As far as Rashad was concerned, his life had been ruined. Ever since childhood, he and Khalif had talked about how they’d use their basketball skills to get out of the ghetto. They’d go to college on scholarships and then play in the NBA. They even joked about who’d have the upper hand when their respective teams played each other, or if they were really lucky, maybe they’d get to play together for the Knicks or the Nets. They’d have money and all the things it bought; they’d buy nice homes for their moms and their siblings, too. Their kids would grow up happy and prosperous. Such would be the will of Allah.
Then it all came tumbling down. He’d had sex with the bitch, just like everybody else, if what he’d heard was right. Then when she kept calling, he’d told her he wanted no part of her. Then there was the party. The bitch got drunk and lured Khalif into her room and they’d had sex. When Khalif came out, he looked troubled. “It was a sin to lie with a whore,” he said. “I’m going to go get my coat and leave. You coming?”
“Yeah, just a minute,” Rashad said, and went into the bedroom. There were candles burning, and the bitch had known who he was. “I knew you’d come back, Rashad, if you thought I was going to be with your friend. Now come here.”
A lay was a lay and Rashad had not minded sloppy seconds. But then Khalif returned to the room and flicked on the lights. He looked disgusted but only said, “I’m going,” and turned away. Rashad had laughed and jumped up, pulling up his pants.
“Come on, baby, stay here tonight,” the woman pouted.
Rashad had laughed again. “Fuck no, bitch. I ain’t spending the night with a whore. There’s another five guys out in the living room, but you can get one or two of them to keep you company.” Then he left, thinking it was the last time he’d see her.
Then the bitch lied and went to the university and said she’d been raped by a man she didn’t know. But worse than that, the district attorney’s office had believed her, and then compounded it by hiding evidence that would have demonstrated it was a lie. That’s the way it was when a white woman accused a black man.
Nightmare followed nightmare. First, the university kicked them out and withdrew their scholarships. Then there was the trial, where he’d had to sit quietly in his seat and listen to the bitch lie and the prosecutor lie worse. After that the jury came back, and as he listened in disbelief, he and his best friend were found guilty. But nothing, nothing could compare to the terror of arriving at Attica, trying to look tough while real criminals leered and taunted. Except for the night he was gang raped when the Bloods caught him alone in the prison laundry. He’d been too ashamed even to tell Khalif, but Mr. Mustafa had understood his hatred.
Mr. Mustafa had put it all in perspective. The district attorney was a Jew. The prosecutor, Rachel Rachman, was supposedly a Catholic, “but look at her name…she’s just another Jew,” Mustafa said. The jury had contained some blacks “but the Jews on the jury swayed them with their lies and deceits.” He’d lost his dream and been defiled “because of the Jews.” That’s when he’d sworn to join the jihad.
Then Mr. Mustafa started talking about a traitor, and he wondered if they thought it was Khalif. He hadn’t told his friend any of the details, having taken Mr. Mustafa’s warning to keep secrets or be considered a traitor to heart, but he’d gone to Union Square that morning just to see what would happen. When the UPS truck was swarmed by cops, he figured Khalif must have somehow figured it out and snitched. He’d been about to jump up and explain that his friend was just misguided and not a traitor when Mr. Mustafa turned on the little man next to him.
“Thus, it is written, will be the fate of all traitors who have sworn to Allah to carry out jihad,” Mr. Mustafa said.
Al-Sistani looked over the frightened faces. Good, he thought, there will be no more traitors. Still, as one of his men dragged the body out of the room for its final journey to the New Jersey landfill, he wanted to try one more test.
“Tonight, I am going to tell you our plan and your role,” he said. “But first, I want to ask you to search your hearts, and if you do not have the will for jihad, leave us now in peace.”
No one moved but a lot of eyes went to the man with the gun.
“Do not worry,” Al-Sistani said. “I do not consider it an act of treason to leave, so long as you make no attempt to contact our enemies, which we would surely know and take our revenge for. But until I have divulged the plan, you are free to leave, the blessings of Allah upon you.” It was a lie, of course; anyone who stood up was going to receive a bullet in the head, but no one stood.
