The Fourth Assassin: An Omar Yussef Mystery

by Matt Beynon Rees

  He shoved the window until it was almost closed. “This room is getting as cold as your blood,” he said.

  The two men shifted their jaws slowly and kept their stares firm.

  “I don’t believe a word of this,” Khamis Zeydan whispered.

  Nizar blew smoke out of his nostrils.

  “It’s three in the morning,” Omar Yussef said. “He’s explained his story to you three, no, four times already.”

  “The president’s speech is tomorrow at nine A.M. That gives us thirty hours.” Khamis Zeydan rolled his thumb slowly across the wheel of his lighter, watching it spark. “Plenty of time to confirm the truth before I have to panic.”

  “I brought Nizar here so you could help him get immunity.” Omar Yussef slapped his thigh. “You’ve heard his story. You know he killed Rashid to prevent the assassination of the president. We have to talk to Sergeant Abayat to get Police Department protection for Nizar.”

  “You mean Islamic Jihad will be sitting around now thinking, ‘Well, Nizar’s end of things was a bust. Let’s just forget about assassinating the president.’” Khamis Zeydan opened his eyes wide like a simpleton. “No, I want to hear the backup plan.”

  “How could Nizar know? He’s not the assassin. The assassin is dead.”

  “By your ancestors, will you shut up and let me talk to him?”

  “You weren’t talking to him. You were having a staring contest.”

  Nizar’s laugh was warm and smoky. He stubbed out his cigarette. “Is this some kind of comical third-degree? You two old fellows bitch at each other until I get worried one of you’ll die of a heart attack—then I confess to everything, just to calm you down?” He sniggered and lit another smoke.

  Omar Yussef scratched his mustache in embarrassment. Khamis Zeydan stared at his prosthetic hand.

  “Let me attempt to convince you another way, Abu Adel,” Nizar said.

  “Try me.” Khamis Zeydan poured himself a whisky.

  Nizar stroked his long hair. “In Palestine, everyone knows what it means to be from Bethlehem. Here, I tell people where I’m from, and they look at me with incomprehension. I explain that I come from the town where Jesus was born, and that’s about all the detail they can handle. Even then they sometimes get confused, because I’m an Arab, and Jesus wasn’t an Arab, was he?”

  The boy stared beyond the two older men, as though he were tallying the lighted windows in the UN building at the end of the street.

  “At first, I responded to this ignorance by turning my back on Americans,” he said. “I became more religious than I had ever been before. I couldn’t have been more of an Arab if I’d gone on the Hajj to Mecca, shaved my head, and thrown seven pebbles at the Pillar of Aqaba. But I couldn’t keep that up.” He clapped his hands and gestured like a magician who has conjured an object into thin air. “You know the oath from surat al-Waqi’ah? ‘I swear by the shelter of the stars that this is a glorious Koran.’ Well, I could never see the stars in Brooklyn. At night, the sky was illuminated with the orange glow of the city, blotting out the heavens.”

  Omar Yussef thought of the clouds and rain, sleet, and snow that had obscured the sky most of the time since he had arrived in New York. “So this city blotted out Allah’s creation and left you an unbeliever?” he said.

  “In truth, I left religion because I’m a bad man.” Nizar’s eyes seemed to turn in on themselves, closing around his memories, smothering his emotions. “After I had been in the U.S. for a while, I had sex with an American woman. It made me hate myself, because I had betrayed what I thought I believed in.”

  “That doesn’t make you bad, my son,” Omar Yussef said. “It just means you were living outside our culture. At home, sex is possible only with your wife, but here everything is permitted. You did something natural.”

  “I didn’t do it with pleasure, ustaz. I screwed her like a frightened rabbit. I was scared of the fact that she welcomed sex, that she wanted to do it. She cooperated because she saw how bad I was—that’s what I thought. She had recognized my wicked character, and so she allowed me to do these disgusting things to her.”

  Khamis Zeydan whistled and slugged some whisky.

  Nizar slapped a fist into the palm of his hand. “That’s why women are forbidden to us, except in marriage. Because in sex a man sees how weak he is, unless the woman is his possession, his wife. Give me some of that whisky.”

