by J. G. Sandom
“Tell that to your fellow agents, as they harass and arrest my people, as they lock them up without legal representation, as they hold them indefinitely without charge.”
“Your people?” Decker smiled. “You were in New York when the towers fell, weren’t you?” He pulled the sketch he’d found in Moussa’s locker from his pocket and laid it gently on the professor’s desk.
Hassan glanced at it momentarily and said, “Is that meant to make me feel all patriotic, all mushy and sentimental inside?”
Decker reached into his gym bag on the floor. He removed his notebook and plopped it on the desk. “But you are a naturalized citizen, are you not?” He opened the notebook casually, revealing the sketch he had made of the PC wallpaper.
“I was during Vietnam and Watergate as well,” Hassan said. “And when you lied to us about WMDs in Iraq.” He looked down at the notebook on his desk. Decker noticed his eyes grow wide. “There is a higher calling associated with being an American than just towing the party line, Agent Decker. Wasn’t that the lesson of McCarthy? It may be considered old-fashioned, even sentimental these days, but I still believe in personal rights and freedoms.” He craned his neck to get a better look at the drawing from the jukebox dealer. “So did the Founding Fathers. I wonder how they’d fare today in our political environment. Patriot’s Act indeed! I’m sure they would have had their phones tapped by the current administration, and . . . where did you get these drawings?” he inquired.
“I’m sorry, but I can’t tell you that.”
Hassan scowled. “I’m a busy man, Agent Decker. In fact, I’m late for a meeting as it is.” He stood, brushed the wrinkles from his suit, and started toward the door. A few students still lingered in the hallway.
Decker turned his notebook so that it faced Hassan. “I’m curious. What did you feel exactly when the towers fell?” he asked. The professor stopped in his tracks. “Did you know anyone who died there? Did you lose a friend, a loved one?” Decker pointed at the sketches before him. “My partner died helping me get these illustrations. I came here to ask you for your help in interpreting them. All of the official channels, our so-called Islamic experts and intelligence resources, have drawn a blank. Professor Hassan, like it or not, you’re my only hope. I believe there may be other lives at stake here.”
Hassan leaned forward, resting his fists on the surface of the desk. “Shall I tell you what Nine Eleven reminds me of, Agent Decker? I have a son. His name is Malik. He was on his way to school one day, not long after . . . the tragedy. Anyway, he was riding the subway and the train stopped and this gang of teenagers got on – white kids – and they saw him standing in the back. They began to make fun of him, to call him names. They said he looked like an Arab; that he was probably from Afghanistan, a member of the Taliban; that he and his kind were responsible for what had happened to the World Trade Towers; that he had no business being in America. The boys began to egg each other on. ‘If you hate America so much,’ one of them said as he approached Malik, ‘why don’t you just leave?’ He said this to my son, who was born in St. Vincent’s Hospital in the Village, mind you. And someone else said, ‘He deserves to suffer, just like those people in the towers suffered.’ That’s exactly what he said. And then a third one added, and this is the best of all, ‘This is what it feels like, towel head, when you know you’re about to die, and there ain’t nothin’ you can do about it, except watch.’” Hassan shook his head. “He was only twelve,” he added. “Twelve! They kicked him over and over again, until he lost consciousness. He would have probably died there too if a stranger hadn’t come along and scared the boys away. So why, exactly, should I help you?”
Decker nodded, trying not to feel the car begin to slide, to spin, to feel the hit, the grim concussion as the other vehicle plowed into them again. And there had been nothing he could do. Nothing! He closed his eyes. “So that it doesn’t happen again,” he said in Arabic. “To Malik, or someone else’s son.”
“What?” Hassan took a step back. He cocked his head “What did you say?”
“I came to learn,” continued Decker. His Arabic was fluent, with the trilling accent of north Egypt. He could have been born in Al Iskandariyah. “I need your help, Professor. Like your son did on that subway train, when that stranger came to his assistance.”