“Please,” Al-Sistani said, motioning those who were still standing back to their chairs. “It is time to reveal the great blow you will help us strike for Allah.”
Of course, he wasn’t going to reveal the real plan. These martyrs would have no role except as laborers, and then would defend the supplies up until the moment they, along with thousands of others, were sent to meet the Creator. He didn’t want them thinking, however, that this was a suicidal mission. Even the brainwashed children of Palestine sometimes balked at that; no, they would be told that they would live to fight another day.
“We have discovered an old, abandoned tunnel that the infidels have forgotten,” he said. “This tunnel happens to run beneath the New York Stock Exchange, the financial heart of the oppressors. On New Year’s Eve, we plan—with your help—to break into the building from below, set explosive charges, and bring the entire building crashing to the ground, and with it, the financial stability of the United States and its loathsome puppetmaster, Israel.”
It was a good plan, he thought, one that did not seem to involve a lot of deaths to innocent civilians and would therefore be more palatable to these new warriors of the jihad. They could strike a blow for freedom without a lot of killing, which might have weighed on their consciences.
“Of course,” he said, “there is some risk. You will be asked to help with final preparations and then to guard my men as they prepare the bomb. You will be given weapons for this task. But you will also be compensated so that you can live decently while continuing your efforts on behalf of the jihad. You may not know this, but the infidels keep quite a bit of currency in the building; my men will retrieve this and distribute it among you.”
“How much, dawg?” asked Mahmoud Rauf, a hardened gang member who’d been among the first to swear fealty.
“About one hundred thousand dollars each…dawg,” Al-Sistani replied, smiling at the different inflection he’d given dawg so that it came out as an insult.
“Damn,” Rauf declared. “I’m in.”
Al-Sistani smiled. “Great, Mahmoud. Now, the rest of you, are you in?” All the heads nodded. “This is good, here are your instructions.”
Two hours later, Zakir prepared to turn in for the night. He lived in a small room upstairs in the back of the building. Mr. Mustafa and his men had quickly left, followed by the recruits. The killing had frightened him and he just wanted everyone to leave so he could forget about the whole thing in his slumber. He was just about to turn out the lights when there was a pounding on the front door of the mosque.
Sighing, he rose from his bed and walked down the stairs. Someone had probably forgotten something, though why they couldn’t wait for the morning peeved him. He took out the .45-caliber Colt he kept in a box at the door—an imam couldn’t be too careful in such a high-crime area, not with all the cash he had stuffed under his mattress.
Zakir looked out of the peephole and saw shadows moving away from the door. He could just make out a bag that had been left on the doorstep, and he smiled. Sometimes the members of his congregation left food and other items for him because they lacked cash; these had probably been too embarrassed by their pitiful donation.
He opened the door and saw a large, plastic shopping bag from Macy’s. Picking it up, he was surprised by its weight. He looked inside…then started to scream and dropped the bag, which fell over on its side. Two round objects rolled out, one of them bouncing all
the way down the three steps to the sidewalk, where it came to a stop.
The bearded head of Rajid Basir, a former member of the Taliban in Afghanistan, stared back at Zakir from the stoop. He assumed the round object on the sidewalk had belonged to Akmed Moammar, a Libyan who’d fought in Chechnya, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He didn’t really care to go find out and instead just continued screaming as lights came on in the buildings near the mosque.
In the alley across the street, two hooded shadows stepped farther back into the darker recesses. “That went even better than I’d hoped, Father,” the shorter of the two shadows whispered. “He screams like a woman. Shall I go slit his throat before the police arrive?”
The taller of the shadows placed his hand on the other’s shoulder. “No, my son,” he said quietly. “We need this one to tell the others. Let his fear infect them.”
A police siren wailed in the distance. “Come, let us depart,” the taller shadow said. He took a step, then bent over as a gasp of pain escaped his lips.
