“They will not be claimed,” Fuchs said. The Native American with the dark eyes and the pitted face and the loping stride had just inquired after the bodies of three of the men killed in Locust Valley last week. Like a forest creature, Fuchs thought. Be careful.
“They can’t stay in the morgue forever.”
“I agree.”
“We’ll take them off your hands.”
“This offer I will decline.”
“You just said they wouldn’t be claimed.”
“I may have a use for them.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know yet”
Out of the corner of his eye, Fuchs could see Crow shaking his head. They walked for a while in silence. Both Ali al-Hajjar and Adnan Farah were Syrian citizens, with documented connections to the Mukhabarat, Syria’s secret police. Both, using aliases, were known to be in Beirut in early 2005. A cell phone linked to Farah had been used to detonate the explosives, equivalent to a ton of TNT, that had killed Rafik Hariri and many others as his motorcade drove past the St. George Hotel on 14 February.
Hajjar and Farah disappeared afterward, but continuous satellite and security camera sweeps of various Syrian embassies and Syrian Arab Airlines’ comings and goings had them arriving in New York, on work visas, in October last, their sponsor one Mustafa al-Rahim, the servant of Syrian oil magnate, Basil al-Hassan. Fuchs, working at the Monteverde headquarters of the UN’s special commission investigating the Hariri assassination, had been sent to the United States, where he hastily put together a team to follow Hajjar and Farah night and day.
“It’s a dead-end,” said Crow.
“I don’t agree. Someone here in New York was controlling them. I am convinced of it.”
“They may be taking a different tack in Washington.”
So this is what he has come to tell me, thought Fuchs.
“I take my orders from Monteverde.”
“You may be hearing from Monteverde.”
“And the Hayek girl?” Fuchs said, “I can’t sit on that much longer.”
“They are considering their options in Washington.”
“Washington is considering its options? This is a UN investigation. I am personally responsible. The DeMarco boy faces the death penalty.”
“He raped her.”
“He’s charged with murder one.”
“A deal may be worked out on the rape.”
“You mean drop the murder charges?”
“Yes.”
“I will wait a day or two, no more. I will not let the boy hang.”
They parted at the park’s Fifth Avenue exit, and Fuchs watched Crow walk uptown through the thickening snow. He did not tell the CIA agent with the rough-hewn face that early this morning he had attended a meeting with the New York City Police Commissioner, the NYPD’s Homicide Bureau Chief and two veteran detectives named McCann and Goode. Nor of his conversation last night with Daniel LeClair, the independent investigator in charge of Monteverde, who, with Farah and Hajjar dead, had given him two days to tie up any loose ends and return with his team to Beirut.
Who to trust? He did not yet know. He had been closely following the international news, as he always did. There was no doubt that the wind between Washington and Damascus had been blowing differently under the new U.S. administration. Were they actually thinking of trusting Syria? Did they not know that Damascus took orders from Tehran? Senator Kerry’s press release had been amateurishly revealing: We discussed the possibility of cooperating on a number of issues. Did the United States not know that any prize it hoped to win from such cooperation would turn out to be an illusion, a mirage in a desert? Or worse, a knife in the back?
Fuchs headed across town to the U.N., where he had an office and a small command center. He had been in New York long enough to know that there were no cabs to be had when it rained or snowed. He did not need the walk, as the chain-smoking Crow obviously did. He used the U.N.’s lavishly appointed gym and spa several times a week. Stocky but agile, his blond hair only slightly thinning, he was fit at fifty, or fit at fitty as the American gangster rappers might say.
Walking east on 40th Street, hunching against the wind that was now starting to blow, Fuchs’ thoughts returned to his meeting at One Police Plaza this morning. The looks on the faces of the four New York policemen were grim. Worse than grim. They had lost two of their own. Both were working for Fuchs at or near the time of their violent deaths. What was he working on? Who were his suspects? He had been polite, respectful, humble: you must petition your State Department or your Justice Department. I am not the one to answer your questions. Was petition the right word? He was not sure, there being so many words for the simple verb vraag in English.
Fuchs had worked for MIVD, Holland’s Military Intelligence and Security Service, for twenty years before taking his current job with the U.N. Childless, the death of his wife from ovarian cancer the year before had almost killed him too. Leaving his homeland, with its countless reminders of his beloved Kaat, had saved him. But not by much. He had nothing left to lose, and was therefore free to pursue his own agenda, to choose whom to trust and whom not. The faces of detectives Goode and McCann had been especially dark. Lethal, actually.
Erhard Fuchs feared the Mukhabarat, Syria’s secret police. He feared Bill Crow and the CIA, who could crush him in an instant if they wished. But it was Detectives McCann and Goode that he feared the most. As he was leaving One Police Plaza this morning, the black detective, Clarke Goode, had caught up to him on the street and walked with him to his car.
“Colder than hell out here,” Clarke had said. He had not replied, just kept walking. His car, parked on the perimeter of a dozen or more patrol and unmarked cars situated at various angles to the curb, was only fifty paces away.
“Do you believe in hell?” Goode had asked, as they continued walking, the wind kicking scraps of paper up around them. “Good and evil?” He had remained silent.
