Forsaken (11 page)

“Can you stay on the phone, ma’am?”

“No, but I’ll get someone to talk to you.” I shoved the phone at a man in a torn gray business suit, who was peeking out from beneath a tablecloth next to me. “This is 911. Talk to her. And don’t lose the phone; I’ll be back for it.” He put the phone to his ear. I crawled over to Simon.

“If anyone was going to come in shooting, they’d have been here by now, but there could be follow-up bombs. Keep your eyes open and remember to stay down.” The idea of a follow-up explosion didn’t really seem likely. Whoever did this knew we were there and had a great shot at us. For whatever reason, they had taken that shot and missed.

Simon looked around the room, then turned his attention back to the woman in front of him. He had dropped the napkin from the cut on his own neck, which was bleeding again. I picked up another napkin and held it to the wound. “Don’t forget, you’re bleeding too.”

He took the napkin. “Thanks.”

I squatted behind him. “You know, this doesn’t figure.”

“Seems pretty clear to me. The limo driver set us up.“

I’d forgotten about Hakim. “Good point. That’s not what I was talking about, though. The explosion shattered the window, but that’s about it. Look, the broken glass barely made it past the first row of tables. They knew you were here, and they had a whole stretch limo to pack with explosives. But all they did was pop the hood off and break a window. Why wasn’t the bomb bigger?”

“You’re asking the wrong person.”

“Getting the bomb into the car and getting the car to the restaurant were the hard parts. If the bomb had been large enough, we wouldn’t be sitting here talking now. Why was the bomb so small?”

“Stupid bomber?” The wind was picking up, and it blew into the room from the street. The woman Simon was helping shivered. He took off his jacket and put it around her.

I shook my head. “Maybe, but I doubt it. A lot of planning obviously went into this thing. I can’t believe they wouldn’t have gotten the bomb part right. Maybe the bomb was just the right size for their purposes.”

He looked over his shoulder at me. “What do you mean?”

“Maybe they didn’t intend to kill anybody.”

“That makes no sense. Bombs are for killing people. They must have known I was in the restaurant. And we know they want to kill me. Therefore, the bomb was intended to kill me.”

“Who wants to kill you?” The woman’s voice rose.

“No one wants to kill anyone,” he said. “We were talking about a television show.” She tilted her head to one side and looked up at him.

I rolled my eyes. He offered a sheepish smile.

“Or it was intended to accomplish something else,” I continued.

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Maybe send a message.”

“What message?” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “That they want to kill me? We already knew that.”

“I don’t know what message. Maybe they just wanted to prove they could get to you—to intimidate you. Maybe the message was that if they can get to you, they can get to anyone. Maybe it was a diversion for something else they’re doing. I just don’t know.”

For the first time since the explosion, Simon’s face turned pale.

I touched his arm. “What’s wrong?”

“Kacey.”

LATE THE NEXT AFTERNOON, Simon, Elise, and I huddled around a mahogany table with Michael Harrison, Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Dallas field office. The night before, at about the time we were wallowing in broken glass on the floor of Pascali’s, Simon’s sister, Meg, had been waiting for Kacey at the baggage claim at DFW airport in Dallas. Kacey never arrived.

Within an hour the Chicago police confirmed that Kacey never boarded her flight at O’Hare. Kacey, her escort Cheryl, and the limousine driver were all missing.

Harrison flew to Chicago that morning, as soon as the Chicago authorities officially designated the case as a suspected kidnapping. We were in the dining room
of an executive suite in the Azure Hotel, a room so artfully fitted with intricately carved furniture and deep, jeweled upholstery that it could have been the setting for an eighteenth-century painting of counts and countesses in powdered wigs. We, however, wore blue jeans—except Harrison, who had already tossed his charcoal suit jacket over a chair and rolled his shirtsleeves up over his broad, dark forearms.

