Dead on Arrival (12 page)

Blunt worked out of an office at JFK Airport. DeMarco took a cab to the airport and located the air marshals’ office, where he found three men engaged in an intense discussion about the New York Giants. Two of the men were white, the third man black, and none of them was physically impressive. They were all of average height and weight, not muscular but not skinny or fat either. If you saw them seated in the coach section of an airplane dressed in rumpled suits, they’d look like tired salesmen on their way home.

DeMarco showed them his ID and told them he was a lawyer who worked for Congress. If the marshals were impressed, they disguised their awe quite well. He asked where he could find Blunt and was told that the man was on administrative leave. That made sense. DeMarco guessed that when a marshal shot somebody – though he couldn’t recall this ever happening before – the bosses would probably conduct some sort of review and take the guy off duty until the review was complete. But he didn’t bother to confirm this with the three guys in the bullpen; he could tell they’d be no help at all. When he asked where Blunt lived, they as much as told him to go shit in his hat. If he wanted that sort of information he’d have to talk to their supervisor, who was in D.C. and wouldn’t be back for two days.

So DeMarco thanked Blunt’s coworkers for all their help, called directory assistance, and got an address and a phone number for Blunt in the town of Commack on Long Island. He called the phone number; nobody answered. He caught another cab, took a long, expensive ride out to Blunt’s place, and discovered that Blunt wasn’t home.

There’s an old mountain man’s saying: Some days you eat the bear and some days the bear eats you. The bear, that day, had DeMarco for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

He had spent every day with the boy for the last five days. The boy would come to his motel in the morning and they would pray together and read the Koran for an hour – and then they would begin to talk. He soon found out that he didn’t need to fan the boy’s hatred. What he did instead was provide a structure for his beliefs, some perspective, and, of course, the history that the boy lacked. Having spent his whole life in America, the boy’s concept of reality, of what was happening in the rest of the world, was completely distorted. So he told the boy about his own people, how they’d suffered, how they’d died, how they’d been exploited – and how they would continue to be exploited if good men didn’t act. He spoke a lot about how the world would be a better place if everyone followed the true path. And the boy soaked it all up, like he’d been waiting his whole life to have someone explain the things to him that he already felt in his heart but didn’t know how to put into words.

The boy was like a nearly finished sculpture. Only a few deft chisel strokes were needed for it to become precisely the form the artist desired.

This boy was different from the young men he had recruited in Baltimore. There was nothing frivolous about him. He paid attention, he didn’t fidget, he didn’t get bored; he was
focused
, intensely focused. And he had no doubts about the boy’s faith. He had never been certain, but he had thought from the very beginning that the two from Baltimore had agreed to help him only because of the money he had promised them – and that was why he’d set the detonator to kill them as soon as they armed the bomb. But this boy was different. He reminded him very much of another boy, one in Indonesia whom he had trained, a boy who had walked onto a bus and praised God as he detonated the bomb strapped to his narrow chest.

Yes, he knew this boy’s heart. It was time to take the next step.

‘Come with me,’ he said, and they took a city bus to a used-car lot. He wanted a pickup truck. He could put things in the back of a truck: old furniture, boxes, maybe grass clippings and a lawn mower – things that would make it look as if he and the boy were just a couple of immigrants engaged in menial manual labor. But the trucks on the lot were either too big – he didn’t feel comfortable driving a large vehicle in the city – or too new and expensive. He said this to the salesman, a man whose teeth were so white he must have gargled with bleach.

‘I think I have just what you’re looking for,’ the salesman said, and showed them a type of automobile he’d never seen before. The front part of the vehicle looked like a sedan but the back was a truck. ‘It’s called an El Camino,’ the salesman said. ‘It’s made by Chevy. Ford used to make one just like it called the Ranchero. It rides like a car, looks classy, good horsepower,
and
you can haul stuff in it. This one’s an ’eighty-six and only has ninety thousand miles on it. I can let you have it for twenty-five hundred.’

El Camino. Silly name, he thought, but typical of foolish Americans and their obsession with automobiles. It was an odd color too – a pale green – but the price was acceptable and he liked that it had a low profile and wasn’t so big he’d feel uncomfortable driving it. He would have preferred one of the more conventional-looking trucks made by Toyota or Honda, but this – this El Camino – would do.

Then, for the first time, he and the boy made the 120-mile journey to a city that sat on the western edge of Lake Erie. He stopped the car on a hill and pointed. He pointed at the refinery – and at the tanks inside the refinery that contained the chemical.

Mahoney sat in his condo at the Watergate, staring out the window holding a glass filled with bourbon and crushed ice against his forehead. He had a headache, and the cool glass made his head feel better. It never occurred to him that the bourbon in the glass had made his head hurt in the first place.

