A dead pigeon lay in their traffic lane. Sami saw a sunbaked soldier named John Herne standing on the corner, staring at the fallen bird as if it hid a bomb.
“Look at this town,” said Harry. “I remember when this was an AM radio burg where white folks were scared to come out after dark and Nixon had his finger on the Doomsday trigger. ‘Top dollar’ meant a civil service paycheck. Nobody was from D.C. People came here as cause-humpers. Now, crash or no crash, all the big money has a D.C. cash register.
“Some say we’re inevitable. Like Rome, only adjusted for the Internet and Mister Glock .40. I say if we create a Sophia Loren like Rome did, let the D.C. of Washington stand for ‘Destiny City.’”
“My jihad brothers say the same thing. So do Ted and his evangelical crusaders.”
“What do you say?”
“That real people are trapped in those big ideas.”
“Yeah, but what about Sophia Loren?”
The two men laughed.
“D.C. is your story, Sami. Destiny City. Born and bred for it. Spy life and street action are all you know. What makes you think you can quit?”
Harry’s cell phone rang. He took the call. Listened. Clicked off.
Told Sami, “Our geniuses got no idea what Zlatko is building. We’re flooding every Radio Shack kinda place with agents and Zlakto’s photos to see what he bought before, but it’s elbow-to-elbow Christmas rush in those stores.”
They rode past a block strung with colored bulbs.
“In this life,” said Harry, “you’re either doing something or something’s getting done to you. What’s your deal, Sami?”
Sami let Harry out of the cab, drove to a commercial strip where French and African patois jammed with Spanish. Cruising cars blasted gangsta rap idolized by white Kansas teenagers. Sami parked his cab in the lot of a four-story commercial building.
He checked his watch: 4:29. Ivan usually closed his doctor’s office at 5:00 and drove his gold SUV home. Sami scanned ethnic stores, discount furniture barns, a veterinary hospital with a green Dumpster. Told himself he couldn’t see flies circling the emerald steel. Wondered where Harry’d set up the surveillance posts. Wondered if they’d called in his presence, if a satellite snapped his picture.
“Understand our new spy biz,” Harry had told Sami. “Sure, satellite surveillance of Doc Ivan’s office and house is overkill, but it’s about buy-in.
“We got something real, but if it’s only a Homeland/CIA/FBI-outsourced Argus show, with sixteen major spy shops dancing for the old U.S. of A., we might be weak on bureaucratic muscle. So I partnered my company with a contractor for the National Applications Office to satellite-monitor your Ameer. Now NAO’ll line up to make sure we get what we want so they can share our credit.”
I’m a taxi driver, thought Sami. I take you where you want to go.
I’m a spy. I take you where you want to go.
At 4:47 a brown medical transport services van parked at the building. The driver in a white uniform got out to lower the electric motored stairs.
They shuffled out of the building. Some were black, some brown. A wispy blond girl on crutches swung toward the van. They were all poor. The bottom line mattered as much as any for two women in black burkas that exposed only their eyes.
Last out of the door came Ivan, a doctor who didn’t care about health insurance, charged what patients could afford for what he could do. Sometimes, like now, that meant walking a white-haired old lady to the van.
Sami parked behind the van, pulled on a black Detroit Tigers baseball cap to hide his face as he joined his Ameer and the old lady.
“Taxi,” said Sami.
Ivan kept the poise of an emergency room boss. “Here you go, Mrs. Callaghan.”
The white-haired old lady wrinkled her brow. “But … I didn’t order a cab.”
“You’ve got a voucher for today,” said her doctor. “Remember?”
“I do?”
“Yes.”
The white-uniformed van driver took his cue from Doc Ivan. The stairs’ electric motor whined, the doors shut, and away drove the brown van.
Her doctor said, “Emma, did you drop your gloves in the elevator?”
The old lady looked at her trembling bird hands. “I must have.”
“I’ll wait with the cabbie. Take your time.”
She toddled back inside the building.
“Ameer, I must confess,” blurted Sami. He told him about breaking the rules to confront a worried Zlatko and replace the lost money.
“But why are you here now?”
“I fear that Zlatko’s vision of what is acceptable for our target and the vision you and I share … I fear a conflict of faith. I have seen this before.”
