Gods and Fathers

by Lepore, James

  “You were in Lucky’s?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s Mom.”

  “Your mother?”

  “Mustafa’s drugging her. I followed him.”

  “Drugging her? How? Why?”

  “I don’t know, but something’s wrong. They want me to plead guilty.”

  “Plead guilty? Who does?”

  “Stryker, Basil.”

  Matt took this in. His breathing was returning to normal. The cold air still burning in his lungs felt good, cleansing. The light on the pole Michael had careened into was broken. A young black woman in a short red leather jacket, a skin-tight black and white striped skirt and blocky high-heels was standing on the landing of the stoop of a scarred old brownstone, smoking, looking down at them, her pretty face expressionless in the dim porch light.

  “Where’s your car?” Matt asked.

  “Back there.”

  “Leave it. I’ll drive you home. We need to talk.”

  Chapter 26

  Kawkab, Syria, 7AM,

  Tuesday, March 3, 2009,

  (1AM, New York)

  “They are brave men, Gamal.”

  “They are all prepared to die.”

  “But not to be tortured.”

  “They have their pills. Their families are safe.”

  “Or dead.”

  “Yes.”

  “Like yours.”

  Basil waited for his friend to reply, but he remained silent, concentrating on the dusty highway, looking, Basil knew, for the obscure turn-off to the even dustier, unnamed road that would take them to the village of Kawkab: godforsaken Kawkab, twelve miles south of Damascus, on what was, two thousand years ago, the Jerusalem Road, its ancient footprint obliterated by sand and wind and time. Gamal had made this trip many times, but he always paid strict attention at this point, leaving Basil to marvel at the orange glow of the hills to the east, and Mount Hermon, the old man, the Sheik, rearing its snow-capped head to the north.

  The Oil Ministry’s Mercedes limousine was out of place here, a gleaming black ship on wheels gliding on a sea of sand. Gamal, handling it expertly, effortlessly, turned toward Kawkab, and a short time later stopped next to one of the twelve arches that circled their destination: the church of St. Paul the Messenger. It was a simple stone building, but to Basil’s eye it was always mirage-like, shimmering with the energy left over, two thousand years later, from the vision of Jesus that felled St. Paul on this spot, blinding him, converting him, saving his soul, and, so Christians believed—and who could deny it?—changing history.

  “Our friend,” Gamal said. He was talking about the old man in the red-and-white checked kafiyah sitting on the church’s front steps, smiling the same crooked, near-toothless smile he always greeted them with. If he wasn’t there, Gamal would have driven on, not even slowing. “I will not be long.”

  Basil watched his friend of nearly fifty years—they had met on the first day of grammar school in Latakia in 1961—exit the limousine, walk past the old man without acknowledging him, and enter the church. Inside he would say his confession to Father Phillip, the Eastern Orthodox priest who had been running the small, impoverished parish since the church was rebuilt in 1965, rebuilt on ruins that dated back to the first century. Basil reflected on 1961, when the insanity of Sharia was just a whisper and not a drumbeat as it was now, drowning out the voices of reason in a Middle East gone mad. Was he equally mad, to think he could do something to put an end to the fundamentalists and their corruption of Islam? To have undergone such a stark conversion? Paul, on his way to Damascus to hunt down and kill Christians when he was knocked off his mule, must have asked himself the same question. Look what he accomplished.

  Gamal returned a few minutes later and they drove off. Basil watched as the old man on the church steps clapped his hands above his head as a sign of Godspeed. The locals, Gamal had informed him when they first visited, clapped this way as a symbol of Paul’s experience, knocked to the hard desert ground by the hand of God. Paul, why dost thou persecute me?

  “How did it go?” Basil asked when they were out of the village.

  “The shipment arrived.”

  “When is the next delivery?”

  “They are expecting new altar stones by Palm Sunday.”

  “When is that?”

  “April fifth.”

  “How many cases will that make?”

  “Forty-two.”

  “How many more can he store?”

  “Perhaps another forty.”

  “It is slow, Gamal.”

  “Yes, Basil, it is slow. But steady. We will be ready.”

  Chapter 27

  Manhattan,

  Tuesday, March 3, 2009,

  12:00AM

  “Did he cooperate?” asked Erhard Fuchs.

  “Yes,” Sylvana Dalessio answered.

  “Who is it?”

  “A Syrian named Mustafa al-Rahim. He is a servant, an assistant if you will. He works for Basil al-Hassan, the SPC hero.”

  “One of the ninety-nine names of God,” said Fuchs.

  “What?”

  “al-Rahim is one of the ninety-names of God in the Koran. When they become jihadists they often take one of these names.”

  “I see. Farah referred to him with great reverence as The Servant. His eyes were shining, like Rahim was God, in fact, or at his right hand.”

  “He did not implicate Hassan?”

  “He says that Hassan is an unknowing front, that he is being used.”

  “By whom? Who does Rahim take his orders from?”

  “That was the hard part.”

  “Who?”

  “An SMI colonel. Adullah al-Haq.”

  “What about the Four Horsemen?”

