“You look like you’ve been someplace where the sun actually shines,” Hansen said.
“Yeah, Key West,” DeMarco said.
He’d gotten off the plane an hour ago and managed to make it to Jerry Hansen’s office at Homeland Security just as Hansen was shutting off his computer and locking up his safe. DeMarco’s plane had in fact been delayed leaving Miami because of security. They were searching every carry-on bag going onto every plane because of the attempted hijacking of the New York–D.C. shuttle.
“Key West,” Hansen echoed. “Man, that sounds good. It must have been ten degrees when I left for work this morning.”
“Is that right?” DeMarco said. He didn’t want to talk with Hansen about the weather or his aborted vacation. “I was just wondering if you could fill me in on that hijacker, like you did before with Reza Zarif.”
“I dunno,” Hansen said. “The general said I could talk to you about Zarif; he didn’t say anything about this other guy. Plus it’s kinda late.”
“I cleared it with the general,” DeMarco lied. “Call him up. He’ll tell you.”
DeMarco was betting that Andy Banks’s staff hated talking to him, Banks being the unpleasant, unreasonable, demanding bastard that he was.
Hansen studied DeMarco’s face, looking for signs that DeMarco was lying.
“Nah, that’s okay,” Hansen said, after a moment. “I’ll take your word for it. Anyway, it’s just like it was with Zarif. If you read the paper this morning, you got almost everything.”
Hansen then told DeMarco just what he’d already read in the newspaper. Twenty-five years ago Youseff Khalid had left Somalia with his parents, became an American citizen, and eventually earned a degree in computer sciences from Colorado State University. He had worked for IBM in New York City for nine years but was laid off three months ago. According to IBM, Youseff had just been a random casualty of corporate downsizing, meaning there was probably some guy in India who was now doing his job. Youseff, however, didn’t accept this explanation. He was convinced that he’d been fired because he was both black and Muslim, and he had filed a discrimination suit. He’d been informed a week ago that it would probably take two or three years before anyone would make a decision on his lawsuit, and in the three months since he’d lost his job the only work he had been able to find involved making coffee drinks for people who didn’t need caffeine. Youseff’s friends told the FBI that Youseff had been depressed, angry, and absolutely convinced that he was a victim of racial and religious bigotry.
Youseff’s congressman, Representative Charles Cantrell from the fourteenth district of New York, came forward about this time and showed the FBI two letters that he’d received from Youseff. The first letter politely asked Cantrell for help. The second letter, written a month later, cursed Cantrell to the heavens for caring more about IBM than he did about a poor constituent—which, of course, Cantrell did: IBM was a major contributor; Youseff was not. Youseff’s second letter concluded with the statement that Shakespeare got it only half right: We shouldn’t just kill all the lawyers, we should kill all the lawmakers too. Then the FBI discovered that Youseff had taken six flying lessons four years earlier but had never obtained a pilot’s license.
The FBI added up the facts: a Muslim with a grievance plus flying lessons plus a letter to his congressman saying all lawmakers should be killed, and the Bureau concluded it was very likely that Youseff had planned to crash the shuttle into the Capitol after he had hijacked it. And because the shuttle was cleared to land at Reagan National, it was possible that Youseff could have entered the no-fly zone and crashed the plane before the Capitol’s defenders had time to react and shoot it down.
To DeMarco there was one major difference between Reza Zarif and Youseff Khalid, which was that Khalid’s motive seemed more substantial. It appeared that Zarif had just wigged out and turned kamikaze. Khalid, on the other hand, had, at least from his perspective, a more legitimate complaint. He’d lost his job because of what he thought was prejudice and then was ignored after trying to rectify the situation by filing a lawsuit and writing his congressman. It may have been irrational to try to hijack a plane and crash it into the Capitol, but at least DeMarco could somewhat understand his reasoning.
Come to think of it, there was another major difference between Khalid and Zarif: Khalid, thank God, hadn’t killed his wife and his three kids.
“Did the FBI uncover any sort of connection between Reza Zarif and this hijacker?” DeMarco asked. “You know, phone calls to each other, letters from the same mosque, e-mails, common friends, anything like that?”
“No, and they looked hard,” Hansen said.
“Where’d he get the gun he snuck on the plane?” DeMarco asked.
“Now that’s the sixty-four thousand-dollar question,” Hansen said. “It’s the gun that makes the Bureau think some bad guys—you know, al-Qaeda—may have gone to Youseff and convinced him to do what he did. This weapon was special. The Bureau’s lab thinks at least one part came from India, and it took pretty high-tech equipment to make the plastic parts. This weapon definitely wasn’t somethin’ you could pick up in your average gun shop.”
“How ’bout from someone like Donny Cray?” DeMarco said.
“No way. Cray didn’t have the equipment or the know-how to make something like this,” Hansen said, as he put on his coat. “And in case you’re wondering, the Bureau didn’t find Cray’s fingerprints in Khalid’s house or in his car or on the gun.”
“But there’s no trail to any specific terrorist group,” DeMarco said.
“Not yet, but Jesus, DeMarco, this thing just happened two days ago. Look, I gotta get—”
“Did the Bureau ever find Donny Cray?” DeMarco said.
“Yeah they found him. His body, anyway.”
Hansen wrapped a bright orange scarf around his neck and started toward the door, but DeMarco remained seated.
“His body?” DeMarco said.
“Yeah. It was just like I told you. The guy hitched his trailer to his pickup, headed south, and drove off the road. And he left the same day the roads were icier than shit. Anyway, some hunter found the pickup and the trailer in a gulch. Cray’s neck had snapped and his girlfriend—her head went through the windshield. Neither of them was wearing seat belts, and his truck was so damn old it didn’t have air bags. Look, I gotta catch—”
“So the FBI wasn’t able to confirm that Cray really sold Reza a gun.”
“No, it’s hard to talk to a dead guy, but Cray selling him a gun still makes a hell of a lot more sense than Cray having been to Zarif’s house or him being some kind of Muslim convert al-Qaeda operative. Look, I’m outta here.”
DeMarco thanked Hansen and trailed behind him as he left the Homeland Security building. He didn’t even try to keep up; he bet that the fastest the guy moved all day was when he was leaving work.
As DeMarco watched Hansen fleeing, he was thinking that maybe now he could report back to Mahoney and tell him that he was through investigating Reza Zarif. He hadn’t uncovered any flaws in the FBI’s explanation for either event, and there didn’t appear to be any connection between Reza and Youseff Khalid.
But one thing did bother him, and the thing just wouldn’t go away. It was like a woodpecker rapping on the back of his head.
It bothered him that Donny Cray had died before the FBI could talk to him.