“Father!” the shorter man whispered. “Are you all right?”
“Fine,” his comrade said, straightening with an effort. “I am fine enough for these last days. But come, we’ve stayed too long.”
As the screams of the siren began to drown out those of Zakir, the two shadows slipped from the alley and, unnoticed by the small group of people who’d gathered around the head on the sidewalk, moved away.
Reaching their destination several blocks away, the shadow men pulled the cover off a manhole and climbed down the ladder, pulling the cover shut just as a taxi came around the corner and nearly caught them in its headlights. Standing in several inches of filthy water at the bottom, the taller of the two mussed the hair of his comrade and sniffed.
“Ah,” he said, “home sweet home.”
14
Saturday, December 18
TED VANDERS REACHED FOR THE BREAST OF THE NAKED WOMAN in the bed lying next to him, only to have a finger bent back nearly to his wrist. “Jesus Christ!” he cried out. “What did you do that for?”
“Because I didn’t want you to touch me,” the woman replied. “When I want you to touch me, I’ll tell you. Until then, keep your fucking hands to yourself.”
Sarah Ryder stretched like a cat and then rose quickly from the bed and stood in front of the full-length mirror, turning this way and that. By and large, she was pleased with the response from men she got to the breast augmentation surgery she’d had a year earlier, changing her from a 34C to a 36DD. However, of late she’d been wondering if more was better and she should revisit her plastic surgeon and pump up the volume, so to speak. The bigger the bait, the richer the tiger, she thought.
“What do you think, Ted,” she said, turning sideways. “Should I get bigger tits?
“I think they’re perfect just the way they are, my love,” Vanders said with a pout. “That’s why I wanted to touch them…at least until you almost broke my finger.”
Ryder rolled her eyes. “Fuck, why would I ask you,” she sneered. “You’d think an old water balloon was a turn-on. And if I’d wanted to break your finger, I would have. Now quit with the fucking ‘my love’ shit, it makes me want to throw up.”
Having just screwed Ted Vanders didn’t mean she liked Ted Vanders. In fact, she pretty much detested Ted Vanders—from his skinny, sunken white chest and muscleless arms to his crooked teeth and myopic eyes. However, it was his imperfection that made him perfect for her plan. After all, who would believe that a hottie like Sarah Lynn Ryder, who had a body and face that real men fought over, would have anything to do with a faggy little English major like Ted?
Ted, on the other hand, was hopelessly in love with her. He actually thought that she was attracted to his stupid poetry and romanticism. My love, blech. Oh yes, she’d giggled like a virginal schoolgirl when she picked him out at the student union on the NYU campus, but she’d nearly regretted it the first time she let him have sex with her. He was so excited that it hardly lasted thirty seconds and that was if you included his amateurish attempts at foreplay. It was all she could do to keep from gagging when she told him it was all right and that “a few minutes of perfection is better than hours with another man.”
After that he was hooked, and she treated him pretty much like dirt. He would do anything to have sex with her, which she kept to a minimum both because it sickened her and because she wanted him desperate. As she figured, he became so enraptured that he’d even agreed to go along with her plan to exact revenge on her professor of Russian poetry, Alexis Michalik. Of course, she’d framed it in a way—the man had used her and cast her aside—to appeal to both his jealousy and romantic nature…the bull (albeit a skinny, nearsighted bull) who sees another bull in the paddock with the heifer in heat.
Twenty-five-year-old Sarah Ryder had known for more than half her life that men found her attractive—especially when, as her spinster aunt back home in Iowa said, she’d “blossomed early.” The first such man was a friend of her parents who’d come over with his wife every Friday night for a friendly game of canasta and insisted on tucking “little Sarah” into bed. He’d gone from fondling her “naughty places” to more painful exercises, all the time warning her not to tell her parents or she’d be punished. Two years later, after she figured out that he was the one who should be worried, she told him that she didn’t mind the sex, but if he didn’t do what she wanted him to do—including giving her a rather large allowance—she’d not only tell her parents, she’d tell the cops.