  Omar Yussef passed a glass from the minibar and Khamis Zeydan slopped out another large Scotch. Nizar drank it and wiped his mouth with his hand.

  “I remember everything about that woman’s disgusting body, ustaz. The dimples in the flesh of her legs and the stretches in the skin around her breasts. The cold trace of sweat between her buttocks. Her paleness. As soon as I had finished, I made my excuses to leave. She lay in bed, staring at me with impatience and contempt while I dressed.” He drained the rest of the whisky. “I tried to be American. I drank Scotch, I ate all the pork they put in front of me, and I fucked a woman whose name I barely knew. But I may as well have trotted down Broadway on a camel. I wasn’t a good Muslim. Still, it was evident that I was no American.”

  “Could you see no compromise between the two ways of life?” Omar Yussef said.

  Nizar closed his eyes. “I found it in Rania. I thought I could marry her, experience bliss on earth here in America, and then she would come with me to Paradise after our deaths.”

  “Why didn’t you do just that?” Khamis Zeydan’s voice was low and suspicious.

  “Because of Islamic Jihad. They forced me into the drug trade with Rania’s father. It made me an unacceptable son-in-law for Marwan.”

  “But it was his drug ring.”

  “He was in jail on drug charges while his own wife died of cancer. He didn’t want Rania ever to experience the same abandonment.”

  “So you killed Rania’s father, because he objected to your marriage,” Khamis Zeydan said. “What did Rania think of that?”

  The young man hesitated. He grinned weakly and averted his eyes.

  Khamis Zeydan tapped the cap of the whisky bottle against his prosthesis. “What’s the fallback plan? What do you do in a case like this where the preparations for the murder have fallen through?”

  “We wait for instructions.”

  “How do you receive them?”

  Nizar wagged his finger at Khamis Zeydan. “Brigadier, you’re a clever fellow.”

  “No stalling.”

  “The command places an ad in a local newspaper.”

  “Haven’t you heard of e-mail?”

  Nizar’s smile was condescending. “And I’ve heard it can be traced too. This is simpler. It can’t be connected to us. It’d be meaningless to the police.”

  “Which newspaper?” Omar Yussef asked.

  “The Metro Muslim. It’s a weekly.”

  “What day does it come out?”

  “It would’ve been distributed early yesterday evening about the time you spoiled my date. The command has had time to place a message since Rashid’s death, so I expect there’ll be new instructions in the current edition of the paper.”

  Khamis Zeydan turned to Omar Yussef. “Where can we get a copy?”

  “At this time of night,” Nizar said, “you won’t be able to find one.”

  “We’ve only got a day to figure everything out before the president’s speech,” Khamis Zeydan said. “We can’t just wait for the stores to open.”

  “Now you’re in a hurry?” Omar Yussef remembered the stacks of newspapers by Hamza’s desk in the precinct house and reached for the phone. “Let me call Sergeant Abayat. I have his cell-phone number.”

  Nizar pushed the handset back into its cradle. “Not yet, ustaz. I want to know if the Honored Pasha is going to protect me from the American police.”

  Khamis Zeydan glared at Nizar. He reached for the whisky. “I’ll make sure you’re protected,” he said. “Let’s drink to it.”

  Nizar took his hand off the phone, and Omar Yussef
dialed.

  “Greetings, O Hamza,” he said, when Abayat picked up the phone. “Thanks be to Allah, everything is fine, yes. I need you to come to my hotel room right away. There’s someone here you’ll want to see. . . . Nizar, that’s who. Please bring the latest copy of the Metro Muslim also. The edition that came out this past evening. Do you have it?” He put his hand over the receiver and turned to Khamis Zeydan. “He has one in his office. Then come quickly with it, Hamza. It’s urgent.” He hung up.

  Khamis Zeydan’s eyes were moist and gleaming as he took another drink, wild with excitement born of danger. The tiny broken veins high on his cheeks flushed.

  “We’re halfway to stopping this,” the police chief said, pouring another drink for Nizar. “Changing a plan at the last minute is tough, even if the police aren’t on to you. And to carry out a hit in New York City is no easy task.”

