Dead on Arrival (2 page)

Omar had asked for a lawyer when the interrogation first began, and Clark had nodded to Knox and Knox had grabbed Omar by the throat and slammed him up against the wall of the interrogation room. As Omar was pinned against the wall, choking, his feet no longer touching the floor, Knox said, ‘If you say
lawyer
one more time I’m gonna kick your teeth out.’

That’s when Omar began to fully appreciate his situation. This wasn’t like TV. It wasn’t like all those
Law and Order
shows where the cops yelled at the prisoners but never touched them – and stopped yelling as soon as they asked for a mouthpiece. No, Clark and Knox had made it clear to Omar that he had no rights. He wasn’t going to be allowed to see anyone. Not a lawyer, not his partner, not his mother. He was completely alone.

If they took these clowns to trial, the fact that they’d trampled all over their rights as citizens could be a problem. The government’s lawyers would spout legal gibberish to minimize the damage, but
convicting
these guys wasn’t a priority, not at this point. In London, in Spain, in India, the subway attacks hadn’t involved just a single bomb; the terrorists had set off four or five bombs simultaneously. Clark needed to know if Omar and his pal had accomplices, and if he had to cause Omar a little discomfort to find this out … well, too bad for Omar.

So for twenty-six hours Omar wasn’t allowed to sleep. He’d be allowed to almost fall asleep, but just as his head would hit his chest, Knox would slam open the door to the interrogation room, cuff him on the back of the head, and tell him to go stand in the corner as if he were a truculent five-year-old.

And Omar was given no food and a lot of coffee. The coffee not only kept him awake but the caffeine in his empty stomach com pounded the condition of his already jangling nerves. Yes, Omar was ready. Omar’s partner – who was just a bit dumber than Omar and didn’t have Omar’s imagination – would last a bit longer, but not much.

Clark checked his appearance in the mirror near the interrogation room door and entered the room. He took a seat across the table from the prisoner and looked for a moment into his bloodshot eyes, his terrified young face. ‘Well, you’ve beaten me, Omar,’ he said, shak ing his head in mock disappointment. ‘My boss says we gotta send you someplace else, to see if some other guys can do better than me. We used to send people like you to Gitmo, Guantánamo Bay, down there in Cuba. But Gitmo became a fishbowl, Omar. Too many pussy liberals always watchin’ over our shoulders, always tryin’ to make us play by the rules. Well, my friend, we’ve gotten a lot smarter since Gitmo. Now we use an island off the coast of Maine.’

Clark smiled sadly at Omar, as if he truly pitied him.

‘The army used to use the island for testing biological weapons. They have a facility there, and they have cages in the facility. The cages don’t have a lot of headroom because they used to keep monkeys in them – you know, the monkeys they used for the experiments. The monkeys are all dead now, but the cages are still there. But the best part isn’t the cages, Omar. The best part is that nobody knows about the island. And nobody knows what happens there.’

Omar al-Assad stared at Clark for a moment, maybe looking for mercy, but knowing by now that there was nothing merciful about Myron Clark.

‘We were going to explode the bomb in the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel,’ Omar said.

In the next hour, Clark had the whole story. Omar al-Assad and his friend Bashar Hariri were American-born Muslims. They were eigh teen years of age, from low-income families, high school dropouts, and unemployed. Neither young man was particularly religious, and their tastes and style of dress were typical of Americans their age.

One Saturday evening, they attended a lecture at a local mosque. The main reason they attended was because it was cold outside, and free food and coffee came with the speech. The title of the lecture, which neither young man could remember exactly, was ‘The Impact of American Imperialism on the Muslim World.’ Something like that, they said.

The lecturer told the two Americans that his name was Muhammad – he might as well have said John Smith – and he was from Yemen, was an imam, and was traveling around America preaching to the faithful. He instantly became the two young Americans’ new best friend, spending hours with them, buying them din ners and hammering into their weak brains a message of hate. After a month he convinced them that blowing a hole in the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel, killing several hundred people, and disrupting com merce up and down the eastern seaboard would be a good and noble thing to do.
And
they’d each be given ten thousand dollars after the job was done.

