and whispered something in his ear. O’Hanlon stayed at his battle station, his eyes glassy. Plans to house the Westchester Metro North commuters and the Long Island Railroad commuters were quickly formulated with the city’s major hotels. Car traffic would not be restricted out of the city—as a safety valve—but no one could drive in. Subway and bus service suspended. All major hotel chains ordered to give stranded commuters such hospitality as available. The Mayor went downstairs, holding a printed text with scribbling on it in two different color pens.

  After his brief prepared remarks, he took a few questions, then listed badly under his own inability or unwillingness to give precise answers to the shouted follow-ups.

  “Is it biological? Chemical? What’s this substance?”


  “Anthrax? Is it anthrax?”

  “How do you define ‘acting suspiciously’?”

  “What do these ‘young men’ look like and act like? And how do you define ‘young’?”

  “How many are there? Is this the beginning or the end?”

  Every channel in America not devoted to sports, cooking, old feature films, or TV movies about women hooked on questionable men showed the same live images of the Mayor ducking back into the Waldorf, surrounded by boom mikes, frantic, pushing reporters, and a blue line of cops trying to maintain order. They didn’t have TVs in the interrogation room, but someone opened the door to tell Banquo, assuming he’d want to know, “The Mayor’s blowing it.”

  Banquo registered no surprise, nor did he feel any. He’d seen the Mayor’s mettle earlier and had pegged him as a man without a chest. After this, the urban solon should go back to Hizzoner’s prior obsession with transferring the entire cab fleet into hybrids and banning McDonald’s as a public health risk—that is, if he survived this.

  Banquo turned to O’Hanlon: “Make sure someone from DOJ gets out there to clean this up. We can’t have a general melee out in the streets.”

  Banquo asked for a cup of coffee and braced himself for what would be a bow wave of reports of suspected Jihadis in the wake of the Mayor’s presser. It would be like the aftermath of the famous radio broadcast of War of the Worlds—except some of the panicked calls would be reporting genuine aliens in their midst. He asked the Police Commissioner what surge capacity they had for 911 operators, and he said he’d see about diverting the operators from 311—the city’s nonemergency information line—to handling emergency calls. To no one in particular and everyone, Banquo announced, “Let’s buckle down, ladies and gentlemen. This is only the end of the beginning.”