Mary Pat had purchased the condo after his fifth term, maybe thinking that after having served in the House for ten years, her husband’s career in politics was secure enough to invest in a permanent D.C. residence. He liked the place mostly because it was a quick drive to his office and because of the view. From where he sat he could see the dome of the Capitol, all lit up at night, looking like a cathedral – a cathedral where the unholy gathered.

Naturally, living at the Watergate made him occasionally reflect on Richard Nixon. What had always amazed Mahoney most about Nixon was not the cover-up and all that stuff. What had amazed him was that the man hadn’t liked people. Mahoney couldn’t imagine being a politician and not liking people. Clinton, Kennedy, Truman, Bush – all of them had seemed to genuinely enjoy spending some time with the folks who had elected them. It was certainly that way with Mahoney; it wasn’t an act with him. He took real pleasure eatin’ barbecue with a bunch of blue-collar guys and their wives. But Nixon, that gloomy bastard, always came across as a man who preferred to hide in his office, the door bolted, having as little contact with the common folk as he possibly could. Hell, even an asshole like Broderick seemed to like people – or at least some of them.

Based on the mail Mahoney had been getting, a lot of folks back home favored Broderick’s thinking, which wasn’t all that surprising. Not only were people scared, but Mahoney’s district included Boston, a city where not that long ago a black man entering certain parts of the town was likely to get an Irish thrashing. There may have been a lot of liberal thinkers at Harvard and MIT, but in places like Southie and in suburbs like Revere and Chelsea, people tended not to be so cerebral.

But Broderick’s bill was just
wrong
. To Mahoney this wasn’t a matter of constitutional law, although the Supreme Court might have a problem with it. It was instead a matter of fairness. An American citizen had a right to be treated like all other Americans until he did something illegal, something that could be proven to violate the law. And there was something else. It was one thing to think of Muslims in the abstract, faceless strangers practicing their incomprehensible religion, but when you actually knew a good decent Muslim family the way Mahoney knew the Zarifs – well, it changed the way you thought about what Broderick was proposing.

The problem was that Broderick’s damn bill just kept gathering momentum. You couldn’t turn on a television set without seeing two people debating it, and the editorial pages of every newspaper in the country had been devoted to the topic for the last three months. Oprah, of course, had a show where she dressed in a burka and compared the Muslim registry proposal to the Holocaust and Japanese internment camps and lynchings in the South. God bless Oprah.

And lately, almost assuredly because of all the media attention on the subject, other things were starting to happen. Customs agents on the Canadian–Michigan border riddled a car with bullets and killed the driver – a turban-wearing Sikh, not a Muslim – when he attempted to flee a security checkpoint. It turned out the man had two pounds of hashish hidden in his spare tire. Subway cops in Chicago stopped three Muslim teenagers who ‘looked suspicious,’ and when the teenagers sassed the cops, one of them got thumped with a nightstick and was still in a coma. In Kansas City, an Arabic-looking kid was jumped by two college football players because they’d seen the kid shove a parcel into the courthouse mail slot and run away from the building, which in fact the kid had done. He worked for a law firm and was dropping off a transcript that the courthouse clerk had wanted back that night, and he was running to catch his bus. His neck was accidentally broken during the tussle. In Dallas, people stampeded out of a Wal-Mart, screaming their heads off, when a Muslim woman entered the store with a bulge under her coat. It turned out that the woman had not wrapped sticks of dynamite around her torso; she was pregnant.

Mahoney could understand that people were afraid. They were terrified that they or their loved ones might be the victim of the next suicide attack. He could also understand why the Japanese were put in the camps after Pearl Harbor and how McCarthy had been able to whip the country into a Commie-hunting frenzy in the years following World War II when ol’ Joe Stalin had the bomb. He didn’t like it, but he could understand it. And he also knew that if Broderick’s bill passed, people would one day regret what they had done just as they now regretted having interned the Japanese fifty years ago. But what really pissed him off were people like Bill Broderick, politicians who took advantage of a frightening situation and fanned the flames of hatred and bigotry to get their way.

What he wished was that something else would happen – he didn’t know what, but something. Some scandal, some crisis; hell, even some natural disaster. Anything that would take people’s minds off the Muslims, anything that would change the current focus and provide some time for people to come to their senses.

Dear Lord
, Mahoney prayed,
please let things just
quiet down for a while
.

It had been a long time since John Mahoney had prayed.

Mustafa Ahmed was praying as he walked slowly across the Capitol’s grounds toward the West Terrace. There were tourists everywhere, even as cold as it was. He stopped when he reached the wooden sawhorses barricading the steps leading up to the Capitol and looked up at the building, a building he’d always loved.