Muhammad gave the young men the money to purchase a truck and the other ingredients they needed to make the bomb. He had been helping them assemble the bomb until just before Omar and Bashar were captured. All Omar knew – and ultimately, three hours later, Myron Clark believed him – was that Muhammad had to leave the garage to call someone, but Omar didn’t know who.

But the most important thing Omar told Clark was that Muham mad had an artificial leg. That’s what allowed the Bureau to find Muhammad in their files and determine who he really was – an honest-to-God al-Qaeda operative.

‘How did you catch us?’ an exhausted Omar asked.

Clark didn’t tell him, but they’d caught Omar and his buddy be cause a fertilizer seller hadn’t liked their looks.

They had needed two major ingredients for their bomb: ammonium nitrate fertilizer and a racing fuel composed primarily of nitromethane. At one of the places they’d purchased the ammonium nitrate, the fer tilizer supplier had asked the young men why they needed it and Omar had said that they operated a landscaping business. The supplier was used to dealing with beefy white farmers, and the two men purchasing the fertilizer were obviously of Middle Eastern ancestry, too young to be likely principals in any business and visibly nervous during the pur chase. He was on the phone to the FBI before the young men and their truck had exited his parking lot.

But instead of answering Omar’s question, Clark asked one of his own. ‘Why did you and Bashar decide to become martyrs? I mean, do you guys really believe all that virgins-in-paradise bullshit?’

‘Martyrs?’ Omar said. ‘We weren’t going to be martyrs.’

Then Omar explained. Their plan had been to drive the truck and another car – the car Muhammad had escaped in – into the tunnel, punch out the tires on the truck so it couldn’t be easily moved, and flee the scene in the second vehicle. They would have been miles away when the bomb exploded.

That’s when Clark unveiled the part of Muhammad’s plan that Omar obviously didn’t know.

‘Omar,’ he said, ‘your pal Muhammad had set the timer to deto nate the bomb two seconds after you armed it.’

Senator William Davis Broderick, Republican, the junior senator from Virginia, waited impatiently for his turn to speak.

In the two weeks since those Muslim boys had tried to explode a bomb in the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel, Broderick had listened to his colleagues say all the usual and expected things. Some senators grumbled that controls for bomb-making materials like ammonium nitrate were still lacking. Yada yada yada, Broderick said to himself.

Others complained that our borders were still too porous, that ter rorists could obviously enter and leave the country at will. Shake-ups at Homeland Security were coming, they promised. Hearings would soon be held, they warned.

Yeah, like
that
was gonna help.

But what Broderick really liked was that the senator currently speak ing had just given him the perfect lead-in to his speech. Patty Moran, the senior senator from Oregon, had just said that the federal gov ernment was continuing to underfund those poor cops and medics who would be first on the scene the next time al-Qaeda attacked. And then she said the magic words. She said them as if she’d been given an advance copy of Broderick’s speech. She said, ‘We
must
adequately fund our first responders, senators, because, as we all know, it’s not a matter of if there will be another attack, it’s only a matter of when.’

Oh, Patty, if you weren’t a Democrat I’d kiss you
.

Finally, Broderick was at the podium. He went through the obliga tory will-the-senator-yield litany and then took his speech from the inside pocket of his suit, knowing he would never look at it. He had this one nailed.

‘My friends,’ he said, ‘we just heard the good gentlewoman from the great state of Oregon say what we’ve all heard so many times before. In fact, I’ve heard it said so many times I’m sick of it. She said that another terrorist attack is not a matter of
if
but
when
. Well, ladies and gentlemen, I’m here to tell you it’s only a matter of if –
if
nothing changes.’

Broderick’s aide, Nick Fine, had written the speech, and Broderick had to admit the man had done a good job. He knew Nick didn’t like him – hell, the man hated him – but when writing this particu lar speech ol’ Nick had really put his heart into it.

