Dressed in gray coveralls, his Arabic finery neatly folded into a plastic bag, Chouza Khalid watched the bomb come up out of its fiberglass casing. Big Mahmoud was pulling on the chain hoist, what the Americans delightfully called a come-along. The squat, rounded cylinder contained two hundred and fifty kilograms, over five hundred fifty pounds, of RDX high explosive. Although in its present unarmed state this was about as dangerous as so much sawdust, he was being extremely careful.
The thing cleared its former coffin and came down on a wheeled dolly. The transport plug was still in its nose. The detonator was still in its cardboard tube, which had been shipped in a separate crate. Mahmoud got busy with wrenches, removing the fins from the carcass of the bomb. Khalid was no stranger to explosives, and had set a bomb or two in his time, but he did not care for them, abhorring in his marrow the idea that a lump of what looked like clay could instantly convert itself into an inferno and make a person (perhaps even oneself!) utterly vanish from the earth.
He walked out into the main bay of the warehouse, passing the elevator shaft into which he had encrypted Bashar, and the place where he had dumped used oil and sawdust over the bloodstains, checking to see if anything showed (nothing did) and experiencing real satisfaction about how that business had all worked out.
Near that place, Rifaat was filling five-gallon plastic cans with diesel fuel from a fifty-five-gallon drum fitted with a hand pump. Out on the dock and a safe distance from the fuel, Abdel was busy with a cutting torch and a rusty sheet of one-inch steel plate. Khalid thought that the fuel and the steel plates represented overkill, given the power of the bomb they had, but Ibn-Salemeh was quite precise in the way he wanted things done.
And thinking now of Ibn-Salemeh, Khalid returned again to what the man had said the other night. Crown Heights. No one knew that Khalid had a house in Crown Heights. He had kept that place secret from everyone, especially from his employer. Perhaps it was just a way of speaking, mentioning neighborhoods—he could have said Park Slope or Cobble Hill. Or maybe not. Was he letting Khalid know in his typically elliptical way that he knew about the house? If he knew about that, what else did he know? Khalid felt a warm flush break out on his forehead and on the backs of his hands. If Ibn-Salemeh knew, then perhaps Bashar also knew. He looked down at the oil smear on the floor and recalled what had lain there. If Bashar knew, then the Mexican knew too. He looked at his watch, suddenly close to panic.
“Abdel,” he said, “I must go on an errand. We have three hours until the boy arrives, and I’ll be back before then. Hussein!”
The other man looked up from the white Cadillac, which he had been cleaning.
“I need the car for a while. Give me your cap and jacket.”
“It’s not your fault, Butch, stop it!” said Marlene for about the sixth time.
They were in a crowded waiting room off the surgical ward of Bellevue Hospital. Karp was slumped in a pink plastic chair not nearly big enough for him, emitting at short intervals sighs, groans, and muffled curses. The place was full of cops, in uniform and plain clothes, dropping by to check on Roland and on Hillyer. Roland had taken a nine through the small of his back; the kidney was involved. Hillyer had been shot twice through the chest and was in worse shape. Both were still in surgery. Their assailant had vanished as usual.
Karp glowered at her and stifled a curse. Of course it was his fault. He should have realized instantly that the only reason for the unknown Mexican shooter to show at Khalid’s garage was that the Obregons had told him to. They had their money, and now they were using Khalid to dispose of an embarrassing and now unnecessary shooter. Khalid would be delighted to oblige in getting rid of someone who had caused so much trouble. As for the shooter, once he had escaped from the trap, it would be obvious to him what had gone down, and his first thought would have been to get the Obregons. And who knew where the Obregons were? Not in jail—that would be easy for him to check. No, they were being held as material witnesses, and naturally the prosecutor in charge of the case, whose face and name had been plastered over television for weeks, would know this location.
“I should have seen it,” he muttered to himself.
“What?”
“Nothing,” said Karp and studied the print of a sailboat hanging opposite, a form of art clearly aimed at keeping the mind away from thoughts of loved ones in surgery.
“Hi, Clay,” said Marlene. Karp tore his eyes away from the sprightly sloop. Fulton was leaning against the door of the waiting room, looking gray and grim. They both looked at him expectantly, as if he were the surgeon. He shook his head.