“In Beirut,” said the Ameer, “where holy martyrs blew up the Marines’ barracks and Ronald Reagan slunk away. There we learned Americans will back down. Then sex-crazy Clinton ran from one Blackhawk helicopter crash, missed Osama with missiles.”
The Ameer put a fatherly hand on Sami’s shoulder. “Sometimes it’s easiest for a soldier not to know all, so if his heart is challenged, his conscience is clear. Don’t worry about Zlatko. He will do what must be done. His part will not pain his soul. All else is sacrifice to contain this disease called America. Americans fear death. Their overreaction to us will force our misguided Muslim brothers to rally to our true path.”
“What of my part, Ameer? I have done so little.”
“You are whispered about online.” The doctor smiled, so Sami knew the legend birthed by the CIA still lived. “Praise Allah that I work in a building where if you make friends, keys are shared. With my colleagues at the medical imaging office. With two kuffars who repair computers that are probably stolen.”
Dozens of computers! Untraceable! That’s how he makes contacts!
“I dared not put you too close to the operation. If your fame attracted attention … But in two days, we will both be heroes on the run.”
The building’s glass doors showed Emma tottering toward them.
The Ameer told Sami what to do that night at the vaquera’s. Told Sami where to go tomorrow morning.
Emma wiggled her gloved hands. “They were in my pockets!” Sami drove her home, refused a tip of her few silver coins.
He drove to a pay phone. Called Harry, told him about the computers, the Ameer’s new orders. Argued for the cell to be rolled up. Got told, “We’re gonna let it ride.” Drove to 13th Street’s hilltop panorama of Destiny City, parked on a block of row houses where a Latino grocery store flanked a green door.
He pushed the doorbell for the green door. Made a loud ring!
Invisible feet clunked down unseen stairs. The door’s glass peephole darkened as someone looked out. The green door opened. Star-streaked midnight hair curled to her blue sweater. She wore faded jeans. Had a clean jaw, high cheekbones with a puckered scar on her heart side from the punch she’d taken in junior high soccer. The scar gave her lips a perpetual sardonic smile. Those fleshy lips along with her desert tribe Jewish Sephardic tan skin and the Sinaloensa Mexican she’d perfected while surfing away the summer before law school fooled people into thinking Rose was gringo for Rosalita.
“I wasn’t expecting anyone,” said Rose.
Climbing those stairs behind her rounded blue jean hips, Sami smelled Christmas pine, spices like cumin and chili from the downstairs store, perhaps incense, her musk.
Her apartment’s main room held a computer, fax, photocopy machine. An eviction-salvaged sofa. Two chairs separated by a table where Sami had set his tea the morning he’d been officially waiting for a fax from the Taxi Commission but truly waiting for Zlatko to return for credit card applications the vaquera had promised him.
Sami’s eyes swept through the kitchen to the closed door for a room lined with law books, government manuals. The door to her bedroom—closed. He refused to fear the closed doors. Refused to wonder whether Harry had bugged all of Rose’s rooms.
She stood behind Sami.
“Are you here for work?”
“Yes.”
Shadows filled the apartment. Her walls and fading-gray-light glass windows kept out sounds of the street. Muffled screams.
He lunged with his hands like a Muay Thai strike, caught her face in his prayer grasp, pressed her against the wall as she met his kiss.
Night took the city.
They sat naked in her bed, propped on pillows, covers drawn up. A lamp glowed.
Rose lit a joint. “Do you think Harry figured this would happen?”
“He’s practical.”
“For your crew, I’m just an inferior woman you seduced to use, but Harry … Maybe he figures, What the hell, let them get some happy.”
“Maybe,” said Sami as he watched her take a hit.
Across town in her Virginia apartment, redheaded Lorna Dumas exhaled burned tobacco, stared at the blue uniform on her bed, thought, I gotta quit smoking.
Upstairs from her green door, Rose asked Sami, “Do you still think of yourself as Muslim?”
“Feels like some God is chasing me.”
“Nice dodge.” Rose passed him the joint.
Sami took a hit.
She said: “Getting stoned puts you in solid with both your jihad and the FBI.”
“I always wanted to be popular. What about you?”