I assumed from the beginning that Kacey was dead. After all, they’re called terrorists for a reason. They didn’t seem to have anything to gain by kidnapping an evangelist’s twenty-year-old daughter. After watching Simon closely, I was certain that he felt the same way. It wasn’t just that he was emotionally battered. Who wouldn’t be? It was that he was
only
battered. He seemed to have little interest when the discussions turned to the possibility that she’d been kidnapped, as if he were simply going through the motions. The life had left him, and what remained was a mechanical facsimile.

Regardless of our feelings, the FBI seemed convinced it was a kidnapping. Harrison—in his early thirties and already one of the youngest men ever to ascend to Agent in Charge of a major FBI field office—took personal command of the investigation. Though he now lived in Dallas, Harrison grew up in Chicago’s notorious Cabrini Green housing project. Thick-necked and solid, with a nose that had been flattened by something blunt, he was, as Dad would have said, a linebacker not a receiver. A summa cum laude economics graduate of the University of Chicago, he had zero tolerance for
crime. His recent résumé included a high-profile bust of a Mexican drug runner who killed two elementary school kids in the crossfire of a drug hit. Throughout most of his career he had focused on white-collar economic crime. Since 9/11, though, he had become one of the nation’s most respected authorities on Muslim terror groups and frequently consulted with other FBI offices around the country.

Harrison arrived at Pascali’s at around 3:00 in the morning. By that time we already knew Kacey was missing, and it was obvious we’d be staying in Chicago for a while. I suggested we move Simon from the Palmer House because whoever set off the bomb almost certainly knew where he was staying. Harrison agreed and arranged to move Simon and Elise to the Azure. We couldn’t keep Simon’s location a secret for long, but at least this would buy us some time. Harrison arranged for two Chicago cops to guard the hallway outside Simon’s suite. Four plainclothes officers guarded the lobby of the hotel. Elise and I checked into the rooms on either side of Simon’s.

Now Simon, drawn and unshaven, sat with his back to the table and stared out the suite’s expansive row of windows toward Lake Michigan. From time to time he hooked his index finger in the collar of his gray T-shirt and slid it from side to side, as if the collar were too tight around his neck. He’d stretched the collar so much that it was now nearly a V-neck.

Elise hadn’t spoken much since the night before. She spent most of the day on the couch in the suite’s
living area, flipping from one news station to the next. With her blonde curls dangling just to the shoulders of her pink sweatshirt, she looked like a cute but frazzled suburban mom about to drive carpool. I had a hunch she was going to need professional help when this whole thing was over. At the moment she was sitting alone at the far end of the dining room table, drinking too much coffee and sketching something in a spiral notebook with a red felt-tip pen.

A couple of hours earlier, Harrison briefed us on the information the FBI had gathered in the past twelve hours. It was impossible not to be impressed as he strode back and forth next to the table, his tie loosened at the collar, explaining what we should expect if this was, in fact, a kidnapping. Now he leaned back against the wall that separated the dining area from the kitchenette, talking on his cell phone.

I’d just slid my chair back to put on a fresh pot of coffee when the doorbell rang. I went to the door and looked through the peep hole. It was one of the cops posted outside the door. He had a phone to his ear. I opened the door.

“Hey, Michael,” the cop said, “the front desk has a delivery package for Reverend Mason. It came over from the Palmer House. What do you want us to do with it?”

Harrison turned toward Simon. “Were you expecting anything?”

Simon scratched his head. “I can’t think of anything. Do you know of anything, Elise?”

She looked up from her note pad long enough to shake her head.

“Where is it from?” Simon said.

The cop spoke into his cell phone then looked back at Simon. “West suburbs, Naperville.”

“I don’t know anyone in Naperville. How could anyone have known I was here?”

“The manager of the Palmer House forwarded it. Someone apparently knew you were there.”

Harrison looked at the policeman. “Are we talking about a box or a letter-sized envelope or what?”

“Letter size.”

“Get the bomb and biohazard guys over here to check it. In the meantime, have your people take it down to the basement and isolate it so it can’t do any damage. They’re going to have to open it. Simon. You okay with that?”