“They’re still in there, is what I heard.” He sat on one of the pink seats, sighing.
“I have to go,” said Marlene, glad that there was someone else to wait with Karp, and to his questioning look, she replied, “Church. It’s Good Friday. I’m going with Lucy.”
“That’s probably a good place to be,” Karp said. “Pray, huh?”
Marlene nodded, hugged both men, and left.
“Hell of a note,” said Fulton after a silence. “Another cop, a prosecutor.”
“Why can’t we seem to nail this guy?” asked Karp.
“Why? It’s a big town. It’s only been a couple of days. We didn’t even figure him for a Mexican until this morning. We’ll get him. He’s got no place to run and no place to hide.”
“Who is he? Do we have any idea?”
“Well, the Obregons aren’t talking, and we don’t have any real leverage on them until we have this asshole in custody. By the way, we found the Erbes girl. In Santo Domingo, the D.R. The Feds have a team there trying to get her out, but she’s fighting it. She does not want to see this Mexican or the Obregons ever again. So that could be a blank too on the big questions. Did they import a killer? Who is he? Why should they tell us?”
Why indeed? After a while Karp said, musingly, “You get used to there being rules, you know? I talked with Jack about this the other day. You don’t shoot cops unless you’re totally hyped up or into some wacky politics. You never shoot judges or prosecutors.”
“Not never … you took a bullet a couple years back, I recall.”
“Right, the exception that proves the rule. The guys who shot me were Cuban gangsters. This guy is a Mexican gangster. And the Arabs, the terrorists—it’s a different culture, where the cops and the judges are just part of a different gang. The idea that there’s a system, a rule that’s somewhere up above street life, the scrabbling and fighting, just isn’t there. It’s just naked power, no limits…”
“Yeah, and you know, Stretch, a lot of the folks uptown think that’s what we got already,” said Fulton lightly, and then regretted it, for Karp rounded on him vehemently.
“And they’re fucking wrong! You know they’re wrong, Clay. Your whole life says that. There is a difference. Are there bad cops? Sure. Does the system creak and moan? It does. But there’s still a difference, and the guapos and the hustlers know it; they fucking depend on it, which is why a couple of cops can go into a dope market and pull guys out and arrest them and nobody’ll say boo, guys with guns, guys with knives. Anyplace in the city they can do it—there’s no casbah in New York, there’s no place where a cop can’t walk, because the cops don’t shoot kids when storekeepers pay them to like they do in Brazil, and they don’t moonlight as death squads for the government like they do down in Central America. Okay, it’s thin. God, if anybody knows how thin it is, it’s me, but it’s still there. But these new guys—it’s not there to them at all. They’re importing Mexican rules, Lebanon rules, into New York. And we’re starting to respond in the same way—like another gang—and all the local shitheels who think that’s just fine are coming out of the closet, they love it.” He paused, suddenly aware that the other people in the waiting room were staring at him, apparently distracted from the soaps playing on the TV that hung from the ceiling.
“I want it to stop,” he finished lamely, feeling ever more a jerk.
Fulton, however, was smiling at him benignly. “That was a pretty good one, Stretch. You need to save that for the closing when we get these bastards. Speaking of which, I think we caught us a little break last night.”
“Ah, good news for a change!”
“It could be,” said Fulton more cautiously. “Say what you want about the FBI, when they tackle something they’re thorough. The phone in Khalid’s office was used to make a dozen or so calls to a number in London. They asked the Brits to check it out. An empty office, no surprise there, but the Feds also asked for a phone record from that phone and it came in on Telex late last night. A couple of calls made to Abu Dhabi down there on the Persian Gulf, some big sheik, Rashid something or other. Meanwhile, they’re running all the phone records against visas—did anybody these bastards called enter or leave the U.S. recently? And it turns out this Sheik Rashid’s private jet landed at Kennedy the other day, seven passengers, the big kahuna and six buddies checked through INS.”
“And … ?”
