He had only God to thank that he was not at that moment in a jail cell being tortured. He had left the garage in Baltimore that night to make a phone call, a call from a public phone booth, and had difficulty finding a working phone in a country inhabited by animals. And then he had gotten lost because he didn’t know the city very well. Had it not been for making a wrong turn, he too would have been in the garage when the FBI blasted their way in. But God saved him. Praise be to God.
He knew from subsequent news reports how the two fools had been caught. He’d told them to buy the ammonium nitrate in small batches, very small batches, but for whatever reason — laziness, recklessness, stupidity — they had purchased enough fertilizer in one place to draw suspicion upon themselves. Worse yet, he had been identified.
When he had fled Baltimore he had gone to the home of a devout couple in Philadelphia. His intent had been to stay there only a week, two at the most, by which time he thought it would be safe to travel. But then the fools told the FBI about his artificial leg, and the next thing he knew there was a grainy, barely recognizable photograph of him in the newspapers. So he had cut his hair and shaved his beard and stayed in the basement for two months. But it hadn’t been a total waste of time; while he was in hiding he learned more about the boy in Cleveland and about another boy, this one in Sante Fe. And he learned much more about the next objective.
The Internet truly would set the world free.
The amazing thing about the incident in Baltimore had been the reaction of this senator, this William Broderick. It was exactly the sort of reaction they had wanted, but he had never expected it when the attack on the tunnel had failed. But now, because of what this lawyer had done, there was talk of some law being passed that would cause even more discontent among the faithful in this country.
They were truly blessed.
What he didn’t know was if any of his brethren had helped the lawyer. He knew he was not the only one of his kind in this country, so it was possible that the leader of another cell had recruited the man. But the lawyer was not the type he himself would have selected; he was too old, too well educated, and, most important, he seemed too entrenched in American society, not a devout Muslim at all. So maybe it was as their FBI had said — the man had just gone insane because of all that had happened to him — but that didn’t strike him as sounding right either.
Whatever the case, the lawyer had helped them, and this senator — he was helping them even more.
6
DeMarco had learned long ago that working for John Mahoney was never simple.
The simple thing would have been for Mahoney to call the FBI, ask his questions about Reza Zarif, and then swear the Bureau to secrecy if he was worried about the press. But no, that would have been simple. And straightforward.
Mahoney had never done anything straightforward in his life.
But if Mahoney’s character had been different he wouldn’t have employed DeMarco, a man with an office in the subbasement of the Capitol, a space a long way from the speaker’s realm in terms of both distance and stature. DeMarco’s family history — the fact that his father had worked for the mob — was not something a politician preferred on an employee’s resume. DeMarco’s lineage, however, was not the only reason he worked where he did. The other reason was that Mahoney liked having a man on his staff who wasn’t really on his staff.
No organizational chart showed that the speaker employed DeMarco, because this provided Mahoney that ever-important political advantage known as deniability. For example, because it was DeMarco who brought Mahoney envelopes stuffed with cash, Mahoney could honestly deny ever having met with the envelope stuffer, should the need arise. DeMarco was the guy, in other words, that Mahoney used when he wanted something done but didn’t want his fat fingerprints, literally or otherwise, found at the scene. And if DeMarco was ever caught doing something illegal, John Mahoney could, and would, deny that DeMarco worked for him.
DeMarco could understand, of course, why Mahoney had no desire for the press to know of his relationship to the Zarif family — that he was, as Mahoney had phrased it, a lifelong friend of a man whose son ‘tried to park a plane on the president’s desk.’ DeMarco figured, however, that the news guys would have to dig pretty hard to connect Mahoney to Ali Zarif.
Ali was an Iranian immigrant who had come to this country when he was ten and had known Mahoney from the time they were teenagers. Mahoney had been the catcher on his high school baseball team, and Ali Zarif had pitched. How the young Iranian had learned to throw a curve ball was but another legend of the American melting pot.
In his twenties, Ali leased a space near Boston’s Quincy Market and began to sell rugs. Persian rugs, Chinese rugs, Indian rugs. He sold beautiful, expensive rugs. Forty years later, he owned two other stores in the Boston area. When his friend John Mahoney made his first run for Congress those many years ago, Ali helped with the young politician’s campaign, registered his fellow Muslims to vote — and they all voted for John Mahoney. But Ali was just a successful businessman and not a big-name donor or a guy who craved the spotlight. Unless the press discovered that Hassan Zarif had visited Mahoney — or became aware that the floors of Mahoney’s Boston home were covered with Ali’s rugs — Mahoney’s friendship with Ali would most likely remain hidden from the media.
Regarding Reza Zarif, DeMarco decided that before he talked to the Bureau or anyone else, he needed to do a little preliminary research. And this meant bending over and picking from the stack of newspapers on the floor next to his desk the last two days’ editions of The New York Times and The Washington Post. He’d read the articles about Reza before, but when he’d read them the first time he’d just been another shocked citizen and not a man assigned to uncover the reasons behind a terrorist act.
As he hated to work in his windowless office, DeMarco decided to accomplish his research on Reza in more pleasant surroundings: the Hawk and Dove, a Capitol Hill bar that had been in business almost as long as politicians had been taking bribes. He plopped down onto a bar stool, greeted the barman, and ordered a martini. He had discovered that the first martini of the day sharpened his mental powers; the martinis that followed tended to have the opposite effect. Drink in hand, he then spread open the papers to read for a second time what all the Pulitzer Prize winners had to say about Reza.
There was no question that he was flying the plane that the Air National Guard had blown out of the sky two days ago. The plane had been co-owned by Reza and three other lawyers, the other men all white Christians. The morning he attacked the White House, Reza had been seen by two people at the Stafford airfield who had known him for five and seven years respectively, and one of those men had seen Reza climb into the cockpit of the Cessna.
Ten minutes after the F-16 pilot had identified the tail numbers on the Cessna, FBI agents had been dispatched to Reza’s home in Arlington. Inside the house they found Reza’s wife and two children — a boy of eight and a girl of eleven — all dead. They’d each been shot once in the head with a.9mm automatic that had been found sitting in the middle of the Zarifs’ dining room table like some sort of ugly lethal centerpiece. Reza’s fingerprints were on the gun.