Professor Hassan looked at Decker for several seconds. He took in the pale face, the thick black hair, the pale gray eyes that stared back with imponderable sadness. “I’m sure I’m not on your approved list of Islamic experts, Agent Decker.”
Decker shrugged.
“That doesn’t worry you?”
Decker shook his head. “‘There will come to you a guidance from Me, then whoever follows My guidance, no fear shall come upon them.’”
“‘Nor shall they grieve.’” Hassan smiled a little smile. He glanced down at the illustrations on the table. Then he closed the notebook and pushed it back across the desk. “I’m sorry, Agent Decker. But I cannot help you.”
Decker held him by the elbow. “You mean you will not.”
Hassan smiled, pulling himself free. “As you wish,” he said.
Decker took out his wallet and handed the professor his card. “Please,” he said. “Take it. In case you change your mind.”
“I won’t,” Hassan replied, but he took the card anyway. “Well, unless you plan to arrest me, I do have other things to do.”
“I’ll walk out with you,” said Decker.
“No!” snapped Hassan. “Don’t bother.”
Decker stepped back. He knew exactly what the professor meant. It didn’t pay for a man of Hassan’s reputation to be seen hobnobbing with the FBI. It would appear, well . . . unseemly to most of his constituencies. And it would certainly undermine the access he enjoyed to both the powerful throughout the Middle East, and to those who lay upon the outer fringes of the carpet of Islam – the radicals, the Fundamentalists, the pure of faith. Decker reached his hand out, adding. “Thank you, Professor.”
“What for?” He looked down at Decker’s hand, but he did not shake it. “You think I don’t understand the threat implicit in your visit?”
“Excuse me?” Decker noticed a small crowd of students gathering by the door.
“I’m an American citizen,” Hassan declared, puffing himself up. “Your veiled threats of deportation hold no currency with me. Bully me all you wish, but I will not compromise my principles. I will not turn away, or hide within the shell of my indifference.”
Decker smiled. Then he spun about, he scowled and headed out the door, pushing his way through the students in the hall.
Hassan kept up his bold soliloquy. “Threaten me all you want, Agent Decker, but I know my rights. They haven’t all been hijacked by the so-called ‘Department of Justice.’ I know tyranny when I smell it.”
The door closed with a bang. Decker started back down College Walk. He had just passed Low Plaza when his phone began to vibrate on his hip. He flipped it open. It was a text message. The note read: Reading Room 26, Avery Library. It was not signed but Decker knew the author. He stopped and asked a pretty young female student for directions. Avery was just up those steps by Low Library – third building on the right after St. Paul’s.
Reading Room 26 was empty. Even with the light turned off, Decker could tell. The air was absolutely still. But what had he expected? Then he noticed a leather-bound book on the table. He turned on the light. It was a copy of the Qur’an. He approached the table. The Muslim holy text was opened to Al-Takwir, Sura 81. He only had to glance at it to recognize the words: When the sun is veiled, and the stars are dimmed, and the mountains are made to move, and ten-months pregnant she-camels are discarded as a means of transportation and the wild ones are gathered together, and the rivers are diverted, and people are brought together, and when the female infant buried alive is questioned about: For what crime was she killed? And when books are spread abroad, and when heaven is laid bare, and when hell is stoked up, and when the Garden is
brought nigh, then everyone will know that which He has wrought.
Decker read the passage several times. He read the words, but while he now knew the source of the quotation, he still didn’t understand its meaning. Behind each door, three more always appeared, and then nine after that.
He headed out of Avery Hall, down the steps, and back toward Broadway and the subway station. It was growing colder by the minute. A girl with a knapsack on her back approached him from the river. Probably a coed, he thought. She looked a little like Maureen, the Irish girl he’d dated in Chicago. The same wavy, reddish-brown hair. The same nose and sky blue eyes. But this girl’s mouth was fuller. And she was younger too. She was wearing a long black coat with buttons that looked like they were made of bone or ivory. Decker sighed as she passed by. He watched her walk away. Then he turned and started down the steps into the subway station.