“And the Feds raid the airplane, and what do they find? Seven guys eating sandwiches and watching TV. The INS swears there were only seven people on that plane, and seven people in Arab costumes were seen leaving the airport in a stretch limo. What do you think of that?”
“It sounds like they’re bringing in reinforcements. Do you have the seven guys yet?”
“No,” replied Fulton with some heat, “but if the NYPD can’t find seven guys in head rags and bed sheets, we’d better hang it the fuck up.”
El Chivato had no objection to wearing women’s clothing and had often done so in making an approach for an assassination. In Mexico he had known tough and experienced bodyguards to continue making lewd remarks and sucking noises right up to the moment he killed them. When he was a boy, his older sisters had delighted to dress him in girl’s clothes and do his face and his hair. He did not mind this either, although he had shot several men who had suggested that he looked like a girl. Consistency in these matters was not something that much troubled El Chivato.
In the Midtown parking garage where he had spent Thursday night, he strolled back and forth as if coming from a car, smiling brightly at all he met until, after the morning rush was over, he spotted a slim blond woman locking a gold Nissan Maxima. He smiled at her too, and she smiled back, and when she had just gone past him, he whirled and cracked her over the head with his pistol. She fell and he hit her again.
It took less than three minutes to stuff her in the Nissan’s trunk and get under way, with her purse and ID on the front seat and her big sunglasses on his face. He drove to Brooklyn at a sedate pace, to Park Slope, but when he passed Seventh Avenue and Ninth Street, he saw that the street ahead was filled with police vehicles and a cop was stationed at the corner to divert traffic. He allowed himself to be diverted.
As he drove to the other address he had tortured out of Bashar, he reflected on how foolish he had been to approach the prosecutor. If the Obregons went to jail again, that was no problem, for no place was easier to get into than a jail. He would come back at a later date, when the police no longer sought him quite as avidly. If the Obregons were released, they would eventually return to Mexico, and that was no problem either, as he could certainly find and kill anyone in Mexico. Naturally, if he had a good, easy chance he would do them, but it was something he could leave for later. No, it was this maddening pressure of time that had thrown off his instincts, that and the fever. His wound was not healing; the whole side of his body was now red and swollen, and it hurt, although he tried to push back the pain and the hot fog that clouded his vision and his judgment by eating Percodan and aspirin like gumdrops. He shook four more tablets, two of each, into his hand and swallowed them dry.
There was the house. El Chivato found a parking space opposite and watched it for a while. His forehead broke out in a sweat, and he was glad he had sunglasses. The day was overcast but bright, and the light bothered his eyes.
He left the car and went through the overgrown front yard and around the back of the house. The back door had grilles and a new lock on it, but underneath it was the old-fashioned glass-windowed kind, dating from the days when this had been a civilized street and the resident housewife might have looked through that window, pushing back a thin white curtain to smile at the delivery boy. El Chivato went back to the car, opened the trunk, wrestled a tire tool out from under the woman’s flaccid body, and went back to the house, where he used the tire tool to pry up the grille. He broke a pane and let himself in.
The backdoor led via a short hallway to the kitchen, which was clean and in reasonable repair. Not so the rest of the house. The first floor was a ruin of fallen plaster, hanging wiring, and cracked wood, dimly lit by sunlight entering through gaps in the plywood covering the windows. It had clearly been used at some time in the past as a haunt of junkies. El Chivato wrinkled his nose and climbed to the second floor. There one bedroom and its adjoining bath had been renovated to a degree. They were clean at least and supplied with electricity and water. There were sheets and blankets on a simple cot that made up the bedroom’s sole furniture. A cardboard carton held folded clothes—jeans and shirts, socks and underwear. On the sink in the bathroom he found toothpaste, a toothbrush (quite dry), and a bottle of aspirin. El Chivato took the bottle and descended the stairs, past the first floor, and through a door he found behind the main staircase.
A hanging lamp cord brushed his face. He yanked it and walked down the narrow, worn steps. A large, empty room, floored with concrete. Dim light entered through narrow, filthy windows near the ceiling. A door from this led to a smaller room with an oil furnace in it, a square brown box that stood next to the cylindrical gray coal-burning unit it had replaced. He pulled another hanging string and turned on the overhead bulb.