“My mother taught my girlfriends how to give a blowjob,” said Rose. “Made me promise not to have sex until I knew what the hell I was doing.
“Who the hell ever knows what they’re doing? I fell for the wrong guy over and over again, became a kick-ass federal prosecutor who one day found a certain political slant to her job, spent two years as a public defender, realized that helping unconnected people work the system was the only way they were ever going to get a fair shake.
“So now I’m the vaquera. Don’t speak enough English to fill out an immigration form without fucking yourself? Go to the vaquera. Work permits, car registration, insurance, your political asylum application with the photo of you minus your arm that got hacked off in Sierra Leone—hey, America is the fill-in-the-blank society.
“Then came Zlatko. Everybody lies, but he lied like an antiabortion murderer I interviewed when I was a prosecutor. Hard-core eyes. Plus no way was he Albanian. I can’t trust badges, but the tingles made me call my old pal Harry.”
She hit the joint, held it to him. “Zlatko found me through the people who snuck here with him from Mexico, right?”
Sami waved away another hit—
—fluttering wing vision vanished like smoke.
“Right,” said Rose. “I’m not supposed to know anything.”
“Be glad you’ve got no idea what it’s like out there.”
“I stipulate to a certain degree of unreality. But I’m no virgin.”
Sami said, “I knew this kid. His virgin mission, he gets handed killing three guys. Said he went ‘wild in his mind.’ That’s what it’s like out there. You live behind the world others see. All alone out there on a street full of invisible gunmen is you.”
“You adopt survival mechanisms,” she said.
“Fuck survival. You beat the other guy.
“Beirut. I’m thirteen. Men drove into the neighborhoods, gave us kids AK-47s. I never thought to ask who the ammo really really came from. Barricades cut up my home blocks. Sandbags, barbed wire, fuel barrels. Fuck what our parents said, we were cool and saving our world. I learned to run fast because I was small, and the fucking snipers’ priority was wounding kids because that suckers out rescuers.
“One day, down the block at some other crew’s barricade, those guys made an old man step out front, hands in the air. We see he’s one of us, a Muslim. They tell him to walk to us. So he does, him and us thinking it’s a swap. They let him get ‘bout nine feet from our sandbags. Shot him dead.
“We couldn’t leave cover to pull his body in, so it lay there. After three days we had to abandon our barricade. The stench. The flies.
“Two weeks, different barricade, same thing—only now it’s a teenage Muslim guy just like me, hands up, had taken three steps toward our spot.
“I nailed him. Head shot.” Sami paused. “He was dead as soon as he walked my way. I just got to choose his time and place, his meaning.”
Night held the city.
“Is that why you left Beirut?” asked Rose.
“PLO guys I idolized took custody of a sniper we captured, set him free. Started me thinking: Whose side is anybody really on? Then my father got a job at the Marine barracks. One of our factions blew it and him up. The Marines took care of my family. Put me in a Detroit high school. Soon as I could, I joined the Corps. Semper fi.”
“Me too,” she said.
He leaned into a kiss she captured. She kicked off the covers, cupped his hand over her breast. Seven minutes later, he guided her on top of him, straddling him, arcing over him like a quarter moon as he whispered, “I see you. I see you.”
Afterward, Rose lay across him. “Don’t say anything. Neither of us. Not unless we can say it again and again and again.”
“Until,“he said. “Until, not unless.”
Their flesh goose-bumped. He reached for the sheet and blanket.
“Are you hungry?” she said.
“Not now. Now you have to fall asleep.”
“Why?”
“I have to use your computer when you don’t know it.”
“Oh,” she said.
“But I can spend the night.”
And he did, his last waking moment echoing a fluttering wing.
A mile away in her go-to-sleep teddy bears bedroom, seven-year-old Amy Lewis whispered to her best friend through a cell phone bought for the adventure: “Gramma says I’ll really be going to bed a whole three hours later because the world is round!”
Wake up! Sami bolts upright in Rose’s bed. Glides through the dark to her main room, grabs her phone, taps in the panic number, gets routed to a woken bear who hears Sami whisper, “The Ameer! Keys! Medical imaging office! He’s got access to—”
“Fuck!” Harry killed their call.
Sami calmed his jackhammering heart. Made himself go back to sleep. Have faith in himself and a bear.