“I’ll tell you why I ask,” Goode had said, the car quite near now. “We’ve got two cops dead who were working for you. You can’t tell us what they were working on. We’ll have to ask your bosses at the UN. But they won’t tell us either, will they?”
“I doubt it.”
“I do too, which means you, personally, have a problem.”
“I believe you want to tell me what it is.”
“I do. The thing is, I really want to know what you’re working on. My partner and I want to help you. I know you’re a tough guy, Fuchs. I know you were in the Marines over there in Holland, the BBE, counterterrorism. All that. The thing is, if you won’t let us help you, then we’ll have no choice but to be against you. I’m talking about the entire NYPD. That’s forty-thousand pissed off cops. Are you following me?”
“Please don’t patronize me, detective. I respect you, but I am not afraid of you.”
“I think you should be.”
“Why? Are you threatening me?”
“No, Mr. Fuchs, I’m not.” They had reached his car. “Let’s call it a warning. A fair warning.”
As he turned right onto U.N. Plaza, Fuchs felt the vibrating of his Blackberry, which he dug out of his inside coat pocket and covered with his free hand to keep the snow from hitting it. The message was from Daniel LeClair. Two days, it said, then shut down NY.
Bill Crow’s scarred face was not the result of smallpox. It was acne that had done it, the result of too much alcohol and cigarettes and junk food consumed as a wild teenager on his reservation in New Mexico. When his mother died of cirrhosis he was in the midst of those wild years, seventeen and suddenly alone, his father unknown to him. The tribal council placed him with a family who took him in only for the monthly stipend that came with him. On the day of his high school graduation, he took off into the mountains, the Sangre de Christos, aflame at s
unset with the dark red color that New Mexico’s earliest settlers likened to the blood of Christ. He stayed through all four seasons—one year—emerging with his face scarred but no longer erupting, two fingers lost to a homemade beaver trap, and the certain knowledge that his salvation lay in isolation and total self-reliance.
He joined the army for the sole purpose of getting special forces training, which put him on the path to his present career as a contract operative for various United States government agencies, most often the CIA or the FBI or, as in the present case, both. He lived and worked—they were the same to him—in a vaguely-bounded no-man’s land with no rules except his own, killing to eat, going to sleep each night fully prepared to be awoken by the grunts of a night monster he would have to grapple with at close quarters if he could not gun it down. The mountains.
Bill Crow did not have a Blackberry, but he knew, before Erhard Fuchs did, that Fuchs’ operation in New York had come to an end. It ended, not on February 25, with the deaths of Adnan Farah and Ali al-Najjar, although that was convenient, but a month earlier, with the arrival of a new administration in Washington. The Syrians would be courted. Would they make a separate peace with Israel? Would they help broker a peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians? What would they like in return? How about the closing down of the UN investigation into the assassination of Rafik Hariri? Would they like that?
Crow had also talked to Daniel LeClair—a very bitter Daniel LeClair—last night. Washington, it appears, had spoken. So easy for the great white fathers to switch sides. Fuchs and his team would be returning to Lebanon. Crow’s contact in the CIA, a boy of thirty with an encyclopedic knowledge of the Middle East, thought the case was closed. But Crow was not so sure. As it turned out, there was no need to kill Farah and al-Najjar. The UN investigation would have been shut down anyway, on one pretext or another. The Syrians had overplayed their hand, and in the process two New York cops had been killed. The NYPD could not be happy about that.
The second cop, Davila, had taken something from the UN commission’s command post in Glen Cove and been blown to pieces for his trouble. That there was a traitor in his midst was by now obvious to Fuchs. And then there was the issue of the dead bodies. I may have a use for them, the Dutchman had said. I am determined to continue. No, the case was not over. There was prey out there, and more hunters than before.
Chapter 17
Manhattan,
Monday, March 2, 2009,
11:00AM
“I can’t tell you much, you know, Mr. DeMarco.”
“Call me Matt.”
“Certainly.”
Behind Everett Stryker was a wall of glass, through which Matt could see all of New York Harbor some thirty stories below. Four tugboats were nudging a barge, top-heavy with red and blue cargo containers, between Liberty and Governors Islands. To the left, people were walking along the river on a promenade in Brooklyn, enjoying the first sunny day in a couple of weeks. To Matt’s right, sitting on handsome leather chairs were two young associates of Stryker’s, yellow legal pads on their laps, listening to their boss as if he were giving the Sermon on the Mount.
“I’ve resigned from the District Attorney’s office, if that makes any difference.”
“It doesn’t. It’s a matter of my client’s consent.”
“My son.”
“Yes.”
“Or is it Mr. al-Hassan you’re taking orders from?”
Stryker raised his white eyebrows at this, but did not respond immediately. Instead he picked up a crystal paperweight in the shape of a lion’s head from the top of his large and nearly empty desktop, turned it over casually once or twice and replaced it. If possible, the tall, sixtyish lawyer looked even more distinguished and elegant, in his charcoal gray suit, creamy white button-down shirt and two-hundred dollar tie, than he did the day Matt saw him going into the Tombs with Basil and Debra.