  “He says they are a distraction.”

  The Four Horsemen were Fuchs’ and Sylvana’s shorthand for the four Lebanese generals who were being held in a Beirut jail, accused by LeClair of organizing the assassination of Rafik Hariri inside Lebanon.

  “How would he know?” Fuchs asked.

  “He and al-Hajjar were Haq’s boys. He saved them from the rubble of Hama. He trained them personally, taught them how to make bombs. He brought them to New York, through the Servant.”

  “Brought them?”

  “Yes, he is stationed here.”

  “And the others, the MP’s?”

  “Yes, he and Ali killed all eleven on orders from Haq via Rahim.”

  “If the Four Horsemen were not involved, then who? There had to be Lebanese help.”

  “Hezbollah. They brought him to a facility in Beirut where he had his pick of weapons, bomb material, and cell phones.”

  “For all of the killings?”

  “Yes, each one first cleared by Haq, each one set up by Hezbollah people who were trusted in government circles.”

  “Why was he brought to New York?”

  “He does not know.”

  “Does he know who tried to kill him in Locust Valley?”

  “He acknowledges it could be Rahim on Haq’s orders.”

  “To silence him.”

  “Yes.”

  “What about The New York detectives who were killed? Did Farah say?”

  “Of that he knows nothing,” the Italian replied, “except of course he assumes Haq gave the orders for the second one, Davila, the car bomb.”

  “So Mason was Haq’s man,” the Dutchman replied, saying this more to himself than to the Italian policewoman.

  “Was Haq’s man?”

  “Yes, he’s dead.”

  Silence.

  “Too bad,” Dalessio said, finally, then: “Erhard?”

  “Yes.”

  “I spoke to Johannes. He
said the terrorists who killed your mother and sister were Indonesian.”

  “One was Persian.”

  “Oh…”

  “The one who killed them. He was the leader.”

  “I see.”

  “He was released five years later.”

  “By your government?”

  “Yes, it was all classified, but I had sources.”

  Fuchs paused, waiting for Dalessio to ask another question. When she didn’t, he went on: “I saw his picture in De Telegraaf the day I buried Kaat. He was standing behind Assad, who was greeting Ahmadinajad in Damascus.”

  “Was he identified?”

  “In the paper, no. But I ran a search.”

  “Who is he?”

  “Abdullah al-Haq.”

  Again the Italian agent was silent.

  “He’s come a long way,” she said, finally.

  “Yes,” the Dutchman replied. “Born in Iran, sent on missions all over the world, now planted in the midst of Syrian intelligence.”

  “Why was an Iranian leading those Indonesians?”

  “They were Muslims. He was one of Khomeini’s fanatics. His name was Massoud Karimi then. He trained them, the whole raid was Khomeini’s idea.”

  “Directed from Paris.”

  “Yes, while the French elite fed him escargot and caviar.”

  “And the reign of terror continues.”

  “Yes it does.”

  “And our plan remains the same?”

  “Yes.”

  “I will send the boys.”

  “Sylvana, one last thing.”

  “Yes.”

  “Yasmine Hayek.”

  “They did it.”

  “As a message to Pierre and his anti-Syrian friends?”

  “No, on that score Farah said something strange.”

  “Is it on the tape?”

  “Yes.”

  “It can wait. I am meeting Goode and his partner. I see them parking their car.”

  “OK, ciao. Good luck.”

  Fuchs hung up. He was sitting in the Square Diner, a cup of horrible black coffee in front of him. The NYPD detectives were right outside his window, their coat collars turned up against the cold, the white one, McCann, taking a drag on an unfiltered cigarette and then flipping it into the gutter. The black had sounded strange on the phone. Something must have happened. They could waterboard me, he thought. Would I talk?

  Chapter 28

  Manhattan,

  Tuesday, March 3, 2009,

  12:00AM

  Did you think they were sincere, our friends in Damascus?

  Silence.

  Does this change anything?

  I’ll get back to you.

  This was the conversation Bill Crow had with his young CIA contact right after the murder of Yasmine Hayek. The contact, known to him only via a voice ID code on his cell phone screen, had later confirmed that nothing had changed. His mission was the same.

  But things were different now. Two NYPD detectives were dead, one in a piece of bad luck, the second assassinated. The Locust Valley and Glen Cove police had been muzzled. Threats of criminal action, of charges of violation of national security laws had had to be made in order to accomplish this. Still, the mayor, the governor, both New York senators—all members of the same political party as the new president—were asking questions. But that wasn’t the problem. They could be backed off, they were politicians. It was the NYPD and the boyfriend’s father that were the problem. They didn’t care about politics, or somebody in Washington getting the Nobel Peace Prize.

  This morning he had spoken to his contact in Langley again.

  The clockmaker is alive. The cat lover is holding him.

  Alive?

  Yes, and talking, I’m sure.

  Without doubt.

  He thinks the client will try to reach him.

  Would they dare?

  It depends on what’s at stake.

  If it goes wrong…

  He’s also talking about freeing the DeMarco boy.