As he did so, he heard a faint noise coming from behind a new, steel-framed wooden door built into the brick wall next to the coal furnace. It was locked from the outside by a turn bolt. El Chivato flattened himself against the wall, turned the bolt, and flung back the door. Nothing. He peeked around the frame, pistol pointing, and saw a young girl crouched on a mattress. At first he thought she was a black girl, but closer inspection showed that she was merely filthy with coal dust. He asked her who she was, and she told him her story, how the man she had heard called Chouza had kidnapped her on behalf of her family, who wanted her dead because she was a whore, although she wasn’t really. As the girl prattled on, El Chivato considered whether it would harm his enemy worse to kill the girl or let her go, and decided that it was the latter. He asked her when Chouza would return, to which she replied that she didn’t know, but that she had not been fed that day, and so she expected him at any time. He always comes down here? Yes. He made a decision.
“Go,” he said, “but before you leave, lock me in here.”
“Why?” Fatyma was mildly surprised at being rescued by a transvestite. She had known several on the Deuce, and most of them had been eccentric in one way or another. Wanting to be locked into a coal cellar was, however, a new one.
“Just do it,” he said, and gave her a look that made her swallow hard. He sat down on the cleanest part of the mattress and leaned against the brick. Fatyma shut the door and turned the bolt.
After that she went immediately to the coal furnace, knelt, rummaged in the ash grate, and pulled out a plastic-wrapped package the size of two bricks. Peeling back a corner of the plastic, she saw that it was composed of currency—twenties, fifties, and hundred-dollar bills. She ran upstairs to the kitchen and washed her face and her hands at the sink, and found a grocery bag into which she placed the package. She found a steak knife in a drawer and put that in the bag too. Then she went searching for clothes, because she was not about to walk through the streets in a T-shirt and panties. In the upstairs bedroom she found a pair of jeans, which when hoisted to breast height and tied with a strip of cloth torn from the bed sheet, and hacked off for length, would serve as a covering. She found some rubber zoris in the bathroom, slipped them on, put the money in a shopping bag she had found, and slipped out of the house. A few streets away, on Atlantic Avenue, she found a large, cheap variety store, where she bought herself several outfits, a straw handbag, some sneakers, big sunglasses, a large and unlikely platinum-blond wig, and a cloth suitcase to hold what she wasn’t wearing. Then she hailed a cab and told the driver to take her to the airport.
Khalid entered his house by the front door and went immediately to the kitchen to prepare a meal for his prisoner. He began to fill a pot at the sink. When he saw the soot stains, he let out a cry of dismay and dropped the pot. It made a sound like a gong. He checked the back door, saw the broken glass, ran down the cellar stairs, knelt by the furnace door, his pulse thrumming in his ears. He reached deeply into the ash grate and let out another cry and a string of curses. One of his packages was gone. And the other one, all the way in the back…? He grasped it with sweating hands and drew it out, holding it to his breast like an infant.
He stayed there a moment, willing his stricken brain to unfreeze. Someone had broken in and taken half his money and released the girl. Ibn-Salemeh or the Mexican? Certainly, the Mexican. Ibn-Salemeh had been playing sheik since the last time Khalid visited the girl, and if any of the others had explored the furnace, they would have taken all the money—and told Ibn-Salemeh that Khalid had been skimming money and Khalid would now be floating in the harbor. So where was the Mexican now? With the girl? Or …
At that moment Khalid noticed that the door to the coal cellar was closed. And locked. Why would the girl lock it behind her? He drew his pistol from his waistband and fired a half dozen shots through the wooden door. Then he turned and ran, as the door panel flew into splinters from the sleet of automatic fire that came from inside the coal cellar.
“I must go now,” said Walid importantly, looking at his watch. He was tired and irritable, having been up all night repairing the damage that the dirty Jews had done to their bakery and baking too. His father had burned his hands extinguishing the fire in the shop, preventing the flames from reaching the kitchen. Although Hassan could not bake at present, there was nothing wrong with his mouth, and he found plenty of fault with Walid’s technique. Toward dawn, having, of course, overexerted himself, he began to have trouble breathing, and was now under observation in Bellevue, which was why Walid was free with the truck on a Friday afternoon.