‘Senators,’ Broderick said, ‘I’m here today to propose changes, real changes, changes that will make this great country safer. It’s time to stop being po litically correct. It’s time to stop being afraid to speak the truth because someone will be offended. It is instead time for
somebody
in this body, this body chosen to represent and protect the people, to stand up and say what needs to be said. And I’m gonna say it.

‘The first thing I propose to change is that we quit calling this a war on terrorism. We’re not at war with terrorists. We’re at war with
Muslim
terrorists. It’s time to quit making redheaded schoolchildren and their grandmothers take off their shoes at airports when we all know the most likely terrorist is a young Muslim man.’

Broderick could almost hear the redheads cheering.

‘And as the near miss in Baltimore clearly showed, the threat isn’t solely from outsiders, from foreigners from across the sea. My friends, even though we don’t like to say it out loud, the fact is that we are at risk from some of our own citizens because some of them – hopefully a very small number – have more allegiance to Islam than they do to their own country.’

Broderick looked around the Senate chamber. It was half empty, and most of the senators in attendance were busy talking to their aides or reading e-mail on their BlackBerries. That’s the way it usually went. Politicians didn’t give speeches to change the minds of other politi cians; they gave speeches to get their faces on C-SPAN and their names in the papers. And Broderick’s name
was
going to be in the papers. As he was speaking, Nick Fine was e-mailing the text of his speech to everyone, friend and enemy alike, and Broderick figured that on this occasion his enemies were going to be at least as much help as his friends.

‘My fellow Americans, I’m going to introduce a bill that contains three provisions that will make this country safer. Some of you will be shocked, some of you will be angered, but as I said before it’s time for us to start doing something other than
praying
that we don’t have another nine-eleven. Yes, it’s time for somebody in the United States Senate to do something other than hold a bunch of daggone hear ings after we finish mopping up the blood from the latest Muslim attack.’

And lay out his bill he did. He noticed that as he spoke a few sena tors actually began to pay attention – or, to be accurate, he could see them chuckling and shaking their heads. But they’d see who had the last laugh.

His first proposal was to eliminate a large part of the threat by shipping every Muslim who was not an American out of the coun try. And he wasn’t kidding, he said. Students, visitors, immigrants with green cards … Well, adios, or whatever the Arabic word was for goodbye. He noted that Prime Minister Tony Blair had had a similar reaction toward foreign Muslims when the London subways were bombed. Blair, however, had wanted to deport only the rabble-rousers and agitators; Broderick wanted to take Tony’s good idea one large step further.

His second proposal was that future visits by people from Mus lim countries would be significantly limited, carefully controlled, and primarily allowed only for business purposes. Being a good Re publican he knew that business mattered, but Muslims could send their children to Europe for school and if they wanted to take a vacation they could visit the Fijis. He knew some would argue that education and tourism
were
businesses, but hey, you had to draw the line somewhere.

Muslims desiring to enter the country would have to apply for entry months in advance to permit time for background checks. Upon ar rival they would be photographed, fingerprinted, and DNA-sampled,
and
they would have to have an American sponsor who would be responsible for their conduct. Naturally, these people would be care fully monitored while they were in the States.

But Broderick knew it was his last proposal that would draw the most attention: he proposed that background checks be performed on all Muslim Americans. These background checks would identify if a Muslim belonged to a radical group or supported radical causes and, most importantly, would identify who these people knew and were related to overseas.

‘The near demolition of the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel – God only knows how many would have died – showed that radical Muslims in this country, American citizens, can be proselytized and turned into weapons of mass destruction. We
must
take steps to guard against this very real threat.’

Later, he wished that he hadn’t used the word
registry
, but he did. He said that all Muslims who successfully passed the background checks he was proposing would then be entered into a registry, one of the benefits of this being that airport travel for these folks would become less bothersome. He wasn’t saying they wouldn’t have to go through the metal detectors, just that they were less likely to be pulled off to the side and patted down. He noted that the idea of travelers having some sort of special identification to speed up airport screen ing was nothing new.