  “Really?” Nizar murmured over the lip of his tumbler, his eyes still, intense and probing. “Surely for you PLO people, New York presented no special problems.”

  “In Europe, we had some freedom of movement. We made deals with the national intelligence services.” Khamis Zeydan emptied his glass and grinned. “In West Germany, we were allowed to operate freely, so long as we didn’t attack German targets. But the Americans were always too close to Israel to give us any such leeway. I can tell you, the only operation I carried out in New York—it stretched even me to my limits.”

  Nizar drank slowly.

  Chapter 26

  Nizar leafed through to the classifieds at the back of the Metro Muslim. Hamza stood over him, his lips peeled back from his teeth and his tired eyes dry and hostile.

  “I don’t like this,” the detective said. “I ought to take him in now.”

  Nizar kept his eyes on the newspaper. “How far had you progressed in your crack investigation of the headless corpse? You’d never have found me. You didn’t even match fingerprints on the dead body.”

  Hamza turned a glance of hurt and betrayal on Omar Yussef.

  “If I hadn’t come forward, you’d still be hunting for poor old Rashid,” Nizar said.

  “May Allah be merciful upon him,” Hamza said, “and may you beg the pardon of Allah for what you’ve done.”

  Nizar murmured, “‘He whose hand is in the water isn’t the same as he whose hand is in the fire.’”

  That’s true, Omar Yussef thought. You can’t condemn someone’s behavior until you’ve experienced their situation. He took Hamza’s hand and held it close to his chest like a man imploring a lover. “I know you see Nizar as a murderer, but you have to work with him now to save the president.”

  Hamza frowned at Khamis Zeydan. “How severe is the danger to the president?”

  The police chief rolled his tongue behind his mustache. “I wouldn’t let my dear old auntie sit next to him at dinner in case of a ricochet.”

  “You’re canceling his speech?”

  Khamis Zeydan bit at the ends of his mustache. “Not just yet. But I’m thinking about it.”

  Omar Yussef remembered the Jerusalem girl he had met on the subway during his first day in New York. He recalled wishing that Palestinians back home could live as she did, driven neither by politics and ideology, nor by murder and greed. If the president died here, Omar Yussef’s granddaughter would never experience the security that girl knew. The children at Omar Yussef’s poor little school for refugees would be engulfed once more in civil war and the viciousness of thugs and killers.

  “O Hamza, you need to be a little less of a New York cop and a little more of a Palestinian,” he said. “You’re from Bethlehem. You have a duty to the Palestinian people, as well as to New York. Bend the rules. If you don’t, the president may be killed here in New York. The Palestinians will have a dead leader and perhaps a civil war.”

  Hamza cursed quietly.

  “It’s here,” Nizar said, his voice exuberant and uneasy.

  Khamis Zeydan drained his glass and leaned over the young man’s shoulder.

  Nizar’s fingers rustled the margins of the Metro Muslim, an expression of bewilderment on his face. He looked like a newspaper subscriber whose breakfast had been upset by an unexpected obituary for a friend. His hopeless gaze brought Omar Yussef to his feet. “What is it?” he said.

  He came to Nizar’s side and scanned the page of ads. Feidy’s Halal Butcher and Grocery. Muhammad Hammad, Esq., Attorney at Law. Experienced Muslim Babysitter Available. “Which one is it?”

  Nizar’s finger hovered until it came down on an ad at the bottom of the page.

  Omar Yussef read aloud: “The Hassan-i Sabbagh School. Recruiting for teachers. Qualifications: Good Islamic character. Sound knowledge of Islam. Legal U.S. status with valid Social Security number. Proficiency in English. One year experience preferable. Apply: Alamut Mosque.” An address in Bay Ridge followed.

  “That address—it’s your apartment.” Hamza shoved Nizar’s shoulder. “The place you shared with Rashid and Ala.”

  “What the hell does that tell us?” Khamis Zeydan slapped the page.

  “It tells us our friend Nizar isn’t misleading us,” Omar Yussef said.

  “How do you know?”