“Can I come with you?” asked Posie. They were lying on a bed of cardboard cartons in the back of the bread van. Posie felt pretty good, even though Walid didn’t know shit about women; it had been necessary to show him where everything was and what it was for. She still hadn’t let him do it yet—Marlene had reiterated her orders about that the other night—but she figured a quick blowjob wasn’t really doing it, and the poor dude was popping out of his pants. It went like a trick a biker she once knew could do, cracking the top off a beer bottle with his teeth, and the foam gushing out, that fast. And it was nice to be with a guy who was grateful instead of like you were lighting their cigarette or something. She had her dress unbuttoned all the way down the front and her breasts out of her bra. His head was resting on these now. Another neat thing about Walid, he didn’t get up right away after he shot his rocks, like some guys, like you were a Kleenex they’d just used.
“No, because it is a secret,” said Walid. “I am not allowed to talk of it.”
“Oh, come on, man! You could tell me. Who am I gonna tell?”
Walid sighed and nuzzled deeper into those unbelievably soft pillows. It was moving too fast for him. His life had not prepared him for these events: first nineteen years in which all he had to do was obey older people, first his uncles in Palestine, then his father, then Ali and the others, which hadn’t worked out too well, he had to admit, and then his sister disappearing, kidnapped by the Zionists, and Chouza and his mission, which was something he might have imagined, at least, politics, the struggle, and now this girl, a gift, it seemed from heaven, well, not heaven perhaps, but not, in any case, something he was going to take any chance on losing.
“It is a secret,” he repeated. “They are going to put special equipment in my truck. For operations.”
“What do you mean, operations?” Posie knew that this was the kind of stuff Marlene wanted to know, although he hadn’t mentioned his sister at all, which was supposed to be the point.
“Secret operations.” He suddenly felt the urge to move and turned his head away from her and rose. “You must get dressed now and go,” he said. But she rose too and followed him and put her arms around him from behind.
“Aw, Wally, couldn’t I just come along a little way? I could get out when you do the secret stuff. Please?”
“Where is Hussein?” asked Ibn-Salemeh, frowning. He did not like it when plans were changed.
“He is helping Abdel with the steel. It was a bigger job than we thought.”
Ibn-Salemeh grunted and swept out of the hotel room, followed by Little Mahmoud, both of them in robes. Khalid was wearing a chauffeur’s black coat and cap, with a clip-on leather bow tie. He felt only slightly less foolish than he had in the robes.
It had not, in fact, taken the NYPD long to find out where a bunch of rich Arabs were staying, just, as it turned out, twenty minutes too long, which was about the interval between the white Caddie pulling away from the curb, and the arrival, at the same curb, of Detectives Raney and White. They showed their warrant and went upstairs with the assistant manager. Behind the desk, a young man, late of Amman, Kingdom of Jordan, waited until the elevator door closed and made a phone call to a number he had been given.
Holidays are time machines, was Marlene’s thought as she knelt in Old St. Pat’s and listened to the familiar Good Friday service: this is the Wood of the Cross on which was hung the Savior of the World, said the priest, and she responded with all the others, come, let us worship. It was all in English now, not Latin, and she had Lucy there next to her, solemn and still, but it did take you back, she thought, to all the churches she’d been in, back to St. Joseph’s in Ozone Park, Queens. She looked sideways at the small dark head beside her, saw the entranced expression, and felt a pang of envy, and a greater one of regret. Apprehension too: she recalled vividly what it had felt like, the Real Presence, as they say, at nine, ten, and eleven, and afterward the fading, the loss, so gradual and subtle that you didn’t even know it was gone, and one day it was just words, and you had it not. Sex and modern rationalism: a hard combo for anything to go up against, and in her case it had been no contest, and yet here she was still going, still kneeling, still offering her child to the Church, and all of her liberal friends thinking she was dotty on the subject. As she was, although none of her liberal friends went armed all the time and shot people on a fairly regular basis, and tortured people, and sent their gormless nursemaids out to seduce terrorists, and so they were perhaps not entitled to an opinion about why Marlene chose to open herself, on Sundays and holidays, to the possibility of infinite mercy.