  That’s not good.

  Do you want me to take care of it?

  Yes.

  There will be a fee.

  How much?

  One million.

  In the same account?

  Yes. And I will need information.

  Go ahead.

  Sylvana Dalessio. Who is she? Does she have relatives in Los Angeles? If so, is one of them sick? A nephew?

  Anything else?

  Erhard Fuchs. Who are his friends in the U.S.? And I need his family history.

  That’s it?

  Yes.

  I’ll get back to you.

  Bill Crow looked up and down 23rd Street before stepping away from the Chelsea Hotel’s stump of a portico and heading toward Ninth Avenue. It could be, he thought, that he was wrong, that his CIA contact was not so young after all, that he just had a youthful sounding voice. How else to explain the immediate grant of authority to take care of it, a euphemism for kill Adnan Farah and anyone who tries to stop you? Of course with the administration so new and so naïve, his contact could actually be a thirty-year-old Yale graduate in a cubicle someplace who had been told to take care of Syria’s Monteverde problem, and been left to his own devices.

  Did Bill Crow care one way or the other? No. All of his fees went to a numbered account in Switzerland from one of the thousands of slush funds controlled by the CIA but untraceable to it. The only time he ever used a phone was when he talked to his contacts, who could listen to any phone conversation in the world if they wanted to, and whose own phones were interception-proof. Like the terrorists were now doing, Bill Crow otherwise communicated exclusively via simple signals or cryptic, coded messages, not unlike the way the old mountain and plains Indians did. Smoke; rocks arranged a certain way; a hatchet mark in bark. Ephemeral, they soon vanished, as did Crow when a job was done.

  It was no use telling his contact who posed the greatest threat to his mission. He wouldn’t care. Or he’d get nervous, even though he had total deniability, not because of the juvenile code he insisted on using, but because their conversations never existed. Such was the high level of the agency’s technology, not to mention the supreme immunity from oversight it had enjoyed since it’s inception in the chaotic aftermath of World War II.

  Fuchs had stonewalled the NYPD, as he was obliged to do. He had threatened to reveal the true killers of Yasmine Hayek, but that was obviously a bluff. He planned on using the bomb maker as bait, and would not want the NYPD barging in, as they surely would if they sensed he was holding something back. They wanted Farah’s bosses as much as Fuchs did. The killing of the second New York detective had been a mistake, an overplay that only a mad man would do. But then again, all jihadis were mad man, were they not?

  If the great half-black, half-white father thought he could bring peace to the Middle East, who was Bill Crow to argue with him, to tell him that Islam permitted—obligated might be the better word—its followers to lie to infidels, to tell him that the only way to deal with Islam was to reduce it to a handful of defeated stragglers on reservations, perhaps eventually let them build casinos.

  Bill Crow smiled at this thought, a rare thing for him. Tomorrow Fuchs’ team would depart. On his own, or perhaps with the help of the Italian, the Dutchman would be defenseless. Crow would find out where Adnan Farah was being held and kill him, along with Fuchs and Dalessio if necessary. He would also, with the help of another person blinded by hate, take out some insurance, like any good businessman would do.

  Chapter 29

  Manhattan,

  Tuesday, March 3, 2009,

  12:00AM

  “Mason is dead,” said Erhard Fuchs. “He fell from his hotel roo
m’s balcony.”

  “Fell or was pushed?” Jack McCann asked.

  “Pushed of course.”

  “You told us to sit on him at his hotel,” said Clarke Goode. “No wonder he never came out.”

  “He did,” Fuchs replied. “Off the balcony.”

  “Are there surveillance tapes?” Goode asked.

  “Yes, we’ll have them soon.”

  “Our CB people have images of the Mason surveillance,” the black detective said. “They’re vetting them. Do you want copies?”

  “Of course.”

  “How many floors?” McCann asked.

  “Twenty-one.”

  “When did this happen?” Goode asked.

  “Nine-thirty.”

  “So who was he?”

  They were sitting in a booth at the back of the Square Diner, McCann and Goode on one side, Fuchs on the other.

  “A mole on my team.”

  “Working for whom?”

  “Iran, Syria. Probably both. He was their pipeline into what we were doing.”

  “You were hoping he would lead you to his contact.”

  “Yes.”

  “We were in Lucky’s ourselves tonight,” Goode said.

  “Doing what?”

  “Our job. We got two cops dead, remember?”

  “What led you there?”

  Clarke Goode looked at his partner and raised his thick, salt and pepper eyebrows.

  “You asked for this meeting,” McCann said.

  “I apologize. I was just being a cop myself.”

  “You mentioned needing our help. Again.”

  “I know who killed Loh and Davila.”

  “Who?” McCann and Goode said this at the same time, with the same deadly quiet tone in their voices. The Dutchman was suddenly very glad to have these men as allies.

  “A Colonel Abdullah al-Haq of Syrian Military Intelligence, and his field operative, a man named Mustafa al-Rahim. They are trying to derail my investigation into a series of assassinations in Lebanon, starting with Rafik Hariri in 2005.”