“I represent your son,” Stryker said, finally, his voice neutral.
“I came here to give you information, not receive it,” Matt said. “I appreciate you seeing me.” When he first sat down before Stryker’s throne of a desk, Matt had asked how the case was going as a matter of making preliminary conversation, small talk. Stryker’s answer—blunt and unexpected—had stung. Matt regretted his sarcastic response, ruing, not for the first time in his forty-seven years on earth, his inability to keep his temper in check.
“Would you like us to call Michael. Perhaps…”
“No,” Matt interrupted, “I’ll speak to him later.”
“Fine. I understand. What is it you came to tell me?”
“One of the D. A.’s key witnesses was killed last weekend. The doorman at Yasmine Hayek’s building, Felix Diaz. Did you know that?”
“I did not.”
“Shot in the back of the head, like Yasmine.”
“Are there suspects?”
“I don’t know.”
Stryker drummed his fingers on his desk for a second or two before answering. “Jeff, Karen,” he said, looking over at the two young lawyers, “please excuse us for a moment.” The associates left, closing the office’s large oak door quietly behind them.
“I asked them to leave to protect you, Mr. DeMarco”
“Protect me?”
“How did you come by this information?”
“It was in the Daily News. I put two and two together.”
“You know the Brady case of course.”
Matt was silent for a second. Brady v. Maryland was the United States Supreme Court decision that in effect obligated all federal and state prosecutors to disclose exculpatory evidence to criminal defendants. Matt knew it well and had followed its dictates on numerous occasions, once or twice even disclosing the names of “Brady cops”—policemen with a known record of lying in their official capacity.
“Yes, I know it,” he answered finally.
“Then I don’t have to explain my position to you.”
“Yes, you do.”
“Of course. I’ll wait for Healy to formally notify me of this Diaz murder. If he doesn’t—and he should have by now—we’ll have an appealable issue.”
“Appealable issue? We want an acquittal, or a dismissal, not an appealable issue.”
“Yes, but I’m your son’s attorney. These tactical decisions are for me to make.”
“What about the GSR test?” Matt asked, his voice and demeanor neutral, under control, but not by much. “Why was that cancelled?”
“I’m not at liberty to say.”
“Michael says he didn’t handle the gun. He didn’t know it existed until he was arrested.”
“As I said…”
“You’re not at liberty to say.”
“Correct.”
“Did you know that TARU thinks the building’s security system was tampered with?”
“TARU?”
“The NYPD’s high-tech unit.”
“The report we received was silent on the issue.”
“Speak to Jane Manning at TARU. I spoke to her this morning. She thinks it’s edited.”
“I’ll make a note of it,” Stryker said, but wrote nothing down.
“The security company has absconded,” Matt said. “They must have something to hide.”
“And you know this how?”
“Friends at the NYPD.”
“You seem to have many friends in the NYPD.”
Matt ignored this. It was getting easier to control his temper now that he realized that Stryker was not only a condescending prick, which he had expected, but also an adversary, which he had not. Conflict was his milieu, it was where he had had lived nearly all his life.
“Perhaps the owner of the building knows where they are,” Matt said. “It’s a company called Westside Properties. You represent th
em.”
Stryker rose from his chair.
Matt stood as well.
“I do,” Stryker said. “That’s a matter of public record, on file with the Secretary of State’s office.”
“Who are the individual owners?” Matt asked. “I’d like to talk to them.”
“I’ll talk to them.”
“That’s privileged as well, I suppose.”
“You suppose correctly.”
Matt was taller than Stryker by several inches. He moved almost to the edge of Stryker’s long sleek desk.
“One more thing,” he said, looking the older attorney in the eye.
“Yes, I’m listening.”
“I don’t like the picture I’m getting here. And I don’t mean your million-dollar view. Michael and I have issues. But he’s my son, my only child. You don’t want my help, that’s fine. But if you sell him out, or if you fuck his case up, I won’t stop until you’re out of the profession. You’ll have to kill me to stop me.”
Stryker did not respond. Instead he pushed a button on his desk. Matt turned and headed for the door, which swung open as he approached it, revealing Stryker’s elegant middle-aged assistant, Ms. Hartman, who had greeted him with a fake smile when he arrived. She stepped aside to let Matt pass, not bothering to smile this time, her eyes looking past him to Stryker, to see what the great legal god wanted of her.
Chapter 18
Latakia,
Monday, March 2, 2009,
9:00PM Damascus/2:00PM New York
Basil al-Hassan sat alone on the terrace of his spacious apartment in Latakia, overlooking the Mediterranean, on which the reflection of the rising moon formed a sparkling pathway to the beach below. To the south the lights of the pyramid-shaped, multi-tiered Meridien Hotel were also reflected on the sea, and the sound of music from the hotel’s terrace café occasionally drifted his way. Beyond the tourist hotels were the city center and the modern harbor built twenty years ago, small but very busy now that Beirut—a real port city—was lost. Basil, a young engineer at the time, just out of the army, had fought hard for the construction of Latakia’s harbor facilities. He had had an audience with President Assad, who, prescient and succinct, had said, yes, build it. We can trust no one in Beirut and perhaps will not be there forever.
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