The priest was consuming the Host, facing the stripped altar (“Lord, I am not worthy to receive you”), and in fact Marlene did not feel worthy and declined. Lucy shot her a worried look, but moved out of the row toward the communion rail, her back stiff and pointing straight up to Heaven.
The service over, the congregation having filed silently out in the traditional way, they went to their car. On the drive home, Marlene noticed that Lucy was as still as one of the plaster saints in the place they had just left.
“Are you okay, Luce?”
“Sure. Why?”
“You’re not moving. I thought you might be sick or something.”
“No, Tran is teaching me how to be still. He says it’ll improve my concentration, and also make me ready for, you know … like, an attack.”
“Uh-huh. Is it working?”
“I think so. I do conjugations and vocabulary in my head. I think my memory is improving. And I’m more relaxed. I don’t get so pissed—I mean, annoyed at things. The twins, school stuff. I still get a kind of annoyance when they mention the Jews in church. I think about Dad.”
“Well, that was a long time ago,” said Marlene carefully. “I think they’ve dropped the business about the guilt of modern Jews.”
“I know that. Sister Teresa explained that part in Sunday school. But it’s still in the words. They didn’t change the Gospels. And like the news and stuff? The Arab terrorists and those black guys. Do you think they’ll ever like genocide Jews again, like in the old days?”
“No, and in any case, it’s unlikely they’d start in New York. Does it worry you?”
“No, not really,” said Lucy. “We have guns. Do you think when Tran dies, he’ll be a holy soul in purgatory?”
Marlene had to clear her throat. “Well, you know that’s hard to say, Lucy. It’s not something I’m comfortable speculating on.” What a mealy-mouthed answer, thought Marlene. The kid’s looking for spiritual guidance, and here I am…
“At least he’ll have me to pray for him,” said Lucy. “I’m probably the only one in the whole world he’ll have praying. Do you ever think about that? What it’s really like after you die?”
“As little as I can. When I do, it’s me being carried up to Heaven by angels blowing trumpets.” Meant as a light remark, but Lucy responded straight-faced.
“You know, Mom,” she said, “honestly, the way you’re going … I wouldn’t count on it.”
The radio detonator was manufactured in Czechoslovakia and was an excellent and reliable design. Ibn-Salemeh sat at a table made of pallets and plywood in his warehouse and tested its circuits with a Radio Shack galvanometer, one of the few articles of equipment he had purchased in New York. That too was part of the plan—everything had been shipped in through America’s porous borders—no suspicious purchases of ingredients, no risky thefts to accomplish. What they needed was in the crates. He picked up the code transmitter and gave it to Khalid, who walked away with it to the end of the warehouse. At Ibn-Salemeh’s shouted directions, he pushed buttons and Ibn-Salemeh noted with satisfaction that the detonator armed itself and sent the correct signal to the circuit that actually fired the detonating charge. He called Khalid back.
“Does it work?” Khalid asked.
“Perfectly. Are they almost ready?”
Khalid went to check. The Daoud bakery van had been backed up to the lip of the loading dock. The steel shelves that had lined both sides of the van had been removed, and the men had just finished bolting the last of the thick steel plates into place. The five-gallon cans, twenty of them, were filled and lined up on the dock. Khalid squatted down and looked inside the van. The driver’s side, the floor, and the overhead had been reinforced with the plate steel. The passenger side remained the original thin sheet-metal. Khalid understood the principle. When a bomb explodes, a relatively small volume of solid turns almost instantly into a very, very large quantity of hot gas. The key word is almost. Left to themselves, explosives explode spherically, exerting equal pressure in all directions, but if early in the explosion the nascent event is directed, shown that there is less resistance to expansion in one direction than in another, then the explosion can be directed, shaped even, like an ephemeral sculpture. This was the point of the steel plates. When the 250-kilogram bomb detonated, it would first vaporize the plastic fuel cans and ignite the diesel fuel. The fetal inferno would probe its womb, seeking a way out. In the first few milliseconds of its existence, it would discover the weak passenger-side wall, and that is where the main force of the explosion would go. A great fiery bubble would erupt from the side of the van. Traveling at thousands of feet per second, it would knock down, pulverize, and roast anything in its path.