When he got back to the Village, it was almost five o’clock. Decker stopped off at a bar on Greenwich Avenue, not far from his apartment, and ordered a glass of cabernet. He drank it far too fast, trying to push the cold away, but it only made him more depressed. The case was going nowhere. Even with their APBs, they hadn’t been able to locate the suspects from the apartment in Queens. Decker missed Chicago. New York seemed so much bigger, so much less manageable. He should work out, he told himself, relieve the stress, but he didn’t feel like it.
Decker left the bar and suddenly resolved to go to a place about which Tony had once told him. He knew that he shouldn’t, but he found himself going anyway. As he walked, he thought again about Maureen O’Donnell. She had wanted him to settle down, to give up the Bureau, and a part of him had really tried. He had loved her, in his own way. But, in the end, he simply couldn’t do it. Somewhere along the road the job had become his life. He thought about Maureen’s white skin, her lips, her tender heavy breasts, the soft curve of her thighs where they had come together at the top, that triangle of light he’d always spotted as she walked away from him toward the bathroom to wash up after they’d finished making love.
Decker stopped in front of a building on Twenty-third Street. He buzzed and someone let him in. It was baking inside the lobby and he could feel himself begin to sweat as he climbed the stairs. There was a door at the top of the stairs with a small peephole. He knocked. The peephole opened and he said, “Anthony Bartolo sent me.” The door opened.
It was a cathouse. Young, barely dressed girls of all shapes and sizes and ethnicities were standing around by the front desk. He paid his entrance fee and ordered another glass of wine from a young Asian girl with small breasts and a heart-shaped ass. The girls kept coming up to him and, eventually, he picked one – a brunette with long straight hair. She was pale-skinned and soft and round. A little short, he thought, but decent-looking, with a pretty mouth covered in pink lipstick, and doe-like brown eyes.
She led him down the hall into a private room. It featured a simple cot with a pale blue sheet. There was only one pillow. She closed the door, told Decker to take off his clothes, and slipped into the bathroom. He could hear the water running behind the hollow wall. When she finally came out, she took her bra and panties off. She had large breasts for her frame, and two tiny dimples just above her ass. Her skin was startlingly white in the dim light. She helped him with his clothes.
“You’re in good shape,” she said, admiring his physique. “Are you a professional athlete or something?”
Decker smiled. “I guess you could say that.”
“What’s your name?”
“John.”
She laughed. “I bet,” she said. “Hi, John. My name is–”
He placed his hand across her mouth. He shook his head. She shrugged, plucked something from the cot, and got down on her knees before him. She took him in her mouth, staring up at him with her big brown eyes as she worked. Decker felt himself grow more and more excited, enlarging in her mouth, between those lips with the pink lipstick. She pulled back and he realized that he already had a condom on.
“You’re ready,” she said.
He pushed her roughly to the cot and entered her with ease. She was already wet. They fucked mechanically, methodically. He could feel his frustration, his anger rising up inside of him. After only a few minutes, he came and pulled away. She started to get up from the cot but he held her in his arms. “Not yet,” he said. “Just lay here for a minute.” His tone was so plaintive, so desperate and forlorn that she softened and lay back down beside him.
“It’ll cost you more,” she said.
He laughed bleakly. He could feel her breath on his face. It was minty fresh. He realized that she had a pockmark on one cheek, next to her ear, and a small white scar beneath her chin. For some strange reason, this made him happy. “It always does,” he said.
Chapter 15
Saturday, January 29 – 9:16 AM
New York City
Seamus Gallagher sat in the Blue Moon Diner just across from the offices of WKXY-TV on Broadway and Seventy-ninth Street. He sat there every day at this time, in the same red vinyl booth, looking out the same window at the passing cars and people jostling by. His enemies and detractors – and there were many of them; of that he was most proud – claimed it was because the diner had named a sandwich after him: corned beef and tongue on rye, with mustard. Others said he liked the window booth because it increased his chances of being recognized by passersby. And then there were those who speculated it was because a Moroccan owned the diner, and Gallagher . . . well, he felt at home there.