Before 9/11, people could simply walk up the steps and stand on the terrace and look back at the National Mall, or they could walk right into the Capitol itself and look around. But no longer; all that had changed. Now, to see the interior of the building, tourists had to go through a visitor’s entry and pass through metal detectors and wait while their bags were searched. And the exterior of the building, including the West Terrace, was surrounded by wooden and concrete barricades, and behind the barricades stood uniformed U.S. Capitol policemen. Mustafa could see two of the policemen standing there now, up at the top of the steps, and just as he crossed the barrier a third officer joined the other two men.

‘Sir,’ one of the policemen called out, ‘you can’t come up this way. You need to use the tourist entrance.’

Mustafa ignored the cop and slowly continued up the steps.

‘Sir!’ the cop yelled. ‘Did you hear what I said?’

And then Mustafa opened his raincoat.

Beneath his raincoat was a canvas vest, and attached to the vest were twenty small bricks of C-4 explosive. White, red, and blue wires connected the bricks to each other. In Mustafa’s right hand was a dead man’s switch. The switch was a black tube about four inches long, and wires ran from the switch, up his arm, through his coat sleeve, and connected to a detonator. The switch was called a dead man’s switch because if Mustafa took his thumb off the little button on the top of the switch – or if his thumb was to come off because he had been killed – the C-4 would explode.

Mustafa continued to walk up the steps, his pace measured, his arms spread wide. The U.S. Capitol policemen, all three of them, now had their weapons out. They were screaming at Mustafa; they were screaming at the tourists to run away; they were screaming at one another.

Then one of the policemen shot Mustafa three times in the chest.

The last thought Mustafa Ahmed had before he died was: Thank God. They hadn’t lied to him when they said the bomb wouldn’t explode.

DeMarco and Mahoney had been in their respective offices when Mustafa Ahmed was killed.

Mahoney’s office was on the second floor. It was spacious, filled with historically significant furniture, and had a view appropriate for a man of his station. He had been sitting behind his desk, sipping coffee laced with bourbon as he listened to one of his staff brief him on a bill having to do with tax benefits for people who made fuel out of corn, a subject simultaneously so boring and so complex that it made his brain ache.

DeMarco had been in his windowless box in the subbasement, and the only thing historically significant about his office furniture – one wooden desk, two chairs, and an empty file cabinet – was that the items had been purchased when Jimmy Carter was president. When Mustafa Ahmed was killed, he had been on the phone trying once again to contact the air marshal who had shot Youseff Khalid.

According to structural engineers hired by Fox News, had Mustafa been allowed to enter the building, and had his bomb exploded inside, the dome of the building might have collapsed into the rotunda, and then all the rubble would have continued downward, squashing DeMarco pancake-flat as he sat in his office.

Mahoney would most likely have died too. But in Mahoney’s case, he could have been killed if the bomb had exploded when Mustafa was standing on the West Terrace steps. The walls in Mahoney’s office could have imploded and crushed him, or the glass in the windows could have blown out, a million sharp pieces, severing Mahoney’s head from his thick neck.

Mahoney had not heard the shots that killed Mustafa but he did hear the sirens. It seemed that every car in Washington equipped with a siren was simultaneously headed toward the Capitol. He was wondering what all the commotion was about when two plain-clothed U.S. Capitol policemen burst into his office and told him he had to leave immediately. As the security guys were hustling Mahoney from his office, he asked what the hell was going on.

‘Some Muslim son of a bitch just tried to blow up the Capitol,’ one of the cops said. ‘We need to get you out of here until we can sweep the building.’

DeMarco left the Capitol along with a few hundred other people like himself – meaning those not sufficiently important to warrant personal protection. He was standing on Independence Avenue, watching all the cops milling about, when a woman grabbed his arm. ‘Come on, honey,’ she said, ‘let’s go over to Bullfeathers and get us a drink. You know they’re not gonna let us back in for a couple of hours.’

The woman – a forty-year-old redhead with a body sculpted by some sadist who taught aerobics – worked for the Majority Whip, and whenever she saw DeMarco she treated him to a smile that was more than just friendly. According to Mahoney’s secretary, a woman who could be relied upon for such information, the redhead was recently divorced and was trying to make up for twenty years of monogamy.

DeMarco wanted to know about the dead man lying on the West Terrace steps, but when he saw all the news vans he figured he’d learn more sitting in a bar and watching television than he would by bothering the Capitol cops.

‘Sounds good,’ he said to the redhead, but he felt leery, like a little kid who’d just been offered a ride by a stranger.