Walid was confined to the warehouse office while they worked on his truck. He looked at his watch every five minutes, and wondered if Posie would be waiting at the arranged place when they let him go. Previously, when alone and with nothing to do, he had thought about self-sacrifice, and about honor, which involved slaughtering his sister; and he had also thought, in a vague, incoherent way, about sex. Now he thought more concretely, about breasts, and about the slippery feel and scent of the woman’s genitals, and about how she squirmed and cried out when, after much instruction, he was able to manipulate them in a satisfactory way. Dying for the cause had become less attractive to him.
They finished bolting in the plates and returned the shelf units to the interior of the van. They rolled the bomb out on its dolly. Ibn-Salemeh screwed the radio fuse into the detonator and placed it into the fuse socket in the nose of the bomb. He supervised the movement of the bomb—three men working slowly and in complete concentration—from the dolly to its place on the lowest shelf on the driver’s side. It was secured to the shelf with strapping. A plywood box, painted black, was fitted over it. Then the jerry cans of fuel were arranged around it, taking up the rest of the lower shelf and most of the one above it.
“Fine. Get the boy,” said Ibn-Salemeh.
Walid came out, blinking. He was told to get into the truck. Khalid spoke to him through the window.
“Here are your orders: you must first of all behave normally. Go directly home. Go to the mosque. Bake your bread. Tomorrow morning and Sunday you will travel the route you have been traveling these past weeks, exactly. Exactly! Do you understand?”
“Yes. What have you done to the truck?” He shrank from the other man’s glare. “If someone asks.”
“We have installed communications equipment,” said Khalid. “Very advanced, so the Zionists will not be able to spy on us. This is also the explanation of the steel plates. It is shielding, you understand?”
“Yes. What is that smell?”
“Diesel oil. It is for a secret generator we have. You will be informed where to take it through the communications device.”
“Really? But I have no earphones.”
“There is a loudspeaker. Believe me, Walid, you will have no trouble hearing it.”
“Roland’s back with us,” said the D.A. when Karp came into his office. “The hospital just called. Hillyer’s in intensive care; they doubt he’ll make it. My God! I’ve lost count. What is that, eight cops? Why can’t they catch this guy?”
Karp sat down in a side chair, massaged his brow, and said, “I asked Fulton that very question just now. It’s not so crazy when you think about it. How do we catch any criminal once we have his face? The cops hit the usual hangouts, ask around. Snitches love dropping one on a cop killer. Yeah, that looks like Ernie. He hangs at the White Rose on Third. Guys have girlfriends, pals, relatives. This guy’s from out of town. He’s got no known connection in the City except the Erbes woman and the Obregons. The woman, we now find, ran to the Dominican Republic last week. The Obregons we have. He doesn’t hang out. He changes his appearance. Hillyer said, just before he went out, that the guy showed at Roland’s as a woman.”
“Wonderful! And on the Arab front?”
“Some progress. They located the house in Park Slope the Arabs were using and raided it. Not much in it, and what there was led to stuff we already knew about. Packing material from the basement seems to match the stuff found in the Daoud van, but we knew that too. These guys are good, boss.”
“Yeah, and I’m tired of hearing that. What about the airplane business, that sheik?”
“Same thing—the cops arrive at the Carlyle, where they were staying, and just missed them. They’re at large in a white stretch limo, if you can believe it. The cops are stopping everything that even looks like a white Caddie limo. The beautiful people could be in for some lumps. Expect irate calls.”
“I’ll brace myself. Any other good news?”
“No. Beatings and scuffles all over town, mini-riots. The cops canceled leaves this afternoon, indefinitely, until these guys are in the can. Easter weekend. So we got fifteen thousand armed men wandering around the city, all of them with attitudes. To add to the civic peace, Rabbi Lowenstein has announced a rally and a march down Bedford Avenue on Sunday.”
“I heard. The cops refused a permit.”
“Right, but he claims he’s going ahead with it anyway, according to my many contacts in the Jewish community.”