The truth was it was sheer convenience that had brought him to the Blue Moon five years earlier when he had first moved to New York from Atlanta and joined the news team at WKXY-TV. The diner was right across the street from the studios. Not that Gallagher was lazy by disposition. He hadn’t ascended through the firmament of local evening TV news, hadn’t crawled his way from Boston through Duluth and Biloxi, from Atlanta to New York by shirking his responsibilities. Indeed, he had stepped on countless others, destroyed myriad careers, in order to get where he was.
Freckled, red-haired with a square-shaped face, plump and rather short, Gallagher had had to labor extra hard for his success. He wasn’t just another pretty-boy-stuffed-shirt. He was a real reporter, a man of the streets, an old-fashioned news hound – at least, that’s how he liked to see himself, and it was the image he tried desperately to project.
Two years earlier, he’d covered a story about a Hassidic Jew who’d run over a black kid in Brooklyn. The accident had sparked a series of brutal riots during which a black man stabbed a young Hassidim. The black man – it turned out – was also a devout Muslim. The story received a lot of play. Many in the Jewish community thought the piece was not only incendiary but also anti-Semitic, and Gallagher received death threats for months. But the story earned him the respect of the New York Muslim communities. Then, after 9/11, he parlayed that reputation into some interesting exclusives with various Muslim clerics throughout the tri-state area resulting in numerous awards, including a coveted Emmy for the local evening news team. He wrote a book, which did reasonably well, although the reviews were mixed at best. Gallagher didn’t care. The notoriety garnered him a sizeable promotion, more money and more airtime than most with his experience. And, as a nice by-product, it had earned him his own sandwich at the Blue Moon Diner.
Gallagher finished up his cup of chicken soup and salad, and was reaching into his jacket for his wallet, when a young busboy appeared from nowhere and began to clear his table.
“Hey, I’m still eating here,” he uttered with disdain.
The busboy ignored him and continued to clear the table. He was a young Arab but Gallagher didn’t recognize him. He wasn’t one of the owner’s boys. “Are you deaf?” he said. “Can’t you wait ’til I’m done?”
The busboy stared at the reporter. “Gallagher?” he said, with a thick Middle Eastern accent. “Seamus Gallagher?” He began to clean the surface of the table with a rag.
“That’s right. Wh
o are you?”
The young man didn’t answer. He reached behind his apron and took out a piece of paper. Then he dropped it on the table and, without another word, moved off.
Gallagher watched him weave and wiggle through the breakfast crowd, back toward the rear of the diner. The reporter shook his head. He picked up the piece of paper. It was a hand-written note. It read: On Friday, 28 January, a train transporting highly enriched uranium (HEU) from the BN-350 fast breeder reactor at the Mangystau Atomic Energy Combine in Aktau, Kazakhstan, for long-term storage at the Semipalatinsk Test Site in Kurchatov City, was hijacked by Gulzhan Baqrah on behalf of El Aqrab and the Brotherhood of the Crimson Scimitar. Eight kilos of HEU was stolen, enough to make a nuclear bomb with a one kiloton yield. Unless El Aqrab is released from his Zionist cell, the Brotherhood will detonate a WMD somewhere on the soil of our enemies. It is the will of Allah.
The reporter read the note again. He could feel his pulse quicken. He looked toward the rear of the diner. The busboy had disappeared.
Gallagher got up and snaked his way through the crowd. “Hey, Omar,” he said to one of the young waiters drifting by. He grabbed him by the elbow. The waiter almost dropped his plate of eggs and bacon on the floor. “Omar, what’s the name of your new busboy?” Gallagher insisted.