Sex was a means to an end. She soon learned that she didn’t even have to have sex to use it as a weapon. When she was fifteen, her parents divorced, and her mother remarried a year later. Her stepfather was a good man who would never have touched her, but when he tried to lay down the law on her curfew, she called the police and said he’d raped her. She was smart enough to know that the police wouldn’t just take her word for it, so she’d had sex with one of the neighborhood boys before calling the police.
Based on her report and the initial examination at the hospital, her stepfather was arrested, a fact that was reported in the hometown newspaper. However, she’d been naïve and hadn’t thought to make the boy wear a condom, so when the DNA tests came back negative for her stepfather six weeks later, she’d been confronted and she confessed. The Department of Social Services had sent her to a counselor, who’d lectured her about the harmful aspects of lying, pointing out that her stepfather’s reputation in the town had been badly damaged.
Ryder had been so contrite, promising with many tears that she’d learned her lesson, that the counselor considered her a triumph of modern talk-therapy and recommended that she be allowed to go back to her family. However, her stepfather, who’d received dozens of pieces of hate mail and had even been accosted on the street, moved out and shortly thereafter left town.
“Good riddance,” she told her mom when the divorce papers arrived a month later. “Even if he didn’t, he wanted to and would have sooner or later.” Her mother had just looked at her funny, then fled into her bedroom, where she sobbed all day. Sarah had rolled her eyes then, too. Ryder had moved to New York hoping to become a Broadway star. When leading roles, or any roles for that matter, weren’t immediately forthcoming, she enrolled at NYU as a theater major, while hostessing at a Steak Sizzler on Times Square.
Life got better when she started dating a member of the New York Rangers hockey club. Dmitri Federov was stunningly good-looking, rich, and had a great accent. He was also generous—putting her up in a small flat in the Village and even buying her a five-carat diamond ring for Christmas. He didn’t exactly call it an engagement ring or ask her to marry him, but she took it as a fait accompli. She thought they made the perfect couple and even took Russian lessons throughout that year so that she’d be able to converse with his family someday.
After a year of seeing him when he felt like it, she suggested that they get married. But he just laughed and said, “But what would I tell my wife in Moscow?”
Ryder reacted first by threatening to tell his wife and/or the police. However, he’d pointed to a small camera hidden in a corner of the ceiling of his bedroom where they were talking—a camera he admitted he’d used to film their lovemaking. “It’s still on.” He smiled. “Now, shall I take that to the police and tell them you are trying to blackmail me?”
“Ha ha, just teasing,” she’d said. “I don’t want to get married.”
“Get out,” he replied. “I don’t want to ever see you again. And by the way, your breasts are too small.”
With her face burning, Ryder stormed off to the bathroom—“to get my things”—where she promptly swallowed a bottle of Ambien sleeping pills. She figured she’d either almost die and make him see how much she loved him and then he’d take her back, or cause him enough embarrassment in the press to flee the country. Maybe he’ll even lose his work visa, she thought as she drifted off to sleep.
However, Federov soon discovered her and called an ambulance. His agent then paid off the right people to keep it out of the newspapers and have Ryder committed to Bellevue for observation “as a danger to herself and others.” By the time she got out, Dmitri’s lawyers had obtained a restraining order preventing her from calling, writing, or coming within one hundred yards of their client. She also discovered that he must have removed the diamond ring from her finger while waiting for the ambulance and cleaned out and closed the bank account he’d set up for her “expenses.”
Ryder had returned to her classes at NYU much poorer but also wiser. She was determined that the next time some guy fucked with her, he’d pay one way or the other. She was still trying to figure out her best option—turn her charms on one of the rich old men who hung out in TriBeCa looking for trophy wives (“But with my luck, they’d live to be a hundred and be as horny as a goat,” she complained to one of her few friends), or try for a rich young man “except they’re all married, gay, or allergic to commitment.”
Fury (The Butch Karp and Marlene Ciampi Series Book 17) Page 23