Simon waved his hand. “Whatever you say.” His voice was so soft that we barely heard him. He turned his chair toward the window.

I shoved my hands in the pockets of my jeans and looked out toward Lake Michigan. A dark bank of clouds moved rapidly toward the Azure, darting and swirling each time the wind rattled the windows. Across Lake Shore Drive the water churned into white caps, making Lake Michigan appear as bitter as the North Sea. I remembered my cab driver’s promise of the evening before, that the weather today would be in the fifties and sunny. I wondered where he got his forecast.

Above the narrow strip of beach between the drive and the water, a flock of gulls spiraled downward in slow circles. One by one they landed and pecked at a thick, brown lump that lay motionless in the sand. I couldn’t make out whether it was an animal or a bag of trash. I glanced at Simon. He was watching the birds also, his elbows on the arms of his chair and his chin resting on his interlocked fingers. It was a depressing sight on both sides of the glass. I tried to break the trance by pointing to a jogger whose windbreaker ballooned behind him as he ran along the beach, head bowed into the wind. “Intrepid guy there. Reminds me of my dad. Nothing kept him from working out.”

Simon looked up at me from his chair. “You must miss him.”

I leaned back against the windowsill. “I do.”

“Someone you love that much never completely leaves you. I learned that with Marie.”

This was not what I had in mind. This conversation was in danger of plummeting into the abyss. Fortunately, Harrison walked over to the window. “I hate to do this to you, but I’d like to go over last night one more time with all of you together. Just in case there was something we missed the first time around.”

I was glad for the interruption—not for me, but for Simon. For the next couple of hours we retold the story of the prior day, stopping to focus on every detail with any potential for importance. Halfway through the interview, Harrison received a phone call. They had found Hakim. He had gone voluntarily with the police to
FBI headquarters for questioning. After the call Harrison focused on our brief encounter with Hakim on the drive to Pascali’s.

Once Harrison finished with us, there was little to do but sit around the suite and wait. Simon and I remained at the dining room table, talking from time to time, but mostly just staring out the window at the lake. Elise sat on the couch, alternately dozing and watching news reports about Kacey’s disappearance.

What would have been a major domestic news story under any circumstances had taken on monumental international proportions because of the media’s hype of the war-of-religions angle. FOX and CNN covered the story nonstop. Amazingly—and thanks to the heroic lack of cooperation of the managers at both hotels—reporters hadn’t yet figured out where the FBI had moved Simon. Still, we didn’t expect our location would remain secret much longer.

Simon had just walked over to the couch and sat down next to Elise when the doorbell rang. It was the same cop as before. When I opened the door he stuck in his head. “Michael, can I see you for a minute?”

Harrison was sitting at a desk in the living area, working on his laptop. He nodded, then got up and went out the door.

After about ten minutes, the bell rang again. When I opened the door, Harrison brushed past me. He carried a cardboard delivery envelope in one hand. “Kacey’s alive, but they’ve got her.” He went straight to the dining room table and sat down.

Simon lifted his hands toward the ceiling and closed his eyes. “Thank you, God, thank you!” He moved his chair to a spot directly across the table from Harrison and leaned forward. “Who’s got her, and what can we do to get her back?”

Elise came around the table and moved in behind Simon.

“A group called the Storm of Islam,” Harrison said. “To our knowledge, they haven’t been anything but an obscure Arab-Muslim Internet site until now. There are hundreds just like them. We’ve got our people researching them.”

“How do you know it’s them?” Simon said.

Harrison nodded at the package that he’d laid on the table.

Simon looked down at it. “What’s in it?”

“There was evidence in the delivery envelope— proof that they’ve got Kacey. We’ve put the contents in evidence bags. It’s all in the package. I’ve got to warn you, Simon, it’s bad. I think you’re going to want to open it alone.” He made eye contact with Elise and then with me. I turned to leave.