  “Hassan-i Sabbagh was the Old Man of the Mountain,” Omar Yussef said, “the greatest, most feared leader of the medieval Assassins. We’ve come across references to them at every turn, and here they are again.”

  “The Alamut Mosque too,” Hamza mumbled.

  “A mosque which doesn’t exist at an address that matches Nizar’s,” Omar Yussef said. “What’s the message, Nizar? Is it in code?”

  Nizar seemed to have drifted into a dream. It took him a moment to come back. He shook his head, and his long black hair slipped over his eyes. “You missed the logo,” he said, his raw voice catching in his throat.

  Above the text, a small graphic showed a man in traditional Arab dress walking with an axe held above his head. Behind him came a horse bearing a turbaned rider, dignified and upright.

  “Do I have to remind you of the lessons you gave us, ustaz?” Nizar said.

  “What does he mean?” Khamis Zeydan asked.

  Omar Yussef rubbed the white stubble on his chin. “When the leader of the Assassins rode out of his castle, he was always preceded by a man bearing an axe who would shout, ‘Turn out of the way of him who bears in his hands the death of kings.’”

  Khamis Zeydan dragged Nizar’s face toward him with the back of his hand. “Well?” he said.

  Nizar murmured, “There’s another assassin here to kill the president.”

  “You know that from the logo?”

  “The man who called out about the death of kings—that’s the signal. Another hit man is in town. Maybe he’s been here all along, as a backup. If the graphic showed just the man on his horse, it would mean we were to proceed as planned. But this is different.”

  Omar Yussef stroked his mustache. “Islamic Jihad is using references to the Assassins to send secret messages.”

  “That’s right,” Nizar said. “All our messages were based around the Assassins.”

  “When you killed Rashid, you left a veil where his head ought to have been—another element from the Assassins’ religious lore. What message were you sending to them?”

  Nizar grimaced. “I wanted them to think that the operation had been betrayed—the Veiled Man was a traitor. I expected them to call it all off.”

  Omar Yussef remembered the man in black who had fled Ala’s apartment. Because I was there, he never entered the bedroom, he thought. He didn’t see the reference to the Veiled Man. If he was from Islamic Jihad, then the group didn’t get Nizar’s signal, so they went ahead with the plan.

  “Another hit man is in place.” Khamis Zeydan grabbed Nizar’s collar. “How do we find him?”

  “I don’t know,” Nizar said.

  “If this was the backup plan, you must know what to do.”

  “I was supposed to wait. When I saw this ad, I’d know that the new assassin wou
ld come to me. He’d find me and let me know what he needed from me.”

  “So this newspaper message is useless to us,” Hamza said.

  “Not quite. We know that the danger to the president didn’t end with the death of Rashid, his intended killer.” Omar Yussef looked at Khamis Zeydan. “We have to call off the speech. The president can’t appear in public.”

  Khamis Zeydan’s leg rocked nervously. “You care so much about his life? I thought you despised politicians.”

  “I care about the civil war that would start between our worthless political factions if the president were attacked. I care about the family and friends who’d be caught up in it. So do you. You have to keep him out of harm’s way.”

  The police chief muttered his assent.

  “Speaking of harm’s way, I’m taking this bastard with me.” Hamza put his big hand on Nizar’s shoulder.

  “You promised not to arrest him,” Omar Yussef said.

  “Do you see any handcuffs? If he’s to get immunity, I have to discuss it with the lieutenant, and from her it’ll go higher. I’ll take him to the station.”

  “So you’ll try?”

  “That’s the best this son of a whore’ll get.”

  Nizar’s shoulders fell and his chin dropped to his chest, as though he were already in chains.

  “When this is all finished and the president is safe, you’ll be free,” Omar Yussef said.

  Nizar’s eyebrows twitched. He spoke as though he were listening to his own words being played back to him. “What will I do then?”

  “Return to Palestine. That’s Ala’s plan.”

  “Ala’s going home?”

  “When I’ve finished with my speech at the conference, he’ll fly back with me. You could join us.”

  Nizar ran his tongue over his lips. “Rania can’t go there.”