“I thought he died,” said the D.A.
“Thank you,” said Karp sourly. “You forget, my brother is a fanatic too. I got one of my infrequent calls from him this afternoon, asking me to use my influence to get the permit issued. When I told him I thought it was a shitty idea, he vouchsafed to me, in so many words, that the rabbi didn’t need no stinkin’ permit.”
“Christ!”
“Yeah, that too, Easter Sunday. I realize the big churches have toned down the anti-Semitic aspects, but there’s a lot of little churches in town that haven’t got the message. Then you’ve got a huge black community, maybe a fifth of them either Nation of Islam members or sympathizers. There’s a Muslim leader in Bed-Stuy who’s saying that if the Jews do a march, he’s going to take his people out on the streets too. Okay, that’s Brooklyn, but if Brooklyn goes up, we won’t be far behind. The other thing is, we got a lot of itchy, scared cops looking for a thin Hispanic guy armed with a machine gun and grenades. There are at least fifty thousand people in the city who fit that general description, not counting girls, who he might be too. Okay, let’s say a cop spots somebody he thinks might be our guy. What’s he going to do? Excuse me, sir, or ma’am, could I see some identification? No, he is not. He’s going to pull his piece and scream, ‘Freeze, motherfucker!’ This is going to cause tensions in the Hispanic community. The wrong people are going to get shot. It won’t do, Jack.”
“What’s the alternative?” asked Keegan.
“We have to draw him to a place we choose, where there won’t be any confusion, and where there’s a reduced chance of bullets taking out innocent people. And we already know what’ll draw him.”
“Meaning …?”
Karp took a breath. He had been thinking about this since the meeting at the FBI, and discussed it with Fulton, who said, when heavily pressed, that it was feasible, and now he laid it in front of Keegan, briefly, ignoring the growing frown on his boss’s face.
“Absolutely not,” said Keegan forcefully.
“I’ll take that as a provisional yes,” said Karp.
“We are not going back to the hotel,” said Ibn-Salemeh.
The six other men looked at him in surprise.
“Why not?” Khalid asked.
“Because the desk man called on the car phone with the arranged signal. The police were there. They knew we were there.”
A silence, then a chorus of confused expostulations. It was Khalid who first divined the implications. “Then they have the plane too,” he exclaimed. “What has happened?” Khalid’s tone was not what it usually was when he addressed Ibn-Salemeh. The others noticed this. Each man made a small nervous gesture or cast a glance, and a rippling movement passed through the little group, as if an animal were moving through high grass. Ibn-Salemeh did not seem to notice this.
“Obviously, they found it and discovered that the people who left the airport were not those who arrived from overseas. It does not matter.”
“How does it not matter?” Khalid cried. “That plane was our escape. How are we going to get out of the city after the bomb explodes on Sunday?”
“The bomb will explode tomorrow,” said Ibn-Salemeh abruptly. “On Saturday.”
Another stunner. All their planning had been based on a Sunday target.
“The longer we stay in the city, the more risk we endure. We will stay here tonight. It is not as comfortable as in the hotel, but adequate. Tomorrow we will take the gray van, which is a perfectly clean vehicle that no one is looking for, drive to the target, wait for the bread truck, detonate the bomb, and drive slowly away. We will cross the river and drive to Detroit, where we have friends. We can then easily cross the border and fly out of Canada on Canadian passports.” He paused to see what effect this was having. Nods. “Which I took care to provide for all of us in case something went wrong with our first plan. You should know that there is always a backup.” Smiles now; the crisis was over. The remarkable Ibn-Salemeh had again outsmarted his enemies.
“Throw some tarpaulins and trash over that Cadillac,” he ordered. “We don’t want anyone seeing it from the street. Rifaat! Take the van and get us something to eat. Oh, and buy one of those portable television sets. We must continue to keep informed. What is it, Hussein?”
Hussein was looking confused. “Effendi, the Cadillac—does this mean we will not be returning it for the deposit?”
Ibn-Salemeh stared at him in amazement. Then he burst into uproarious laughter and clapped the man hard on the back, and after a moment the others joined in. Even Khalid.