Senturk, the giant, now looked like a pile of bloody laundry dumped on the floor.
“Where is it? You have it here. We know you never leave here. Where the fuck is it, you little twerp?” said Mr. Joyce, putting the hot metal barrel of the shotgun to Ahmed’s forehead.
“Screw you maniacs. I am willing to be martyred!” said Ahmed as he tried lamely to push off Mr. Beckett’s iron grip.
“I thought you might say something like that,” said Mr. Joyce as he shrugged off the backpack he was wearing. He took something bulky out of it and clunked it onto the desk.
“Let us test your faith, shall we?” Mr. Joyce said as he plugged in the home-kitchen meat-slicing machine they’d just bought from Bed Bath & Beyond.
Ahmed pissed himself as Mr. Beckett chocked his hand into the meat holder, inches from the spinning, shining stainless steel circular blade.
“It’s in the bedroom closet!” said Ahmed, weeping. “Please! In the upstairs closet — I swear!”
“What a pigsty, Ahmed. Didn’t your mommy ever teach you how to make your bed?” Mr. Joyce said after he came down from the bedroom with the duffel bag full of explosives a minute later.
“Please, I can help. I have money. Millions in cash. You know that. I want to help you!” Ahmed said as he dropped out of Mr. Beckett’s grip onto his knees.
“You want to help?” Mr. Joyce said.
“Yes, of course. Please,” Ahmed said, still weeping.
“Then don’t move an inch,” Mr. Joyce said, and he raised the shotgun one-handed and shot Ahmed point-blank in the face.
Chapter 50
Under normal circumstances, Peter Luger Steak House, an old redbrick Brooklyn landmark, would have been a sight for sore eyes.
But nothing is even close to normal, I thought as I pulled into the parking lot across from its famous brown awning.
Emily and I weren’t there to chow down on some USDA Prime but to meet up with Chief Fabretti. They’d put the mayor in the ground at Queens’s Calvary Cemetery this morning, and a lot of brass and pols had gathered with the mayor’s family at his favorite restaurant after the service.
Still too busy scouring through everything we’d found at al Gharsi’s to attend the service, Emily and I had watched snatches of it broadcast live on TV. Several thousand people had attended, including the vice president.
Watching Mayor Doucette’s bright American flag — draped coffin being brought through the cemetery gates on a horse-drawn carriage, I couldn’t stop shaking my head.
I also couldn’t stop thinking about the rousing speech he’d given right before he’d been shot and how he’d bravely insisted on holding the speech outside to help the city heal. Though the sun was shining, it was one very dark day for the city.
I spotted Fabretti straight off inside the door at the end of the three-deep bar talking to a white-shirted female cop who split as we stepped up.
“Mike, Emily — thanks for meeting here on short notice. Drink?” Fabretti said over the crowd hum.
Fabretti tipped his glass at us ceremoniously after the bartender brought us a couple of ice-cold Stellas.
“First, I want to congratulate you guys on a job well done. I knew you wouldn’t disappoint me, Mike.”
Emily and I looked at each other.
“I can’t tell you what a relief it’s been to tell those press jackals that we finally have someone in custody,” Fabretti continued as he patted me on the shoulder.
“Whoa, boss,” I said, shaking my head. “I don’t know who you’ve been talking to, but this thing ain’t over.”
“What do you mean? You bagged al Gharsi last night, right? He hasn’t escaped, has he?”
“No. Al Gharsi is involved. He obviously knows something about the PayPal thing, but he’s not behind it,” said Emily.
“This guy isn’t it?” Fabretti said. “He runs a frickin’ terrorist training camp! This guy’s affiliated with al Qaeda.”
“All that is true, but the level of sophistication of the attacks implies a lot of money and massive technical expertise. A deep thinker with deep pockets. That doesn’t exactly describe al Gharsi.”
“Emily’s right,” I said, “especially about the deep pockets. I’d say al Gharsi was on a shoestring budget, except his kids didn’t even seem to have any shoes.”
“Precisely. The whole place stinks of poverty and desperation,” Emily said. “I think al Gharsi was used. Like the NYU students. He was a patsy, a cutout.”
“What about his pocket litter? You know, his computers and cell-phone records. What have you found?” said Fabretti hopefully.
“Nothing conclusive and nothing new,” Emily said. “We’re not back to square one, but we’re close to it.”
“Shit,” he said, staring a glum hole through the bottles at the back of the bar.
Of course he was upset. Careers had been smashed to pieces over far lesser cases than this. But it wasn’t just that, I thought as I remembered Fabretti with his dog in his house — a meeting that felt like it took place a billion years ago. He lived here, too. This was killing him. Killing all of us. The city hadn’t been this psychologically screwed up since 9/11.
“We need to find these people,” Fabretti said.
I nodded as I stared over the crowded bar into the restaurant. The Tudor beams and dark paneling. The busy waiters in their old-fashioned white shirts and aprons and black bow ties. Looking at them, I thought of all the millions of busy people in the city trying to keep the wheels on, trying to do right, to support and protect their families.
But nothing was safe. Not anymore.
Part three
All work and no play
Chapter 51
The next dawn’s early light found Emily and me on Nineteenth Avenue in East Elmhurst, Queens.
Near the on-ramp of the bridge to the Rikers Island jail, we had the unmarked tucked behind an abandoned truck trailer. To our right was an old chain-link fence with empty gin bottles and scraggly trees behind it. To our left was a four-square-block industrial zone of manufacturing firms and warehouses.
I glanced at my phone as the metal howl of an unseen airliner from nearby LaGuardia Airport ripped through the gray sky overhead.
“What time you got?” I said.
“Another five minutes,” Emily said, much more calmly than I felt.
I tucked my phone back into a pouch of my heavy Kevlar vest and blotted sweat off my face with a Dunkin’ Donuts napkin.
I’m sweating, all right, I thought as I blinked at the black barrel of the automatic M4 rifle propped upright on the dash beside my knee.
Sweating bullets.
We were about to hit one of the industrial buildings on our second antiterrorist raid in forty-eight hours. This newest lead had come in last night around midnight. It had been sifted out of the electronics that we had collected from al Gharsi’s dump upstate. It had been pulled from his kids’ Xbox, of all things. The Wi-Fi — linked gaming networks that allowed players to communicate with each other were being used by al Gharsi to make contact with the group of Queens-based terrorists to whom we were about to pay what we hoped was an unexpected morning visit.
This group of nefarious and dangerous American-hating losers was a new one for me. They were Nigerians, and it was speculated that they were members of an offshoot of al Qaeda based in Nigeria called Boko Haram. A hasty surveillance operation on the locale had spotted at least six to eight Nigerian men working, and apparently living, inside a massive carpet- and rug-importing warehouse.
Two of the Nigerians had been identified from photographs as being on student visas. What had really set off alarm bells were the cell-phone records of one of the two students, who had apparently been in contact with a man overseas named Abubar Kwaja. Kwaja was a wanted Nigerian-based wealthy arms dealer who supplied Boko Haram with weapons.