Gray clouds covered the morning sky. Sami drove to where the Ameer had sent Maher. Maher waved. Too friendly for just a cab, but this feral kid’s street skills had beaten Harry’s tails. Maher climbed in front. Another mistake. Sami thought, Where do you live? How do you get money? Did you come up with using Facebook?
“What’s that smell?” said Sami as they drove around the Beltway.
“Sorry, chemicals from the dry cleaners. The Koreans are nice. Took me a month to get the job through that Christian youth hostel.”
Maher carried a backpack. “The newspaper calls it the Trackside Slaughter. Ballistics say the gun was also used to shoot a gangbanger from the Clifton Terrace crew. The cops can’t figure Latino and black bodies.”
The future filled Maher’s eyes. “We’ll be something to write about. Brother,” he said, “I know Ameer is worried. But I’m chill. He’s so smart! Combining what you’ve got to do with checking me out while I get the last of my shit, like, how tight is that?”
“Very tight.” Sami grinned. “Is that how American kids say it?”
“Yeah.” Suburbia flowed past the taxi. “Look out there. Re-dondo Beach. Akron where my cousins live. Here. It’s all the same TV shows. Stupid news about dumb rich girls who do nothing but get their pictures taken. The holy Jesus in the Koran, blessed be his name, what if he were driving with us today, seeing all this meaningless crap? We gotta stop all the ruining. If not us, who?”
“We’re in the same car, my brother.”
The gun shop sat in a Beltway exit mall. A pine wreath decorated the barred door. The clerk behind the glass counter wore a holstered Glock and a red Santa Claus hat.
“Hey, guy!” The clerk smiled at Maher. “Good to see you again.”
“Yeah.” Maher handed the clerk his California driv
er’s license for routine processing by the law with a five-year backlog.
The clerk filled his eyes with nonblond Sami.
“This is my uncle,” explained Maher. “He’s Jewish.”
“Oh, well Sha-lum Ha-nooka.”
“Shalom,” said Sami.
Maher rented a 1911 Colt .45 automatic and ear protectors, bought four boxes of ammo and a black silhouette from a target display that featured a pistol-pointing, grizzled Arab in a burnoose and bumper stickers proclaiming that an aging, antiwar movie actress should still be bombed back to Hanoi.
The store’s shooting range had ten lanes, three occupied. Gunfire boomed. As Sami shot holes in their target, Maher dumped three boxes of ammo into his backpack.
“The .45s are the biggest bullets,” said Maher, taking his turn on the firing line. He showed no post-traumatic stress syndrome from the last time he’d fired a gun.
As they left the gun shop, the clerk said, “Happy New Year!”
At the next mall, the sporting goods store roared with crazed shoppers. Sami gave a clerk the order printed from Rose’s computer. The clerk said, “You know these bikes are unassembled in boxes, right?”
“Cheaper that way.”
“It’s for orphans,” said Maher.
“God bless you.” The clerk took their cash so they could skip the line.
“Um,” said Maher. “Do you guys sell steel cup protectors? You know. For … for down there. For hockey.”
“I think they’re all plastic.”
As they carried three bike boxes to the taxi, Sami said, “Hockey?”
Maher shrugged. “Won’t happen tomorrow, but when I become a holy martyr, the virgins waiting for me in paradise will get one too. I wanna be able to have kids.”
“You want to have children in paradise?”
“Got to be a better place to raise them than here.”
They crammed the bike boxes in the taxi. Drove to a subway stop. Only then did Maher relay the Ameer’s orders for that night, where to be tomorrow, what to do precisely when. Before he vanished into the crowd, Maher said, “I love you, brother.”
Thirty-four minutes later, Harry rode in the taxi beside Sami and said, “Before dawn, NEST black-bagged Ivan’s building—not the Nuclear Emergency Search Teams, their shadows whose S stands for Strike. They pulled all hazmat out of the medical imaging office, substituted fake material, and broke the machines so nobody will wonder when they don’t work. We’re still balancing records hacked from the office computers, but it looks like all radioactive material is accounted for. Put that together with your horny teenager looking for a metal cup to shield his balls, and they’re probably building a put-together-at-the-last-minute dirty bomb.”
Harlan Coben Page 21